Aligning Education with 21st Century Skills

Our economy and world today is driven by innovation, ingenuity and technology, with competition and renewal being the main themes. Corporate climates have diversified to an environment of creativity and collaboration that rest on a platform of social media and networking. We can all agree that education is the cornerstone for our nation in order to keep it’s pace in a global competition. All of these economic evolutions place a high demand on our country’s education, to continually create fresh approaches that truly prepare our youth for global competitiveness.  Therefore our education system must stay aligned with the necessary 21st century skill sets, in order to properly prepare our youth for the workplace. As this need increases, so does the demand for parents shopping for the types of schools that stay ahead of the education trends. As a parent, you want to seek out schools that keep innovation as the driver for it’s education model, not only by offering a technology-enriched curriculum, but also by implementing the 21st century skillsets into it’s teaching platform.

There are four main skillsets that will increase American’s marketability and demand for employment.

1)     Ways of thinking. Critical thinking empowers our students to properly assess the barrage of information coming at them through media and the web. They have the ability to make accurate judgments and place credibility where it’s due. Creativity is the skillset most highly linked to job creation, which every entrepreneur embodies, including the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world. Problem-solving is an underrated skill, according to the linear method found in most traditional schools’ model of teaching and testing. Real-world problems and issues in the workplace do not come in a multiple-choice format, and require the individual to think their way through a problem and involve team members to create solutions.

2)     Ways of working. Collaboration of teams across departments, cultures and worldly perspectives is the key to having successful growth in a company. The only way for collaboration to anchor itself as a bedrock in a company is with effective communication that fosters mutually beneficial relationships between departments and their clients.

3)     Tools for working. Having information literacy is the main key to being marketable in today’s workplace. So why aren’t more schools educating their students in a way that cultivates this skill? More schools are beginning to take on the use of iPads as a teaching tool. However, the schools that have not implemented such household technology will be a disservice to preparing their students for college and beyond.

4)     Skills for living in the world. Respectful citizenship, civic and social responsibility, and wise choices toward life and career, are the foundations set upon us by our founding fathers. The alternative is a society that makes poor decisions resulting dire consequences that take decades or longer to fix.

Education systems need to start including these skills as a necessity for student mastery on their pathway to success in college, career and life. There are many schools today that evolve and innovate their teaching models, curriculum and schooling environment ranging from private, to homeschools, to magnet schools. Halstrom Academy is a niche private school that uses a platform of one teacher: one student ratio, to implement outside of the box teaching and thinking, mastery content of material, and the use of iPads and Skype to stay current with technology trends. In such a one on one classroom environment, the students are not only nurtured through education, they are mentored to embody the 21st century skillset generating a body of confident students that are innovators, creators, developers, and initiators.