Route 21 Skills - Partnership for 21st Century Skills

How I wish I could clone myself as I only ever have when I had two very young children!  This entire endeavor, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is incredible.  I'll be investigating it on an ongoing basis for months I'm sure.

Learning and Innovation Skills -

1. There's that collaboration element again.  Just as we're being called to in library school, 21st century learning seems to believe it's an education necessity as well.  We're preparing kids (we hope) for an economy that values innovation, making connections between disparate pieces of information and people, and finding smart work.  Of course, by preparing kids for this world, we're also creating it, right?  Yes, were responding to their world, but we're also determining what shape it takes right along with them.
2. "...understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas."  So important to separate our egos from what we and others can actually do.  Disappointment is inevitable, but with some perspective on just what can really happen, it's mitigated somewhat.  On the other hand, youth has the courage to ignore obvious limits and drive the culture furthet for its lack of recognizing pain around the corner.
3. "...understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes."  How can we keep this at the forefront of our teaching and learning while grades hold such a huge place in our kids' consciousness?  Pride in work is huge, but some standardized motivating element is doubtless effective.

Information, Media, and Technology Skills -

• Understanding how, why and for what purpose media are presented is so important and something fairly complex.  It's easy just to villify every .com s a money-grubbing source as opposed to orgs's or 'edu's.  But that's not the whole story of course.  This how, why and for what purpose teaching has to be ongoing from the bery beginning, through college, I believe.

Life and Career Skills -

1. "Work effectively in a climate of ambiguity and changing priorities."  This is a lesson we faculty desperately need to learn and model for our students.  It's radically difficult, like truly from our roots.  We want to depend on the way things are, and we want the kids to behave dependably.  But we need to figure out when we're creating order and predicatability for own own comfort primarily when it might be limiting our students' harmless and real need for freedom to explore their world and express themselves within it.
2. Under "Initiative and self-direction," I question the ubiquitous need for multi-tasking as a skills.  In my experience it's extremely effective, in fact default, for some people, and absolutely disastrous for others.  This is one we need to look at on an individual basis, I think.