The Partnership for 21st Century skills (http://www.21stcenturyskills.org) has been taking a lot of heat of late. One New York based blogger (http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2009/09/partnership-for-21st-century-skills-p21.html) has drawn a lot of attention by claiming that the P21 folks have mis-identified the component skills required to be a 21st century learner. The Buck Institute realizes there is much debate, rightfully so, about 21st Century Skills. We have drawn a line in the sand, saying that we only feel comfortable focusing on 21st Century Skills that are supported by teaching materials and assessments (rubrics), such as those found in the resource section of this site. The three skills we focus on are communication, collaboration and critical thinking/problem solving.

David,

Can you link me to your 21st century rubrics?  I did not find your resource section.

Thanks,

Jeff Spencer

**Found it**

Jeff:

I’m sorry about the confusion. I assumed we had posted everything when we re-launched our site in late January. Can you email me your request to my office email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and I’ll send you Word and PDF versions of the documents/rubrics. I’ll also tell our webmaster that he should post them. Thanks.

I read the blog post that was skeptical of 21st century skills. I thought that the person who was in the company “Teaching That Makes Sense” had a pretty rational explanation of how standards and debates in education can be like two ships passing in the night, with lots of undefined terms and mistaken assumptions driving the arguments and often missing ‘common sense’ middle ground.

I particularly liked his questions below. The point is, How well can we create a learning and teaching environment where great things happen? Where we capture the kid’s hearts, minds, and internal motivation?

1. How did so many students receive good educations before standards?

2. How did so many teachers created rich and rigorous curricula before standards?

3. How did so many schools provide good teaching and learning environments before standards?

Great questions….

Standards are really only necessary to give us (teachers) a focus.  Its good for us to think what we really need the kids to know.  The problem is that we have so many standards in so many subjects areas that we cannot realistically cover them all.  Its more the discipline of the educational process (ie time management, problem solving skills, group interaction) that creates learners which equates to a good education.

Innovation is an important component to the skills that students need. It dove-tails with Synthesis from Bloom. More to the point, innovation is how we take research and content learning, and turn it into something meaningful. With the tools available from multimedia to social networks, students (and adult learners) are creating. We need to harness it in classrooms more pervasively.

Standards are how we quantify what needs to be learned. They set clear criteria. Standards become troublesome when as in education a discipline lists everything as essential, thus creating a mammoth list (a topic for another post). Standards-based rubrics qualify the depth of student learning beyond core academic learning up to Application. That is to say, to assess critical thinking—which Innovation is part of, but should be assessed on it’s own merit—with reduction in subjectivity, standards-based rubrics provide clarity.

Innovation incorporates communication, collaboration, and critical thinking, leading to a laser-like focus towards developing something that either did not exist before, or sheds new light on a topic. Without developing concepts of Innovation, it will still occur, but by accident, happen chance, or blind luck.