In my teaching lab class at Michigan State University and my student teaching experience, I learned about how to create meaningful science experiments that incorporated thinking skills of the scientific method. Around the same time, No Child Left Behind was created. Along with it came mandated state testing. Over the course of my classroom teaching experience, I watched teaching change from a focus on skills to one on content. Throughout most of my career, I taught TAKS- or STAAR-tested subjects. That is, I taught 8th-grade science for seven years, 5th-grade math for one year, and 5th-grade for five years.
Skills Over Content
While I worked my hardest to continue to focus on skills over content, the stress of teaching a tested subject wore on me. I finally felt a sense of freedom when I taught a STEM course that I got to design myself. My goal was to concentrate on skills by applying both the scientific method and the engineering design process. In spite of many false starts and mistakes, I created a course that allowed kids to analyze, innovate, and synthesize information they learned in all of their courses in an authentic environment with real-world problems. Of course, then COVID hit and the technology skills I learned as a teacher catapulted me to a new role in technology instruction.
Welcome to the 21st Century
While teaching the STEM course, I realized the importance of 21st-century skills for the future of unpredictable jobs. We “went from an economy of using hands to work to using brains to work in a short amount of time. The skills for a successful career, continuous learning, and active and informed citizenship have converged” (Wagner, 2009). In class, I showed the IDEO: Shopping Cart Design Process (ABC Nightly News, 2017) to my students to encourage design thinking. In the video, IDEO uses the engineering design process to redesign a shopping cart. During the video, I noticed how long the team at IDEO spent analyzing the problem of the shopping cart. In fact, they seemed to spend more of their time analyzing the problem than designing new carts!
In Seven Skills Students Need for Their Future, Dr. Wagner (2009) postulates that we need to spend more time reframing the education problem. It’s not about reform, testing, and professional development (Wagner, 2009). Rather, we need to “rethink, reimagine, and reconceptualize education for the 21st century” (Wagner, 2009).
Seven Essential Life Skills
While I have seen many iterations on 21st-century skills, both Wagner (2009) and Galinsky (2020) suggest that there are seven essential life skills that students need to see success in the future workforce. In the table below, I listed the skills in the order mentioned in each video. Next, I defined each based on the definitions used by the speakers in each video. Finally, I color-coded skills from Wagner’s (2009) interpretation to match skills from Galinsky’s (2020) video. While they weren’t a perfect match, you can see that the skills align pretty well in both videos.
No list is perfect. However, both lists provide a great framework to address the problem that is our educational system. A shift in attention to either list – or any combination of these traits – would be a step in the right direction for public schools. After all, these “executive life skills add up to helping us be ongoing learners. In a world where information changes so rapidly it is the ongoing learners that will survive” (Galinsky, 2020).
Just Teach
In the midst of my position as a 5th-grade science teacher, I attended Margaret Kilgo’s Data-Driven Decision Making Conference (Kilgo, 2014). We looked at TEKS, disaggregated data, analyzed STAAR test questions, and attended to verbs. However, in the end, Margaret Kilgo’s advice was to create real, experiential learning environments with an emphasis on the process skills in your TEKS snapshot. In other words, “just teach” (Kilgo, 2014).
How do you educate to innovate?
References
ABC Nightly News. (2017, September 29). IDEO: Shopping Cart Design Process. YouTube. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjhx17NuSE
Galinsky, E. (2020, April 17). The Seven Essential Life Skills. YouTube. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from http://youtu.be/SdIkQnTy6jA%20
Kilgo, M. (2014). Data-Driven Decision Making [Conference].
Wagner, T. (2009, October 1). Seven Skills Students Need for Their Future. YouTube. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from http://youtu.be/NS2PqTTxFFc