Preparing Students for the Future

Jerica C. Jorge

Traditional teaching has been always been confined in the classroom. Teachers teach students how to write, read and calculate. W e also teach our students teamwork and critical thinking. But, are these skills enough for them to survive in the real world?

These skills may not be enough for our students. So, we teachers, are challenged with preparing our students for the unpredictable future.

Aside from classroom skills, it is also important to teach our students critical thinking and problem solving skills by prompting our students to see problems from different perspectives and formulate solutions by themselves. The ability to think and act quickly will be a very useful tool for students in the future.

In preparing students for the future, collaboration across networks and leading by influence are crucial to teach. To achieve these skills, facilitating typical teamwork tasks will not suffice. Instead of simply getting into a group and splitting the tasks with each other, students should instead be encouraged to take on different roles within their group for each task within the project. This way, students could work in a more collaborative way. These skills will be very helpful once our students enter the workplace in the real world.

Aside from collaboration skills, agility and adaptability are two other skills that we can teach to our students today, and could be of high usage to them in the future. Our students need to be comfortable with the idea of change and be willing to adapt to the changes around them. By presenting various environments to them in the classroom can help them easily adapt to changes in the real workplace in the future, or even with changes in our society.

There are still many skills that we can teach to our students to make them ready for the future. But, the ones I discussed here are the most important. W e, their teachers, have to do our best to teach them these skills.

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The author is Teacher III at Pampanga High School