Bringing it into the 21st century

This week I am being asked to consider how well I feel prepared for 21st century teaching and learning.  How well does anyone feel for anything new?  If I said “I feel absolutely prepared, I am ready to teach my students everything they need to know in exactly the ways they need to know it,” I would either be lying or ridiculously naive.  Since I am neither one, I must say that I am unsure about my ability to adequately prepare my students for the world that they will encounter when they leave school.  But thankfully, it is not solely up to me to prepare the students I teach; I share the burden with many others.

As I review the literature on “21^st century skills”, I believe that I do work toward preparing my students to do all the things listed as 21^st century skills.  We work on developing critical thinking and problem solving and practice collaborating and communicating with our peers as we participate in small group and class projects.  We learn to be flexible and creative as we find that our plans are going to be disrupted for whatever reason and we have to not only change our schedule, but also have to rearrange our lessons to still get everything to “fit”. Also, in designing lessons that give students choices and ask them to decide how to present information, they are required to practice decision-making skills and to be creative.   But what about making certain my students are information and technology literate?  Am I preparing them to be globally competent and financially literate?  How do I even do these things?  Does information literate mean academic content?  Is technology literate the same as being able to use appropriate technology?  How am I going to know that my students are globally competent?  Is financial literacy being able to write checks and balance a checkbook, or is there more to it than that?

Even as I ask myself these questions and wonder about the terms, I also think about how “21^st century” these skills really are.  Aren’t these skills that we have needed all along?  Every generation has needed these skills in order to be successful.  I think what makes them seem so new and shiny is that, like character education and values in the 1980s and 1990s, they had been taught at home and now we are finding that too many people are lacking these skills and it is suddenly the responsibility of teachers.  So we say they are 21^st century skills, wrap them in pretty colors, and hope no one notices that these aren’t so new or exciting and that once again we are giving teachers the responsibility of raising our nation’s children.

I struggle as I consider my strengths and weaknesses.  Right now all I can think about is how it is yet again teachers that are being expected to clean up the mess that society has created.  But I do know that I am passionate about learning and about encouraging my students to be independent learners and that means that I am going to have to do all those things that are so 21^st century, but I have been doing since 1997 and my teachers were doing in the 1980s and 1990s.  So I guess my strength is that maybe, with the exception of technology, I know that I am a strong teacher of all the 21^st century skills and incorporating them into the academic curriculum.  I know that I need to challenge myself to use technology more with my students.  I also know that my pessimism and frustration at the sleight of hand and subterfuge in calling these 21^st century skills is a challenge because it causes me to lose focus, which does not benefit my students or school.

So where do I go from here?  The same place I always go, back to the beginning.  I read some encouraging professional books (by Steven Layne and Mem Fox) and good children’s fiction (by Blue Balliett, E.L. Konigsburg, and Madeline L’Engle) and then start working on a grand and glorious plan to be the most amazing teacher anyone has ever imagined or written about.  I dream not about the perfect class, but about the perfect school year—where I am the best and most exciting teacher any of my students has ever had.  And since it is almost summer, I am at that point, full of hope and ready to start again.  Looking back on everything that didn’t go the way I would have liked and determining how I can do it right this time.  That is the most wonderful part of being a teacher, every year is new and I have yet another chance at making it perfect!