What does it mean to be a 21^st century teacher? Who is a 21st century teacher? If you have ever wondered what it takes to be a successful 21^st-century teacher, below are tips to help you out.

A 21^st century education is one that responds to the economical, technological, and societal shifts that are happening at an ever-increasing pace. It is an education that sets children up to succeed in a world where more than half of the jobs they will have over their careers don’t even exist yet.  In short, it is an education that provides students with the skills and competencies they need to thrive in the 21^st century. The 21^st century teacher is the key player.

Collaborative Learning

An effective 21^st century teacher must be able to collaborate and work well within a team and most of all foster collaboration among the learners. The key element of collaboration is willingness, all participants have to be willing to sacrifice parts of their own ideas and adopt others to get results. To foster collaboration in learners the teacher should adopt the following:

• Enable students to work together when the activity requires them to work in pairs or groups to either discuss an issue, solve a problem or create a product. The groups should incorporate individual outside the classroom such us other classes, schools, community or experts. Collaboration can take place either face to face or remotely via the technology.
• The teacher should ensure that there is shared responsibility in the groups and collective ownership of the work and the outcomes. Each individual on the team is responsible for a task that he or she must complete in order for the group to do its work. The role of each student on the team is essential.

Project-based Learning/Creativity

The teaching with textbooks is not of 21^st century teacher, as today’s students have access to authentic resources on the web, experts anywhere in the world, and peers learning the same subject somewhere else. The teacher should allow learners by guiding them to have their own learning space; identify problems or driving questions, do research, collaborate with experts and come up with final project using resources available to them. This skill empowers students to see concepts in a different light, which leads to innovation. Learning creativity as a skill requires learner to understand that the way of doing things is continuously changing. To achieve project based learning/creativity the teacher should adopt the following:

• Develop tasks that are challenging to learners by either developing a solution to a problem, completing a task without instructions on how to do it or designing a complex product that meet a set of requirements.
• The teacher should ensure that the problems being solved by learners are real word problems and solutions can be applied in the real world.
• Innovation requires putting students’ ideas or solutions into practice in the real world The teacher should encourage, support and offer guidance to the learners to apply their solutions in the real world

Skilled Communication

It is crucial for students to learn how to effectively convey ideas among different personality types, which makes them valuable parts of their teams. Without understanding proper communication, students in the 21^st Century will lack a pivotal skill to progress their careers. Students can enhance their communication with the support of the teacher by adopting the following in the learning process:

• Skilled communication is achieved when student must produce communication that represents a set of connected ideas, not a single simple thought.  In written work, it is the equivalent of one or more complete paragraphs rather than a sentence or phrase. In electronic or visual media, extended communication might take the form of a sequence of video, a podcast, or a page of a presentation that connects or illustrates several ideas. 
• The teacher should encourage the students in class presentations or on any form of communication during the learning process to use more than one form of communication media. For example, students might create a presentation that integrates video and text, or embed a photograph.
• The teacher should emphasize on supporting evidence from the learners communication/presentation. Students must explain their ideas or support their thesis with facts or examples.
• The communication from the learner should be design to fit the targeted audience and not general. To qualify for this idea, the learning activity might specify a particular audience, or students might be allowed to select their own audience.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the most important quality for someone to have. It is the mechanism that identify problems and replaces them with solution/innovation. It is what helps students be creative or solve problems when they don’t have a teacher. Critical thinking happens when students do more than reproduce what they have learned; they go beyond knowledge reproduction to generate ideas and understandings that are new to them. The teacher should create learning activity that would allow for critical thinking. Critical thinking emphasizes the following skills:

• Analysis: the ability to collect and process information and knowledge.
• Synthesis: identifying the relationships between two or more ideas
• Interpretation: concluding what the meaning of processed information is.
• Inference: assessing whether the knowledge you have is sufficient and reliable.
• Evaluation: the ability to make decisions based on the available information.
• Explanation: communicating your findings and reasoning clearly.

Self-Regulation Learning

Self-regulation learning is recurring process, where the student plans for a task, monitors their performance, and then reflects on the outcome. The cycle then repeats as the student uses the reflection to adjust and prepare for the next task. Teaching self-regulation to learners can be a bit challenging, it takes time and practice to gain effective habits. Initial efforts must be refined based on student’s feedback, performance, and personal reflection. The teacher should adapt the following practices to successes in self-regulation learning:

• Guide learners’ self-beliefs, goal setting, and expectations
• Promote reflective dialogue
• Provide corrective feedback
• Help learners make connections between abstract concepts
• Help learners link new experiences to prior learning

Integration of ICT

Technology in the classroom is moving at a rapid pace and the 21^st century teacher moves right along with it. In order to be able to offer students choices, is having one’s own hands-on experience and expertise will be useful. A 21^st century teacher does not have to have a class set of tablets in every child’s hand, or the latest Smart-board. But they can have a nice balance of educational tools in their classroom. As 21^st century teacher one should also teach learners on the basic information they need to understand what gadgets perform what tasks and why. This understanding removes the intimidating feeling that technology tends to have. After all, if you don’t understand how technology works, it might as well be magic. This will allow learners to use technology to complete all or part of the learning activity.

Adaptive/Flexible

A 21^st century teacher is able to adapt to whatever comes their way. To look at their practice and adapt based on the needs of their students. They must be able to adapt their teaching style to include different modes of learning, adapt when a lesson fails, and adapt to new technology. They must be able to adapt to the curriculum and the requirements and be able to use their imagination to teach in creative ways.

Be Vulnerable

The first step to encouraging students to be vulnerable is by being vulnerable in the classroom as a teacher. In short to prevent disengagement, the teacher must absolutely stop pretending that he knows all the answers or he doesn’t make mistakes. As a teacher accept mistakes in class and even use your own personal life failures as examples when teaching.

Advocate for the Profession

The perception of the teaching profession in most countries is negative and has discourage most learners in joining the profession. As a 21^st century teacher should be able to stand out and advocate for the profession. Take initiative & become a mentor, support or simply an ear to listen to your students. Reach out and offer your time to advocate and provide advice on teaching as a profession.