Seven Survival
Skills for the 21st
Century
From Tony Wagner’s
The Global
Achievement Gap
Objectives
• Become familiar with the seven critical 21st
century skills outlined by Tony Wagner.
Tony Wagner
The Seven Survival Skills
for Careers, College, and Citizenship
1.Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2.Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by
Influence
3.Agility and Adaptability
4.Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
5.Effective Oral and Written Communication
6.Accessing and Analyzing Information
7.Curiosity and Imagination
What’s My Skill? Activity
• Each group will be assigned one of the seven critical
skills to become an expert on.
• Find the slides in this presentation about your assigned
skill and discuss what they say.
• Then look on the Internet to find more information about
your skill: what it means, why it’s needed, and what it
looks like in action (either in the “real world” or in
schools).
• Be prepared to clearly explain your skill to the whole
group.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
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Ask good questions
Deal with vast amounts of information
Figure out what’s important and what’s not
Decide what’s accurate and what’s not
Have a plan of action
Do things that haven’t been done before
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
"The idea that a company's senior leaders
have all the answers and can solve problems
by themselves has gone completely by the
wayside...The person who's close to the work
has to have strong analytic skills. You have to
be rigorous: test your assumptions, don't take
things at face value, don't go in with
preconceived ideas that you're trying to
prove." - Ellen Kumata, consultant to Fortune 200
companies
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
“First and foremost, I look for
someone who asks good questions,”
Parker responded. “We can teach
them the technical stuff, but we can't
teach them how to ask good
questions—how to think.”
Clay Parker, president of the Chemical Management Division of BOC
Edwards
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
To compete in the new global economy, companies
need their workers to think about how to
continuously improve their products, processes, or
services. Over and over, executives told me that the
heart of critical thinking and problem solving is the
ability to ask the right questions. As one senior
executive from Dell said, “Yesterday's answers won't
solve today's problems.”
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Ellen Kumata, managing partner at Cambria
Associates, explained the extraordinary pressures on
leaders today. “The challenge is this: How do you do
things that haven't been done before, where you
have to rethink or think anew? It's not incremental
improvement any more. The markets are changing
too fast.”
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving:
Student View
Ask our students to be the ones who
question-- not just the ones who answer.
In the words of one student:
“Miss, if you already know the answer,
why do you keep asking us the question?
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Activity:
1-What types of activities would allow learners to go through the Five Step Problem Solving
Strategy?
http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/as/407.htm
2-How can you assess critical thinking?
http://www.criticalthinking.com/company/articles/assessing-critical-thinking.jsp
3-How can a lesson be structured to provide opportunities to master 21st century skills?
Read the article: Infusing Teaching Thinking Into Subject-Area Instruction
Visit: http://www.cloudnet.com/~edrbsass/edcreative.htm
Collaboration Across Networks and
Leading by Influence
• Work in teams, both face-to-face and
virtually
• Make your own decisions
• Ability to influence the people around you
• Empower others to achieve results and not
just complete tasks
• Understand and respect differences among
people
• General leadership skills
Collaboration Across Networks and
Leading by Influence
"The biggest problem we have in the
company as a whole is finding people
capable of exerting leadership across the
board...Our mantra is that you lead by
influence, rather than authority."
- Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President and General
Counsel at Cisco
Collaboration Across Networks and
Leading by Influence
Teamwork is no longer just about working with
others in your building. Christie Pedra, CEO of
Siemens, explained, “Technology has allowed for
virtual teams. We have teams working on major
infrastructure projects that are all over the U.S. On
other projects, you're working with people all
around the world on solving a software problem.
Every week they're on a variety of conference calls;
they're doing Web casts; they're doing net
meetings.”
Collaboration Across Networks and
Leading by Influence
Mike Summers, vice president for Global Talent
Management at Dell, said that his greatest concern
was young people's lack of leadership skills. “Kids
just out of school have an amazing lack of
preparedness in general leadership skills and
collaborative skills,” he explained. “They lack the
ability to influence.”
Collaboration Across
Networks and
Leading by Influence:
Student View
Collaboration Across Networks and
Leading by Influence
Activity:
1-What types of projects can encourage collaborating with others that are geographically in
different places?
Global Education On a Dime: A Low-Cost Way to Connect: http://www.edutopia.org/globaleducation-international-exchange
Harris Burdick Project:
http://classroombooktalk.wikispaces.com/Mysteries+of+Harris+Burdick
2-What does “The World is Flat” mean for education?
http://www.edutopia.org/what-does-world-flat-mean-education
3-Name some examples of good leaders that lead by influence? What characteristics do
they have in common?
Internet research
Agility and Adaptability
• Able to work when the right answer isn’t
there or when there isn’t a right answer
• Adapt to constant change
• Work with disruptions
• Use a variety of tools (not just one) to solve
new problems
Agility and Adaptability
Clay Parker explained that anyone who works at
BOC Edwards today “has to think, be flexible,
change, and use a variety of tools to solve new
problems. We change what we do all the time. I
can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will
change or may not exist in the future, so this is
why adaptability and learning skills are more
important than technical skills.”
Agility and Adaptability
"I've been here four years, and we've done
fundamental reorganization every year
because of changes in the business...I can
guarantee the job I hire someone to do will
change or may not exist in the future, so this is
why adaptability and learning skills are more
important than technical skills."
– Clay Parker, President of Chemical Management Division of
BOC Edwards
Agility and
Adaptability:
Student View
Agility and Adaptability:
Activity:
1-In a world where technologies are quickly outdated, how can schools prepare
students?
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
2-How can schools best prepare students to succeed in the first decades of the 21st
century where agility and adaptability are crucial skills for career success?
Read article: Learning for the 21st Century
3-What types of activities would allow students to master these skills?
Internet Research
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
• Proactive, self-starters
• Create your own answers and solutions
• Actively look for ways to improve the
systems around you
• Not be afraid to try and fail
• Understand that continuous success may
mean you’re not reaching high enough or
far enough
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
"For our production and crafts staff, the hourly
workers, we need self-directed people...who
can find creative solutions to some very tough,
challenging problems.“
- Mark Maddox, Human Resources Manager at Unilever
Foods North America
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Mark Chandler, senior vice president and general
counsel at Cisco, was one of the strongest proponents of
initiative: “I say to my employees, if you try five things
and get all five of them right, you may be failing. If you
try 10 things, and get eight of them right, you're a hero.
You'll never be blamed for failing to reach a stretch goal,
but you will be blamed for not trying. One of the
problems of a large company is risk aversion. Our
challenge is how to create an entrepreneurial culture in
a larger organization.”
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism:
Student View
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Activity:
1-What does creativity have to do with education?
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
2-What does “The World is Flat” mean for education?
http://www.edutopia.org/what-does-world-flat-mean-education
3-What types of activities would allow students to master these skills?
Internet Research
Effective Oral and Written
Communication
• Clear and concise writing, speaking, and
presenting with focus, energy, and passion
• Ability to persuade others
• Know how and when to use different levels
of communication
• Ability to provide “elevator speeches”
• Presentation skills
Effective Oral and Written
Communication
Mike Summers of Dell said, “We are routinely surprised
at the difficulty some young people have in
communicating: verbal skills, written skills,
presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and
concise; it's hard for them to create focus, energy, and
passion around the points they want to make. If you're
talking to an exec, the first thing you'll get asked if you
haven't made it perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds
of your presentation is, ‘What do you want me to take
away from this meeting?’ They don't know how to
answer that question.”
Effective Oral and Written
Communication
Summers and other leaders from various companies
were not necessarily complaining about young
people's poor grammar, punctuation, or spelling—the
things we spend so much time teaching and testing in
our schools. Although writing and speaking correctly
are obviously important, the complaints I heard most
frequently were about fuzzy thinking and young
people not knowing how to write with a real voice.
Effective Oral and Written
Communication
"The biggest skill people are missing is the
ability to communicate: both written and oral
presentations. It's a huge problem for us."
- Annmarie Neal, Vice President for Talent Management at
Cisco Systems
Effective Oral and Written
Communication: Student View
Effective Oral and Written
Communication
Activity:
1- What does “The World is Flat” mean for education?
http://www.edutopia.org/what-does-world-flat-mean-education
2-How can blogs, email, texting help learners master written communication?
Internet research
3-How can a lesson be structured to provide opportunities to master 21st century skills?
Read the article: Infusing Teaching Thinking Into Subject-Area Instruction
Accessing and Analyzing
Information
• Find, evaluate, and synthesize information
• Use information from a variety of sources
(web pages, magazines, podcasts, TV, faceto-face interviews and discussions, videos,
surveys, books, etc.)
• Understand how rapidly information is
changing and be able to deal with that
Accessing and Analyzing
Information
"There is so much information available that it
is almost too much, and if people aren't
prepared to process the information effectively,
it almost freezes them in their steps."
- Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent
Management at Dell
Accessing and Analyzing
Information
Employees in the 21st century have to manage an
astronomical amount of information daily. As Mike
Summers told me, “There is so much information
available that it is almost too much, and if people
aren't prepared to process the information
effectively it almost freezes them in their steps.”
Accessing and Analyzing
Information
It's not only the sheer quantity of information that
represents a challenge, but also how rapidly the
information is changing. Quick—how many planets
are there? In the early 1990s, I heard then–Harvard
University president Neil Rudenstine say in a
speech that the half-life of knowledge in the
humanities is 10 years, and in math and science,
it's only two or three years. I wonder what he
would say it is today.
Accessing and Analyzing Information:
Student View
Accessing and Analyzing
Information:
Student View
• Watch the Bing video here.
• Bing TV Commercial - The Cure for Search
Overload Syndrome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIxfk3hS0
uU&feature=related
Accessing and Analyzing Information:
Activity:
1-What important questions need to be asked about web content?
Your Guide To Online Learning:
http://www.econcordia.com/courses/study_skills/lesson6/061.aspx
2-How can the learner improve their research and information gathering skills?
http://www.edutopia.org/personal-learning-networks-technology
3-What tools can a learner use to practice assessing and analyzing web content?
Internet research
Videos to watch:
BING Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w4W7fQHgYw
BING Commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIxfk3hS0uU&feature=related
BING Commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0f8X_SOVjA&feature=channel
Curiosity and Imagination
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Ability to continually ask great questions
Never be satisfied with the status quo
Search for unique solutions
Ask “What if…?”
Dream
Ability to develop unique products and
services
• Empathy
Curiosity and Imagination
"Our old idea is that work is defined by
employers and that employees have to do
whatever the employer wants...but actually,
you would like him to come up with an
interpretation that you like-he's adding
something personal-a creative element."
- Michael Jung, Senior Consultant at McKinsey and Company
Curiosity and Imagination
Mike Summers told me, “People who've learned to
ask great questions and have learned to be
inquisitive are the ones who move the fastest in
our environment because they solve the biggest
problems in ways that have the most impact on
innovation.”
Curiosity and Imagination
Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, observes
that with increasing abundance, people want unique
products and services: “For businesses it's no longer
enough to create a product that's reasonably priced and
adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique,
and meaningful.”1 Pink notes that developing young
people's capacities for imagination, creativity, and
empathy will be increasingly important for maintaining
the United States' competitive advantage in the future.
Curiosity and
Imagination:
Student View
Curiosity and Imagination:
Student View
• Watch the “Think Different” video here.
• Apple Think Different http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLcYyivv
9AI
Curiosity and Imagination
Activity:
1-What does creativity have to do with education?
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
2-What value do the arts have in becoming life-long learners?
Arts in Schools http://www.keepartsinschools.org/Interviews/SarahMurr.php
3-What types of activities would allow students to master these skills?
Internet Research