21st Century Skills

I recently came across an article from the World Economic Forum where they identified skills that are valued in the 21st century workforce. (Specific definitions of each of these 16 identified skills are listed in Appendix 1 in the linked article.)  The foundational literacies are the traditional core skills (reading, writing, and arithmetic) with an emphasis on application.  As our economy moves from an industrial production model toward an information technology model, the competencies become more and more important, eloquently articulated by Daniel Pink in his book A Whole New Mind.  But I was primarily interested in the character qualities, asking myself how we, as a Christian school, can help develop those skills.

My mind went to a recent activity I was closely involved with here at HCA.  Mr. Russ Miller and I worked with a group of students and adult mentors who joined with 40+ other teams from a 4-state area in the First Technology Challenge robotics competition in late January.  This competition was the culmination of a process that began in September when the details of this year's competition were announced.  For the next 4 months, a dozen students and 6-7 adult mentors worked to design and build a robot to accomplish the various tasks presented in this competition.  Curiosity was demonstrated as the team discussed various strategies to score the most points.  Students showed initiative by stepping up to the challenge and taking on various elements of the task.  Failure is always are part of the process like this - Edison famously said, "I didn't fail a thousand times to create a light bulb; I was successful in finding 1,000 ways that didn't work."  When faced with a concept that didn't perform as expected, the team was forced to show grit (see previous post) to keep pursuing the goal and adaptability in finding new ways to accomplish the task.  It was a delight to see different students step up a various times during the process to assert leadership, accepting the challenge of a specific part of the task.  And of course, the social dynamic of a group of this size working together for four months required a keen sense of social awareness.

This is only one example of the type of activity that helps students develop these skills.  I could write a similar paragraph on an athletic team, the senior class ministering together on their missions trip, or a group of students preparing for a dramatic production.  The key is that these are all elements of lifelong learning.  In fact, I think you could make the case that those items listed in the 2nd and 3rd columns become more important as life goes on.  And at the end of the day, we want our students to be lifelong learners.

NOTE:  For the record, the rookie Charger Robotics team performed well enough to be chosen to be one of a dozen teams to move on from the qualification rounds to compete in the elimination round.