How would the manager of someone on the team evaluate that member’s work at the close of the project?

The manager might use a set of performance evaluation criteria, a common practice in most businesses today, that includes both work outcomes and skill ratings. The results might look something like Table 5.1.

Though the set of evaluation criteria used to rate employee performance in this example includes virtually all of the 21st century skills we’ve discussed so far, the last five criteria—the career and life skills of the P21 learning framework (highlighted in Figure 5.1) are some of the performance qualities most often reviewed on employee evaluations.

We turn to these work and life skills next.

The rapid pace of technological change forces us all to adapt quickly to new ways of communicating, learning, working, and living. We switch jobs and careers more frequently, and entirely new kinds of work are arising from innovations in many fields.

One of the few unchanging aspects of the 21st century knowledge economy is the universal need to organize work into well-defined projects carried out by global project teams on tight time schedules with limited resources.

Whether the project at hand is for school, work, or around the home, we all know it can take an unexpected turn that requires rapid changes to our plans. Adjusting and adapting strategies to accommodate new circumstances is an essential “flex-ability” that everyone must develop in fast-changing times.

The ability to adapt—such as shifting to a whole new way of looking at the problem at hand—can turn the unexpected to your advantage, resulting in uniquely creative solutions and true innovations that can help meet the 21st century demand for fresh ideas and approaches.

The SARS Project team faced a number of tough challenges, both technically, in implementing their Web site design, and collaboratively, in trying to coordinate their work across the globe. Some of the best features of their Web site came from unexpected solutions to their technical problems. For example, as the deadline for the competition approached, team members were able to use their different time zones to their advantage—passing text written in one time zone to the graphics artist in the next for illustration, then on to the programmer in the third zone to assemble all the elements into a working Web page, and finally to the project coordinator to test, edit, and suggest revisions for the team’s next round of work. This allowed project work to continue around the clock.

As the employee performance evaluation form in Table 4.1 suggests, another type of flexibility and adaptability that is valuable today is the ability to deal with criticism, setbacks, and even failure.

The skills involved in flexibility and adaptability can be learned by working on progressively more complex projects that challenge student teams to change course when things aren’t working well, adapt to new developments in the project, and incorporate new team members on both current and new projects. Students can also develop high degrees of flexibility and adaptability as part of a “tech support” team for their school, helping their teachers to quickly solve technology problems as they arise. (See Appendix A for further resources.)

The amount of time busy managers have for mentoring and guiding employees is quickly diminishing. Time, goals, project plans, workload, and “just-in-time” learning must all be self-managed and self-directed in today’s wound-up work world.

Though teachers may be familiar with having a fairly high level of independence and autonomy in their classrooms, helping students become more self-reliant and independent as learners has always been a challenge. Technology is helping, though, providing a wealth of always-on self-service tools for researching and learning online.

The teacher coaches of the SARS team were amazed at the level of self-direction, motivation, and independence their students demonstrated. They asked for help at the start of the project, especially technical help in selecting and using the right tools to create their Web site, and occasionally during the course of the project when they hit particularly tricky technical issues. Otherwise, they mostly relied on each other to help solve problems or to find answers to their questions on the Internet. As one of the coaches said, “The best thing about this group is, they know what they want and they just go for it.”

Today’s students must prepare for the reality of 21st century work and develop deeper levels of initiative and self-direction skills as they progress through school. Offering each student the appropriate level of freedom to exercise self-direction and initiative is an ongoing, universal challenge for both teachers and parents. Music, dance, and theater performances; mentorships, apprenticeships, internships, and community service projects; and student-developed projects and hobbies all provide good opportunities to develop a passion for a subject and to exercise self-motivation, initiative, and self-direction.

The ability to work effectively and creatively with team members and classmates regardless of differences in culture and style is an essential 21st century life skill. Understanding and accommodating cultural and social differences, and using these differences to come up with even more creative ideas and solutions to problems, will be increasingly important throughout our century.

Recent research on the importance of emotional and social intelligence to a child’s development and to successful learning has led to a wide variety of programs and learning materials that support social skills and social responsibility.¹ One excellent example is the classroom learning materials on building more connected and respectful environments for learning available from Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR). From practical and constructive methods for resolving conflict between students to procedures for creating a team contract before working together on a collaborative project, ESR offers a wide range of well-tested learning activities and methods for creating more pro-social learning environments (see Appendix A for further resources).

Students are successfully developing cross-cultural interaction skills both online and face-to-face, as the international team in the SARS project did. A number of organizations have created excellent materials to further develop students’ cross-cultural understanding—a notable example is the Asia Society, whose excellent reports and curriculum resources are helping teachers and students go global in their learning. The cross-sharing of firsthand reports of what daily life is like for students in other countries and a wide variety of cross-cultural student exchanges and projects that the Asia Society and others sponsor are giving students a better sense of how we are all different and all the same.

The skills to become socially adept, cross-culturally fluent global learners and citizens are more important than ever.

With an expanding toolkit of knowledge work tools designed to boost personal and group productivity, both efficiency and effectiveness in learning and work are increasing dramatically. Technology is also easing the burden of accountability—the tracking and sharing of work done and lessons learned.

Projects—defining, planning, executing, and evaluating them—have become the currency of 21st century work. And learning projects are also becoming more important as a unit of instruction in 21st century learning. Good project management skills are crucial to both work and learning projects, and a number of programs are helping teachers and students better manage the “learning project cycle.” (More on what this project cycle contains and how it can be applied to learning projects can be found in Chapter Seven.) Professional development programs for teachers wanting to develop effective learning projects for their students are offered by a number of organizations including the Oracle Education Foundation (see the Project Learning Institute video segment on the DVD included in this book, on this book’s Web site at http://21stcenturyskillsbook.com, or at the OEF Web site, http://oraclefoundation.org/single_player.html?v=5), Intel’s Teach program, the Buck Institute of Education, the Project Management Institute Education Foundation, The Coalition of Essential Schools, and others (see Appendix A for further information).

Productivity and accountability are important skill sets that all 21st century students and teachers need for success in school, work, and life.

Though the SARS team had an overall team coordinator—Van from Philadelphia—each team member was responsible for a part of the work that needed to be done, but each also had to be mindful of how that part would be woven into other work done by other team members. Three levels of responsibility and teamwork—individual leadership, coordination between team members, and overall team collaboration toward a common vision—were important to the success of the SARS project.

People coming together to work on a project they care about, dividing the work up among the team, taking on roles that play to their strengths, everyone contributing to a creative outcome and celebrating the results, then each person moving on to the next project with a different set of players, has been called the “studio model”—for the ways that films and television programs are produced in media production studios.

This project-based, studio model of work is becoming more prevalent in the knowledge work economy, and will be an important work style to master in the 21st century.

The studio model also offers students a powerful style of learning that can provide lots of opportunities to take responsibility and exercise leadership—skills important to future employers. The studio project model of learning can also help build many of the other 21st century skills in the P21 framework, such as collaboration, communications, and cross-cultural understanding.

A wide number of student leadership programs already focus on developing these skills, from local, national, and international perspectives. One example of an international leadership development program is the Model UN program, where students simulate a United Nations meeting to deal with a particular international crisis, with each student delegate representing the views of a particular country (see Appendix A for further examples).

The life and career skills detailed in this chapter are essential to both work and learning in the 21st century. Though these skills have been around for a very long time, they take on new significance with the digital power tools now available for work and learning. They will no doubt be important skills to have right into the 22nd century.

As we look back over all eleven of the 21st century skills detailed in Chapters Three, Four, and Five, an important question arises: How are we ever going to make sure that all students have an opportunity to learn these skills along with the core subjects and contemporary themes needed for a well-rounded 21st century education?

Answers to this question will be explored next in Part Three.