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What are your initial reactions to what you saw in the presentation? I, quite frankly, was appaled by our lag and how we are lacking a real plan to bridge this gap.

What do we think it means to prepare students for the 21st century? I think teachers need to go out of our way and our comfort zone to teach foundation skills like ciritical thinking, independent thought, team building, etc. as the careers our students will be taking on may not exist as yet.

What skills do students need to survive and thrive in this new era? Critical thinking; outside the box thought; teamwork

What implications does this have for our current way of doing things? I think that the main implication is that we need to change our approach. Clearly, what we are doing is not working as well as we may wish. We need to study the approaches of otehr places, i.e. India and China, to see what we can do to better serve our students.

How do we get from here to there? Teachers, administrators, boards of education, and the US government need to all embrace the necessary changes. Once each link in the chain admits we need to develop, we can start on the right track towards helping our youth.