Panel Discussion | What types of skills will today’s children need?

Administrators, Opinion, Teachers

On Thursday, November 12, 2009, at Lower Canada College in Montreal, Quebec, Alan November provided the keynote address before joining the panel discussion. Hosted by the ReThink IT ReFresh IT conference and moderated by Anne-Marie Kee of the Canadian Educational Standards Institute (CESI) , the panel discussed the skills that today’s children need.

What do we need to be doing today to outlast technology?

Shannon: As Alan mentioned, our attention and focus should not be so much on the technology or on the tools—the hardware and the software—but on two key things: empowerment and collaboration. And this translates into students displaying creativity and problem solving, and schools have to connect better to those elements and practices. I was asked to point to three things as a school head that we can do to develop student aptitudes:

1. Teach the teachers: I think we have to concentrate on teaching the teachers. We need to invent new priorities in the ongoing training and professional conversation about teaching. Teachers are the engine of schools. Teachers matter more now than they ever did before. They are the important human connection to students, and administrators need to support all faculty members, but we need to reward stars because they are the agents of change. They are the leaders who truly inspire students.

2. Skill development: We, the educators, need to talk to students often about these new standards and new priorities and why they matter. We have to remember that the 21st century is not somewhere down the road, it began a whole decade ago; it is about skill development now. This conversation is not part of some dry administrative overview on school initiatives but an ongoing dialogue about what matters: collaboration, valuing creativity and initiative, and critical thinking that is active and engaging of the kids. And we need to reinforce to young people that these qualities are key to their personal development, their community development, and need to be valued in their eyes today and well into the future.

3. Global citizens: Finally, we owe it to students to nurture them as global citizens with a conscious interest in learning about the other: those who are different than themselves within close reach and those who are far away at the international level. We have to foster curiosity and interest in language and culture, and a variety of perspectives that go a long way to build bridges and to bury fear, hesitation, intolerance and ignorance born from inexperience. Technology has in many ways erased distance, but we still have to help our students to do this in reality. It is about celebrating difference as a new norm, and I think we will all benefit from that.

Ballantyne: I think that when we look around the world today, we see tremendous opportunity alongside small groups of chaos. As educators, we need to bring the real world to the classroom. Students should be able to self-direct some of their own learning, to make choices, take risks, make mistakes, experience chaos and learn how to navigate through that chaos and be able to rapidly adapt. Their learning needs to be connected to the adult world and incorporate lasting values. Technology does play an important role in the world today, and so it should be within the classroom.

Gazith: We have to help kids problem solve. We have to provide them with opportunities to be creative—creativity happens when the opportunity presents itself. We have to stop asking questions that demand answers, and we have to start helping kids to ask the right questions. And we have to really encourage them to move away from the concept of if there is a correct answer, but really be creative enough to think of questions they could be asking. Once we have taught the “how to” question, we must help them understand what’s worth debating, what’s worth arguing, what’s worth questioning. A lot of this happens when we provide kids with authentic tasks. We have to give them things to do, roles to take on that mirror what people do outside the classroom. We have to get to the core of what is important, the values are so important, and we have to ensure that they also colour outside the lines. The role of the teacher is to listen. The students are there to talk.

Rogers: Despite a somewhat stagnant provincial curriculum, one that might change every 10 years at best, and inflexible standardized exams, learners of the 21st century will need a complex skill set that will allow them to adapt to rapid changes in technology, education and society itself. In this theme, Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People notes that our students will be moving from an industrial age into a knowledge-worker age. This is a paradigm shift. To guide our students into this knowledge-worker age, in this new era, we as educators will need to provide them with a unique set of skills to ensure that they are positive members of the global community.
We need to give our students a succinct direction and a confident message. This message can come in the form of a mission statement or skill values that allow students to face challenges we do not understand and cannot even imagine. Students will learn to ask the right questions about problems they do not even know are there. True development, ingenuity, character and direction will come to these creative people who can adapt to situations and work with others in these environments.

How do we teach kids these big skills, and how do we ensure we are continuing to teach them all the way through?

Shannon: I’d go back to the teachers. We see it when we go into a classroom; a good teacher will create the energy. An effective teacher will infect the room.

Rogers: I think the question drives to heart of the sense of inquiry and when this sense of inquiry becomes dashed. The idea of inquiry is dashed when you say that differences are wrong. When you do something differently, it’s wrong. Educational teacher-based solutions to not saying that differences are wrong but that differences are acceptable is really the basis and foundation of a teaching practice called differentiation. And Tomlinson writes very long-windedly about that very fact, that kids can produce work that meets the same objectives in any number of ways. It is a way for kids to stay interested.

How do you envision your ideal classroom?

Gazith: There is an amazing amount of work that transpires before a teacher ever goes into a classroom. We want kids to constantly be talking, reading and writing. They have to be talking to one another, and the teacher has to be an expert facilitator. In the ideal classroom, students are almost oblivious to the fact that a teacher is even sitting there. We give them the problems, the tools, and let them take the leadership.

Shannon: Teaching can be a very isolating profession. Teachers by design—the way we run schools—teachers go into a room and are alone with a bunch of young people. Here, we’ve designed a model where teachers have to work together. Teachers have partners, are a part of a learning group, and we give them time to be a part of that. We find there is much more discussion of things relevant to teachers’ lives and there is much more collaboration. And when we talk about collaboration and how to get children to collaborate, we need to be role models.

November: High Tech High was built from scratch. I cannot name a single school in the United States that already existed that made the change. So, High Tech High is a few years old and they have had that vision from the start. So, they did not change. That is really important. The research is pretty clear: an organization will not change because of a great idea. An organization will change when the pressure on the outside to change is greater than the pressure on the inside to stay the same.

What do we really mean when we speak of teamwork and collaboration?

November: You do have new software, like Google Docs, that has a tool built in to know which person on the team contributed what. So you can take care of the eighth grader who comes home and says, “I did all the work.” You can just push a button and see exactly who did the work. So that is new. The other thing that fascinates me is that when the kids come home and use their computer, they are on MySpace or Facebook. The dominate choice children make when they are not in school is social interaction over the web. Developmentally, children need to feel like they belong; if they don’t, they’re in really big trouble. That is why they are doing this, trying to strengthen their relationships and their networks and common sense. In most schools, we ignore Facebook and MySpace and try to keep it out of school. There are some teachers at this school that are using something like Ning, which is a Facebook-like world, but managed by educators instead of kids. I have been fascinated to see when an educator takes the shell of Facebook and puts rigorous academic content into a community. That is when I’ve seen some really great stuff.

Gazith: Collaboration ought to happen in the classroom. Kids need to learn how to work collaboratively. I think it is a mistake to send projects home. Kids should be doing a lot more talking with each other than with the teacher. Project work should take place when the content is so dense that everybody has a real part of the project to tackle on their own.