Thriving in the 21st Century: Essential Skills for Success
What are the principles of 21St Century Skills? How do the 21st Century skills impact your teaching or your beliefs about teaching? Which skill is the most important or critical for students to learn in order to be successful? Answers to these questions are given in 21st century skills essay. Among several principles of 21st Century Skills, three most principles that connect with my beliefs are as follow.
- Learners at the centre: It is important that the learners are recognized as the core participants, and are encouraged to engage actively and develop an understanding of their own activity, so as to maximize the effectiveness of the learning outcomes.
- Recognizing individual differences: We also should ensure that differences of each student are taken into account in the 21st Century skills-set so that each of them is empowered for their full potential.
- Assessment of learning: The learning environment should also operate with clarity of expectations through proper assessment strategies, and a strong emphasis on constructive feedback to facilitate smooth learning of individuals.
21st Century Skills and My Teaching
As an educator, I have realized the importance of 21st Century Skills, and therefore have my lessons integrated with some of the skills-set. For example, the education I accessed to just focused on summative assessments such as exams and tests, but I have added three areas of the 21st Century Skills; Life and Career Skills, Learning and Innovation Skills, and Information, Media and Technology Skills to my teaching.
Starting with Life and Career Skills, our typical classrooms are isolated with memorizing the lectures for the exam, but without preparing for the actual skills needed in students’ life and career, and therefore, I do add decision making, problem solving and teamwork which plays essential skills for our economy and the job market.
Turning to Learning and Innovation Skills, developed countries such as Finland and Japan have urged teachers to make students be curious and learn life-long, but not just the things what the teachers teach, and I do agree with them. As the students become older, they need to realize the areas they should develop, and thus the habit of self-learning should be cultivated since they were young. Last but not least, Information, Media and Technology skills cannot be avoided as they become rapidly important for our life. The current COVID-19 pandemic has widened the education gap between students who can access to technology and cannot.
The Most Important Skill for Students’ Success
When it comes to picking up the most important skill for the students’ success, it is difficult to decide as all skills are important in their own way. However, determining the most important skill for students may generally depend on the skill that the targeted students are lack of and the potential demand of that particular skill in their society. For instance, a report from UNESCO suggests that students who are independent and self-confident may need to be encouraged to work collaboratively for a better team spirit and collaborative skill, and vice versa. Regardless of these, from the perspective of an educator from a developing country, critical thinking seems the urgent need for most students as the education system of these countries generally do not encourage students to question or bring different ideas to the class, instead ask students to listen to what the teacher says. After spending more than a decade in such classrooms, students tend not to question, think and criticize, and therefore, the role of critical thinking plays an important aspect for students in my country.
References
- Choi, A. (2015, December 22). What the best education systems are doing right.
- 7 Principles of 21st-century learning and eLearning.
- Guiding Principles for learning in the 21st Century.
- World Bank. (2018). Ch 2: The great school expansion- and those it has left behind. In The World Development Report 2018: LEARNING to Realize Education’s Promise.
