Building Schools for the Future
Building Schools for the future is about balancing learning, curriculum and developing. As parents think about the skills you left your school with and whether they helped you in your life as an adult. In short, did they prepare you for the Future?
The Future our children will be stepping into is uncertain and complex. It will be like nothing we have known. Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and pervasive technologies will alter the job market. According to a CNN report in 2017, for children joining KG today - 65% of the jobs they will step into have yet to be invented.
What will they be doing - maybe roles linked to artificial intelligence and machine-learning and robotics. Or maybe nanotechnology, 3-D printing, or genetics and biotechnology. We don’t know but we do know that rapid technological change is changing the skill requirements for most jobs.
So how do we design a school curriculum that will deliver the leaders of tomorrow and equip our children with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the future? We need our educators to teach skills for jobs we don’t know exist yet, solving problems we’ve never seen before and won’t see for years.
So what are the kinds of jobs that could exist? Extinction Revivalists - Robotic Earthworm Drivers - Time Hackers - Amnesia Surgeons Mass Energy Storage Developers and Plant Educators are some indicators that Google threw up.
What skills will industry leaders be looking for? Design skills and disruptive thinking is mandatory at Google & IBM. Collaboration is critical. No one works solo. They also look for creators, makers and problem solvers. Some of the key skills in high demand are leadership, collaboration, creativity and innovation.
Could robots replace teachers? Technology is now fully woven into the curriculum and we are seeing greater use of robotics within the school, but perhaps the best classroom technology will continue to be the teacher who will build the human connections that are at the core of these skill areas. Can robots teach collaboration, creativity and disruptive thinking? Not yet!
Schools struggle to develop a curriculum that helps teachers teach the skills of the future. And therein lies the problem. Will children be equipped with the skills to solve the problem of global warming in a curriculum that omits design, technology and arts?
Sir Ken Robinson calls for a new Balance – one that builds a creative and cultural education around the core curriculum of Language Arts, Maths, Science and The Humanities. Over a number of years the balance in education appears to have been lost. We force young people to choose between the arts and sciences at the age of 14!
So here are some Mantras for the future for Parents & Schools
Academic ability alone will no longer guarantee success or personal achievement. While employers continue to demand high academic standards, they also now want more. They want people who can adapt, see connections, innovate, communicate and work with others. These are skills schools need to build into their Teaching & Learning processes.
The creative industries will continue to thrive – they will interact with innovations in science and technology. So we need to place emphasis on the Arts and build creative thinking processes into our Teaching & Learning
Most young people will change not just jobs, but occupations, several times in their working lives. There is a growing emphasis on freelance work, short contracts, self-employment and entrepreneurial ability. So adaptability and resilience is KEYEvery single person in the world of work will need the ability to change, the self-confidence to learn new things and the capacity for overview. The curriculum, therefore, calls for breadth, for programs for the emotional wellbeing of our children which foster a strong sense of self and above all, resilience.
We will have to stop viewing children through the lens of academic ability alone and appreciate that each individual has highly developed alternative intellectual abilities. A child with poor spatial abilities may have high linguistic or aural intelligence. Some children have particular capacities for mathematics, for music, for dance, for languages, or for several of these. When children discover their real strengths, there can be a dramatic change in their overall motivation in education.
Physical education is central to this balance in the curriculum. It contributes directly to the physical health of young people. There is now evidence that physical education can also enhance creative processes by quickening concentration and mental agility.
Finally - let’s be prepared for a life of learning because our learning will never end. We need to prepare our children to adapt and continuously learn because whatever the world looks like in 2030 we need to be willing to acquire new skills and experiences to prepare for 2050, and beyond.
