Recently I was nominated as one of the 100 most influential educators in the world by HundrED to help improve education around the world by sharing innovations, ideas and insights.
I was interviewed in London to share my thoughts and beliefs about eight essential questions on education.
The article is here from the HundrED website: https://hundred.org/en/articles/ingvi-omarsson-explains-why-every-teacher-should-be-a-lead-learner?ref=rns_tw
Here are the questions and the transcript of my answers:
1. Do you feel that the current way we are educating children fully prepares them for the needs of the 21st century?
First of all we need to look at the skills for the 21st century and a lot of reports have come out talking about the 4 Cs, which are communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative thinking. Some people have added 2 more – citizenship and character – and I think those are skills we should definitely work on.
I really dislike when people say we should teach ‘basics’, meaning reading, writing and arithmetic – like that’s what school is about, like that’s what learning is about – it’s not! I think we should really focus on how we can co-exist and how we can actively make the world better for everyone.
We should be preparing students to be active and critical citizens and in a democracy, who can truly listen to other people’s points of view and act accordingly and empathize and discuss and deal with issues critically. I think that’s a really important issue.
I think also in the past there was a big focus on secreterial skills and nowadays what we’re preparing our kids for is more CEO skills. I know Abdul Chohan has talked about that at great lengths. CEO skills – if you see a good leader, what quality does that leader possess? The ablility to think and innovate and speak and fail – not afraid to do that – and empower others, have vision, know how to communicate their message and collaborate with others – collaborate with people who are different than you, hear different points of view and show true character through adversity. I think that’s one of the main things we need to be focusing on.
I think education as well should be more about creating real, meaningful work that matters to the community as a whole, because a lot of times in schools we have students do projects for us and they are not shown to anyone and if students are doing projects for you, they want them to be good enough. But if they’re doing it for the world and they’re showing their skills and people can find their work, not all of it but some of it, they want it to be good, they want it to be really good. So, that’s a big difference.
The basics, what we should be looking at, if basics are what we’re talking about – is arts and music and dance and all of those creative things that work and tie so closely in with the 4 Cs as well.
I think how we are preparing, that’s a big question and that varies a lot between what people are doing and I think it should, in a way. Assessment and standardization requires us and wants us to do the same thing for everyone, exactly the same thing, but what we really need is different types of skills and then the ability to collaborate with each other. So, I don’t have to be decent at everything, it’s alright to be bad at some things. I’m terrible at some things but I know people who are better than me in a lot of ways, so I find those people and I find a way to work with them, so that’s how we do great stuff.
So, are we preparing them? We’re on the right track, I think, as long as we keep this conversation alive and we ask people about where the future’s heading and what we shoul...