4 Skills You Need to Teach Your Students for the Future World of Work
To move ahead with times, we all need to upgrade our skill sets. To make our future knowledge more competitive, we need to go beyond the limitations of the traditional knowledge and prepare them for future industry requirements. The big question is that:
How can you contribute as a teacher to make your students future-ready?
World Economic Forum highlights the staggering gap between what people learn and what they actually need. The report on New Vision for Education throws light on the skill sets required for the future and here’s how you can help your students acquire them:
A Perfect Man-Machine Interfacing: There is no doubt that we have moved beyond Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence is where the future lies. You can learn more about the world of Artificial Intelligence with our sponsored online short course in A.I. from MIT. There are several ways AI can be incorporated into your teaching programs.
Teachers may opt for automated grading of tests with multiple-choice answer sheets or fill-in-the-blank type tests - so that they can have more time to prepare for class, work on their professional development, interact with students, and focus on other in-class activities. They may encourage students to participate in the adaptive learning programs (like Khan Academy) which respond to the student needs more appropriately or connect with them through Coursera (a massive online course provider) which alerts teachers immediately if a number of students answer a question incorrectly.
While basic AI makes our teaching effective, a wonderful way to motivate your students to learn more about the technology itself is to play science fiction movies for them. Here is an excellent article on how to explain AI to kids.
A Perfect Man-Man Interfacing: While we are looking out for smoother ways to connect with the machines, we should take our race along. Or else, we are doomed. Emotional intelligence is a required asset wherein every individual has self-awareness, has good interpersonal skills, ability to deal with emotions (both positive and negative), and so much more. When we deal with humans, we need skills to make decisions, negotiate our way forward, and have a great service orientation.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is a highly trending topic these days. Schools with students from a range of social and economic backgrounds and cultures, speaking in different languages, find that SEL concepts go a long way in creating a safe and positive learning environment for students.
Positive student-teacher relationships enable students to offer emotional support to students and foster student engagement in class. When teachers focus on nurturing interpersonal and student-centered instructional strategies, students learn to voice their opinions and learn autonomy. Activities that help students develop a sense of community can help in the prevention of bullying and encourage them to help each other.
Buck Up to a Data-Driven World: With the man-machine culmination at its peak, it is the data that drives the world today. So, we need data analysts and we need data scientists. It’s a blast of data that might just blow away the shackles of traditional knowledge. But, we need a navigator to curtail it, to give it the right direction, and to pick only what is desired (information).
This is something that an academic assignment helps the school or university students with. They help students work on their skills of data research and analysis, and effective understanding and implementation of the concepts. This being absolutely in line with what the future workforce would need to reckon with. To be agile, alert, and deal with dynamic scenarios – upon careful data analysis. Come out with different strategies that help students come up with the desired result after careful consideration of the disparate data they already have.
Data literacy can be encouraged through simple classroom conversations. You can ask questions like which country produces most Olympic gold medalists or even how many students in class know people with two thumbs in one hand. The idea should be to make children curious about the question, get them to do some investigating, go on to curate data sets, and then find out the information.
Developing Cognitive Thinking: With the fast-paced life, it is the need of the future to be quick thinkers. Deal with different scenarios in different ways and work around the challenges. One needs to be prepared for unexpected scenarios and adapt strategies that prove successful.
To get students to think and apply problem-solving strategies to any given problem, teachers should encourage them to analyze a piece of information from different angles and classify it. The teachers can also conduct debates on a given topic, ask students to demonstrate a process or explain something in front of the class, or ask them to write about pros and cons of a certain idea.
These four skills will give you an edge to your students over their peers in terms of academic and career success in the near future, and they’ll thank you for it.
Author Bio: Monica Gill is a writer that maintains a home tutoring resource in Singapore. She is passionate about writing and collecting new books. She believes in hard work and it is her persistence that keeps her doing better. She loves traveling whenever she needs time off of her busy schedule, and her favorite holiday destination is Hawaii.