Preparing Your Students for the Challenges of Tomorrow

Right now, you have students. Eventually, those students will become the citizens -- employers, employees, professionals, educators, and caretakers of our planet in 21st century. Beyond mastery of standards, what can you do to help prepare them? What can you promote to be sure they are equipped with the skill sets they will need to take on challenges and opportunities that we can't yet even imagine?

Following are six tips to guide you in preparing your students for what they're likely to face in the years and decades to come.

1. Teach Collaboration as a Value and Skill Set Students of today need new skills for the coming century that will make them ready to collaborate with others on a global level. Whatever they do, we can expect their work to include finding creative solutions to emerging challenges.

2. Evaluate Information Accuracy 

New information is being discovered and disseminated at a phenomenal rate. It is predicted 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 

• how to find accurate information, and 
• how to use critical analysis for 
• assessing the veracity or bias and 
• the current or potential uses of new information. 

These are the executive functions that they need to develop and practice in the home and at school today, because without them, students will be unprepared to find, analyze, and use the information of tomorrow.

3. Teach Tolerance 

In order for collaboration to happen within a global community, job applicants of the future will be evaluated by their ability for communication with, openness to, and tolerance for unfamiliar cultures and ideas. To foster these critical skills, today's students will need open discussions and experiences that can help them learn about and feel comfortable communicating with people of other cultures.

4. Help Students Learn Through Their Strengths 

Children are born with brains that want to learn. They're also born with different strengths -- and they grow best through those strengths. One size does not fit all in assessment and instruction. The current testing system and the curriculum that it has spawned leave behind the majority of students who might not be doing their best with the linear, sequential instruction required for this kind of testing. Look ahead on the curriculum map and help promote each student's interest in the topic beforehand. Use clever "front-loading" techniques that will pique their curiosity.

5. Use Learning Beyond the Classroom
New "learning" does not become permanent memory unless there is repeated stimulation of the new memory circuits in the brain pathways. This is the "practice makes permanent" aspect of neuroplasticity where neural networks that are the most stimulated develop more dendrites, synapses, and thicker myelin for more efficient information transmission. These stronger networks are less susceptible to pruning, and they become long-term memory holders. Students need to use what they learn repeatedly and in different, personally meaningful ways for short-term memory to become permanent knowledge that can be retrieved and used in the future. Help your students make memories permanent by providing opportunities for them to "transfer" school learning to real-life situations.

6. Teach Students to Use Their Brain Owner's Manual
The most important manual that you can share with your students is the owner's manual to their own brains. When they understand how their brains take in and store information (PDF, 139KB), they hold the keys to successfully operating the most powerful tool they'll ever own. When your students understand that, through neuroplasticity, they can change their own brains and intelligence, together you can build their resilience and willingness to persevere through the challenges that they will undoubtedly face in the future.

How are you preparing your students to thrive in the world they'll inhabit as adults?


ORIGINAL: Edutopia 

Judy Willis MD's Profile

August 20, 2014

Redefining Blended Learning

In over a year of writing about blended learning—largely defined as using an online delivery of content to augment face-to-face instruction—I’ve heard the same, tired criticism from too many well-meaning critics. They associate the approach with 

• all parties needing to master overly intricate programming and Web 2.0 skills, 
• cheapening the traditional classroom environment and t
• he sacred student-teacher relationship.

Certainly, an advanced familiarity with all things technical comes in handy with blended learning. But set aside the 

• most engaging screencasts, 
• inspiring flipped classroom models, and 
• nifty online teaching and assessment tools. 

At its core, blended learning enhances and promotes entrepreneurship and risk-taking, while giving students the skills they need to succeed in an increasingly flat, competitive, and digital 21st century. That’s it. It doesn’t really matter how “tech savvy” you are, as long as you feel inspired to rethink how you approach teaching.

With the Internet at my students’ fingertips—with smartphones, quite literally—I’m not the only or even the best source of knowledge. What I do possess, though, and what no computer could ever replicate, is a deep passion for my subjects. I’m excited and energetic about history and journalism, and I do whatever I can to infect my students with a similar love of learning and discovery. To the best of my ability, I allow and encourage self-directed learning (which is a large component of blended learning), and I don’t penalize failure harshly, so long as I see a clear passion for improvement.

How else do I define blended learning, and how do I employ it in my classroom? Here are five approaches that every teacher should consider.

1. A large component of blended learning is self-directed learning. Whenever I assign a project or an essay, I allow students to propose their own topics. Too often, students are dependent on adults for guidance and direction. More often, we need to allow and encourage students to make their own decisions, even if that sometimes means seeing the consequences of their actions. After all, we learn equally from success and failure. At home and during class, my students explore online resources to inform their understanding. As challenging as it sometimes is, I refrain from offering immediate answers and solutions. If students can use the Internet to figure something out for themselves, they do. I might look like the bad guy, but I know it’s for their development.
2. Along these lines, I also coach and encourage students to think about what constitutes “credible information,” and where to find it online. This is a crucial skill for students to master, no matter what profession they ultimately pursue. At home, students use the Internet to learn about their own subjects, whether from videos, articles, or other media. This is blended learning, but it’s also self-directed learning. As online learning tools advance, teachers will become increasingly responsible for guiding students to appropriate sources, rather than teaching material directly themselves.
3. As I see it, a crucial part of the blended classroom environment includes teachers and students working and learning together. In my experience, this often involves using online tools. Three years ago, I worked with a former student to launch The Falconer, an online student news site. I can’t recount how many hours he and I spent watching “how-to” YouTube videos, learning not only about coding and maintaining a website, but also about recording podcasts, editing video, and streaming live events.
4. Blended learning also calls for rethinking how we assess, with or without online tools. In the near future, competency-based learning, where students progress at their own pace to master a predetermined set of skills, will lead the way. Grades will become less and less significant, eventually vanishing completely. Higher education is already making this a reality. At College for America at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), students demonstrate mastery of 120 “competencies” rather than earn class credit. “Students show their mastery by completing tasks,” SNHU President Paul J. LeBlanc told me last May. “These are real-world hypotheticals. They’re not exams, they’re not the kind of isolated assignments you might get in a college class. They’re meant to be hypothetical, which mimic more closely how that competency is used in the real world.” I give grades because I have to, but in most cases, I allow students an infinite number of retakes.
5. Similarly, blended learning also calls for rethinking how we teach, with or without online tools. Students want to see the relevance in what they learn, and that’s hard to accomplish by studying subjects in isolation. On that front, I admit that my own teaching needs improvement. I should do more to reach out to teachers in other fields who are interested in having students work on a shared project. After all, students might be told that learning about the Civil War or the quadratic formula is important, but unless they can put such knowledge to practical use, they will eventually forget it. But if students can see that a concept has multiple applications, especially to real-world scenarios, they will be much much likely to remember.

What are your thoughts on blended learning, and how it’s defined? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

ORIGINAL: Spin Edu

What Thomas L. Friedman Didn’t Report About Getting Hired by Google

Graphic: Max Griboedov / shutterstock / LinkedIn Pulse 

Last month, New York Times op-ed columnist, Thomas L. Friedman, wrote a column entitled, “How to Get a Job at Google.” He did not report that this is how to get a job anywhere.
His op-ed focused on an interview with Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. It pointed out that a high grade-point average is not a predictor of success.

Bock was quoted as saying, “…For every job, though, the No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q.

• It’s learning ability. 
• It’s the ability to process on the fly. 
• It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information. 

We assess that using structured behavioral interviews that we validate to make sure they’re predictive.”

While Google has dubbed this learning ability – we have codified it through cognitive assessments of hundreds of executives, plus guiding the hiring of thousands more as Learning Agility. In fact, I focused a post on Learning Agility in November entitled, “How to Get Hired By Twitter – Or WalMart.”

I noted then that we have found that learning agility is the leading predictor of success – No. 1 above intelligence and education.

While Friedman reported on one company, I am writing to tell you that learning agility will get you a job anywhere – from Walmart to Twitter, to Google, to Facebook, to GM, to Tata, to L’Oreal and more.

And, in today’s workplace, jobs and job responsibilities change quickly. So, the key to retaining a job and growing in your career is learning agility.

The Peter Principle, which asserts that employees will continue to get promoted until they reach their highest level of incompetence, has evolved. Today employees don’t need to get promoted to become incompetent. They will become incompetent in their current jobs if they don’t grow, adapt, and evolve.

If you stop growing and learning, your job will outgrow you. If you grow and learn faster than your job, employers will always want you.

The other thing that Friedman did not tell you is that the “learning agile” 

• uncover new challenges, 
• solicit direct feedback, 
• self-reflect, and 
• find ways to get jobs done resourcefully. 
• They see unique patterns and 
• make fresh connections that others overlook.

A Korn Ferry study of sales managers bears this out: The higher an individual’s learning agility, the more promotions he or she received during a 10-year period. Similarly, longitudinal studies observed that managers who modified their behaviors, exhibited flexibility, and accepted mistakes as part of learning new competencies, were more successful than their counterparts as they climbed the corporate ladder.

There are five factors to Learning Agility:

• mental agility, 
• self-awareness, 
• people agility, 
• change agility, and 
• results agility.

The net-net is that most successful executives are able to 

• move out of their comfort zone, 
• take risks, 
• learn from mistakes, and 
• begin anew as they encounter new assignments. 
• The successful leaders continually learn, bend, and flex as their work world changed. 

In other words, they were learning agile.

While Friedman explained how to get hired at Google, it was the tip-of-the-iceberg of how to get hired anywhere, anyplace, anytime.

Now please go back to work, make a mistake, learn from it – and then apply the learning to the next situation.

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ORIGINAL: LinkedIn

By Gary BurnisonInfluencer Chief Executive Officer at Korn/Ferry International
March 13, 2014