Here at Sphero, we talk a lot about 21st Century Skills, and we’re certain you’ve heard A LOT about them. (The phrase has become somewhat of a buzzword.) But what are 21st Century Skills and which are the most important? Well, the short answer is they’re all important, but we’ll dive into each one a bit further here and how to best implement the right activities and curriculum to achieve them as goals. Show What exactly are 21st Century Skills?21st Century Skills are considered the most important skills to succeed in today’s workplace. 21st Century Skills include skills like critical thinking, communication, technology literacy, and more. Students will need to develop these skills in the classroom so they can have great careers in the future! Examples of 21st Century Skills in the ClassroomOne example of a 21st Century Skill in the classroom is communication. The communication skill involves listening to the speaker and communicating with others through both oral and written means. This skill can be taught through reading and discussing what is read, asking questions, and turning to others to formulate ideas. The Most Important 21st Century Skills To Develop In the ClassroomNo matter what grade your students are in, they are likely aware that the world is changing rapidly. Jobs that didn't exist 10 years ago are now standard. The competitive advantage for companies that will make students successful in the future is nurturing the skills needed in STEM careers. 21st Century Skills are skills that are essential to society's prosperity in the 21st century. They are not academic skills but rather the skills that will be needed to succeed in the innovation economy. Some of the skills that are important to have are essential skills in the world of work. Basic skills are necessary for success, but others are becoming more and more important. Essential skills for success include learning skills, literacy skills, and life skills. Take a look at our comprehensive list below. Learning Skills
Literacy Skills
Life Skills
You may be asking yourself, why, with everything students are expected to learn, are these skills so important? Not only do 21st Century Skills provide a foundation for successful learning in school, they also help to ensure students are successful outside of the classroom, in real-world scenarios in life and future workplaces where change is inevitable. While developing academic skill sets are crucial, 21st Century Skills allow for a student to become a well-rounded, adjusted and socialized adult human being who will ultimately contribute to a nation’s society. Hands-on learning through play-based activities are one of the most key factors in developing these skills early on in the classroom. From working in small teams to achieve a goal, to brainstorming new ways to approach an existing problem, these types of activities and curriculum offer students the chance to learn a core subject matter, in addition to lifelong skills needed for continued success.
21st century learning is the development of a highly valuable skill set for the future. 21st century skills are flagged as critical for the digital and evolving economy. Instead of specific subject knowledge, 21st century skills are ways of thinking, ways of working and ways of living. The Australian Curriculum includes seven general capabilities:
The list below from the Assessment & Teaching of 21st Century Skills website shows another approach to categorising these skills: Ways of thinking
Ways of working
Tools for working
Living in the world
Best practice STEM education is complementary to 21st century learning. At the same time as developing important skills and knowledge in the STEM subjects, students engage in activities and projects that promote 21st century skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration. How does it help?Linking to 21st century learning prepares students for the future world of work, and arms them with critical life skills. It supports students to be critical and creative-thinkers, communicators and collaborators. How do you do it?21st century skills can be included in the classroom through:
The term “21st-century skills” is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today’s world. In a broader sense, however, the idea of what learning in the 21st century should look like is open to interpretation—and controversy. To get a sense of how views on the subject align—and differ—we recently asked a range of education experts to define 21st-century learning from their own perspectives. Richard Allington
 I’m an old guy. I’ve never Tweeted, Skyped, Facebooked, or YouTubed. Oddly, I don’t feel the least bit disenfranchised by technology. I am preparing this response on my laptop, I use (though not much) my Blackberry every day, and I will e-mail this response. But I’m still stuck on fostering 18th-century literacy in citizens. As far as I can tell, illiterates rarely use 21st-century literacies if only because they never developed the 18th-century kind of literacy. I think we actually could teach everyone to read (the old way) and for the life of me I cannot understand why schools would spend funds on computers when their libraries are almost empty of things students might want to read. I cannot understand why classrooms have whiteboards but no classroom libraries. The research, to date, has provided no evidence that having either computers or whiteboards in schools has any positive effect on students’ reading and writing proficiencies. But school and classroom libraries are well established as essential if we plan to develop a literate citizenry. However, there is no buzz about books. Barnett Berry
Twenty-first-century learning means that students master content while producing, synthesizing, and evaluating information from a wide variety of subjects and sources with an understanding of and respect for diverse cultures. Students demonstrate the three Rs, but also the three Cs: creativity, communication, and collaboration. They demonstrate digital literacy as well as civic responsibility. Virtual tools and open-source software create borderless learning territories for students of all ages, anytime and anywhere. Powerful learning of this nature demands well-prepared teachers who draw on advances in cognitive science and are strategically organized in teams, in and out of cyberspace. Many will emerge as teacherpreneurs who work closely with students in their local communities while also serving as learning concierges, virtual network guides, gaming experts, community organizers, and policy researchers. Sarah Brown Wessling
Twenty-first-century learning embodies an approach to teaching that marries content to skill. Without skills, students are left to memorize facts, recall details for worksheets, and relegate their educational experience to passivity. Without content, students may engage in problem-solving or team-working experiences that fall into triviality, into relevance without rigor. Instead, the 21st-century learning paradigm offers an opportunity to synergize the margins of the content vs. skills debate and bring it into a framework that dispels these dichotomies. Twenty-first-century learning means hearkening to cornerstones of the past to help us navigate our future. Embracing a 21st-century learning model requires consideration of those elements that could comprise such a shift: creating learners who take intellectual risks, fostering learning dispositions, and nurturing school communities where everyone is a learner. Karen Cator
Success in the 21st century requires knowing how to learn. Students today will likely have several careers in their lifetime. They must develop strong critical thinking and interpersonal communication skills in order to be successful in an increasingly fluid, interconnected, and complex world. Technology allows for 24/7 access to information, constant social interaction, and easily created and shared digital content. In this setting, educators can leverage technology to create an engaging and personalized environment to meet the emerging educational needs of this generation. No longer does learning have to be one-size-fits-all or confined to the classroom. The opportunities afforded by technology should be used to re-imagine 21st-century education, focusing on preparing students to be learners for life. Milton Chen
Twenty-first-century learning shouldn’t be controversial. It is simply an effort to define modern learning using modern tools. (The problem is that what’s modern in 2010 has accelerated far beyond 2000, a year which now seems “so last century.”) Twenty-first-century learning builds upon such past conceptions of learning as “core knowledge in subject areas” and recasts them for today’s world, where a global perspective and collaboration skills are critical. It’s no longer enough to “know things.” It’s even more important to stay curious about finding out things. The Internet, which has enabled instant global communication and access to information, likewise holds the key to enacting a new educational system, where students use information at their fingertips and work in teams to accomplish more than what one individual can alone, mirroring the 21st-century workplace. If 10 years from now we are still debating 21st-century learning, it would be a clear sign that a permanent myopia has clouded what should be 20/20 vision. Steven Farr
Twenty-first-century learning must include the 20th-century ideals of Brown v. Board of Education. Sadly, we have failed to deliver on that promise. Our system perpetuates a racial and socioeconomic achievement gap that undermines our ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity. As we study what distinguishes highly effective teachers in our nation’s most challenging contexts, we see that education reform requires much more than lists of skills. We need classroom leaders setting an ambitious vision, rallying others to work hard to achieve it, planning and executing to ensure student learning, and defining the very notion of teaching as changing the life paths of students. What will make America a global leader in the 21st century is acting on what we know to educate all children, regardless of socioeconomic background. Steve Hargadon
Twenty-first-century learning will ultimately be “learner-driven.” Our old stories of education (factory-model, top-down, compliance-driven) are breaking down or broken, and this is because the Internet is releasing intellectual energy that comes from our latent desires as human beings to have a voice, to create, and to participate. The knowledge-based results look a lot like free-market economies or democratic governments (think: Wikipedia). Loosely governed and highly self-directed, these teaching and learning activities exist beyond the sanction or control of formal educational institutions. I believe the political and institutional responses will be to continue to promote stories about education that are highly-structured and defined from above, like national standards or (ironically) the teaching of 21st-century skills. These will, however, seem increasingly out-of-sync not just with parents, educators, and administrators watching the Internet Revolution, but with students, who themselves are largely prepared to drive their own educations. Lynne Munson
I define 21st-century learning as 20th- (or even 19th!-) century learning but with better tools. Today’s students are fortunate to have powerful learning tools at their disposal that allow them to locate, acquire, and even create knowledge much more quickly than their predecessors. But being able to Google is no substitute for true understanding. Students still need to know and deeply understand the history that brought them and our nation to where we are today. They need to be able to enjoy man’s greatest artistic and scientific achievements and to speak a language besides their mother tongue. According to most 21st-century skills’ advocates, students needn’t actually walk around with such knowledge in their heads, they need only to have the skills to find it. I disagree. Twenty-first-century technology should be seen as an opportunity to acquire more knowledge, not an excuse to know less. Keith Moore
Students in the 21st century learn in a global classroom and it’s not necessarily within four walls. They are more inclined to find information by accessing the Internet through cellphones and computers, or chatting with friends on a social networking site. Similarly, many teachers are monitoring and issuing assignments via virtual classrooms. Many of our Bureau of Indian Education schools are located in disadvantaged rural and remote areas. The BIE is working with various stakeholders to ensure that our schools have a Common Operating Environment so that students and teachers can access information beyond the classroom. Within the federal BIE school system, we must rely upon the vision and the ability of our tribal leadership, parents, teachers, and students to work with the federal leadership to keep education a top priority. Diane Ravitch
To be prepared for the 21st century, our children require the following skills and knowledge: an understanding of history, civics, geography, mathematics, and science, so they may comprehend unforeseen events and act wisely; the ability to speak, write, and read English well; mastery of a foreign language; engagement in the arts, to enrich their lives; close encounters with great literature, to gain insight into timeless dilemmas and the human condition; a love of learning, so they continue to develop their minds when their formal schooling ends; self-discipline, to pursue their goals to completion; ethical and moral character; the social skills to collaborate fruitfully with others; the ability to use technology wisely; the ability to make and repair useful objects, for personal independence; and the ability to play a musical instrument, for personal satisfaction. Susan Rundell Singer
Adaptability, complex communication skills, non-routine problem solving, self-management, and systems-thinking are essential skills in the 21st-century workforce. From my perspective as a scientist and science educator, the most effective way to prepare students for the workforce and college is to implement and scale what is already known about effective learning and teaching. Content vs. process wars should be ancient history, based on the evidence from the learning sciences. Integrating core concepts with key skills will prepare students for the workplace and college. We need to move past mile-wide and inch-deep coverage of ever-expanding content in the classroom. Developing skills in the context of core concepts is simply good practice. It’s time to let go of polarizing debates, consider the evidence, and get to work. Page 2
The term “21st-century skills” is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today’s world. In a broader sense, however, the idea of what learning in the 21st century should look like is open to interpretation—and controversy. To get a sense of how views on the subject align—and differ—we recently asked a range of education experts to define 21st-century learning from their own perspectives. Richard Allington
I’m an old guy. I’ve never Tweeted, Skyped, Facebooked, or YouTubed. Oddly, I don’t feel the least bit disenfranchised by technology. I am preparing this response on my laptop, I use (though not much) my Blackberry every day, and I will e-mail this response. But I’m still stuck on fostering 18th-century literacy in citizens. As far as I can tell, illiterates rarely use 21st-century literacies if only because they never developed the 18th-century kind of literacy. I think we actually could teach everyone to read (the old way) and for the life of me I cannot understand why schools would spend funds on computers when their libraries are almost empty of things students might want to read. I cannot understand why classrooms have whiteboards but no classroom libraries. The research, to date, has provided no evidence that having either computers or whiteboards in schools has any positive effect on students’ reading and writing proficiencies. But school and classroom libraries are well established as essential if we plan to develop a literate citizenry. However, there is no buzz about books. Barnett Berry
Twenty-first-century learning means that students master content while producing, synthesizing, and evaluating information from a wide variety of subjects and sources with an understanding of and respect for diverse cultures. Students demonstrate the three Rs, but also the three Cs: creativity, communication, and collaboration. They demonstrate digital literacy as well as civic responsibility. Virtual tools and open-source software create borderless learning territories for students of all ages, anytime and anywhere. Powerful learning of this nature demands well-prepared teachers who draw on advances in cognitive science and are strategically organized in teams, in and out of cyberspace. Many will emerge as teacherpreneurs who work closely with students in their local communities while also serving as learning concierges, virtual network guides, gaming experts, community organizers, and policy researchers. Sarah Brown Wessling
Twenty-first-century learning embodies an approach to teaching that marries content to skill. Without skills, students are left to memorize facts, recall details for worksheets, and relegate their educational experience to passivity. Without content, students may engage in problem-solving or team-working experiences that fall into triviality, into relevance without rigor. Instead, the 21st-century learning paradigm offers an opportunity to synergize the margins of the content vs. skills debate and bring it into a framework that dispels these dichotomies. Twenty-first-century learning means hearkening to cornerstones of the past to help us navigate our future. Embracing a 21st-century learning model requires consideration of those elements that could comprise such a shift: creating learners who take intellectual risks, fostering learning dispositions, and nurturing school communities where everyone is a learner. Karen Cator
Success in the 21st century requires knowing how to learn. Students today will likely have several careers in their lifetime. They must develop strong critical thinking and interpersonal communication skills in order to be successful in an increasingly fluid, interconnected, and complex world. Technology allows for 24/7 access to information, constant social interaction, and easily created and shared digital content. In this setting, educators can leverage technology to create an engaging and personalized environment to meet the emerging educational needs of this generation. No longer does learning have to be one-size-fits-all or confined to the classroom. The opportunities afforded by technology should be used to re-imagine 21st-century education, focusing on preparing students to be learners for life. Milton Chen
Twenty-first-century learning shouldn’t be controversial. It is simply an effort to define modern learning using modern tools. (The problem is that what’s modern in 2010 has accelerated far beyond 2000, a year which now seems “so last century.”) Twenty-first-century learning builds upon such past conceptions of learning as “core knowledge in subject areas” and recasts them for today’s world, where a global perspective and collaboration skills are critical. It’s no longer enough to “know things.” It’s even more important to stay curious about finding out things. The Internet, which has enabled instant global communication and access to information, likewise holds the key to enacting a new educational system, where students use information at their fingertips and work in teams to accomplish more than what one individual can alone, mirroring the 21st-century workplace. If 10 years from now we are still debating 21st-century learning, it would be a clear sign that a permanent myopia has clouded what should be 20/20 vision. Steven Farr
Twenty-first-century learning must include the 20th-century ideals of Brown v. Board of Education. Sadly, we have failed to deliver on that promise. Our system perpetuates a racial and socioeconomic achievement gap that undermines our ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity. As we study what distinguishes highly effective teachers in our nation’s most challenging contexts, we see that education reform requires much more than lists of skills. We need classroom leaders setting an ambitious vision, rallying others to work hard to achieve it, planning and executing to ensure student learning, and defining the very notion of teaching as changing the life paths of students. What will make America a global leader in the 21st century is acting on what we know to educate all children, regardless of socioeconomic background. Steve Hargadon
Twenty-first-century learning will ultimately be “learner-driven.” Our old stories of education (factory-model, top-down, compliance-driven) are breaking down or broken, and this is because the Internet is releasing intellectual energy that comes from our latent desires as human beings to have a voice, to create, and to participate. The knowledge-based results look a lot like free-market economies or democratic governments (think: Wikipedia). Loosely governed and highly self-directed, these teaching and learning activities exist beyond the sanction or control of formal educational institutions. I believe the political and institutional responses will be to continue to promote stories about education that are highly-structured and defined from above, like national standards or (ironically) the teaching of 21st-century skills. These will, however, seem increasingly out-of-sync not just with parents, educators, and administrators watching the Internet Revolution, but with students, who themselves are largely prepared to drive their own educations. Lynne Munson
I define 21st-century learning as 20th- (or even 19th!-) century learning but with better tools. Today’s students are fortunate to have powerful learning tools at their disposal that allow them to locate, acquire, and even create knowledge much more quickly than their predecessors. But being able to Google is no substitute for true understanding. Students still need to know and deeply understand the history that brought them and our nation to where we are today. They need to be able to enjoy man’s greatest artistic and scientific achievements and to speak a language besides their mother tongue. According to most 21st-century skills’ advocates, students needn’t actually walk around with such knowledge in their heads, they need only to have the skills to find it. I disagree. Twenty-first-century technology should be seen as an opportunity to acquire more knowledge, not an excuse to know less. Keith Moore
Students in the 21st century learn in a global classroom and it’s not necessarily within four walls. They are more inclined to find information by accessing the Internet through cellphones and computers, or chatting with friends on a social networking site. Similarly, many teachers are monitoring and issuing assignments via virtual classrooms. Many of our Bureau of Indian Education schools are located in disadvantaged rural and remote areas. The BIE is working with various stakeholders to ensure that our schools have a Common Operating Environment so that students and teachers can access information beyond the classroom. Within the federal BIE school system, we must rely upon the vision and the ability of our tribal leadership, parents, teachers, and students to work with the federal leadership to keep education a top priority. Diane Ravitch
To be prepared for the 21st century, our children require the following skills and knowledge: an understanding of history, civics, geography, mathematics, and science, so they may comprehend unforeseen events and act wisely; the ability to speak, write, and read English well; mastery of a foreign language; engagement in the arts, to enrich their lives; close encounters with great literature, to gain insight into timeless dilemmas and the human condition; a love of learning, so they continue to develop their minds when their formal schooling ends; self-discipline, to pursue their goals to completion; ethical and moral character; the social skills to collaborate fruitfully with others; the ability to use technology wisely; the ability to make and repair useful objects, for personal independence; and the ability to play a musical instrument, for personal satisfaction. Susan Rundell Singer
Adaptability, complex communication skills, non-routine problem solving, self-management, and systems-thinking are essential skills in the 21st-century workforce. From my perspective as a scientist and science educator, the most effective way to prepare students for the workforce and college is to implement and scale what is already known about effective learning and teaching. Content vs. process wars should be ancient history, based on the evidence from the learning sciences. Integrating core concepts with key skills will prepare students for the workplace and college. We need to move past mile-wide and inch-deep coverage of ever-expanding content in the classroom. Developing skills in the context of core concepts is simply good practice. It’s time to let go of polarizing debates, consider the evidence, and get to work. |
What does 21st century curriculum mean and what 21st century skills should our learners be taught?
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