Alan November asserted that educators should teach students how to learn. As he put it, the traditional school model (in which teachers strive to transfer what they already know to students) is the “content-driven side,” while teaching students how to learn on their own is the “skill side.” He stated

I think we should begin to move more and more toward the skill side, because if we teach you to memorize and regurgitate content and your job is wiped out by technology, you’re not well prepared to reinvent yourself if you didn’t learn how to learn.

Alan shared an innovative way that a Norwegian middle school social studies teacher that he’d met was teaching critical thinking.

“For every unit they were studying, he engaged his students with authentic conversations focused all around the world,” Alan said. For example, when they were studying crime, the class got in touch with a Chicago police officer and a teenager behind bars in the United States.

Read the full article on 21st-Century skills for students by Angela Burgess at Getting Smart