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We often speak of the importance of teaching students 21^st century skills, especially what the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills calls “the 4 Cs” – creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking. But what does that actually look like?   

Ask Bijal Damani. At the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum, this business teacher from India told me about a course-long project she uses to improve the 21^st century skills of grade 11-12 students and to prepare them for the real-life challenges that they may face once they enter university and the job market.

In this project (which is also a competition), 120 students divide themselves into teams of ten. Each team then comes up with an innovative product that solves a problem to make the world better (so while something like chocolate flavored cigarettes is “innovative,” it wouldn’t count here).

Once the students decide on a product, they have to come up with a marketing plan for it. That plan must include a newspaper advertisement, a magazine advertisement, a radio jingle and a TV advertisement. They have to determine the price of their product. And they have to create a website for it – as Damani pointed out, you have to reach out digitally to consumers in this day and age.

In addition, students must officially “launch” the project in an onstage presentation in front of other students, parents, school staff and judges.

The ultimate goal is to get students thinking critically. They have a lot of freedom – all Damini gives them are the project objective, a list of required outcomes and deadlines to meet. The rest they have to figure out themselves.

The students came up with some remarkable products. One was “Chalkster” – a chalkboard eraser that collects chalk dust and recycles it into a new piece of chalk. The creators touted it as affordable, user-friendly and environmentally-friendly.

Another was a machine that you place in a window to convert wind energy into power (very practical in the area where students live, which is windy and prone to power outages). A third was a unique mechanism to clean windows in high-rise buildings. Rather than requiring people to dangle on the sides of buildings to wipe windows, windows are designed to include cleaning solution and wipers, much like the front window in a car.

Students are not required to build a working prototype of their product, but some students do. Others are just ideas – but as Damani said, when the idea of the first airplane was conceived, most were skeptical. Ideas can always be converted into products. 

Projects like this help students develop so many skills. It takes creativity to come up with a brand-new product. It takes technological and design skills to build a website and lay out advertisements. It takes skills in collaboration to work in a group. It takes communication skills to convey, both in writing and in-person, the importance on a new product. And this project is also interdisciplinary. While Damini’s course is technically business, it incorporates product engineering, psychology, ethics, economics and language (Hindi and English).

But something I recognized immediately: Very little of what these students learned could be accurately assessed on a standardized assessment. And as we all know, standardized assessments are how policymakers have chosen to define school quality – and in a growing number of places, teacher quality – here in the US.  

I hope that policymakers learn about projects like Damini’s and are inspired. I hope they recognize that these are the kinds of learning experiences that American students need if we as a nation want to keep our competitive edge. And I hope they create policies that incentivize schools, districts and individual teachers to undertake them.

Image by Acdx, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported