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GUEST POST: Podsie – Connecting Teachers and Students to Learning Science

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GUEST POST: Podsie – Connecting Teachers and Students to Learning Science

Like Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, describes, the forgetting curve is an “imperfect” but “useful” tool (originally developed by a psychologist named Herman Ebingghaus in 1885 (2)) that helps us understand just how fast humans forget without review. In my case, asking my students to recall content that they hadn’t seen in months was simply setting them up for failure.

Retrieval

I could have also improved on the way I reviewed with my students. In my second year, I intuitively knew that my students needed more review, but instead of asking them to re-read notes or do whole class call-and-response, it would have been much more effective for them to engage in retrieval practice, another well-documented learning science strategy (3).

Concretely, this might have looked like providing them with some low-stakes practice on solving those negative integer operations, asking them to retrieve that knowledge from memory, and then providing feedback along the way to fill in any gaps or clarify misconceptions.

The bigger problem

If we dig deeper, the bigger problem was that as a teacher, I was not equipped with a concrete and thorough understanding of how people learn. In fact, I didn’t come across these cognitive science principles until a few years after I had left the classroom, when I read the book “Make It Stick” by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel. 

Like it was for so many other educators, this book was hugely influential for me. On one hand, it formalized best practices that I had vague intuitions around and presented them in an evidence-based and definitive way.

More importantly, it revealed to me a clear gap between what learning science experts recommended and what was actually being implemented in classrooms.

Bridging the gap

At Podsie, we’re trying to help bridge that gap. Podsie is a nonprofit organization committed to empowering teachers and improving student learning by ensuring that all teachers and students have access to learning science best practices.

We want to do this in a couple of ways. First, we want to join in the movement of educators, researchers, and educational leaders who have already been working tirelessly towards this goal. We want to form partnerships, share what they’ve already been doing, and help create more resources that teachers and students can use.

Podsie the web tool

One of the key resources we’ve created so far is Podsie the web tool, which allows teachers and students to more easily implement spacing and retrieval in their classrooms.

To provide a brief overview of how this tool works, let’s imagine we were using Podsie back in my classroom. When my students first learned about negative integer operations, Podsie would have allowed me to give a formative assessment made up of questions that looked like this: 

Lesson of the Day: ‘A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics’

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Lesson of the Day: ‘A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics’

2. What are muons? What did Chris Polly, a physicist, observe that was unusual about their behavior?

3. How does this recent experiment at Fermilab relate to a similar experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2001?

4. What did Dr. Polly mean when he asked, “What monsters might be lurking there?” Do you have this same curiosity about the significance of the muon’s aberrant behavior? Why or why not?

5. What does it take for experimental results to be confirmed as a physics discovery? What is next in the process for the muon experiment?

6. What kind of questions might the muon experiment answer? Have you ever wondered about questions like the ones listed in the article?

7. How did physicists respond to the announcement on April 7 of the first results from the Muon g-2 experiment hosted at Fermilab? What do you think of the results?

Option 1: Read the rest of the article.

Here are some guiding questions to help you reflect on what you learn as you read each of the following sections:

  • ‘Who ordered that?’ — What else did you learn about muons, the g factor and the original experiment in Brookhaven?

  • The big move — What details stood out to you about preparations for the Fermilab experiment?

  • Into the dark — What new information did you gain about the results of the Fermilab experiment?

Then react to the final paragraphs of the article:

Physicists say the anomaly has given them ideas for how to search for new particles. Among them are particles lightweight enough to be within the grasp of the Large Hadron Collider or its projected successor. Indeed, some might already have been recorded but are so rare that they have not yet emerged from the blizzard of data recorded by the instrument.

Another candidate called the Z-prime could shed light on some puzzles in the Big Bang, according to Gordan Krnjaic, a cosmologist at Fermilab.

The g-2 result, he said in an email, could set the agenda for physics in the next generation.

“If the central value of the observed anomaly stays fixed, the new particles can’t hide forever,” he said. “We will learn a great deal more about fundamental physics going forward.”

What do you think? How big a deal do you think these results are? And, what new discoveries do you think the continuing Muon g-2 experiment will lead to?

Option 2: Explain one or more of the concepts discussed in the article via a creative piece.

Muon particles, the g factor and the Standard Model may not be familiar terms for most teenagers — or for most adults. Take one or more of the ideas you learned by watching the video in the warm-up activity and by reading the Times article, and help break it down by making a creative piece. Your goal is to help people without a strong grasp of particle physics understand.

Tarot Tales

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Tarot Tales

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

What story does this image inspire for you?

Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by this illustration — or tell us about a memory from your own life that this image makes you think of.

Post it in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.

About Picture Prompts

• Find all our Picture Prompts in this column.
• Have an idea for a Picture Prompt? Tell us about it.
• Teachers, discover more ways to teach with our Picture Prompts and learn how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning.

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Word of the Day: wend

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Word of the Day: wend

: direct one’s course or way

_________

The word wend has appeared in 11 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 22 in “‘Ham on Rye’ Review: Coming of Age, With Existential Unease” by Glenn Kenny:

With his first feature, the director and co-writer Tyler Taormina delivers something at first familiar and then increasingly — but never ostentatiously — strange. “Ham on Rye” can be taken as an allegory for middle-class suburban life in America, but it’s got added value as a potent mood piece, accomplished with a bare minimum of means.

It’s late spring in the suburbs, and boys and girls of high-school age are dressing up — not quite in prom wear, but in sundresses and ties and jackets, headed to some kind of event. As they wend their way through more or less quiet streets, the boys talk, crudely but with awkward innocence, about sex. The girls talk about fashion and popularity.

Can you correctly use the word wend in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how wend can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.

Our 12th Annual Summer Reading Contest

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Our 12th Annual Summer Reading Contest

Every year since 2010, The Learning Network has invited teenagers around the world to add The New York Times to their summer reading lists. So far, more than 70,000 have done so.

If you are looking for ways to offer students more “voice and choice,” we hope our open-ended contest can help. Every week, we ask participants to choose something in The Times that has piqued their interest, and then tell us why. At the end of the week, judges from the Times newsroom pick their favorite responses, and we publish them. It’s that simple

Though our goals include some that appear on many educators’ lists — helping students become more aware of the world and their place in it; learning how to navigate sophisticated nonfiction; and practicing writing for an audience — we also hope that students will realize that reading the newspaper can be fun. As you’ll see in the guidelines below, they can choose anything that was published on NYTimes.com in 2021. The subject matter isn’t important; we just care about why they chose it.

When the contest begins on June 11, we’ll post directions both here and at the top of this page for how to submit. But in short:

Any 11- to 19-year-old anywhere in the world is invited to join us, if you are in middle or high school, or if you graduated from high school in 2021 and haven’t yet started college.

Every Friday starting on June 11, we’ll post a fresh version of this question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” We will link to each week’s version here. Here is an example from last summer. How you respond to this question will depend on your age:

  • Students ages 13 to 19 in the United States and Britain — and ages 16 to 19 elsewhere in the world — can submit by posting a comment on the post itself. You can see examples of what that looks like by visiting this post from last summer and clicking on the comments.

  • Students ages 11 to 12 in the United States and Britain — and ages 11 to 15 elsewhere in the world — can have an adult submit a comment on their behalf via a short form that will be embedded in each week’s post.

_________

1. Every Friday beginning on June 11, we will publish a post asking the same question: “What got your attention in The Times this week?” That’s where you should post an answer any time until the following Friday, when we will close that post to comment and open a new one that asks the same question.

You can always find the proper link to the place to post at the top of this page, updated each week. You can also always find it on our home page.

To see how this works, visit this post from June 2020 and check out the student comments that were submitted at that time.

2. You can choose anything you like that was published in the print paper or on NYTimes.com in 2021, including articles, Op-Eds, videos, graphics, photos and podcasts. To see the variety of topics winners have written about over the years, read this column.

3. You can participate as often as every week, but we allow only one submission per person per week.

4. Responses must be 1,500 characters or fewer. We have a contest rubric as well as a guide for students that details four simple ways to make your response stand out.

5. Any teenager anywhere in the world is invited to join us, if you are in middle or high school, or if you graduated from high school in 2021 and haven’t started college yet. See above, How to Submit, for more details.

6. Make sure to provide us with the complete URL or headline. For example, “A Man Found 15,000 Bees in His Car After Grocery Shopping” or https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/bees-car-new-mexico.html.

7. Every Tuesday during the contest, starting June 29 and ending Sept. 7, we will publish a previous week’s winner or winners in a separate post you can find here. We will also celebrate the winners on Twitter and Facebook.

8. The children and stepchildren of New York Times employees are not eligible to enter this contest. (Teenagers who live in the same household as a Times employee are also ineligible.)

We have several resources to help students practice for this contest before summer begins, and by early May we’ll be adding several more. They include:

Coming soon (and we’ll link here when these are live):

  • A video version of our “Annotated by the Author” series in which 2020 student winners discuss the writer’s moves they made.

  • A special May 6 webinar for 2021 participants, Supporting Independent Reading and Writing.

  • Some reflections from teenagers in classrooms across the country who tried a short experiment this spring in which they were challenged to read one Times article on a topic within their comfort zone, and one article on a topic outside it, and reflect on the results.

This contest has been running more or less the same way for years, but please write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com if your question is not addressed below.

Q. What kinds of responses are you looking for?

A. The subject matter isn’t important; neither is whether you loved or hated it. What we care about is what you have to say about why you picked it.

If you don’t believe us, scroll through the work of previous winners. They have written on weighty topics like the coronavirus pandemic, racism, Alzheimer’s disease and the dangers of vaping, but they have also written on handbags, hummingbirds, power naps, junk food, Beyoncé, Disney shows, running and bagels.

Whatever the subject, you’ll see that the best responses year after year make personal connections to the news and discuss the broader questions and ideas that the topic raises. We have even created a guide that outlines four simple things you can do to make your responses more powerful. We will use this rubric to judge entries.

So whether you were moved by an article, enlightened by an essay, bowled over by a photo, irked by an editorial or inspired by a video, simply find something in The Times that genuinely interests you and tell us why, as honestly and originally as you can.

Q. Who will be judging my work?

A. The Learning Network staff, a team of as-yet-to-be-named New York Times journalists, and some educators from across the country.

Q. What is the “prize”?

A. The prize for winning any of our contests is having your work published on The Learning Network.

Q. When should I check to see if my submission won?

A. Every Tuesday from June 29 to Sept. 7, we will publish the previous week’s winner or winners in a separate article that you can find here. We will also celebrate the winners on Twitter and Facebook.

Q. How do I participate in this contest if I don’t have a digital subscription to The Times?

A. Until September 2021, high school students across the United States can get free digital access to NYTimes.com. After that, NYTimes.com has a digital subscription system in which readers have free access to five articles each month. If you exceed that limit, you will be asked to become a digital subscriber.

One thing you should know, however, is that all Learning Network posts for students, as well as all Times articles linked from them, are accessible without a digital subscription. So if you use any of the articles we have linked to on our site, they will not count as part of the five-article limit.

And, each time we pose our question — “What interested you most in The Times this week?” — we will link to about 25 recent articles that you can choose from if you don’t have your own subscription.

You can also find copies of The New York Times at most public libraries, and some even allow you to access NYTimes.com with your library card.

And remember: You can use anything published anytime in 2021. This post, “21 Things Teenagers Can Do With a New York Times Subscription,” can help you find everything from breaking news to advice for “smarter living” to fun diversions you probably never knew The Times offered.

Q. How do I prove to my teacher that I participated?

A. If you are 16 to 19 years old and are submitting your response by posting a comment, make sure to check the box that asks if you would like to be emailed when your comment is published. If you do so, the system will send you a link to your comment, which you can use to show your teacher, your parents, your friends or anyone else you’d like to impress. (Please note that you will not get an email until the comment has been approved, which may take longer over weekends.)

If you are 11 to 15 years old and are submitting your response via the embedded form, you will automatically get an email thanking you for participating.

Another method? Some teachers ask students to keep a Google doc of all their submissions, while others instruct students to take screenshots of their comments before they hit “submit.”

Q. How can teachers, librarians and parents use this challenge?

A. Through the years, adults have told us over and over that participating in this contest has made students both more aware of and more interested in what’s going on in the world. Many see it as a low-stakes way to help teenagers start building a news-reading habit. And at a time when a global pandemic is threatening us all, and an “infodemic”— the spread of misinformation, lies and rumors about the coronavirus — is contributing to the danger, keeping up with reliable news is especially important.

If that’s not reason enough to assign it to students, our contest is also an easy way to add more nonfiction to your students’ reading lists — and to encourage teenagers to make their own choices about what to read, as anything published in The Times in 2021 is fair game.

Participating also meets the recommendations given in this joint statement on independent reading issued by the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Canadian Children’s Book Center.

And for some teachers, assigning the contest over the summer helps them to quickly get to know their new students when school starts. In our related webinar, Karen Gold, English department chair at the Governor’s Academy in Massachusetts, details how she uses the contest this way.

But maybe the most compelling reason to assign this contest is what students themselves say about it. At the end of the summer of 2020, many teenagers told us that the weekly reading and writing helped them through a difficult time. For instance, a participant named Ava wrote:

This year’s summer reading contest has helped me learn not only about the world around me, but about myself. After seeing other students’ responses on race, the teenage experience, and the coronavirus, I felt a little less alone about my complicated feelings during this tumultuous year. After all, there has never been a time in my life during which it’s been easier to fall into social isolation. However, because the articles I chose to write about were those that I could easily relate to and express my opinion on, I found comfort in my weekly submissions.

In 2017, Emma Weber, a student from London, posted that, thanks to the contest, “I feel grounded in my views and understand what’s going on in the world. It’s amazing what a change 1,500 characters a week make.” Last summer we invited Emma to help judge the entries, and here is what she had to say after Week 10:

I know firsthand that the Summer Reading Contest has the ability to change the way one engages in the news — I went from passively reading to actively thinking and questioning. The more you reflect on what is going on in the world and what interests you about it, the more you will understand your place within it. I urge all those who enjoyed participating this summer to continue reading, reflecting and writing.

Thank you for making this contest a hit year after year, and please spread the word that it’s back for its 12th season.

Good luck!

The image at the top of this post was borrowed from the Book Review’s 2020 celebration of Summer Reading.

What’s Going On in This Graph? | April 21, 2021

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What’s Going On in This Graph? | April 21, 2021

4. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button to address that student directly.

On Wednesday, April 21, teachers from our collaborator, the American Statistical Association, will facilitate this discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time.

5. By Friday morning, April 23, we will reveal more information about the graph, including a free link to the article that included this graph, at the bottom of this post. We encourage you to post additional comments based on the article, possibly using statistical terms defined in the Stat Nuggets.

We’ll post more information here on Thursday afternoon. Stay tuned!

More?

• See all graphs in this series or a slide show of 60 of our favorite graphs.

• View our archives that link to all past releases, organized by topic, graph type and Stat Nugget.

• Learn more about the “Notice and Wonder” teaching strategy and how and why other teachers are using this feature from our on-demand webinar.

• Sign up for our free weekly Learning Network newsletter so you never miss a graph. Graphs are always released by the Friday before the Wednesday live-moderation to give teachers time to plan ahead.

• Go to the American Statistical Association K-12 website, which includes teacher statistics resources, professional development opportunities, and more.

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Skills for The Future

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Skills for The Future

The Future of Skills. I’m sure you have heard this phrase. It’s everywhere. Some sites provide the answer to the question – “What are the skills of the future?” Yet, that shouldn’t be the question.

What should be the first question – “What do skills of the future mean?” “How does it apply to those individuals who are in working in Corporate?” “How will it apply to those in education, or farming or with blue-collar jobs?”

Those are the questions, that everyone seems to be avoiding. And it is a shame, because not everyone works in the corporate sector. The World Economic Forum’s job forecast focused only on Business. Not farming. Nor education. Nor any other sector that isn’t business (i.e. corporate).

In the blog, I will refer to corporate to include for-profit, non-profit, and associations.

What is the impact of universities and colleges related to training students for the skills of the future?

Perhaps a better way to say this is that if we go by their track record during 2020 with remote learning (edtech’s term, not mine), I’d say pretty dismal. Universities and colleges should be embarrassed, for how they decided that students away from the physical location should learn. If anyone set back the e-learning industry for EdTech, it was the sector itself – universities and colleges (yes there were exceptions, but there was far more griping about how awful e-learning is, then love).

Instead of boring everyone with Zoom or web conferencing calls, they could have done any of the following

  • Created asynchronous-based courses, allowing students to bounce around and focus on areas of interest and knowledge – tapping into developing skills and building them, by having real-life scenarios within the course, each chapter actually.
  • Tapping into gaming thru skill-building and applying those skills to other content items they would have access to online. We aren’t talking about people buying a $50 latest greatest, a simple fun game could have been created or found on the net.
  • Project-based, project-driven tying into the skills for that subject matter and application. If online – a virtual lab, or virtual camp, if offline – way many options.
  • Leveraging social that the kids are using today, with the creation of videos on Tik Tok for example, around a specific skill for them to learn tied to the subject. I mean, what is the training one people often do at the beginning of so many sessions – how do you make a peanut butter sandwich? It requires you to use a variety of skills, from formulation to process to implementation. Remember it is step by step, critical thinking exercise. Hello, business skill.

Part of the blame has to be on the learning systems focused only on the edtech market, because I couldn’t find one that had skills functionality like a skills library tied to various learning subjects. The ones who have a skills library capability, and again even then it wasn’t universal, played in corporate too.

This is WHY

Corporate will have to be the ones who identify, build, develop the skills of folks entering the workforce, because it won’t come the way of universities or colleges, not those who offer at least 50% of the programs 100% online for a degree (you never have to be in a physical classroom), nor those whereas students attend a physical classroom setting. Sure it depends on the subject, I mean Journalism usually involves learning skills from reporting, to typing, to ledes etc. Compared to say Philosophy. But why couldn’t you take a subject like philosophy and tap it into a business or non-business setting, and allow the student to explore what are the measures to resolve XYZ from a philosophical or ethical standpoint?

I digress.

The point is that, you, the head of L&D or you, the head of Training or even you, the head of sales or HR or product or whoever is going to the main person responsible for providing the skills for these folks. Life skills. Technical skills (if applicable). Professional development skills and so forth. Soft skills is just one part, that everyone knows, but even some basic skills that you will think they will acquire in their schooling, may come at a bummer to you, that they haven’t.

Today, kids are using technology everywhere. Great, you think. But then consider what is taking place in Japan, where young people (college, 20s) are hiring people to help them on dates. Now, this doesn’t mean the three is crowd here, rather they hire dating experts to help with having a conversation – communicating, listening to another person on a date, without looking at their mobile device.

That – the art of communication, listening, eye contact is going by the wayside and it, as in as a life skill, isn’t something normally offered in a non-corporate, let alone corporate setting – because it goes beyond customer service or communicating with your team type of stuff.

Listening is a crucial skill and will be in our new world, post COVID-19 (granted it will still be around).

Corporate World Skills of the Future

Every where I look, I see technical skills. Technology skills. Skills to be a data scientist. Skills to be something with technology and so on. What they forget is that not everyone is going to be a data scientist. Not everyone is going to be using Python or other programming languages. Not everyone really needs to know how AI or machine learning or deep learning works.

And yet, there is this overwhelming push towards technology skills.

The skills that people need in 2022 (I won’t go past that, because if we have learned anything, is that anything can happen and disrupt), will be the following in the corporate side

  • Communication, Writing and team work with a remote workforce

The majority of white-collar workers are not going to return to the office. Traditional companies such as Ford, have stated that they only need to be there two or three days a week. My vibe is that it will be dependent on what they are working on. Target has cut back on office space in their downtown Minneapolis HQ and followed the same two or three-day thing. And there is many more following suit. Just as there are plenty who have realized that their workers never have to come into the office.

There will be exceptions, of course, Facebook, for example, has stated they want their workers back in the office, but overall, the more common will be remote.

Communicating with someone remote thru Teams, Slack and other SaaS solutions/apps requires finesse. They can’t see you, thus tone becomes critical. It is easy to misinterpret something because you are thinking in one tone when they could be writing in another.

Grammar becomes relevant again. Effective writing too. Any verbal communication will likely come via one of these apps or thru Zoom or similar, which thus requires skills around the team, building rapport, eye contact, facial expressions, and so on. When people see others looking at a mobile device, they will think they are not paying attention, and yet that person might be typing what is being said.

  • Microsoft Office 365 Skills – People are working from home, they are using their own computers, and thus their own products. If they are a Mac User they may not be using Office 365, so uh, get ready to buy – for them (if they are not). Word 365, PowerPoint 365, Excel 365 become everyday tools in the remote workforce. Outlook 365 or Gmail too. Yet there are plenty of 3rd party content providers who lack Gmail training for example. The skills to acquire here go beyond how to open a file. I attended a presentation the other day, whereas they couldn’t figure out how to go to presentation mode for the PPT, resulting in a few minutes of watching them on-screen move around the mouse in PowerPoint to figure it out. And these were well-educated, professionals, one of which, had technical skills.
  • Internet SaaS solutions – Again tapping into the remote workforce angle, you are going to have more and more people leveraging SaaS solutions/apps than before (such as web conferencing solutions), especially if in your workplace, you block the internet or block social. Well, hello -those days are gone.

People ignore the social media site, but you should seriously look at getting content on communication tied around social. This is because there continue to be mishaps on social media with workers who say something or do something and now everyone sees it. Even if they say “these are my own views”, it won’t matter if the comment is offensive or disgusting in some fashion – the complaints will be coming to you – the company, the business, and so forth.

Technical tied to apps like Teams, Slack, and soon others to follow – Too many tech skill sites focus on programming language, coding, or algorithms – great if you are into that, but since the majority of the workforce isn’t – well, it isn’t relevant. What are the technical solutions they are using daily – those are the skills you want them to learn.

  • Critical thinking, reasoning, complex problem solving, situational problem-solving skills will be as important as technology skills.

Not everyone is going to need to know how Mr. Roboto is going to work, learning robotics, especially if Mr. Roboto eventually replaces the human worker.

  • Skills tied to the job role are obvious, but push past that and tie in skills that tap into the person themselves. Which means life skills, sometimes noted as personal skills. Time management is a skill. Identifying stress and the ways to resolve that or at least relax is a skill. Maybe you decide to offer the skill of mediation to your employees. No one is forced to take it, but there will be those who do. Well-being becomes a critical part of the day-to-day corporate experience.
  • Understanding the impact of new technology – This is not the same thing as learning a technical skill like AI. Rather it is acquiring skills to adapt to the ever-changing world, regardless of the business.
  • Foreign Language – I know most people will disagree, but learning a new language (even if it is 10 words) is of great value. Part life skill, part professional development. We are a global village as Marshall McLuhan rightly predicted, back in the ’60s, and not everyone speaks the same language. The fact that millions of people every day are on mobile devices taking a foreign language, should tell you that, uh, it is relevant and of interest. Yet, you hardly find it on a learning system – or even content that a vendor will add to their marketplace.

Upskilling

A wonderful world. Truly, wonderful. But, ummm how does that work exactly, If I am not aware that I need that skill? Upskilling sounds like a word that belongs in the Ivory Tower ( a term meaning academia). Reskilling sounds great too, unless those folks happen to be blue-collar, who have lost their job, then where pray tell are they supposed to get that reskilling? Who is providing that to them? How many of your blue-collar workers at your company, do you offer reskilling to? How many of them do you offer them new skills to acquire beyond their job role? Ask yourself, is upskilling just for a privileged few or is it for everyone at the company – from the executive assistant to the C-suite?

The problem is that upskilling and reskilling are now parts of the lexicon, great if you are one of the folks who are offered that, no so great, if not. And it isn’t a one for all, all for one type of thing either, usually it is one of few.

Safety Skills

If your workers are not going to be working in the office, then these skills can be tweaked, from the office to home – again, life skills around safety. It is a different mindset to be sure, but one that is relevant.

Blue-Collar

Tap into more skills around what you offer to your white-collar workforce. It always amazes me how many companies rely on the plant worker, the maintenace worker, the person in the field for day to day operations, yet fails to offer them any skills that go beyond them doing their job. It is as if, they do not have any aspirations or interest in acquiring skills that are not job related.

Trust me, they are. Critical thinking is very relevant. Decision making? Relevant. New technologies that are coming – relevant. Automation may be relevent to one set of your blue-collar workforce, but not the other.

Listening though is universal. Teamwork? Universal. Problem solving? Relevant. And the list goes on.

Skills tied to Scenarios

To utilize any skill, will require the L&D or Training department, or learning system to incorporate scenarios that can be leveraged to learn and apply these skills. Virtual labs or virtual camps. Digital Scenarios.

Small Business, One person Ops, Consultants, etc.

If you are a small business, or a one person shop, or a consultant, or someone who provides services, the skills you will need for 2022 include

Customer communication – If someone isn’t wearing a mask, and doesn’t want to, what are you going to do about it? Conflict resolution, de-escalation becomes crucial.

Decision making – I’d argue that this is one skill that everyone needs because I see it daily, where folks can’t make a decision without pondering it for a long period of time. There are times you need to make a decision quickly, and in 2022, speed and efficiency will be critical.

How to use solutions such as Venmo? If you haven’t heard of it, trust me you will want to. I use it and it is fantastic. My stylist accepts it, my landscaper uses it, the painters use it, and then friends use it as well. It is gaining a lot of attention (it is owned by PayPal). I now offer it for folks who want to pay for my business services, and who have a Venmo account.

Technical as it pertains to your small business – from how to do payroll, budgeting, accounting 101, to managing a workforce around hiring and retention. Understanding data protection – especially if you are capturing data, is a worthwhile skill.

Bottom Line

The future of skills is not only technical or the usual groupings that you see every year. Professional development will be very relevant and a must need, beyond skills tied around job roles.

The big skill though, the one set of skills, that corporate and thus many are missing is the one that all workers will need help with

Life.

Or as those in Training and L&D will come to know it

Life Skills.

E-Learning 24/7

#LearnActImpact with courses in social justice, climate change, and more

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#LearnActImpact with courses in social justice, climate change, and more

By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera

Each of us has the ability to create positive change in the world. Even seemingly small gestures can make a big difference. Nevertheless, as new challenges continue to emerge across the globe, we can sometimes feel helpless—unsure of how to make an impact, fix a problem, or make a bad situation better. Learning is a powerful force for good because it helps us understand the challenges we face, overcome feelings of helplessness, and realize we can make a difference—that we can create real solutions. Learning is how we can change and grow, and it’s a critical part of creating a more just and equitable world. 

We are grateful to the Coursera partner community for building new learning opportunities that can help you gain the knowledge and skills you need  to make an impact in your community. With these recently launched courses, you can learn about topics such as diversity, equality, climate change, public health, sustainability, social work, and more. 

Learn about the issues you care about from experts who are leading the way forward. Gain the knowledge and skills to start making your own positive contributions.

Act on the knowledge and skills you gain to challenge the status quo, find innovative new solutions, and drive progress. 

Impact your community and the world around you in positive ways. Join inspiring movements and organizations, lead new initiatives, and help create a safer and more inclusive world for all. 

You can always find the most recent social impact courses from Coursera partners in this curated collection.  

With the skills you learn and the knowledge you gain in these courses, you’ll be ready to act and make an impact! Share your impact stories with the global Coursera community using #LearnActImpact on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We can’t wait to see what you learn next!

1

Should Kids Still Learn to Tell Time?

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Should Kids Still Learn to Tell Time?

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Do you think it is important for children to learn how to tell time on an analog clock?

What about other analog skills that are taught in school? For instance, should all students learn to have clear handwriting — or has typing made that obsolete? Should students be able to spell without spell-check and to add and subtract without a calculator?

Do you think that learning analog skills benefits children? Or are some of those skills becoming outdated as the world changes?

In “Teach Children to Tell Time. (They Could Become Customers.),” Rachel Felder writes about clock lessons and watches for children:

School curriculums may include contemporary skills like computer programming, but many parents — and watch makers — are pleased that a traditional lesson still usually remains: How to tell time on a clock with hands rather than just reading a digital display.

After all, when children learn how to read the hands of a clock, they then could become potential analog watch customers.

Amy Christiansen, the London-based founder of the fragrance line Sana Jardin, said she was pleased that her two sons were taught at school how to tell time by reading a clock’s hands.

“I think it’s a challenging concept to teach so I was relieved they were learning it in school,” she said.

Most schools teach students who are around 6 or 7 how to read an analog clock through classroom instruction and then send work sheets home.

For adults who want to teach children themselves, or reinforce school lessons, there are books, and free resources online. Some YouTube videos, like the musical ones by Jack Hartmann, intentionally look more like lighthearted entertainment than educational content.

And there is “R is for Rolex: ABCs for the Future Watch Collectors,” a board book by Diaper Book Club in which A, for example, is accompanied by an illustration of an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. (Fortunately for impressionable toddlers and their doting parents and grandparents, prices are not included.)

Ms. Felder also discusses the debate over smartwatches for children:

Just like the tug of war in the adult watch market between traditional Swiss timepieces and smartwatches, there are, along with analog options, connected wristwatches and fitness trackers for children — mostly simplified, less expensive takes on typical grown-up versions and aimed at older children.

… For some parents, having their children switch from a basic watch to a connected timepiece isn’t easy.

“I was saddened because it was a move away from something traditional that seemed old fashioned and more wholesome,” said Ms. Christiansen. Her older son, now 13, got an Apple Watch as a gift and later passed it on to his brother, now 9, in favor of a vintage Casio digital piece. (They both had been about 7 when they were taught to tell analog time at Garden House School, near their home in London’s Chelsea neighborhood.)

“As a parent, you’re always trying to swat them away from a screen,” she said. “When it’s on their wrist, it’s even harder to keep them focused.”

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

  • Should all children learn to tell time on an analog clock? Why or why not?

  • How did you learn to tell time? Do you think that learning to read an analog watch face helps children visualize the concept of time? Do you think you would understand time differently if you had learned to read only digital devices?

  • How do you check the time? Do you wear a watch? If so, is it analog or digital? If not, what device do you usually use?

  • Do you think it is important to learn analog skills like telling time in school? What other analog skills do you think children today should learn? Why?

  • Do you think any of the skills you’re learning in school are outdated? Are there digital skills you wish you’d been taught, or taught better? Which and why?

  • How do you feel about smartwatches and fitness trackers? Would having a screen on your wrist make you feel more connected, more distracted or both? In your opinion, what age is too young for a smartwatch?

About Student Opinion

• Find all of our Student Opinion questions in this column.
• Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it.
• Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning.

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Word of the Day: replete

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Word of the Day: replete

1. deeply filled or permeated (followed by with)

2. filled to satisfaction with food or drink

3. complete

_________

The word replete has appeared in 114 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on March 14 in “Blue Ivy Carter, Beyoncé’s daughter, wins her first Grammy.” by Julia Jacobs:

At only 9 years old, Beyoncé’s oldest daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, is already starting to follow in her parents’ footsteps, winning her first Grammy for her role in the music video for “Brown Skin Girl.”

“Brown Skin Girl,” a celebratory anthem filled with familiar faces — including Lupita Nyong’o and Kelly Rowland — is replete with imagery of loving relationships between Black women: mothers and daughters, sisters, friends. Blue Ivy appears at the beginning, with a shot of her playing a hand clapping game with her mother. She later appears all dolled up like a debutante, wearing a string of pearls and white gloves.

Can you correctly use the word replete in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how replete can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

If you enjoy this daily challenge, try using multiple Words of the Day in a 50-word story that you submit to our Monthly Vocabulary Challenge.

Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.

The Word of the Day has been provided by Vocabulary.com. Learn more and see usage examples across a range of subjects in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary. See every Word of the Day in this column.

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