21st Century Skills are core
competencies that certain individuals believe schools need to teach in order
for students to be successful in today’s world.
These core competencies have been identified as Ways
of Thinking
(creativity, critical thinking, and
problem-solving, decision-making and learning), Ways of Working (communication
and collaboration). Tools for Working (information and communications
technology and information literacy), and Skills for Living in the World (citizenship, life and career,
and personal and social responsibility).
I believe that teaching students “Ways of Working” is crucial to their
success outside the school walls. “Ways of Working” emphasizes
communication and collaboration skills. For
me, it is hard to separate communication and collaboration. These two competencies stress speaking and
writing as well as working with diverse groups of individuals, learning to make
compromises to reach the end result and sharing responsibilities for
collaborative work. John Seeley Brown and
Paul Duguid, in their article The
Social Life of Information, define effective work teams as
those in which “the talk and the work, the communication and the practice are inseparable.”
Infusing communication and
collaboration into the classroom can be done by making lessons relevant to
real-world situations and allowing students to be creative during the
process. In addition, fostering teamwork
as a process and helping students to learn to deal with misunderstandings and
conflict in a direct manner will prepare them for life outside of the
classroom.
As classroom teachers we must be
willing to allow our students to drive off the main road, take the back roads
and see where they lead. This will
require us to change our way of thinking about classroom assessments where everyone
has an “identical” project. That
identical project is much easier for us to turn around a grade; however, it can
get very boring and monotonous as well.
If we, as educators, are bored with the results; more than likely the
students were bored with the process. Some
ideas for assessments might be allowing students to interview persons of
authority on the subject and create digital and audio files of the interviews. You might team your students with another
class to research specific topics and then produce a multimedia Public Service
Announcement. Students can be assigned
specific interdependent roles created with their individual interests and
talents in mind. The roles might include
those of background research, data gathering, creating graphs, and
communicating findings. These investigative
teams can meet, face-to-face or virtually, to plan and execute their assignment. When done, students can share their project. Each one of the assessments mentioned above demonstrates
the students’ ability to work effectively with a diverse team.
If we provide students with lots
of tools and tell them the sky is the limit we will be amazed with what they
will give us in return! We just have to be willing to take the back roads, you know, the ones less traveled.
