Future-Ready Skills

Laura Swiatek, chemistry teacher, employs a disciplined style of instruction called “modeling” to push students to construct their own knowledge and understanding.

Incorporating problem-solving, critical thinking and practical life skills, Trinity students are preparing for college, life and the unforeseen jobs of the future

t’s the first day of unit two in Laura Swiatek’s introduction to chemistry class, and students in groups of three sift through a series of unlabeled diagrams on laminated index cards. With no prior knowledge of the terms, their challenge is to categorize each card as an element or compound, pure substance or mixture. Consensus does not come quickly. Disagreements abound. Students move freely from group to group, offering theories and refuting others. I

“I am loving the debates you guys are having,” says Swiatek, encouraging the sort of back forth that might normally be reserved for a lesson in literature or global politics. “When students are arguing, it means they care.”

As each group begins to establish its own conclusions, they write them on their own portable whiteboard. “Feel free to move about the cabin,” said Swiatek, “Take a moment to read the other boards. Where do you agree? Where do you disagree?”

Employing a disciplined style of instruction called “modeling,” Swiatek is intentionally turning the traditional method of teaching on its head. Instead of presenting a list of facts to memorize and confirm with a predetermined lab, the teacher begins each unit with an event, a research question or an open-ended lab investigation. When students ask the teacher a question, they don’t get a simple answer — they get another question, one aimed at probing deeper toward a conclusion based on their own observations and reasoning.

“Collaboration applies to every discipline. No one works in a vacuum. The ability to answer a question without a clear answer is a skill that will be useful to them far beyond the walls of my classroom.”

“When they answer their own questions, they remember it better than if I tell them,” says Swiatek. “If they are constructing their own understanding, there is better retention. It takes longer at the beginning to establish the content, but I don’t spend as much time reinforcing it later on.”

Learning this way can feel scary and frustrating to students at first, but as they begin to grapple with concepts, they become empowered. Students aren’t simply learning the content necessary to pass a test and move on. They are learning valuable skills — evidence-based inquiry, problem-solving, collaboration, communication — that will serve them well in the future, regardless of their professional path. “Collaboration applies to every discipline. No one works in a vacuum,” says Swiatek. “The ability to answer a question without a clear answer is a skill that will be useful to them far beyond the walls of my classroom.”

THE SKILLS TO SUCCEED

In a September 2017 article in Education Week entitled “Stop Teaching Students What to Think. Teach them How to Think,” writer Scott Santens sums up the new paradigm of secondary education by questioning the sheer memorization of facts “in a world where everyone carries around the entire knowledge base of the human species on their person.”

Meanwhile, at universities across the country, students are enrolling in courses with titles like “adulting” and “self-care” that emphasize practical, universal skills like personal finance and healthy strategies to cope with stress.

In his 2014 book “Pure Genius,” influential educator Don Wettrick lists the qualities that major employers now look for in an employee. “Without hesitation most of them identified creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation as the top three traits,” he writes. “Jeopardy! winners are out. Innovators are in.”

In the view of these and countless other authorities on the aim of education in the 21st century, the message is clear: the best schools are emphasizing future-ready skills that can empower today’s students to meet the demands of an unknowable future.

When Trinity launched its latest five-year strategic plan, “Honor the Mission” in 2018, school leaders placed future-ready skills at

the forefront. In 2018-19, a team of faculty met regularly through the year to study the question, “How do we broaden and deepen opportunities for students to be engaged learners, leading to the development of future-ready skills?” Using an array of resources, such as the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme’s Approaches to Teaching and Learning and Oxford University’s “The Future of Skills Employment,” the group has encouraged teachers across all disciplines and programs to incorporate lessons that emphasize critical thinking, self-management, communication, collaboration, problem-solving, adaptability and a lifelong love of learning.

“As a school, over the last decade plus, we have made a concerted effort to prepare students for life beyond Trinity and life beyond college,” says Laura Hamlin Weiler ’00, head of community engagement. “We are no longer simply a college prep school. That’s not our sole goal. We’re preparing people to be able to solve problems, face challenges and feel successful no matter where they go.”

Begun in 2017, the Titan Prep class gives 8th grade students a homeroom-like stability along with opportunities for collaboration and self-knowledge.

THE PATH TO ADULTHOOD

For the last 10 years, Weiler has taught a popular class called Life Essentials, covering topics that are essential to success beyond high school: resume and cover letter writing, interview skills, public speaking, basic etiquette, automotive maintenance and personal finance among others. “We talk a lot about soft skills,” says Weiler. “How to make a phone call. How to shake hands.” As evidence of the course’s timeliness, Weiler points to a recent LA Times article, in which writer Hannah Fry writes: “Adulting classes for college students and postgrads have swelled in popularity in recent years, in part because many high schools have largely abandoned ‘life skills’ courses... which were created to help students navigate the path to adulthood.” As an alumna of the Life Essentials class at Trinity, Annalynn Lathrop ’18 is grateful not only for the practical lessons in check writing and unit pricing that have helped her manage her finances, but also for the broader skills that Trinity equipped her with. “I think learning how to manage your time while doing a multitude of assignments at one time has been a huge help,” she says.

Time management is also a major theme of the nascent Titan Prep class, begun in 2017 to support the youngest Titans as they make the transition from middle school to high school. Taught by ceramics teacher Molly Sanyour ’01, the class gives the group of about two dozen 8th graders a homeroom-like stability while providing opportunities for collaboration and self-knowledge.

“This class really helps you identify strengths and weaknesses when it comes to academics,” says Cameron Walker ’24. “It helps us all work collaboratively to positively affect everyone based on your strengths and weaknesses. It also really helps you organize and write about experiences, which could help you write things like college essays.”

GETTING THE GREEN LIGHT

Building on the success of the Titan Prep class, a similar program for 9th graders called “Green” was launched in 2018. Like Titan Prep, the class provides structure and study time, but increasingly sprinkles in instruction from a variety of teachers and administrators with an emphasis on future-ready skills. “These are very essential soft skills that I think are imperative for workplace success and in college,” says Lee Sprague, associate head of school. “These include collaboration, public speaking, interviewing and being an active listener. They range from something as simple as penmanship to online safety and the power of social media or

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coding and artificial intelligence. The variety of people coming in keeps it pretty fresh.” the undergraduate population — enrolled. It is now considered the most popular course in the school’s history.”

The program’s coordinator, Malcolm Bell, devised a brand challenge for the group last fall. “They had to create a company, develop a brand, do a SWOT [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats] analysis, just like in business school, and then come up with a sales pitch to get people to buy it,” says Bell. “Any time you can have an interactive challenge like that, it really forces them to think outside the box.”

PUTTING THE IMPORTANT THINGS FIRST

Last December, an article in the Christian Science Monitor detailed a nationwide trend in college courses on healthy coping skills. “And students have responded in huge numbers,” writes Stephanie Hanes. “At Yale University, when psychology professor Laurie Santos offered a new course last year called Psychology and the Good Life, some 1,200 students — nearly a quarter of At Trinity, school counselor Mallory Ballard uses time in Green class to equip all 9th grade students with healthy coping skills that can help them successfully navigate the stresses of high school, college and life. “Developing those skills is like learning a subject in many ways. In order to learn good coping skills, you have to practice doing it,” Ballard says. “Things like focusing on slowing down your breath, or meditation or relaxation. Getting your body used to doing those things when you’re feeling that weight of the semester. Eating well, sleeping well. Those are things that take effort.”

To illustrate the tremendous power of time management in reducing stress, Ballard has every student map out a list of their life’s priorities as if they were trying to fit a pile of rocks, pebbles and sand into a jar. When the large rocks — the important things in life — go in first, then there is room for all the rest. “But if you put the smaller priorities first, things like watching TV, playing on your phone,” says Ballard, “then your jar starts to fill up then you run out of room for those big priorities. So how do you manage your time better?”

We are no longer simply a college prep school…. We’re preparing people to be able to solve problems, face challenges and feel successful no matter where they go.”

For Mandy Augst, school librarian, the most critical skill is inquiry. “Using information effectively permeates everything,” she says.

CREATING NEW KNOWLEDGE

When Associate Head of School Lee Sprague thinks about futureready skills, she observes a timeless quality. “In many ways, we are reaffirming how vital they are,” she says. “One of them is communication. We are affirming that a person who is prepared for the future is one that can communicate well and in writing.”

For Mandy Augst, school librarian, the most critical, timeless skill is inquiry. “Inquiry is so important because it’s throughout the different subject areas,” she says. “Using information effectively permeates everything. It’s about making smart life decisions based on data and evidence and knowing how to navigate and evaluate it.”

Within the Green class especially, Augst has had the opportunity to guide inquiry toward the creation of new knowledge, something she calls the essence of good research. “Research is a misused term,” she says, noting that nearly all students arrive from middle school believing it’s enough to simply gather and list facts. “The skills they have coming in are reporting skills — accessing and gathering information. This generation of students is the best at it,” Augst says. “But they have to move from gathering to synthesizing — which means taking everything they’ve learned and understanding it as a whole. For some kids it happens in 9th grade. For others it doesn’t happen until their third year of college. But when you get it, you get it. You try to give them the skills to be ready for that aha moment.”

Similar to the modeling method employed by chemistry teacher Laura Swiatek, the guided inquiry framework developed by educational scholar Carol Kuhlthau requires teachers to be somewhat hands off in order to let students take ownership of their inquiry. “Last year I opened it up to their passions,” says Augst. “What are you interested in? What are you passionate about? What makes you wake up and want to listen in class? Let’s pursue those things.”

NURTURING A LOVE OF LEARNING

One way Trinity has created space for the kind of exploration that nurtures this love of learning is through the Pre-IB Core Seminar, developed last year for 9th graders in conjunction with the Green program. Unique to Trinity and open to any 9th grade student with intellectual curiosity to explore a topic of their own interest, the program also gives them a taste of what it’s like to think like an IB student. “We do activities that push them to think outside their comfort zone,” says Sprague. “There are no grades attached; It’s purely for the pleasure of learning.”

Kayla Quigley ’23 is a participant in the seminar. “One skill that I gained during the seminar was how to communicate with and interview a professional who I didn’t know,” she says. “As a part of the final project, I had to interview a professor at the University of Richmond, and it made me really nervous… However, I had to overcome my fear in order to gain a valuable professional perspective that really helped me obtain a better understanding of my topic.”

In the Pre-IB Core Seminar, like every IB course Trinity offers, there is a premium on skills over content. “IB teaches you how to think, not what to think,” says IB Diploma Programme Coordinator Marti Truman. She recalls meeting with a junior who described the unique challenges of IB: “At my old school, we were told ‘here is what you need to learn, and here is exactly how you will learn it,’ she said, but with IB, you are told ‘here is what you need to learn and here are some different ways you can learn it.’ You have to be a flexible thinker.”

“Once they come back to us from college, our alums understand better that they have developed critical thinking skills,” Truman says. “They say that they realize the depth of understanding their professors are expecting. They know how to evaluate their sources of information.”

Nikki Carroll teaches Theory of Knowledge, an IB staple affectionately known by its acronym, TOK. “In terms of future-ready skills, that’s what TOK is all about!” says Carroll. “TOK gets students to learn to think open-mindedly, critically, and differently. They learn how to analyze their own perspectives while also respecting and recognizing the value in the perspectives of others. In an increasingly global society, this is extremely important. Students also learn how to look for bias and reliability in sources, which is an important skill in the era of ‘fake news.’”

“It is difficult sometimes to take that step back as a teacher and put more of the work on students shoulders, but it’s what we have to do.”

Laurie Pierce, technology facilitator, leads students in “design thinking,” an iterative process used at companies like Apple, Procter & Gamble and IBM.

DESIGN THINKING

In the technology department, the most popular course is called Programming through Game Development. In each project, Laurie Pierce, technology facilitator leads students through the design thinking process, which she calls a non-linear, iterative process which seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.”

“It is pretty fascinating to watch our Trinity students navigate through this process and apply future-ready skills such as problemsolving, adaptability, and the ability to work together in a team to come up with a solution that is successful, whether designing an object to be 3D printed to meet a need or programming a Sphero robot to navigate through a maze,” Pierce says. “As our world becomes increasingly interconnected and complex, design thinking offers a way to address change in a more human-centric manner. Solving a problem for someone else helps to teach empathy and creating with intention to understand the experience of someone else is powerful work.”

READY FOR ANYTHING

When Stefanie Jochman teaches Shakespeare, she likes to throw her students into the deep end. Using the “Folger method,” she immediately asks her students to begin reading the text of a scene aloud. “The first time through, you usually get a lot of confusion around the language, so we read it again,” she says. “With each subsequent read, they pick up something new. By the third time, I start asking questions about the characters.” Just like in Laura Swiatek’s chemistry class, Jochman has to resist the natural urge of a teacher to answer every question. Instead she responds with more questions. “How is the text guiding you? How did something you already knew help you figure out what these new words mean?”

After the fourth or fifth time through, the students begin to act out the scene, peppering each other with stage directions. “It feels like chaos, because you have a couple of actors at the center and the rest of the class chiming in, but by the end it, they’ve staged a scene of Shakespeare,” Jochman says. “They’ve done something really complicated, and they’ve done it before we’ve studied anything else in the play. And it’s really empowering.”

Jochman eschews the traditional model of reading comprehension quizzes most of us are familiar with from 20th century education. “It’s astounding the things students can do when we don’t set them up that way,” she says. “It is difficult sometimes to take that step back as a teacher and put more of the work on students shoulders, but it’s what we have to do. We live in a time when the knowledge we used to test students for is available at the click of a button or at a ‘hey Alexa!’ Now our job as teachers is to say, ‘How do you sift through what’s valuable or not, what’s valid or not? How do you judge some evidence against another piece and make meaning of all this wealth of information that’s so accessible to you?’”

A veteran IB teacher, Jochman says she loves how tests are structured in the IB English courses. “The emphasis is much more on skill than a particular type of knowledge,” she says. “When they take their exams in the spring, they will be analyzing literature they’ve never seen before, and they will have to apply all the skills they’ve been practicing to those pieces. So it’s not something you can memorize to prepare for.”

“To be future-ready is to be adaptable,” she says. “You have to be ready for anything.”

In the view countless authorities on education in the 21st century, the message is clear: the best schools are emphasizing future-ready skills that can empower today’s students to meet the demands of an unknowable future.