Skills for Future Leaders

Another excellent Quora question today:

What are the necessary skills for 21st century students and future leaders?

Critical thinking and higher order skills seems to be the one from bloom's taxonomy. What does the research from educational psychology, learning sciences etc literature tell us about all the other required skills ? What does other experts, teachers etc tell us about it ?

Answer from Jordan B Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto:

The most important skill is the ability to write. There is little difference between writing and thinking (at least verbal thinking) -- so, to write is to think. To think is to avoid obstacles and capitalize on opportunity. To think is to set things straight. To think is to convince and explain.

What you write, you remember. What you merely recognize, you are merely familiar with. Multiple choice tests generally reward recognition memory, which is much shallower than recall memory (which writing facilitates). If you write something, then you know it well enough to talk about it, so you can then speak -- even publicly.

To write well, you need first to know what you are talking about. Thus, you have to do your research. To do that, you have to know how to read, what to read, and where to find it. Then you have to be able to generate information, so that your writing is creative, and edit it, so that you separate the wheat from the chaff. Then you have to be able to organize your argument, at the level of the word, the sentence, the paragraph and the essay itself. If you can do that, you can organize your thoughts and, in consequence, your brain. Then you can help organize other brains, and other structures.

http://www.quora.com/Education/What-are-the-necessary-skills-for-21st-century-students-and-future-leaders

This is great. It fits in exactly with my teaching style- I ask the children to focus on developing GCSE standard writing and analysis skills by the end if the Prep (age 11). Having reviewed our progress on the www.ixl.com maths website last night, I found that the entire Reception maths curriculum can be completed by an astute child in less than three hours. Assuming an hour of maths a day- both in structured lesson activities and open play scenarios- our young pupils are effectively spending 197 hours in their first full-time school year completing supporting activites rather than actually learning!

We are now three and a half weeks into our Summer holiday and i've spent 15-20 minutes with my lad on ixl.com each day. He'a about to start in a Reception class in September, and yet he's now completed most of the Reception activites and many of the Year One assessments too! We've had to pause at times and practice- scaffold- his new knowledge, for instance we spent a day talking about 'left' and 'right' and practicing them in different situations before he grasped the concept.

What i'm saying is that much of the Primary School curriculum is really simple. Giving children the prompts to write and explore via writing can help them to progress quicker and more effectively and build important 'independent learner' skills.

For me, this Quora post has impacted on my planning for the next school year. When i've taught something, the class will write it down and try to express the concept to each other in different ways. Making films producing songs, and plain essay work will help my charges to develop into future leaders.