Sandy Hooda

As educators and parents, we are striving to prepare our children for the ‘real world’. A world that exists beyond the comfort of our homes and the walls of the classrooms. While we are ensuring children learn how to read, write, memorize, count and calculate we are overlooking a large blind spot. In the not so distant future, almost 50% of the jobs of the world will vanish and many of the remaining jobs will evolve. The residual jobs shall require a very different range of skills. Therefore we need to urgently ensure our children develop these (less tangible but vital) skills.

Bridging the Gap between Academics and Job-readiness for the Workplaces of the Future

India is experiencing the highest unemployment rates in 45 years. India’s private sector is struggling to find entry-level talent. Recruiters and HR managers agree the main reason for the struggle we are witnessing today is the wide gap between theoretical knowledge and skills required for job readiness. True that India’s literacy levels have indeed increased over the last few years however more and more graduates are graduating with professional degrees and certificates without the right skills needed for the workplace.

In my interactions with parents, I (Sandy Hooda, Co-Founder — VEGA SCHOOLS) often find they do not yet know about the power of PBL, or problem-based learning. Parents and sometimes even educators view PBL with curiosity, however the reality is that PBL is the optimal educational pedagogy for the 21st century, and is changing education the world.

Introduced nearly half-a-century ago, PBL is a teaching strategy that prepares learners for the challenges of real life. It’s a research-oriented learning process, where children are in the driver’s seat, they are at the center of learning. They don’t just follow instructions from an adult in a classroom-setting. Instead, children ask questions, discover answers, solve problems and tackle real challenges being faced by their community and the larger society.

Learners solve problems by imagining, investigating, evaluating, designing, inventing, collaborating, and communicating. With the world advancing at a rapid pace into the 21st century, PBL is by far the most effective teaching method for future-thinking learners.

Schools have a responsibility to teach learners, as much as knowledge, skills they will require in the real world. In a changing and challenging world, schools must help students emerge as young adults with an array of diverse, real-world skills like imagination and creativity, complex problem solving, entrepreneurship and ownership, getting along with others and resilience.

This presents a significant challenge. How do we test if our children’s school education has indeed equipped them with real-world skills? While it’s easy to test a child’s capability in math, reading, writing and science, it’s not possible to evaluate real-world skills with conventional assessment methods.

Given that employers require a very different set of skills than those taught at schools, how do we check if our children are on the right track? In this article, I explore — authentic assessment. It’s an emerging assessment practice that enables educators to test a child’s real-world skills.

“A guide on the side and not a sage on the stage” is a popular quote that is often used when speaking about teachers of the 21st century. Teachers of today need to break-free from the shackles of the industrial-era style of teaching. They need to evolve. They need to be modern, adaptive, and forward-thinking to equip Generation Alpha or the iGeneration (children born between 2010 and 2025) prepare for the paradigm changes of tomorrow.

The fulcrum of education has always been, and will always be teachers. Teaching in the 21st century is a whole lot different phenomenon from what it was a few decades ago. With children having access to enormous content thanks to lightning-fast technologies anywhere and anytime, the teacher should no longer be a dispenser of content and information. The teacher has to don several hats and transform into an educator, a facilitator, an integrator and above all, a trusted collaborator.

So, what does being a teacher in the 21st century mean? Let’s explore the 5 key characteristics of what it takes to be a teacher for the iGeneration.

Create Learners who are “life-ready”!

In the uncertain and complex world of the future, the only constant is — change. More than memorizing science and math formulas, young children should be taught the art of — how to adapt and thrive in the continually evolving world of tomorrow.

McKinsey Global Institute reports that by 2030, robots and AI would have replaced one-fifth of the global workforce. Industry analyzers assure us that for every job taken over by machines, new ones will be created. But, the big question is — what are the new roles likely to be, and how should we prepare our children for the challenging workplace of tomorrow?

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, recently announced on his 55th birthday that he is stepping down from the post of Chairman to return to his first love — teaching. However, this time, he wants to do things differently. He states that the things we’re teaching our children today are things from the past 200 years — it’s all knowledge-based. It doesn’t prepare them for a future where they have to co-exist with machines.

Ma states that our children shouldn’t be competing with machines based on knowledge. Instead, we should teach our children the skills and values that machines cannot possess. He goes on to state that qualities like independent thinking, empathy, teamwork will be the most prized skills a few years down the line. It is what will make our children irreplaceable in the workplace of the future. He goes on to state that creative skills like — arts, painting, music, sports — are what will make them different.