After watching Tony Wagner's "7 Skills Students Need for the Future" (Asia Society, 2009) and Ellen Galinsky's "The Seven Essential Life Skills," (Big Think, 2013) I really started thinking again about how broken our education system is. Most schools really don't prepare students for how life is going to be outside of a school building.
Starting from a young age, all our students learn is how to take a test. I'm just as guilty as the next person. I teach the one math subject in high school that gets tested by the state. There's pressure from all sides to make sure that I make it through the curriculum and prepare the students for the STAAR test. Never mind that the people who make up the standards we are supposed to teach try to cram way too much information in a year to properly teach it so that students can understand. My quest in teaching everything usually means that my students are just recipients of my knowledge instead of developing their own. I'm hoping with my innovation project that I can gain a little time in the classroom where students will get to learn and use some critical thinking skills to problem solve effectively without me having to spoon feed them enough information to make it through the test.
There are definitely items on both Wagner's and Galinsky's lists of life skills that need to be addressed.
Both mention the need for critical thinking skills. As I mentioned above, I'm terrible at not letting my students have the time to struggle with the material a little on their own. We need to allow them the time to think things out themselves instead of swooping in like Superman to save the day when they get stuck. If they don't learn to think for themselves in school, they will struggle with it once they are out. Sometimes jobs require you to think outside the box, and they need to know how to.
Both speaker also mention communication skills. Wow this is should be a no-brainer, but high school students do NOT know how to put ideas down on paper. I know that when I was in school we were taught capitalization and grammar rules for writing papers and such, but you'd think we don't teach that any more (I know that we do). People these days are so used to sending text messages and such with as few letters as needed, that trying to write properly isn't done. Case in point: I'm teaching a one month, crash course in algebra 1 for incoming freshmen that want to be ahead of the math game in high school. We're talking the smarter students of the bunch here. I asked for complete sentences for explanations on why an answer was correct or not, and most didn't capitalize the first word or make a complete sentence. I am SO glad I'm not the English teacher.
Look at the following table to see how I believe the two lists connect to one another beyond what I wrote:
Notice that in comparison to Wagner's seven skills, Galinsky's doesn't match up perfectly, but multiples of hers sometimes make up one of his skills.
References:
Asia Society (2009, October 1). 7 Skills students need for their future {Video}. YouTube.
Big Think (2013, July 17). The seven essential life skills, with Ellen Galinsky {Video}. YouTube.
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