"What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skill" and reflecting how 20th century and 21st century skills differ? Do we need both?

This video was very interesting as much of the message was similar to what I have heard since starting my teaching career. This made me think about the potential difference between American education and NZ education as I think NZ is further along this journey than the video tells. The main point of the video was that we can't wait for a government driven change but rather need to start changing the way we view 'skills' now. In Christchurch there has already been a bit of a shake up of the education sector through the implementation of clusters. These clusters have starting breaking down the silos Lichtman talks about and encourages more collaboration between schools. Likewise the implementation of collaboration in the classrooms is making a huge difference to the way students are now taught.

Lichtman discusses the difference between 20th century and 21st century skills.

He discusses how 20th century industrial skills are not reflective of the world we will in today. Therefore education needs to move with this new way of being and put more emphasis on 21st century 'ecosystem' skills and approaches. These two approaches differ predominantly in the role of the child in both systems. In the 20th century model there was much more focus on adult control and passive children whereas in the 21st century model children are encourage to drive their own learning as much as possible. This also reflects the huge social changes that have occurred with views towards children. I think the main difference between the two is adults being open to change and getting things wrong. We are no longer expected to be the 'sage on the stage' and know it all but rather encouraged to model failure and perseverance to children. Lichtman talks about how 21st century learners need to be self-evolving. Technology is changing so fast that we can't predict what concrete skills our children will need and therefore Lichtman argues that we should be teaching children to evolve constantly to develop new skills for different situations. Therefore as adults and teachers we also need to embrace this constant change and develop schools that are also self-evolving. This can prove difficult when schools are still answerable to an industrial model of measurement and standards based performance. I think there is a place for some 20th century skills to remain in the 21st century education model. Many parents are worried that teachers are throwing the baby away with the bathwater however we need to clarify that this is not the case. Children will still leave school with the traditional skills of being able to read, write and add however they also need to leave school with resilience, problem solving, adaptability, teamwork and self-management skills as these will form the basis of many jobs they undertake. Even teachers who have been present in western society for many, many years have a very different role now to how they were 100 years ago. We still have the same job title and basic role requirements however a teacher from 100 years ago would find it quite challenging to teach today. Likewise our children may hold similar roles in the future (e.g. doctor) however this will be very different to how we perceive doctors now. We need to teach students for their future not based on what is in our past. Research clearly shows that the biggest influence on how a teacher teaches comes from how we were taught ourselves. This also goes for parent expectations of schools. We need to broaden our thinking around this. This is by no means a new concept, Dewey was discussing this years ago.