Teaching in the 21st century will be a feather walk for teachers

Teachers will have to kindle the curiosity of their students

A teacher is a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity, knowledge and wisdom. “Teaching in the 21st century will be a feather walk for a teacher only if the curiosity, knowledge and wisdom of the students are kindled well.

Teachers will need to have the 21st Century Skills

To be well equipped in the arena of twenty-first-century teaching, first of all, a teacher has to acquire most of the twenty-first-century skills. The Twenty-First-century skills are a spread of various knowledge, skills and appreciable habits which are leading a person to compete and survive in this world of cut-throat competition.

So what are these 21st Century skills?

• Critical thinking,
• problem-solving, reasoning,
• interpretation, analysing and synthesizing any information,
• Creativity, innovation,
• self-direction, self-Discipline,
• adaptability and initiative

To transfer all these skills to the students, a teacher has to be aware of all of these traits and to try to adapt them.

How can teachers cultivate 21st Century Skills in students?

When the teacher is including various opportunities for the students to embrace all these skills from the classroom, that is the proudest moment for a teacher to say loudly to the world that she/he is a twenty-first-century teacher.

Here, the teacher is moulding up the students’ personality in such a way that each student is becoming self-sufficient with high self-esteem and becoming dare enough to face the challenges in life.

In addition to that, the students have to get a platform for freedom of expression through oral and written communication, presentations, debates and speeches.

Being fluent in communication adds more to the students’ personality. Leadership, teamwork, imbibing values, getting mastery over information technology and global awareness are also the need of the hour for the students of this century to get acquainted to the emerging changes and challenges in the world.

What are the core teaching principles for teaching in the 21st Century?

A teacher who teaches in the twenty-first century has to prioritize teaching through authenticity, creating real-life situations for the students to seek knowledge, explore things by themselves,

They should be allowed to elaborate their newly acquired knowledge to their life around and then to extend their findings to more real-life situations.

The teacher has to encourage them to be the path makers and not the path followers. Adapting new ways of teaching, triggering critical thinking in the students and pace themselves as per the changing world can be the watchword for the twenty-first-century teacher.

Usha Krishnan