What are the skills and attributes needed in tomorrow's workforce?

I love the provocation in this article. We talk a lot about what skills our children need. This article suggests the need to emotional intelligence rather than factual knowledge and skills will be increasingly important in the future. The collaborative and cooperative skills learned and demonstrated in primary classrooms are more closely related to the skills needed in the workplace than those learned and demonstrated in secondary and tertiary schools.

How can we redesign learning to encourage older students to build on these skills?
What is more important, what or how we learn?

An article that doesn't provide the answers but poses some great questions.

Making Collaborative Practice Work

This is a case study of Wildwood IB World Magnet School. Teachers there believe teacher collaboration fosters a supportive professional culture, lessens conflict between teachers and provides students with school-wide best practices.

The reading provides a video, overview, explains how it's done and gives links to further reading.

Building Relationships Means Having Empathy

I have the long held belief that relationships are at the heart of learning. Building, sustaining and nourishing those relationships requires energy and hard work. Here are some blog posts from Edutopia about empathy which provide ideas to do just that.

Back to Inquiry

Inquiry learning has had its turn to take a bit of a hammering. It certainly has been on the back burner in many schools largely due to the national standards and the subsequent focus on reading, writing and maths.

Great inquiry begins with immersion and getting the children to wonder. This ASCD reading http://bit.ly/ASCDInquiryandWonder reminds me of some of the gems of inquiry learning. There is nothing more exciting than immersing children in a topic and provide tools for them to explore and wonder about their learning.

Learning really ignites when inquiry learning blends with design thinking. Great things are happening at Stonefields and Hobsonville Point in regard to this.

Steve Mouldey from  shared this great resource. His blog is worth checking out.

Using tools like this children are able to play a great role in their learning and thinking. They need to have a say in what it is they want to learn about.