21st Century Pedagogy Skills: A Study

Preparing students for work, citizenship, and life in the 21st century is not straightforward. Globalization, technology, migration, international competition, changing market conditions, and transnational environmental and political crises have reinvigorated interest in pedagogy and curriculum that will develop the skills and knowledge that are needed for success in the 21st century. Educators, education ministries and governments, philanthropic foundations, employers, and researchers are using various means of naming these skills: including “21st century skills”, “higher-order thinking skills”, “deeper learning outcomes”, and “complex thinking and communication skills”. Skills like these are not fresh topics of study for researchers. For more than 40 years, the team of researchers at a variety of foreign and Indian University’s Project Zero, have studied what students learn and how techniques for teaching students these skills. In this paper, we turn our focus to what the research tells us about how to teach student’s 21st century skills, as well as how the research tells us students develop those skills. Keywords: 21st century skills, higher-order thinking skills, deeper learning outcomes, and complex thinking and communication skills, etc.