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Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity are vital and each plays an important role in allowing us to manage the complexity of modern day life. Beyond being relevant to success in the classroom the Four C’s are the foundations of life-long learning but I question if alone they are enough. I believe we must include a fifth; compassion.

By contrast, the report’s short-term developments, online learning and makerspaces, have a distinct yesterday’s news vibe about them. But make no mistake, they still hold some of the biggest long-term promise in the report.

six trends, six challenges, and six so-called important developments.

Take online learning and makerspaces for example, which are now expected to find their way into even more classrooms during the next year.

analysts predict that over the next five years, major American companies will need to add to their workforce a total of nearly 1.6 million employees versed in STEM: 945,000 who possess basic STEM literacy and 635,000 who demonstrate advanced STEM knowledge. Other data suggest that at least 20 percent of U.S. jobs require a high level of knowledge in at least one STEM field, according to the report.

Accessible learning activities that invite intentional play and risk.

Flexible and inclusive learning spaces. Teachers and students need flexibility in structures, equipment and access to materials in both the classroom and the natural world, as well as environments augmented by virtual and technology-based platforms.

1. Equity and diversity will not happen by accident

3. Projects should not be limited to classrooms

This idea of blending Maker opportunities with real-life activities has a strong supporter in Davis, who believes that it helps to show students the purpose of what they are doing.

Working through guided projects can help students to develop the skills that they need to further explore creatively.  It’s true that some students can just figure it out, but most need that gentle push to get them started.

Following patterns to the letter when I first got started helped me to learn the skills that I needed to be creative in my knitting.

The problem comes when all we ever do are guided projects.  Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager warn against the “20 identical birdhouses” style class projects, where there is zero creativity involved.  It’s very easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much on standards, rubrics and guided projects and zapping all the fun and creativity out, turning a makerspace into nothing more than another classroom.  It’s tempting for many educators to just print out a list of instructions, sit students down in front of a “maker kit” and check their e-mail while students work through the steps one by one.  This is obviously not what we want in our makerspaces.

If a school were to alter their approach for teaching boys, a priority would have to be placed on hands-on experiences, constructing knowledge at their pace, and not placing such a premium on assignment deadlines or the printed and written word.

Another idea is to allow students to dictate their writing using voice recognition software. This circumvents the oft-cited complaint of boys that they hate the physical act of putting words on paper. This deficit is supported by research that shows boys develop more slowly than girls in fine motor skills, a critical skill for writing.

we need to rebuild schools and make them more accommodating for how boys learn.

handwriting appears to focus classroom attention and boost learning in a way that typing notes on a keyboard does not, new studies suggest.

Students who took handwritten notes generally outperformed students who typed their notes via computer, researchers at Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles found.

Compared with those who type their notes, people who write them out in longhand appear to learn better, retain information longer, and more readily grasp new ideas

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

In psychology, there are currently two common approaches to empathy: shared emotional response and perspective taking.

Shared emotional response, or affective empathy, occurs when an individual shares another person’s emotions.

Today's classrooms are notorious for handing students the basic skills to live in the world while denying them the strength of character to transform it.

Angela Duckworth (1), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, studied (among others) the performance of West Point cadets during basic training. She discovered that the most powerful predictor of success -- acceptance into the academy -- was grit. Duckworth calls grit "the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals."

Duckworth’s research is heir to the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck (2) on mindsets. Believing that we can succeed even after suffering repeated setbacks (what Dweck calls a "growth mindset") can actually re-wire our brains -- and rewrite our fortunes.

In Age of Distraction: Why It's Crucial for Students to Learn to Focus (1), Katrina Schwartz refers to studies showing that the ability to focus on a task has been linked to future success. She quotes psychologist and author Daniel Goleman as saying, "This ability [to focus] is more important than IQ or the socio economic status of the family you grew up in for determining career success, financial success and health."

In a similar article, With Tech Tools, How Should Teachers Tackle Multitasking in Class? (2), author Holly Korbey explores research around student study habits and talks to veteran teachers about their experiences with students using technology in the classroom.

Instead, we should be deliberately teaching students how to manage their attention with their devices.