This document discusses 21st century skills, specifically creativity, innovation, critical thinking, and problem solving. It provides descriptions of effective and distinguished teacher and student behaviors that encourage these skills. Suggestions are given for how to incorporate the skills into lessons through exit tickets, assessments, debates, and small group discussions. Teachers are prompted to design a lesson promoting creative problem solving and reflect on its effectiveness.

1. Week 2 21st Century Skills

2. I-14: Provides opportunities for creativity/ innovation, critical thinking, and problem solving Instruction 14

3. Effective Educator Behaviors Teacher structures lesson so students demonstrate significant originality and include diverse perspectives. Teacher designs tasks that require students to acquire and evaluate knowledge, reason effectively, and analyze and evaluate evidence before making judgments or decisions (i.e., opportunities to grow students‘ problem-solving skills).

4. Distinguished Teacher Behaviors addition to “Effective”: Teacher structures lessons that give students space and/or time to create and invent new learning from those ideas. Teacher provides opportunities for students to grow and exhibit their problem-solving skills.

5. Effective Student behaviors Students approach tasks and responses with evidence of divergent thinking, original thought, or some connection to ideas and issues beyond classroom. Students construct viable arguments and critique others‘ reasoning by responding to diverse perspectives, analyzing similarities and differences, justifying conclusions, and discerning correct logic from flawed reasoning. Students are creative problem solvers. Students apply what they know in discipline to solve problems arising in everyday life, society, and the workplace. Students reason abstractly and quantitatively by making sense of quantities and relationships, creating coherent representations of problems, and knowing and using different properties of items.

6. Distinguished Student Behaviors Students approach tasks and responses in highly original and applied ways. Students ―mediate‖ diverse opinions or approaches and devise their own. Students are creative problem-solvers and think about systems, not just isolated parts. Students look for and use structures by stepping back, shifting perspective, and seeing complex things as being composed of several objects.

8. Individual assessment-paper or oral

9. Whole class debate-great discussion topics

11. Will you use it again?