As the world around us rapidly evolves, the skills required to succeed in the workforce and life are also changing. Therefore, students must develop the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in an ever-changing world.
At Spark, we focus greatly on future-readiness – it might help to know that even our tagline is “Fit for Future Education”. Through modern learning technologies and by focusing on cultivating skills like leadership, communicative nature, etc. we aim to help our students to learn not only technical knowledge but also skills that are necessary for surviving and thriving in the real world.
So what are future-ready skills?
A simple definition for Future-ready skills would be that they are a set of skills that will help us be prepared for the constant changes happening in the workforce and not only. Being flexible and adaptable to changes is crucial to surviving in a fast-paced environment. Thus, we try to equip our students with the qualities and skills that are necessary to assure a successful future career.
For example:
- Technological Intelligence
- Emotional Intelligence
- Cultural Intelligence
- Cohesive collaboration
- Novel and adaptive thinking
- Active agility
- Cognitive flexibility
If you want to read more about these skills and what they mean, we went more in-depth in describing them in our fresh blog post about Future-ready skills – you can find it on the Spark Blog.
When it comes to the strategies used to develop and nurture the future-ready skills that we mentioned, we can talk about project-based learning, collaborative tasks, student-led activities, etc.
One of the things that Spark implemented recently, was a work-experience program for our students who want to cultivate their leadership skills or want to get a peek into different career paths to assure that they will make calculated decisions when it comes to choosing their future jobs.
One of our very engaged students, Miruna M. was the first person to give this experience a try as she was curious to learn more about what it takes to become a successful lawyer:
“The Work Experience Internship was an extraordinary opportunity that Spark offered me.
I did my Work Experience at a lawyer’s office, and now, after finishing it, I realize just how amazing the experience was. It makes a significant difference to actively go and see what it means and what it feels like to work in a certain professional field rather than just reading online about others’ experiences or talking with someone who has that job.
The internship gave me a lot of reassurance, meaning that before doing it I was extremely unsure if I would like to consider becoming a lawyer. After seeing as much as possible, I realized what it means to be a lawyer and that I might enjoy it. Only doing research online or talking to a lawyer would not have made me this confident, I am sure about it.”Miruna M (year 10)
How is your School helping students develop 21st-century skills? Get in touch with us at Spark if you are a student, parent, or teacher that wants to bring change to your school.