The teacher is able to help the student relate content knowledge to real world applications through introducing and reinforcing skills needed to identify, analyze, and solve problems in productive collaborative work.
The effective teacher provides opportunities for students to learn and practice problem solving and communication skills so that they are equipped to function in the global workplace. By introducing multiple perspectives and providing instruction that connects content areas with other disciplines, the teacher can reinforce the importance of questioning and higher order thinking skills, as well as encourage creativity and discovery of original ideas. I intend to help students develop those higher order thinking skills and encourage creativity in my classroom through incorporating 21st Century Learning Skills. Because, like any other skill, these skill must be taught and practiced to attain mastery, I will offer students opportunities to gradually build those skills and practice them in diverse situations.
21st Century Learning Skills
The world is changing rapidly and teachers must teach students how to develop the skills they will need to become productive members of a global community. The 21st Century Skills, as they are referred to, include working respectfully with other people and being able to see other perspectives, communicating effectively in a variety of media, finding creative and innovative solutions to problems, and thinking critically by analyzing information and sources and determining what is important and valid. I created an infographic that describes the categories of 21st Century skills and functions as both a checklist for planning my lessons and a reminder to students of the skills they should be developing through their learning.
Critical Thinking
Instruction must enable students to not just accept what they are told but to understand how to question and process the information they are confronted with on a daily basis. Critical thinking is a skill that must not only be taught, but practiced as well. The graphic novel study of MAUS gave me an opportunity to work with students on interpreting illustrations and thinking more deeply based on the information they were given or not given. Focus activities for several lessons included questions that required students to look beyond the pictures on the pages in front of them and draw on background knowledge, prior experiences and inferences from earlier pages in the novel, as well as identify the information that was missing and determine what else they wanted to know. The Focus activities also required progressively deeper thinking and analysis skills.
By practicing these skills with the novel illustrations and becoming more comfortable with identifying the imagery in them, the students strengthened their abilities to gather information, recognize their assumptions, and make decisions based on what they knew or didn’t know. In addition, one of the lessons was pulled from another graphic novel, They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, about the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans in the United States during WWII. Talking about the internment camps in the US along with the Nazi’s concentration camps in Poland allowed students to build a more global awareness of the time period and offered perspectives different from their own.
Creativity in Project Options
For the MAUS study, students were given a list of options from which to choose their final project. Each option was flexible enough to allow individual students to create a project that was connected to their own interests and would allow them to demonstrate their understanding of the novel in their own way. In addition, a “Design your own” project was included for students who needed the additional creativity. The project was divided into chapter responses, to be submitted as each of the first five chapters of the book was read. One student had a deep knowledge of the military equipment and strategies of WWII and chose to create a work of writing for each chapter. In his first response, he admitted to not knowing exactly how to proceed and that he knew much more about the war itself than the effect it had on the people living in Germany and the surrounding countries. Still, he wrote extensively about the reasoning behind the military decisions and was able to pick up on parts of the book that others did not notice. The second submission began again with the disclaimer that he understood the events of the war better than the effect it had on the people, but he added: “after finishing the other project, I think I’m getting a bit better at it.”
While his writing focused much more on the war events than on analysis of the book, the student demonstrated that he was able to make his own connections across disciplines. In addition, he is learning how to recognize and understand differing perspectives. Both of these are key components of the 21st Century Learning skills.