Cultivating Our Students’ Skills

Haydee B. Roque

Skills such as resilience, communication, proactivity, and leadership are just some of the areas that are essential when facing the challenges of the 21st century work landscape, but it’s not always clear how to teach these.

Sustaining young students’ ability when facing big challenges and equipping them with the skillsets they’ll need to prepare for the unseen future is a significant task. It may seem difficult, but as their teachers, we can support and nurture them so can succeed in their future career journey.

As our world continue to evolve, our leaners need new skills for the current and future workplace that will make them ready to collaborate with others, not only in their own classroom or workplace but potentially with others. Encouraging students to work together on a creative challenge, and allowing them to reflect on the learnings they take from the exercise, will help them better understand what it means to be a part of an increasingly collaborative and connected planet.

Moreover, aside from equipping them with academic knowledge, we can also help build their evaluation and analysis. New information is being discovered and shared at an ever-growing rate. Studies show that 50 percent of the facts students are memorising today will no longer be accurate or complete in the near future. Students need to know not only how to find accurate information, but also how to critically analyze its reliability and usefulness. Building research-based tasks and projects into our teaching will provide a basis to develop this essential 21st century skillset for work.

Aside from this, we must teach our students tolerance and resilience. To successfully work in a growing collaborative and global community, employers will be looking for candidates who show an ability and openness to communicate with unfamiliar cultures and ideas. To build these skills, students will need exposure to open discussions and experiences that can help them feel comfortable communicating with others.

As their second parent, let us help our students learn through their strengths. We are all born with active minds that want to learn. We are also born with different strengths, and by growing the strengths we best identify with, we can better feed that appetite for learning.

To conclude, one size certainly doesn’t fit all when it comes to developing young minds. It can be challenging to tailor the curriculum for each individual, but by looking ahead, we can start to pinpoint elements of our classes which will appeal to particular students’ strengths and interests. By using effective techniques to bring these particular topics to the forefront of our teaching, we can start to tap into our students’ natural curiosity.

By using what they learn repeatedly and in different, personally meaningful ways, students will find it much easier to retain and retrieve what they learn in our class. It will also help them better understand the importance of certain skills in their everyday and future lives.

--oOo-

The author is Teacher I at Talba Elementary School