Five essential skills to prepare students for the future

Posted by Hlengiwe Zwane on 04 April 2023, 15:30 SAST

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As educators, we constantly look for ways to prepare our students for the real world that exists around them. From teaching them how to read, write, and calculate. To the less tangible skills we teach such as working in a team, thinking critically, and being curious about the things they encounter on a daily basis. 

We may not know exactly what lies ahead for our students in the future, but we have the advantage of knowing what skills they will need to give them a head start. Here are the five survival skills of the 21st century and how they can be purposefully applied in your classroom:

1: Critical thinking and problem-solving
Teaching students to develop their skills at seeing problems from different angles and formulating their own solutions. Regardless of the career they will choose to enter, the ability to think and act quickly is an indispensable tool for the future. To practice this, teachers should present students with situations in which they need to figure things out for themselves where skills that they have already developed can be drawn upon and applied to help them figure out a problem.

2: Collaboration and networking
Understanding that not every person is born a natural leader. However, the ability to lead can help a person to advance and become successful in their chosen career. To best prepare students in this area, more than just the typical teamwork is required. Instead of simply getting into a group and splitting the tasks with each other, students should instead be encouraged to take on different roles within their group for each task within the project.

3: Agility and adaptability
Students need to be comfortable with the idea of change and be willing to adapt to the changes around them. Teachers can create a very dynamic environment within the classroom that can help to prepare students for the future. Using different teaching strategies, the setup of the classroom, the ways that learning is demonstrated by students, and even the guidelines for group work or homework can help students learn to adapt.

4: Initiative and entrepreneurship
Students need to be able to take initiative and contribute to the world. Encouraging these skills within our classrooms and our communities. Students can be incredibly creative and interested in shaping their experience in the classroom, pushing them for much more than a list of classroom rules and consequences. Let them know that you are available and willing to listen to any of their ideas about improving the classroom or school. 

5: Accessing and analyzing information
Students have access to unimaginable amounts of information today, the internet provides incredible research tools. Accessing information is easy, but accessing good information tends to be more complicated. Students need to be taught how to sift through the millions of web pages available on a topic and find what they need (and be able to trust what they find). They need to learn the difference between factual information and factual-sounding opinions.
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