21st Century Skills - How can we prepare our students for their real world?

As educators, we understand that society is always changing, therefore the way that we teach and reach our students is constantly changing as well.  When asked to take the opportunity to peruse The Partnership for 21st Century Skills  it was interesting how much our students need to know and be able to do by the time they graduate high school.  The question is: who is responsible for teaching them and how can we ensure that they are being taught all that they need to know?

I found this website to be a valuable resource as it provides a foundation for the essential skills that our students will need to be productive citizens after their completion of high school.  While many may think that these skills are a bit outrageous in the fact that it may most likely be assumed that students will learn these skills in a school setting, I find it interesting at the variety of skills that are listed for our students to be successful in the working 21st Century.  The one area that I find most interesting and eye opening is the wide array of life and career skills, with attention to Productivity and Accountability.  I find this area intriguing as I do not feel that the education system holds other factors involved in the education process accountable other than teachers and administrators.  The factors that I am referring to are parents and students.  For example, in my school district schools that are not making the appropriate amount of progress on high stake standards provide families with the option of a school choice.  As if to say, we are not doing our jobs as educators and you now may choose the school that your child may attend because of our short comings.  However, the reality is in order for us to be successful with our students we need the support from the home as well.  We need parents to ensure that students are completing homework and that they are coming to school prepared to learn.  When do parents begin to be held accountable for their student's progress as we are as educators?

Many could or would argue that quite possibly all of these skills are not necessary for students to have by the time that they graduate high school.  However, I am in support of these skills as they are skills that many of us learned throughout our years and have had experience with through various opportunities.  I believe that the website above has done an excellent job of identifying those skills and breaking them out into categories to show how they fit within the different areas of our lives.  I never once thought that we would need a large knowledge base of ICT Literacy, but with the continuous advances in technology it has become apparent why we need to this form of literacy.

Through the exploration of this website, I have realized how imperative it is that we begin to address these skills with our students in elementary school all the way through their educational careers.  It is a large challenge, but just as the skills of the 21st Century have shown us we have to be creative in our thinking just as we need to teach our students to do so as well.  It will also be a challenge for students to understand the various tasks and challenges that will come with teaching 21st Century skills, but with careful thought and creativity it can be done.  It will take more time, which is not something we have a plethora of, but these skills can be integrated into our curriculum through more project based learning and less test types of assessments.