The Skill Approach In Education

Today, information and technological developments grow at a rapid pace. Social and political life becomes more and more complicated and, in this process, active citizenship becomes more essential. Knowledge-driven changes in society and economies require individuals to quickly acquire new skills. Otherwise, it is increasingly difficult for employees to adapt to business life and to find a job. Education has to take account of these circumstances, adapt to the rapid developments in the world and educate individuals to continue lifelong learning. For this, skills such as active and independent learning, assertiveness, creativity, self-improvement, lifelong learning are important. Skill teaching differs from knowledge teaching. Skill is the transfer of knowledge to practice. This process involves a learning process that requires the steps of researching, planning, controlling and correcting. The knowledge should be organized, integrated, transferred into practice, mental and physical resources should be activated, and knowledge use should be demonstrated in practice in order to improve the skill. This book contributes to the teaching of skills and includes basic concepts and skills, language skills, science and mathematics skills, psycho-social skills and visual arts skills. It also explains how to teach skills, how to prepare for activities and how to implement activities in educational settings. These applications are intended to draw attention to skill teaching, to raise educators, to increase the success of education, to improve the skills of students, and to enable them to use the skills they have learned in school outside of school and in complex tasks.

This book offers an autobiographical reflexive approach to foreign language education. It offers unique ways of developing vocational language teaching as an integrated holistic approach combining language contents with vocationally relevant topics and the interactive, dialogical processes of working in language classes. It is presented in a "common sense" way and accessible to non-native English readers.

This second volume of papers from the ATC21STM project deals with the development of an assessment and teaching system of 21st century skills. Readers are guided through a detailed description of the methods used in this process. The first volume was published by Springer in 2012 (Griffin, P., McGaw, B. & Care, E., Eds., Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills, Dordrecht: Springer). The major elements of this new volume are the identification and description of two 21st century skills that are amenable to teaching and learning: collaborative problem solving, and learning in digital networks. Features of the skills that need to be mirrored in their assessment are identified so that they can be reflected in assessment tasks. The tasks are formulated so that reporting of student performance can guide implementation in the classroom for use in teaching and learning. How simple tasks can act as platforms for development of 21st century skills is demonstrated, with the concurrent technical infrastructure required for its support. How countries with different languages and cultures participated and contributed to the development process is described. The psychometric qualities of the online tasks developed are reported, in the context of the robustness of the automated scoring processes. Finally, technical and educational issues to be resolved in global projects of this nature are outlined.

School improvement begins with self-examination and honest dialogue about socialization, bias, discrimination, and cultural insensitivity. The authors acknowledge both the structural and sociological issues that contribute to low-performing schools and offer multiple tools and strategies to assess and improve classroom management, increase literacy, establish academic vocabulary, and contribute to a healthier school culture.