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Corporate Social Responsibility at Intel®
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Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills @ the Education World Forum in London

Systemic Education Transformation is not possible without innovative ways of assessing and teaching 21st century skills in the classroom - perhaps one of the most challenging parts of the current reform on-going in Education.  The project Assessment and Teaching of 21st-Century Skills (ATC21S) [http://atc21s.org/] is exactly addressing this challenge. It is spearheading research, development and implementation of pilots and trials on 21st Century skills assessment and teaching in primary and secondary school classrooms. A global partnership founded and funded by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, headquartered at the University of Melbourne, with pilots and trials currently implemented by 6 governments, endorsed by OECD PISA and IEA. And ready for scale mid of this year.

Formed in 2008, the consortium aims to build in-class and system-wide teaching tools and assessment frameworks that will enable school systems to teach 21st century skills, assess students’ developmental progress towards proficiency, track and report performance for every student, and provide guidance on teaching and policy regulations. The evolution of education to meet these new requirements is more critical now than at any other time in the last century. Our children’s futures depend on it. To this end, the ATC21S team is pledged to investigating and developing new approaches, methods and technologies to support the teaching and measuring of 21st century learning in classrooms around the world. In doing this, we will help prepare our students for success in their future workplaces and in their lives.

This week the ATC21S consortium finds itself in London, where we are excited to show and share the results of the project at the 2012 Educational World Forum (EWF). [http://www.ewf2011.org/]  The EWF is a prestigious global summit for education ministers from around the globe.  It brings government representatives, industry leaders, and major organizations from more than 60 countries around the world together and provides a forum for rich discussion on current issues, cutting-edge advancements, and the most important needs in education at the local, national, international, and global scale.

The ATC21S consortium will host a Ministerial Break Out session on the project hosted by the Chair, Shelley Esque, Vice President of Corporate Affairs Intel and led by Patrick Griffin, the ATC21S Executive Director from the University of Melbourne. Beyond reflecting on the current status of the project pilots and trials, new assessment tools will be demoed, and videos of students and teachers during the assessment process will be shown. The major focus of the discussion with ministers will be the interdependency between assessment and teaching and learning, giving guidance, and sharing experiences. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, will facilitate the discussion on policy frameworks and implications on systemic change. It’s going to be an interesting session.