Education Shouldn't Hurt!

The Mandate of the 21st Century

from NASSP Leading Schools
(National Association of Secondary School Principals)

Now that we are 12 years into the 21st century, it is odd and a little bit frustrating to have ongoing conversations about moving toward 21st century skills. It seems that schools should already be there. Many are. Some are not. Some are not, but think they are. And still some, quite honestly, do not have a clear notion of what 21st century skills are, which is understandable. The expression is often tossed around without any real context or definition. Even worse, the expression is just as often perceived as a bludgeon to remind educators that whatever they are doing is not enough and that what they have done no longer has value. That perception polarizes educators rather than building the consensus that we need to move all schools forward.
Those camps of educators are further driven away by notions that 21st century skills are the domain of those born in the 21st century and that such skills are synonymous with intensive technology integration. Our surveys of members reveal that reflective practice and continuous improvement are not unique to any age demographic; although the acquisition of 21st century skills is certainly enabled by technology, the mere integration of technology is hardly enough to develop the skills. So, what are these skills? I prefer a version of the definition promoted by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, often referred to as the 4Cs.

Critical thinking and problem solving. As the partnership describes it, students are well-served when they are encouraged to use different kinds of reasoning and apply systems thinking to determine how parts of a whole interact to produce outcomes. This category also captures such skills as evaluating evidence, arguments, and points of view; synthesizing and connecting arguments; interpreting information and drawing conclusions; and reflecting critically on the learning experience and process. Dust off your old Foundations in Education textbook, and you’ll see shades of Bloom’s Taxonomy in much of this language. Yet there is a greater urgency than ever before for schools to push students higher up the taxonomy, and we see more and more schools developing these skills in the context of realworld problems. Such instruction carries many names—inquiry learning, problembased learning, project-based learning, challenge- based learning, and so forth.

Creativity and innovation. Innovation is very much in vogue in education policy circles, but we rarely stop to consider where innovation comes from. It is, in fact, inseparable from the skill of creativity, which requires the application of a wide range of idea-creation techniques and the ability to elaborate, refine, analyze, and evaluate ideas to improve creative efforts. Creation techniques include brainstorming, assumption busting, guided imagery, and many others. (For more techniques and definitions, visit www.creatingminds.org.) As the partnership explains, students should be encouraged to “view failure as an opportunity to learn and understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes.” And schools, by extension, must become places where mistakes are encouraged as part of the creative process.

Collaboration. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, author Steven Johnson develops the notion of the “adjacent possible,” a premise that innovation flourishes only when ideas encounter one another and recombine to create new and more complete ideas. As Johnson explains, even those great aha moments in history were actually slow hunches that stumbled across other slow hunches to create a breakthrough—whether a new theory such as evolution, or a new invention such as the light bulb. The message for schools is that isolation is a dead end for innovation and that we must replace the framework of competition with one of collaboration. To foster the creation of new ideas, we have to explicitly teach students how to work effectively and respectfully in diverse teams, how to make compromises to accomplish a common goal, and how to assume shared responsibility for work while valuing individual contribution.

Communication. Linked closely to collaboration, the skill of communication includes the ability to both deliver and critically receive messages. As the partnership defines it, students must be able to articulate thoughts and ideas effectively using oral, written, and nonverbal communication skills in a variety of forms and contexts. But they should also learn to listen effectively to decipher meaning. Digital-age communication requires that students use multiple media and technologies and know how to judge their effectiveness and assess their impact.
Little about the content of these skills is new. Humans have been solving problems and communicating since the dawn of time, and we have all enjoyed the benefits of the creativity of the generations that preceded us. Yet if we look at recent history, can we be confident that those innovations took place because of schooling and not despite it? If we embrace the mandate of the 21st century, our schools will prepare students to innovate our way out of the biggest problems we face. This is a goal we can all embrace. NL