The Future Doesn’t Exist Yet: Reflections on College and Career Readiness

I've been thinking a lot about keyboards.

Dazzling subject to spend time pondering about, I know.

I guess the keyboard isn't really the focus of my thinking, though. It's more about what the keyboard represents. To me, it represents a problem that exists now that won't in the future, and this is where I run into my dilemma. A student who can't type now won't be successful in the workplace today, but a student who can't type now will very likely be fine in the workplace of tomorrow. 

I think too often our schools view college and career readiness as a stationary target, when in reality it is more than just a moving target. It's a target that doesn't even exist yet! How do you prepare students for a hypothetical? We treat our approach to preparing students for colleges and careers as if is a guarantee, when it really will always be a gamble.

The approach to college and career readiness that we often use in our schools today is based on compliance and learning content. This makes sense based on the jobs that exist now.

Here's what I've been struggling with, though. If we are asking students to follow along, do what they're told, and learn content that we give them, they won't know how to be successful in the future. They won't know how to adapt or foray into unknown territory. They'll be lemmings without a leader. (Side note: What happened to that game? I used to love it.)

This is where things get tricky. As educators and schools, we can't just throw our hands up and say, "Well, there's nothing we can do." We owe it to our students to give them what they need to be successful.

Now the question is, what do they need to be successful, and how do we do that?

While this will in no way be a complete list, here are some of the concepts I've identified as most important:

1. Problem-solving skills

We laud the use of problem-solving skills in our classroom, but most schools don't really do it well. Just think about how many questions students ask that could have been answered in a Google search. I always tell my students that I'm not always going to be here (I intentionally make it sound morbid most of the time), and how are they going to learn the answer when I'm gone. If we are training students to always be dependent on us, we are training them to be the followers of the future. Will they be okay as a follower? Probably, but if we truly mean it when we say we want to prepare students to be successful, shouldn't that mean we are giving them the skill set to be a leader?

What can we do about it?
Teach your students how to find answers on their own. To be clear, I said teach them, not expect them. Some students already have developed the skills to be self-sufficient. For other students, it's not natural. They need to be shown how to do it. Show them strategies. Model it for yourself. Maybe most importantly, think about how your projects require students to develop those skills. If we are always telling them exactly what to do, we are training them to be followers.

Granted, scaffolding is a crucial piece here. Some students can't start off by figuring things out themselves. You know who those students are in your classes. However, we often give those students all the steps to follow every. single. time. Try to gradually release that responsibility. Build out a schedule, if that helps you. If you have four large pieces of writing due in a term, figure out a good process to help students become more self-sufficient in how they approach those projects.

2. Social-emotional skills

One of my biggest concerns about the direction of education is that we are moving away from educating the whole person. Our standards are entirely content-based (yes, yes, or concept based), but if a student knows all the states and capitals of the U.S. but freaks out and cries whenever they get one wrong...um, that's not going to fly in a college or career. Pretty hard to be successful when you're the one who throws a tantrum in the office whenever you get negative feedback. 

What can we do about it?

Before you go redesign your lesson plans to have students sit together and sing Kum Ba Yah while reflecting on their deepest childhood pain, that's not exactly where I'm going with this. I think we need to focus on failure. I think our system promotes two responses to failure right now: learned helplessness or denial. 

Our traditionally low-performing students have developed a learned helplessness because they view low scores as out of their control. Even if we allow them to revise an assignment or retake a test, it does little to combat this learned helplessness. This is not a quick fix for education, though. The standards-based movement has the answer, but our education system has not embraced it. The beauty of implementing this type of system is the ability to tell students that their growth and ability at the end of a term is what matters more than how they did right now. Give students hope. Hope is the only way to combat learned helplessness.

On the other end of the spectrum are the high-achievers who always turn in their work, and as a result, always have an A. They view compliance as deserving of an A, so whenever they get feedback of any other kind, they feel like a failure. They get upset or angry, or as I've seen recently, just go into denial. The feedback is antithetical to their own view of themselves. These are the students who will go to college for a term and drop out after a bad quarter, or even worse, one bad test will send them into a downward spiral. These are the students who will start a business, and when their first attempt fails, they'll never try again. These students need to be taught how to use feedback. Not only this, we should be having conversations about vulnerability with these students. They are afraid to be seen as anything other than perfect, and as a result, they will never be able to be honest enough with themselves to grow.

3. Motivation

"If you gave me a class of motivated students, we would change the world." I actually heard someone say that at a conference once. In my head I was like, "If you gave a doctor a set of healthy patients, then you wouldn't need a doctor." Our job is to find the motivation and passion buried inside of students. If we don't, we aren't preparing them for college or a career. We've all seen those people (not in schools of course...) who are there just to be there. They don't know how to motivate themselves. They don't know how to tap into a passion and let it drive them. Motivation is not something that everyone naturally knows how to access, so it's our job to provide them opportunities to find it.

What can we do about it?

First tip: nobody is positively motivated by compliance. Some of our students will be motivated by a fear of failure, but is that really the motivation we want to be teaching? Creativity is key when it comes to passion. Teachers are no different. Hand them a curriculum and watch their passion dwindle and die. Let them be creative, and they will love their job again. 

The two biggest things when it comes to motivation are choice and real-life application. It will take time for it to work, though. Students aren't used to getting the opportunity to choose something they are passionate about. They need that time. The same way you would scaffold anything else, some students will need scaffolding to help them learn to identify what they're passionate about. 

I'm not saying give up tests or in-class writing. They still have value for gathering quick data. I'm saying that students won't ever do that once they are out of our education system. (Okay, so teachers have to take tests for their license, but we all know those are just hoops to jump through so we can give our offering to the Pearson god. Did I say that out loud?) Stop emphasizing compliance; start emphasizing creativity. Otherwise, stop complaining about a lack of motivation.

4. Collaborative skills

Sometimes I love watching what happens when students have to start a group project. It's like this beautiful chaos where students have to remember what it's like to communicate without a screen. After about five minutes, reality starts to set in. They aren't getting anything done!

The way we typically approach this dilemma is always concerning to me. We approach the group and criticize the students who aren't working while praising the student who is doing all the work on their own. I am definitely guilty of this, but again, it only teaches compliance. 

What can we do about it?

For your students who are the ones not doing any of the work, they need to see their abilities as valuable. Half of the time they don't do the work (probably more) is because they don't want to be embarrassed. I've found that the best way to help those students is to have them tell me what they're good at. This goes back to the social-emotional concept, but if those students see their value, they will add it to the group (obviously not always, but most of the time). 

For your students who are doing all the work, you should be just as concerned about them. They aren't learning how to be a leader; they're learning how to be a pack mule. They need to learn leadership skills. No one is going to be successful in the future if they don't know how to lead a group, and for a lot of our students, they don't know how to lead. Every time I have students do group projects, I have them rotate leaders every class period or so. Every time there is a new leader, I give them one leadership quality and ask them to use it in their group. To be clear, I'm not giving them a task to do. I'm giving them a quality to embody. I guess that's sort of from the whole, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for life."

Conclusion:

That last phrase, cheesy as it may be, should inform how our schools approach college and career readiness. What are the things we do to ensure students are ready for life, for their future? We shouldn't be asking, "What do students need today?" We should be asking, "How are we giving students the ability to adapt for what we can't see coming?" If we approach it that way, we will begin to create entrepreneurs, social leaders, revolutionaries. If we keep focusing on today, we'll create a large workforce of unmotivated followers living for their paycheck, and if that's the goal of college and career readiness, count me out.