TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION: ENGAGING AND EMPOWERING THE LEARNERS OF TOMORROW

How should we teach in an age of uncertainty, when two-thirds of today’s school children will work in jobs that don’t yet exist (Fisch and McLeod, 2010)? In an age where artificial intelligence will equal their intelligence by the time they finish school (Sheninger and Murray, 2017, p. 16)? In an age of mass education, when more students over the next thirty years will graduate than since the beginning of recorded history (Koulopoulos and Keldsen, 2016, p. 136). How can teachers efficiently and effectively manage such an incursion? Today’s students are the first true digital natives, they take in information instantaneously and lose interest just as fast (Williams, 2015). They are more likely to look for a solution on the internet than to ask for advice and are accustomed to watching online lessons to learn, yet still value a university degree (Törőcsik, Szűcs and Kehl, 2014). How can we meet their expectations and engage them meaningfully? This paper looks at teaching methodologies that can be implemented in order to enthuse the next generation of students. It looks at ways improve student agency, engagement, motivation and encourage higher-order thinking skills, ultimately aiming to empower them with the competencies that they will need to succeed. It sees the role of the teacher as a guide rather than a gatekeeper to knowledge, after all, knowledge transfer today, and therefore traditional teaching methods, have been outsourced to the likes of YouTube and Netflix (Sheninger and Murray, 2017, p. 59). Finally, it ties all of the research together into a concrete teaching approach that can be directly applied in the classroom.