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21st Century Skills Need Assessment Committee Beginning the Conversation

Welcome! Please use this Wiki to browse resources that directly address the need for 21st Century learning in our high schools. Below you will find three resources to begin the conversation. ** On the navigation bar to the left, you will see the different areas to explore additional resources. ** //Today's education system faces irrelevance// //unless we bridge the gap between// //how students live and how they learn.//

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How Do You Define 21st-Century Learning? //The term "21st-century skills" is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today's world. In a broader sense, however, the idea of what learning in the 21st century should look like is open to interpretation—and controversy.// //To get a sense of how views on the subject align—and differ—Education Week recently asked a range of education experts to define 21st-century learning from their own perspectives.// Click on the link to read - One question. Eleven answers.

[[image:time_cover.jpg width="160" height="207" align="right"]]How Do We Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century?
//Public education provides the bedrock from which our national and individual prosperity rise together, but, a chasm separates the world inside the schoolhouse with the world outside. Some of our nation's most forward-thinking schools are addressing the educational needs of students in the 21st century. There remains, however, a profound gap between the knowledge and skills most students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need in typical 21st century communities and workplaces.//

Click on this link to find out How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century. (Time)

Defining the Need for Change
//A simple question to ask is,// //'How has the world of a child changed in the last 150 years?'// //And the answer is,// //'It's hard to imagine any way in which it hasn't changed.'// //Children know more about what's going on// //in the the world today than their teachers,// //often because of the media environment they grow up in.// //They're immersed in a media environment// //of all kinds of stuff that was unheard of// //150 years ago, and yet if you look at school today// //versus 100 years ago,// //they are more similar than dissimilar.// - Peter Senge, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The world in which students live has changed dramatically--and schools must change as well, as they have in the past, to meet the demands of the agricultural, industrial and Cold War eras. The explosion of powerful technology has altered traditional practices in workplaces and communities.

Click on this link to read how Partnership for 21st Century Skills defines the need for change in Part I of their //Learning for the 21st Century// report.