21st Century Skills: Yes please!

Every morning, before I go to school, I stare deep, deep into the mirror and ask myself, "Am I a 21st century teacher fostering 21st century learning of 21st century skills to 21st century learners? YES I AM."

OK, I don't do that.

But our school has been in conversation about 21st century skills for several years, to the point that among us as a faculty, the term has become something of a joke, as most aggressively employed teacher-speak terms do at some point (though the ideas are not a joke). I feel strongly that I have been encouraging this 21st century style of learning in my classroom since the 20th century, at least the last couple years of it. Further, I believe that by nature and by discipline, I am well equipped for a classroom structured to foster this sort of thinking.

Rather than write on and on, let me list a few elements of the English classes I teach or have recently taught that fall into this "21st century learning" model:

• Critical Thinking: Close reading exercises in which we explicate an excerpt from a work of literature; analysis of 'texts' from the broader culture (speeches, advertisements, political cartoons, propaganda posters); role playing exercises, such as when my students adopted specific roles in a "school board" debate about whether to keep Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a high school curriculum; students teaching class, as when my honors American literature students became responsible for a movement or era in American literature and had to formulate and post a handout and teach the key points of that movement's beliefs or writerly traits to their classmates; any analytical and argumentative essays
• Creativity/Problem Solving: Mimetic writing assignments, as when English 11 students write an original poem in the style or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson; Creative extensions or alternate scenes, as when our English 9 students might choose to write "Book 25" of Homer's Odyssey; illustrations of literary works, as when, for the same Odyssey creative assignment, other students chose to make a comic book version of part of Odysseus' journey (Book 22, so gory!); group projects that pose a "problem" or creative task with high expectations and few limits, as when English 7 students have to make a poster illustrating a part of speech in several specific ways or English 9 students have to develop an advertising portfolio for a fictitious product or English 11 students have to design their own utopia or develop a biographical film celebrating the presidential qualifications of a faculty member.
• Communication: Daily discussion-based classes; extensive and varied writing assignments, described in small part above and below; class presentations and speeches and instruction, such as today when individual students had to stand up in front of the class, plug in their iPads, and explain how one of the advertisements they chose for homework exemplified rhetorical techniques such as logos, pathos, or bandwagon appeal; online commentary via wiki posts; group work (see above and below).
• Collaboration: informal small-group work (working together on grammar exercises, analyzing a poem or image, etc.); more extensive and formal group work, as is required by any of the group work described above, which is a mere smattering of the kinds of collaborative challenges our kids face.

As a part of our school's effort to be more conscious and intentional in equipping students with 21st century skills, I have also worked to do the following:

• Use technology in a meaningful, dynamic, not-unnecessarily-burdensome-and-not-superfluous way. My students all have school-issued iPads. We use them as often as makes sense for the classroom, for planning, notetaking, research, collaboration, writing...you name it. I have worked to equip them with information that will make them more informed, skillful consumers of the internet and captains of their personal iPads. Just in recent weeks, for example, we have used Explain Everything and Creative Commons, two options my students did not know about before I told or showed them (thank you, EDMS 550). I have also been experimenting with a 'flipped classroom' model for grammar.
• Help students gain greater self-knowledge so that each understands better what his or her individual strengths and weaknesses are. This kind of understanding is meaningful in many ways. It is most relevant in terms of 21st century skills because of the importance of successful collaboration (do I need to explain how? I hope not.)

I could go on and on. In fact, it would seem I already have. In short, when I look in the mirror, I can (if I so choose) answer the question Are you a 21st century teacher with "YES. YES, I AM."