Understanding 21st Century Skills for Workforce, Education, and Youth Development (Part One)

This is the first in a series of posts about 21^st Century Skills; defining what they are, how practitioners have conceived of these skills, what employers want and how you integrate this thinking into your work. We invite you to share your thinking as practitioners across the fields of education, workforce development, and youth development. Each post offers a discussion question to engage readers.

21^st Century Skills Defined Over the Years

We at Pathways Consultants work across education, workforce development and youth development programming with children through adults. We think a great deal about what it means to be work ready and college ready. Much has been made of preparing youth and young adults with 21^st Century Skills. I once heard a teacher quip, “Well, what century are we supposed to be preparing them for??”  But work to define 21^st Century Skills actually started in the early 1990’s and we are still defining them in 2012.

21^st Century skills frameworks are guidelines to help us better prepare youth and adults with the necessary skills needed for today’s rapidly changing world of work and post-secondary education. Practitioners started developing 21^st Century skill frameworks in the early 1990’s, with a future focus for what the next millennium would bring to the world of work and education. Today, 13 years into the millennium, it’s time revisit this concept and evaluate if we are all talking about the same thing and aligning it to what employers need.

The Framework for 21^st Century Learning is the pivotal framework used nationally and developed by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. In this model, the “rainbow” below represents the goals, standards, and intended outcomes of learning for  21^st  century students, and the “pools” below indicate the learning supports and systems that help students reach those goals.

As practitioners, we are interested in engaging you in conversation through our blog. Our question for you is:

Whose job is it ensure that young people have the skills to be ready for 21^st Century jobs? Is it teachers? And if so, how do you think schools and educators can create classroom environments and school cultures, especially those that support digital literacy, to achieve these objectives given today’s budget constraints?

Partnership for 21st Century Skills also recently released a toolkit designed to help state and district education leaders implement Common Core State Standards within the P21 Framework for  21^st  Century Skills. I really love this toolkit because it gives real world examples of lessons aligned between Common Core and 21^st Century skills across the K-12 continuum.