The 21ST Century Skills OECD Strategy and Curricular Reform Of Teacher Preparation Faculties in Albania

Abstract

Many nations around the world have undertaken wide-ranging reforms of curriculum, instruction and assessments with the intention of better preparing all children for the higher educational demands of life and work in the 21st century. What are the skills that young people need to be successful in this rapidly changing world, and what competencies do teachers need in turn to teach those skills. This leads to the question what teacher preparation programs are needed to prepare graduates who are ready to teach well in a 21st century classroom. As the world of the 21st century bears little resemblance to that of the 19th century, education curricula and teacher preparation curricula need to be deeply redesigned for the full triad of Knowledge, Skills and Character, and keeping in the forefront the Meta-layer of learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, personalization etc. OECD has lastly launched the OECD Skills Strategy responding to this by shifting the focus from a quantitative notion of human capital, measured in years of formal education, to the skills people actually acquire, enhance and nurture over their lifetimes. The curriculum is already overburdened with content, which makes it much harder for students to acquire skills via deep dive into projects. Drawing a parallelism between what is the rationale of the 2012 OECD Skills Strategy and what the Albanian pre-university and university education curriculum is like, the paper attempts to come up with recommendations about the measures to be taken to make Albanian universities and training programs become more responsive to the workforce and the societal needs of today.