Gateway to 21st Century Skills

Preparing students for the 21st Century calls for collective action on many fronts. Leaders in the education, business, and the public sector have been discussing the need for a 21st Century education model for at least a decade—but we still have much to accomplish. 

Next Steps for K-12 Education Leaders

• Examine local learning goals, curriculum, teaching tools, instructional practices and student assessments to make sure they are aligned in support of 21^st century skills.
• Provide teachers and administrators with professional development that prepares them to learn 21^st century skills.
• Increase your own ICT literacy.
• Provide staff access to 21^st century tools.
• Improve assessments to measure 21^st century skills.
• Increase teacher knowledge and use of classroom assessment methodologies.
• Seek funding to support 21^st century skills.

Spotlight on Leading & Managing Resources

• Students "On Task" Less in Larger Classes
  A new British study quantifies and confirms what many teachers have long believed: Students tend to be “off task” more often when they are in larger classes. Studies on class size have long suggested that elementary school pupils tend to learn more in classes of 20 students or fewer. Cutting class size by 30% gives children the equivalent of four extra months of learning per year but costs around £20,000 (about $39,4000 US) per class per year, says Professor Dylan Wiliam, deputy director of the Institute of Education, London.
• School Libraries
  School library media centers should focus on motivating students, expanding access to technologies, and working with students with disabilities, recommends a report by Ruth Small, a professor of school information studies at Syracuse University. The report, the first in a two-year study that will examine the impact of certified librarians on student achievement, collected more than 1,000 electronic surveys from elementary school librarians in New York state. Many librarians surveyed for the study said that much of the frustration they experienced in their jobs was due to the poor quality of facilities, a lack of technology, and from being limited to part-time employment.
• Panel Calls for Systematic, Basic Approach to Math
  

  The influence of a federal report calling for a more orderly approach to teaching mathematics in the early grades will hinge largely on whether its message is accepted by the nation’s diverse and often fiercely divided math community, members of the panel that crafted it acknowledge. The report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel recommends that schools present elementary and middle school math in a better-defined manner, in contrast to the jumble of strategies now used in states and school districts. The 90-page document calls for the math curriculum to be streamlined in pre-K-8, a strategy it calls putting “first things first.” Students need to be grounded in both the effortless, automatic recall of simple procedures and in the acquisition of broader problem-solving skills. Too often, those skills are wrongly presented as incompatible, the report says. The panel’s report repeatedly calls for students to be able to recall math procedures, such as basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, quickly and effortlessly. It also says that students’ difficulty with fractions is “pervasive” and a “major obstacle” to learning algebra. Initial reaction to the report, “Foundations for Success,” was mixed.