Today, +Rich Kiker was a keynote speaker at our district. He brought to life some of the critical reasons why we need #futureready learning now. The world is changing. In a society where the world's information is so instantaneously accessible, we need to now shift our practices towards valuing questions, and not answers. Teaching students to be innovative, critical thinkers who are empowered to do better; to change the world.
Students need to embrace struggles and celebrate successes. Negative associations with failure should be replaced with positive ones. Teaching students to ‘fail forward’ and that it is okay to take calculated risks, even if you don't succeed the first time. +Rich Kiker provided us with a great example of this below. These people may not know what they are doing, but they are trying. They are taking a risk, they are putting themselves out there, they are being real learners in the real world.
Being a transparent learner and taking risks is a learned behavior. These positive connections can be made by modeling risk taking and celebrating attempts in learning.
We do not want students to be fragile in their thinking and their learning. Rich brought up the idea of antifragility. In Nasim Taleb's book Antifragile, he explains that antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
As you reflect on your teaching practices and how students learn in your school or in your classroom, is the learning that you are asking them to do authentic? Does it reflect the real world in which we live? +Alice Keeler wrote an insightful blog post on real world teaching which talks about the importance of school mimicking the real world.
As Rich said today, 'Access to information is more important and more empowering than ever before.' The question now becomes, what will your students do with that information?
