Wagner lays our seven survival skills that he believes are the key to today's workplace as well as for lifelong learning and active citizenship:
- Critical thinking and problem solving
- Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
- Agility and adaptability
- Initiative and entrepreneurialism
- Effective oral and written communication
- Accessing and analyzing information
- Curiosity and imagination
In theory, our schools should be the place that our kids learn these skills. Unfortunately, feedback from colleges and employers suggest that they are falling short. As parents, our job is to figure out how to supplement what they are learning in school in a way that these skills will emerge. The good news is that the best way to learn many of these skills is through project based learning and many of the FUN extra curricular activities that our kids already engage in. All it takes is some active thinking about how these activities are being conducted. More ideas on this later.
1 comment:
I would content that while the above list enumerates great skills to have, they could describe any forward-thinking individual over the last several hundred years, but most notable in the renaissance, i.e. Da Vinci, Newton, and Shakespeare. So they could even be described as 14th century skills, really.
What distinguishes 21st century skills from earlier innovators is the complexity, scale (i.e. number of parts; renaissance=hundreds -> modern = trillions), personal interconnectivity; renaissance=hundreds-> modern=millions, and the time scale (renaissance = centuries, modern = weeks) of developments.
All of the modern-scale challenges rely almost entirely on computers to organize the exponentially-growing data, designs, communication interconnections, etc... with ever more rapidly evolving tools and techniques.
So to make it a genuine 21st-century list, I would add
:
1.) facility with technical tools (across all disciplines) that allow management of increasingly complex problems through abstraction and scoping, and hierarchical and iterative design, where modern day individuals with updated tools replace more and more functional roles from past enterprise.
2.) A meta-skill of learning how to rapidly learn whatever new tools and techniques come about independently, so that when trillions become quadrillions, you will still be current.
3.) The ability to leverage proficiency with these technical tools as a vast multiplier to your personal (and collaborative) productivity.
4.) Interdisciplinary facility with all of the above.
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