21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times,   ISBN:9780470475386

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An informative book for any parent who is actively engaged in their child's education. If more schools had the kind of learning framework presented here, we could revolutionize education as we know it. So many of us faltered along the way because we were forced to learn in a system that didn't optimize our capabilities or support our learning styles. This book offers the guidance and vision within a comprehensive framework that can do both. We need this kind of thoughtful leadership now more than ever if we want to be competitive in the global environment.

Be sure to watch the DVD portion, it was so inspiring it made me want to go back to 4th grade..and that's the way our kids should feel about going to school every day!

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I found myself dogearning many pages with helpful info on leading schools to a more relevant education.

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"....to the little girl in Santo Domingo, whose eyes will forever remind me that 'a mind is a terrible thing to waste.' "

May you, and the millions like you, find the dignity, happiness, and serenity you deserve, through the transformational power of education.

This powerful and personal memory ends Charles Fadel's dedication of the book he has co-authored with Bernie Trilling: 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times. The slogan of the UNCF, a phrase redolent of that long and continuing struggle for civil rights in the USA, is an apt reminder of the critical role of education in building and maintaining a world in which every child has the chance to experience the joy of learning and a chance to take his or her life somewhere beyond mere survival.

The first point to make is that 21st Century Skills is a highly practical and down-to-earth introduction to the detail that underpins the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21), the US-based (but determinedly outward-looking) organization focused on "...infusing 21st century skills into education." The book manages to offer a concise and accessible exposition of all the key issues, ideas and philosophy of P21. Anyone who wants all of that in a single, highly readable package would do well to seek out this book.

Fadel & Trilling take us through their definition of 21st century learning, through what they call `the perfect learning storm', namely a convergence of forces, as they see them, that should be causing us to re-think the shape and objectives of schooling today, through the full P21 set of 21st century skills, and through a series of pragmatic examples of P21 in practice. The objective is to meet one of the pivotal challenges of our time:

"The 21st century challenge for each of us is to build and maintain our own identity from our given traditions and from the wide variety of traditions all around us. At the same time we must all learn to apply tolerance and compassion for the different identities and values of others."

I like this because it accords with my own preference to view education primarily as a means for the reproduction and development of cultures, and only secondarily as a means for the maintenance of a society. Jerome Bruner has written:

"Man's intellect....is not simply his own, but is communal in the sense that its unlocking or empowering depends upon the success of the culture in developing means to that end."

Building and strengthening of culture is a process that happens from the ground up, while building and strengthening a society tends to happen from the top down. If one of the underlying tenets of P21 is to focus on the former, while not forgetting the importance of the latter, then I can only commend this attempt to describe the 21st century skills approach as one that teachers should, at the very least, take account of in developing their own teaching practice.

There are those who have tried to dismiss P21 as an endeavour whose primary aim is the creation of a `content-free curriculum', or even a `knowledge-free curriculum'. This is simply nonsense, and is indeed, at heart, malicious in its intent. P21 is about shifting the balance in the curriculum; it is not about deleting the experience of hundreds of years of formal education. As the authors say:

Teachers who are shifting their practices to meet the needs of our times talk about how they're remixing the coverage of content with the uncovering of ideas and concepts....

21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times is, I believe, an important book, one that offers a clear, intelligible and comprehensive characterization of the essential features of the P21 approach. It is a book that I would commend to anyone interested in thinking through the relevance of education to children today and into the future.

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Want to read a whole book about how education should be reshaped to fit the needs of America's biggest companies? Then we recommend Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel's new book, 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in our Times, a book-length ad for the content-free learning championed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Trilling is global director for the Oracle Education Foundation, a P21 board member. Fadel is global leader for education as Cisco Systems, also a P21 board member. They co-chair P21's Standards, Assessment, and Professional Development committee.

Why are 21st century skills so important? Trilling and Fadel's answer is that a "21st century skills gap" causes businesses to spend "over $200 billion a year...finding and hiring scarce, highly skilled talent, and in bringing new employees up to required skill levels through costly training programs." (p. 7) (There isn't a citation for either the existence of a "21st century skills gap" or for the $200 billion figure.)

So Trilling and Fadel argue that the skills identified as "21st century skills" by P21 (critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity and innovation, etc.) must become the basis for education because these skills "address new work skill demands" and will prepare students to "invent new and better services and products for the global marketplace." (pages 49, 56)

The authors imagine schools shifting from a "20th century model" to a "21st century model" in order to teach 21st century skills. In the 21st century school, according to Fadel and Trilling, class time would include "50 percent time for inquiry, design, and collaborative project learning and 50 percent for more traditional and direct methods of instruction." (p. 135) Why? Because "[p]rojects - defining, planning, executing, and evaluating them - have become the currency of 21st century work." (p. 82)

Here's the authors' argument in a nutshell: In order to better serve business and save the for-profit world $200 billion a year, we need to replace at least half of the curriculum in America's schools with an unproven program that puts the needs of business before the needs of students. Trilling and Fadel don't consider the possibility that there are students who might want to be scientists, doctors, teachers, artists, or any of the host of occupations that don't involve "invent[ing] new and better services and products for the global marketplace." And they neglect entirely our schools' role in the creation of knowledgeable citizens.

Jay Mathews, reviewing Trilling and Fadel's book on the Washington Post's Website recently, said that he is "trying NOT to write off the 21st century skills movement as a sham, but its leaders don't make it easy." Agreed.

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First off, thanks to the authors for writing a book that is applicable to teaching and learning. I've read 6 other books on 21st century skills topics and none have come close to providing models, examples, etc. on teaching and learning. In this book the authors spend less time detailing the changes in our world that are bringing an emphasis on "21st century skills" back to the forefront and more time on defining the skills and a learning framework to be used by educators in assisting students acquisition of these skills. The text details each "21st century skill" with descriptors of what students should be able to do. For educators, this is paramount in designing performance tasks and/or evaluating student performance tasks as actually being a "21st century skill." The authors then provide a learning framework or the "the project learning bicycle" and finish up with good descriptors of system changes to promote the implementation of their ideas. To sum up my thoughts, this is a book written for educational practitioners.

Dee W. Hartt, Ed. D.