XVIII Международный конкурс научно-исследовательских и творческих работ учащихся
Старт в науке
21st CENTURY SKILLS
Автор работы награжден дипломом победителя II степени
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Introduction
Nowadays the question «What are the skills of 21st century?» remains valid. Before we answer, we have to realize the society we live in, what are features and differences of our time.
21st century is a period of rapidly developing technologies, space exploring, science inventions and improvements. Now achievements of science-technical progress do not keep still and we cannot imagine our life without them. This way, people`s manual labor is replaced by robots and machines, majority of people use e-mail in stand of traditional one, students are able to study by e-books, we have access to the Internet where we can find necessary information, books, films or stay in touch with friend and relatives.
All in all, these achievements make our life much easier. But it is only at first glance. Actually, a 21st century person must be prepared for our world in order to have a successful life. We must have specified qualities and skills to comply with hardship of our world.
Moreover, a process of globalization is active and all of us are affected by it. That process requires responsibility, disciplinary and initiative. So, in my opinion, a person of our time must be ambitious, enterprising, versatile, motivated and with a lot of creative ideas.
The purpose of our project is to define 21st century skills and ascertain how develop them yourself.
Our aims are: 1) to study theoretical materials on the issue, 2) take a survey among school students on this topic, 3) design a way of effective skills developing.
We use analytical and survey methods to carry out this work.
1.The three categories of 21st century skills
Each 21st century skill is separated into one of three categories (the three L`s):
Learning skills
Literacy skills
Life skills
Learning skills (The four C`s)
Learning skills are by far the most popular ones. They consist of critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication.
Critical thinking is the ability to think in a rational and clear way with the purpose to understand logical connection between ideas or facts. Critical thinking has been the subject of lots of debates since the time of the first Greek philosophers such as Plato and Socrates and has persisted to be a subject of discussion into the present day, for example the capability to identify fake news, which surround us everywhere in our information century. Approximately, critical thinking requires us to analyze information, not just receive it. Critical thinkers strictly question ideas and assumptions rather than taking them at truth. They always identify and solve problems systematically in place of by intuition or instinct.
Creativity is the ability to assume about a challenging task in a new way and to use the imagination in order to generate different and modern ideas. Creativity empower you to look on a problem from a unique side and find opportunities to deal with complex tasks. By developing creativity you experience such advantages as generating the best solutions to daily exigencies, higher workplace involvement, more efficient teamwork and bonding.
Collaboration is the capability to work in groups to achieve common goals. Most work environments require collaboration, so it is essential. They include a willingness to communicating clearly, actively listening to others, respecting the variety of your team`s members and taking responsibility for mistakes. We cannot fail to mention that we indeed practice that skill at school: students are given different tasks to do in groups, for example projects. It is great for our future life and career. We often produce significant ideas working with others, because thought by thought we find a right key for the unlocked door.
Communication skills let you to interact with people productively. We can say that it is one part of collaboration skill. Nowadays it is imperative to put effort into improving communication skills: they help to establish good relations with colleagues and advance a career. The six rules of auspicious communication are: ensure that the purpose of your message is clear, be concise and keep the length of your message as short as possible, information you want to share need to be grammatically and factually correct, your message must be genuine and based on real facts, be polite and respect your audience for giving their time to listen or read your letter, be coherent and structure your message logically.
Literacy skills(IMT)
Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring people find and recognize desired information, have the capability to use and assess it. Information literacy is a base of constant learning. It is relevant for all disciplines and to all levels of education. Nowadays it becomes more and more important for the reason we live in information age and we receive lots of different information during a day, so working with information and filtering it is obviously essential.
Media literacy is the ability to discern and judge forms of communication. We are involved in media production every day while we are reading a newspaper, watching a TV or engaging with any others variations of media, so media literacy allow us to determine the influence and meaning behind media messages and estimate an author`s credibility and intent. We live in a world of powerful 24/7 media. The amount of time children and youth are spending with media has extremely increased over the last decade. According to recent research children ages from 8 to 18 now spend an average about 7 hours per day with entertainment media. The problem is that a lot of children are not taught to use media thoughtfully and it is why media literacy is crucial.
Technology literacy is the ability to use, manage, accept technology efficiently, carefully and responsibly. Actually technology deeply impacts on us and our wellbeing since it plays a key role in many aspects of our daily lives. Even though it provides many benefits, there are some risks and drawbacks to using technology: become too dependent on technology and overuse it, spoiling health, browse untrusted sites and keep insecure passwords and private information about yourself. Technology literacy teaches us not to make such mistakes while we use technology.
Life skills (FLIP)
Flexibility is the cooperative ability to adjust to changes in workplace and manage them without creating stress. Being flexible means that you are able to adopt to unexpected situations and change your plans rapidly. This skill is important either for your personal life or professional career. For example, more you are flexible – more you are a dependable worker, it widens your career opportunities. By the way, this skill impacts a mental health: taking a positive approach to unexpected problems is a great way to handle them.
Leadership is the ability to organize people around a general goal. This skill requires a person to motivate others and be initiative. Leadership includes: ability to accept responsibility, great oral and communication experience, smart deligating to keep a team productive, effective conflict resolution, having excellent time management and organization skills, realizing that a leader cannot complete every project alone – teamwork is essential.
Initiative is the ability to assess a situation and behave enthusiastically and independently without direction from someone else. This type of skill helps you do better in your workplace or study, for the reason that you spot and take advantage of opportunities that others abandon. One of the bases of being initiative is to build self-confidence and not to fear that people may disagree with your suggestions. Employers want employees who can think on their own and take fast reactions without waiting a clue about what to do, so this is why the popularity of initiative increases.
Productivity is the ability to intensify efficiency and establish engaging work organization. Nowadays we are all busy with schedules, so this type of skill encourages us to cope with our tasks on time. For today`s people being productive is a key to success, because they can systematize and prioritize tasks, for example, which are more important. Likewise, productive people have great time management and plan their actions beforehand.
Now we are acquainted with different variations of skills of our century. It is hardly ever possible to have a successful career without having these abilities. We are ready to move forward and begin our practical part with taking a survey among students of our class and analyze their answers and awareness on our issue.
2.Experiment
According to our theoretical part, we made a decision to delve into critical thinking, for the reason it is a base of skills. Critical thinking skills are extremely important in our information age, where students have to consume countless amount of information every day, analyze it in right way and have their own opinion. Moreover, students now are goal-orientired and seek to a high-qualified professions, which require to be a critical thinker. For example, critical thinking is inevitable for accountants, analysists, criminologists, doctors, lawyers.
Due to the answers, we report that all of our classmates have heard about critical thinking (Figure 1), and overall majority considers that it`s certainly meaningful skill for everyone (Figure 2). But unfortunately, less than the half try to develop their critical thinking, only 48% do it (Figure 3). And in the last question they were suggested to asses their level of critical thinking on a 10-point scale. According to the results, 53% of interviewed students level their critical thinking from 4 to 7; 41% of students level it from 0 to 3; and only 6% of students level it from 8 to 10 (Figure 4).
Analyzing the results, we diceded to create our class club calling «Class Debates», where we would prepare controversial themes to discuss. We decided to arrange it every week to develop critical thinking among students of our class.
The plan of debates is:
Topic suggestion.
The class is divided into two teams (supporters and opponents of a theme)
Each team nominates their speakers, and they share opinions. While the speaker is presenting their opinion the members of the team may conmen and add some more points and help their speaker. In the end of the speech a sinquain is presented. When the first team finishes the answer, turn is passed to their opponents. Presentation time is limited: 10 minutes for preparation, 4-5 minutes for presentation.
Opponents may ask questions to each other right after a statement (no more than 2 minutes)
Operation algorithm of teams:
Discussion on a theme and compilation a sinquain.
Representative of opinion with proof and arguments.
Sinquain.
Response to opponents` questions.
The first our theme and the students` arguments you can see in Figure 5. In the beginning our students were quite worried about upcoming activity. During the preparation they rapidly and sometimes loudly discussed the topic. It was unusual type of work for them so they were lack of time a little. The first team presented pros of zoos, a speaker did his best to keep confidently and his companions supported him, complementing and expanding his words. In conclusion they read a sinquain and the opponents asked them several questions, but guys cleverly responded. Then it was the turn of their opponents. They presented cons of zoos. They became more energetic and determinedly nominated the arguments and a sinquain. Our first debates passed successfully. All in all, it took them for 25 minutes to prepare and listen to each other. But it was a real «brainstorm» for them.
The students enjoyed a lot and we came to agreement to arrange such an activity every Tuesday right after our lessons. We discussed such topics as «Should people stop wearing natural fur?», «Should scientists stop testing on animals?», «Should death penalty be returned?».
After a month of our class debates we asked the students to level their critical thinking again and monitor if something changed (Figure 6). We see that the level of critical thinking among our class has increased. Our purpose was to develop critical thinking skills using debates on controversial topics. Thanks for our experiment, we have learned to solve problems, find keys for different questions, think wider, defend opinion. Moreover, we developed our collaboration skills: now we better work in groups, listen to each other and take responsibility for our teams.
Conclusion
21st century requires us to be prepared for it and develop necessary skills which help us to deal with all challenging tasks successfully. We live in a century of rapidly developing technologies, our world changes every day because of new researches, achievements, inventions. For this reason we should have the ability to adopt to volatile conditions of life. Additionally, we should develop a lot of skills. Learning skills: communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking. Literacy skills: information literacy, technology literacy, media literacy. And life skills: flexibility, leadership, initiative, productivity. All these skills are interrelated and you can not develop one of them, not advancing others. Our decision was to go deeply in critical thinking. We think it is a base.
We took a survey among the students of our class. According to the results, we found out that not many of them develop critical thinking, but they reckon that it is obviously important for our modern times. They assessed their critical thinking level quite low, and for this reason we established a club called «Class debates». Our purpose was to increase the average level of critical thinking among the children of our class.
We designed a plan of debates: there were two teams who were for or against of our topic. Their aim was to describe and share their opinion, trying to persuade opponents. During that mini-game, each participant learned to analyze, build reflections, think logically and rationally.
After a month of arrangements of debates, we asked the students to asses their level of critical thinking again. And the results were much better than in the beginning. By the way, it is a good way to learn to work in groups and communicate. Now we continue to discuss different issues of our century and self-develop more day by day.
Appendix
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
|
Should zoos be banned? (pros and cons) |
|
|
1)It is easier for scientists to carry out researchers and monitoring of animals |
1)A limited space for animals |
|
2)Taking care of endangered species |
2)Permanent people`s attention |
|
3)Protection from natural selection |
3)A cruel treatment with animals |
|
4)They get enough amount of food and water |
4)The absence of natural environment |
Figure 6
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