Children need to develop relationships-building skills future workers need such as being able to motivate, collaborate, persevere and navigate through a buffet of freelance opportunities In all the discussions, debates and deliberations on the need to enhance learning outcomes in America’s classrooms and improve performance on playing fields, I am yet to hear anyone talk about the most fundamental and timeless ingredient required for effectively educating our youth: relationships building. A century ago, education in America was dispensed in one-room schoolhouses, where teachers and children of all ages knew each other well and learning happened not merely as the teacher lectured, but as life happened. Children were also schooled in church basements where a vicar or minister passed on his knowledge to young people and invested time, money and effort in them. While these children and youth didn’t have video, PowerPoint slides or internet connections, they had something precious which today’s children don’t have: relationships in the midst of communities. In his film, Most Likely to Succeed (2015), Greg Whiteley highlights how static, traditional pedagogies have remained pervasive for far too long, negatively impacting the economy. The school system, he says, was fashioned after a Prussian model designed over 100 years ago. Its main purpose was to download content into students’ minds, with success or failure determined by standardised tests. This lecture and textbooks pedagogy bores and disengages children in America’s classrooms to this day. Quite obviously these pedagogies are unable to prepare children for modern workplaces. Today information is ubiquitous. Children can look up any fact on their cell phones, a computer can defeat Ken Jennings, the world’s best ‘Jeopardy!’ contestant at a game of information retrieval. Computers can write routine news stories and handle backroom legal work. And yet, our tests-driven schools are training children for the type of rote tasks that can be done much more effectively by computers. Whiteley’s documentary is about relationships, not subject matter. The film argues that educators need to take content off centrestage and focus on teaching children to develop the relationship building skills future workers need — such as being able to motivate, collaborate, persevere and navigate through a complex buffet of freelance opportunities. I believe that relationships-building is at the heart of instruction (teaching, coaching, mentoring, etc). How do we build relationships between teachers (including parents) and youth to more effectively prepare young people for the future? Here are my reflections on the issue: Caring. We need to respect young people as unique individuals who have their own values, perceptions, fears and aspirations and who deserve to be acknowledged, heard, and negotiated with. In short, youth need to be treated with dignity. Welcome them, treat them as worthy of personal attention, and show that you care about them as individuals. Authenticity. True caring about kids requires more than talking and listening. It also means being real with them. Being real doesn’t involve trying to copy their dress and gestures and talk their language, unless of course, you are part of their subculture.…
