Evaluation of Partnership for 21st Century Skills Website and Organization

This week, I was asked to evaluate the website, www.p21.org and principals of the creators of it, the  Partnership for the 21^st Century Skills.  I’ll start by saying, as a computer teacher, of course I agree with the initiative.  They push for teachers to teach 21^st century readiness skills to their students so they will be ready for the world they have to face.  I love the initiative, but wasn’t crazy about the site.  Focusing has always been an issue for me, and teaching the students that I teach, I know I’m not alone.  That is what made this site difficult for me to spend long periods of time on.

I was very unimpressed with their graph.  I love graphs, maps, scales, and other graphic representations of data, but this graph was a little too much for me.  I went to the interactive graph to try and understand it better, and once I did, I had to ask myself if this was the best way they could represent their information, or was this more for show, “bells and whistles.”  I prefer things to be straight forward, practical, and helpful at all times.  These preferences of mine also lead me to dislike the rest of the site.  I just felt that there might have been a lot repetition that could have been condensed so that my interest wouldn’t have been lost so easily in the many sessions I tried to devote to studying this site.  Lastly, the online resources seemed to be nothing more than an elaboration of the information the site was already explaining, paragraphs and paragraphs of the same thing.  I thought that section was going to point me to activities, videos and collaborative sites of schools already using these principals, lessons.  I am already doing much of what was pushed on this site, now, like they said, I need to sell the idea to the rest of the staff at my school; this is my challenge. 

I love the initiative, however, and hope it succeeds.  I know I’ll continue to teach by this model.  Teaching these skills is the direction all schools need to go if our students are going to be prepared for the real world.  I found it a little ironic that they based some of the skills on the core curriculum and 8^th grade technology literacy skills of No Child Left behind (NCLB), considering how badly that legislation failed our students.  P21 encourages critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation, as outlined by the 3Rs and 4Cs, something NCLB inadvertently deprived of our students and teachers.  Without mastery of these skills, how will our children succeed in the workplace, especially since so much of this will be done online?  We must prepare our students to not only be familiar with this style of work, but to also be so fluent at it that it becomes second nature.

I also found the videos very inspiring.  These were very straight forward and made very powerful points.  The video, Above and Beyond, was the perfect video to sum up the entire website.  It especially demonstrated the power of cooperation and creativity.  To me, the boy represented the present situation of the students following a very specific set of directions, and not being able to see beyond that.  The girl represented the drive to think critically about a situation and possible solutions.  Of course, in the end, this all comes together because they can collaborate the two ways of approaching the problem; one of the goals of The Partnership of the 21^st Century Skills.

Overall, I will teach to the principals discussed on this site and their pamphlets.  Whether an initiative tells me to do so or not, I will continue to push my students to understand and use the skills in my lab that they will need for the 21^st Century.  I just wish this site was less repetitious and more informative on exactly how to teach these skills, perhaps give me ideas I hadn’t thought of.  Perhaps those ideas were there, and I just didn’t dig deep enough, but there lies the problem, I shouldn’t have to dig at all.