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A Review for – 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times

The Lowest Price we could find is $27.95 $13.74

The new building blocks for learning in a complex world

This important resource introduces a framework for 21st Century learning that maps out the skills needed to survive and thrive in a complex and connected world. 21st Century content includes the basic core subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic-but also emphasizes global awareness, financial/economic literacy, and health issues. The skills fall into three categories: learning and innovations skills; digital literacy skills; and life and career skills. This book is filled with vignettes, international examples, and classroom samples that help illustrate the framework and provide an exciting view of what twenty-first century teaching and learning can achieve.

A vital resource that outlines the skills needed for students to excel in the twenty-first century

• Explores the three main categories of 21st Century Skills: learning and innovations skills; digital literacy skills; and life and career skills
• Addresses timely issues such as the rapid advance of technology and increased economic competition
• Based on a framework developed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21)
• Includes a DVD with video clips of classroom teaching

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

For more information on book visit www.21stcenturyskillsbook.com/

Review:

“….to the little girl in Santo Domingo, whose eyes will forever remind me that ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste.’ ”

May you, and the millions like you, find the dignity, happiness, and serenity you deserve, through the transformational power of education.

This powerful and personal memory ends Charles Fadel’s dedication of the book he has co-authored with Bernie Trilling: 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times. The slogan of the UNCF, a phrase redolent of that long and continuing struggle for civil rights in the USA, is an apt reminder of the critical role of education in building and maintaining a world in which every child has the chance to experience the joy of learning and a chance to take his or her life somewhere beyond mere survival.

The first point to make is that 21st Century Skills is a highly practical and down-to-earth introduction to the detail that underpins the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the US-based (but determinedly outward-looking) organization focused on “…infusing 21st century skills into education.” The book manages to offer a concise and accessible exposition of all the key issues, ideas and philosophy of P21. Anyone who wants all of that in a single, highly readable package would do well to seek out this book.

Fadel & Trilling take us through their definition of 21st century learning, through what they call `the perfect learning storm’, namely a convergence of forces, as they see them, that should be causing us to re-think the shape and objectives of schooling today, through the full P21 set of 21st century skills, and through a series of pragmatic examples of P21 in practice. The objective is to meet one of the pivotal challenges of our time:

“The 21st century challenge for each of us is to build and maintain our own identity from our given traditions and from the wide variety of traditions all around us. At the same time we must all learn to apply tolerance and compassion for the different identities and values of others.”

I like this because it accords with my own preference to view education primarily as a means for the reproduction and development of cultures, and only secondarily as a means for the maintenance of a society. Jerome Bruner has written:

“Man’s intellect….is not simply his own, but is communal in the sense that its unlocking or empowering depends upon the success of the culture in developing means to that end.”

Building and strengthening of culture is a process that happens from the ground up, while building and strengthening a society tends to happen from the top down. If one of the underlying tenets of P21 is to focus on the former, while not forgetting the importance of the latter, then I can only commend this attempt to describe the 21st century skills approach as one that teachers should, at the very least, take account of in developing their own teaching practice.

There are those who have tried to dismiss P21 as an endeavour whose primary aim is the creation of a `content-free curriculum’, or even a `knowledge-free curriculum’. This is simply nonsense, and is indeed, at heart, malicious in its intent. P21 is about shifting the balance in the curriculum; it is not about deleting the experience of hundreds of years of formal education. As the authors say:

Teachers who are shifting their practices to meet the needs of our times talk about how they’re remixing the coverage of content with the uncovering of ideas and concepts….

21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times is, I believe, an important book, one that offers a clear, intelligible and comprehensive characterization of the essential features of the P21 approach. It is a book that I would commend to anyone interested in thinking through the relevance of education to children today and into the future.