The future of skills is at the intersection of technical skills for the digital economy, higher cognitive functioning, and social-emotional learning. The way we look at our education structures needs to shift in order to satisfy these future-ready skills needs. This week, Kelly is joined by Mark Sparvell, an award-winning educator with over twenty-five years of experience leading improvement for schools, systems, higher ed, and professional associations. In his current role with Microsoft, Mark is interested in how we can empower every learner on the planet to achieve more.  

Mark believes the aim isn't to develop second-class robots, it's to develop first-class humans. 

Big Takeaways:  

• (7:00) “Emotions are the gatekeeper to motivation, to cognition and attention. They are the contributing factor to personal success, to organizational success, to health, to well-being, to productivity as an inoculation against uncertainty and ambiguity and stresses in life.” 
• (21:00) “One of the things that I think is the greatest kind of a misname is when people talk about soft skills, because there are a lot harder to learn or a lot harder to apply. And they're hard, unfortunately, to measure, which is what their greatest challenge is because you can't really easily measure that on a standardized test. And we avoid that. Unfortunately, we treasure what we measure.” 
• (30:00) “At the end of the day, you know, we want young people to be able to, get a job, to keep a job. Or to create a job because we know that ultimately if we want young people to be active and informed citizens who are capable of making ethical and responsible decisions and contributing purposefully and positively to society, you know, they need this beautiful blend of this new future in skills.” 

Follow Mark on Twitter @sparvell 

Join Mark’s Facebook Group: Social-Emotional Learning in Education: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SELinEDU 

Microsoft Education