21st Century Capacities vs. Mindsets: What's In a Name?

11/4/2024

21st Century Capacities vs. Mindsets: What's In a Name?

Shifting an important baseline disposition when considering what students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century.

DR. ROBERTA LENGER KANG
Executive Director, CPET

Working in cross-cultural contexts gives us a lot of opportunities to recognize, question, and explore assumptions and values that we may or may not have noticed otherwise. Our partnership with the Shanghai-based professional development organization CPET-YouCH frequently surfaces questions and ideas about 21st century learning as they unpack our Global Mindset Framework and adapt these concepts into a context that makes sense in their teaching and learning environment.

A few weeks ago, Kirk, one of our colleagues, posed a question about the specific wording of the Framework’s title. He shared the following:

“In our social media we're encountering a linguistic and maybe cultural issue in discussing "mindsets" vs "capacities," especially with regard to the 2019 Global Mindset Framework. Could you point me toward any resources or videos about how you all think about this delineation, and why you started using "mindsets" instead of "capacities?" My understanding is you wanted to avoid implying that these are finite skills with progress bars, instead preferring the more open approach of mindset as a way of viewing the world. Is that close?”

This was an important question. While many may see the title as simple semantics, Kirk’s attention to detail highlighted not only the language we’re currently using (Mindsets) but also that in 2019 we made an intentional shift away from language we’d previously used (Capacities). The rationale behind the shift reveals an important baseline disposition we believe is important when considering what students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century.

Kirk’s understanding, that we “wanted to avoid implying that these are finite skills” and favor the “open approach of mindset as a way of viewing the world” was more than close — it was exactly right.

Evidence of evolving skills

Language used to describe 21st century skills in the early 2000s often referenced 21st century competencies, which has always been a real turn off for me. A "competency" often implies something you have or you don't — you're either "competent" (which to me sounds like a minimum criteria) or you're "incompetent" which is just full of deficit thinking. How can we approach teaching and learning for the next 75 years from a deficit perspective?

In the first few iterations CPET’s research-based framework for 21st century skills, our researchers preferred the word capacities over competencies, channeling the notion that it's not an all or nothing benchmark to obtain the skills, but rather, we need to create an understanding that these are skills that can be built up with greater and greater levels of fullness, so to speak.

But in 2018, our team went to Finland for the Global Learning Alliance Summit where we brought together groups of students from three different countries (Singapore, US, and Finland). For months, the students had been working online on a cross-cultural research project that focused on wellness and wellbeing. While the students were focused on understanding what wellness looked like in their local environments, and what was similar across all three cultures, our researchers focused on understanding how their engagement with this cross-cultural, project-based learning experience enhanced and expedited the learning of the 21st century skills outlined in the framework.

After the students spent time working together online, and then in person, they presented their research findings to a group of educational leaders from around the world, and we conducted focus groups and questionnaires with the students to better understand their learning processes. From this research, not only did we see evidence of the 21st century skills outlined in Critical, Creative, Collaborative & Global Consciousness categories — we also noticed a huge impact in the increase of care, self-efficacy, and character building. This was the origin of the Caring category.

A call to continuous learning

What was clear in the data was that this didn't seem to be a one-time learning opportunity. Participating in the project seemed to shift the students' dispositions or mindsets, helping them see the world in a new way and shifting their perspective on who they were as learners and what they were capable of. This began to change how we interpreted the other domains in the framework and whether or not capacity was really what we were hoping for.

While capacity is 100% better (in my opinion) than competency, it still implies a notion that there's a limit, an end point. When you're at capacity, does it mean there's nothing left to learn? If you reach capacity, does that mean you can stop trying?

The shift to mindset became a distinction from the notion that learning is limited. It’s a call to continuous learning — cultivating transformative change in perspective. The mindset of Critical Thinking is a disposition that never just accepts blindly what someone else tells you, without thinking it through on your own. The mindset of Collaboration always expects to work with others and is intentional about capturing multiple perspectives. When it comes to developing 21st century skills, the goal isn't to be able to turn it on and off at will, but to make a permanent shift in our thinking and in our way of interpreting the world around us. The goal of the revised framework from capacities to mindsets is about saying that this isn't a race to completion, but rather a commitment toward Global Consciousness and Care through the 21st century skills.

I shared these thoughts with Kirk, in hopes that it would be helpful for him to better understand the underlying beliefs and values behind what’s in a name. But cultural contexts are also important, so my final note to him was this:

“All that to say — often, even here in the US, the terms are used interchangeably and much of what I've described is nuanced semantics. If there's a term that best fits for your community, parents, teachers etc., please feel free to lean into that option (except competency — that's still terrible).”

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