By Rebecca A. London and Ilana Horwitz

Over the past several years, education reform efforts have focused on enabling students to become college- and career-ready with the “21st century skills” they need to succeed. According to a report from the National Research Council, these include skills such as adaptability, communication, problem-solving, self-management, and complex thinking.1 Educational reforms like No Child Left Behind, which emphasizes standardized testing and performance accountability, have narrowed and fractured curriculum to focus on basic skills acquisition in selected core subjects at the expense of broader knowledge acquisition.2 Today, reformers argue that students need to accumulate a set of skills that allow them to participate in argumentation and discussion, work in groups, use new technologies and apply what they learned in school to other situations, both professional and personal.

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Gardner_Center__Deeper_Learning_and_21st_Century_Skills_12.28.2011.pdf