Out of the “What School Ought to Teach” list: Adaptability

HTT’s “What School Ought to Teach” list includes ten values we consider to be core competencies for a new generation. Adaptability – the ability to navigate through changing times, environments, and contexts – is one of them.

1. Adaptability as seen by Holistic Think Tank

Adaptability, understood as the capacity to adapt, is a key competency of the 21st century. Holistic Think Tank understands it as the ability to find oneself in changing times, environments, and contexts, including in relation to the development of Artificial Intelligence and Industry 4.0.

The power to adapt has played a decisive role in the history of the evolution of the human species. It is all the more indispensable nowadays, in an era of such rapid technological, social, climatic, economic, and demographic transformations.

In neuroscientific terms, this trait is associated with the prefrontal cortex – the longest maturing (until about age 20) structure of the human brain (Gogtay N., Giedd J.N., Lusk L., Hayashi K.M., Greenstein D., Vaituzis A.C., Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood, 2004). Consequently, adaptability should be most intensively trained during the school period. This necessity is reinforced in the context of researchers’ predictions that as many as 65 percent of current students (The Future of Jobs. Global Challenge Insight Report, World Economic Forum, 2016) will work in professions that do not yet exist.

2. Adaptability in pedagogical theories 

Researchers point to a strong correlation between adaptability, creativity, and innovation at work (Feng X., Feng W., Feng C., Perceval G., High Cognitive Flexibility Learners Perform Better in Probabilistic Rule Learning, Frontiers Psychology, 2020). Also, research by Danish cognitive scientist Prof. Roshan Cools shows a correlation between high cognitive flexibility and professional and school achievement.

OECD experts in “The Future of Education and Skills 2030” emphasize that training transformational competencies – which also include critical thinking, the ability to solve dilemmas, and the capacity to take responsibility for one’s actions – is the role of the school.

Some educational institutions have already incorporated the teaching of this value into their classes. The “Promoting Adaptability in Schools” report shows that students who attend those schools are not only more capable of adapting to changing contexts but also learn more effectively, achieving better results (Promoting Adaptability in Schools, Educational Psychology Review, 2020).

3. The teacher’s role in developing adaptability among students

While technology, the business world, science, and even such traditional areas of social life as culture are – to a greater or lesser extent – adapting to the changing world, education remains relatively unchanged.

The age of digital technology means instant access to information. However, this rule does not apply to the school classroom. There has also been little change in the process of teacher training and professional development. Schooling is still mainly about teachers passing on information to prepare students for standardized external exams. But do excellent test scores guarantee young people’s professional and social success in the future world? There is an obvious gap between formal teaching in the school classroom and the outside world. A teacher’s job requires responding to and managing constant change.

The teacher should strengthen adaptability in students and prepare them to act in the context of uncertainty, showing that changing the attitudes and actions in response to a new situation or given data is not only not a weakness but, in fact – an act of maturity and wisdom. Students should be encouraged to learn new skills and take on more strategies, as well as to learn from the experiences and information they have gained.

However, for a young person to be comfortable with this, he must have – both internal and built by the environment – a belief that he has the right to make mistakes. Research indicates that students who have the space to make mistakes and change their attitudes show greater creativity and willingness to take on new challenges (Blackwell L., Trzesniewski K., Dweck C., Implict Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across and Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention, Society Research in Child Development, 2007).

To strengthen students’ cognitive flexibility, the teacher can reach for such didactic tools as student discussions (which, to a much greater extent than debates, encourage students to listen to the opinions of others, enter into dialogue and cooperation with them, and as a consequence, consider modifying their own attitudes), projects based on the problem-solving method ( that is, analyzing and decoding a problem into smaller parts and then developing a proposal for a solution), and adaptive training (controlled introduction of students into situations that require flexibility and change of action patterns, such as crisis simulations).

4. Examples of questions

In the process of strengthening adaptability and readiness to acquire new skills in students, it may be helpful to seek answers to the following questions together:

– Change of mind – strength or weakness?

– How do you imagine the professions of the future?

– Every experience teaches us something – do you agree with this opinion?

– What can we learn from people who think differently than we do?

– What have you learned as a consequence of your own mistake?

– What are the good things about changing jobs/locations/environments?

– Robots and the market and jobs. Is Artificial Intelligence our ally or enemy?

– Can change be good for human development?

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5. Examples of topics

Exemplary topics for lessons and/or projects that strengthen adaptability:

– The only constant is changeability. Development of humankind throughout the revolutions: agrarian, technical, technological.

– Man in the face of climate change. Opportunities, threats, and ideas in the fight against the climate crisis.

– It is the young who will change the world (for the better). What challenges the generation of today’s students will face?

– Innovators. How out-of-the-box thinking and bold ideas changed the world.

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