Are we teaching our students the skills they need for their future?
Do we know what these are and if we do, are we aligning these to our curriculum? Are we making the shift necessary for this to happen?
Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard’s Change Leadership Group has identified what he calls a “global achievement gap,” which is the leap between what even our best schools are teaching, and the must-have skills of the future: * Critical thinking and problem-solving * Collaboration across networks and leading by influence * Agility and adaptability * Initiative and entrepreneurialism * Effective oral and written communication * Accessing and analyzing information * Curiosity and imagination
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS2PqTTxFFc&w=420&h=315]
Here are the 10 future work skills identified by The Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Institute.
- Sense Making
- Novel and Adaptive Thinking
- Transdisciplinary
- Social Intelligence
- New Media Literacy
- Computational Thinking
- Cognitive Load Management
- Design Management
- Cross Cultural Competence
- Virtual Collaboration
For teacher librarians, these skills clearly identify our areas of expertise at a time when some principals are making decisions to reduce staffing in school libraries, or replace teacher librarians with librarians or technicians, indicating their loss of faith that teacher librarians are an essential part of the teaching staff. Our strength lies in working with teachers to embed these skills in student learning, to encourage collaborative platforms and relational learning through the connections made possible by social media platforms, to embed critical, digital and information literacies into student learning.
Read more about the skills our students must have for their future here and here. Please share more if you have them.
One thought on “Are we teaching our students the skills they need for their future?”