Countries across the world are currently engaged in a wide-range of reforms in their respective education curricula with a view to better preparing their children for the more demanding educational responsibilities of jobs and of life, generally, in the twenty first century.
What are the skills that will be demanded of the work force in the 21st century, going forward? Perhaps the more relevant question has to do with the competencies that teachers need to effectively teach those skills to their students. What teacher preparation programmes and transformations in teacher training institutions are needed to ready their graduates to take their places in the twenty first century classroom?
The reality is that the world is rapidly becoming a different place. Those changes, whether we like it or not, impose upon individuals and societies challenges and responsibilities that are different, more complex than anything that we have previously seen. Perhaps the biggest challenge for educators in the 21st century has to do with the fact that the routine, rule-based knowledge, which has become relatively easy to teach and to test is also easiest to digitize, automate and outsource. The issue of 21st-century skills is by no means orthogonal to traditional school subjects but, in fact, equally relevant to the latter. Mathematics is as good an example as any. Traditionally mathematics has been taught in an abstract mathematical world, using an approach that is removed from actual contexts, a circumstance which many students find discouraging largely because they do not see the relevance. For example, students are taught the techniques of arithmetic, then given lots of similar equations to solve. In contrast, in the 21st century, students need to have an understanding of the fundamental concepts of mathematics, they need to be able to translate a new situation or problem they face into a form that exposes the relevance of mathematics, make the problem amenable to mathematical treatment, identify and use the relevant mathematical knowledge to solve the problem, and then evaluate the solution in the original problem context. Further, their creativity can be enhanced by devising novel solutions, and even new problems with non-standard solutions.
Literacy provides another example. In the past, literacy was mainly about learning to read, a set of technical skills that individuals would acquire once for a lifetime in order to process an established body of coded knowledge. In the 21st century, literacy is about reading for learning, the capacity and motivation to identify, understand, interpret, create and communicate knowledge, using written materials associated with varying situations in continuously changing contexts. In the past, it was sufficient to direct students to an encyclopedia to find the answer to a question, and they could generally rely on what they found to be true. Today, literacy is about curiosity and self-direction, managing non-linear information structures, building one’s own mental representation and synthesis of information as one finds one’s own way through hypertext on the Internet, about dealing with ambiguity, developing healthy skepticism, an inquiring mindset, and interpreting and resolving conflicting pieces of information. Similarly, the conventional approach of schools to problems was to break these down into manageable bits and pieces, and then teaching students the techniques to solve them. But today, individuals create value by synthesizing the disparate bits. This is about open-mindedness and making connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated, which requires being familiar with and receptive to knowledge in different fields. The world is also no longer divided into specialists and generalists. What counts today are educators who are able to apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles. They are capable not only of constantly adapting but also of constantly learning and growing, of positioning themselves and repositioning themselves in a fast changing world.
Accordingly, what competencies do teachers require to function effectively in imparting those skills to their charges? Here, the question arises as to what teacher preparation programmes are needed to prepares graduates for the classroom well into the twenty first century.
Of all of the so-called “twenty first century skills,” creativity and innovation are particularly worthy of mention. At the level of countries, as much as at the individual level, these two have been acknowledged as critical to the challenge of addressing issues of “employability, personal and societal challenges.” Accordingly, if schools are to be relevant they need to nurture creativity amongst their charges, across all disciplines, not just those that we loosely describe as ‘the Arts.’ In today’s schools, students typically learn individually and at the end of the school year, schools certify their individual achievements. That too has to change. The more interdependent the world becomes, the more important the capacity of individuals to collaborate and orchestrate becomes.
The ‘bottom line’ here is this. Changes in the demand for skills now have profound
implications for the competencies which teachers must acquire to effectively teach 21st-century skills to their students. A generation ago, when teachers could reasonably expect that what they taught would last for a lifetime, teaching a fixed syllabus of content was at the center of education in most countries. Today, where individuals can access content on search engines, teachers need to enable people to become lifelong learners, to manage non-rule-based complex ways of thinking and of working. The past was about delivered wisdom, the challenge now is to foster user-generated wisdom among teachers and school leaders in the front line. Students’ lack of motivation, and often disengagement, reflects the inability of education systems to connect the content to real-world relevance. There is a need to rethink the significance and applicability of what is taught, and in concert to strike a better balance between the conceptual and the practical.
Here, it is necessary to dwell for a moment on the Guyana situation where, up until now, talk of curriculum reform in the school system has not, up until now, been attended by any discernable action. Two points should be made here. Changes in the educational demands of a society that looks to raise its game in the 21st century can no longer move at a pace determined by ponderous and seemingly uncertain bureaucracies. It is the urgency of the need for change that must dictate the pace at which curriculum reform moves.
Secondly, and here one assumes that the local education authorities are cognisant of this, curriculum reform at the level of the school cannot be isolated from corresponding shifts in the shape and content of the curriculum at our teacher training institutions. It is hardly necessary to point out that curriculum change that excludes commensurate shift in both content and methodology at our training institutions will leave our teachers in a proverbial lurch since, in the final analysis, there is the enormous risk that they will be challenged to be Captains of ships the complexity of which, their limited skills and abilities do not allow them to ‘skipper’ effectively.
But there will be more to teaching as the 21st century unfolds. As the challenges associated with managing a more complex society ‘ramp up’ it will become increasingly necessary to afford character traits greater room on the curriculum. These will include: adaptability, persistence, resilience, determination and virtues related to morality including integrity, justice, empathy, ethics. While the objective of the past was standardisation and conformity, today it is about ingenuity and about personalising educational experiences. Yesteryear was curriculum-centered, the present is learner-centered, that is to say that education systems increasingly need to identify how individuals learn differently and foster new forms of educational provision.
What can teacher preparation programs do to prepare graduates who are ready to teach well in a 21st-century classroom? Education systems generally struggle with finding answers to this question and there is no agreement across countries on how success should be measured and quality assured. However, there is considerable agreement across countries regarding important attributes that 21st-century learning environments should provide. It is widely agreed that optimising the effectiveness of the teaching/learning experience requires that we:
● make learning central, encourage engagement, and be the place where
students come to under- stand themselves as learners.
● ensure that learning is social and often collaborative.
● be highly attuned to students’ motivations and the importance of emotions.
● be acutely sensitive to individual differences, including in prior knowledge.
● be demanding of every student, without overloading students.
● use assessments that emphasise formative feedback and
● promote connections across activities and subjects, both in and out of
school.
Taken together, these principles form a demanding framework on which teachers’ professionalism is based. In addition to developing such individual skills, teachers also need to be able and have opportunities to work collaboratively with others in designing learning environments, addressing the learning needs of particular groups of students, developing themselves professionally, and teaching with others in team approaches.
Teachers need to be well-versed in the subjects they teach in order to be adept at using different methods and, if necessary, changing their approaches to optimise learning. This includes content-specific strategies and methods to teach specific content. They need a rich repertoire of teaching strategies, the ability to combine approaches, and the knowledge of how and when to use certain methods and strategies. The strategies used should include direct, whole-group teaching, guided discovery, group work, and the facilitation of self-study and individual discovery. They should also include personalised feedback.
Teachers also need to have a deep understanding of how learning happens, in general, and of individual students’ motivations, emotions and lives outside the classroom, in particular. They must be able to work in highly collaborative ways, working with other teachers, parents and other professionals within the same organisation, or with individuals in other organisations, networks of professional communities and different partnership arrangements, which may include mentoring.
Teachers also need to develop the capacity to help design, lead, manage and plan learning environments in collaboration with others. Finally, teachers need to reflect on their practices in order to learn from their experience.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The completion of this article was facilitated through resort to other research-based and opinion pieces, from various. Those various contributions to the author’s final product are gratefully acknowledged
