Getting From A to B

I am staying in Old Town (Alexandria, Virginia).  The Model Schools Conference is at the Gaylord Convention Center across the Potomac river.  The conference provides a shuttle bus each morning, but I was ready early this morning and decided to take an Uber.  My driver, Lee, was friendly and safe and she got me to the Gaylord.  She did miss an exit along the way which required us to travel an extra mile and do a U-turn to get back on track.  Now, in her defense, she did need to navigate the spaghetti maze of highways and ramps shown in the photo.  She knew immediately when she missed the turn and said, "I'm sorry.  I knew I should have turned there, but I was reading the signs and they didn't match."  Luckily, I have a growth mindset, a polite disposition and I was not in a hurry.  Also, the exact same thing happened to me in an Uber with a different driver three days ago.

This is the new world.  Anyone can be a part-time taxi driver.  This new world requires a comfort with mistakes.  It requires the ability to respond to mistakes with civility.  It requires the ability to respond to feedback and know how to fix mistakes, problem solve and think critically. It requires people to interact, apologize, empathize and treat others with kindness.  It requires social and emotional intelligence, a growth mindset and resilience.   More people are doing more things that are new to them.

You could argue that those skills have always been important long before they were packaged as 21st Century Skills.  But the industrial age of the 19th and 20th centuries diminished the frequency of their use.  People were often trained to do low-level manual tasks early in their careers and then continue doing those for a lifetime.  If they encountered any problem solving or critical thinking it was early in the process and once they figured it out they seldom encountered different circumstances in which to apply those skills.  Teaching others and learning from others was relegated to schools, not the "real" world.  On the social/emotional front it was always important to be polite and perhaps even cooperative, but true collaboration didn't occur all that much.  You learned how to treat other people from your parents, siblings, church, scouts, and sports teams.  Not math class.

So what?  Now what?  What are we going to do about the gap between the new world and schools?  How are we preparing students for this new world?  What assurances will we have that they have the skills they need?  And, by the way, they are here now.  The children are not our future.  The children are here now.  Living lives.  Wanting to be part of society.  Wanting to contribute.  Let's not make them wait.

How are schools acting for impact?  That is the question posed at this year's Model School's Conference.  They have provided many examples, many strategies and much inspiration.  The answer to that question is now up to each of us.