Sharing Good Practice
(Continued from page 30)
Putney High School in England were in
the news recently as they have taken
the bold step of hiring an in-house
entrepreneur to inspire students to
start their own businesses because,
so many traditional jobs will not exist
in the future. They wish to encourage
students to “blaze their own trail”
rather than simply following well-
trodden career paths. At SAFA British
School, we have emulated this by
opening our doors to our amazing
parents. In Dubai, we are blessed
with a community of parents who
have a wide variety of interesting and
successful career paths. As schools we
would be foolish not to tap into this on
behalf of our students. This term, I’ve
been lucky enough to work with our
gifted young students in an Enterprise
club, designed to unlock their true
potential. They’ve learnt the principles
of entrepreneurship and used this to
design a product for one of the EXPO
2020’s key themes: Opportunity,
Sustainability or Mobility. The students
came to life during the programme as
they had the chance to put many of
their 21st Century Skills into action.
to formulate their own solutions.
To practice this, we should provide
students with situations where their
existing skills, can be applied to solve
problems with multiple solutions, as
we do not want to teach students that
there is only one answer available, but
instead that problem-solving can be a
creative and personal experience.
Analysing information is an important
part of critical thinking. Information has
never been more readily available. It can
be found at the click of a button, and
now with advances in voice recognition
tools such as Apple’s ‘Siri’ and
Amazon’s ‘Echo’, we don’t even have to
do that. This sudden and dramatic shift
from a world with a limited amount and
availability of information, to a world of
information flux and glut, brings a new
challenge. The skill for students is no
longer finding information; it is being
able to select the information that is
relevant and credible. We cannot truly
claim to have prepared our students
for the world, unless they can question
the reliability of the information they
consume.
Whether these skills can be taught, is
up for debate, but teachers can create
the circumstances in which they can
be learnt. For example, to develop
critical thinking skills, students will
need to develop an ability to approach
problems in a variety of different ways
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Class Time
When students begin school, they
are naturally curious about the
world and want to explore it. Their
imaginations are vast and untamed,
creating endless amounts of practical
and impractical things. Our task
as educators has less to do with
teaching them how to be curious and
imaginative, and more to do with not
taking that away from them. We need
to continue to encourage them to
develop these skills, as well as teach
them how to apply them creatively
and purposefully. One way in which we
can do this is by focusing on creating,
instead of consuming. The internet is a
vast expanse of resources. It’s easy to
be a consumer, but students who are
willing to be creators will be at a huge
advantage because when students
create their own learning content,
they put into practice all of the skills
outlined above. Clearly, in a world
that is rapidly evolving, our students
are going to need to be comfortable
with the idea of change and be willing
to adapt to the changes around them.
We can help prepare them for this, by
creating a dynamic environment within
the classroom that can help to prepare
students for the future. Varying the
teaching strategies we use, the setup
of the classroom, and the ways that
students demonstrate learning, can
keep them adaptable.
Whenever I read about the future
of work, many of the predictions
are scary and suggest scenarios in
which millions of talented people are
unemployed. Yet if education is able to
reform, many new jobs will be created
in the process. Just as the education
system adapted to meet the demands
of the agricultural and industrial
revolutions before, I’m confident that
we can prepare the learners of today
for the technological revolution of
tomorrow.
George is currently the Head of Innovation and Data at SAFA British School.
Around two years ago, he built his own learning platform called Sharek, which
is now widely used across the UAE. This year, George will be speaking at the
JESS Innovation Summit, the GESS conference and the Edutech Middle East
Conference.