21st Century Learning for Middle School Educators

Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners—who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants. This lesson will help students identify bias in words to help them build digital literacy skills. This is one lesson of many offered to assist teachers with equipping students with the 21st Century skills to help them navigate in a global society.

This lesson supports students learning the 21st Century Skill Leadership. This lesson is part of the Scholastic.com series to support student development of 21st Century skills. In this lesson students will identify characteristics of leadership by researching the lives of great American leaders.

This activity exposes students to Communication in the workplace. Communication is an essential skill that students must learn to be successful in the workplace. In this lesson, students act out scenarios that depict common situations in which effective communication is essential to solve problems. The students work in small groups, journal their ideas and discuss ways to communicate with each other and other adults. This is part of a series of lessons produced by the US Department of Labor.

To equip our students with the skills they need to succeed in the 21st Century we must support them with Emotional Intelligence.This lesson from Edutopia.com focuses on one aspect of emotional intelligence, mindfulness. This is one of the most important skills to master in learning and student goal setting. This lesson is a powerful tool for educators to support learning in their class. It’s quick and easy to implement, and has proven benefits including boosted working memory and reduced stress.

To support students learning about Entrepreneurship, bizkids.com offers multiple lessons that can be used in middle school classes. This particular lesson introduces students to several entrepreneurs and tells the story of how they developed their products. As students watch three clips, they are exposed to topics including entrepreneurship, communication and business ethics. Participants will be engaged as they answer questions about how they would handle situations as the entrepreneur.

This lesson was designed as a part of the Resources For Rethinking website to help students learn about becoming global citizens. This lesson is broken into three learning stations in which student groups work together to solve issues we face as members of a global community. Using case studies and visual literacy, students discuss ideas to make the world better for all humans.

Lesson Plan | Thinking through problems in schools to find creative, practical solutions is a quick and easy way to introduce students to problem solving, an essential 21st Century skill. This article provides two activities along with a graphic organizer to help guide students through the process Students will become problem student advocates as they examine and research school issues and develop solutions that will benefit the school community.

This simple teamwork game helps students learn about their own teamwork skills and the importance of teamwork in preparation for later adult life and the workforce. Promoting teamwork is essential for many reasons: effective classroom management, cohesiveness, tolerance and acceptance and development of lifelong learning skills to name a few. This activity will have students choose team members from a list to achieve an important task.