21st Century Skills

There is a rather large corporate entity at the northern edge of our school district that manufactures world-class quality vehicles (No name - but Let's Go Places). They are an excellent community neighbor. I was at a meeting a few years back where our Superintendent was basically asking: "What would YOU like us to be doing to prepare our students for the work force after college?" We pretty consistently send 85%+ of our graduates on to post-secondary education.

Their answer was quite simple about the qualities they wanted in a potential employee:

1) Be able to work as part of a team

2) Be able to express yourself clearly 

3) Come to work to work

Notice - no mention of robotics, STEM, technology, Cultural Touchstones, Extra-Curricular Activities, Sports (gasp! heresy!), Fine Arts - and so on. 

I have to say this heavily influences me to pick "Ways of working. Communication and collaboration."

I need to focus on building students' abilities to work together. I do many team projects. The not-so-hidden agenda is about getting everyone in the group to contribute - using each person's strengths - developing leadership - accepting a team role.

I need to focus on what I consider a multiple layered approach to communication - being able to deliver content in multiple formats tailored for diverse and separate methods from 7 seconds in Vine to overkill minutes in YouTube and/or from brevity in Twitter to the verbosity of a Blog post (not mine, of course).