Equipping Students For the Future

Education is a key factor for success. According to the recent surveys of private sector companies, students are not adequately prepared for the workforce both in terms of hard and soft skills.  The professors at the college entry level assume that the students are tech savvy, capable of multitasking, comfortable with using technology in classrooms however the students are easily distracted. The students need to be taught how to validate, synthesize and document information which are the basics to be taught in school before students graduate.  

Many educators tend to blame the students if they don’t learn well. Perhaps it is about time that we change the way we teach. In this day and age for learning to be meaningful, it has to be active and interactive. On June 30^th 2016 , World Economic Forum published the ten key skills people will need to enter the workforce by 2020 are –

Cognitive Flexibility

Negotiation

Service Orientation

Judgement and Decision Making

Emotional Intelligence

Coordinating with others

People Management

Creativity

Critical Thinking

Complex problem solving

The key challenges are how schools are going to develop the curriculum embedding the above mentioned skills ensuring the students are armed with right knowledge and appropriate skills. Above all how proficiently the teachers will be able to strategize their instructional design to meet the demands of the 21^st century?
https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/10153567832406479/?pnref=story 

Future of Education

FUTURE OF EDUCATION

Traditional teachers are increasingly losing the education war because the teenage students are distracted by the social world. Of course the students don’t see it the same way. They never wanted the endless instruction on topics that are irrelevant to them. They desperately want to learn, but what they want to learn about is their social world- how it works, how they can secure a place in it that will maximize their social rewards and minimize their social pain. (Leiberman 2013:282)

Demographic dynamics and technology are set to revolutionize the workplace. Futurists predict that anything which is “routine” will be automated, virtualized or carried out by robots. Gerd Leonhard, a futurist and author says that “there is one key word that you would not want in future is routine. If your job is routine and it doesn’t matter if it’s cognitive or manual- it will be automated.” And if teachers are to succeed through this disruptive change they need to understand the wide gap which exists between the educational systems and the demands of the workforce.

It remains to be seen how educators on one hand adapt the technology within the classrooms and on the other how futurists are pondering on whether the advances in technology will create more jobs than they destroy. What futurist Leonhard predicts is that large scale job losses will definitely lead to major social and cultural changes. Could it be that with the technological advances in the next decade or so we do not have fixed work force?

If we were to draw an analogy of what the flexible work force would look like- a ‘Film Crew” is an ideal model which comes to mind, where a set of specialists are brought together for the duration of the project and then disbanded.

As educators we need to evaluate how are we evolving and revolutionizing teaching methods and curriculums to meet the demands of the future and curriculums constantly to keep our students engaged.

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