Critical 21st Century Skills Every Student Needs and Why via Wabisabi

Literacy is Not Enough 

The Critical 21st Century Skills Every Student Needs and Why

No pupil in the history of education is like today’s modern learner.

Wabisabi Learning: 4.21.2020

Preparing a child for the world that doesn’t yet exist is not an easy task for any teacher. Step back and look at that picture from a broad perspective. What are the critical 21st century skills every student needs to survive and succeed in our world? What abilities and traits will serve them in a time that’s changing and developing so rapidly?

This is a complex, energetic, and tech-savvy individual. They want to be challenged and inspired in their learning. They want to collaborate and work with their peers. They want to incorporate the technology they love into their classroom experiences as much as they can. In short, they have just as high a set of expectations of their educators as their educators have of them.

How Are Educators Responding?

The New Zealand Ministry of Education defines five key competencies for living and lifelong learning listed below:

Thinking

Using language, symbols, and text

Managing self

Relating to others

Participating and contributing

The International Baccalaureate is a non-profit educational foundation created in 1968. It designs its programs to develop crucial intellectual, personal, emotional, and social skills. Their IB Learner Profile suggests that students should be conditioned by their learning to be:

Inquirers

Knowledgeable

Thinkers

Communicators

Principled

Open-minded

Caring

Risk-takers

Balanced

Reflective

═════════►

Our Big List of Essential 21st Century Skills

This list comes from our book Literacy is Not Enough (Crockett, Lee et. al.; 2011). You’ll be able to see it correlates rather well with both New Zealand’s list and the IB Learner Profile. They certainly cover the Common Core’s bases, too. It’s good to know we’re all on the same page, isn’t it? That’s great news for our students!

So, according to the folks we’ve asked, the consensus is that students need transparency-level skills in these areas:

Problem solving

Creativity

Analytic thinking

Collaboration

Communication

Ethics, action, and accountability

     READ MORE ➤➤

Automatic Readability Checker

Based on (7) readability formulas:

Grade Level: 11

Reading Level: fairly difficult to read.

Reader's Age: 15-17 yrs. old

(Tenth to Eleventh graders)