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.

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.

What skills does someone need in a rapidly changing economy? How does one prepare for a life that has financial security and meaning? How does a high school student figure out who they are and what they want out of life? What does it mean to engage in work that feels purposeful?

the best way to 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.

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.

We read Pink’s work, and thought, what if we designed learning with mastery, autonomy, and purpose at the center? Today, we call it self-directed learning. What it means is students become the leaders of their own learning. What it takes is years of deliberate practice and feedback, intentionally building the skills to do so.

Those five behaviors are strategy-shifting, challenge-seeking, persistence, responding to setbacks, and appropriate help-seeking.

While the basic idea of learning from failure is supported by evidence, the sink-or-swim method doesn’t really work. 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.

What groups do well is solve complex problems that benefit from different experience, expertise, skills, and knowledge. Groups aren’t better at completing tasks that are rote or linear, with a single right answer.

I’ve been asking myself the same three questions every day since I started Summit. Is Summit the school I wish I had attended? Is Summit the school where I would want to teach? Is Summit the school I want to send my own child to?

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.

preparedforsuccess.org