The president of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is responding to serious scholarly criticism of his organization’s agenda with spin and more spin. First he called the criticisms that Diane Ravitch, E.D. Hirsch, and Dan Willingham leveled against P21 a “sideshow.” That’s a strange way to refer to scholars who have authored and edited more than two dozen books between them. Then Kay produced a YouTube video in which he sits in front of a representation of P21′s infamous rainbow chart and misrepresents these scholars’ criticisms as touting “a false choice” between skills and content.
Ravitch, Hirsch, and Willingham never said skills weren’t important. They said the opposite: That skills are important and only can be successfully taught alongside content. Now Kay’s taking his barrage on the road with three presentations at the upcoming ASCD annual conference in Orlando. Kay is a master at saying things that sound true. Such as this statement taken verbatim from his YouTube video: “The truth is that 21st century skills and core curriculum are mutually supportive of one another.” So let’s just take a moment to discover how that “mutually supportive” relationship plays out.
On YouTube Kay touts P21′s work in North Carolina, in particular how they have reshaped teacher education in that state. Here’s a link to a lesson plan for K-8 teachers in NC seeking to advance their students’ understanding of goal-setting. It is called “Goals, Goals, Goals….” which I guess is an attempt at humor because if you want to follow along you’ll have to get a soccer ball. The entire lesson consists of getting a group of students to figure out how they can all touch the ball in the shortest period of time. They start by standing in a circle and, when the ball is tossed to them, giving one “feeling word” to describe how they feel that day. Then they just start coming up with ways to toss and touch the ball more and more quickly. We had an entire class dedicated to this type of activity when I was in school. It was called Gym–not English, Social Studies, or Math.
Lynne Munson
Tags: 21st century skills
One of Ken Kay’s tricks is to wave around a lot of vague terms that may have vastly different meanings to different people. Michael John Demiashkevich (1891-1938) referred to this sort of verbal trickery as “the witchery of words.”
Ken Kay argues that everyone wants the same 21st century skills: employers, not-for-profits, civic groups… everyone. In his video he says:
“There’s another area that has recently been raised, as to whether 21st century skills is just about preparation for the workforce. It’s not. When we started out six and a half years ago, we were as committed to civic engagement and the development of 21st century citizens as we were to the development of 21st century workers. We took our model out to everybody: to employers, but we also took our model out to folks involved in civic engagement, folks involved in nonprofit—not-for-profit—institutions, folks involved in civic life. And we asked them, ‘Take a look at these skills: critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, innovation, technology literacy, self-direction, global awareness. Are those the skills you need if you’re gonna work for a not-for-profit? Are those the skills you need if you’re developing 21st century citizens?’ They all said, ‘You got ’em right. You nailed them. Those are the skills we need.’ And so what we found in our work as we went around the country and talked to folks, is the skills we need for 21st century, the skills we need for 21st century citizens, the skills we need for 21st century workers are the same skills, and there’s a false choice that you have to choose the skills for the new economy or the skills for 21st century citizenship, that’s not the case, and we’re proud of the work we’ve done to forward civic engagement in many of the states that we’re working with as a major part of our effort.”
Now, critical thinking could mean anything from discussing Melville to “sharing out” about peer pressure and bullying. Problem-solving could mean anything from tackling a complex trigonometry problem to touching a soccer ball, as in the NC lesson that Lynne Munson mentioned. Communication could mean strong, coherent writing, or it could mean rapid, abbreviated texting. Collaboration could involve substantial solitary work, or it could mean constant groupwork. And so forth.
So when P21 goes around to not-for-profits and civic groups and asks, “Are these the skills you need? Are they? Are they?” the respondents are likely to say yes, because the skills are indeed needed in some form. But if you asked them to define each of these terms, you’d probably get a range of answers. P21 does not probe further, from what I can see. It is happy with its superficial consensus.
Then P21 takes its “consensus” to the schools and asks them to embrace these skills. How do these skills translate into curriculum, under the P21 plan? Take a look at those “21st Century Skills Maps” for English and social studies. Many of the suggested projects are vapid, cumbersome, and distracting, with a great emphasis on software and Web tools. Software and Web tools have their place, but they should not overwhelm the curriculum or become ends in themselves. It seems a lot of companies want to get their products in the door.
Why does it not occur to P21 that students need a counterbalance to all those gadgets and media? If students are to learn how to think, they need quiet. They need focus. They need respite from flashing, beeping things. And they need to learn how to use words carefully instead of throwing jargon around as P21 does.
Diana Senechal
Just a thought, but it seems to me 21st Century civics skills means being able to tell when state officials are being conned. And by the way, here’s one of the better exchanges (with Susan Traiman, Business Roundtable) that took place via the National Academy of Science:
Research on Future Skill Demands: A Workshop Summary
National Academies Press, 2008
Kay … sees K-12 systems as more willing to explore these broad skills than higher education, which is focused on deep content knowledge in disciplinary “silos.” Traiman, noting that higher education has a powerful influence on K-12 education, said that, if leading universities were to require the broad skills in addition to academic content knowledge, high schools and high school students would respond.
Ms Traiman’s bio is here:
http://www.businessroundtable.org/member_details?id=167&width=640&height=480&TB_iframe=true
[...] to do with teaching students to text message or figure out a way for everyone in the class to touch a soccer ball–examples of the kind of classroom activities P21 [...]