Dare to Visualize the Future

We may often hear that we need to prepare students for “jobs that don’t exist yet”, or that we need to prepare students for what will be “their” future: a different reality from what we have lived so far, knowing that everything is changing faster and faster. But do we fully grasp what that means? Do we really stop to think about what we need to change “now” to prepare students for “their future”? We may be so immersed in our present reality that it seems so absolute. We may even forget that in our recent past there was no such thing as Internet ( at least for a good number of us).

For most of us, even for young teachers, the experience of learning at school and college still followed the “old style”: I wait to be taught by the teacher, I answer the questions and problems the teacher proposes, and I share most of my learning only with the teacher, or once in a while I share with peers in my own classroom.

The new reality in the world today, as discussed in our post If Students Learn How to Learn, How Do You Teach Your Subject?, calls for a different type of teaching that will develop students that are different from ourselves. Nowadays, we have the responsibility and the knowledge from educational research, to develop students who are independent and eager to learn, who ask good questions, solve problems that still do not exist, and who share their inquiry and knowledge with others, knowing how it feels like to contribute to different communities.

 

The challenge is of course to teach in a way that we never learned ourselves. AmplifiEDUcation is a great resource that can help you in this challenge, as they are an online course platform created by teachers, for teachers. They empathise with your fears of learning something new and changing, as talked about in their post How are you dealing with 21st Century Education and Technology Integration?. They realize the profound impact of technology in the way we teach and learn. For this reason, amplifiEDUcation provides simple, convenient, step-by-step online courses to help you take small bites out of the new knowledge that is necessary to change education, because they know it can be overwhelming. They make suggestions on how to go about the courses and digest new learning in a way that is more convenient to you, offering three categories of courses that can be taken as a sequence or you can choose to start at any place that seems appropriate to where you are right now with your classroom. As the courses have connections, they hope to slowly provide a path to help you visualize this future for your students.