Look to experience, not policy, to assess 21st century skills

08-12-2011

Opinion by Charles Taylor Kerchner/Thoughts on Public Education

Charles Taylor Kerchner is Research Professor in the School Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University

Learning to collaborate and to solve ill-defined problems are to the 21st Century what industrial discipline was to the last hundred years, according to those who have studied what employers and society need. They need to be considered basic skills, just as are reading, math, and science, and they are one of the key elements of Learning 2.0. By the turn of the millennium, it was clear that jobs requiring routine thinking and skills were giving way to those involving both higher levels of knowledge and also some applied skills, such as expert thinking and complex communicating, that are not well captured by most current educational standards or taught in the conventional curriculum. Teamwork, for example, is taught mostly in extracurricular activities. But how to do this? If we as a society want creativity, if we want working together, where do we teach it? How do we assess it? The current policy path links new basic skills with a new generation of tests that will be a part of the Common Core of standards. (more...)

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Look to experience, not policy, to assess 21st century skills

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