5 future skills our students will need

Ken Beatty
A silhouette of several buisness people stood by a desk, in the background are skyscrapers.

Elevator to the future: English skills

¡°Would it be safer to take the stairs?¡±

The question came to mind in Montreal last week when I visited a 1929 apartment building and came face-to-face with its equally ancient caged elevator. An elderly woman shooed me inside the polished brass and oak confection and, as we ascended, confided that there was still an elevator operator when she first moved into the building.

Ah, an elevator operator ¨C it¡¯s a career and skill set we¡¯ve almost forgotten. But just as hard as it is for us to imagine doing a job that only involves opening and closing doors and pressing buttons, an elevator operator from 50 years ago would find it impossible to imagine much of today¡¯s work. And, in turn, we may not be able to imagine the jobs our students will have in the coming years. Fortunately, imagining the education that will take our students there is less difficult.

To educate today¡¯s students, we should heed the advice of Ali ibn Abi Talib (599-661 CE): ¡°Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time¡±.

Today¡¯s students are different in five key ways: visual learning, collaboration, critical and creative thinking, digital involvement, and control of their learning.

1. Developing visual literacy

Today¡¯s learners grew up with the rich multimedia of computers and are used to exploring ideas independently. They¡¯re less dependent on teachers for the information they want, and often find it in surprising ways. For example, avoiding dictionary definitions and instead doing image searches to understand new words.

What you can do

Develop students¡¯ visual literacy. Do they know the differences between bar charts, pie charts and Gantt charts? Can they interpret the data in line graphs and Venn diagrams? Can they apply what they know to present and explain ideas in dynamic ways? Expose students to a range of visual formats, from illustrations to diagrams, and give them tasks where they have to use them.

2. Encouraging collaboration

Schools were traditionally organized around competition, aimed at separating the most able students from the least able. But teachers today can¡¯t ignore those who seem less able; we need to be more like doctors, devoting the greater part of our time and resources to those who need it most. Our aim should be to bring everyone up to the same level.

What you can do

Collaboration involves offering more tasks where students can help each other, particularly getting more able and less able students to work together to benefit from peer teaching. More able students may resist, but remind them that one who teaches learns twice.

3. Facilitating critical and creative thinking

Critical thinking has become far more important than schools¡¯ traditional focus on memorization. Employers expect that students will become problem solvers. Gone is the factory model of employees doing repetitive jobs; those are now more efficiently and effectively done by machines.

What you can do

Traditionally, teachers have asked questions for which they know the answer and for which there is only one answer. Try to ask more open-ended questions for which there may be multiple answers. Ask questions to which you don¡¯t know the answer. Encourage creativity. Ask students to brainstorm, and then use analytical skills to determine the best answers.

4. Leveraging the digital environment

Today¡¯s students are digital natives. They first learned to type on digital keyboards and, since then, have embraced phones as a key resource. English writer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said there were two kinds of knowledge: knowing a thing or knowing where to find it. For today¡¯s students, finding information has never been easier.

What you can do

Many teachers dread phones in the classroom, but they are powerful computers that let students connect to online learning resources and learn what they want, when, and where they want. Steer students toward using their phones to improve their English but also teach them to be reflective about the sources of the information they choose to use.

5. Offering autonomy

Today¡¯s students are too often referred to as clients, suggesting that the teacher-student relationship is no more than a business arrangement. It¡¯s wrong to think so but, at the same time, we recognize that today¡¯s students are savvy about assessing what they need to learn and how they would prefer to learn it. They have grown up with ideas about multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1993).

What you can do

Open a dialog with your students to see if they have learning preferences and whether these preferences can be accommodated in the classroom. Give more individual projects letting students choose topics based on their needs and interests.

Even among elevator operators, there were those who were better or worse at their jobs. Perhaps the greatest skill for students today is a sense that they need to take responsibility and examine the needs of any task or career that interests them, and figure out how to learn the skills that will get them there.

Reference

Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice. New York: Basic Books.

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  • A young woman sat in a library with headphones around her neck reading a book

    Does progress in English slow as you get more advanced?

    By Ian Wood
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    Why does progression seem to slow down as an English learner moves from beginner to more advanced skills?

    The journey of learning English

    When presenting at ELT conferences, I often ask the audience ¨C typically teachers and school administrators ¨C ¡°When you left home today, to start your journey here, did you know where you were going?¡± The audience invariably responds with a laugh and says yes, of course. I then ask, ¡°Did you know roughly when you would arrive at your destination?¡± Again the answer is, of course, yes. ¡°But what about your students on their English learning journey? Can they say the same?¡± At this point, the laughter stops.

    All too often English learners find themselves without a clear picture of the journey they are embarking on and the steps they will need to take to achieve their goals. We all share a fundamental need for orientation, and in a world of mobile phone GPS we take it for granted. Questions such as: Where am I? Where am I going? When will I get there? are answered instantly at the touch of a screen. If you¡¯re driving along a motorway, you get a mileage sign every three miles.

    When they stop appearing regularly we soon feel uneasy. How often do English language learners see mileage signs counting down to their learning goal? Do they even have a specific goal?

    Am I there yet?

    The key thing about GPS is that it¡¯s very precise. You can see your start point, where you are heading and tell, to the mile or kilometer, how long your journey will be. You can also get an estimated time of arrival to the minute. As Mike Mayor mentioned in his post about what it means to be fluent, the same can¡¯t be said for understanding and measuring English proficiency. For several decades, the ELL industry got by with the terms ¡®beginner¡¯, ¡®elementary¡¯, ¡®pre-intermediate¡¯ and ¡®advanced¡¯ ¨C even though there was no definition of what they meant, where they started and where they ended.

    The CEFR has become widely accepted as a measure of English proficiency, bringing an element of shared understanding of what it means to be at a particular level in English. However, the wide bands that make up the CEFR can result in a situation where learners start a course of study as B1 and, when they end the course, they are still within the B1 band. That doesn¡¯t necessarily mean that their English skills haven¡¯t improved ¨C they might have developed substantially ¨C but it¡¯s just that the measurement system isn¡¯t granular enough to pick up these improvements in proficiency.

    So here¡¯s the first weakness in our English language GPS and one that¡¯s well on the way to being remedied with the Global Scale of English (GSE). Because the GSE measures proficiency on a 10-90 scale across each of the four skills, students using assessment tools reporting on the GSE are able to see incremental progress in their skills even within a CEFR level. So we have the map for an English language GPS to be able to track location and plot the journey to the end goal.

    ¡®The intermediate plateau¡¯

    When it comes to pinpointing how long it¡¯s going to take to reach that goal, we need to factor in the fact that the amount of effort it takes to improve your English increases as you become more proficient. Although the bands in the CEFR are approximately the same width, the law of diminishing returns means that the better your English is to begin with, the harder it is to make further progress ¨C and the harder it is to feel that progress is being made.

    That¡¯s why many an English language-learning journey gets abandoned on the intermediate plateau. With no sense of progression or a tangible, achievable goal on the horizon, the learner can become disoriented and demoralised.

    To draw another travel analogy, when you climb 100 meters up a mountain at 5,000 meters above sea level the effort required is greater than when you climb 100 meters of gentle slope down in the foothills. It¡¯s exactly the same 100 meter distance, it¡¯s just that those hundred 100 meters require progressively more effort the higher up you are, and the steeper the slope. So, how do we keep learners motivated as they pass through the intermediate plateau?

    Education, effort and motivation

    We have a number of tools available to keep learners on track as they start to experience the law of diminishing returns. We can show every bit of progress they are making using tools that capture incremental improvements in ability. We can also provide new content that challenges the learner in a way that¡¯s realistic.

    Setting unrealistic expectations and promising outcomes that aren¡¯t deliverable is hugely demotivating for the learner. It also has a negative impact on teachers ¨C it¡¯s hard to feel job satisfaction when your students are feeling increasingly frustrated by their apparent lack of progress.

    Big data is providing a growing bank of information. In the long term this will deliver a much more precise estimate of effort required to reach higher levels of proficiency, even down to a recommendation of the hours required to go from A to B and how those hours are best invested. That way, learners and teachers alike would be able to see where they are now, where they want to be and a path to get there. It¡¯s a fully functioning English language learning GPS system, if you like.