Importance Of 21st Century Skills

Introduction

Preparing students for work, citizenship, and life in the 21st century is complicated. Globalization, technology, migration, international competition, changing markets, and transnational environmental and political challenges add a new urgency to develop the skills and knowledge students need for success in the 21st century context. Educators, education ministries and governments, foundations, employers, and researchers refer to these abilities with terms that include “21st century skills,” “higher-order thinking skills,” “deeper learning outcomes,” and “complex thinking and communication skills.” Interest in these skills is not new. For example, for more than 40 years, researchers at Harvard University’s Project Zero have been

Economic, civic, and global rationales for why they are important. We attend to the criticisms leveled against 21st century skills by examining why these skills must be taught primarily through disciplinary content, taking care not to “trivialize subject matter”

3. Identifying specific ways to do so. The majority of the paper thus focuses on explaining how these skills should be taught, given what we know about how students learn. We then discuss the assessment of 21st century skills and conclude with an overview of the teacher capacity implications of institutionalizing “new” teaching and learning processes.

Defining 21st Century Skills There is no shortage of current definitions of 21st century skills and knowledge. 21st century skills, knowledge, and attitudes, values, and ethics into the following four categories:

Ways of Thinking: creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and learning to learn.

Ways of Working: communication and teamwork

Tools for Working: general knowledge and ICT literacy

Living in the World: Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility, including cultural awareness and competence. Students need seven survival skills to be prepared for 21st century life, work, and

Because education standards and the purposes of education are changing, curriculum frameworks and instructional methods must also change. Those changes in curriculum and instruction have many important human capital implications, including those related to teacher training, professional development, career mobility, and general cultural standing of the teaching profession. In this section, we address these human capital issues.

Teaching and Learning Researchers and practitioners agree that building an education system that focuses on 21st century skills requires a strong human capital base. After all, teachers cannot teach 21st century skills through the disciplines if they themselves have mastered only basic lower-order thinking skills and do not have a strong disciplinary background. The logic is compelling. A strong human capital base is essential, but it will take some countries time to increase the capacity of their teaching forces and to build social trust in those teachers’ competence. To accomplish these ends, in addition to investing in the capacity of teachers who are now starting to enter the teaching profession, countries should also invest in building the capacity of current teachers to teach 21st century