How do we prepare our learners for 20 years and beyond?

The robot is definitely not taking over!!! Unless we allow it to?
The radical advancement of technology has changed our mindset toward knowledge and is leading quite rapidly to interactions becoming increasingly digital with people.

Pedagogy needs to adapt in order to educate students today for the world they're poised to lead tomorrow.
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Critical thinking, collaboration, creativity, caring, and global consciousness are now becoming more important than ever. However, education should not lose sight of developing students' interpersonal communication with peers and ability to work in teams using imagination, inquiry, and curiosity with a global consciousness.

They need skills to believe that they can act and that having input into a local challenge may impact other people and cultures.

A new pedagogy is essential!
There is no doubt that with the advancement of technology, AI, changing economies, and environmental challenges, the needs of our students are very different from 20 years ago – and are very different now.

This is now a real motivation to review and develop a landscape for change while maintaining important values, relevant curriculum, and developing future skills. At the same time, we diagnose the future requirements of societies and the world.

Most important is for our learners to develop skills of self-reliance and self-regulation.

It is in schools where our students can work not only individually but also in teams, which are perhaps project inquiry-based, and get the freedom to organize their learning by working out their pathways to achieving learning objectives. This requires trust on behalf of the teacher - the ability to let go.

We all want our students to develop the maturity to make informed choices, build resilience to navigate challenges and changes, and develop the self-esteem to drive innovation. 

Education must be real…

• It has never been more important for education and curriculum to develop real-world connections as the school generation will generate impact at individual and societal levels.
• It has never been more important to provide children and young people with the freedom and mindset to take on unpredictable challenges independently and in teams which will strengthen their personalities.

Skills for the future are the now!
Leading education for a better world includes values such as empathy, living with diversity thriving on global identity, developing a real passion for whatever they do with resilience, the ability to think and act out of the box, and developing a sense of never give up which are all essential skills which will lead to entrepreneurship.

It is no longer content that is important; we are now well beyond this. Self-organization and self-optimization are now critical for this new generation.

The global climate of war and dispute across borders has demonstrated that developing learners who can interact respectfully across cultures, act in the best interests of themselves, their society, and the environment, and are empathetic with global cultures and different generations are so much more important than learning facts.

Even more critical than ever are to develop objective-driven, trustworthy, enabling, and creative individuals who can think out of the box.

This requires a paradigm shift from labeling students to believing that they can all succeed, developing trust rather than competition, and developing self-confidence and the confidence to go beyond one's limits and take risks, leading to impactful action. In addition, developing the belief that every learner has the resources within them to be successful is key.

Curriculum - no innovation required.
Most important is that any curriculum used is arranged and taught meaningfully to empower all students. This does not need innovation - it needs a different approach to teaching, where learning comes first.

Networking and developing people relationships.
Schools also have the opportunity to develop relationships with their communities.
Enormous benefits for students to:

• Learn from different generations with different perspectives and skills.
• from experts from the community and the world of work;  
• to understand that tradition is important and that innovation is inevitable
• to not forget that developing relationships between human beings is important
• to value nature and the environment
• to reduce boundaries locally and geographically

So what will education look like in 20 years? We, as educational leaders, have the power to make a difference. Once we, too, embrace the fact that it is not productive to sit in rows, lecture, and pass on information through PowerPoints, and develop more skills-based authentic assessments based on real-life applied learner evidence - then we have a vehicle to have a significant impact locally and globally.​

In 2015 I wrote an article suggesting:
"Learners should be provided with opportunities to engage and create different forms of writing, jottings, and musings and be formally assessed on an ongoing basis. The aim is to foster self-reliance, motivation led from within, and a sense of exploration. However, a tight, over-controlled curriculum hinders creativity. It strangles inspirational teachers' freedom to encourage children to link their learning to other curricular areas and their other persona, thus empowering them as enquiring learners."

It is now 2022 - 7 years later. So will we still be talking about this in 2030?

By Tassos Anastasiades