Silvia Tolisano, author and blogger at Langwitches, recently wrote a post entitled 21st Century Skills-Literacies-Fluencies. The real meat of the post IMHO is her coach analogy through which she describes a metaphor for thinking about technology support and teacher practice as it applies to instructional technology:

Coaches are working with athletes…but… they can’t PLAY FOR the athletes. The coaches’ job is to prepare them, to teach them the rules of the game and to have a plan to condition the athletes to be at their physical best when it is time to play or compete. Teachers need to see us as their coaches. We can show them tools that will help them teach 21st Century skills. We can introduce them to projects, resources, hardware, software and materials that will support 21st Century literacies…but ultimately educators will have to go out on the field and “play”. We can coach them, but ultimately they will have to do the work to become “fit” for themselves.

Her thoughtful ideas extend to 21st Century literacies and fluencies. Yet, despite her clear examples, I am fixated on her introduction. Sylvia begins by half-apologizing for using the phrase “21st Century Skills” and words like collaboration, creativity, and communication. Her reason: Some edubloggers and educators feel that the 21st Century Skills movement, espoused by Tony Wagner and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, is becoming a cliche that is batted around willy-nilly in modern reform of schools. It is losing its meaning, a meaning and skill list that some believe has been around for some time.

Sylvia, don’t couch your thoughts!

One of the primary attacks against 21st Century Skills is the contention that the skills aren’t really knew. Some contend that skills like creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and connectivity are holdovers from prior decades. Tim Stahmer, a blogger at Assorted Stuff, succinctly summarizes this line of thought by saying:

As we enter the second decade of the century, this is a cliche that has lost whatever meaning it might have had. Mostly it’s used by politicians and education experts as a catch-all for whatever concept they’re currently pushing.

The skills most often included – creativity, critical thinking, communication, etc. – are nothing unique to this century.

And they are, for the most part, the diametrical opposite of the test-driven crap that has been passed off as education reform during the past decade.

In a way, Tim is absolutely correct by saying that these skills are not unique to this century. Superficially, I doubt many would be convinced that it was unimportant for students to be creative or (fill-in-the-blank with a 21st Century Skill) in the 90s, 80s, or 70s. If you look at the skills in isolation, I am certain bygone teachers would say, “Yeah, all of those were emphasized to a certain degree during my era.”

What is different is the context in which the phrase 21st Century Skills and all of the skills and literacies appear. According to Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, work and life in the modern world is vastly different then in decades past- and schools aren’t changing.

…I have come to understand that there is a core set of survival skills for today’s workplace, as well as for lifelong learning and active citizenship- skills that are neither taught nor tested even in our best school systems. Young people who want to earn more than minimum wage and who go out into the world without the new survival skills I’ve uncovered in my research are crippled for life; they are similarly unprepared to be active and informed citizens or to be adults who will continue to be stimulated by new information and ideas. Parents and educators who do not attend to these skills are putting their children at an increased risk of not being able to get and keep a good job, grow as learners, or make positive contributions to their community. I believe that opinion leaders and policy-makers who do not understand the profound implications of teaching and testing these new survival skills are complicit in an unwitting conspiracy to put our nation at even greater risk of losing our competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the bet that No Child Left Behind will save us is a losing one (p. 14).

The emphasis and need to attend to 21st Century Skills (or Survival Skills as Wagner calls them) is ever more important now because the world is quite different. The context imbues the words and phrases that Tim believes are now trite cliches with enhanced meaning and urgency, a semantic flavoring that is unseen when examining phonetic words on a printed or digital page in isolation. Yes, creativity-collaboration-problem solving-communication-critical thinking were important before, but the shifting landscape of work and life in this era adds a level of imperative gravity to the skills.

When I hear someone write or say “21st Century Skills,” I immediately think of the invisible backstory described by Wagner and Thomas Friedman- a sociological description of what it now means to be a successful student, worker, and citizen in this day and age. This backstory that appears in my mind was impossible when I first began teaching, not because I wasn’t well read or uninformed, but because the world was beginning a metamorphosis that is still happening. A change that requires critical thinking, analysis, collaboration, and communication- all of which were nice in the 80s and 90s but not crucial. There is definitely an enhanced meaning in these words and phrases for me now, much like saying “fire” in a burning building differs from saying the same word with people holding guns.

We need to talk about 21st Century Skills, not encourage people to “stop saying that” because some overuse or decontextualize the concept. Write on, Sylvia!