The document discusses skills needed for the future and innovative approaches to education. It summarizes several initiatives focused on developing skills like collaboration, creativity, problem solving and digital literacy. These initiatives incorporate project-based learning, individualized learning plans, and real-world applications. The document advocates for teaching meta-skills across various contexts and through educational projects involving students, schools and communities. It also discusses challenges and opportunities for the Russian Minor Academy of Sciences to help students develop skills for an uncertain future.

1. ‘Skills of the Future’:
Towards Radical Innovation
in School Education
Pavel Luksha
pavel.luksha@gmail.com
Presented to the Forum of
the Minor Academy of Sciences,
March 2010,
Bekasovo, Russia

2. 2
Current Trends
•Totality of digital reality, blurring online / offline
worlds
•Automation of routine physical
and intellectual labor
•Globalization (human capital is
the key competitiveness factor)
•Transforming roles of corporations,
governments and communities
•Technologies changing the reality
of manufacturing (e.g. 3D printers)
•Transformations of social reality (e.g. social
innovations, superstructures)

3. 3
Just One Trend: the Labor Market
Source: Levy and Murnane (2004: 50)

4. 4
Challenges
• Digital and network technologies change methods
of finding and acquiring knowledge
• Global issues: environmental crisis, peaking
natural resources, global security
• Increasing technological, social, political,
geographical uncertainty
• Educational systems are rigid and inadequate to
the current global transformation. This problem
exists for all countries, and not only for Russia.

5. 5
The future is already
here - it is just
unevenly distributed.
William Gibson

6. 6
Partnership for 21 Century Skills
• Partners include: US Department of Education,
National Education Association, leading ICT
companies (Apple, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell
and others), leaders of innovative education (EF
Education, ETS, McGraw-Hill and others) and media
companies (Walt Disney, Sesame Street and others)
• Programs are running in 14 states (25% of US schools)
• Initiative involved in the development of legislation,
educational standards and appraisal systems

7. 7
21 Century Skills (2):
Project Structure

8. 8
Edutopia (George Lucas Foundation)
Six ‘core concepts’:
• Integrated studies:
different formats of learning and communication
• Project-based learning
• Technology integration
• Social and emotional skills
• Comprehensive assessment: not only test results,
but portfolios of projects, social activities etc.
• Continuous teacher development and emphasis on
individual contacts with students

9. 9
World Wide Workshop
Six ‘skills of the future’:
• Network ‘surfing’ and use of network applications
• Design and implementation of original digital projects
• Project-based learning in wiki-environments
• Publication and promotion of student own creative
works through digital media
• Learning and knowledge sharing in social networks
• Skills of information search and analysis

10. 10
School for One
(NYC Dept of Education)
• ‘Customized’ learning programs allowing
students to choose the best suiting formats
depending on their individual learning style
and speed (individual ‘day trajectories’ for
students)
• Collaborative work of many teachers and
students on the development of personal
‘learning trajectories’
• Combination of tutoring, project-based
learning and ICT solutions

11. 11
Other ‘focused’ initiatives
• Oracle ThinkQuest: solution for
project-based learning
• One Laptop per Child
Foundation: solution to ‘digital
barrier’ through provision of laptops
to children in developing countries
• Globaloria: teachning game design
and use of new media environment
to children through educational
projects

12. 12
European initiatives to help involve
school students into science
• Pilot projects of child-adult research
collaboration – education based on
collaborative research (Pollen: 12 cities,
Sinus-Transfer: 13 cities)
• Initiatives that support ‘best practices’
(Science on Stage, GRID Network and
others)
• Emphasis on teaching ‘skills of the
future’ in researcher work: skills of
exploration, problem solving etc.

13. 13
What are all these projects about?
• Nonspecific response to future challenges:
– We do not know how exactly the future will look, but
we know about its increasing uncertainty, and therefore
we must provide the most universal tools
– Many of these new tools are well-forgotten old: they
have existed in the history of education much longer
than the main content of ’20th
century school’
• ‘Digital world’
• Creation of the ‘desirable future’ through
education

14. 14
The illiterate of the
twenty-first century
will not be those who
cannot read and
write, but those who
cannot learn,
unlearn, and relearn
Alvin Toffler

15. 15
‘Skills of the future’ or
Meta-subject skills
• Meta-subject skill areas include: learning / re-learning
methods, skills for individual and group creativity,
communication and self-regulation skills, as well as
skills of using new environments and tools
• Meta-subject skills are universal – however, they can
be learnt in subject contexts only
• Appropriate learning of meta-subject skills requires:
– more than one learning context (ideally, across a great
variety of contexts)
– usage in real life (non-school) contexts

16. 16
Learning ‘skills of the future’
Meta-subject skills Educational (project)
formats
Beneficiaries /
stakeholders
- design thinking
- team work
- effective
information
processing
- time-management
- ...
- role playing game
- media campaign
- research
- volunteer practice
- ...
- group of students
- micro-society (class,
school ...)
- non-school societies
(local community,
district, town ...) and
different real-life
groups (entrepreneurs,
disables, ...)
- ...
Learning through different formats of educational
projects that refer to different ‘project stakeholders’

17. 17
How will the School of the Future look?
2. META-
SUBJECT
SKILLS
3. CORE AND
CROSS-
DISCIPLINIARY
KNOWLEDGE
ABOUT KEY
PROBLEMS
4. PROJECT
BASED
EDUCATION
5. INTERFACE OF INITIATIVES THAT MERGE
SCHOOL LIFE AND REAL LIFE WORLDS
1. BASIC SUBJECTS / ‘LANGUAGES’
(native language, mathematics, foreign languages)

18. 18
Creation of learning environments
Design of learning environment (any - not capital-
rich and technology-rich only) is one of the
purposes of ‘skills of the future’ community

19. 19
Learning environments
become a resource of education
Ordrup School in Denmark (Bosch & Fjord project)

20. We affirm that at the
core of all the
troubles we face today
is our very ignorance
of knowing
Humberto Maturana
and Francisco Varela

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Minor Academy of Science (MAN) and
other bearers of educational innovation
in Russia
• Despite the loss of momentum, the advanced practices
of educational innovators in Russia still retain leading
positions in the world.
• MAN system is one of the key repositories of ‘future
skills’ in the context of collaborative research PBL
• ... along with other systems of child-adult collaborative
project-based learning (e.g. in the context of design:
‘Epistemotics’ by Yu. Gromyko, EDAS by V.
Kirpichev, ‘The School of Car Design’ by S. Rykov
etc.)

22. 22
So, what are our problems?
• The Russian society and business do not pose clear
requests to scientific and cultural sectors
• In the circumstances of uncertainty, the Russian
government and state education systems towards
conservation, not development
• …which means: ‘The government YET is not
interested’
• Who are the users of results produced by MAN and
other educational innovators?
• How do we solve the problem of talented youth dis-
adaptation due to their inability to realize themselves
in Russian science and culture?

23. 23
Moving towards the ‘Skills of the future’
• Teaching ‘skills of the future’ in different learning
contexts (scientific research, engineering design,
game design etc.) might become the key future area
for MAN
• Empowerment (the perceived power to bring
initiative into real life) at the core of ‘skills of the
future’ learning
• Extension of ‘skills of the future’ usage contexts to
everyday life:
– business: e.g. children startups and other practices of
innovative businesses
– social: e.g. volunteer work and other activities for the
benefit of society

24. 24
Moving towards
the ‘Skills of the future’ (2)
• Partnership with innovative business (‘agents of
future shaping’ interested in advanced research
and culture)
• ‘Going out of the box’:
– Teaching ‘skills of the future’ to parents and spreading
through parent education communities
– Involving experts across the variety of professional
domains
• International partnerships: significant (but
untapped) interest in the EU, the US and emerging
markets

25. 25
What are we going to do?
• To hold a forum on innovative education models
for the 21st
century
• To launch the training project to develop
teachers’ ‘skills of the future’ that will help them
teach these skills to their students
• To create a web-based platform:
a wiki on educational technologies related to
‘skills of the future’, and an environment for
collaboration
• To initiate projects of international
collaboration

26. 26
We are at the threshold of tremendous
changes that will give us amazing
opportunities...