No More Excuses: Teaching 21st-Century Skills in a Low-Tech Setting

[Commentary] When you teach at a school where most of the kids are on free and reduced lunch, access to home computers, expensive Internet services, and trendy smart phones is limited, to say the least. And, when you teach at a school where $100 makes for a successful PTA fundraiser, the computers are hand-me-downs, the budget for photocopies barely gets a teacher through the first quarter, and the front of the room still contains a whiteboard instead of a screen, using the technology that has become so prevalent at other schools in other districts just isn’t possible. So, to suggest my students e-mail me their work is like suggesting teachers really do get their summers off.

With each day that went by that I didn’t incorporate screens into my instruction, my students, I felt, fell further behind from their peers in richer districts where the resources were plentiful and the use of those resources was as intuitive as smiling or laughing (both of which I imagined those students and teachers were constantly doing as they basked in the light of their powered-on monitors). As I wallowed in the unfairness of it all and finger-pointed my way to believing all was lost, what I really lost was valuable days of instruction where, in fact, I could have been teaching my students the 21st-century skills they needed all along—without a computer in sight. I realized that it wasn’t technology that was coming between my students and those in wealthier schools, it was me. What snapped me out of my computer-less fog was an article from the National Education Association about the four critical elements for student learning in the 21st century: collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creative innovation. As I reflected on this article, I started to brainstorm all the lessons I was currently doing that had those elements: a classroom debate that required communication and critical thinking, a group activity that relied on collaboration, a project that utilized creative innovation.

As I watched my list grow, I became encouraged by the fact that I was teaching 21st-century skills to my students. Maybe they weren’t going to be as far behind as I previous thought! Motivated by my new understanding, I took the next day’s lesson plan and redesigned it to focus on communication. My previous lesson consisted of a class discussion; the new lesson used a “table-top blog.” And, after seeing the results from my students (more writing than some had ever done in their life and more participation from students I usually had to bribe with candy to speak), I stopped focusing on the technology and started focusing on the skills.