Not Content – Get It?

Are we really preparing students for their future?

What skills are we giving children that they can really use?

I got to a point a few years ago where I would sit in the classroom, during a rare quiet pocket of the day and wonder ‘what am I doing here?’ Not in the Nietzsche existential way, or in the just-covered-nightmare-class-4 and wanna cry into my cardigan way, but in the ‘what impact am I actually having?’ way. I was pretty sure I was a good teacher – my students test scores were above average, I had a good relationship with my pupils and I could deliver content in an interesting way but I wasn’t happy.

Meanwhile, in the staff room teachers would often relate how their children achieved high scores but lacked the ability to take the initiative, to apply, to solve real problems or to organize themselves. To me these are real-life skills, skills that would later be invaluable to them! I decided that I would take a good look at my class and see how much truth there was to this, I would irresponsibly turn my current class into a group of guinea pigs for the greater good.

I organised a class test, the students had the usual two weeks notice period to study and the class passed with their usual good standard. Two weeks later I threw the same test at them. The results were bad... Children were learning for the test and then forgetting everything! I thought hard about our teaching and assessment models in school, and came to the realization that we were crafting a very efficient race of test-passing robots. We were only challenging children superficially and not scraping very far up the sides of Bloom's famous hierarchy at all.

At the same time my colleague Anne was drawing a similar conclusion. Results from a large World Economic Forum paper had been released outlining the key skills which the workforce of the future would require.

The 5 skills outlined as necessary for jobs in the future were:

Complex-problem solving

Critical Thinking

Creativity

Collaboration

Emotional Intelligence

When matching these skill sets against the opportunities afforded by our school's current curriculum, we found our provision was not attempting to meet these skill demands and worse, it was exactly the skills sets that our teachers had complained that the students lacked the most.

App designer, coder, cloud architect, social media manager, data scientist - these are among some of the most desirable and well paid jobs in modern society, yet they didn’t exist even 15 years ago. What is the best way to enable children to meet an uncertain future?

'Our world is changing rapidly and as a result desired skill sets are changing, making more traditional educational routes less and less relevant. Even the freshest teachers straight out of college are teaching with outdated methods for a future that is quickly putting distance between itself and our current education systems'.

Many countries around the world are struggling to bring their education systems up to speed with a society and job market entering a fourth industrial revolution. We realized that too much emphasis is placed upon learning content by rote and even worse learning it for a standardized test where children are judged on their ability to store information and regurgitate it at a later date. Learning facts without context or understanding of how it can be applied in the outside world is as useful as pub quiz trivia. Listen, I’m not saying content is unimportant, but we should see content assimilation as a byproduct of training skill sets not the other way around. I realised the reason for my previous unease - I was doing my job well, but the job was all wrong.

Which begs the question that all of us should ask: how are we as educators setting students up for their life? What practices are embedded in our schools that allow children to develop these vital ‘soft’ skill sets?

This was just the beginning of our realization and our journey to put our school on the right track...