Exploring the Influence of 21st‑Century Skills on Educational Practices: How Teaching Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Digital Literacy is Shaping Modern Classrooms
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55737/psi.2025d-44131Keywords:
21st-century Skills, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Classroom Integration, Teacher Preparedness, Student Engagement, Educational Practices, Professional Development, Curriculum ReformAbstract
This paper examines how critical thinking, collaboration, and digital literacy are being incorporated into the classroom contexts and how these necessary 21st-century competencies are being instructed, graded and viewed by teachers and learners. Observations were conducted in the classroom, interviews were held with the teachers, as well as the analysis of documents in two secondary schools, and the results could give us an idea about the challenge of integrating skills and the frequency and quality of the processes. The results are that, although digital literacy has the most integrated and well-received skills, critical thinking and collaboration have a lot of challenges associated with teacher preparedness, resource constraints and curriculum inflexibility. The activities most often implemented and the most satisfactory in terms of student engagement and their performance were those that concerned digital literacy. Conversely, critical thinking and collaboration were also not as often instructed, and teachers showed an intermediate level of confidence and acted more often in collaboration. The research paper reveals the necessity of working on specific professional growth, the change of curriculum, and the allocation of more resources towards the accommodations of the 21st-century skills in the classroom, such that the students would be ready to possess the competencies that would ensure their success in the rapidly transforming world.
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