SPECIAL SECTION: In the Classroom
Teaching 21st-Century Skills via Group-Facilitated Class Discussions
By Sheri Jordan
Do postsecondary and adult ESL learners have the
skills they need for the 21st century? What are those
skills? Does “21st century” necessarily mean “technology”?
And how do we foster these skills? In this article, I will
briefly interrogate the term “21st-century
skills” and then outline a lesson plan for
postsecondary and adult ESL learners that
aims to foster some of these skills.
In the Summer 2013 issue of
CATESOL News, Mary Mardirosian
suggested “simple tools” to incorporate
technology into the K-12 content-area
classroom to enhance student preparation
Sheri Jordan
for Common Core and English language
development (ELD) standards testing
(p. 15). These recommendations offer practical ways to
engage young learners more deeply with the material,
whatever that material may be, while fostering “21stcentury skills.”
This helpful article, as well as discussions buzzing in
the TESOL media and at professional conferences, may
unwittingly encourage us to equate “21st-century skills”
with “technology skills.” In the Web 2.0 world, however,
technology is just a reflection of the Brave New World for
which we are preparing our “digital native” students (who
grew up on the Internet and computers)—a world much
more complex than many of us “digital immigrants” grew
into (Prensky, 2001). As Mardirosian (2013) points out,
we do not even necessarily need to teach our students
technological skills at all (realizing, of course, that many
adult learners are also “digital immigrants”). What do we
need to teach them, then, to help them develop those
“21st-century skills”?
What Are 21st-Century Skills?
Some of these skills include, but are not limited to, the
following (adapted from “21st Century Skills Maps” for K-12
foreign language learners [Partnership, 2011] and English
classrooms [Partnership, 2008] and Salas-Isnardi [2011] on
21st-century skills for adult education), all of which are to
be developed in the target language:
• Collaborative skills—the ability to cooperate toward a
common goal and share the burden with diverse group
members;
• Information and critical-thinking skills—the ability to
research, synthesize, and analyze informati ۈ