Take a look at an excerpt from this month's Educational Leadership:
Perspectives / Tough Choices
Marge Scherer
Of all the courses you have taken—as a child or as an adult—which one would you say has been the most valuable to you? Would you choose the class in which you learned a skill that was useful in your future job? (Journalism 101 comes to mind—we had to memorize a stylebook). Or would you recall a class that stirred and stretched your mind? (Understanding Poetry is a book I still own). Or how about picking the class that—at the time—didn't seem worth the struggle (Principles of Accounting)?
Now list all the classes whose content you have long since forgotten. No doubt each of our lists would be different, depending on our interests, dispositions, abilities, careers, and definitions of the word valuable. Of course, the teachers who taught us those valuable, and not so valuable, classes mattered, too.
The current issue of Educational Leadership tackles an even more difficult question: What kind of classes/content knowledge/skills would our students today most benefit from? When they look back 5, 20, 50 years after high school graduation—when globalization and technology, policies and individuals have changed the world more than we or they can imagine—will our students be enthusiastically recalling their prep course for the new SAT, musing about the value of their Introduction to Robotics class, or regretting they never studied World Languages? What about their schooling today will they consider "Learning for Life"?
March 2016 | Volume 73 | Number 6
Learning for Life Pages 18-22
Four Predictions for Students' Tomorrows
Erik Palmer
To make students' futures better, we need to consider what skills they will need—and teach them.
If we really want to prepare students for life beyond school, we could begin by asking ourselves what pieces of our own education we are using now as adults. That is an edgy question, and many teachers will take offense if anyone suggests that, in spite of their personal, deep love of haiku/Shakespeare/geodes/the Articles of Confederation/cosine, most adults have never needed deep knowledge of any of those to succeed.
The truth is, many highly successful people gain success without remembering large amounts of material that they learned in school. When the Colorado Student Assessment Program was introduced, Bill Owens, the governor at the time, refused to take the test, despite being a proponent of standards and testing.1 The legislators who did take a version of the test did not do well. This can be read as criticism of the politicians behind big tests, but it is possibly more of a criticism of our curriculums.
All of us would fail most of the tests we took in school. The information we were tested on has not been relevant to our lives and has been forgotten.
Does that mean we've been teaching the wrong things? Is it possible that TheScarlet Letter and the dates of the Hundred Years War are not crucial to life after school? Heresy, right?
What parts of your education have been critical to your adult success? What do you wish you had been taught? Many adults say they wish they were better at public speaking, so let's teach more oral communication. What else? These are tough questions that, answered truthfully, could radically change what we teach.
The relevant, long-lasting lessons from our own education will likely be relevant and long-lasting for our current students. But the world our students graduate into will not look exactly like the world of 2016. We want to prepare students for their futures, which leads us to make predictions. This is a tricky business and not one with which educators have had a lot of success.
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