This document discusses skills needed for 21st century learning and how curriculum needs to evolve. It defines technical skills and compares 20th and 21st century capabilities. 21st century skills involve expert thinking, complex communication, and transferring skills to real-world situations. However, current assessments and pedagogy still focus on routine 20th century skills. The role of teachers also needs to change from instructors to facilitators. Integrating design thinking into curriculum can help students develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills needed for the 21st century.

1. Sorsogon State College
SCHOOL OF GRADUATES STUDIES
Sorsogon City
Topic: CURRICULUM INNOVATION THROUGH
MASTERY OF TECHNICAL SKILLS
Discussant: Ms. Marian A. Habla
MAEd - English

2. Technical Skills
• The knowledge and
abilities needed to
accomplish
mathematical,
engineering, scientific or
computer-related duties,
as well as other specific
tasks.
(http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/technical-
skills.asp)

3. Technical Skills
• Technical Skills are the
basic knowledge
required to perform a
task.
• Technical skills can
include educational
qualifications and
degrees that an
employee hold.
(http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_definit
ion_of_technical_skills?#slide=1)

4. The 20th Century
Learning from 21st
Century Learning:
?

5. The difference between 21st century
and 20th century
1. The capabilities people need for work,
citizenship, and self-actualization.
2. The emergence of very sophisticated
information and communications
technologies

6. • According to Pink (2005)21st century learning
will be dominated by a different way of
knowing, being, and doing, and right-brain
capacities will come increasingly to the fore.
• “A robust temperament, and a personality
that is unafraid of assuming reasonable risks,
cognitive and physical” a key dispositions
that will mark the future creator and must be
developed early in life (Gardner, 2010, pp.
28).

7. The crucial component of what constitutes
21st century knowledge and skills
• “Expert thinking [involves] effective
pattern matching based on detailed
knowledge; and metacognition, the set
of skills used by the perplexed expert to
decide when to give up on one strategy
and what to try next” (Levy & Murnane,
2004, p. 75).

8. • “Complex communication requires the
exchange of vast amounts of verbal and
nonverbal information. The information
flow is constantly adjusted as the
communication evolves unpredictably”
(Levy & Munane, 2004, p. 94).

9. For instance,
• A skilled teacher is an expert in complex
communication, able to improvise
answers and facilitate dialogue in the
unpredictable, chaotic flow of classroom
discussion.

10. • Recently, Prensky (2010) asserts in
Teaching Digital Natives that what
today’s kids do have a short attention
span for are “our old ways of learning”
(pp. 2).

11. • Weinberger (2007) describes the power
of “digital disorder,” which takes
advantage of the fact that virtual
information can transcend the limited
properties of physical objects (like books
or index cards).
• This creates a new set of contextual 21st
century skills centered on “disorderly”
knowledge co-creation and sharing.

12. • Conventional, 20th century K-12
instruction emphasizes manipulating
pre-digested information to build fluency
in routine problem solving, rather than
filtering data derived from experiences in
complex settings to develop skills in
sophisticated problem finding.

13. Problems encountered...
• Assessments and tests focus on
measuring students’ fluency in various
abstract, routine skills, but typically do
not assess their strategies for expert
decision making when no standard
approach seems applicable.
• Essays emphasize simple presentation
rather than sophisticated forms of
rhetorical interaction.

14. Problems encountered...
• Students’ abilities to transfer their
understandings to real world situations are
not assessed, nor are capabilities related to
various aspects of teamwork.
• The use of technological applications and
representations is generally banned from
testing, rather than measuring students’
capacities to use tools, applications, and
media effectively.

15. Problems encountered...
• A major, often unrecognized challenge in
professional development is helping
teachers, policy makers, and local
communities unlearn the beliefs, values,
assumptions, and cultures underlying
schools’ industrial-era operating practices,
such as forty-five minute class periods that
allow insufficient time for all but superficial
forms of active learning by students.

16. • Educators, business executives,
politicians, and the general public have
much to unlearn if 21st century
understandings are to assume a central
place in schooling.

17. • Reflecting educators’ usage of 20th
century pedagogy, current approaches
to using technology in schooling largely
reflect applying information and
communication technologies as a means
of increasing the effectiveness of
traditional 20th century instructional
approaches:

18. 1. enhancing productivity through tools
such as word processors
2. aiding communication by channels such
as email and threaded asynchronous
discussions
3. expanding access to information via
Web-browsers and streaming video
(Dede, 2009a)

19. • All these have proven worthy in
conventional schooling, as they have in
workplace settings; however, none draw
on the full power of information and
communications technologies for
individual and collective expression,
experience, and interpretation – human
capabilities emerging as key work and
life skills for the first part of the 21st
century.

20. • The challenges of 21st century for us as
educational professionals is not only to
impart knowledge but to train students
with skills to become better and
competent learners so that they can
translate bookish knowledge into real
situation [Newby 2000].

21. So...
• The K-12 curriculum has to be geared to
the social needs of the country, varied
learning strategies have to be adopted to
provide relevant and holistic learning to
the students of various academic
competence.

22. And…to meet 21st century expectations…
• Educators therefore need to depart from the ideas
and pedagogies of yesterday and become bold
advocates to develop the sorts of learning
dispositions needed for our learners and their work
futures.
• This means spending less time explaining through
instruction and investing more time in experimental
and error-tolerant modes of engagement.

23. Changing role of a teacher as a facilitator …
• Shakespeare’s dictum that – “some are born
great, some achieve greatness and some
have greatness thrust upon them”. (Choube -
2003)
• The teaching profession has a unique
feature. It helps the teacher to grow in mind
and spirit while engaged in it. According to
social activists approach a teacher has to
adapt to the role of a facilitator (Bauser
Sfeld).

24. Teacher
• Gives a didactic lecture
• Learner plays a
passive role
• Tells
• Lectures from the front
• Gives answers
according to a set
curriculum
Facilitator
• Helps the learner to get
to his / her own
understanding
• Learners plays an
active role
• Asks
• Supports from the back
• Creates the learning
environment

25. • Francis (2010), pointed out that the activity
based instruction can be teacher driven with
direction from an instructor or learner driven
with the learner having freedom to explore.
• Subong (2010), observed that teaching
methods has gone from initiation during the
early stage of educational development to
non-traditional and modern methods in the
present educational set-up.

26. • Certain strategies and techniques have come
into existence with accompanying
frameworks to make the best out of every
student through innovative, efficient, and
effective instruction.
• This approach provides opportunities for
students to express their freedom to explore
possible ways to solve a certain problem or
to manipulate materials with the teacher’s
role reduced to that of facilitator.

27. • Adeleye (2003), as he pointed out that
adequate teaching materials and equipment
must be provided to the trainers of vocational
and technology education.
• Adeleye, further stressed that it no gain
saying that vocational and technical
education is capital intensive and demands a
lot of tools equipment before any meaningful
development can be made.

28. • Anka (2009), in a media interview said
for effective teachings in vocational and
technical education there should be
necessary ingredients such as right
teachers with the right attitudes and the
right qualification, teaching the right
subjects.

29. In “Catching Up or Leading the Way:
American Education in the Age of
Globalization”, Zhao (2009) outlines five
core assumptions which can be used to
guide decisions about what schools
should teach:

30. 1. Skills and knowledge that are not
available at a cheaper price in other
countries or that cannot be rendered
useless by machines;
2. Creativity, interpreted as both ability and
passion to make new things and adapt
to new situations;

31. 3. New skills and knowledge that are
needed for living in the global world and
the virtual world (examples include
foreign languages, global awareness,
and multicultural literacy, and knowledge
to cope with the global world, and digital
or technology literacy for the virtual
world);

32. 4. High-level cognitive skills such as
problem solving and critical thinking;
5. Emotional intelligence - the ability and
capacity to understand and manage
emotions of self and others, the ability to
interact with others, understand others,
communicate with others, and manage
one's own feelings (pp. 150-151)

33. • Instruction that uses design thinking as
leverage for learning can thus provide
rich experiences that encourage
meaning making without the imposition
of a fixed set of knowledge and skills.

34. • Through the implementation of
curriculum that integrates design
thinking and academic content,
educators can help students develop a
skill set that includes ideas generally not
fostered within traditional school
settings.

35. • This process would contribute to
different levels of creative knowledge,
creative skills and creative mindsets that
can be achieved by design thinking
education, culminating in a capability
that is called “creative confidence”
(Rauth, I. et al, 2010; Carroll et al, 2010).

36. • By applying the techniques of design to
education, teachers loosen the narrow,
rigid process of traditional learning and
tap into students’ deep wells of creativity,
encouraging them to see nuanced
problems from inside the very core of an
issue, and make critical thinking
essential to solving any problem
(Barseghian, 2009).

37. • The design thinking process moves beyond
problem solving and project-based work by
including a human centered approach.
• With a focus on addressing user needs,
learning through design thinking therefore
becomes an active endeavor of students that
takes place in an environment that stresses
problem-solving, reasoning, and thoughtful
interaction among students.

38. References:
• Comparing Frameworks for “21st Century Skills”
C.Dede Harvard Graduate School of Education ,July, 2009
• Innovation in the Classroom: Design Thinking for 21st
Century Learning
Swee Hong KWEK
• Revitalizing School Curriculum through Innovative
Technologies A Pragmatic Approach
Verlaxmi Indrakanti
• Technology and its impact in the classroom
Rozalind G. Muir-Herzig
February 2003

39. Thank
you for
listening!