21st Century Skills 7/7/09

I think the school where I work does an average job at fostering and developing 21st century skills. I think in some areas they are strong and other areas they need to improve their 21st century skills. The area of effective communicating is an area that I believe my school is very strong in. Teachers in our school are all involved in team teaching with a math, social studies, science, English, and there is a special education teacher on each team. The team also has one period a day for team time to discuss issue regarding students, and materials that might be presented in class in the upcoming weeks. I think another area that our teachers seem to do well in is digital age literacy. Most teachers that I come in contact with during a school day seem to try and use technology as much as they can, and teachers are also very aware of the economic hardships that we are going through as a country today so they try to communicate that to the students so thee students are able to understand what is happening in the world today. The two areas I believe our school struggles with a little bit and could use a little help in are in the areas of inventive thinking and high productivity. In my opinion the school struggles in these areas because these are areas that need highly motivated teachers so the programs can be successful. Most times I feel that the teachers are not motivated or involved enough. One major thing that could be done to help the teachers in these areas would be to hold in-services that are geared toward helping teachers time manage, how to put their time to better use, how to prioritize, how to be more creative, and how to learn how to take educated risks. If these areas were covered during in-services the weaknesses would be strengthened, and our school programs would be more effective.