Learning for the Future

The literacies that our students of today will need to be productive in their lives during the 21st Century are continually changing. I recall a colleague some 25 or more years ago who was agonizing over how/what to teach to prepare his students with skills for their post-graduation years. He wondered how we could teach students what they needed to know when everything was changing so rapidly. Now, as then, I think the answer is that we need to teach the students concepts, not specific skill sets. We need to teach problem solving, analysis etc. not just how to solve for x and y, not just what Shakespeare meant in Romeo and Juliet.

Clearly the most challenging thing for educators is to ensure that the students have the ability to continually learn new things and to continually change the way they interact with people, and technology. The successful individual is the one who is able to reinvent his ways of working and interacting on a continual basis. Thus educators of today must look at curriculum and content to see whether they promote the ability to learn and to shift paradigms so that today's students are tomorrow's successful individuals.

Another major challenge is for the educator to embrace these changes in his/her own life and teaching. From "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side" to perhaps exploring together. I do not know what the future holds, but I do know it will be different, challenging and some of it will be wonderful. Some however will be useless fillers of time. The secret is to learn to discern which is which.