
– Prof. Griffin, as one of the world’s leading experts in assessment
and teaching of 21st century skills, could you please clarify: what exactly is
implied by the 21st century skills?
To be more precise, my field is generally measurement and assessment
in education, as well as all kinds of educational psychometrics. And the
assessment and teaching of 21st century skills is just one of applications of
the research that I was engaged in during the last few years. But it is an area
that is attracting a lot of attention at the moment. The essence of the concept
is as follows: the skills that defined literacy in the industrial era were
described as reading, writing and arithmetic, which in the English-speaking
world are referred to as ‘the three R’s’, despite the obvious spelling issues.
In the 21st century the emphasis is shifting to what we call ‘the four C’s’:
critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. And, although
that is not so much a skill but rather a personal attribute, a lot of groups
add curiosity to that as well.
– There’s a common opinion that the education system
in its present form was formed as a response to the beginning of
industrialization, when first large industrial facilities began to emerge, and
they required a large number of workers who would arrive to their work places
day after day and would work in front of a conveyor belt for 8-10 hours in a
row doing a very definite and narrow set of operations. Is this really so?
Yes, it is. I think
that the present education systems in many countries seem to emphasize
rewarding people for how much they know, so the purpose of education is the
accumulation of knowledge. What is happening now is the shift away from the
industrial manufacturing era, which you correctly describe as a kind of a
conveyor belt assembly line in which people were employed to undertake simple
repetitive actions. Now all of those skills that are repetitive and routine
have been replaced by robotics and digital media. This means that people now
should be rewarded and educated not in terms of how much they know but in terms
of how well they can think and accrue and critically evaluate information
rather than just accumulate and memorize it. So there is a lot of pressure on
school systems to move away from that old industrial-era curriculum as soon as
possible to a more advanced education system that will help to prepare people
for the knowledge economy and information society. Naturally, teaching
approaches are going to change as well – thanks to the Internet and digital
media, today students are often way ahead of their teachers in terms of how
much they know. So the role of a teacher as a transmitter is changing or needs
to change quickly into that of a facilitator. For many of today’s teachers this
change is going to be very difficult. So, the post-industrial curriculums need
to foster and encourage critical thinking, communication, creativity and
collaboration to place more emphasis on non-routine interpersonal relationship
type skills. As soon as something routine is digitized or automated, labour is
removed from that particular type of skill, and once labour is removed it never
goes back.
So, everything is
changing, even things like a lawyer’s role, for instance. In the USA at the
moment about 80% of personal litigation cases are conducted without people
having legal representation. Individuals are looking after themselves; they can
find the precedents on the Internet, combine their own cases and they don’t
need a lawyer. Or another example: a British television program once told a
story of a young man who decided to convert an old cowshed into a house for his
family. And he did it all by himself by reading up on the Internet about what
to do and how he can do it, and succeeded.
So anything that can be learned on the Internet
can replace a lot of the existing professions. Literacy as being able to read, write
and count will, of course, remain mandatory, but this is not enough anymore.
When creating curriculums, we will need to emphasize broader competencies such
as problem solving and teamwork skills. But we still have geography teachers,
history teachers, science teachers; we don’t have critical thinking teachers,
collaboration teachers or curiosity teachers.
– So the whole
system needs to change radically?
Yes. The curriculum
needs to, first of all, embed those types of skills in the traditional subjects,
and then gradually move away from the content of the subject to the critical
skills and attributes of people. The subject/discipline style curriculum will
be very difficult to change right away, so we will need to make a gradual shift
to it – by first changing the content and the way in which those subjects are
taught.
– Some experts
argue that the very notion of profession/occupation is going vanish in the
future. And this is going to happen because the most important ability is going
to be that of collecting a new set of skills for each particular task. So, here
we have the so-called project approach, which is going to be the dominant one.
That’s right. I think that project-based
curriculum and problem-based curriculum are emerging as quite serious contenders
to the traditional methods of education. And the same can be said about the
skill of ‘learning to learn’. This rhetoric has been around since the 1980s but
now this becomes a vital need. We need to teach children the skills of
self-regulated learning – both students and their teachers will have to
readjust a great deal to make that possible.
– You have
mentioned that manual labour will have to disappear. But now there are still
enough people who stand in front of a conveyor belt… Moreover, during the
industrialization period there already was a demand for people with the skills
that you say are essential for the 21st century. Because without critical
thinking or being able to communicate and negotiate it is hardly possible to
accomplish an industrial revolution in the first place. So what has exactly
changed since then?
Well, two major
shifts have taken place, two revolutionary steps. The first was in the 1950s
and 1960s, when the computer was invented together with the whole idea of
digital computing. The second revolution happened in the middle of the last
century. You will be surprised but I am talking about the development of the
contraceptive pill. We might think of those as two things that are very
different and completely unrelated. But this is not so. The development of
computing has forever changed the way we work. It changed the tools that we
work with, the means of learning and the way we think. As for the development
of the contraceptive pill, it changed the nature and structure of the work
force: the possibility of controlling childbirth led to the fact that women are
now rapidly approaching 50% of the work force, and they used to constitute a
very small minority of the work force during the industrial era. So, two things
are happening at the same time: the number of jobs that require a person’s
involvement in the workplace is being reduced by automation, and the number of
people involved in the production work is almost doubling, because now men and
women have almost equal access to work positions. This is the reality of today,
and in this reality we need an educated workforce that will be able to complete
this shift from standing beside an assembly line to post-industrial way of
working. As for your observation about some people still standing beside a
conveyor belt – well that is only because the companies they work for do not
have the resources to automate. But the economics will soon force those
companies into bankruptcy because their competition can do it at a fraction of
the cost, and the human labour cost is much more expensive than automation.
But these phenomena
cause educational problems, too. For instance, there is the question of what to
do with the group of students that we were previously preparing for manual
routine work. Students who studied for professions that are disappearing – what
are we going to do with those kids?
So all the production changes that have happened
in the last 60 years caused a major turnaround in the development of the
society. And the educational system probably has to move very swiftly in that
direction as well. It is not so that the post-industrial workforce has invented
creativity, communication, critical thinking or curiosity, but it made these
skills mandatory. Now we need those as basic skills as much as we need reading,
writing and arithmetic.
– But there is also
one thing you haven’t mentioned which is entrepreneurship, the ability of
finding new ideas and turning them into businesses. Do you agree with this,
because some of the skills you have mentioned are of utmost importance for an
entrepreneur?
I totally agree. And it is very interesting,
because the World Economic Forum that was recently held in Abu Dhabi listed
entrepreneurship as one of the essential characteristics that people need to
develop in the modern world. They developed three lists at this Forum – one of
literacies (basic literacy, numeracy, scientific and cultural literacies), the
other of competencies (problem solving, creativity, etc.) and the third one of
attributes (curiosity, entrepreneurship, teamwork and so on). Another example:
The Economist magazine early last year released a study of 26 countries in 19
business sectors, and they also listed entrepreneurial thinking as a
development skill that needs to happen. Some researchers combine critical
thinking, curiosity and creativity and say that they are the underpinning
skills of entrepreneurship. However, they do not list risk-taking, which is a
really essential part of entrepreneurship. And indeed, if you are not prepared
to take risks, you simply cannot be an entrepreneur.
– Let’s go back a
bit. What motivated you to begin your research of this problem? Was it any
peculiarities or drawbacks of the Australian education system or certain global
trends?
No, it was just an
opportunity that was presented to me and I took it. Vice-Presidents of three
large companies – Microsoft, Cisco and Intel – decided to set up a project to
develop a new educational system because they were concerned that schools and
universities were not producing graduates that could fit best into the digital
work places and the new manufacturing system. They commissioned a study written
by American scholar Bob Kozma called “A Call to Action”, and that paper
eventually led to companies approaching six governments – Australia, Singapore,
Portugal, Finland, UK and USA – to start a project that would study assessment
and teaching of 21st century skills. A three-day conference on that topic that
was held shortly afterwards attracted about 250 people from industry and
academia. At the end of it they appointed the University of Melbourne to lead
that project and put funding together, and I was given the opportunity of
leading that project. And the reason I was approached to do it is because I am
a specialist in educational psychometrics and I could put together a scientific
approach to developing the tasks and the curriculums associated with them.
Our first step was
to try and define what was meant by 21st century skills. Researchers of
education from all over the world wrote a number of papers on this. We had
meetings, round tables, conferences. At one of such meetings in 2010 we decided
we would combine collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving and
communication, and we called it collaborative problem-solving, a complex skill.
In the same year we also started researching social media in terms of how they
can be used for teaching students those skills. That was six years ago; right
now we are already at the stage of being able to define a template that allows
those sets of skills to work.
– How many
countries are involved in the project now?
There were 6
initial countries by 2010. Then Portugal and UK dropped out of the project due
to the global financial crisis, but they were replaced by the Netherlands and
Costa Rica. A massive amount of funds is being invested in these studies in the
USA, I am talking about tens of millions of dollars. Besides, Latin America is
showing a lot of interest in the project (mostly Argentina, Chile and
Columbia). China, South Korea and Thailand are getting involved too. Japan is
making enquiries about it. I was also in Moscow last November, and there is
some work being done at the Institute of Higher Economics who are translating
our work to Russian. So we are now in your little corner of the world as well.
All in all there are about 20 countries attached to the project.
A lot of countries
now realize that this has simply got to happen. There was a PISA-OECD project –
they recently tested collaborative problem-solving, our invention, in 53
different countries of the world. That would give you some idea of the scope
and the speed with which this is emerging.
– You have
mentioned a huge amount of investments being made into this in the USA. Who is
making these investments – the government or large companies like Microsoft?
It is a bit of both. For example, the Education
Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, put aside a budget of 35 mln. USD to
explore and to evaluate the potential of collaborative problem-solving. As far
as I know, the plans are still in place for it to be assessed in a nation-wide
survey program in 2017. We can expect that such an event will have a ripple
effect all over the world.
– Is your project
more applicable to school education or university education?
It equally applies
to both, and also includes workplace training. There already are educational
institutions that have started using the newly developed approaches. In
Thailand the University of Chiang Mai wants to incorporate 21st century skills
assessment into the business faculty. Monash University here in Melbourne wants
to do the same thing. In Finland they have incorporated this concept into
teacher education at University of Jyväskylä. There are moves to start
introducing it into undergraduate university education in Stellenbosch, South
Africa. Universities join this work slower than schools do. But judging by how
fast similar work expanded at a school level, once universities get into that
area, I am thinking it would start to move very rapidly there as well. As for
workplaces, we are starting to see that there are some unexpected applications
of our materials. For instance, the British Council looked at the problems of
unemployment and underemployment in the Middle East. They found that in Egypt
56% of university graduates remain unemployed and unemployable because their
economy is simply not geared towards absorbing people from universities. So the
British Council is planning to use our materials to assess the kinds of skills
that people might have that might enable them to think of alternative career
placement.
– How does the
development of information and communication technology such as the Internet
and social media influence education around the world? In your opinion, can
these means be used more effectively and reasonably than they are being used
now?
Undoubtedly. This
technology is changing and developing with an incredible speed – children as
young as 3 and 4 are able to manipulate tablet computers in far more
sophisticated ways than their parents. Teachers like me who have been in the
field for more than 50 years constantly come across students who are way more
advanced than we are in the use of technology. And many older generation
teachers are literally afraid of technology and do not know how to use it! I
have read just this morning about a grade 5 student who is over at the Silicon
Valley at this moment because she wrote an app for an iPhone to teach her
younger sister how to recognize animals and the app has gone viral. A grade 5 student!
It’s incredible!
There is a lot of
movement now to introduce coding into the school curriculum. I think this idea
will soon gain momentum, and it will change the way we teach as well, because a
lot of programming will be done by the kids, the new generation, and this will
open endless possibilities for them. Even in my own field – educational
measurement and psychometrics – I cannot recruit a person unless that person is
also a programmer, because this sphere now completely depends upon computing. And
teaching is going to come under similar pressure.
– How do schools
and universities need to change? What other changes must happen in the
educational process, except the three R’s being replaced by the four C’s? Must
the students still attend lectures and classes, do lab work, take tests and
exams?
I think it would be fanciful to try and change
everything – and probably impossible and unnecessary. Education is a
conservative system that is very slow to change. At my own University of
Melbourne we managed to completely change the structure of teacher education
programs so that they became data-driven and evidence-based, but what we have
not been able to do just yet is to shift the emphasis away from disciplines
because all of my colleagues are specialists in mathematics and geography and
science, so we need to change what they teach and how they teach. As for
examinations, practical classes and lab work, the students will still take all
that, but the nature of assessing their results will have to change. The
examinations will measure thinking skills and learning skills, not how much
content the students can remember. And the form of exams and tests that might
happen in the future will become new as well. The kinds of tests that we
develop do not require the students to find the value of X or memorize names of
cities and temperatures and historic dates and that sort of thing. Instead,
students are going to communicate via computer devices to solve problems
together, with the computer logging everything they do and write and say to one
another. And out of that log file afterwards we will interpret their social and
cognitive abilities, their creativity and communication skills, etc.
We are also
researching ways to apply this technology to MOOCs. There are certain nuances
in terms of objectivity and subjectivity of the assessment, but we try to find
ways of using this logging activity in order to automate the assessment
process. So universities should now look to their own laurels about how they
might develop. In the future the research side of a university will become more
pronounced, while the training side of a university will become more automated
through online courses.
– Does that mean we
will have fewer teachers?
I am afraid so,
yes. The teacher will stop being a specialist in transmitting knowledge, and
will need to become more of an expert in helping people to learn. There is
already a thing called ‘a flipped classroom’ where students do most of their
reading, writing and learning outside the classroom, and when they come into
the classroom they rationalize the work that they have done at home and
consolidate it. And that will be the new role of a teacher: organising the
students’ work outside the class and bringing them into the class. In fact,
Harvard Professor Eric Mazur who developed a flipped classroom at the
university won an award for it. As far as I know, your magazine had a talk with
him and published an article about it.
– Yes, indeed we
did have a talk with Professor Mazur... But we would also like to hear your
opinion on another famous initiative – the things done by Elon Musk. He has
recently created a school for his own children, which is also attended by
children of other SpaceX staff members. The school’s peculiarity is in its
different approach to learning. There is no group or class division, no first,
second or third grade. All students study simultaneously. Musk says that
personal interests of schoolchildren are more important than their age, so the
education must be conducted based on their capabilities and their interest to
certain subjects. Can such type of a school develop the skills that you talk
about?
Yes, I believe so. In fact, the more students
become independent learners, the less relevant year levels and grade levels
become. When I came to work at my first school as a mathematics teacher back in
the 1960s, I ran some tests over my seventh grade students in mathematics. And
I was really alarmed to find that the students had a grade equivalent ranging
from grade 2 to grade 9. And I asked my colleagues then: how are we ever going
to teach a class of students whose levels are so wildly different? And we
decided that there won’t be any classes or levels. Instead we allowed students
to work at their own speed, thus eradicating a possibility of failure. We
presented materials to them at different levels of difficulty and practiced
individual approach and peer mentoring. We tried to challenge the kids and also
had certain quality control mechanisms. I worked in that school for five years,
and in these five years my colleagues and I did not send any homework in
mathematics – it was impossible because of the kids’ different levels. But
their parents complained bitterly about the excessive amount of homework that
the students had! As it turned out they took to mathematics so much that they
dedicated all of their free time to it! The students couldn’t get enough of
mathematics, because success was motivating them. At that time there were no
theories explaining the advantages of such methods, it just seemed like common
sense.
Photo: Patrick
Griffin discusses the future of global education with colleagues.
– In conclusion of
our talk, could you tell us about the future steps of your project – in 3-5
years?
In the near 3-5 years I think a new generation
of researchers will pick up our work, because I do not see myself involved in
that time. But the Latin American developments of the last few months are very
exciting. What is ahead is developing new techniques, new methods of coding and
scoring, new ways of developing tasks, new areas of application for our
project. The number of researchers in this area is rapidly growing and I expect
to see more breakthroughs in methodology and development in the next few years.
The work we did was very pioneering. Figuratively speaking, it was very much a
horse and buggy type work, but I would expect the Rolls Royce to appear very
soon, and then space rockets. But we are very proud of our horse and buggy. It
was a small step but we have woken a new field of research that I hope will see
new developments. I hope that in 5-6 years time there will be a whole different
approach to Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills, and a much more
effective one.
Sign up for eRazvitie.org on our Facebook page not to miss new articles.