Episode 15 is all about 21st century skills. Join us as we discuss this much-talked about education term, paying particular focus to Cambridge Global Perspectives: a course that is all about skills building.
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Janey: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod from Cambridge University Press. I’m your host Janey Webb. Today, we’re here to discuss 21st century skills with a focus on Cambridge Global Perspectives.
I’ve done a lot of research and spoken to teachers around the world on this topic as the Commissioning Editor for our Global Perspectives resources. So I’m really looking forward to digging into this further with our two guests today.
This time we have two new voices to welcome into the podcast mix. Firstly, I’d like to welcome Adrian Ravenscroft to the show. Adrian is an Independent Education Consultant and is also working on our new Global Perspectives primary series. Adrian, welcome to the show.
Adrian: Good to be here.
Janey: Our second guest is Tom Holman, who is an Assessment Specialist and is co-writing our primary series with Adrian. Tom, it’s great to have you here today.
Tom: It’s very nice to be here. Thank you.
Janey: Both Adrian and Tom will be answering questions on the topic of 21st century skills and Global Perspectives. So before we get started, remember all the links and information we discuss are linked throughout.
You can also get in touch with us on Twitter using the hashtag #BrighterPod, or by tweeting us at CambridgeInt.
Best lesson you have ever had?
Janey: Before we discuss skills development, I thought it might be nice to get to know our guests a little more.
I have a question that we’ve asked Tom and Adrian to have a think about, which is what is the best lesson you’ve ever had? This could be one you’ve taught yourself or one where you were the student, but we want to know what made it stand out to you. Adrian, what’s your best lesson?
Adrian: I was working at a school with a group of children who had been identified as not reaching the potential that prior assessment said that they would capable of. We needed to turn things around pretty quickly in the end of key stage assessment year.
I knew that the Deputy Head Teacher was due to come in and see my lesson at some point and on the day of the lesson, she turned up with a clipboard and I was initially profusely apologetic. I said, ‘look, I’m ever so sorry, today they’re just going to be writing.’ And she said, ‘no, that’s not a problem, I’ll see the lesson that you’ve got planned.’ And so we carried on.
The Deputy Head Teacher saw these children 10, 11 year olds doing what I described as ‘just writing’. Subsequently, it became clear to me why that lesson was successful without me realising quite the extent to which it was at the time.
So what were they doing? Quite successfully in previous lessons we’d gone through how to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning. I’d modelled my own thinking to help them know what I thought a good job looked like. I’d set them an appropriate level of challenge, I knew where they were headed and they knew where they were headed.
They knew I’d use various levels – for example, ‘if you want to knock my socks off, you can have a go at doing this’. Whereas this lesson was really very much getting our heads down and doing writing, previous lessons had been characterised by what I now understand to be metacognitive talk – talking about our own learning, pupils talking together about how could we do even better? I explicitly taught them how they could organise their own learning independently. And for all those reasons, I think it worked.
Janey: Fantastic! So real independence, ownership of learning, engagement with the task scaffolded towards being able to demonstrate those skills. That sounds fantastic. And Tom, how about you?
Tom: Well, I must say I came at this rather differently. It was an interesting question to ask! It becomes apparent because of all those thousands of hours that you’ve spent in the classroom, in my case as a primary teacher in my local primary school, it’s the times when you actually manage to get out of the classroom that really stick in your mind.
One of the first things that came to my mind was a lesson when we were looking at the water cycle. I think it must’ve been geography or science, and it was a lovely sunny day. We just walked out of the classroom onto the playground, carrying buckets of water and simulated a kind of rain shower on the playground to see where the water went.
And you obviously some of it evaporated and some of it ran down into the storm drains and so on, but it’s that kind of exception to being in the classroom that really does stick in the mind.
It makes you think that actually that kind of learning is likely to be so much more memorable to the children.
I also have another memory, probably only a few days after that, getting really quite annoyed in the classroom because there was a lot of noise coming from the street outside. Looking out the window, I realised that this was a group of workers from the local water company digging a hole in the street outside.
And again, I took the whole class out. These men were astonished to have a group of 13, 10/11 year old children standing around the hole that they had just dug, looking at a water main, which was probably the first time they’d ever seen anything like it, bringing the water into the school!
So it’s that kind of thing that sticks in the mind more and makes me think that’s when perhaps most learning happens for children. It’s one of the things that I think makes Global Perspectives a particularly attractive opportunity for that kind of learning.
Janey: Thank you very much. A memorable learning experience and the flexibility to adapt to the circumstance. Thank you! Different approaches, but interesting answers, and they sound like good fun lessons too.
What does the term ‘21st century skills’ mean to you?
Janey: Moving on now to our first question. This is to set the tone of the show and it digs into 21st century skills a little more. What to you does the term 21st century skills actually mean? Tom, would you mind starting for us?
Tom: I felt I’ve drawn the short straw a little bit when I heard this! It’s a very grand sounding term. I think the first thing that I’d say is that these are not skills which are exclusive to the 21st century, by any means. We’ve needed such skills going back for a long, long time. But currently I think there is more demand for such skills and more people need to have access to them.
If you look at the Global Perspectives curriculum, there’s a list of the skills – research, analysis, evaluation, reflection, collaboration, and communication – and it’s a rather dry sounding list. If you wanted to know more about that, the best place to look is in the Cambridge Global Perspectives curriculum framework, where you can see that the learning objective related to both skills strands.
But I think it’s the effect of learning those skills which is most important. Regard them as a package rather than just each skill; these skills are mutually supportive of one another. And I don’t want to tread on the toes of the next question, but they are skills which are going to help our learners to adapt to a changing world and succeed in work environments, and cope with life in general.
Janey: Adrian, is there anything you would like to add to that?
Adrian: I very much like the way that this question was phrased – ‘what does the phrase 21st century skills mean to you?’ That I think is something that our listeners would do well to ponder on as well, because of course the impact of the changes that are shaping our world are being felt very differently in different places.
I think that that’s an absolutely crucial thing to get your head around. What does it mean for me, as somebody from a former industrial area – the west Midlands of England? I think it’s an appropriate time – two decades in – to take stock of it. Where have we come from? Where are we headed?
If we go back 50 years where I come from, I think the pace of change certainly was increasing. The majority of pupils did not pass the Eleven-plus that would allow them to go to grammar school. They went to secondary modern schools.
Once the pace of change was increasing, there was the perception that secondary modern schools had an understanding of the world of work in which these young people were going to pass their working lives. There were certain skills, knowledge understanding that could be transmitted.
Young people would hit the workplace with qualifications in skills. For example, technical drawings were deemed to be relevant to the world of work. From that, employers would then invest quite highly in the skills of people they took on through apprenticeships.
One could go from being an unskilled worker to a skilled worker and get a decent job on the back of maybe four or five yearlong apprenticeships. But what happened is the pace of change ramped up.
If a machine was developed that could do that industrial process that took you four or five years to learn how to do as a skilled craftsperson, all of a sudden you find yourself going from being a highly skilled craftsperson to being essentially a machine minder.
If the change was fast in the 1970s, it has increased exponentially since then.
I think if we’re really honest with ourselves, we have very little understanding of the working world our young learners will go onto, beyond the fact that they are going to continue to have to cope with exponentially increasing change.
So from a situation where skills development might be characterised by transmission, I think what we need to characterise the skills development of our learners as transformative. You need to have the knowledge, the skills, the attributes of a lifelong learner in order to continue to make a living.
Janey: Thank you very much for that, Adrian, a very interesting, and in depth response to the question. It sounds like it’s all about preparing learners to be able to cope with their future and that adaptability to manage in response to whatever the world is throwing at us. As well as the individual skills that contribute together and collect together to enable those competencies to move forward.
Why are 21st century skills important?
Janey: Moving onto question two, which is a direct follow on from that. Often we’ve discussed what we mean by 21st century skills. We’d like to now look at why they’re important and why is it particularly beneficial for schools to think about them? I think you’ve already touched on this, but maybe if Tom, I could just ask you to give your thoughts from the perspective of schools.
Tom: From the school’s point of view, one of the benefits of the Global Perspectives’ focus on skills is that the skills are transferrable – they will be useful to the learners across the group. It won’t just be that they are skills for Global Perspectives. They will be useful in science, in humanities, social sciences and so on.
The other thing is to really think about what happens if schools ignore these skills. Learners are likely to be facing situations in their lives outside of school where they are needing skills of this sort anyway. We would not face up to our full responsibilities as educationalists to help young learners to become as effective and efficient in their use of those skills as possible, rather than having to find all of this out for themselves.
For instance, when they do a search online for information, how do they cope with the huge amount of information that’s available on the internet? How do they know what is reliable information? What is credible when they use social media to interact with their peers? How can they make those interactions more constructive and creative rather than destructive?
I think there are questions like this that schools need to face up to. These things will be going on whether or not they really address the issue of the types of skills we’ve been talking about. I feel incumbent on schools to take some responsibility for the development of those skills to make sure that they happen in the right way.
Adrian: We spoke previously about this – the world of the 21st century being characterised by increasingly rapid change. So far, what we’re witnessing certainly is that this rapid change is accompanied by corresponding increased pressure on the world’s resources. So why do we need to prepare our learners with 21st century skills? Well, why not?
Let’s make our schools the models of sustainable and democratic communities. They’re going to be the kind of places that are going to formulate solutions to the problems caused by increasing pressure on the world’s resources.
Tom was talking there about efficient and effective models of learning, and as they might apply to finding out facts, I think that could equally apply. How can we efficiently, fairly and effectively use the resources that are at our disposal? Our schools should be models for that. And by doing that, I would suggest they become better places to teach in and better places to learn in.
Janey: Thank you for that. Interesting.
Teaching 21st century skills to primary learners
Janey: Going into more detail. How would you suggest that we teach 21st century skills to young children? So children, perhaps at primary age, do you think that’s possible?
Adrian: I think it’s not only possible, but it’s essential that we do. Just look at the way that Global Perspectives has evolved. Initially we were looking at a high stakes qualification for secondary pupils, and then gradually as time went on, people ask themselves the question, how can we better prepare our learners for the final analysis?
Good practice in primary education has always fostered the kind of self-regulated learner who is good at collaboration, communication reflection. Good practice like asking:
‘what are you making there? That’s interesting. Okay. Let’s look at this’ and so on. When they’ve made it, ‘what have you done differently?’ Or ‘what can we learn from that? What do you like about what you’ve done there?’ That kind of high quality dialogue goes on with a really good quality early years specialist engaging with learners.
Yes, the cognitive demands, the level of skills that we expect of our older learners is higher, but I would say that the attributes of the successful learner – responsibility, being engaged, being empathetic to our colleagues, reflecting on our learning, evaluating our progress – those apply right across the school.
Janey: Thank you for that. And Tom, was there anything you wanted to add to that?
Tom: One thing that came to my mind when I heard the question was how do we teach that? But also flip that, how do learners learn those skills? And I was saying in an earlier answer, this is going to happen outside school, whether or not we want it.
It’s going to be part of growing up in the modern world. And the question then is can we in schools actually provide learners with that type of experience, that type of encounter with the real world, which is likely to help them to bring those skills on, to develop those skills?
It’s a question of trying to scaffold the experiences that learners are already aware they need. It’s something that they have found would be useful to have in their interactions with the real world anyway. So there’s the motivation there for learning if schools can find a way of helping to scaffold it.
Global Perspectives does provide them with some of that scaffolding. What we see particularly with the curriculum for the earlier stages is that there’s a lot of emphasis on teachers providing the material that the learners work with. And that provision is gradually removed as the learners get older and go into later stages.
I think it’s worth pointing out in Global Perspectives that there’s this emphasis on different levels of perspective between a personal perspective and a local/national perspective and a global perspective.
And again, the emphasis for younger learners will be much more on their personal perspective. ‘What do I think or feel about this?’ and perhaps then beginning to wonder, ‘why do I think or feel this way about this issue?’, moving on then to ‘how do other people think or feel about it and why?’
You see there a kind of progression from the personal, towards the more local or national, and ultimately of course, towards the global.
The other thing that we could point to here in terms of a progression for younger learners is that distinction between primary and secondary research.
This is something that we’ve tried to look at in the work that we’ve been doing – how we can engage younger learners in primary research. This is where they go out and ask questions, interview people, use questionnaires, and so on, to acquire the data for themselves rather than having to access what is sometimes really quite dense technical texts, which provide secondary sources of research.
So again, there’s that progression perhaps from more emphasis on primary research for younger learners, moving through to the emphasis on secondary research as they get older.
Janey: Thank you for that. It’s interesting hearing about that progression and how you would approach your teaching as the children get older – moving from primary to secondary. So thank you for your answers to that.
How to structure a skills lesson
Janey: Moving onto the next question. We’re looking a bit more about the practical reality of the classroom in this question. Question three focuses on how to structure a skills lesson.
Ahead of the show, we asked you both to bring a lesson plan that teachers could take away with them and use today. Tom, could you tell me which skill you’ve chosen to focus on and then tell us about your lesson plan?
Tom: Yes. I think the focus would be on collaboration and communication. These are interesting areas that Global Perspectives brings more to the fore than some other curriculum subjects might do.
What interests me here is how you can bring in other skills to support this process of collaboration and communication. So I’m going to talk about something which I’m afraid might be rather old hat to some of our listeners.
It’s using what I think now is referred to as a jigsaw style activity in the classroom as a way of distributing information among the learners, so that they can then collaborate to piece together that information. So if I talk in very general terms – you’d need, as a teacher, to have a source available, which contains information that you want learners to share with each other.
I’m going to use an example that is in the book that we’ve written, which is to do with bees. We’ll think of this in terms of using a reading text as a source.
As with any reading activity, you would need some purpose to it. You could perhaps ask some questions that you want the learners to find out from this source, or you could encourage learners to write their own questions. What are they particularly interested in finding out? But the key thing will be to not give each learner the source in its entirety.
So if we’re thinking in terms of the reading texts, collaborating in groups, split the source into four parts. You can do it quite simply by photocopying it and cutting it up.
Make sure that within the groups each learner gets a different part of the text with different information in it. Learners then spend a little time working individually with the questions (that either they have set, or you as the teachers has set) looking for information to respond.
They then get back into a group and begin to share, or pool that information with each other. Each of them having had something rather different to look at.
So you can see there how important communication will be in the activity. They will have to be able to convey the information that they found out from their bit of the text or source. They will also of course, have to listen to one another in order to get that information from each other.
I think it works well in terms of collaboration. And this is not just because they’re working as a group. I think collaboration can be seen as something more involved than that. For instance, it would be an opportunity to get the groups to assign roles within the group.
We would be thinking of having one member of the group being a secretary who was going to write down all the information, another member of the group who might be a kind of coordinator who would make sure that everyone got an equal chance to speak and to communicate their information.
Someone else might be acting as a timekeeper to make sure that all of this was done within the time set by the teacher. Someone else might actually be a kind of reporter in the group – someone who was actually going to tell other groups what that particular group has found out about bees, in this case.
I think there is also one other skill that could be drawn in here. You can see the links to research here, but reflection is also a very interesting area in Global Perspectives. And it perhaps means something slightly different in a Global Perspectives context than one might imagine.
Looking at the curriculum framework would be the best way to see exactly what it means, but it’s very often to do with asking learners to reflect on their individual contribution to teamwork. So they’ve worked as a team, they’ve collaborated to share this information, how well did they think they did that? And what could they improve about the performance on that aspect of the task?
Reflection as a skill is also focused on getting learns to think, ‘what have I personally learnt from this, has it altered my thinking about a topic or an issue?’ Or ‘what might actually lead to changes in my behaviour as a result of what I’ve learnt?’
A jigsaw activity of this kind brings in a lot of different skills. It does need a bit of structuring by the teacher, which is something that needs to be prepared beforehand, but I think there are such benefits to be gained from it that that is a worthwhile investment.
Janey: That was absolutely fascinating! And I love the way you broke down what collaboration might involve in terms of the practical reality of it. And similarly with reflection really interesting.
Tom: They are quite complex skills.
Janey: Absolutely. And it’s interesting to hear you articulate the nuance of them in that way, and in the context of the classroom as well.
How about you, Adrian? Could you tell us which skill you decided to focus on and what ideas you’ve brought in terms of a lesson?
Adrian: I picked out a lesson on analysing perspectives.
Essentially, this lesson looks at two things. How can we identify different perspectives? And how can I spot something that is for, or against a proposition – or something that adopts a neutral stance? So how can I gauge the strength of feeling either for, or against this proposition based on the language that’s used.
I think for effective Global Perspectives teaching, you need to be aware – through engagement with the local community, the local media, what’s happening in your area – about what people are getting hot under the collar about.
In my particular locality, it’s the construction of a new supermarket. Wherever you are, your local area will be changing and our learners will probably already have some sort of exposure to a local issue. How do they feel about it? Are they clear on three things –
- Firstly, am I clear what the issue is?
- Am I clear why it’s contested?
- And am I clear why the people who support it, support it and why some of them feel strongly about it?
For that discussion about different perspectives, talk to different people and look at the local media.
Having done some of that let’s move then to a different issue. It could be one that’s taking place on a different scale. The one that we look at in the learning materials is the construction of a dam. We need to give our learners some perspectives – within the learning materials in the teacher’s guide some are provided for you. I think really you need to be looking about the media adapt appropriately for young learners.
Let’s look at phrases to do with this, like ‘people are just making money out of other people’s misery.’ Well, there’s one that we could identify as against. How do we know that it is against? We don’t like misery, do we? No.
So having established this is something that is against the proposition, in this case the dam that is being built, do we think that’s somewhat against or strongly against? Let’s look at it again. ‘The working conditions on this dam project are a total disgrace. These merciless contractors are just making money out of other people’s misery.’
I think we are getting that this is something pretty strongly against the dam, isn’t that right? So moving on, we now understand how to spot an argument, whether it’s for or against, strongly for, or strongly against. Having understand that, what are we going to do with that?
Well, we’re going to apply that to our local context – the supermarket. Divide your class up. They might have their own private perspective and you may choose to let them do so. If they actually quite like the idea of this new supermarket, or they’re opposed to this new supermarket, that’s one way of doing it.
Or another possibility is to simply give them a local person that they’ve come across to role-play their response to this new supermarket’s construction. Now they know what a response – strongly for or strongly against – might sound like to this different project, have them role-play that to a partner. The partner can give them feedback. ‘How well have you done?’ ‘Did you manage to convince me?’
And then as the teacher, recap. How are we now? How do we feel? Do you think we have now got better at spotting some different ways that people might think about an issue? These are skills that are going to stay with them right the way through the development of Global Perspectives.
Janey: Thank you for that, Adrian. So it’s about highlighting real issues, modelling example perspectives within that, using real language and real examples. Getting the students to put things into practice, working with their peers and encouraging them to reflect on what they’ve been doing as well.
Thank you both for those responses. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you to Adrian Ravenscroft and Thomas Holman for taking time out of your very busy schedules to be with us here today.
Thank you also to anyone who sent in questions, we’d love to hear from you. So please do keep them coming by getting in touch with us via Twitter or you can also email us at [email protected]
And that’s all for our 21st century skills episode. Don’t forget to tell your friends and colleagues about us and rate our show on whatever platform you’re listening on. We’ll see you next time.
