Education Must Change. What should today's teaching look like?

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Dear Readers,

Several years back, as a Head of a college prep school searching for a topic for my dissertation, I realized that I was seeking the answer to one important question:

“What are the skills and qualities our students will need to be successful in a world that is careening beyond the norms and limits that define success today.” 

To help answer that question, I began interviewing CEOs of corporations to determine what they are looking for when they hire today’s young people.  To a person, they let me know that they have shifted their expectations. Companies can train for job skills. They are less concerned with finding task-ready applicants, and are now seeking potential hires who are; creative, critical thinkers, problem solvers, and designers. They seek to hire young employees who are committed to ethics, who are persistent, who have a multi-tiered proficiency in communication, who demonstrate global competency, and who embody empathy and resilience. It is these qualities which will define success for future employees. The question I needed an answer to was, “How will we instill in our students the skills and ability to solve real-world problems through higher-order thinking skills, and to solve them in a variety of scenarios?”

Perhaps an even bigger question today is, “How will we engage their minds, to draw them away from their screens, to connect with them on new levels, to show them the connections between subject areas, between the past, the present, and the future, to inspire them to embrace these necessary skills and qualities?”

Gone are the days of the “sage on the stage” model of having our teachers stand in front of the classroom to lecture while students are tasked with frantic note-taking, memorizing content, and regurgitating facts for grades. That model is a futile and ineffective path to student success in their future endeavors.  This is not new news.  Since the launch of shows like Sesame Street where actors in fluffy bird costumes sing and dance the alphabet, educators have known that more is required of us than lecturing and fact-doling to engage our students. The question is, how do we make this shift? How can teachers grab the attention of students who literally have the world at their fingertips, without us?

Back when I was a student charged with writing a report on Taiwan, I found a few pages of facts about the country and a picture or two in the “T” encyclopedia. When today’s students “google” Taiwan, within seconds, they have 2,720,000,000 results to choose from alongside 81,200,000 videos, and countless images. I would have been lost with that much information to sort through without someone to guide me. The necessary shift, to help our students find success in today’s age of information, is in the role of the teacher, not the student. The task of today’s teacher is to guide students in discerning which of these results are relevant, which have valid sources, and which are ethically-based.  We need to help them learn how to transfer the knowledge they acquire in authentic ways. But first, we need to have their attention. We need engagement.

Several years back, I was invited to join a group of alumni from the class of 1962 for a reunion lunch.  This was a lively group of friends, all in their late 70s who spent the hour in a high-spirited, joyful sharing of every touchdown scored, basketball dunked, volleyball spiked, and cheers cheered. They accounted for season wins and losses, opponent performances, courts and fields played on, and countless other highlights of their high school days.  It was a wildly energetic and enthusiastic time together. Laughter punctuated the stories shared as they brought their memories back to life. I was so grateful to be able to witness this joy-filled event.

As I pondered this experience, the thought came to me, if I had asked them to tell me about the battle of Hastings, or to recite the Pythagorean Theorem, though they had all learned it in great detail during their high school years, they would likely be hard-pressed to conjure up the details for me at this luncheon. Why the disparity?  I realized that it was because those friend-based times together represented shared, lived-experiences. They weren’t just memorized facts that they had mentally compartmentalized, never applied or revisited.  The facts learned through memorization are eventually forgotten.  These high school friends could remember so many details of their experiences because they were engaged and involved in these lived experiences.  We need to capture the same level of engagement in our classrooms.

As we venture into the world of AI and ChatGPT, a world of easy access to content knowledge and written composition, a world where teachers compete with TicToc reels and Snapchat, it is falling to teachers to find ways to engage students and teach them to be creative, discerning, authentic, spiritually-minded knowledge seekers. To do this, we need to teach through the lens of those septuagenarian classmates, the lens of shared and lived-experiences. Our teachers need to become guides and mentors, helping our students navigate this world of information overflow.  We have to stop focusing on test scores and move to a laser-focus on teacher support and professional development.  Schools are in the critical position of determining how to best support our teachers and students in making this educational shift happen.

Tune into the next chapter of Storyteller to find some answers.

Warmly,

Merry

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Thank you for sharing another wonderful holiday season with me and the

characters from "The Little Snowman and the Star." It was heartwarming to see so many

family and friends join the live book reading and such an honor to have the

New Orleans Women and Children's Shelter as our special guests.

I look forward to making more memories with you again soon!

www.merrysorrells.com