Author: Beth

Student Flexibility: How to Navigate When You Have Limited Resources

Posted on by Beth

Earlier this year, a great example of navigating student flexibility was when I taught an online course called “Introduction to Digital Design.” Students made several different digital artifacts in class, like a Personal Webpage, a Blog, and a Video to share on the blog. The course was open to students all across Asia and the Middle East. Twelve students signed up for the class that met once a week for six weeks. The program’s intent was an after-school enrichment course. So I didn’t anticipate the wide variety of resources available to the students.

Two students from Hong Kong had their mini recording studios with green screens, stage lighting, and high-end laptop computers. Three other students living in Northern India were all siblings. They used one mobile device and did not have access to any other technology or devices. The rest of the students had a laptop at the minimum. As a result, I had to reconsider approaching the expectations for student flexibility, delivery, and final project outcomes.

Designing for Student Flexibility

Since that experience, I developed strategies focused on student needs and the different resources they may or may not have. Here are my top three techniques in designing for student flexibility.

Survey ahead of time

It can be helpful to gather some data about the resources available, skill ability, and limitations that students may have. I now send a survey ahead of time to collect information which helps me plan how to approach their needs. The survey also helps me plan which curricular materials to use and if I need to find alternatives before the class.

Provide Voice and Choice opportunities

In my example, where students had limited access to laptops, I had to help students find digital tools and resources that fit their needs. Allowing all students this same flexibility allowed more student choice in the tools and software they wanted to use. For example, this allowed the advanced students to use OBS studio with a green screen, while other students used a simple mobile video editor. This student flexibility approach empowers students to choose, allowing them to share their unique voices effectively.

Celebrate the differences

Instead of seeing a problem with students having limited resources, we turned it into an opportunity to share more about their circumstances, how they learn, their day-to-day lives, and how they know at home, leading to a cultural exchange between them. They became fascinated about the lives of their peers, and some even became online friends throughout the course. We learned about the customs, foods, and lives of people in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. In the end, students shared their final projects, and everyone celebrated the achievements of each individual.

My highest priority is to meet each of the students where they are and with what they have while providing a high educational value to each student. But, unfortunately, I couldn’t follow traditional teaching practices where I simultaneously teach the same content to the same students.

As a result, I confronted some changes to my course design and became flexible in my teaching practices. Each student completed the course work and produced fantastic results because I tailored the content to the needs of each student and allowed them the flexibility to choose their digital tools and outputs.

Design Thinking: Applying to Business, Employee Experience, and Sales

Posted on by Beth

Recently, my colleague Mark Barnett wrote What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular.

Today, I explore what are the origins of Design Thinking (DT) and its application in the world of business. The idea of design thinking in product design, development, and innovation isn’t new but it’s now applicable in other business areas like communication and sales.  

This concept originally emerged as a way of educating engineers on how to creatively solve problems, as designers do. John E. Arnold, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University was one of the first people to write about DT. In 1959, he wrote “Creative Engineering,” which established the four areas of design thinking. Design thinking evolved as a “way of thinking” in the fields of science, engineering, product development, and innovation. 

Emily Stevens describes Design Thinking “as both an ideology and a process that seeks to solve complex problems in a user-centric way.”

As companies grow, they get more complex and new problems develop. One of the challenges of a large company is employee retention. Recently, Design Thinking has shifted from being an innovative solution for customers to solving problems for the company’s employees. Companies have begun thinking about their employees as users too, which makes sense as employees are crucial internal stakeholders. This has given rise to a new term – Employee User Experience! 

An example of a company using Design Thinking to transform the employee experience is the Jewellery company, Pandora. The company recently put out a job advert for a UX Designer – Employee Experience. The description of the role states – “Applying UX design to support Pandora’s strategic ambition to employ the happiest, most empowered and digitally-enabled employees.”

For increasingly remote companies, empathizing with employees, understanding their challenges, and crafting work experiences that enable them is a priority. 

This ensures that the company understands its employees and their needs. It also leads to higher trust and performance, the positive by-product of which can be higher employee retention. 

Like in employee experience, another field within businesses that hasn’t received as much focused internal innovation is sales. Falon Fatemi at Forbes believes that Design Thinking is the Future of Sales and I agree with her. In the last year, my role at BSD Education has evolved from Learner Experience to Partnerships.

A major part of my job now is understanding and empathizing with educators, school leaders, business partners, and government officials. Deeply understanding their needs, concerns, challenges and then curating solutions for them. Sales and marketing are two fields that are perceived to have the lowest trust according to Hubspot.

Design Thinking alleviates this challenge and builds more trust. 

With sales, marketing teams have also begun embracing Design Thinking strategies and transforming their practice. This not only elevates the marketing output but also enables the sales teams in a company. Marketing teams no longer rely on gut instinct but spend time understanding their different potential users.

They do this by developing user personas and building small campaigns to test and measure the performance. Finally, they roll out large data-backed campaigns.

In this article Autodesk’s Director of UX shares how she combined her UX and Marketing background to solve a marketing problem at her company. She says, “While some marketing best practices prove to work time and again, we must also meet the unique needs of specific customers in order to drive significant business value. Professing to intuitively know those specifics is shortsighted; only once we go out and try to understand the challenges of our target audience can we truly accommodate their needs.”

We have seen Design Thinking evolve from its origins in engineering to product development and innovation to now molding the world of employee experience, sales, and marketing. As educators, giving students opportunities to develop their design thinking skills equips them to be prepared for the 21st Century work environment. 

Interested in learning more about how we help develop design thinking skills in students and how we use it in our professional work at BSD Education, do contact me at mq@bsd.education. 

What Are The Benefits of Technology in the Classroom?

Posted on by Beth

You might be asking, what are the benefits of technology in the classroom? It’s fair to say that when I was in school, the use of technology in the classroom wasn’t widespread. There were no personal laptops for each student, no digital planners, no classes on coding or programming. I remember when the teacher would pull out the overhead projector for lectures. My school certainly wasn’t set up for the level of technology use that teachers were faced with recently.

It’s exciting to think back on how much has changed in the educational landscape since then! Since my high school graduation, social media use has skyrocketed, video conferencing has streamlined and improved greatly. Most students have personal laptops but also smartphones, iPads, watches, and Alexas provide any information they could possibly want to know.

Technology changes on a dime. As education continues to systemically evolve, we’re going to see the many benefits of educational technology come to fruition over the next few decades.

Read on!

Students are more engaged

“Bueller?” This scene from “Ferris Bueller” has to be the epitome of a bored, disinterested classroom. Whether out of a lack of interest in the topic or distraction, two things are happening here. They aren’t paying attention and they aren’t learning.

It’s been 35 years since that film came out and the classroom looks entirely different. Now teachers compete with a myriad of distractions that continues to evolve. So you may be wondering, how can teachers engage their students more effectively in the digital age? Well, I’m glad you asked! There are many ways to harness the positive power of technology and capture your student’s attention at the same time.

Meet them where they are – on devices, social media, websites, games – and bring this technology into your lessons, homework, projects. For example, their five-paragraph essay can become a blog. Now, not only are they more invested in what they’re learning but they’re building essential digital skills.

Part of increasing student engagement in any class is giving them an applicable reason for being there. Something they can relate to. Utilizing the interconnectivity of technology in the classroom helps you reap the benefits. Plus, your students are more likely to retain the information.

Incorporates different learning styles

There’s a big debate in education between the use of more personalized learning vs. a one-size-fits-all approach and it’s valid. When you have 30+ students in your class, it’s more difficult to create unique lesson plans that engage each student. Especially when you’re already overworked and underpaid as it is. We get it.

One of the many benefits of technology is that it provides an easier way to reach each student’s unique learning styles, playing to their various strengths and respond more intently to you.

  • If your student is more aural, it means they retain information better by hearing it. Some ideas for using technology to your advantage here:
    – Record your lessons! You can turn these into a private podcast that they can re-listen to as they study at home, use audiobooks. This helps you as well for any student that misses a class, they can be directed to your “podcast” and quickly get caught up.
    – Students can use an app like Me Book that allows them to listen to stories and record themselves reading.
    – Language teachers can make use of AI robots and chatbots to speak to students in different languages so they can practice as if talking to a real person.
  • Visual learners respond more to things they can see and are prone to retain more information if they can read/watch it rather than listen.
    – Try incorporating more graphic visuals aids to make the connection, or using more interactive videos in your lessons.
    – You can use technology like coding to allow student to visually code a website, or apps like Canva and Photoshop to create graphics that underline their classroom comprehension and level of engagement.\

Improves Collaboration

There are multiple benefits of technology is that it fosters a higher level of collaboration, not just within your classroom but on a global scale. It’s now easier than ever for students to work together with project management tools, video conference breakout rooms, social media, and even as simple as AirDropping files to someone in under a few minutes. This collaboration also works to the teachers’ benefit! If you’re grading papers, students can now see all of your notes and all communication can be kept in one space. Thus giving you more access to teaching students even outside of the school walls and time.

Embracing the global reach of the internet offers up exciting new possibilities for your students as well. Similar to pen-pals, maybe you have a sister school in a different country, and not only can the students communicate with each other as friends but they can also work remotely as teammates in completing a project. This would take a lot of planning of course, but the possibilities are endless!

Prepares Children for the Future

The single most important benefit of technology in the classroom is that it prepares students to be future-ready. We know that all students will need digital skills for their futures, but there are also many challenges when it comes to teaching digital skills.

At BSD Education, our goal is to prepare students for their undefined futures where artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and data privacy are all emerging topics with tremendous impacts on society. To accomplish this, we embed four approaches into our curriculum that have been identified as future proof and fundamental:

a) Computational Thinking
b) Design Thinking
c) Coding/Programming
d) Digital Citizenship

These are just a few of the many benefits to utilizing more technology in the classroom but I’d love to hear from you on how you use technology to boost student engagement or substantiate a lesson plan? Send me a message at bd@bsd.education or leave a comment below! We’d love to hear from you!

Maker Learning is a Mindset, Not a Space

Posted on by Beth

I started volunteering in 2010 as a coach and officiator for local educational robotics competitions. Entering a world of deep and impactful learning, I soon realized it did not resemble any previous learning environments that I had been exposed to in my education. I began to wonder how we could inspire this learning to take place in classrooms. So, inspired by adult-oriented hackerspaces in Boston and San Francisco, I started a youth-focused Makerspace in San Antonio, Texas, outfitted with 3D printers, robots, laser cutters, and other equipment. We hosted maker learning summer camps and out-of-school activities, but teachers weren’t seeing the transformative classroom connections I was hoping for.

Maker Learning on the road

With some luck and a generous donation, I took the maker space on the road with a giant bus called the Geekbus. We took the maker space to schools instead of asking them to come to us, and it worked! We did workshops with students and teachers and shared new pedagogical approaches and interests in new technologies.

I have since continued to help schools all over the world start and grow educational maker spaces. I even host a virtual workshop series (Maker Educator Certificate) where I teach about the pedagogical foundations of Maker Learning as a mindset.

Changing your mindset

I have designed and expanded many maker spaces for schools over several years. In that time, I’ve also learned that the physical maker space is just a place where you keep “the stuff.”

When you keep all of the learning inside the maker space, it just creates another silo, where specific types of knowledge, tools, and materials are taught only to be used at certain times.

One approach to education is Transformative Maker Learning. The idea is that students can utilize various tools, materials, and equipment to facilitate learning. This way of learning spans across any subject and can take place anywhere.

What if students learned maths through the construction of playground equipment? What if they learned history through costume design and learned science through building models? This requires a mindset shift. It also necessitates high-quality professional development for teachers to feel comfortable and understand the impact of such types of learning.

To help teachers understand Maker Learning as a mindset, I have helped to develop four essential elements: 

  1. Purpose: Students have to be connected to “the why” of the 犀利士 project and feel an authentic connection to it.
  2. Condition: A conducive learning environment must set the stage for curiosity, wonder, and occasional failure/struggle.
  3. Assessment: Students must be able to demonstrate what they know or have learned, but must be empowered to show their learning through the use of a variety of tools, methods, and modalities.
  4. Reflection: Students must be able to reflect on their work and ask “what have I learned from this experience?”

These four essential elements do not require any physical environment or specific space. Instead, students can use them anytime and anywhere with tools or materials, which allows Maker Learning to flourish as a mindset instead of being isolated into one particular space.

Want to explore further? Here are a few more articles to help you learn about Maker Learning!

Bring Technology Into Your Subject in Five Ways

Posted on by Beth

Last year saw a heavy reliance on technology to provide education and continuity to the classroom experience. But, as life gradually returns to normalcy, you might wonder how technology fits into your school structure as schools return to in-person. In short? Schools are getting back to normal but technology isn’t going anywhere. Bringing technology in your subject area doesn’t mean that you need to be an expert in coding or designing websites as a side hustle. Instead, it’s about innovative thinking and putting yourself in your student’s shoes.

A few more questions for you:

How are your students already using technology to understand the world they live in?
How can you, as an educator, provide the context digitally?
What are some strategies to bring more technology into your subject area to engage students?

We’re here to help! We’ve asked our Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Nickey Khemchandani, to share some of his favorite ideas to engage students with technology. Read on to see what he said!

Pick something your students don’t like.

For example, if students are disinterested in writing another five-paragraph essay, turn those essays into a classroom blog! They can share this not just with family/friends but in college portfolios and job applications, students can share. They’re building something that they can represent themselves with using a computer, but they’re also more engaged with homework.

Find an easy win that can be interactive.

Another great way of bringing technology in your subject is with math. Let’s say you’re teaching probability to your students – building a dice game online adds a layer of fun to the lesson while also teaching them critical mathematics and technology skills.

Look for a student who’s already an evangelist with technology.

You do not have to bear the burden of carrying all of the technology weight into your classroom. Usually, your students are already pushing for it. Find an evangelist in your classroom and have them bring technology into their assignments. For example, using technology to build a website instead of writing a paper will inform how to start implementing more tech across your subject.

Talk about social media in your classroom.

Your students are already involved and having conversations about it, so you should too! They’re using platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram, and how they potentially create social media posts around your subject areas will give you insight into their understanding of the subject. One of the best ways to interact with social media is to have them build a campaign, just like you see with Coca-Cola or Netflix, to get them to create a movement around your subject topic.

Build online portfolios

One of the best things a student can do in your subject is to represent your subject with technology. If they start taking pieces of the topic, they learn and add them into a shareable portfolio. So you can have essentially a handbook of all of the issues they’ve engaged with and can now share as notes for future students taking that class or (depending on the topics/skills) they can add to an online portfolio that prepares them for collegiate and professional futures.

The Benefits of Introducing Children to Technology Early

Posted on by Beth

As a millennial, my early experiences with technology were between the “analog” experience and the burgeoning technological revolution that we’re experiencing now.

I grew up at a time where you had only had access to the internet if someone wasn’t speaking on the phone (dial-up, anyone?), texting being more complicated than picking up a phone, and watching as social media went from online chat rooms to a legitimate channel for marketing.

It wasn’t that long ago that Facebook was just for college students, and now it’s a tech behemoth that every business needs to utilize.

But kids of today? Technology is eve威而鋼 rywhere, and they interact with technology more frequently at younger ages than any other generation in history.

They’ll never know a world without free WiFi, smartphones, and the power of Google in their pockets. All this before they’ve even reached school.

What are the benefits of being exposed to so many experiences with technology at such a young age? Many! Today, we’re sharing six gifts that we’ve seen in the students we work with every day.

They become more independent

Children today have infinite knowledge at their fingertips, always. Access to technology has dramatically impacted their education and their ability to learn. This is because the accessibility to that information has massively increased. These experiences with technology also means that they can follow up on their curiosity during lessons by exploring topics more in-depth independently.

Building community & social engagement

There’s no doubt that children need social interaction to develop and grow. But, in our modern age, this is no longer limited to physical bonding. Now children also need experiences with technology to virtually bond. This might be through participating in online discussions or finding friends that live across the world. These experiences lead to children feeling more connected than ever with technology.

Many summer camps and after-school programs encourage physical-virtual bonding in childhood with technology courses to teach kids new digital skills and offer them opportunities to engage with others while building more tech skills.

Digital literacy translates to more economic power

We’re experiencing a swelling gap between those with digital skills and those struggling to adapt to technological changes in our economy. Those who “upskilled,” innovated in their industries, and tried new things have learned how to adapt in turbulent times.

Children introduced to technology and digital skills learning at a younger age are more equipped for work soon.

Being more technically literate has prepared me to be adaptable, resilient, and curious about the world and career I’m in. There is no exception for children today, and the benefits of introducing children to more experiences with technology are countless.

What is Design Thinking and Why Is It Important

Posted on by Beth

Design Thinking is a professional process that engineers and designers use to ideate, prototype, and test new inventions, ideas, and products, emerging in K-12 education as a strategy for use in the classroom as well as a tool used for total school improvement.

SparkTruck inspired me to later create my own mobile Design Thinking vehicle called the Geekbus. Since then, I have gone on to teach Design Thinking to students and educators all over the world.

So, what is Design Thinking? I highly recommend this quick video introduction to get acquainted.

There are 5 main steps to Design Thinking:

1. Empathy

2. Define

3. Ideate

4. Prototype

5. Test.

The first step is the most impactful because it requires designers/students to consider the needs of the customer/user. This allows for the development of crucially needed social-emotional skills.

In contrast, the Engineering Design Process does not include this step and goes straight to the ideation and the problem-solving stage without careful consideration of the needs of the people involved. 

There are many ways to gain empathy for the customers/users that you’re designing for, but the best way is to speak directly to them through interviews to ask about their needs, pain-points and to get advice about what they really want and not just what we think they want.

If interviewing customers/users isn’t a viable option, you can brainstorm through empathetic thinking to imagine scenarios where people would use your idea and how they might respond to it.

Design Thinking can be used to create and make products, processes, events, organizations, and even food! The process is adaptable to many situations and once you have some practice with it, it can become a culture-changing practice that can be transformative at whole-school levels.

While Design Thinking can be a useful and practical tool for many situations, it also has limits. One criticism of Design Thinking is that it becomes a crutch and doesn’t help to cultivate what the d.school is calling Design Abilities.

Their 8 Core Design Abilities are: 

  • Navigate Ambiguity
  • Learn from Others
  • Synthesize Information
  • Rapidly Experiment
  • Move Between Concrete and Abstract
  • Build and Craft Intentionally
  • Communicate Deliberately
  • Design your Design Work

If you want to read more about these 8 Core Design Abilities, I recommend that you read the d.school’s description of each ability and the need for an approach that moves beyond Design Thinking.
Design Thinking has left a lasting impact on me and my work, which continues to this day in my work as an ed-tech leader and curriculum designer at BSD Education.

At BSD, we use the Design Think process to develop a new curriculum and to build new features on our custom coding platform. If you want to learn more about our approach at BSD, check out our certified curriculum design process.

Technology in the Classroom: Best Questions to Ask Before Integration

Posted on by Beth



There are so many developments in technology becoming a factor in how schools develop their curriculum. So it can be difficult to discern which technologies to implement and how effective they will be.

We’ve collected questions from our customers that are key when deciding whether or not to integrate technology into your school.

Will this help all students think and learn more deeply?

This is a great question! Not just because education is how students develop crucial critical thinking skills. But it also helps teachers differentiate instruction to help every student access that thinking instead of only some.

What student outcomes are you working towards?

You might ask this when you’re considering if an EdTech tool can and should be integrated into lessons. Ask yourself if that technology will help your students achieve specific curricular goals.

Is there ongoing support for this technology in the classroom?

Technology is constantly evolving, so we highly recommend that any tool you utilize is set up for ongoing support. No one wants to struggle to learn a new update without help!

How do you already use technology in the classroom?

This question depends on how you use technology with your students right now. The right EdTech tool has the potential to be a game-changer in digital skills learning. Consider how this technology will coexist alongside what you’re already using and how it will improve student learning outcomes.

How will this tech empower students to control their learning?

At BSD, we’ve designed our online platform to follow an experiential learning cycle that encourages them to explore, learn and create. As a result, students can apply the digital skills of coding, programming, and web development (among others), to what they are learning in the classroom and what they are interested in.

Is this a toy or a tool?

By definition, education technology should always be considered a learning tool, not something to entertain them digitally. So when asking this question, consider how this technology integrates understanding and real-world application. Is it based on a pedagogical foundation? How will you be able to teach your students with this technology? Is this preparing students to be future-ready? If the answer to any of these is no, then it’s likely that this platform should not be an EdTech tool for schools to consider.

Is this the best technology to prepare my students for the modern world?

Ah! This is one of the most essential questions because the reality is that your students are experiencing the modern world. Students have already been introduced to technology, and one day, they will soon be in jobs that likely don’t even exist. That means they need tech tools that teach them more digital skills.

What are some deciding factors for you when choosing an EdTech tool for your school? We’d like to hear from you. Please send us a message at info@bsd.education or leave a comment below!

The Future of Education Shaped By Technology

Posted on by Beth

Driven by technology, we see several opportunities for progress in the future of education in the coming decades.

Students and educators worldwide must be provided access to the training, devices, connectivity, and fundamental infrastructure. This access will be pivotal in making ubiquitous progress.

However, we cannot determine progress in education where similar changes potentially widen inequality and divide us globally.

Redefinition of Literacy to include Digital to Shape the Future of Education

It’s now more acceptable in discussions with, particularly formal educators, to emphasize the importance of the career relevance of education. That said, a significant part of career relevance in education connects to technology readiness. This preparation includes a comprehensive understanding of the real world’s tools, skills, mindsets, and technology methodologies.

Accenture recently stated: “86% of executives agree their organization must train its people to think like technologists – to use and customize technology solutions at the individual level, but without highly technical skills”.

A compelling case for foundational literacies of language and numeracy is to expand to include digital literacy, skills, and a competency palette of the technological and digital world we live in.

The Development of Pedagogical Technologies to Shape the Future of Education

In the last year, we have seen the greatest ever adoption of digital technologies within education.

However, many technologies center on the process and administration of education. Therefore, it ultimately corresponds to a literal digital reincarnation of the offline school, such as learning management systems and video communication tools. 

There remains a significant future opportunity in pedagogical technologies to shape the future of learning. These may or may not be enhanced by AI but critically maximizes students’ engagement, relevance, and personalization of learning. Teachers also have the confidence to effectively exercise the principles of teaching and learning within their knowledge comfort zones.

The next generation of pedagogical technologies can potentially harness the lessons and opportunities of virtual learning and drive student and professional knowledge. As new modalities of learning become increasingly commonplace, this will continue to occur.

The Technology of Assessment and Credentialing to Shape the Future of Education

The evolution of literacies and the proliferation of pedagogical technologies are necessary evolutions in shaping the future of education. However, they will be forever constrained unless the currently predominant system of assessment in education persists. 

As stated by MIT’s Playful Learning Lab: “To improve the whole system, we must have assessments that work well with all other components. In recent years there has been a push for instruction to become more student-centered and engaging, but we have not seen any attempt to transform assessment in these same ways. Unless we change how students are assessed in today’s education system, we won’t see a significant change in the system as a whole.”

Even systems of badging and micro-credential still essentially correspond to a summative model in their means of ultimate achievement.

Educational initiatives such as Credential As You Go and the Mastery Transcript Consortium will continue to move practice forward in time. The associated technologies will drive this phenomenon beyond the walls of traditional schools and universities and beyond the defined scope of existing ones with traditionally thought of educational pathways.

Technology can increase a revolution in assessment while unlocking freedom of a (technology-enhanced) pedagogy and a digital literacy included core educational mandate. Thus, there is a fascinating possibility to proliferate ubiquity of access and hopefully equity in all its corresponding opportunities for the future of education.

How To Teach Adaptability In Your Classroom

Posted on by Beth

Did you know as of 2021, 65% of our students will be in jobs that don’t even exist yet? At BSD Education, we talk a lot about preparing students for “the future of work”. But the reality is that many of us don’t know what that future necessarily looks like. So how can we prepare students?

By cultivating adaptability in the classroom.

Our students’ natural adaptability was put to the test during COVID as their education was hit by an evolution of technology overnight. While the unpredictability of education in the 2020/21 school year was often criticized, it’s also a reminder of the uncertainty our students are facing. Especially when they look ahead to their futures – from kindergarten to senior year.

Building more skills in adaptability while they are still in school will provide them with long-term benefits when the time comes that they need to pivot their skillsets and learn new technology at a moment’s notice.

This level of adaptability is an immeasurable resource for your student and teachers are uniquely placed to help build confidence in this area as a crucial skill they will need in the future.

Not only does it help them adapt to new situations and develop new skills more quickly, but adaptable students also are more likely to have higher self-confidence and satisfaction in their lives.

Teachers have a collective responsibility to prepare their students to embrace and adapt to challenge and change. To better prepare them for the future of work, we’ve collected a few of our favorite strategies for fostering adaptability in schools. 

Teach Resilience

Adaptability and resilience go hand in hand! Resilience is the ability to overcome challenges with a positive impact, but it’s also a mindset that should be developed early in life.

If something negatively impacts your student – whether it’s falling behind on grades or later on, not getting into the college they were hoping for – they always fall back on their resilience and find creative ways to push forward and improve. In a world where technology changes on a dime, this skill will be incredibly beneficial to your students.

As their teacher, you can help to foster this by encouraging them to find creative solutions to their problems and provide a safe environment to explore new ideas.

Promote Self-Regulation

Students as they grow into adulthood will need to learn how to manage their emotional thinking, especially when faced with challenges.

This is a teachable skill that gives them the ability to handle unexpected situations without obvious frustration. Teachers can reinforce this skill by educating students on how to set achievable goals, scaffolding, and other classroom activities. 

Dispel the Fear of Failure

No one likes to fail and for many people, the idea of failure is absolutely devastating and debilitating for students and adults alike. There is always the risk of failing when a situation starts to change. It’s really a fear of the unknown and not wanting to do something that won’t be as successful as keeping the status quo.

But it’s important to remember – and teach students from a young age – that success comes from failing and learning from it. This can be taught through recognizing effort, building community among peers, asking questions, taking risks, and self-reflection.

By not being afraid of failure, students will be more motivated to learn and find interesting solutions to changes in an uncertain future.

Encourage Continuous Learning

Learning and developing new skills is something we experience throughout our lives, but when applied to a future workspace where change is rampant, this willingness to learn is what keeps you a few steps ahead.

Teachers can build this excitement for education with their students by indulging their curiosity and even displaying their own enthusiasm in a subject. Taking the metrics of education out of it can often encourage students to see a lesson in a new light.

This is something that they will carry with them throughout their lives and help foster critical thinking and creative problem-solving. 

It’s impossible to prepare students for every eventuality. However, educators can foster adaptive skills and teach students how to respond to challenging, changing situations in positive ways. With this skill, students will grow into adulthood able to keep pace with unexpected situations and be more successful in future careers.