Key Points
- Social and emotional learning (SEL) is central to preparing students for the future. By integrating SEL into classrooms, students can build the emotional intelligence, empathy, and relationship skills needed to navigate complex social and professional environments.
- Durable skills like communication, adaptability, and problem-solving, alongside academic knowledge, are crucial for success in students’ personal lives and future careers, especially in a rapidly changing world.
- Future-ready classrooms balance traditional teaching methods with student-centered activities, focusing on relationship-building, real-world problem-solving, and experiential learning.
Thriving in Tomorrow’s World Three-Part Webinar Series: Part 1 Recap
How do we prepare a generation for a world that is more complex, globally connected, and technologically advanced than we have ever experienced?
CASEL’s new three-part webinar series, Thriving in Tomorrow’s World: Learning Spaces for a Future-Ready Generation, dives into this critical question. Leading researchers, practitioners, and policymakers will explore the vital role of social and emotional learning (SEL) in future-readiness, along with systems-level approaches and classroom strategies that can equip students with the skills they need for success in a rapidly shifting world.
To kick off the series, Andy Tucker, Director of Policy at CASEL, was joined by a panel of experts to discuss future-ready skills and how we can design learning spaces that foster these skills in students.
- Bob Chapman, Chairman and CEO, Barry-Wehmiller
- Catharina Gress-Wright, Analyst and SEL Lead, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
- Julie Lammers, Executive Vice President, American Student Assistance (ASA)
Watch the recording of the webinar below, or read on for key takeaways from the conversation.
What does it mean when we talk about future-ready skills, sometimes called durable skills?
Back to topTucker:
“Communication, adaptability, critical thinking, flexibility, problem-solving, collaboration, are all examples of future-ready skills. Each of us, as professionals, has to use these skills every single day to be successful in our careers. And that’s what we need to be teaching our students as well. Not only the academic and technical skills they need, but the social and emotional skills they need to be successful in school, in the future world of work, and in their lives.”
Chapman:
“We’ve become aware of this epidemic of anguish in this country. Young people with high levels of depression and anxiety, and a poverty of dignity where people don’t feel valued. I’m very concerned with how education can transform this. How can education begin to create people with life skills, not just academic skills?”
Lammers:
“Durable skills is a term that has been increasingly used to talk about what we used to call soft skills. America Succeeds looked at job postings and found that about 7 out of 10 of the most-requested skills were what we were terming ‘durable skills.’ These skills were requested significantly more than the hard skills, which employers felt they could train themselves if they needed to. Employers were saying these durable skills were ones employees really needed to come to them with—collaborate, communicate, think critically about issues.
“There’s a lot of crossover between the durable skills employers are looking for and the social and emotional framework that CASEL has created. … We are working diligently through SEL and other efforts to make sure young people are able to build skills not just for work success, but for life success.”
What does a future-ready learning space look like?
Back to topGress-Wright:
“It’s about doing things we already do, just differently and better. … It starts with relationships. This means the adults being aware of their own capacities and skills. Am I modeling these capacities—for example, the leadership you want to see—and then teaching it to kids? So things like feedback and classroom interaction … every teacher I know of does that, but think about how you are doing it. Are you giving feedback in a way that is relationship-oriented and not just content-oriented?
“Future-ready classrooms are not a radical new thing that we’ve never seen before. They’re finding a balance between some of the traditional stuff and more student-centered stuff, and then harnessing things like feedback and classroom interactions and relationships so that those don’t become byproducts, but they become some of the central factors and drivers of the classroom.”
Lammers:
“How are we bringing in opportunities for experiential learning, project-based learning, service learning, to connect what’s happening in the real world to what’s happening in the classroom? We need to begin to build those skills in a real way. Rather than the theoretical of ‘this is how you work on a team,’ how are you actually working on a team to solve a real-world problem?
“We want to make sure that when we’re talking about future readiness, it’s not some theoretical thing you need to deal with 10 years from now. We are building opportunities for kids to experience these activities, determine the way they like to work and their own career identity, and begin to build social capital in a real way, so that when they are moving into the working world they have opportunities for relationships with workplace mentors. … These experiences allow young people to really understand themselves, not only what they like, but also what that they don’t like. How are we building those relationships and that social capital while supporting young people to develop the real-world skills that will inform their long-term career goals?”
What skills do you think will be especially important for the future?
Back to topChapman:
“We forgot one thing when we designed our education system: We need to have leaders who have the skill and courage to care for the people they employ. Our team came up with three fundamental human, durable skills. The most powerful, it turns out, is empathetic listening. Not listening to debate, judge, or respond, but listening to validate the worth of others. In schools, we teach speech and debate, but we don’t teach students how to listen. The second durable skill was how do you recognize the goodness in others in a meaningful way? The third thing we taught was culture of service, seizing the opportunity to serve others. … The greatest thing we’ve learned in the last 20 years is giving people the skills to move from ‘it’s all about me and my career and my job’, to ‘it’s about we,’ to actually care for others. We need leaders in all parts of our lives who genuinely care for the people they’re leading.”
Gress-Wright:
“When I think about future-readiness, the first thing is adaptability: the ability to adjust to a world that is changing in more and more dramatic ways that we’re all experiencing in our daily lives, the ability to adapt to those changes and come up with new solutions and new ways to approach those challenges. The other is compassionate responsibility. When we feel a lot of big changes in the world that feel out of our control … it’s not just about doing what you want and doing what’s good for your closest people, but thinking what does the world need and how does that align with your passions and your own individual capacities? These are two things that I think are going to be the characteristics of a future-ready person.”
For more on creating future-ready learning spaces, register for the three-part Thriving in Tomorrow’s World series. Join us on April 3 at 12 p.m. CT for Part 2: Systems for Future Readiness.
Related Posts
- State of the SEL Field 2025: Skills That Last, Impact That Endures
- We Asked High School Graduates What SEL Skills They’ll Bring Into Their Futures. Here’s What They Said.
- How Can States Prepare Students for the Future? The “Portrait of the Graduate” Helps Set the Vision.
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