Lesson Planning that Revolves Around 21st Century Skills

In order to know how to teach the 21st Century Skills that we want our students to obtain mastery of prior to graduation of high school, we need to know what they are.

Plain and simple — What you are saying you are doing by offering 21st century skills to students, is that you are focusing on elements of (The 4 C’s) — collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity, via technological, hands on, and real world applicable avenues for practice and application.

collaboration can look like anything, as long as they do it…

Teaching 21st Century skills, means you’re teaching kids to learn to interact, think, speak, and function — in an adult world, with respect, most effectively.

The elements of an effective lesson plan, especially one that maximizes engagement, should cover the basics of the 4 C’s, and you can do that easily with an old school point of entry modeled lesson plan.

1. Open ended Aim questions, guide students to new information, offer means to explore connection and application of that new information, and exemplify comprehension via a multitude of student chosen activities.
2. A Do Now or Starter Activity, gets them thinking with a task to demonstrate thought immediately.
3. Review and an introduction of new information to your students can come in a brief mini lesson, and students are given to the majority of the class time to inquire on their own in a number of ways. The purpose is to experience and practice why the information should be learned and how to apply it in the real world.
4. At the end, students demonstrate that they can answer the Aim by actually doing so in a way that they see fit and is acceptable to you as the teacher — and you are a successful teacher of 21st century skills that day because of your lesson plan.

Your role as the teacher here is to facilitate.

You go from group to group working with students. Check in on them based on the process. Guide them when you see fit. Some may have different sources of information. Some may be using different platforms. Some may be in groups, or videoing in another location, or will be needing technology from another department — all the better.

This intrinsic student guided inquiry based approach to learning — will resound.

When thinking of the easiest ways to fuse this into our lesson plans, you have two ways you can begin. The first, revolves around making your lesson plans student centered. This will maximize guided student interactions and covers collaboration and communication immediately. By putting the students at the core of what is done, how it is done, and evaluate a demonstration of why they learned it, this element of self choice or even intrinsic buy-in will engage students to want to participate more.

A traditional lesson or a teacher centered lesson, would be a teacher led discussion, notes on the powerpoint copied into student notebooks, some questions at the end, maybe a lab/handout. Not much real collaboration. No challenge to learn any sort of why, but more what and when and where. Stuff that can be looked up and researched. Critical thinking may come in the final question of the hand out.

A student centered lesson plan should always begin with an open ended question, which at all cost possible — tie into a real world applicable purpose as to why they should remember that information. How can geometry make our bridges strongest? Why can learning the literary element of characterization improve our social awareness? Why is using data important to our survival as a human race?

These questions begin the lesson and if you challenge students immediately upon entry of your classroom, you can engage them with self inquiry of new information, and a delivery of said obtained which is to their liking. I find when I say, here’s new information, such as the literary element of characterization. Find out online who your favorite character from your past is of any kind, and describe why they are and how that will impact your life as you get older, and present it to the class in any way that you’d like — now, kids are diving deep. Right away they either smile, think about it, get writing because they already know, or look sad, because they’ve already traveled that far down the mental part of starting the assignment. They are analyzing these people in their lives as expert “characterologists” I would call them, and it was the first day. Some ask to work in groups because they are a pair that each relate to and that’s awesome.

In the end after hearing a few, I said that imagine when authors tell the stories of those in their past, both real and made up, in the same way, but have done it so that people have remembered these characters for who they are and what they’ve done — for hundreds of years.

This leaves a lasting memory on why learning to characterize can make an impact. I can challenge them with a situation at the end of the lesson where they walk into a bank. I want to know why it’s important to know how to characterize at that time — and how that could be useful. Or how about if they are trying to be funny in an interview — why would knowing their audience be important then? Why does a full description make a difference? How does the development of a character make a story better? And we’re cooking with gas… all 4 C’s covered and that lesson remembered and easily applied to text in the future.

The second way, is to tie every outcome to a real world purpose.

By doing so, you innately mandate yourself to include elements of preparation of any sort for that discovered connection to real life — it’s also considered capitalizing on a teachable moment.

For example, If you know you just let them loose for 40 minutes, with the challenge of transforming a major aspect of our campus, making it as COVID safe as possible for in person instruction — and kids are going nuts with ideas and plans; use it. If they get into changing the circulation system and flow in our school by altering windows, walls, and filters to maximize air recycled in our school building, have them prepare a prezi, and deliver it to the class using some sort of multimedia fusion approach. Have the students listening follow guided questions for each presentation given, with mandate responses, questions, and praise for each.

Those class results will resound with engagement. It will even impact your classroom management needs as well. You’ll have to create some sort of internship program for your students so they can also experience the real world first hand. This will also fuse all 21st Century Skills into the student’s learning, because they’re literally experiencing it.

Relating as much of that as possible to your planning, is the key to fusing 21st Century Skills into your planning very easily.

I came across this program that is revolutionizing high school education by creating a learning environment that has an apprenticeship that starts in 11th grade and ties students into industries, offering them experiences that make them more capable than a college graduate with a new diploma. This program is called CareerWise Colorado, and they are working in New York, D.C., and are coming soon to California. You can read about them here.

I don’t see any better way to prepare high school students for the world than to put them in it and literally interact with it via the experience that CareerWise offers, and that’s why we’re going to try it at my high school. We are literally modifying how and why we teach, so students can prepare for life post high school.

Why not put them in it, and model it as close as possible — to do so most effectively?