By
NICK GOSNELL
Hutch
Post
HUTCHINSON — Mark Tallman with the Kansas Association of School Boards has attended most of the meetings on the Kansans Can success tour and the X factor as he sees it is we don't know what kids are going to need to know throughout their careers.
"We think about what they know, what you can measure on a test," Tallman said. "That is important, but that doesn't tell us what they can actually do. It doesn't tell us how they'll be able to change, because preparing in a certain way with a certain set of knowledge doesn't help you, if what you need to know changes in the future."
There are many skills kids got outside of the formal classroom, that are just as important as the knowledge they may gain there.
"Adaptability and problem solving and the ability to be more self directed, those are all things that we don't really think about as part of the mission of schools," Tallman said. "What we are hearing from parents and business and others is to say, that's what young people really need to have."
Teaching the ability to pivot when you need to synthesize new information is the educational holy grail that makes someone employable throughout their career.
"How do you teach a child to say, I don't know how to do this, how do I figure that out?" Tallman said. "What many people seem to be saying is, you do that by making school more about projects, more about things to accomplish than it has traditionally been. When you're confronted with a whole new thing you didn't study, instead of just kind of giving up or saying that's not my job or that's not what I was trained to do, you have a whole set of skills that says, I need to figure this out, here's tools I can use to figure it out, here's how I can get help, here's how I can work with other people. I'm going to take responsibility for this."
Extracurricular activities and community activities can help, but for kids who struggle academically, they might not get those opportunities, because they're still trying to get the actual school work done.
Also, because of financial hardship, they may not get the chance to put themselves in new situations through things like travel that force them to learn to pivot to gain knowledge.