Your Child’s Envision Experience and the World of Tomorrow

“I’ll Be Back”:  The Future is Coming for Us…

If you have been paying attention, you may have heard that a robot is going to take you and your child’s job.  To listen to some of the rhetoric, it seems that most of us will wander aimlessly across a barren planet in search of work only to realize that the Terminator movies were actually documentaries sent back from the future.

 

While we may not be able to identify the exact job titles of tomorrow, current and emerging trends indicate that:

• 85% of the jobs in 2030 don’t exist today[1]
• Nearly 50% of current work activities can be automated with existing technology[2]
• By 2030, ~375 million workers may need to change their occupation category[3]

 

Simply, the future will be different—really different.  Compared to the present and the past, it will require different skills, different behaviors, and different mindsets. While the next twenty years will be defined by disruption on a historic scale that will redefine the world of work and life, it will also create a period of incredible opportunity for individuals who can innovate, think critically, collaborate, and communicate effectively. 

 

Getting “Future Ready”:  Who Will Win and Why

How do we prepare our children to thrive in tomorrow’s world when we don’t even know what it will look like?  Informed by research, your child’s Envision program experience was purposely designed to help them foster the skills they need to compete and, more importantly, collaborate to build the world of tomorrow.

 

At your child’s Envision program experience, we focused on:

1. Providing students with the opportunity to develop strong social, emotional, and high-level cognitive skills and capabilities as these are difficult to automate and can transfer between occupation categories.
2. Incorporating hands-on challenges and learning experiences that help them become innovators and problem solvers by leveraging their curiosity and permitting themselves to fail while iterating on new solutions to old problems.
3. Enabling them to effectively communicate and collaborate with a diverse set of people and technologies while at the program.

 

Simply, the success stories of the future will be about individuals that can create solutions to challenging problems while communicating and collaborating with an increasingly diverse and global population.  The ubiquitous nature of information and the application of technology through artificial intelligence will actually establish emotive and relational skills as the dominant traits of nimble and adaptable humans in the second half of the 21^st Century.

 

Back to School:  Three Ways to Amplify Your Child’s Envision Program Experience

Recent advances in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogical philosophy indicate several simple ways that parents and educators can positively impact student learning through experiential programs like those offered at Envision; thereby enabling students to “get future ready”:

1. Get Involved – Double down on the inclusion of active, multi-sensory experiences within your child’s education by becoming personally involved.Students who have developed strong social, emotional, and cognitive skills generally have one thing in common—at least one adult is deeply involved in their education.
2. Continue to Foster Social Relationships – Purposely seek out and design opportunities for your child to collaborate and connect with other members of their community.Encourage them to join a club, volunteer, or participate in a sport.Not only will this give them a chance to apply skills learned at their Envision program, it will also help them to strengthen those skills.
3. Let Them Try – Encourage your child to apply the problem solving and creativity skills they exercised at their Envision program inside and outside their classroom.Take on that science fair; build that birdhouse; or even dissect the lawn mower.

 

After nearly twenty years of working in the K16 education space, I have found the fundamental issue impacting learning and the transfer of that learning to be engagement.  Research continues to demonstrate that properly designed and delivered experiential learning activities remain one of the best ways to engage students so that they can build the skills they need to succeed in the future.

 

And we need to get moving on this important work; the future is coming for us… 

 

Best of luck for a great school year!