21st century skills
Santiram Dahal
- Critical thinking: Finding solutions to problems. Click here to learn more about Critical Thinking
- Creativity: Thinking outside the box
- Collaboration: Working with others
- Communication: Talking to others
- Information literacy: Understanding facts, figures, statistics, and data
- Media literacy: Understanding the methods and outlets in which information is published
- Technology literacy: Understanding the machines that make the Information Age possible
Information literacy is a foundational skill. It helps students understand facts, especially data points, that they’ll encounter online. More importantly, it teaches them how to separate fact from fiction.
Media literacy is the practice of identifying publishing methods, outlets, and sources while distinguishing between the ones that are credible and the ones that aren’t. Just like the previous skill, media literacy helps find truth in a world that’s saturated with information. This is how students find trustworthy sources of information in their lives. Without it, anything that looks credible becomes credible. But with it, they can learn which media outlets or formats to ignore. They also learn which ones to embrace, which is equally important.
The five 21st Century life skills are:
- Flexibility: Deviating from plans as needed
- Leadership: Motivating a team to accomplish a goal
- Initiative: Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one’s own
- Productivity: Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions
- Social skills: Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit
Flexibility is the expression of someone’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Flexibility is crucial to a student’s long-term success in a career. Knowing when to change, how to change, and how to react to change is a skill that’ll pay dividends for someone’s entire life.
Leadership is someone’s penchant for setting goals, walking a team through the steps required, and achieving those goals collaboratively.
True success also requires initiative, requiring students to be self-starters. Initiative only comes naturally to a handful of people. As a result, students need to learn it to fully succeed. This is one of the hardest skills to learn and practice. Initiative often means working on projects outside of regular working hours.
Along with initiative, 21st Century skills require students to learn about productivity. That’s a student’s ability to complete work in an appropriate amount of time. By understanding productivity strategies at every level, students discover the ways in which they work best while gaining an appreciation for how others work as well. That equips them with the practical means to carry out the ideas they determine through flexibility, leadership, and initiative.
Still, there’s one last skill that ties all other 21st Century skills together.
Social skills are crucial to the ongoing success of a professional. Business is frequently done through the connections one person makes with others around them.
This concept of networking is more active in some industries than others, but proper social skills are excellent tools for forging long-lasting relationships. While these may have been implied in past generations, the rise of social media and instant communications have changed the nature of human interaction. As a result, today’s students possess a wide range of social skills
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