Employers want to hire people with 21st-century skills and they can’t find enough qualified candidates. The problem, says Charles Fadel, Founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign, is that our education system “is biased for college entrance requirements via tests such as the SAT which are partially obsolete, and never reflected particularly well the needs of employability.” So given the dramatic transformations we are seeing in the workplace, what are the most effective ways to close the increasingly widening education-to-employment gap?
Today in Part 4 of The Global Search for Education 5-part series with Charles Fadel, our focus is on skills. The OECD’s Andreas Schleicher calls Fadel’s book, Four-Dimensional Education: The Competencies Learners Need to Succeed, a “first of its kind organizing framework of competencies needed for this century which defines the spaces in which educators, curriculum planners, policy makers and learners can establish WHAT should be learned.”
Charles, how do you respond to employers’ concerns that students don’t have the skills needed to be productive in their companies?
For the past two decades, employers have stated that they are looking for employees able to display the “4 C’s”: to think Critically – solve problems and draw sound decisions – as well as working Creatively, and able to Communicate and Collaborate on a systematic basis. This is the framework we developed at the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21).
[Source:-Huffington Post]
