CHAPTER II

ST
21 CENTURY SKILLS

A. The Description of the Chapter

This chapter comprises the theory of 21st Century Skills, the scope
and the implementation of it in Teaching English as a Foreign Language
(TEFL). The concept of 21st Century Skills will support your understanding
how to make your students able to learn English in an era which full of the
use of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT).

B. Target of Learning
Having read this chapter, the students are expected to be able to
comprehend what 21st Century Skills are and how to implement them in
English language teaching in Indonesia. In addition, the students are going to
analyze which activities are in line with the concept of 21st Century skills.

C. An Overview of 21st Century Skills

Technology in 21st centuries is growing rapidly in the development
of business and industry. The technology’s growth also leads the type and
skills structure experienced differently years to years so that we cannot
predict a skill for two decades ahead. In fulfilling the 21st century’s skill
needs, we cannot know whether the obstacles that the alumnus will be faced
and what kind of job that the alumnus needed when they entered the
workforce. Skill is very dependent on highly context dependent and
multifaceted (The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, 2015).
Individual’s creative mind all depends on working environment,
knowledge and problem-solving skill. The questions arise about how will the
teacher design his/her learning activities? What is the effective strategy that
the teacher needs to apply to the class? How does the teacher prepare a skilled
millennium generation? Acceleration of educational improvement is
supported by media and digital technology usage which is known as
information superhighway (Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson, 1996).
Since the internet was introduced in the commercial world in early
1970, information rapidly distributed to the entire world. In this century,
education becomes more important to ensure students to get a skill,
innovation ability, creativity, teamwork, and learn how to use life skill in
their life. Problems arise from the variety of importance and excellence skills
for their future.
21st centuries skill concept is one that has gained increasing
currency as a reflection both of changing workplace needs and the evolving
role of education (The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, 2015). Because
of the need to gain access to fast information and fulfillment in 21st centuries,

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 1

 skill demands which are different from the past, making the knowledge-based
education becomes important and needs a reformation in the education
section. A good education is one that encouragingly makes a change by
providing students with adequate knowledge and skills to face the future
challenges.
The term 21st century skills refers to a broad set of knowledge,
skills, work habits, and character traits that are believed—by educators,
school reformers, college professors, employers, and others—to be critically
important to success in today’s world, particularly in collegiate programs and
contemporary careers and workplaces. Generally speaking, 21st century skills
can be applied in all academic subject areas, and in all educational, career,
and civic settings throughout a student’s life.

D. 21st Century Skills in Education

The life of current students is very different with the pattern of life
developed in the existing educational system. It shows lack of concerns
towards knowledge and skills needed to understand existing perspective.
Teachers, students, and authorities put forward a number of important skills
for the student’s future. The authorities prioritized employees’ potential on
the top list and they expected the importance of improving teacher’s role in
teaching based on the individual needs, especially subjects that emphasized
on problem-solving skill. The implication of problem-solving skill in the
learning process can be initiated earlier and become effective by practicing
students with basic skills on practical application subjects.
Emiliana Vegas (The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, 2015)
stated that a successful education system in school is one that attached
problem-solving and combined the problem context with information, as for
example, the use of mathematics and science to solve a practical problem.
This skill had to be known and owned by all employees in order to be skilled
in the workforce. Harvey (2011) viewed skill needs from individual and
institutional perspective. Individual skills are skills or attribute of graduates to
get a job. While institutional skill is related to the level of performance of
educational institution’s graduates.
One-self attribute is a part of working characteristics, includes
flexibility, adaptation ability, and problem-solving. Students demanded to: (1)
have capacity and skill in analyzing and solving problems, to communicate
idea and information, to do planning and organizing activities and
collaboration with others; (2) have quality of confidence, hard works,
optimism, a high self-esteem, and commitment using personal excellence; (3)
have some related skills within their job and understanding of the work
environment, choose a career and training; and (4) become confident,

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 2

creative, and productive in using the new technology, primarily information
and communication technologies, and to understand the effect from
technology to society.

Baruch (1999) stated that individual has the responsibility for their own skill,
while authorities provide a chance to develop them. It means every individual
manage their careers based on the opportunity to their surroundings.
Overtoom (2000) stated that employee needs skills about self-management,
teamwork, interpersonal ability, problem-based, and critical thinking in order
to increase the productivity of their company.
Figure 1 21st Century Education

Knowledge is an important asset for job seeker when they initiate

their work, yet what is really sought is teamwork. Teamwork can be
developed from an early age by enabling students to work in a team. Besides,
communication is also an important aspect and is different for each person.
An effective verbal communication is a fundamental tool of work. Currently,
a verbal communication is not the only important aspect, but also writing
skill, such as individual’s ability in terms of writing sentences.

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 3

E. 4C, The 21st Century Skills
The 21st century skills cover 4C, Creativity, . Below is the
description of each

1. Creativity
Creativity is traditionally considered to be most directly involved
with artistic endeavors such as art and music (Runco and Richard, 1997).
Recently, creativity has been shown to be integral to a wide range of
skills, including scientific thinking, entrepreneurship, design thinking, and
mathematics. According to Csikszentmihalyi (1997), “Most of the things
that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity.
When we are involved in creativity, we feel that we are living more fully
than during the rest of life.
Broadly speaking, teaching for creativity is complementary
with teaching for content knowledge. Open-‐ ended, problem-‐based
learning is more likely to encourage students to think creatively than paper
and pencil exercises in which there is only one right answer. Prompting
people to think in a humorous way has also been found to increase creativity,
as it cues the brain to think in ways that are not necessarily tied to reality
(Russ, 1998). There are opportunities for creativity in the classroom across
all of these levels:
Table 1 Levels of Creativity
Level of Definition Classroom Example
Creativity

Imitation Creation by identical Memorize an excerpt of a piece

replication. This is a of literature and perform it
foundational skill, and is often aloud in class.
the starting point for more
creative tasks.
Variation Creation by varying a particular Rewrite a sentence from a
aspect or aspects of the work, piece of literature with the
and imitating the rest exactly. same grammatical structure, by
changing the subject matter
and vocabulary.
Combinat Mixture of two or more works Create a Rube Goldberg
ion into one, new work. machine out of the simple
machines learned in class.
Transform Translation of an existing work Create a timeline of historical
ation into a different medium or events based on class notes that
representation. separates political, social, and
economic threads.
Original Creation of a new piece of work Write a short story.
Creation that is only very distantly, if at
all, related to previous works.

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 4

 Although more open-‐ended assignments demand greater
creativity, they are not necessarily more effective. If students haven’t
built up the necessary skills, assignments that are too open ended will be
overwhelming and ineffective. Teachers should set helpful boundaries
within which to innovate, according to the learning outcome they hope
to accomplish.

2. Critical Thinking
Critical thinking in education can be traced back to the work of
Socrates, who used questions to encourage his interlocutors to clarify their
assumptions and back up their claims, pushing past ideas that seemed
self-‐ evident and exposing the underlying biases and gaps in reasoning.
Now, 2,400 years later, critical thinking remains a top priority for
education. Such “habits of mind” as those that comprise critical thinking
have been “consistently and emphatically identified by those who
teach entry-‐level college courses as being as important or more
important than any specific content knowledge taught in high school”
(Conley, 2007). The most famous conceptualization of critical thinking
comes from Bloom’s Taxonomy, but many have taken the same ideas
and described them differently. Below is a comparison of taxonomies, all
illustrating the educational goal of progression from lower level forms of
knowledge access to higher levels of comprehension, and into various
goals of critical thinking (analysis, synthesis, evaluation, etc.).
Table 2 Taxonomies of Educational Objectives

Taxonomies of Educational Objectives

Bloom (1956) Anderson & Marzano & Kendall (2006) PISA (2000)
Krathwohl (2001)

Evaluation Create Self-System Thinking Communicate

Synthesis Evaluate Metacognition Construct
Analysis Analyze Knowledge Utilization Evaluate
Comprehension Apply Analysis Integrate
Knowledge Understand Comprehension Manage
Remember Retrieval Access

Teaching critical thinking can come in many different forms,

from an explicit curriculum devoted to identifying and practicing the
necessary higher order thinking skills, to content-‐based projects that
involve interpreting information, analyzing parts and wholes, evaluating
evidence, taking multiple perspectives, discerning patterns, and grasping

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 5

abstract idea Greenstein, 2012) Teaching critical thinking is often tied
closely with developing metacognitive habits of mind, as each can
strengthen the other (Kuhn, 1995). The main challenge is the successful
transfer of critical thinking skills to contexts outside the one in which they
were learned.

3. Collaboration

Collaboration can be thought of as either a process or an outcome of

joint activity, with the former being typically more in line with how it has
been used in the 21st Century skills movement. When synthesizing definitions
across the research literature, three fundamental aspects differentiate
collaboration from other related activities, such as cooperation and
coordination.
a. Two or more students working interdependently.
b. Who participate in a genuine joint activity (e.g. solve a problem,
complete a task, design a product, etc.)
c. By pooling their knowledge, skills, and efforts.
Several collaboration skills are consistently repeated across the research
literature to operationalize these three fundamental aspects for instruction and
assessment purposes. These include the knowledge, skills, and disposition to:
 Plan and make group decisions – Decide with the group how
best to manage and complete the task or project, work with the
group to assign roles or tasks, use negotiation or conflict-
resolution skills as necessary to plan and make group decisions.
 Communicate about thinking with the group – Seek clarity
about others’ thinking, respectfully express how thinking makes
sense or is lacking in some way, solicit alternative perspectives
and input from all group members, elaborate on the explanations
of others.
 Contribute resources, ideas, and efforts and support group
members – Contribute ideas, efforts, and resources, support group
members as needed, take responsibility for task assignments and

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 6

 work quality, check in with group members about progress,
provide feedback on the work of others.
 Monitor, reflect, and adapt individual and group processes to
benefit the group – Reflect on individual and group progress and
processes, work with the team to adjust group efforts to meet the
goal, adapt individual and/or group processes to benefit the group.

Instruction to Support the Development of Collaboration

There is no evidence that merely placing students in a group will

teach or improve student collaboration skills. Most of us have been assigned a
group project where the work is divided into smaller pieces, completed
independently, and then the parts are put together. This type of group work
does not require collaboration and is better described as parallel work.
Teachers play a significant role in setting up the conditions for
collaboration to occur. Specifically, teachers should attend to group
formation, their role in scaffolding and modeling collaborative skills,
task/project structure and design, and feedback to help improve student
learning.

 Group formation: Generally, with more students in a group, the

easier it is for a student to free ride—letting other students do the
work. Heterogeneous grouping appears to benefit lower-achieving
students.
 Participation guidelines: Collaboration is more likely when
teachers set clear guidelines for group participation, such as
supporting ideas with reasons or discussing alternative solutions.
Teachers also support collaboration when they establish norms for
group communication and model those norms.
 Task structure/activation: Rote learning and simple tasks are less
likely to promote collaboration. The structure of the task must
activate particular learning processes and mechanisms for
effective collaboration to occur. Tasks should be sufficiently
complex, authentic, and novel to elicit elaborated explanations
and group thinking so that all students—not just the highest
achieving—can demonstrate the desired performance.
 Teacher Feedback: The teacher plays a critical role in monitoring
the collaborative activity and providing students with formative
feedback on the quality of their collaborative effort during and at
the end of a project (Webb & Mastergeorge, 2003). Teachers need
to anticipate negative group behaviors, such as free riding, and
continuously monitor group interactions.

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 7

  Time for Reflection: Throughout a project, teachers can also
specify time for students to reflect on their own individual
participation and the group’s processes and progress. Such
reflections can be critical for improving the collaborative
experience and collecting evidence about the quality of student
interactions for assessment purposes.
Collaboration skills are both generic and content/context-specific in
that the collaborative skills themselves do not typically vary across content
areas. However, the content and context in which the collaborative activity is
situated can have a significant effect on the students’ ability to transfer their
skills. For example, students can contribute much more effectively in
collaborative tasks—offering resources, ideas, and efforts—when they have
at least some content knowledge. Without such knowledge, students act more
as observers than as true collaborators. Collaboration is also intertwined with
other cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal competencies: effective
collaboration requires communication skills, metacognition, self-direction,
and so on.

4. Communication

Communication skills can be developed through both cooperative

learning and direct instruction, but highest increases are linked with
cooperative settings. While students understand the importance of developing
communication skills, they have a lack of interest, especially in written
communication. This is due in part to feeling a disconnect between classroom
communication experiences and real-world applications. To begin improving
students’ communication skills, set specific communication goals for
students, such as:
a. Articulate thoughts effectively using all forms of communication in a
variety of contexts
b. Listen to others in order to understand meaning, attitude, and intention
c. Communicate for a variety of purposes and audiences
d. Use media and technology to communicate with impact

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 8

 Classroom Strategies to Develop Communication Skills

a. Oral Communication
Oral communication skills are needed to exchange information,
persuade, or explain. Students may excel at casual oral communication with
peers, but this is sometimes difficult to translate into a professional or
technical setting. To help students gain confidence in their oral
communication skills, consider the following strategies:
 Create opportunities for students to present in a public format.
Audiences should vary and not only include peers. Encourage
students to utilize technology and media as a tool to enhance their
presentation, rather than a tool to read from.
 Teach your
students how to
create an
“elevator pitch”
to be effective and
concise in their
speech.
 Hold debates in
your classroom
on topics relating to the content. Rather than a traditional one-to-
one format, have students sit in a circle. They can each take turns
making opening statements, rebuttals, and closing statements.

Written Communication

Written communication skills in the workplace are needed to write

memos, emails, and reports. While writing is used in the STEM classroom
daily, students need to see the connection between classroom writing and

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 9

practical applications. Choose some of the following strategies to make that
connection more concrete for your students:
 Connect all writing assignments to something relevant and
practical. This will not only improve engagement, but will
prepare students for writing in the workplace.
 Ask students to write in a variety of formats, especially business
and persuasive writing. Formats can include letters, pitches,
technical writing, proposals, advertising, flyers, and blog posts.
 Include digital writing assignments to further improve 21st
Century Skills. Blogs and wikis can be used to share student
writing.
 Encourage students to reflect at the end of a learning experience
or activity. As part of experiential learning, reflection will
improve critical thinking skills, along with writing.

Interpersonal Communication

Interpersonal communication or social communication skills are

needed to interact with one another. This skill is often overlooked in the
classroom, but is one that is sought in the STEM workplace. Students can
leave school with a mastery of the content, yet lack the ability to
communicate and collaborate with others. Interpersonal communication
includes the ability to communicate and read emotion, motivation, and
behaviors in a social context. To enhance students’ interpersonal
communication skills, try the following strategies:
 Create diverse groups during classroom activities. This will
encourage students to share different perspectives and develop
listening skills.
 Provide opportunities for students to communicate in virtual
formats, such as email or messaging. It is difficult to convey
meaning when you cannot use nonverbal cues to express yourself.

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 10

 Virtual formats will challenge students to communicate with
group members in a clear and concise manner.
 Practice listening skills by encouraging eye contact, observing
body language, and asking questions.
 Project-based learning activities can be used to foster the
development of team building. While solving problems or
creating products, students must be able to work together over a
long period of time to be successful. Check out some examples
of project-based learning.

Communication is critical to student success. A variety of technology tools

available to 21st century educators expand your ability to give students fast
and effective feedback, saving classroom time and accelerating student
achievement.

F. Summary
Teaching critical thinking and problem solving effectively in the
classroom is vital for students because today’s citizens must be active critical
thinkers if they are to compare evidence, evaluate competing claims, and
make sensible decisions. Communication skills are closely related to
collaboration skills, such as working effectively with diverse teams, making
necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal, and assuming shared
responsibility for collaborative work.
Collaboration is necessary for students and employees, due to
globalization and the rise of technology. As a result of students working
collaboratively, the group can generate more knowledge, making
collaboration a key ingredient to student success in today’s global society.
Besides, innovation springs not from individuals thinking and working alone,
but through cooperation and collaboration with others to draw on existing
knowledge to create new knowledge.

G. References

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 11

Baruch, Y. (1999). Response rate in academic studies-a comparative analysis J.
Hum. Relations 52 pp 421–38
Conley, D. (2007). Toward A More Comprehensive Conception of College
Readiness. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery

and invention. New York: HarperCollins.
Erdogan, Facide. (2019). Integrating 4C Skills of 21st Century into 4 Language
Skills in EFL Classes. International Journal of Education and Research,
Vol. 7, No. 11, November 2019. Retrieved from
https://www.ijern.com/journal/2019/November-2019/09.pdf
Gates B, Myhrvold N and Rinearson P. (1996). The Road Ahead Penguin Books

Greenstein, L. (2012). Assessing 21st century skills: A guide to evaluating

mastery and authentic learning. Corwin Press.
Harvey, L. (2001). Defining and Measuring Employability Qual. High. Educ. 7
97–109

Kuhn, D. (1999). A developmental model of critical thinking. Educational

Researcher, 28(2), 16-46.
Nilsson, P. (2013) Taxonomy of Creative Design. Sense and
Sensation Writing on Education, Creativity, and Cognitive
Science. Retrieved from
http://www.senseandsensation.com/2012/03/taxonomy-of-
creative-design.html?view=magazine
Overtoom. (2000). Employability skills: An update. Eric Digest: Center on
Education and Training for Employment (Ohio: The Ohio State
University)
Runco, M. & Richards, R. (Eds.). (1997). Eminent creativity, everyday creativity,
and health. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Russ, S. (1998). Play, creativity, and adaptive functioning: Implications for
play interventions Play , Creativity, and Adaptive Functioning:
Implications for Play Interventions. Journal of Clinical Child
Psychology, 27(4),469-480.

Sarri, K., Bakouros, I., & Petridou, E. (2010). Entrepreneur training for creativity
and innovation. Journal of European Industrial Training, 34(3), 270- 288.
The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited. (2015). Driving the skills agenda:
Preparing students for the future, An Economist Intelligence Unit Report
Webb, Noreen M. & Mastergeorge, Ann. (2003). Promoting Effective Helping
Behavior in Peer-Directed Groups. International Journal of Educational
Research, Vol. 39, Issues 1-2, Pages 73-97

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 12

TEFL_21st Century Skills_Lutfi Istikharoh _2020| 13