Schooling In The 21st Century
At a charter school in California, fourth and fifth graders study rare insects using an electron microscope via a fiber-optic link to a nearby university. At an elementary school in Washington, fourth graders learn reading, writing, math, science and technology while learning about lizards. And at a Seattle high school, 10th graders work on deadline with local architects to design “schools of the future.”
Welcome to public education in the new millennium, where the classrooms have no walls, pencils and paper have been traded in for computers, and the traditional “3 Rs” have been merged with a new set of skills now deemed equally as important: 21st century skills.
Skill Sets
This catch-all phrase covers a spectrum of skills that today’s employers say will be required to be successful at tomorrow’s jobs: critical thinking, creativity, innovation, leadership, cultural competency, global awareness, and media literacy.
Experts agree that even in states like Massachusetts, where we lead the nation on standardized assessments, today’s global economy demands more than high test scores to succeed after high school. To graduate ready to compete with their peers from around the world, our students need to be both booksmart and steeped in these skills.
This means that things have to change. To integrate the right blend of 21st century skills in the classroom effectively, we need to rethink the whole system, beginning with how we train our teachers, how we educate our students and what we teach.
Skills like creativity and leadership cannot be simply “taught” like English and mathematics. Instead educators need to learn to reshape their curricula to include opportunities to introduce these skills, such as projects that encourage innovative thinking, group assignments that encourage leadership, and computer-based assignments that make better use of technology.
The time is right for Massachusetts to set its old ways aside and rethink how our public schools should look, feel and operate. It is with this goal in mind that Education Secretary Paul Reville created the 20-member Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Task Force on 21st Century Skills earlier this year.
The task force members include leaders in business, education and technology and have spent the past several months developing innovative recommendations for ways to integrate 21st century skills in the K-12 curriculum, prepare teachers to teach them, and to find ways to assess each student’s level of proficiency.
Their recommendations will officially kick start the state’s forward movement into the 21st century. Full-scale change will take time, money and support, but is necessary.
In Massachusetts we already lead the nation in test scores. For the good of our children, and their children, we must now focus on becoming a leader in providing a 21st century education.
Gerald Chertavian is chairman of the Task Force on 21st Century Skills, a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the CEO and founder of Year Up.
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