21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn ed: James Bellanca and Ron Brandt Preface-Chapter 4

p. ix: students using skills to acquire knowledge p. xvi: More than of all jobs in the US are now in the service sector. Manual labor and routine tasks have given way to interactive, non-routine tasks. Technology has replaced workers who perform routine work, while it complements workers with higher-level skills and empowers them to be more productive and creative. p. xvii: Only people who have the knowledge and skills to negotiate constant change and reinvent themselves for new situations will succeed. p. xvii: Without 21st century skills, people are relegated to lowwage, low-skill jobs. p. xviii: Even the best US students cannot match their peers in other advanced economies on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment that measures applied skills of critical thinking and problem solvingstudents demonstrate what they can do with what they are learning). p. xx: Workers are expected to be self-directed and responsible for managing their own work. p. xxiv: In the 21st century, the true test of rigor is for students to be able to look at material theyve never seen before and know what to do with it. p. 10: The kinds of minds we should cultivate in the future are the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind, the ethical mind.

p. 13: The most valued mind will be the synthesizing mindthe mind that can survey a wide range of sources, decide what is important and worth paying attention to, and then put this information together in ways that make send to oneself and to other persons as well. p. 21: A person possessed of an ethical mind is able to think of himself or herself abstractly, and is able to ask, What kind of a worker do I want to be? p. 33: The notion that we could take all the facts that a person need to know, divide them into twelve years of schooling, and learn those facts and be done does not clearly equip young people for the future. Twenty-first century students need a deeper understanding of the core concepts in the disciplines than they now receive. In addition, students need to be able to design, evaluate, and manage their own work. Students need to be able to frame, investigate, and solve problems using a wide range of information resources and digital tools. p. 37: Higher-achieving countries teach fewer topics more deeply each year, focus more on reasoning skills and applications of knowledge, rather than on mere coverage, and have a more thoughtful sequence of expectations based on developmental learning progressions. p. 41: All teachers need the ability to engage in high-quality instruction that adequately represents both the content and the cognitive skills that enhance all students deep understanding of content. p. 52: Growing proportions of the nations labor force are engaged in jobs that emphasize expert thinking or complex communicationtasks that computers cannot do. p. 54: Knowledge separated from skills and presented as revealed truth, rather than as an understanding that is discovered

and constructed, results in students simply learning data about a topic instead of learning how to extend their understanding. p. 55: Essays emphasize simple presentation rather than sophisticated forms of rhetorical interaction. p. 68: Completion of performance tasks does not require the recall of particular facts or formulas; instead, the measures assess the demonstrated ability to interpret, analyze, and synthesize information. p. 69: Analytic writing tasks evaluate students ability to articulate complex ideas, examine claims and evidence, support ideas with relevant reasons and examples. p. 90: Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, once observed, An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. The only way to develop expertise in the concept is to learn by doing, which, to a large extent, is learning through mistakes. p. 92: Educators committed to helping students acquire the knowledge, skills and dispositions essential to their future must operate from the assumption that improvement in student outcomes will require changes in adult behavior.