The Future of Education: The 7Cs, 3Rs & 3Ms of 21st Century Learning

A classroom needs to be a laboratory for exploration and no longer worksheet and scantron factory. Some contrarians may argue that this is only furthering the globalism that is hurting some people, but it would be more detrimental to ignore those changes than to prepare for them. We need to instruct more in skills and character necessary for success not just for future careers, but also to create better human beings as part of a better society. So let’s dig into which traits will remain essential.

Into that challenge of addressing future-learning comes the exploration of global skills that will be necessary across all fields and enterprises in this new world. Those discussions ultimately lead to the recognition of the 4 Cs which would evolve into the 7 Cs of 21st-century learning all spearheaded by the Partnership for 21st-Century Learning. The expansion to 7 included the inclusion of the additional life, career, and media skills, all of which are identified as the most important in modern education. There has been some disagreement about what words should be used to connote those skills, but I am using those found in the book called 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. The other terms, as I will show actually fit inside other skill areas. 

You will also note that of the 7 Cs, not one them is content. Again, it’s not meant to demean content, but rather that the necessary skills are supposed to be applicable across content areas.

In looking beyond the essential skills we begin to think about both the type of person we want students to become to succeed and the type of environment we need to create to make that learning possible. The 3 Rs (not my idea) are character traits that we hope to consistently encourage and the 3 Ms (my idea) are the way we make our classroom effective in those efforts.

Do you want to learn more about this? This is just a snippet of the whole article. 

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