Tonight I reviewed the website of Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national organization advocating 21st Century readiness for students. What I found was an advocacy for strengthening programs of instruction that meet the challenges that today’s students would face following graduation in terms of knowledge and skill development. The focus of the tools and resources presented are on strengthening the 3R’s. The 3R’s are the core subject matter such as English, Reading, Mathematics… Surrounding this is the umbrella of, Life and Career Skills, Information, Media and Tech Skills, and the 4R’s, tools necessary for synthesizing the core content, such as Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, and Innovation. The outcomes are strengthened with support systems that relate to instruction. The result will deliver instruction in a manner that will lead to mastery and the ability for the student to engage their future effectively.
The objectives present a sound program of development of the skills necessary for a student to meet and maintain growth in this new century. Within the current, economic, social and political climate, the support for effective implementation of these objectives would appear to be cloudy at best particularly in terms of the cost of implementation and the complication of oversight. With this in mind the program that Partnership for 21st Century Skills advocate does present a strong model from which the educational community needs to develop instruction thus providing the roots from which our children can effectively engage their futures.
I like your succinct summary of the website and agree that the Partnership presents a strong model for the educational community to draw from. Communication and collaboration will be the key to opening doors to our students futures and the 3R's will provide the foundation for this. Add into the mix the 4R's, specifically creativity and innovation, and our students will be more than adequately prepared to compete in today's global society.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why they call it the "3Rs". Luckily for us, their description goes on to include the arts and many more classes like history and geography in the core subjects! I think the "3Rs" are a misleading part of the framework as other subjects are just as important as reading, writing, and math for 21st century learning. Since the business world is so global, our students need to be able to appreciate art and music from other cultures as well as the historical subjects and geographical makeup of other countries.
ReplyDelete