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Articles by Helyn Kim
Competencies for the 21st century: Jurisdictional progress
Editor's Note: This research was a collaboration between Brookings and the Center for Curriculum Redesign. Education systems around the world are increasingly recognizing the need to teach their students a new set of competencies beyond traditional disciplines such as mathematics, science, and reading.
Optimizing Assessment for All: Developing 21st century skills-embedded curriculum tasks
To be successful in today’s world, students need to have a broad set of knowledge, skills, habits, and traits that go beyond what has traditionally been taught in the classroom, such as rote memorization-based skills. These broad sets of competencies—such as critical thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, technology and information skills, and communication, among others—are often referred to as 21st century skills (21CS).
Optimizing Assessment for All: Framework for understanding project goals and scope
Editor's Note: This framework marks the first in a series of five reports detailing the work of the Optimizing Assessment for All project at Brookings to strengthen education systems capacity to integrate 21st century skills into teaching and learning, using assessment as a lever for changing classroom practices. In a world of rapid advancement and change, people and societies need a new mixture of skills to thrive.
How do you measure happiness? Exploring the happiness curriculum in Delhi schools
“Take a deep breath. Release. Take a deep breath. Release. Concentrate on the noises coming from the environment. What do you hear? Slowly, focus on your own breathing.” A grade 7 teacher at Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya in Delhi, walks her students through a breathing exercise. After three minutes, she says, “When you are ready, starts moving your toes; start moving your fingers; now, slowly, open your eyes.” This is a typical morning in happiness class.
Integrating 21st century skills in the classroom in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Africa has the fastest growing school-age population in the world. It is estimated that within the next three decades, 1 billion African children will need to be educated. To keep up with the increase in the number of students in just the next 10 years, 69 million teachers are needed to provide every child with primary and secondary education. This onus comes with several other challenges facing the continent, such as poverty, conflict, and unemployment.
How do social and emotional skills develop in youth?
On December 17, 1999, the U.N. General Assembly declared August 12th as International Youth Day to celebrate the crucial role that young people play in shaping and transforming societies. This year’s theme, “transforming education,” is an apt reminder that investing in high-quality education is key to capitalizing on the potential of all youth and achieving sustainable and equitable development.
Learning Progressions: Road Maps for 21st-Century Students—and Teachers (SSIR)
Education To equip today’s students for the future, we need to understand the fundamental building blocks of complex skills, and apply that understanding to teaching practices and assessments. By Helyn Kim & Claire Scoular Apr. 24, 2017 As our world grows more interconnected, conversations about education are shifting to focus on identifying and cultivating the complex “21st-century” skills children will need to succeed amid global competition and uncertainty.
To promote success in schools, focus on teacher well-being
Without question, teachers are central to student success. Anyone who has taught knows how rewarding it is to witness student learning. Teaching can also be one of the most stressful, demanding, and undersupported professions, leading to national teacher strikes, shortages, and high rates of turnover.
A collaborative approach to teaching and assessing 21st century skills in Africa
Millions of students around the world are leaving school without learning the most basic skills—often referred to as a “global learning crisis.” But, just as importantly, education systems are not preparing these students for the jobs of the future. In today’s globally interconnected world—a world that is constantly and rapidly changing—21st century skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration are more important for students now than ever before.
To teach or not to teach? It’s a little more complicated than that
The World Bank recently launched Teach, an open-source classroom observation tool designed to capture what goes on in classrooms in low- and middle-income countries. Teach captures time spent on learning, but it also is intended to capture the quality of teacher practices that support children’s cognitive and social-emotional skills, in an effort to monitor and improve teaching practices. When it comes to learning, it is not about how much time is spent in class but how that time is spent.
Education systems need alignment for teaching and learning 21st century skills
Editor's Note: This blog is a summary of our new paper “Education system alignment for 21st century skills: Focus on assessment” and is the first blog in a series on the topic. Education in the 21st century is not the same as education in the 20th century. We hear about the changing educational landscape time and again, but the real question is how is it different? In both centuries, education has been the main mechanism for individuals to gain core knowledge and concepts.
Education system alignment for 21st century skills
Editor's Note: Please see related publication on the use of data from 21st century skills assessments and interpreting learning outcomes to inform teaching and learning. There has been a major shift in educational learning goals—as seen most recently by Goal 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals—focused on global citizenship education and education for sustainable development.
Collaborative capacity building in 21st century skills assessment: Reflections from Mongolia
Countries have long realized the importance of students developing skills for the 21st century. Skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, and problem solving are increasingly identified as important learning goals. To support teaching and learning these skills, assessment is key–and this is one of the main challenges that education systems around the world currently face.
Working with countries in Asia to raise awareness of 21st century skills in classrooms
How can we teach and assess 21st century skills in classrooms? How can teachers adapt their teaching and lesson plans to integrate skills like critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration? Recently, education stakeholders from Cambodia, Mongolia, and Nepal came together to share their resources, learn from each other, and tackle these big challenging questions—a true model of country collaboration.
The role of learning progressions in global scales
Learning progressions are essential tools for understanding students’ progress in their learning. In the classroom, learning progressions enable teachers to identify where students are at in their learning and convert student assessment results into meaningful descriptions of their learning progress. This understanding is essential for informing next steps in teaching and learning, to ensure that every student is making progress, whatever their ability.
Identifying student readiness through science learning progressions in the Philippines
Learning progressions have been described as roadmaps that help align curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. These roadmaps point out important locations on the typical journey from novice to expert by describing what someone at each important location on the roadmap knows and can do. The descriptions highlight what is unique about each location, ensuring that differences between locations are emphasized so the transformations in skills and knowledge along the learning journey can be recognized.
Using learning progressions in teaching students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms
Successful teaching and learning demands a series of observations and decisions, led by fundamental questions: What do my students know now? What is the starting point for their learning? Are all my students starting with the same set of skills and understanding? Or do I need to adapt my teaching to accommodate students with quite different starting points? What is the next step (or transformation) along the progression for each of my students?
Measuring learning: From comparison to understanding
Learning data is a key component for informing national policies and global dialogue in education. With that in mind, a new World Bank paper A Global Data Set on Education Quality (1965‑2015) by Nadir Altinok, Noam Angrist, and Harry Patrinos compiles data of 163 countries and regions from 1965 to 2015—an impressive achievement.
Teaching preschoolers learning strategies: ‘What’ meets ‘how’
During group time in a preschool classroom, a teacher asks the children to, “Raise a nice quiet hand,” in order to share an idea. What does a child need to know and do in order to comply with this request? Children are being asked to: self-monitor behavior; think about and plan what to say; use audio-representation or visualization to hold onto the response; maintain directive attention; and interact with and/or question others.
Learning progressions: Pathways for 21st century teaching and learning
Education policymakers around the world are recognizing that students need a broad range of skills such as communication, collaboration, and problem solving in order to thrive in the future. However, what this means in practice is not clear. Revising curricula to include these skills does not address lack of understanding of the nature of the skills or how to teach the skills. A first step is to understand how these transferable skills develop.
Meet executive function: How to learn in the age of information overload
“School readiness” seems like a transparent if not hackneyed term. Ask anyone on the street and they will tell you about reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic as the keys to school readiness. Children should go to school knowing the alphabet, how to tie their shoes, and how to count to 20. Yet, we live in a time of information overload: in 2009, researchers at the University of California-San Diego estimated that adults read the equivalent of 100,000 words, or 83 newspaper articles, every day.
EdTech in the classroom: Friend or foe?
The concept of individualized learning is as old as teaching itself. We all want to acknowledge the uniqueness of each child, “meet each student where she is” and help her “be the best she can be.” Thus, it seems only natural to take the advantage of technology and democratize this pedagogical model: let’s provide each child with the quality resources that target the child’s needs.
Can we assess if school and classroom practices align with national educational goals?
Fact: Young people need a broad set of competences to thrive in adult life. Fact: Many schools continue to prioritize a narrow set of learning outcomes. Now more than ever, countries are orienting their policies toward equipping children and youth with a broad range of skills to succeed in the 21st century. Given this widespread endorsement at the policy level, why don’t we see it happening in more schools? Could it be that schools lack a means of examining how to assess and teach these skills?
Research-based practices in preparing teachers before they enter the workforce
In August 2016, Finland implemented a new Core Curriculum for Basic Education to ensure that Finnish children and youth will have the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the future. Aligned with the global movement in formal education to combine generic skills and competencies with traditional academic skills, this new curriculum brings major changes.
Using data and technology to enhance classroom teaching
Education assessments like the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) leverage technology to improve the assessment and teaching of 21st century skills at large scale. But how is this useful when classrooms don’t readily have access to technology? How does this help teachers and students in their daily learning environments?
From ivory towers to the classroom: How can we make academic research useful in the real world?
We hear constant claims that technology will facilitate access to better educational opportunities and facilitate independent learning, and we read statistics on the expansion of mobile phone coverage. However, this increased access has not spread equally throughout the world.
The mysteries of communication: What does it take to really listen?
When we think about communication skills, we most frequently focus on expressive skills—what does one say? How does one say it? However, in reality, communication is a two-part process with an expression component and a reception component. The unheard and unseen aspects of both parts are the assumptions that are made both by the communicator and the recipient. These assumptions can both facilitate or obstruct the clarity of the message.
Complementary strategies for teaching collaboration and critical thinking skills
In today’s changing world, students need a broader range of skills beyond traditional academic subject areas that they can apply to a wide range of real-life situations. Students will encounter many future situations where they have to bring together multiple complex skills to complete tasks. Using examples from the U.S. and Australia, we will outline two complementary methods that teach these complex skillsets.
How do you teach critical thinking when the norm is not to question?
Australia’s response to the need to develop students’ 21st century skills is found in the Australian Curriculum’s general capabilities (including literacy, numeracy, information and communication technology (ICT) capability, critical and creative thinking, personal and social capability, among others).
Strategies for teaching metacognition in classrooms
Metacognition is thinking about thinking. It is an increasingly useful mechanism to enhance student learning, both for immediate outcomes and for helping students to understand their own learning processes. So metacognition is a broad concept that refers to the knowledge and thought processes regarding one’s own learning.
Teaching problem solving: Let students get ‘stuck’ and ‘unstuck’
In the real world, students encounter problems that are complex, not well defined, and lack a clear solution and approach. They need to be able to identify and apply different strategies to solve these problems. However, problem solving skills do not necessarily develop naturally; they need to be explicitly taught in a way that can be transferred across multiple settings and contexts.
How do we teach 21st century skills in classrooms?
Over the past several decades, there has been increased demand for formal education to include the development of generic skills as well as traditional academic subjects, i.e., to include competencies for ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working, and skills for living. These skills for today’s rapidly changing society, such as communication, problem solving, collaboration, and critical thinking, are being acknowledged increasingly all over the world.
New data on the breadth of skills movement: Over 150 countries included
With rapid technological advances and changes in the global job market, students around the world require a more diverse skillset than ever before. To prepare students for the 21st century, many countries are adapting education policies to include the skills and competencies needed for contemporary and future challenges. The Skills for a Changing World project seeks to understand how countries globally are moving toward an explicit focus on breadth of skills.
WATCH: Being an education superpower is about more than international rankings
Is Canada an education superpower? Maybe, but as Annie Kidder and I recently argued on BBC World News, being an education superpower is about more than performing well on international tests. Canada ranks fourth among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for student achievement as measured by the Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) 2015 study, which signifies global leadership in education.
The play’s the thing: Active pedagogies to improve learning | Brookings Institution
It is a commonly held conviction in the early childhood education community that young children learn most effectively, if not exclusively, through play. What’s more, a growing body of research indicates that teachers who master these concepts can improve learning development in children. Providing a preschool environment friendly to daily play-based learning is a daunting challenge, however, and there is often a chasm between rhetoric and practice.
New data on the breadth of skills movement: Consolidation | Brookings Institution
As highlighted at the Center for Universal Education’s Annual Research and Policy Symposium at Brookings on April 5, 2017, formal education systems at the global, regional, and national levels acknowledge that for students to be successful in the 21st century they will need a broad range of skills.
Learning Progressions: Road Maps for 21st-Century Students-and Teachers
As our world grows more interconnected, conversations about education are shifting to focus on identifying and cultivating the complex “21st-century” skills children will need to succeed amid global competition and uncertainty. It’s one thing to know what those skills are (for example collaborative problem solving, or critical thinking), but it’s quite another to know where, when, and how to help individual students develop them.
Skills for a “gendered” world: Adding a gender perspective to the skills debate
In spaces that run largely on jargon and buzzwords, the implications of a lack of effective communication can be severe. Girls’ education actors regularly reference “gendered barriers,” “gender perspectives,” and call for developing “girls’ life skills” without hesitation. But these concepts seldom penetrate other policy spheres, even when actors within them are interested in issues that disproportionately impact women and girls.
Science of learning: Why do we care?
Education needs to be informed by the science of learning. This was a strong message coming out of last month’s conference Learning and the Brain: The Science of How we Learn, and one that we hear often from people across the fields of psychology, education, neuroscience, and technology, as well as from practitioners working in the field and designing educational programs.
Skills for a changing world: National perspectives and the global movement
In the Skills for a Changing World project, we are exploring the new demands placed on education in the 21st century and how education systems are responding to them. There have been increased calls globally for students to develop a broader set of skills during the years of formal education than in the past. Education has typically been seen as a preparation for adulthood and its work-related responsibilities.
Science of learning: Why do we care?
But what do we mean by the science of learning? Isn’t all education fundamentally about learning? The relatively young field of learning sciences draws from multiple disciplines to study the ways in which people acquire knowledge, skills, and competencies and to answer the questions of why some strategies for learning work better or worse than others. Our current education systems were not built upon this knowledge.
Let’s not forget the essential link between psychology and education | Brookings Institution
According to the Education Commission, automation will replace half of all current jobs by 2050. This massive shift in the job market creates a daunting challenge for the education community, leading us to ask, “How can we teach students the necessary skills to thrive in such a rapidly changing world?” Identifying the outcomes that we need—skills such as communication, creativity, problem solving, and collaboration—is just the first step. How do we learn these skills?
New data on the breadth of skills movement in education
There is global recognition by education policymakers that, in order to equip children with the ability to succeed in today’s rapidly changing world, students need to be taught a breadth of skills beyond numeracy and literacy. Skills such as communication, collaboration, and critical thinking are not merely desirable outcomes of education; they are necessary to meet the global challenges of the 21st century.
Let’s aspire, but be realistic: What skills can be taught for the 21st century?
The importance of work-ready skills has long been endorsed, but only recently have we seen a move from focus on specific skills for jobs (vocational skills) to generic or 21st century skills necessary for all entering the workforce. But while enthusiasm for “skills” in education abounds, let’s think about some realities. A recent UNESCO report highlights the challenges for education systems in teaching and assessing the skills for this century.
Let’s aspire, but be realistic: What skills can be taught for the 21st century?
The importance of work-ready skills has long been endorsed, but only recently have we seen a move from focus on specific skills for jobs (vocational skills) to generic or 21st century skills necessary for all entering the workforce. But while enthusiasm for “skills” in education abounds, let’s think about some realities. A recent UNESCO report highlights the challenges for education systems in teaching and assessing the skills for this century.
Visualizing the breadth of skills movement across education systems | Brookings Institution
A global movement to include a broad range of competencies or “breadth of skills,” beyond literacy and numeracy, is increasingly visible and evident in national education policies and curricula. The breadth of skills movement manifested at an international level within Sustainable Development Goal 41 to ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning.
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