Achieve Greater Impact Through       21st Century Learning Skills

What We're All About


IL-21 is a community for Illinois educational organizations and businesses dedicated to renewing schools with a vision of 21st century skills for all learners.

Our Vision… to develop and prepare all students’ learning with the skills and knowledge that will better enable them to gain higher levels of achievement, life skills, and work success in the 21st century. 

Our Agenda… to strengthen Illinois schools based on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills for Learning Student Outcomes and Support Systems in order to increase skills, knowledge, and expertise in students for success in work and life in the 21st century.

Our Design … to construct and nurture professional learning communities and schools that encourage broad and deep 21st century learning with core content instruction, enriched by interdisciplinary themes, intentional critical thinking and problem solving skills, project-based and problem-based learning, creativity and innovation, assessed by a variety of measures.  

Our Method…to renew and enhance Illinois educators’ skills and knowledge through multiple channels of national and international educational experts, long term professional development programs for change, and collaboration and communication among all educators.

 

Vision21

Raise awareness in Illinois parents, educators, service providers, and business leaders about the value and need for 21st century learning skills in preparing students for today’s and tomorrow’s competitive world.

Develop practical programs that enrich Illinois educators’ long-term professional learning experiences which create new schools, new curriculum and instruction, and new leadership for the 21st century.

Enhance collaboration and communication among Illinois educators ready to take up the educational challenges presented by the 21st century by forming a network of leaders throughout Illinois.

Establish a network of new model 21st Century schools in which teachers are prepared to use the skills of 21st century instruction to work with children while mentoring teacher apprentices.

Renew Illinois educators’ skills and knowledge by bringing national and international educational voices to guide long term professional development programs that result in powerful change required by the demands of the 21st century.

Learn More About Vision21

AWARENESS21 

 

Will You Want to Hire Your Own Kids? (Will Anybody Else?)

 

"The next generation is not being adequately prepared for the jobs it will inherit. High school and college graduates are showing deficiencies in both basic and applied skills, and a real lack of preparedness for today’s world of work. Workforce entrants are caught between an educational system that teaches⎯and measures⎯one set of skills and a rapidly evolving workplace that demands another."  

(The Conference Board, August 2009).

 

“In a 21st Century World where jobs can  be shipped wherever there’s an Internet connection, where a child born in Dallas is now competing with a child born in New Delhi, where your best job qualification is not what you do but what you know — education is not longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it’s a prerequisite to success.”

(President Barack Obama, March 2009).