Supporting social and emotional skills to balance our lives

by Andreas Schleicher 

Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

As we know from personal experiences, when we feel a deep sense of well-being we are far better able to absorb new information, take risks and be more responsible for our lives.  So don’t we want that for all our kids?  

But growing up is often quite a challenging period.  Ensuring that kids have a wide variety of skills to help them cope with some of life’s challenges may not always occur naturally. Sometimes they will need help in building social and emotional skills - which are the kind of skills involved in achieving goals, working with others and managing emotions. These skills play an indispensable role in all stages of life. Essentially, along with cognitive and learning abilities, it is equally important that our youth develop social and emotional skills in order to balance and ground their personalities and strengthen their characters. Some examples are: Perseverance, the ability to keep going when things get tough and rough (like when the sports teacher demands that you to run another 10 laps of the pitch and you’re already exhausted). Caring, the capacity to be kind to others and to be able to show and feel empathy (like supporting an upset friend by listening and comforting them irrespective of other priorities or personal time constraints). Self-esteem is being able to feel good and being proud of their personal achievements and comfortable with their physical appearances (regardless of any unpleasant comments from peers).

A new book launched today by the OECD, entitled Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills, addresses the importance of these types of skills to enhance and balance our lives. This report confirms international research studies, which validate the need for a steady set of cognitive, social and emotional skill in order to succeed well in life. Fortunately, some of these skills are flexible and adjustable during the growing up years, allowing policy makers, teacher and parents the opportunities to provide the right kind of learning environments to support and nurture them. In the past, we often thought that these types of skills couldn’t be successfully quantified, but fortunately this report demonstrates that they can be measured meaningfully, within cultural and linguistic boundaries. Additionally, the OECD is going to develop more measures and an international comparative framework, in order to better grasp youth’s current and future needs for social and emotional skills. So this report augments the reflection on how future policies could best encourage and nurture the development of social and emotional skills, of course, working hand in hand with parents and teachers. 

Not surprisingly, we need a wide range of diverse skills to contribute to the economy, support better social outcomes and build more unified and tolerant societies. Cognitive abilities such as literacy and problem-solving remain crucial. But, people with strong social and emotional foundation skills thrive better in a highly dynamic labour market and rapidly changing world.  Investing in these skills will be central to addressing numerous socio-economic challenges, and for ensuring prosperous, healthy, engaged, responsible and happy citizens.

Links:

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) 

Skills for Social Progress: The Power of Social and Emotional Skills  

Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Lives: A Strategic Approach to Skills Policies 

Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 

Photo credit: Little Girl Climbing Rock Wall / @Shutterstock

What should students learn in the 21st century?

By Charles Fadel
Founder & chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign 
Vice-chair of the Education committee of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC) to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Visiting scholar, Harvard GSE, MIT ESG/IAP and Wharton/Penn CLO

It has become clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should students learn in the 21st century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers need to have the time and flexibility to develop knowledge, skills, and character, while also considering the meta-layer/fourth dimension that includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and personalisation. Adapting to 21st century needs means revisiting each dimension and how they interact:

Knowledge - relevance required: Students’ lack of motivation, and often disengagement, reflects the inability of education systems to connect content to real-world experience. This is also critically important to economic and social needs, not only students’ wishes. There is a profound need to rethink the significance and applicability of what is taught, and to strike a far better balance between the conceptual and the practical. Questions that should be answered include: Should engineering become a standard part of the curriculum? Should trigonometry be replaced by more statistics? Is long division by hand necessary? What is significant and relevant in history? Should personal finance, journalism, robotics, and other new disciplines be taught to everyone - and starting in which grade? Should entrepreneurship be mandatory? Should ethics be re-valued? What is the role of the arts – and can they be used to foster creativity in all disciplines?

Skills – necessity for education outcomes: Higher-order skills (“21st Century Skills”), such as the “4 C’s” of Creativity, Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and others are essential for absorbing knowledge as well as for work performance. Yet the curriculum is already overburdened with content, which makes it much harder for students to acquire (and teachers to teach) skills via deep dives into projects. There is a reasonable global consensus on what the skills are, and how teaching methods via projects can affect skills acquisition, but there is little time available during the school year, given the overwhelming amount of content to be covered. There is also little in terms of teacher expertise in combining knowledge and skills in a coherent ensemble, with guiding materials, and assessments.

“Character” (behaviours, attitudes, values) – to face an increasingly challenging world: As complexities increase, humankind is rediscovering the importance of teaching character traits, such as performance-related traits (adaptability, persistence, resilience) and moral-related traits (integrity, justice, empathy, ethics). The challenges for public school systems are similar to those for skills, with the extra complexity of accepting that character development is also becoming an intrinsic part of the mission, as it is for private schools.

Meta-Layer:  Essential for activating transference, building expertise, fostering creativity via analogies, establishing lifelong learning habits, and so on. It will answer questions such as: How should students learn how to learn? What is the role of interdisciplinarity? What is the appropriate sequencing within subjects and between subjects? How do we develop curiosity? How do we facilitate students’ pursuing of their own passions in addition to the standard curriculum? How do we adapt curricula to local needs?

So what is actually being done to ensure that our workforce is skilled for 21st century success and  to ensure that students are skilled, ready to work and contribute to society?

The global transformation, often called the "21st century skills" movement is helping move schools closer to learning designs that better prepare students for success in learning, work and life. The OECD Skills Strategy is responding to this by shifting the focus from a quantitative notion of human capital, measured in years of formal education, to the skills people actually acquire, enhance and nurture over their lifetimes. My hope is that schools, universities and training programs will become more responsive to the workforce and societal needs of today, and students will increasingly focus on growing and applying essential 21st century skills and knowledge to real problems and issues, not just learning textbook facts and formulas.

This will raise levels of creativity and innovation, and provide better  skills , better jobs, better societies, and ultimately better lives.

Links:
21st Century Skills – Learning for Life in our Times, by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, Wiley.
Center for Curriculum Redesign

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