Teachers' Workshop: 21st century Education

  • Teachers' Workshop

    What are 21st century skills?

    The 21st century skills are a set of abilities that students need to develop in order to succeed in the information age. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills lists three types:

    Learning Skills

    Critical Thinking

    Creative Thinking

    Collaborating

    Communicating

    Literacy Skills

    Information Literacy

    Media Literacy

    Technology Literacy

    Life Skills

    Flexibility

    Initiative Social Skills

    Productivity

    Leadership

    21st Century Standards

    • Focus on 21st century skills, content knowledge and expertise.
    • Build understanding across and among academic subjects as well as 21st century interdisciplinary themes
    • Emphasize deep understanding rather than shallow knowledge
    • Engage students with the real world data, tools, and experts they will encounter in college, on the job, and in life--students learn best when actively engaged in solving meaningful problems
    • Allow for multiple measures of mastery
    Characteristics of 21st Century

    21st Century Teacher

    21st Century Classrooms

    21st Century Learner

    Assessment of 21st Century Skills
    • Support a balance of assessments, including high-quality standardized testing along with effective classroom formative and summative assessments
    • Emphasize useful feedback on student performance that is embedded into everyday learning
    • Require a balance of technology-enhanced, formative and summative assessments that measure student mastery of 21st century skills
    • Enable development of portfolios of student work that demonstrate mastery of 21st century skills to educators and prospective employers
    • Enable a balanced portfolio of measures to assess the educational system's effectiveness at reaching high levels of student competency in 21st century skills