Molding Skillfull Learners Who Are Ready For Tomorrow's Challenges

Haydee D. Aguilar

Resilience, communication, proactivity, and leadership are just some of the skills that are crucial when facing the demands of the 21st century job landscape. As teachers, it’s not always clear how to teach these. Sustaining young learner’s effort when facing great challenges and equipping them with the skillsets they’ll need to prepare for the unseen future is a significant task. While it can be a daunting one, there are many ways we, as their teachers, can support our students on their future career journey. One of the most important things we can cultivate in them is how they can collaborate with others. Young people 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 across the world. 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 world. Furthermore, it’s important that we help improve their evaluation and analysis. New information is being discovered and shared at an ever-growing rate. Predictions show that 50 percent of the facts students are memorizing 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. To successfully work in a growing collaborative and global community, employers will be looking for prospects 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. Class debates are one of the effective ways of showing students open mindsets. Lastly, it’s crucial that we help students learn through their strengths. We are all born with brains that want to learn. We’re also born with different strengths, and by growing the strengths we best identify with, we can better feed that appetite for learning. 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, you can start to pinpoint elements of your classes which will appeal to particular students’ strengths and interests. 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 the class. It will also help them better understand the importance of certain skills in their everyday and future lives.

--oOo-

The author is Teacher III at Potrero Elementary School - Bacolor South District