21st CENTURY SKILLS
C. Life skills
1. Flexibility: Train your students to accept changes and adapt the differences around them. Urge your students to value the other point of view and accept others. Train them how not to
control everything around them and to agree on decision that has nothing to do concern whether you approve it or not.
2. Leadership: Ability to lead others to achieve a certain goal.
Help your students to be influential to others will help in building their personality and create natural leaders. You have to highlight the qualities that create a good leader.
3. Initiative: urge your students to have motivation and design plans then have an implementation process. The student can create a strategy by his own and become the initiative beginner and owner. It helps students’ productivity.
4. Productivity: Students have to determine goals first, plan well, recognize obstacles and try to surpass, and then manage to succeed. Time management is an essential topic when discussing productivity.
5. Social skills: interacting effectively with others is very important.
So we need to teach social skills to our students. Dealing with a person who is totally different from you needs a specific talent and skill in order to cooperate with him to achieve a goal. Good communication with others is so essential especially using empathy as understanding others who are may be socially and culturally different from us and are from different backgrounds will help us to deal successfully with them.
By understanding and teaching these skills, your students will be well prepared to start and produce in whatever occupation they choose.
To measure the learners’ achievements in the 21st century education, we have to focus on 4 areas that are; curriculum which we teach, instruction
learners’ characteristics who we teach. We have to consider resources that are used in educating learners of the 21st century as well. Let’s discuss how to implement the 6C’s in everyday curriculum. First try to introduce one C at the time then move to the next C after your students fully understand the current one. Second define each C and illustrate the connection with other Cs and how we can use inside the classroom. Third practice and model the C you represent in action. Fourth try to use one of them and ask your students which one you are using. Finally use the 6Cs in projects and activities and challenge your students to use and have fun. Let us be more specific, how can we get our students to acquire these skills? It’s now the time to change the traditional methods and begin to try some innovative techniques to integrate the 6Cs in our learning process by using:
• Project based learning: According to Buck Institute for Education, project-based learning is “a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging and complex question, problem, or challenge“. In project based activities students are involved with a real life problem within the project. Students have to use most of the 6Cs to solve the problem. The main target is not solving the problem but developing the skills during project process.
• Genius hour: it gives the students an opportunity to express their passion in a certain time inside the classroom. Giving the students the freedom to do what they want to do will improve their abilities.
The creation at the end will be unexpected; it may be a new idea, technique or a project. It is important to determine the time of the genius hour.
Conclusion
Our duty is to understand the influence and potential of the 21st century skills for every student nowadays. In order to get the students, acquire the 21st century skills, it is not enough to give them the information and illustrate the skills but they have to practice them in real life setting.
Teachers and schools need to adapt and develop new ways of teaching that suit the new world; they need to recognize what students need to learn for now to be successful in the future. The main role of teachers and schools is to help students succeed in their lives after graduation.
Teachers and schools need to prioritize the 21st century skills as major objectives in teaching. Students don’t need to get information anymore as information is spread everywhere; they need to learn how to use and employ the information in their real lives. The debate of content over skills is not new and will not end soon. So we need to integrate new techniques little by little to obtain the 21st century skills.
Bibliography
Anugerahwati, Mirjam. Integrating the 6Cs of the 21st Century Education into the English Lesson and the School Literacy Movement in Secondary Schools. ISoLEC International Seminar on Language, Education, and Culture Volume 2019 Universitas Negeri Malang Dewey, John. “Democracy and education: an introduction to the
philosophy of education”. Macmillan, Harvard; also Free Press, N.Y. 1916 (pg 239).
Fullan, M. and Duckworth, S. (2015). 21st Century Skills: 6 Cs of Education.
(www. blogawwapp.com) retrieved on July 15, 2018.
Fullan, Michael and Geoff Scott, Education PLUS The world will be led by people you can count on, including you! Collaborative Impact SPC, Seattle, Washington, July 2014
Lewin, Kurt (1948): Resolving social conflicts, Harper, New York.
Miller, B.S. The 6Cs Squared Version of Education in the 21st Century (www. bamradionetwork.com) retrieved on July 26, 2018.
Toffler, Alvin, The 6 C’s of Education for the 21st Century. https://
infogram.com/the-6-cs-of-education-for-the-21st-century- 1gvew2vdygen2nj
Trilling, Bernie and Charles Fadel. 21st Century Skills Learning for Life in Our Times. Jossey-Bass, John Wiley & Sons, INC. USA, 2009.
www.21stcenturyskills.org
CHAPTER VI