Six Steps for Implementing 21st Century Skills - OCM Boces

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Once awareness has been established, the next step is to take stock of your present condition. Districts can use a variety of tools, including some on-line tools, which will provide specific information about the implementation of 21st Century Skills in schools and districts. It is important to look within the district to describe the level of skills implementation and it is also important to reach out to the educational and business community for their input. These data provide a starting point for districts. A helpful assessment tool is the MILE Guide from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The MILE Guide allows schools and districts to examine their program against the P21 Framework. Other tools are being used by districts, including the College and Work Readiness Assessment Project, the 21st Century Skills Assessment, and the iCritical Thinking Assessment . These tools provide districts with specific evidence about the implementation of specific 21st Century Skills (usually the ITC skills of information and technology literacy). While there are not as many assessment tools that assess skills as there are tools that assess student achievement, there are tools that can provide concrete skills assessment data. One of the challenges that arises in schools is that sometimes educators think that they are "already doing that." This can occur because the definitions of the skills can have multiple interpretations. For example, teachers can think that they are teaching critical thinking to students. Yet, a thorough examination might indicate that there is no deliberate, systems-wide approach to the teaching of critical thinking. The classic checkerboard metaphor can be applied to this situation. As students move through their years of education, some students will be in a classroom where critical thinking skills
are addressed more than in others. Each year, as a student moves to another classroom, the same situation exists with some classrooms paying more attention and being more deliberate about critical thinking skills than others. So, as a student progresses from year to year and different class to different class (the checkerboard), the critical thinking skills work that one child does will vary considerably from the experience and learning of other children. Some will have been in classrooms where critical thinking skills were very deliberately addressed every year, while other children might have never had a lot of work with critical thinking skills – all depending on an arbitrary path across the checkerboard. The experiences of other students will be somewhere between these two extremes. It is important that a district have data about the implementation of 21st Century Skills in order to know how to proceed. Step 3: Narrowing to a Manageable Number of Skills Chances are that the assessments used to measure intentional implementation of 21st Century Skills in a district or school will indicate that many skills need to be deliberately addressed. Indeed, different lists of skills that have been offered by organizations and groups are quite lengthy. The Partnership for 21st Skills has identified twenty-five skills that should be addressed, in addition to core subjects and 21st century themes (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007). Bill Coplin has identified 38 skills necessary for career, college, and citizenship readiness (Coplin, 2003). The NcREL/Metiri/Learning Point Associates list of skills, enGuage, lists 22 skills (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 2003). The Buck Institute for Education actually prepared a crosswalk of ten different models of skills. No matter which list of skills one employs, the
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Six Steps for Implementing 21st Century Skills - OCM Boces

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