What are 21st century skills and why are they important?

We want our children to successfully communicate with people, solve life problems, and find self-fulfillment in professional activities. But what do we need to teach them now for this, and will this knowledge remain relevant in ten to fifteen years?

A widely known quote from Richard Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education: "we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't yet been invented, to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet."

What skills might today's students need in the future to solve problems we don't yet know about? The answer depends on what we understand by the word "skills." They are commonly divided into two large groups – so-called soft and hard skills. The latter are clear: these are skills we use in narrow areas of application to solve specific tasks. For example, working with documents, writing code in Python, or knowing how to repair a car. These skills are easily measured using professional tests or exams.

It's more difficult to define what soft skills are. They are not tied to specific fields of activity and are more related to a person's ability to effectively interact with others. Such skills include cognitive skills (related to processing information about the surrounding world), social skills (ability to maintain relationships with other people), and emotional skills (ability to recognize one's emotions and cope with them). They are less concrete and measurable than hard skills, but no less important for solving various life tasks, including professional ones, and for communicating with other people.

What are the 4C skills

As Chris Dede from Harvard University notes, 21st century skills differ from 20th century skills, primarily due to the emergence of complex information and communication technologies. The types of work performed by people (as opposed to work performed by machines) are constantly changing as computers and telecommunications expand the possibilities for performing human tasks. Therefore, many educational institutions and research groups have developed their own concepts of "21st century skills." In particular, the non-profit organization Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21.org) identified four key elements necessary for student development:

• communication
• critical thinking
• collaboration
• creativity.

These competencies became known as the 4C skills. They are considered among the most important in the modern world and can be developed both within the school learning process and outside it – based on extracurricular situations and tasks. In addition to these, children and teenagers may benefit from other soft skills: the ability to be a leader, take responsibility for results or quickly adapt to changes, intercultural competence, or technological literacy. The traditional education system develops many of these qualities, but family interactions and diverse extracurricular activities are also very important. Additionally, the level of soft skills development depends on the student's age and personal characteristics.

How to assess and measure soft skills development in students?

Assessing soft skills is an important task for teachers and other education experts, as well as for student parents. There are specialized tests developed by specialists in psychometrics, including tests adapted to the characteristics of children of different ages.

However, assessing real progress is impossible without observing students over a long period of time. Therefore, parents and educational workers need to monitor manifestations of soft skills during the learning process. It makes sense to track specific actions that relate to soft skill manifestations, as well as provide students with feedback – about what they do well and what could be improved. It's important to distinguish between assessing "hard" disciplinary knowledge and skills from assessing more universal "soft" skills, which are significantly more difficult to test.

There are many methods for analyzing soft skills that take into account age characteristics and subject-specific features. The most common include creative tasks, individual projects, and teamwork assignments. These can also be extracurricular group activities. For example, to assess communication skills, adaptability, and creative thinking in students, you can use the popular game "Charades," in which you need to show and guess words or expressions using gestures, movements, and facial expressions.

How to understand which skills need to be developed?

The strengths and weaknesses of a specific student are identified using the measurement and assessment methods for soft skills described above. Additionally, development needs may be determined by the child's current life tasks. Newcomers who have just transferred to another class and want to fit into the group will benefit from effective communication skills. Children or teenagers in difficult life situations (moving, serious illness, parental divorce) won't be hurt by the ability to recognize their emotions and cope with them. In high school, career guidance work can play a decisive role in preparing students for the future.

What methods and approaches exist for teaching soft skills in school?

It's believed that the term "soft skills" was first used when describing the U.S. Army training system from 1959-1972. Since then, many strategies and methods for developing these skills have emerged. And, of course, no universal approach has emerged that would suit everyone.

Among the most well-proven methods, we can name:

1. Role-playing games and life situation modeling. For example, how to move properly on ice, what to do if you find someone else's wallet, how to behave in public places in certain situations.
2. Modeling method – creating special schemes, models that reproduce in a visual and accessible form for the student the hidden properties of the studied object and connections between its parts. For example, representing relationships between characters in a literary work in the form of a diagram.
3. Didactic games – collective, purposeful educational games where each participant and the team as a whole are united by solving the main task and orient their behavior toward winning. Popular board games such as "Imaginarium" or "Dixit," or party games – the aforementioned "Charades," "Hat," or "Contact" can serve as didactic games aimed at developing soft skills.

How to integrate skills development into the school process?

The main tool for mastering soft skills in school is embedding tasks aimed at their development directly into subject material. Examples include creating cinquains on the topic of "parts of speech" in Russian language class or brainstorming in physics or biology class (why do animals need fat under their skin? if people couldn't distinguish colors, how would traffic lights be designed?).

Another strategy involves tasks aimed directly at developing soft skills, without being tied to any particular academic discipline material. Examples include exercises for developing emotional intelligence: the "color wheel," perspective-changing exercises, or bodily methods for managing emotions.

Embedding such tasks into a student's educational trajectory will help connect necessary skills with specific subject knowledge and foster interest in a particular subject. It's worth noting that applying any soft skills development methodologies is not the task of one or two subject teachers or the school psychologist, but an integral part of the entire educational process and requires cooperation from all participants: teachers, parents, and students themselves. Only in this way can we prepare children for life under conditions of uncertainty in the constantly changing modern world.