Skills vs. Content in Contemporary Learning

Being our second week back from the holiday, everybody is hopefully feeling settled into the new semester. The second semester typically goes by quickly and is very busy, so getting our semester plans laid out is important in these first few weeks.

During the first semester, I wrote a couple of posts leaning more toward pedagogy than technology. Those were “Going Beyond the Essay” and “Looking toward Semester 2: Developing Learner Agency.” The purpose of these posts was to push our pedagogical thinking and hopefully find inspiration to take some risks in our classroom. This week’s post will be in a similar vain, with hopes of some level of action or thought about it taking place this semester as you plan out your units.

Last year, the World Economic Forum had a theme called “Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” As a paragraph in this article states:

“By 2020, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have brought us advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics.”

As you can see, all of these elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution have technology as the core of their existence. At the same time, there are essential “soft” skills involved in those industries (and many others for the matter!) that are critical to success. Though not all students will work directly in these industries, we do need to be preparing our students to live in the world where these technologies, skills, and unpredictable social, economic, political, and technological developments will be an essential part of everyday life.

The same article goes on to list the top 10 skills that employers say they will need in 2020. They compare those skills with the skills employers said they needed a short 5 years earlier in 2015.

Though our current curricula are not devoid of teaching some of these elements, I think there is still an emphasis on content knowledge and traditional approaches to assessment in our curriculum. Here are some questions. Are content knowledge and traditional approaches to assessment truly going to prepare our kids for the world they will enter and these skills they will need to be successful? Should the skills listed above outweigh content in regards to what we are teaching and assessing in our classes? In the lists above “Creativity” shifted from #10 to #3. How can we build more creativity and creative thinking into the work our students produce? Are we incorporating technology enough in our teaching and learning so that students become confident and adaptable users of technology? How can we transform our pedagogical approaches and learning environments so that these skills and the use of technology are not an add-on, but are a core part of our curricula? These are important issues and questions we need to think about as we plan our curriculum.

If as an individual, team, or a department you would like to discuss these questions and issues, I’d be happy to join in on a conversation.