What if, instead of thinking “Where should my students be at the end of the year?” we thought, “Where should my students be at the end of 20 years?” How would that impact our classrooms today?
As teachers, it's easy for us to get caught up in the cycle of planning, teaching, and grading. We forget to think about what kind of adults we are trying to develop. Keeping the long term view in mind helps clarify what is critical this year to change a student’s path in life and lay a solid foundation for a future beyond our classrooms. Elisa Goni, (Empieza por Educar, ‘11) developed three questions to help guide her thoughts around what students need now in order to succeed in the future. We share them here, alongside sample practical paths of action that have been adopted by our teaching community across the globe.
Elisa explains that answering these three questions herself allowed her to know her students better, furthered her understanding of the challenges they have to overcome and helped her prioritise her actions to create transformational change. Across our global community, other teachers are identifying non-academic areas of support that they need to develop in order to help their students flourish. In the UK, research from both primary and secondary classrooms illustrated success factors such as establishing strong parent-school relationships and building various ‘soft skills’ in students. As such, Jack Docherty (Teach First, ‘11) has prioritised strengthening parental involvement in his classroom and developing resilience in his students. Teachers who are a part of Synergies’ Transformational Teaching Fellowship and who attended the Global Teaching Summit as delegates worked through these questions as part of their preparation. You might want to connect with these teachers and read their context analyses before asking them in your own classroom. High achievement both in school and in the future is often measured by students’ academic success. But digging beneath the surface of exam grades, we have discovered—the world over—that non-academic attributes, such as resilience and interpersonal skills, are vital. These are what’s needed to build solid foundations for classroom understanding and application. *article was shared from originally published site, synergies.teachforall.org Comments are closed.
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