21st Century Skills and Teaching them in Classrooms and Programs

How do we operationalize the teaching and learning of 21st century skills? This is a question that I love because it's easy to banter about high-minded ideals, but the real challenge involves transforming lofty ideals into action. We heard a bit of this during our class discussion yesterday in our Youth Development and Social Entrepreneurship class. Our students are developing a charter school proposal and in doing so they must articulate a specific educational approach that they believe will result in student academic and social achievement. We spent some time talking about the promise of 21st Century Skills such as those promoted by Tony Wagner in his new book The Global Achievement Gap. The good discussion we had involved translating the ideals into practice and it generated these thoughts.


One of the skills we've talked about involves the capacity to make decisions. To call it a 21st Century Skills probably is a little absurd since humans have been struggling with quandries, problems, and dilemmas from the time they had a semblance of consciousness. Excuse the smug sarcasm, but I suspect that nomadic hominids struggled with the decision to break camp or head across the plains. Anyway, there is a program out of Stanford focused on 


How do we operationalize the teaching and learning of 21st century skills? As I always I leave class turning over the ideas we grapple with and I wanted to share a few perspectives on this as I believe it will be useful as you develop your prospectus for your charter school.


First, one of the skills we've talked about involves the capacity to make decisions. To call it a 21st Century Skills probably is a little absurd since humans have been struggling with quandries, problems, and dilemmas from the time they had a semblance of consciousness. Excuse the smugness, but I suspect that nomadic hominids struggled with the decision to break camp or head across the plains. Anyway, there is a program out of Stanford focused on teaching kids the principles of decision making. What interests me is the intentional instructional focus on teaching what are often called soft skills or what we call the 'supercognitives' in our Project Coach program. 


Decision Education Foundation (DEF) teaches the process in six steps as described in a well-done article in Edutopia "Decision Making Becomes the Newest Life Science."

• frame the problem
• think about what consequences matter to them
• consider the various choices and alternatives
• do research to uncover information needed to make a choice
• satisfy themselves that they're using sound reasoning in making a choice
• commit to following through.

The focus of the program entails utilizing the above protocol to hash through dilemmas. Students have used decision science to hash through everything from how they might have comported themselves as African Americans prior to the civil rights movement to how best to honor the nation's veterans to how to convince motorists to use seat belts and teenagers to eat healthily and exercise regularly.

I spent some time poking around the Decision Education Foundation web site and looked specifically at several of the activities that they have designed for classroom use. The focus of the activities involves investigating a controversial dilemma, doing systematic research on the issue, developing a position and then engaging in a structured debate/dialogue. 

The challenge is always moving from the tightly packaged and elegant curriculum unit to making it happen on the ground. If a teacher or after school program leader can make this come to life in their setting, it's wonderful stuff because students would be:

a. Taking a stand on an issue

b. Developing a complex position derived from their own value system and from research and information they collect.

c. Develop a plan to influence and persuade others

d. Deploy listening skills that result in them having to respond 

If I were a student, I would be engaged by a process that required me to perform and represent my perspective with coherence. 

We may call these 21st Century Skills, but they are probably more eternal than new age.