The jobs of tomorrow will require creativity, adaptability, and entrepreneurial thinking. How do we prepare students to be leaders and innovators? In Today’s Learners, Tomorrow’s Leaders: Inspire Your Students to Succeed in School and Beyond, educators Tisha Poncio and Rick Butterworth explore the fundamental shift needed in our classrooms—from environments where students passively receive knowledge to dynamic spaces where they actively develop the skills that successful entrepreneurs and leaders value most. In this excerpt, they discuss how examining your classroom dynamics and making small shifts can boost student creativity and critical thinking.
Students begin their learning journey as kindergarteners full of curiosity, imagination, and creativity with little fear of imperfection. By the time they finish middle school and enter high school, they are often filled with fear of their own voice, worry about thinking differently, and have lost the curiosity for being creative in any capacity. It is as if students have been served all their knowledge and thinking on a silver platter by teachers. To guard against this happening in your classroom or school, watch for warning signs by considering:
- Who is doing all the talking in your classroom?
- Who is doing most of the thinking and problem solving?
- Is the teacher or are the students the most engaged in the learning environment?
- Are students expected to wait for permission to be inquisitive and ask questions?
- Are questions even allowed without control and compliance?
- What norms are being established in your classroom, your school, and your school district?
If students do not feel safe enough to ask questions, they absolutely will not open themselves up to being creative enough to mold their talents and skills into something bigger than the four walls of a classroom. Creativity, leadership, critical thinking, and ideation must be fostered repeatedly and will require room for patience and grace from all stakeholders.
There is an unconscious ideology that students go to school to learn skills they do not have, but once they have entered the heart of the curriculum, the expectations of immediate success and perfect scores become overwhelming, and students then shift their focus from learning to satisfying the expectations of parents, teachers, and school leaders. We cannot expect students to just know we are confident in their leadership and ability to succeed. Instead, we need to consciously and intentionally share words and affirm messages to students that encourage growth and unstructured curiosity and show our belief that they are problem solvers and have the power to use their voice in ways that create solutions.
Behavior is a language, and so it is up to us as educators to foster the belief that students are more than the labels others place upon them and to remind them that we believe in them and their abilities. Over time students will gain confidence in themselves and will step into situations, experiences, and roles they previously avoided. You may see students who previously stayed quiet and never volunteered take the lead on a group project or flourish in building community within your classroom or a school organization. Students who always seemed to be the “sidekicks” or picked last may become the go-to expert for troubleshooting technology. Students who never believed they had anything valuable to contribute may become creators or leaders of school-wide or community-wide projects.
We need to consciously and intentionally share words and affirm messages to students that encourage growth and unstructured curiosity.
Students need help and guidance with personal image and self-development, and when you implement a few small changes to support this you will see a shift in their acceptance of themselves and others. For example, Tisha’s former students shared a few messages they received in her classroom that had a lasting impact:
- “Own your shine.”
- “You are more than a perfect score or assignment.”
- “Your skills and talents are different because they are meant to help others in a different way than your peers.”
- “Your voice is powerful, and what you say is what you will see.”
- “There is a way, not the way.”
- “It is okay to take brain breaks. Not every second of your school day must be taken up by thinking.”
Equally essential is the encouragement to embrace failure (the lack of an expected outcome from an action) and reframe it as an opportunity for deep understanding and growth. An entrepreneurial mindset knows perfection cannot be achieved the first time around; the path for growth and success is through failure. The most crucial step to embracing failure is acceptance, which many students struggle with. As often as possible, remind students (and yourself) that failure is only an event, not a characteristic that defines you. On the flip side, students also must be reminded that perfection does not exist, so it is a waste of time trying to the fit the profile of a “perfect student.” Success and failure together create a balanced experience that provides the chance for growth in areas of struggle and empowerment in areas of achievement. In turn, this process creates resilient and adaptable students who become efficient and productive leaders.
Entrepreneurs who build products or offer a service will confirm that a team working together toward a common goal helps to accelerate production and scalable growth. For a team to work as efficiently as possible, communication and collaboration become vital assets and are critical to the team’s success. Communication and collaboration are often two points brought up when assessing improvements in both large and small organizations. These two skills should be introduced and practiced as early as possible. An entrepreneur-driven classroom looks for opportunities where students can practice and refine these skills. Consider your classroom dynamic, and ask yourself:
- Are students engaging in group discussions (in person or online)?
- Do students have a balanced number of individual assignments and group projects? Do the gradebook and year-at-a-glance lesson plans show an imbalance?
- How can lessons and activities better incorporate the practice of speaking, listening, and contributing to a group discussion or topic?
- Are there opportunities for students to illustrate what they have learned?
- Is there a choice available for how to show the learning? Are there alternative ways to share and discuss learning in a means that best accommodates student needs?
Asking yourself reflective questions about your teaching practices or classroom setups, especially those that have been in place for years, helps you reconsider if you are keeping to a structure just because “it has always been done this way.” Adjusting your classrooms to better reflect the future students will enter after graduation can enhance interpersonal skills, cultivate leadership qualities, and leverage the strengths of everyone, including the teacher. To help stimulate entrepreneurial skills, design activities that require students to work together or present to a group, such as to their peers, educators, or the community. Articulating a new idea to someone who has not been involved in its evolution can be difficult, so provide clear and concise explanations to your students and encourage them to do the same in their presentations.
Many students learn by doing, an approach that Rick has always found to be the most impactful for his growth, especially when accommodating his dyslexia in a work environment. Engaging and working with local businesses or community projects gives students a chance at practical experiences and insights into real-world problem solving, making their learning more meaningful and applicable to real-life scenarios. When students can view and do in a classroom instead of sit and get, the age-old student/teacher script is completely flipped and creates a synergy in the classroom that has students thinking in a different way and teachers facilitating curiosity and communication.
Today's Learners, Tomorrow's Leaders
With insights from inside and outside of the classroom, this book offers a rich assortment of resources to support students in developing skills that are critical to prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow.
