Creating Leaders for the future
As an educator, I am charged with two responsibilities. OK, probably more than that, but I am gong to focus on two today. The first is the obvious one. I have the duty to impart information to the students and help them gain a certain level of competency with that material. In my case, that would be the ability to use the Spanish language. The second responsibility is harder. I must develop the future leaders of the world and equip them with skills and abilities that will help them navigate life beyond college. Teaching them to succeed in the future using technology and ideas that haven’t been invented or thought of yet involves much more than just the ability to correctly conjugate verbs and form a coherent sentence. I need to teach them to recognize and be able to obtain the knowledge and skills that they will need even if those skill sets don’t yet exist. I hope you will help me in this endeavor to bring up incredible leaders for our future!
I think it’s about teaching critical thinking skills, more than anything.
The ability to weigh information, organize it, and then synthesize it and apply it. The tools can change, and certainly there are plenty of kids today who’ve never seen a card catalogue, much less used one to find anything, but the basic intellectual process hasn’t changed at all.
Training kids to think critically means expecting both more and less from them than just an accurate regurgitation of the lesson. It’s teaching them to be creative with the knowledge they’ve accumulated.
I don’t think we need to worry about future technology at all. If we’ve taught them to think, they’ll be fine.
Meg,
Thanks for the response! You are spot on! It is also important to teach them to learn on their own without a teacher.