Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life

by Diane Tavenner

Like all kids I know, Isabella wanted an opportunity—not someone to save her.

the joy of helping someone learn.

I can tell you from personal experience, anyone who has ever been poor knows no one wants to be poor.

Employers changed what they wanted in workers. In the 1950s, the top skills employers wanted were: 1) the ability to work rapidly and for long periods of time, 2) memory for details and directions, and 3) arithmetic computation.2 But according to Forbes, the employees of 2020 need: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence. Employers want innovative thinking, independence, initiative.3 These were not coveted skills in our grandparents’ time.

get her kids accepted to selective schools was to help them develop their sense of purpose and to really understand who they were as unique individuals.

First, students had to choose how to use their voices to make a change in their community. What did they think could be different or better? Then they had to really research their topics, to become subject-area experts. The third and final step was to develop and give a persuasive speech to convince other people to change.

Well-designed projects are the most effective learning approach to achieving this goal, so this is how we’ve organized everyday learning.

Preparing our kids to be adults means preparing them to make good decisions when they’re out in the world, which research shows is PBL’s strength.

this basic premise: kids need to know certain information before they become adults. The job of the school is to teach it and the job of the student is to learn it. The other job of the school is to show the world the student learned it. The approach is pretty simple.

Daniel Pink’s bestselling Drive was one of the books on our bookshelf, as it shared research pointing to mastery, autonomy, and purpose as the underpinnings of motivation. Simply put, mastery is when you become good at something, autonomy is when you have some measure of control, and purpose is when you’re doing something for a reason that is authentic to you.

“SMART goal” framework. SMART goals, developed by George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham, are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timebound. “Make it SMART,” reminded Ms. Jones.

Ms. Jones—like all Summit teachers—reinforces the five power behaviors often throughout the day. Those five behaviors are strategy-shifting, challenge-seeking, persistence, responding to setbacks, and appropriate help-seeking.

Failing is only productive when two things are true: first, the person who fails actually learns something from it and is thus motivated to try again; and second, the failure doesn’t permanently close future doors.

I never ask, “What do you want to be?” or “What is your favorite subject?” Rather, I ask, “What do you like doing?” “What parts of that do you like most?” And in the course of our conversation we come up with a list of what we call the “ing” words.

So now, when he thinks about his future, we aren’t searching for a specific degree program that leads to a specific job; instead we are talking about a variety of things that matter to him and how he could find all of them reflected in something specific he wants to do next.

Diversity was intentional when we had just those seven teachers, and it’s remained so now that we have over two hundred and fifty. Not only do diverse teams make better decisions, but experience with diverse people prepares kids for work and life in our rapidly changing society. Many

“How can we choose a mascot for Summit that will represent who we are today and in the future?”

Group work goes wrong in two primary ways. First, most often the task assigned isn’t actually worthy of group work. What groups do well is solve complex problems that benefit from different experience, expertise, skills, and knowledge.

The second way group work goes wrong is when the task is sufficiently complex, but no adult is teaching and supporting the skills required to work collaboratively.

using the STP process—“identify the status,” “define the target,” and “develop the proposal”—that

Habits of success, curiosity-driven knowledge, universal skills, and concrete next steps are the measurable outcomes that matter most if we want our kids to be prepared for a good life.

Dr. Brooke Stafford-Brizard for Turnaround for Children,1 and pulls together decades of the best research in education and learning science. The framework identifies sixteen specific skills, all of which impact school and life success, and all of which can be developed and improved.

Research This!

So imagine a kid who practiced setting a goal, making a plan, executing it, showing what he knew, and reflecting (the self-directed cycle) a ton of times over his life, in school or at home. When he gets a summer job at the local grocery store—restocking shelves, collecting emptied carts, and bagging groceries—out of sheer habit, he uses a similar process to guide his work. He walks into the store each day and recognizes what needs to happen even before his boss tells him what to do. He sets goals for how quickly and efficiently he can collect the carts and devises strategies to do it better each time. He embraces the challenge of making sure every customer’s groceries are packed in a way that nothing gets smashed, they can lift every bag, and they are ready to go by the time the transaction is completed. Contrast that to the kid who is found leaning on counters or lounging around every time he doesn’t have a specific order from a manager. Which kid would you hire? Which kid are you trying to raise?

This is where we have a really big chicken-and-egg problem. On the one hand, it’s easier to learn more and perform academically when you already have knowledge about a subject, but the best way to acquire that knowledge is to learn about it. School makes this unproductive cycle even worse. Up through third grade, schools focus on teaching kids to read. However, in fourth grade, a switch occurs and kids are expected to read in order to learn new information. This obviously creates a problem for kids who haven’t really learned to read by fourth grade, but as studies show, reading proficiency is heavily dependent upon how much you already know about what you’re reading.

But there’s another, better way for kids to acquire knowledge, one that stems from their innate curiosity.

The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected

Athletes in virtually every arena benefit from being cardiovascularly fit, strong, and agile. The same is true for life, as just about everyone agrees skills like communication, critical thinking, and problem solving are pretty important. These broad skills make us feel someone’s got what it takes, and make us want to hire them. Countless lists of what employers seek reflect these skills:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

“At the end of the day, I just want them to be happy. To be good human beings. To be surrounded by people who are different, who they could learn from. To know who they are, what they care about, and have the skills and opportunity to chase after it.

This was the beginning of preparedforsuccess.org, a website devoted to supporting parents who want to ready their children for the world they will graduate into. Parents can use it to bring real-world learning into their everyday life and to help their children at any age develop the skills of self-direction, collaboration, and reflection. It’s a resource for parents who don’t want to be tiger moms, or helicopter, snowplow, and/or free-range parents.

Introduce your child to SMART goals: Goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timebound.

Instead of asking, “What do you want to be?”, ask questions that get to underlying interests. Ask questions like: “What do you like doing?” “What parts of that do you like most?” Help your child figure out that they like creating, or talking, performing, or problem-solving; “ings” that will go far toward helping them better know themselves.