What am I going to do as an English teacher to engage with the 21st century skills?
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What am I going to do as an English teacher to engage with the 21st century skills?

I am a teacher of the 21st century. How to teach nowadays? This question is difficult for me because today’s students are different from their predecessors. Some of them don’t want to listen to a teacher at the lesson because their mobile phones are in their pocket and they are to put down a message immediately.

Besides it is a proved fact that kids in primary school and juniors have interest for learning English; their parents can control them. As for senior students, they have less interest. Many of them consider that English won’t be useful for them because they’ll never go abroad.  They don’t want to learn English because the British and the Americans don’t learn Russian. Students have no time to do homework because there are cell phones, laptops, MP3players, computer games ant the Internet with Google at home; they can find information anytime and anywhere. Not every teacher can boast that he can do a lot of things working on their computers, tablets, mobile phones as students can. According to Marc Prensky, “Our students have changed radically. What should we call these “new” students of today? But the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives.  Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.” More than that, Marc Prensky noted that a teacher is “a digital immigrant forced to work with digital natives.”

Today’s students want to have fun, not to study, but I must teach all of them. At the lessons they do not need to be entertained, they need to be engaged. But our charge is to provide meaningful and powerful engagement for every student. The challenge for teachers today is to make lessons relevant to students’ everyday lives. How to teach them and what to do? To change myself completely is the only thing to do I think.  

Teachers in the 21st century must be different from their predecessors who used only textbooks,paper and pencils. Instead of teaching using a chalk a modern teacher needs to be an information technology expert, a technician, an artist and an actor. The material of the lesson is to be informative, available, not difficult and useful. Working with new technologies and strategies is also important in relating to students.

The roles of a teacher in the 21st century are: the controller, the prompter, the resource, the assessor, the organizer, the participant, the tutor, the facilitator.

The necessary qualities are: critical thinking and doing, creativity, communication, collaboration, cross-cultural understanding, computing (ICT-literacy), and career and learning self-reliance

 A teacher should be elder friend of his pupils, their helper and counselor. At the same time the modern teachers need to be able to cooperate with students’ parents.

I suppose that the main 21st century teachers’ skills are the following: critical thinking, professional development, collaboration and making content relevant for the students, correct using traditional experiences in modern schools. So I must learn all my life. There is a good English proverb “Live and learn”.