The kinds of things people were learning 50 years ago is not going to prepare our kids for the world.
Nancy Steinhauer,
The key to ensuring kids are prepared for the unpredictable world that awaits is to make sure today’s schools allow them to take risks, try new things and learn how to adapt to change, says educator Nancy Steinhauer.
The Toronto school principal teamed up with lawyer and education activist Kelly GallagherMackay to lay out their vision for the future of education in the newly released book Pushing the Limits: How Schools Can Prepare Our Children Today for the Challenges of Tomorrow (Doubleday Canada, 2017). They profile several public schools already championing harderto-measure skills, including high-order thinking and socialemotional learning.
“The kinds of things people were learning 50 years ago, 75 years ago, in school, that’s not going to prepare our kids for the world that they live in,” she says.
Steinhauer documents the five years she spent at an underperforming school where many students were refugees and new immigrants, and most lived in poverty.
She says a shift in priorities — and an influx of funds and professional development through a program targeting inner-city schools — helped turn things around in a case that’s not isolated.
Q I hear a lot about teaching the four C’s — critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. How broadly embraced is that?
A Many of the provincial systems are really looking at that whole idea of 21st-century learning: What do our kids need to know to thrive in a world that is constantly changing? It’s common knowledge most of the jobs that will be the best jobs in 10 years don’t even exist right now. So it’s not enough to teach children basic skills anymore. … Students need to learn about creativity, about problem-solving, they need to learn emotional intelligence, they need to learn how to think about thinking, learn about learning.
Q Does this conflict with the simultaneous push for STEM education, which emphasizes science, technology, engineering and math?
A I don’t think it has to be opposed at all. STEM-based learning is about thinking about problems and coming up with solutions and design-thinking and using the tools that we have to try to be creative … It’s harder to measure creativity, it’s harder to measure social and emotional learning, but what we were finding as we were talking to people — especially to kids who had really extraordinary experiences in schools — was that it was that social-emotional learning piece, it was what they learned about themselves, it was opportunities to think creatively that really kept them motivated.
Q Does any province measure creativity?
A Most provinces as far as I understand are relying on achievement data for the most part. (As part of the Model Schools for Inner Cities program), we were also looking at things like resilience surveys and the Early Development Instrument, which measures a number of things including social-emotional factors in young children. And we were using parent surveys, student surveys, teacher surveys, staff surveys. We were able to see, for example, that our resilience scores were really high. Our kids were feeling really secure in the school. Our parents’ satisfaction surveys were extremely high, they were feeling really good. We discovered that the vast majority of our parents had expectations that their children would continue beyond high school to post-secondary education. That was really a good thing to know.
Q How would a parent be able to evaluate a school on those terms? That information isn’t necessarily readily available.
A Parents can have a lot of power in their own school system. If they let their educational leaders know we value more than just academic achievement, (that) we also want to know how you are addressing these needs of teaching creativity, teaching problem-solving, (then) people pay attention to that.