Food for thought for planning for next year wherever you are.

Dear all,

As another successful year comes to a close at ISHCMC I believe we can be proud of many of the things that we are achieving. Our vision for education is constantly being reinforced and strengthened by researchers and journalist who are awakening to the fact that tomorrow will be different from yesterday. Hence, as this will be my last Food for Thought for this academic year I have decided to continue with my theme of the past few weeks because this will be something that we need to give attention to next year at school; the identification, scope and sequencing and subsequent tracking of the skills that we believe will be important for the future of our students.

I believe that we are pushing education in the right direction and that our students are being energized, engaged and empowered by their learning. Hence I decided to have two sections to this weeks Food for Thought. the first is introducing you to the Institute for the Future and their thinking. This is a document I'd like you all to read, Future Work Skills for 20120 that they have produced that could form the foundation for how we look at and frame our skills needed by our students for their future's. It links very closely with my last few posts.

"In the 1990s, IBM’s Deep Blue beat grandmaster Gary Kasparov in chess; today IBM’s Watson supercomputer is beating contestants on Jeopardy. A decade ago, workers worried about jobs being outsourced overseas; today companies such as ODesk and LiveOps can assemble teams “in the cloud” to do sales, customer support, and many other tasks. Five years ago, it would have taken years for NASA to tag millions of photographs taken by its telescope, but with the power of its collaborative platforms, the task can be accomplished in a few months with the help of thousands of human volunteers. 
Global connectivity, smart machines, and new media are just some of the drivers  reshaping how we think about work, what constitutes work, and the skills we will need to be productive contributors in the future. 
This report analyzes key drivers that will reshape the landscape of work and identifies key work skills needed in the next 10 years. It does not consider what will be the jobs of the future. Many studies have tried to predict specific job categories and labor requirements. Consistently over the years, however, it has been shown that such predictions are difficult and many of the past predictions have been proven wrong. Rather than focusing on future jobs, this report looks at future work skills—proficiencies and abilities required across different jobs and work settings. "

The report concludes with this advice for educational insitutions:

"Educational institutions at the primary, secondary, and post-secondary levels, are largely the products of technology infrastructure and social circumstances of the past. The landscape has changed and educational institutions should consider how to adapt quickly in response. Some directions of change might include:
 » Placing additional emphasis on developing skills such as critical thinking, insight, and analysis capabilities
 » Integrating new-media literacy into education programs
 » Including experiential learning that gives prominence to soft skills—such as the ability to collaborate, work in groups, read social cues, and respond adaptively
 » Broadening the learning constituency beyond teens and young adults through to adulthood
 » Integrating interdisciplinary training that allows students to develop skills and knowledge in a range of subject"

To end this Food for Thought I'm going to share this video, The Elephant in the Classroom. I believe this talk raises questions that all of us at ISHCMC have been thinking about over the past four years. But instead of so many schools and systems who have ignored the elephant in the room we have as a group of educators faced our fear of change and started down the road to creating a school that is fit for preparing students for their place in the 21st century. The opening of the new secondary campus and the additional refurbishment of our present primary campus will further display our commitment to this change whilst providing all of us with the opportunities to further demonstrate that we are educators for the 21st century.

Thank you for a wonderful year at ISHCMC. None of what we have achieved would have been possible without your open mindedness and commitment to our mission and students.

Only three days left of the year.

Have a relaxing Sunday,

Yours
Adrian