#Beyond2020 mindsets: How to stay relevant whilst getting kids future ready in a world of growing uncertainty
This is not an action story about the new role of educators as transformers saving the world of learning in an age of growing uncertainty and ambiguity. Nor is it a quirky account about how robots will bring an end to human civilization. And neither this is about how to tame a blue whale when you see one on your child’s digital screen.
This is about a tale of opportunity for educators that rises from the new age of the impatient and informed learner.
Note: In this article, educators include parents as well, as they are an essential part of the learner’s ecosystem.
Experience is everything
Children are not the children we used to be! Remember the crackling sound of marbles or the flight of our feet playing hop scotch or even the thrill of knocking out all seven stones on the streets of developing India?
This was what experiences looked like in the eighties. Today as we transition from the industrial age to the digital age, we extend ourselves more mentally than physically. Our children are born into this and insta-life comes naturally to them. While our kids effortlessly maneuver from the real to the virtual playground, most of us will never know how this feels because we will always treat digital as a separate medium for engagement.
As the number of people and things continue to get increasingly connected to the internet, our connected planet is now behaving like a big, hyper-active brain.
This has now become a massive source of knowledge and, evidently, an opportunity for our kids to connect, extend and augment themselves with exponential technologies.
As children, the way we consumed experiences was dramatically different. Our consciousness urged us to save the best experiences for the last. With every possible service being increasingly available at our fingertips, our children are finding no real reason to save.
If the cost of living continues to drop due to digitization, we will eventually be able to experience everything and own nothing.
Be it an enthralling moment from the NH7 event shared on Instagram or a ubiquitous service brought to life by a brand such as Amazon or Uber, these technology-enabled experiences allows our children to consume what they want and when they want it. For them, it’s all about experiencing things that are unique and putting out stories that they can share with their friends and even with the world at large.
Instead of fighting this, can we empathize better with children and leverage these behaviors to get them future ready? Can we create or enable learning experiences in moments that matter to them?
The epic struggle — creativity vs efficiency
In a country where digital is breaking barriers of socio-economic divide, the old, unidirectional way of delivering learning is fast becoming irrelevant and ineffective. Many educators trying to experiment with new methods are struggling with the burden of completing their syllabus on time, leave alone the growing demands from parents and the school’s administration needs.
Educators struggle to drive creativity in a system that rewards operational efficiency.
We struggle because of our cultural norms, which we internalized and never questioned. While growing up, we were clearly told that study was serious and play was fun and frivolous. By the virtue of our 19th century education methods, most of us were never taught to have fun with learning, and lost our ability to play and think creatively like a child over time.
Even today, in a world of ambiguity, failing is considered to be a taboo in India.
These notions about how learning should be delivered significantly limits our ability to drive transformative change in teaching methods.
Shifting to #Beyond2020 mindsets
The way we, as educators, think and act ultimately impacts our child’s mindset and development. This can be seen in the way a child thinks, acts, feels, says and ultimately experiences things in the real world.
The first step towards creating great learning experiences for our kids is actually shifting the mindsets of educators and how they deliver learning in today’s world — a world that is increasingly being characterized as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
Six shifts can accelerate teacher-student collaboration, and lead to breakthrough partnership for future-readiness in the new imagination economy — shift role from instructor to mentor, shift learning objectives from gaining efficiency to cultivating creativity, shift classroom from a place to study seriously to an environment to explore, learn and share non-judgmentally, shift method from learning quickly to failing early to succeed sooner, shift teaching aids from the real world to multi-channel platforms, and shift behavior from finding joy in certainty to harmony in chaos.
In order to continue providing value, educators need to collaborate, learn from each other and look for better ways to deliver learning. We need to shift performance measurement to sustaining continuous learning and growth with creativity, curiosity and collaboration as the enablers in the classroom.
Author: AVInash Jhangiani, Founder of Play2Transform Group, a strategic transformation consulting firm. He believes children ought to be designers of their own future and curated India’s (and world’s) first Book of Dreams that carries foreword by Nobel Peace Laureate, Kailash Satyarthi.
