One of the basic tenets of education is that it will prepare students for life after school. Until recently, the future endeavors of our students were somewhat predictable. But now, due to the off-the-charts rate of technological change, it is likely that more than two-thirds of our elementary students who come to school next week will end up doing work that has not yet been invented. Once upon a time we used the term 21st Century Skills to describe what was needed to succeed at these unknown jobs, but since we are 11 years into that century, they are now more aptly called Next Generation Skills. So, what should we be doing to prepare our students for the unknown of tomorrow?
Several of Cathy Davidson’s recommendations in her book “Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn,” make a lot of sense to me. Here are two of them that we can easily support. The first is a no-brainer that schools need to embrace the digital world in which our students live. This does not mean teaching Photoshop instead of history. It does mean teaching a large array of digital skills and then exploiting what the digital world has to offer our classrooms. For example, student motivation is increased by assignments that are published on-line. A second recommendation is moving away from an over dependence on student assessment that is based on solitary piecework. All predictions of the future include jobs that have teams (as is the case today) of people working together. Although collaboration is an over used term in education, it is clearly a necessary piece to educating students for tomorrow.
One of our goals this year includes embedding next generation learning skills in our instruction. All of us need to embrace this. To not do so is an injustice to our students.
Beyond The Familiar Buildings
On Tuesday all of our students will again be back at school to start another school year. As I have done in the past on this first day, I will visit several of our central peninsula schools to say hello to our returning students and staff and to wish them a good year. Whenever I visit a school I am both impressed by the welcoming climate and struck by how familiar each of the buildings is. For in some ways, our buildings are very much like the schools that I attended when I was a child. But if you look beyond the facility, you will find that our teachers are approaching their jobs in a much different way than did the teachers of my youth.
Our staff recognizes the need to be a part of a learning community by regularly devoting time to collaboration. The outcome of this time working together is implementing improvements that are leading to a greater degree of student learning. Examples of this include our Seward schools ensuring that the K-12 experience is fluid and not a disjointed stop at the three buildings and Homer High School raising the bar a notch by eliminating the letter grade D-you now need a C to pass. It is great to see that each of our schools is using collaboration to free itself of some of the constraints of traditional education. So while our buildings may look similar to schools of forty year ago, what is going on inside is, in many cases, much different.