Preparing Students for Today's World

Both the ISTE standards and the 21st Century Skills emphasize the important role critical thinking skills, collaboration, and technology play in ensuring students are prepared to succeed in today's world. While the ISTE standards place a greater emphasis on technology and situate technology as a medium through which students can develop the aforementioned key skills, the 21st Century Skills framework (see image below) emphasizes the important foundational role core content area knowledge plays in helping students develop the knowledge and skills they need to succeed. In this sense, the latter positions core content knowledge at the core of student success while also identifying the critical skills and literacies that will help students stand out in today's world. Ultimately, while I believe both documents adequately address and explicate the diverse skills students need to acquire, I found the 21st Century Skills to be most comprehensive because it provides a holistic framework that is sensitive to the social and contextual factors that are critical to student success (i.e. professional development, curriculum and instruction etc.). However, while the article identifies important skills students need to develop, teaching the wide range of these skills seems extremely difficult to accomplish given the emphasis school's currently place on standards based instruction and assessment and the lack of resources (both fiscal and temporal) to ensure students develop life and career skills as well as information, media and technology skills. Many teachers already struggle to cover the content standards within the constraints of the school year. Not to mention the lack of technological resources available to schools in low-income communities makes it difficult for students to access technology and use it in useful and meaningful ways. If we are to help students develop these skills, we need to ensure that all students have access to technology and instructors who are well-versed in this area while simultaneously providing students with opportunities to engage in internships/volunteer work within their communities to ensure they acquire hands on experience that will help them develop life and career skills.