Today, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) released two new “roadmaps” in geography and science. The maps provide a framework and resources for integrating technology and other 21st century skills into core subject areas. Last year, they put out maps for social studies and English/language arts. The new maps were created by P21 in consultation with the National Science Teachers Association and the National Council for Geographic Education.
What’s the problem? To begin, they include no content. We looked through each of the standards and activities for grades 4, 8, and 12 and could not find one specific reference to content knowledge students would learn by doing what P21 recommends. What we did find was a chart (pg. 16) highlighting the characteristics of 21st century learning, P21 style. It describes 21st Century standards and assessments as having less emphasis on “acquiring information” and on “assessing to learn what students do not know.” So, under P21’s plan, students will learn less and their knowledge gaps will go undetected.
Many of the activities P21 proposes are simply preposterous, especially when you consider that students would be doing these things without first “acquiring information”:
Science- 4th grade:
Students in the class role-play citizens in a town meeting where members of the community express different points of view about a local issue, such as the location of a new school, building a bypass for traffic, or a re-zoning of downtown to be “pedestrian only” without vehicles, etc.
Science- 8th grade:
Students view video samples from a variety of sources of people speaking about a science-related topic (e.g., news reporters, news interviews of science experts, video podcasts of college lectures, segments from public television documentaries, or student-made videos of parents and professionals in their community). Students rate the videos on the degree to which the person sounded scientific…
Geography- 12th grade:
To test the law of retail gravitation (i.e., the number of visits a resident makes to competing shopping centers is inversely proportional to the distances between residence and center and proportional to the size of the center), students work in small groups to conduct a community survey of a retail area’s “retail gravity” on a non-school attendance day….
Once again, P21 and their associates have it backwards. With strong content, quality teaching, and engaging lessons, students’ problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and other related skills will develop as part of their learning.