THE three-day national symposium titled "Education and 21st century Competencies", kickstarted at Shangri-La's Barr al Jissah, praised the country's efforts in the education arena and hailed the modern techniques used in the dissemination of information to its citizens across the country. This national symposium aims to exchange knowledge and experience with the experts and specialists on the local and international levels in all that would improve the efficiency of the education system in the century. The opening ceremony was presided over by Dr Yahaya bin Mahfoudh al Mantheri, Chairman of the State Council, in the presence of Dr Madeeha bint Ahmad al Shaibaniyah, Minister of Education, and other officials. The event was also attended by a representatives from the educational processes, teachers, supervisors and managers of schools, students, parents, business owners, researchers, business leaders, academics, and members of various curricula.
The national symposium on Education and 21st Century Competencies is being organised by the Ministry of Education as one of the most important educational events that initiate the New Academic Year. By organising this event, the ministry is working on putting into action the Royal directives of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos who called for the importance of comprehensive evaluation of education and upgrading its outcomes to cope with the challenges of the time and qualifying those outcomes to meet the job market requirements and its renewable needs. The school played and still plays an important role in advancement of communities civilisation. The stakeholders of education will remain searching for the best strategies and educational accesses to enable the school to efficiently do its best in up bringing the generations in a way inspired by the challenges of present and future.
From this point a lot of educational systems are so busy looking for an answer for one increasingly demanding question: what are the most important competencies that the learner in the 21st Century need? The answer to this question should take into consideration the rapid changes the human experiences in the 21st Century. Those changes play a major role not only in forming the life style and the way of living but also in formulating intellectual trends. So, their impact appears in creating the cultural identity and constructing values for communities. Dr Bader al Kharoosi said: "In this context, we can refer to the technology revolution. With its overgrowing effect, the technology revolution has become one of the main variables that increasingly influences human behavior and methods of making living. For instance, job market has countless examples that manifest the growing impact of technology on individual life. The demographic changes are also a growing global phenomena. It is clear that human communities are witnessing remarkable cultural diversity imposed by the emigration phenomena.
"In response to this, the countries have initiated specialised programmes related to multiculturalism. All these changes ensure that globalisation with all its political, cultural and economic dimensions is not limited to theories and expectations as some have argued for more than two decades, but that it has become real in all details of our lives. These changes in addition to other issues like environment, poverty, international peace and sustainable development are forcing the education systems to review their plans and programmes to maintain qualified outcomes to cope with 21st century challenges," Dr Al Kharusi said. He added: At the national level, the education system needs to foresee the future in its developmental plans by continuous review and evaluation. The drive for development in education, initiated for more than a decade, must take into consideration that the rapid change happening all over the world requires providing the learner with a set of competencies that enables him or her to deal positively and in a sense of responsibility with all life styles and intellectual trends that color human life in the 21st century.
One of the school's goals is to assist the learner to be able to gain all the skills that enable him or her to compete in job market and get a job for decent living. So, it is no wonder that the school is responsible for overseeing the job market requirements. It is also responsible for setting plans in compliance with the governments development plans to supply the labour market with competitive, creative competencies who are able to deal with contemporary tools and technologies and able to practise self-learning and life-long learning. Those who follow the job market variables, for example, realise that business owners focus on skills that competitors for jobs possess more than their qualifications and recruitment standards that are adopted by international cross-boarding companies whose role in the global economy is growing day after day is another example .
Moreover, Omani schools should double their work to enhance the cultural identity values and citizenship within students' communities. As we will all notice in Symposium topics, education for citizenship is a key component in 21st century competencies. If so, the Omani educational system needs to strengthen its educational programmes and plans in this regards especially as we are witnessing political and economic challenges globally. Fortifying Omani community generally and especially its youth of such challenges can be done only through specific educational programmes that enhance community cultural identity in learners and assure its youth unity.
These programmes should emphasise the values of tolerance, respect for each other and that national unity and loyalty for our homeland and its social-cultural-political heritage is a key component to continue the precious county's development march . It is needless to recall here that the Ministry recently introduced a specialised department in developing citizenship programmes of which is an important organisational step to deal more effectively with one of the most important 21st century competencies. These procedures, also, go in line with the increasing regional and global interest in citizenship education issues, as the global education initiative, launched by the United Nations recently "education comes first" regarded global citizenship issue as one of three main topics to push human resource development regionally and globally and citizenship education is a main component of the Arab Bureau of Education to the Gulf states' programmes and activities.
The educational planning which evokes the updates and responds to the needs of the community on the local and global levels is an important element to ensure the school in Oman or other countries improving performance to reap the rewards and benefits of the 21st century as it also ensures that the school can play its role in fortifying learners of this era challenges. From this point, this symposium responds to the need of the educational field in the Sultanate to develop a more profound understanding of the educational skills topic and the exist educational directions in this aspect. The ability of educational institution to establish a precise understanding of the business owners expectations and monitor the rapid changes in the job market, both domestically and internationally, is considered as a matter of utmost importance to clarify the most important competencies that are related to the efficiency of the educational system and its capacity to respond to the actual needs of the job market. Therefore, all national participations and international experiences that have been carefully selected in this symposium and the accompanied discussion, dialogue sessions and expanded seminars are all tools adopted by the symposium to achieve its goals.
The main speaker at the symposium Lord Jim Knight of the United Kingdom presented a worksheet about "The skills of the twenty-first century and the information age". Across the world globalisation and technological change are having a huge impact on the labour market. There is a growth of low paid low skill service jobs and in highly paid highly skilled creative work. All work now requires confidence with technology. The middle range work is either being automated, or exported to wherever the work can be done most cheaply. At the same time technology through social media is changing the way we connect with each other, amplifying cultures of sharing, collaboration and peer-to-peer learning. This is most pronounced amongst young people. These two trends are a huge challenge to traditional education systems that were designed for an Industrial Age. Employers want recruits who are confident at thinking laterally as well as researching in depth. Recruits are growing up online where surfing laterally across what interests you comes naturally. This jells with a curriculum that is fragmented into narrow subjects and didactic teaching styles based on learning information that is now readily available through Google. Governments must urgently seek to develop teaching in schools and universities that facilitates self-directed learning. Working in teams should be mirrored by learning in groups.
Embracing peer-to-peer learning and personal technology offers the opportunity to do this without significant capital investment. The new focus should be on investment in teachers and a 21st century pedagogy that embeds 21st century skills in the whole educational journey. Then Professor Lee Wing-on, presented a paper about The conceptual framework of the 21st century competencies. The learning discourse of the 21st century is characterised by the emergence of the knowledge economy, and the need for lifelong learning for learners to be able to adapt to the fast and ever changing economies of the society. This has created changing demands for the skill sets of the 21st century learners, such as the ability for critical and creative thinking, the ability for self-directed and collaborative learning, the ability to learn formally and informally, and the ability for both competition and cooperation. The skill sets diverge from the almost single-faceted traditional emphasis on academic abilities, and the knowledge functions of the university is gradually changing. Knowledge creation is being regarded as possible not only by basic and discovery research, but also possible in the process of teaching, clinical practice and multi-disciplinary integration.
Knowledge ownership is changing from teachers to combined expectations and ownership of the learners and stakeholders. The significance of knowledge is shifting from discovery towards knowledge utilisation, application and mobilisation, and user's satisfaction. All these have implications for learning and teaching from traditional academic approaches to learning modes characterised by practice and experiential learning, as well as the development of the ability of learning to learn, in order to develop lifelong learning capacities. The purpose of this paper is to examine emergence of these concept changes and how the changes require our adjustment in our teaching and learning approaches, measurement, and expectations for learning outcomes in 21st century education systems. Professor Barry McGaw, presented a Paper about Developing 21st century competencies through disciplines of knowledge developing curriculum requires balancing of transmission of knowledge and culture from the past and the development of new forms of competency required in the contemporary and emerging world. Serious attention to traditional disciplines of knowledge such as language, mathematics, science, history, geography, economics is important for two reasons. One is that they represent several millennia of human thinking about the nature of knowledge. The other is that research on expertise has shown that experts differ from novices in having a deep understanding of a relevant domain of knowledge that enables them to represent problems and to solve them more efficiently and effectively than novices. Furthermore, there is only limited transfer of expertise between domains of knowledge.
Many of the competencies described as '21st century', such as communication, capacity to work with others and intercultural understanding, are not unique to the 21st century. What is new is the way in which they have new requirements in the technology and information-rich societies in which people work and live in the 21st century. In the new Australian curriculum, there are eleven learning areas and seven 21st century skills (called 'general capabilities'). The content (knowledge, understanding and skills in the curriculum serves both learning areas and general capabilities and, because the curriculum is published only online in electronic form, it is possible for the content to be located through the lens of learning areas or the lens of general capabilities. The next paper was presented by Mohammed Saif al Busaidy, Dr Ziyana al Harthy and Siham al Riyamia aptly discussing the School Curricula in Oman: Developing the 21st Century Skills. One of the important elements of good educational system is to upgrade the school curriculum to the needs of learners and catch-up with the rapid development of knowledge and technology. Hence, it is necessary to review and find out what is there to be changed in the curriculum. Alongside with that comes the necessity of reviewing the whole educational system to insure that the curriculum development will make a difference; the difference that is mainly concerns with producing learners who are independent lifelong learners who can thrive in the fast moving, knowledge based economy of the world of the 21st century rather than just learners who simply pass or fail exams (Beere, 2005).
Then Esther Care, Associate Professor presented a Paper about 21st century competencies across the curriculum. This presentation falls into two sections. First it is designed to communicate how the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project has achieved its goals, of formulating a framework for 21st century skills, and developing methods to assess these. Second, the presentation is designed to communicate methods for translating these skills into the classroom. Assuming that thegoal of assessment is to enhance student capacities, then how 21st century skills can be taught and learnt is of paramount interest. This presentation also showcased several regional and global case studies that illustrated how existing schools can be remodeled and new schools can be built with modest expenditures to realise substantial gains in educational outcomes. It addressed the following questions:
1) Why is it essential to move away from the factory model school buildings that still dominates education throughout the world?
2) What does the research say about the connections between learning and the built environment?
3) How can the design of schools encourage new ways of teaching and learning?
4) How can school design empower students to develop the skills and competencies they need to succeed and thrive in the 21st century?
5) How can architecture empower teachers to work collaboratively to create inter-disciplinary, project-based and experiential learning opportunities for students?
After that Dr Dianne Chambers presented a Paper about Teachers and Competencies of the Twenty-first Century, Common themes of inventories of general competencies to support success in the 21st century include being capable of critical thinking & problem solving, being able to continue to learn new things, being able to work in a team, and being a capable communicator. Each of these is a multifaceted capability that cannot be learned through only direct instruction, but rather they are capabilities that are learned through scaffolded and progressively more challenging learning opportunities, through coaching and mentoring, and through practice and self-reflection. Solving complex problems requires both teamwork and harnessing the capabilities that digital technologies make available to us and teachers need to be comfortable as facilitators of learning in a complex and sometimes challenging environment.
Finally Mitchell Smith presented his paper about "Utilising today's educational trends to develop proven approaches that enable our students to consume education, in their learning methods, while creating a future, competent workforce". Today and tomorrow's model of educational consumption and delivery is evolving for four distinct reasons:
1. Students now have access to global education and resources, at their fingertips, which enables all children to have access to education
2. Technology enables teachers to access to the nation's best lesson plans and curriculum, while utilising online assessment and certifications
3. The new approach to learning provides employers with future employees with critical thinking skills, core competencies, and an application of knowledge via collaboration
4. This global access to both education and jobs enables a nation to grow economically (global examples provided).
Education institutions and organisations have adequately monitored and reported the shift continuing in education. The global access to education, as well as jobs, drastically shaped a model that has left many institutions behind. Corporations have access to a global pool of applicants, coupled with tools enabling employees to work from any location globally. Education institutions need to ensure they recognise the needs of the students and prepare them for the global workforce.
On the importance of the National Symposium, Dr Yahya bin Mahfoudh al Mantheri stated that the importance of this symposium is attributed to the intended positive effect on the educational process, especially it makes use of the presence of specialised experts from international , Arab and Gulf States whose participation undoubtedly will enrich the Symposium and open new strong contact to exchange expertise and ideas. He added,"We can see that the students learning attainment is not lower than its counterpart in other countries, but we need to focus on the curriculums, the scientific material and the systems that promote the student's level by adopting assessment methods or teacher selection process or teacher training programmes beside the in-service training and incentives. All that will help enhance the student learning and support the pedagogical process." Dr Rawiah bint Saud al Busaidiyah, Minister of Higher Education, said that one of the most crucial challenges that education in Oman faces is working hard to bridge the gap between the general education and higher education in one hand and labour market requirements in another. Those challenges are to help the student acquire the basic skills and instilling values. She added that the most significant skills that the student needs to cope with the 21st century are communication skills, working as a team and using new technologies in communication.
Dr Ali bin Abdulkhaliq al Qarni, Director-General of Arab Education Office for Gulf States, assured that organising such symposium is a good initiative that aims at examining a change that we heard a lot about; 21st century's skills and competencies and we might repeat this in words more than actions, so we need to make it true this time. We need to utilise other countries' experiences because our schools still have old structures which cant up bring our students in a way that commensurate with 21st century. We do not mean something special in 21st century because we used to request them to think in accordance with 20th and 19th centuries, but this century has brought so many updates which need to be kept up with in addition to studying the bases that we encourage our schools to incorporate so they will be able to acquire the 21st century skills. I have visited many schools, inside or abroad, and I found out that they still used traditional methods. I realise that the change is coming by organising such symposiums in which experts present experiences and exchange ideas that can support Ministry of Education in Oman and the Gulf. Dr Hamood al Harthi, Under-Secretary for Education and Curriculum, stated: "This symposium is a part of overall education development system in the Sultanate.
We expect to receive a number of experts and we hope to come up with recommendations that help us improve our education system in general and school curricula in particular in addition to incorporating the 21st competencies in the curricula. I realise that there are a lot of educational competencies : communication and technology, group work and flexibility to join job market especially the issues related to own functioning in addition to competencies related to citizenship and good behaviours , either local or global." Abdullah bin Mohammed al Faheed from the Ministry of Education, Saudi Arabia, expressed his impressions about the symposium saying: "This symposium is focusing on building the school student personality. As others have said, most of the skills are acquired at school. The school is good soil to grow individual skills. Taking care of up bringing the generation and enabling good education is an crucial factor that benefits the community. It is normal to say that the new generation is rapidly changing. Therefore we need to change some foundations and methods that the old education adopted and to cope with rapid technological development."
© Oman Daily Observer 2013
