Transforming education for the 21st century: rethinking curriculum

This brief paper describes a process for rethinking curriculum to reflect the emerging economic needs of a 21st century global knowledge-based economy. Of course, education has many responsibilities other than aiding economic development, and this brief paper does not attempt to portray the full range of educational missions or the instructional strategies needed for success across this spectrum of goals.  However, all those other responsibilities are possible only if education succeeds in providing the foundation for a prosperous national future. This does not mean that education for economic development is privileged more than other objectives. Nonetheless, those who want education to succeed in resolving major concerns (for example, equity, moral citizenship, self-realisation) need to incorporate perspectives about preparation for 21st century work into their planning. (The material in this paper is excerpted from a longer white paper on ‘Transforming education for the 21st century: new pedagogies that help all students attain sophisticated learning outcomes’, to be published later this year.)

Predictions about the future workplace emerging from early 21st century trends

Thus far, the 21st century has seen a dramatic shift in the economic model for industrialised countries (Dede, Korte, Nelson, Valdez, & Ward, 2005). Systems of economic development based on geography, trade rules and tariffs; slow dissemination of scientific and technological discoveries; and long cycles of product life have given way to global trade, rapid product innovation, the lowering of trade barriers, rapid dissemination of scientific and technological discovery, and rapid global deployment and movement of capital and the means of production (Chang, 2003).

In the early 21st century, income and wealth come from applying technology and new ideas to create new products and processes. Adding value to products and processes is the key to growing jobs and incomes in this new economic environment (Aubert & Reiffers, 2004).

Competitive advantage for a region, state, or nation is now built on the skills of its general workforce, as opposed to its geography, trade laws, research labs, and patents; and critical to that competitive advantage are the education and skills training adults acquire in primary and secondary schools (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001). In this new economic environment - the New Economy - education plays a critical role in maintaining national prosperity and stimulating economic growth (Stevens & Weale, 2003). The level of workforce skills and the periodic need to update those skills are both steadily rising, with no end in sight (Temple, 2001).

The New Economy is driven by entrepreneurs, technology, and innovation. Novel ideas, discoveries, and technologies have produced whole new industries and products; innovation is now the primary basis for income and wealth generation (Sianesi & Van Reenan, 2002).  Globalisation has forced business to drive rapid technological change into the very core of business operations and processes (Bhagwati, 2004). Early efforts to improve productivity in business were aimed at applying technology to administrative and processing applications, such as purchasing, accounting, and payroll. These applications of technology changed the speed of work, but not the fundamental nature of work. As the New Economy took hold, the complexity of business dramatically increased.  Global markets, just-in-time manufacturing and product fulfillment, outsourcing, lean manufacturing, and other changes forced fundamental changes in the nature and complexity of work (Autor, Levy, & Murnane, 2003). Information and communication technologies (ICT) applied to the core functions of business resulted in huge gains in productivity and the ability to manage and solve complex problems (Brown & Duguid, 2000).

Another way in which ICTs are changing the nature of the jobs for which schooling prepares its graduates is the increasing importance of ‘offshoring’: geographic shifts of comparative advantage in various types of economic production (Blinder, 2006). For example, over the last couple of centuries, comparative advantage in textile manufacturing has geographically shifted from England to New England, to the Carolinas, to China and other low-wage countries; with each change, workers and employers in the region losing jobs were surprised and angered. In the 21st century, as ICT grow in power, geographic regions are exporting with comparative advantage not just manufactured goods, but also services, such as being a call-centre operator (Friedman, 2005).

Whether or not employers can import a service from outside their local region is not determined by whether the job is high-skill, high-education (for example, doctor) or low-skill, low education (such as a security guard). Rather, the determining factor is whether the service is deliverable electronically without substantial diminution in quality (for example, securities analysis), or not (for example, taxi drivers, airline pilots). Blinder (op cit.) terms these ‘impersonally delivered services’ and ‘personally delivered services’; over time, advances in ICT will increase the proportion of jobs falling into the former category. Thus, for students to select a career, and for countries to choose an economic development path that will lead to a prosperous, secure lifestyle, is much more complex now than in prior generations because the division of labor and the location of work are both rapidly shifting.

Because the predictions above are based on economic trends in the initial years of the 21st century, they likely underestimate the degree to which work skills and conditions will alter compared to the late 20th century. In particular, the impacts of Web 2.0 media on society (individual and collective expression, experience, and interpretation; distributed cognition and action) are probably understated. Forecasts of technology-based paradigm shifts tend to overestimate how quickly change will occur and to underestimate the impact of the alterations (Porter, Roper, Mason, Rossini, & Banks, 1991). This precept likely applies to our attempt to predict the 21st century capabilities today’s students will need in workplaces a generation from now.

What employers seek in 21st century workers

Numerous reports on the global, knowledge-based economy and the ‘flat’ world document that tomorrow’s workers must be prepared to shift jobs and careers more frequently, to be flexible and adaptable in acquiring job skills, and to integrate and focus a changing mix of job-derived and education-based knowledge on business processes and problems (Friedman, op cit). The application of information technology to the very core of business operations has caused a profound change in the needed skills and talents of New Economy workers (OECD, 2004). Markets in the New Economy are rewarding those who have high educational achievement and technical skill (Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, 2005). 

The worker of the 21st century must have science and mathematics skills, creativity, fluency in information and communication technologies, and the ability to solve complex problems (Business-Higher Education Forum, 2005). As the global economy continues to evolve, predictions are that workers will change jobs seven or eight times during their work life. To be competitive in this constant churn, workers will have to engage in lifelong learning to update their education and job skills (Card & Dinardo, 2002). Clearly, the future personal economic security and well-being of American workers is tied to educational achievement (Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2004).

Yet much of US education is still based on the premise that economic processes and institutions will mirror those in the 20th century. Students are prepared to be future employees of business organizations now rapidly becoming obsolete (Business Roundtable, 2005). Current trends suggest that more students will run their own businesses rather than work for others and as adults must constantly, quickly, and efficiently learn new skills and information to be effective entrepreneurs. In this respect, the workplace forecasts above likely overstate the importance of skills as employees and understate the creativity, flexibility, and strong sense of self-efficacy today’s youth will need to assume roles of economic leadership, rather than serving as followers for a few ‘captains of industry’.

Thus, a crucial challenge for US education is to align curriculum and learning to a whole new economic model based on an emerging global, knowledge-based workplace (Dede, Korte, Nelson, Valdez, & Ward, op cit). To accomplish this, we must transform children’s learning processes, in and out of school, and engage student interest in gaining 21st century skills and knowledge. Linking economic development, educational evolution, workforce development, and strengthened social services is essential to meeting this challenge (National Academy of Science, 2006).

A contextualised conceptual framework for 21st century skills

Before articulating 21st century knowledge that seem central to the curriculum in light of these workplace shifts, developing a contextualised conceptual framework for these core capabilities is necessary. Part of that framework requires stipulating the metrics by which we judge whether, to merit inclusion, a human performance is truly significant in its projected importance to attaining an attractive, prosperous job and lifestyle – and sufficiently different from ‘20th century skills’ to merit special attention. Determining the degree to which the capability is valuable in work and citizenship is key to these metrics, as is distinguishing in kind between ‘perennial’ and ‘contextual’ performances. 

For example, ‘collaboration’ is a perennial capability, always valued as a trait in workplaces across the centuries; as such, the basic value of this interpersonal performance is not intrinsically special to our emerging economic context. Arguably, however, the degree of importance for collaborative capacity is growing in an era where work is increasingly done by teams of people with complementary expertise and roles, as opposed to individuals doing manual operations on an assembly line (Karoly, 2004). Thus, even though perennial in nature, collaboration is worthy of inclusion as a 21st century performance because, for the context in which today’s students will function as adults, the importance of cooperative interpersonal capabilities is substantially higher than in the prior industrial era.

In contrast, the ability to rapidly filter huge amounts of incoming data, extracting information valuable for decision making, is arguably a ‘contextual’ capability. Due to the prevalence of ICT, for the first time in human history people are inundated by enormous amounts of data that they must access, manage, integrate, and evaluate. The ability to separate signal from noise in a potentially overwhelming flood of incoming data is arguably a 21st century performance not in degree – because this is novel in history as a valuable capability – but in kind. This distinction is important because, unlike perennial capabilities, new types of human performances are typically not part of the legacy curriculum inherited from 20th century educational systems.

A framework of omission as well as commission

Another part of the contextualised conceptual framework for 21st century performances is more politically controversial, yet vital. What do we de-emphasise in current instruction and assessment to make room for 21st century understandings? As an illustration of national policy in the United States, at present the dominant model for what the curriculum should contain is the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, supported by both major political parties and the general public and based on ‘test-to-standard’ strategies.  (This suite of policies is roughly similar to what is happening in many, but not all developed countries.) Under NCLB, state content standards are developed by disciplinary experts, professional organisations, and various forms of interest groups; high-stakes tests document whether or not students are learning some subset of that content; and individual students, teachers, schools, and districts are rewarded or punished, based solely on test performance.

In practice, because US individual states’ high-stakes psychometric tests are typically based on multiple-choice and short-answer items that have no mechanism for assessing attainment of higher order understandings and performances (National Research Council, 2001), 21st century competences embedded in state curriculum standards are buried in a mass of lower-level material and generally ignored in day-to-day teaching. The curriculum is crowded with low-level facts and recipe-like procedures (for example, ‘In what year did Columbus discover America?’ ‘What are the seven steps of historical inquiry?’), as opposed to nuanced understandings and performances (for example, ‘What confluence of technological, economic, and political forces led to the age of exploration around the end of the 15th century?’ and ‘By what process of interpreting historical data did you reach this conclusion?’).

Even though the concept of standards, assessments, and accountability makes sense at a fundamental level, current policies for improving educational achievement based on this concept have many problems from the perspective of preparing today’s children for tomorrow’s world (Dede, 2005). For example, current US content standards are based on disciplinary ‘silos’ that do not incorporate metrics of contextual value based on degree and kind. Physics experts indicate what pre-college students need to know if they eventually plan to be physicists. Historians determine what pupils must master if they are to become professional historians, and so on. This has led to a huge tangle of content and skills that US educators are mandated to cover in just 12 years—an impossible task!  Further, much of what is taught within a subject is only useful to the small subset of students who plan to focus on that particular field in college; state curriculum standards in each discipline are typically neither interrelated nor prioritised to emphasise core understandings and performances all students will need to succeed in the 21st century (Aspen Institute, 2007). While attempts at integration and prioritisation are made in national standards from professional organisations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science or the National Council for the Teaching of Mathematics, in practice this level of understandings and performances is ignored in classroom teaching because the high-stakes tests provide no vehicle for measuring student progress on them.

Because of the accountability systems built into this model of educational reform, US teachers are using weak but rapid instructional methods, such as lecture and drill-and-practice, to race through the glut of recipes, facts, and test-taking skills they are expected to cover. Despite research indicating that guided inquiry, collaborative learning, mentoring, and apprenticeships are far more effective pedagogical strategies, introducing these into school settings is difficult given the crowded curriculum and the need to prepare students for high stakes tests. Simply delivering required information for students’ passive absorption takes every second of instructional time. Teachers have no means by which to prioritise what understandings and performances to emphasise in terms of 21st century citizenship; workplace capabilities for the global, knowledge-based economy; and lifelong learning.

Among all these problems, the biggest single issue is that the first generation of high-stakes tests that the US is using to determine students’ educational outcomes has substantial flaws. These are summative, ‘drive-by’ tests, which provide no diagnostic, just-in-time feedback that could help teachers aid struggling students. In addition, while some assessments emphasise core ideas and measure at least a few higher-order thinking skills, many US state legislatures have allocated such limited resources for test development that the resulting instruments often measure only a random assortment of low-level skills and content, rather than core, higher-order 21st century understandings and performances (Nicols, Glass, & Berliner, 2005). In addition, policies such as financial incentives for teachers and districts to raise test scores can exacerbate already troubling differences in educational outcomes, promoting the abandonment of the very at-risk students the NCLB legislation was intended to help (Confrey & Maker, 2005).

Yet this reform movement still has strong bipartisan support and widespread backing from the US public. Under these circumstances, a contextualised framework must take on the political challenge of arguing what to de-emphasise in the US curriculum – and why – in order to make room for students to deeply master core 21st century understandings and performances. This is not a situation in we must eliminate an equivalent amount of current curriculum for each 21st century understanding added, because better pedagogical methods can lead to faster mastery and improved retention, enabling less re-teaching and more coverage within the same timeframe (Van Lehn and the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, 2006). However, what education should emphasise as its core outcomes is politically controversial, even if substantial sections of the 20th century legacy curriculum are not eliminated.

Downgrading the importance of some material in the current US curriculum is much harder than adding content and skills because omission involves ‘unlearning’. A major challenge in professional development is helping teachers, policy makers, and local communities unlearn the beliefs, values, assumptions, and cultures underlying schools’ standard operating practices, such as 45-minute class periods that allow insufficient time for all but superficial forms of active learning by students. Altering deeply ingrained and strongly reinforced rituals of schooling takes more than the superficial interchanges typical in ‘make and take’ professional development or school board meetings. Intellectual, emotional, and social support is essential for ‘unlearning’ and for transformational re-learning that can lead to deeper behavioral changes to create next-generation educational practices. Educators, business executives, politicians, and the general public have much to unlearn if 21st century understandings are to assume a central place in schooling.

Summary

This paper advances a complex conceptual framework for understanding the challenges and opportunities involved rethinking curricula to transform schooling for the 21st century. Its rationale draws on changes in the global economy; the impacts of advanced ICT on work, citizenship and everyday life; and shifts in the outcomes civilization needs from educational systems. A contextualised conceptual framework for 21st century understandings and performances is proposed that includes an appeal to de-emphasise aspects of the 20th century legacy curriculum. Hopefully, this and similar frameworks, will advance dialogue about how to alter curricula to prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s world.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Professor Chris Dede is Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies, at the Graduate School of Education, at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA.

 

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