You are Never Alone

It is interesting to reflect on the number 7: 7 days of the week, the 7 Deadly Sins, the 7 Wonders of the ancient world, and now the 7 skills today’s students desperately need.

Tony Wagner addressed the US State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) this week, and told the audience that their focus on testing interfered with the 7 survival skills 21st century students need. He suggested that US school systems need to move from content standards to performance standards.

The 7 survival skills he lists are
1. Problem-solving and critical thinking;
2. Collaboration across networks and leading by influence;
3. Agility and adaptability;
4. Initiative and entrepreneurship;
5. Effective written and oral communication;
6. Accessing and analyzing information; and
7. Curiosity and imagination.

He sees technology having a crucial role in the development of these skills. SETDA has created “Class of 2020: Action Plan for Education” with a set of 10 recommendations to improve teaching and learning using technology.

The video 3 Steps for 21st Century Learning says the skills needed are those of competition, cooperation, and collaboration. Students need to be involved not only in personal learning but collaborative class projects, creative classrooms.

The issue of 21st century skills and what we mean by them is something that I have touched on before. I think the questions that I posed two months ago are still the ones we need to think about.
If we look at the 7 survival skills listed by Wagner, perhaps the only one we can’t claim to have been accommodated by systems and subjects in the 20th century is number 2: Collaboration across networks…
All the others have been part of more progressive teaching for decades.
Are these new skills? Or just thinking and social skills in new, more technological, contexts?

What is important about their 21st century context? It is a double-sided coin really: do we use the technology to develop the skills, or use the skills to utilise the technology.
The first of the recommendations by SETDA says
[education leaders need to] Ensure that technology tools and resources are used continuously and seamlessly for instruction, collaboration, and assessment.

It is that seamlessness that we don’t yet have, and which many systems still don’t see the importance of. Only the other day I was talking to a teacher who basically could not see why the use of ICTs in the classroom was so important.
She was concerned that getting to the point where we could use technology tools “continuously and seamlessly” was going to be a never ending financial black hole.
These conversations are interesting not because of what the concerns are, but because they reveal the depth of the disagreement about where we should be headed.