“INTEGRATING CURRICULUM FOR 21ST CENTURY SKILLS FOR COMMERCE STUDENTS AT HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL LEVEL IN INDIA”.

“INTEGRATING CURRICULUM FOR 21^ST CENTURY SKILLS FOR COMMERCE STUDENTS AT HIGHER SECONDARY SCHOOL LEVEL IN INDIA”.

Introduction

            We hear a lot about how important it is for today’s students to develop their 21st century skills, in addition to what are often referred to as ‘the basics’. These are the skills, dispositions and attitudes that our students will need to thrive in their future lives of work and play. To succeed in career and life in the 21st century, students must be supported in mastering both content and skills. It is important to note that no 21st century skills implementation can be successful without developing core academic subject knowledge and understanding among all students. Students who can think critically and communicate effectively must build on a base of core academic subject knowledge.

Development of 21^st Century Skills for Commerce Students at Higher Secondary Level

Higher secondary level is the turning point for every student, which directs them for the achievement of the right career growth. Commerce is a new subject for students at higher secondary level. All the concepts in Commerce are new for them, but have some general awareness. Even though those who are learning Commerce have lots of career opportunities in the 21^st century.  But our curriculum at higher secondary level is not adequate to develop the innate abilities of the learners. It gives only theoretical awareness about the concept. At school where state syllabus is following, little opportunity is there to develop 21^st century skills like;    

Critical thinking: Finding solutions to problems

Creativity: Thinking outside the box

Collaboration: Working with others

Communication: Talking to others

Information literacy: Understanding facts, figures, statistics, and data

Media literacy: Understanding the methods and outlets in which information is published

Technology literacy: Understanding the machines that make the Information Age possible

Flexibility: Deviating from plans as needed

Leadership: Motivating a team to accomplish a goal

Initiative: Starting projects, strategies, and plans on one’s own

Productivity: Maintaining efficiency in an age of distractions

Social skills: Meeting and networking with others for mutual benefit

As a teacher, we are getting adequate training on how to develop these type of skills for our students. Present teacher education curriculum also reconstructed to develop such skills in student teachers also. Even though the school curriculum related Commerce is not sufficient to develop such valuable skills that are essential for our new generation. For that the present school curriculum must reconstruct by limiting the importance for developing theoretical awareness and giving more importance to develop practical abilities that will help the learner for their career growth and life.

Lots of changes were brought after conducting researches in our primary education system. Teaching methods are changed from lecture method to activity oriented digital learning. Project methods are created partnership with academic activities. Priority for extra-curricular / co-curricular activities increased in schools. Blooms taxonomy also revised and rearranged to evaluate learning objective according to present scenario (Digital Blooms Taxonomy). Whatever it may be the question paper includes only to assess what the child learned from text book. There is weightage for questions to assess their application ability in the written format. But there is limited opportunity to assess what the child learned for his/her future? Our educational system still lacks to develop and assess such 21^st century skills in students.

21^st Century Skill Curriculum for Commerce Students

          As a Commerce Teacher, I had experienced so many real life situations where our students were not able to apply what they were learned in classroom. They are still struggling to develop the skills for a better career growth. If we consider equal importance for developing both theoretical and practical aspects related to each single concept, it will be a great asset for our students. In order to compete in the modern world, our students have to develop learning skills, literacy skills and life skills. But our curriculum at higher secondary level gives less importance for the development and assessment of 21st century skills.

          The school curriculum for CBSE gives importance for development of concept of Life skills, but the state school curriculum doesn’t. Here I am suggesting some activities that will help the commerce students for developing 21^st century skills, that might be include in the curriculum for all school curriculum.

21ST CENTURY SKILL CURRICULUM FOR COMMERCE STUDENTS AT HIGHER SECONDARY LEVEL
21st Century Skills	Programmes for learner
LEARNING AND INNOVATION SKILLS
Critical thinking	·     Connect students with real business world scenarios and ask them to identify possible issues or problems through medias, surveys and field trips. ·     Provide tasks to identify the present needs of society and opportunities available for setting up start-ups. ·     Develop and pose questions that seek solution through critical thinking from each concepts. ·     Develop a class question wall with student- generated questions related recent scenarios in business field. ·     Conduct roleplays on how they face problems as a business man. ·     Provide projects on complex business problem at present and that may come in future.
Creativity	·     Collect suggestions for change in prevailing systems in business. ·     Add constraints to design challenges to encourage students to come up with new ideas and alternative ways to solve problems in business world. ·     Collect creative expressions of learners in different format like poems, stories, conversation, images, logos, cartoons, etc from each topic and create digital magazines, blogs, etc. ·     Create imaginary interview schedules for different jobs in business field. ·     Provide tasks for inventing new designs for softwares and applications for business transactions.    ·     Conduct competitions for creating new trade marks, logos and captions for new and existing products. ·     Help students to create colourful posters on the side effects of using products created by companies without any legal permission.
Collaboration	·      Provide opportunities for students to work on collaborative projects where each student takes responsibility for an aspect of a larger group project (For example creating a new start up in school campus). ·      Provide opportunities for students to work collaboratively on solving real business world problems, through scientific methods. ·      Set up design challenges where students work together on the same design (For example Student Banks, Co-operative society, School store, School cafe, etc.) ·      Conduct open debates and panel discussions on complex business problems and new challenges.
Communication	·  Create artificial situation secessions for students to learn how to effectively convey ideas among different personality types in different levels of management in a business. ·  Conduct competitions on Seminar presentations with the support of presentation softwares. ·  Provide special coaching with Spoken English sections and tutorial softwares and apps. ·  Conduct special sections in every day school assembly related to commerce in front of the mass audience. ·  Start school FM for commerce students.
INFORMATION, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY SKILLS
Information Literacy	·       Show examples of trustworthy and untrustworthy information and guide students to collect information from trustworthy sources. ·       Define what makes an online source trustworthy, direct them how to separate fact from fiction. ·       Encourage critical thinking
Media Literacy	·       Help learners to identify the most visual, most useful, and most natural methods of sharing a given media, and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each. ·         Direct students to use different educational channels available in Television and in Internet. ·         Provide tasks to identify the different sources from which learners can collect additional information related to each concepts in text books. ·         Conduct workshops to develop contents in different format that can be published in different media. ·         Provide maximum orientation to use the modern medias in the right path for enhancing their learning and skills.
ICT Literacy	·      Provide maximum opportunity to get hands on experience to use the modern technical gadgets. ·      Provide tasks to identify modern technical inventions in the field of commerce. ·      Provide more training to use the different softwares and mobile applications related to recording business events and its summarisation. ·      Help learners to develop designs for applications, softwares and websites that reduce the risks in business transactions. ·      Provide projects to identify the structure of softwares and applications that are used for financial transactions from different organisations. ·      Provide maximum updated information related recent trends in business through virtual classrooms.
LIFE AND CAREER SKILLS
Flexibility & Adaptability	·     Provide group projects / tasks without considering individual difference. (Create groups by mixing high achievers, average ones and slow bloomers equally in a group) ·     Create artificial situation in classroom that shows the difference in behaving with family members and people at work place. ·     Conduct role plays on how to react with customers, higher authorities and colleagues in an organisation. ·     Provide challenging tasks and conduct competitions that teach importance of time management.
Initiative & Self Direction	·     Provide individual projects/ tasks/ challenges, must be completed by them without the directions of teacher. ·     Conduct exhibitions and fairs with an individual contribution of each student. ·     Conduct seminars on topic related to commerce selected by students themselves. ·     Create a design for the business idea / start-up in their dream.
Social & Cross-Cultural Skills	·        Conduct field trips to business places in other states. ·        Provide internship training sections in industries of other state. ·        Conduct workshops on the creation of eco-friendly products. ·        Conduct exhibitions, fairs and competitions for collecting money for charity. ·        Collect consumer products in bulk from producer and wholesaler, distribute it to peoples in rural areas and forest areas without expecting any profit.
Productivity & Accountability	·        Conduct training sessions to create small type products and craft items that can be sold in the market. ·        Provide challenging and responsible problem solving tasks as a citizen.
Leadership & Responsibility	·     Conduct role play based on the life history of top business people and leaders. ·     Provide challenging tasks and problem solving situations as projects. ·     Ask the students to conduct procession on important day’s related commerce at public places. ·     Provide opportunity to conduct street plays on the evils of business towards society. ·     Help students to conduct awareness campaigns on the malpractices by business peoples towards society.

Benefits for Learning 21^st Century Skills By

Commerce Students at Higher Secondary Level

Learning and developing 21^st century skills along with the theoretical aspects of commerce will be much beneficial for setting up a good starting point for the career growth of commerce students. Learning all these skills will help to chase their dreams easily, will solve complex problems that face in future, will develop all the skills needs for a better employment, will develop all job skills, and learning such skills will change students as a good citizen who will contribute much for the growth of our nation.

Conclusion

With a variety of curriculum options, you can customize your approach to every 21st Century skill to make sure your students learn, remember, and implement them as quickly as possible. But, there will be so many practical difficulties to integrate the curriculum for 21^st century skills along with the regular stream. If it is made possible, will be a great contribution for the new generation.  Let us hope for the best.