April 28, 2022

Recently I have been rethinking the idea of how we teach students to prepare them for the future. When I ask questions surrounding what they need in order to succeed professionally and personally over the next 20 years, I muse over the upcoming “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, a nod to the original of the early 1800s when tens of millions left a life of farming for city work in factories. According to a 2017 report from McKinsey Global Institute, up to one-half of all the jobs that currently exist in the world will disappear during this upheaval. This is due to disruption from new industries and technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Deep Learning, Robotics, as well as PWC’s essential technologies. As former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley famously stated, “We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”

At the forefront, education is shifting toward the application of transdisciplinary competencies or skills that will prepare our students to be successful in a future we cannot yet imagine. So how can we actually…