A teacher using an interactive board to present to a class of young learners from diverse backgrounds

Using 21C skills or core skills

See this section to develop skills and understanding that you and your learners need in order to participate actively and critically in learning and in life.

Using 21C skills or core skills

In this section you can find useful professional development resources – including articles, webinars, podcast episodes, research and teaching tips and tools – all to help you develop your skills and knowledge of Using 21C skills or core skills.

What does Using 21C skills or core skills involve?

This professional practice is about the skills that learners and teachers need in order to develop agency, navigate a fast-changing and connected world and to participate actively and critically in learning and in life. It involves:

  • developing your own awareness of and proficiency in:

    Learning skills
    • critical thinking and problem solving
    • communication 
    • collaboration and interpersonal skills
    • creativity and innovation
     Life skills
    • active citizenship around social, political, environmental or economic issues and responsibilities
    • intercultural competence
    • developing and building on learner agency, autonomy and leadership
    • developing lifelong learning skills to support employability
     Literacy skills
    • digital literacy and critical digital literacy (including information literacy)
    • emotional literacy (e.g. self-awareness, maintaining well-being, resilience, motivation)
    • media literacy (e.g. receiving information, understanding and summarising it and then communicating it to others)
  • selecting appropriate methodologies, activities and resources for introducing, developing and evaluating your learners' skills in these areas

  • demonstrating the value and importance of 21C skills or core skills for learning and life for your learners (e.g. modelling your own development of literacy skills as part of your lifelong learning)

  • reflecting on your strengths and weaknesses in relation to your own proficiency in 21C skills or core skills for learning and life and your  ability to develop your learners' proficiency in these areas.

Explore resources on 'Using 21C skills or core skills'
Critical thinking skills, according to the many existing definitions, include observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and metacognition. This last one, as defined in The Free Dictionary, means thinking about one's own mental processes. The notion is widely used in psychology.

When I grew up and went to school in the seventies and eighties, discussions of literacy and numeracy were limited to what we used to call the ‘three Rs’ (reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic), but times have changed, and the notion of 'literacy’ in the wired world of 2014 is a completely different beast.  

Article

Throughout our lives, we are the unwitting subjects of an onslaught of images. From the mobile phone in your hand to the products in your supermarket trolley; from the magazines on your coffee table to the train seat in front of you, someone somewhere is trying to convey an idea to you through messages which are primarily visual.

In this practical talk, Jamie shares some ideas with teachers who are interested in the use of media images for the basis of communicative activities in the language classroom.

Read Jamie's article: Visual literacy in ELT

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Research and insight

Browse fascinating case studies, research papers, publications and books by researchers and ELT experts from around the world.

See our publications, research and insight