How can we prepare our learners for their future?

We all know that the world is changing very fast and are highly aware that we need to prepare our learners for the future but how to? Perhaps one of the questions to ask is what skills would the learners need to succeed in the future. The critical skills needed would be Creativity, Critical Thinking Skills, Communication & Collaboration skills.

From the few sessions that I have attended thus far, the key learning points that I have drawn are as follows:

·                    Independent learning comes only with ownership of the learning. How as teachers could help our learners to own the learning? Help the learners to see the relevance in what they are learning which will spark of their curiosity to want to find out more. These “Relevance” message has been repeated many times across the different lectures and also during our School Visits at Presidio Middle School and Napa New Tech High.

·                    Assessment drives the curriculum & instructions. Structure drives behaviour and assessment likewise will drive the teaching pedagogies. I have gleaned from the sessions that web2.0 promotes self-directed and collaboration learning. Currently, we are still at web1.0 and not many teachers are making use of the web 2.0 tools as assessment. Useful website to explore: http://www.curriculum21.com/home and hopefully, it will encourage more teachers to make use of web2.0 as a teaching tool.

·                    Teacher is the key to students’ achievement, hence the need to Promote Professional Interactions. What we want for our learners, would also mean what we want for our teachers. Eg, if we want our pupils to be critical thinkers and able to ask questions then we also need our teachers to model these questioning skills in their teaching. One of my key takeaways would be that teachers need to plan and prepare the questions ahead, it cannot be left by chance or incidental approach during teaching. Our Time-tabled Time is a good platform for teachers to come together to plan lesson and also to discuss on Higher Order Thinking (HOT) questions to stimulate students’ thinking.