Can 21st Century Skills Replace 19th Century Skills?

I am very fortunate as an educator. I work in a school where the individual passions and strengths of a teacher are respected and utilized in such a way to benefit the students that we serve. We don't have a cookie-cutter system of teaching that we must conform to. We are not only allowed, but urged to develop our craft and become the best we can be. We all do things differently, but we achieve the same goals, meet the same standards, and all of that.

I aws speaking to my Library Media Specialist the other day about 21st century learning. We spoke about how the skills that will be necessary for the world of tomorrow will soon drive the learning in our classrooms. This begs the question... "What are the skills they need?"

While we don't know for sure what they are, we do have ideas and a general direction. Students need to be active learners. They need to be critical thinkers. They need to think "outside of the box". I believe that they need to be taught HOW TO, not taught WHAT.

A simpler analogy that I can refer to is the dreaded choral clap. Many teachers use this method to get student attention. This is especially useful in the lower grades (I guess, or at least that's how it appears). To me, that is more akin to training monkeys or seals than children. Are we Pavlovian training them to react to a sound or are we trying to help them to gauge the appropriateness of their actions and self-correct? The world doesn't clap when you do something wrong. It hits hard. Having students more autonomous and accountable to themselves without constant reminders and redirection from others.. that's what I hope for my students.

Back to the 21st century. There are things that many teachers do that I don't. They simply don't lend themselves to my style and my passions. If I had to assign weekly book reports to my kids, I think I'd jump out of a window (even thought I'm on the first floor). While book reports make me cringe, I have no problems asking my students to blog their thoughts. I would not want to read through pages upon pages of structured responses, but I gladly look through 25-50 blogs each week online and quite a few comments. I don't want to create scrapbooks and dioramas, but I love for my students to put on plays, create movies, and digitally tell stories.

Textbooks tell a story, but I want my kids to experience the story. I want them to feel the fight for independence as if they were alongside the Patriots at the Boston Tea Party, not look at it as an isolated, disonnected and irrelevant part of history. I want them to empathize with the characters in a book, not look on as a casual observer. It's nice to tackle transformative projects, but at what point will 21st century skills actually replace those that are "outdated"? How can we figure out what has become outdated?

On a probability test I gave my class about a month ago, I asked the following question:

A box contains 6 red tiles and 4 blue tiles. Sammy chooses a tile without looking. She wins if the tile is red. Cara wins if the tile is blue. What can you change in order to make this game fair for both players?

What do you think? The standard answers....
1) Remove 2 red tiles
2) Add 2 blue tiles



I had a student write the following on that test...
"Take one red tile and paint it blue"

I will not take credit for that student's thinking. I will tell you that I did say "WOW!" when I was grading it. That's not outside the box.. that's blowing it up.