homework doesn't prepare students for the real world

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Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

A conversation with a Wheelock researcher, a BU student, and a fourth-grade teacher

“Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives,” says Wheelock’s Janine Bempechat. “It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.” Photo by iStock/Glenn Cook Photography

Do your homework.

If only it were that simple.

Educators have debated the merits of homework since the late 19th century. In recent years, amid concerns of some parents and teachers that children are being stressed out by too much homework, things have only gotten more fraught.

“Homework is complicated,” says developmental psychologist Janine Bempechat, a Wheelock College of Education & Human Development clinical professor. The author of the essay “ The Case for (Quality) Homework—Why It Improves Learning and How Parents Can Help ” in the winter 2019 issue of Education Next , Bempechat has studied how the debate about homework is influencing teacher preparation, parent and student beliefs about learning, and school policies.

She worries especially about socioeconomically disadvantaged students from low-performing schools who, according to research by Bempechat and others, get little or no homework.

BU Today  sat down with Bempechat and Erin Bruce (Wheelock’17,’18), a new fourth-grade teacher at a suburban Boston school, and future teacher freshman Emma Ardizzone (Wheelock) to talk about what quality homework looks like, how it can help children learn, and how schools can equip teachers to design it, evaluate it, and facilitate parents’ role in it.

BU Today: Parents and educators who are against homework in elementary school say there is no research definitively linking it to academic performance for kids in the early grades. You’ve said that they’re missing the point.

Bempechat : I think teachers assign homework in elementary school as a way to help kids develop skills they’ll need when they’re older—to begin to instill a sense of responsibility and to learn planning and organizational skills. That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success. If we greatly reduce or eliminate homework in elementary school, we deprive kids and parents of opportunities to instill these important learning habits and skills.

We do know that beginning in late middle school, and continuing through high school, there is a strong and positive correlation between homework completion and academic success.

That’s what I think is the greatest value of homework—in cultivating beliefs about learning and skills associated with academic success.

You talk about the importance of quality homework. What is that?

Quality homework is engaging and relevant to kids’ lives. It gives them autonomy and engages them in the community and with their families. In some subjects, like math, worksheets can be very helpful. It has to do with the value of practicing over and over.

What are your concerns about homework and low-income children?

The argument that some people make—that homework “punishes the poor” because lower-income parents may not be as well-equipped as affluent parents to help their children with homework—is very troubling to me. There are no parents who don’t care about their children’s learning. Parents don’t actually have to help with homework completion in order for kids to do well. They can help in other ways—by helping children organize a study space, providing snacks, being there as a support, helping children work in groups with siblings or friends.

Isn’t the discussion about getting rid of homework happening mostly in affluent communities?

Yes, and the stories we hear of kids being stressed out from too much homework—four or five hours of homework a night—are real. That’s problematic for physical and mental health and overall well-being. But the research shows that higher-income students get a lot more homework than lower-income kids.

Teachers may not have as high expectations for lower-income children. Schools should bear responsibility for providing supports for kids to be able to get their homework done—after-school clubs, community support, peer group support. It does kids a disservice when our expectations are lower for them.

The conversation around homework is to some extent a social class and social justice issue. If we eliminate homework for all children because affluent children have too much, we’re really doing a disservice to low-income children. They need the challenge, and every student can rise to the challenge with enough supports in place.

What did you learn by studying how education schools are preparing future teachers to handle homework?

My colleague, Margarita Jimenez-Silva, at the University of California, Davis, School of Education, and I interviewed faculty members at education schools, as well as supervising teachers, to find out how students are being prepared. And it seemed that they weren’t. There didn’t seem to be any readings on the research, or conversations on what high-quality homework is and how to design it.

Erin, what kind of training did you get in handling homework?

Bruce : I had phenomenal professors at Wheelock, but homework just didn’t come up. I did lots of student teaching. I’ve been in classrooms where the teachers didn’t assign any homework, and I’ve been in rooms where they assigned hours of homework a night. But I never even considered homework as something that was my decision. I just thought it was something I’d pull out of a book and it’d be done.

I started giving homework on the first night of school this year. My first assignment was to go home and draw a picture of the room where you do your homework. I want to know if it’s at a table and if there are chairs around it and if mom’s cooking dinner while you’re doing homework.

The second night I asked them to talk to a grown-up about how are you going to be able to get your homework done during the week. The kids really enjoyed it. There’s a running joke that I’m teaching life skills.

Friday nights, I read all my kids’ responses to me on their homework from the week and it’s wonderful. They pour their hearts out. It’s like we’re having a conversation on my couch Friday night.

It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Bempechat : I can’t imagine that most new teachers would have the intuition Erin had in designing homework the way she did.

Ardizzone : Conversations with kids about homework, feeling you’re being listened to—that’s such a big part of wanting to do homework….I grew up in Westchester County. It was a pretty demanding school district. My junior year English teacher—I loved her—she would give us feedback, have meetings with all of us. She’d say, “If you have any questions, if you have anything you want to talk about, you can talk to me, here are my office hours.” It felt like she actually cared.

Bempechat : It matters to know that the teacher cares about you and that what you think matters to the teacher. Homework is a vehicle to connect home and school…for parents to know teachers are welcoming to them and their families.

Ardizzone : But can’t it lead to parents being overbearing and too involved in their children’s lives as students?

Bempechat : There’s good help and there’s bad help. The bad help is what you’re describing—when parents hover inappropriately, when they micromanage, when they see their children confused and struggling and tell them what to do.

Good help is when parents recognize there’s a struggle going on and instead ask informative questions: “Where do you think you went wrong?” They give hints, or pointers, rather than saying, “You missed this,” or “You didn’t read that.”

Bruce : I hope something comes of this. I hope BU or Wheelock can think of some way to make this a more pressing issue. As a first-year teacher, it was not something I even thought about on the first day of school—until a kid raised his hand and said, “Do we have homework?” It would have been wonderful if I’d had a plan from day one.

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Senior Contributing Editor

Sara Rimer A journalist for more than three decades, Sara Rimer worked at the Miami Herald , Washington Post and, for 26 years, the New York Times , where she was the New England bureau chief, and a national reporter covering education, aging, immigration, and other social justice issues. Her stories on the death penalty’s inequities were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and cited in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Her journalism honors include Columbia University’s Meyer Berger award for in-depth human interest reporting. She holds a BA degree in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Profile

She can be reached at [email protected] .

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There are 81 comments on Does Homework Really Help Students Learn?

Insightful! The values about homework in elementary schools are well aligned with my intuition as a parent.

when i finish my work i do my homework and i sometimes forget what to do because i did not get enough sleep

same omg it does not help me it is stressful and if I have it in more than one class I hate it.

Same I think my parent wants to help me but, she doesn’t care if I get bad grades so I just try my best and my grades are great.

I think that last question about Good help from parents is not know to all parents, we do as our parents did or how we best think it can be done, so maybe coaching parents or giving them resources on how to help with homework would be very beneficial for the parent on how to help and for the teacher to have consistency and improve homework results, and of course for the child. I do see how homework helps reaffirm the knowledge obtained in the classroom, I also have the ability to see progress and it is a time I share with my kids

The answer to the headline question is a no-brainer – a more pressing problem is why there is a difference in how students from different cultures succeed. Perfect example is the student population at BU – why is there a majority population of Asian students and only about 3% black students at BU? In fact at some universities there are law suits by Asians to stop discrimination and quotas against admitting Asian students because the real truth is that as a group they are demonstrating better qualifications for admittance, while at the same time there are quotas and reduced requirements for black students to boost their portion of the student population because as a group they do more poorly in meeting admissions standards – and it is not about the Benjamins. The real problem is that in our PC society no one has the gazuntas to explore this issue as it may reveal that all people are not created equal after all. Or is it just environmental cultural differences??????

I get you have a concern about the issue but that is not even what the point of this article is about. If you have an issue please take this to the site we have and only post your opinion about the actual topic

This is not at all what the article is talking about.

This literally has nothing to do with the article brought up. You should really take your opinions somewhere else before you speak about something that doesn’t make sense.

we have the same name

so they have the same name what of it?

lol you tell her

totally agree

What does that have to do with homework, that is not what the article talks about AT ALL.

Yes, I think homework plays an important role in the development of student life. Through homework, students have to face challenges on a daily basis and they try to solve them quickly.I am an intense online tutor at 24x7homeworkhelp and I give homework to my students at that level in which they handle it easily.

More than two-thirds of students said they used alcohol and drugs, primarily marijuana, to cope with stress.

You know what’s funny? I got this assignment to write an argument for homework about homework and this article was really helpful and understandable, and I also agree with this article’s point of view.

I also got the same task as you! I was looking for some good resources and I found this! I really found this article useful and easy to understand, just like you! ^^

i think that homework is the best thing that a child can have on the school because it help them with their thinking and memory.

I am a child myself and i think homework is a terrific pass time because i can’t play video games during the week. It also helps me set goals.

Homework is not harmful ,but it will if there is too much

I feel like, from a minors point of view that we shouldn’t get homework. Not only is the homework stressful, but it takes us away from relaxing and being social. For example, me and my friends was supposed to hang at the mall last week but we had to postpone it since we all had some sort of work to do. Our minds shouldn’t be focused on finishing an assignment that in realty, doesn’t matter. I completely understand that we should have homework. I have to write a paper on the unimportance of homework so thanks.

homework isn’t that bad

Are you a student? if not then i don’t really think you know how much and how severe todays homework really is

i am a student and i do not enjoy homework because i practice my sport 4 out of the five days we have school for 4 hours and that’s not even counting the commute time or the fact i still have to shower and eat dinner when i get home. its draining!

i totally agree with you. these people are such boomers

why just why

they do make a really good point, i think that there should be a limit though. hours and hours of homework can be really stressful, and the extra work isn’t making a difference to our learning, but i do believe homework should be optional and extra credit. that would make it for students to not have the leaning stress of a assignment and if you have a low grade you you can catch up.

Studies show that homework improves student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college. Research published in the High School Journal indicates that students who spent between 31 and 90 minutes each day on homework “scored about 40 points higher on the SAT-Mathematics subtest than their peers, who reported spending no time on homework each day, on average.” On both standardized tests and grades, students in classes that were assigned homework outperformed 69% of students who didn’t have homework. A majority of studies on homework’s impact – 64% in one meta-study and 72% in another – showed that take home assignments were effective at improving academic achievement. Research by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) concluded that increased homework led to better GPAs and higher probability of college attendance for high school boys. In fact, boys who attended college did more than three hours of additional homework per week in high school.

So how are your measuring student achievement? That’s the real question. The argument that doing homework is simply a tool for teaching responsibility isn’t enough for me. We can teach responsibility in a number of ways. Also the poor argument that parents don’t need to help with homework, and that students can do it on their own, is wishful thinking at best. It completely ignores neurodiverse students. Students in poverty aren’t magically going to find a space to do homework, a friend’s or siblings to help them do it, and snacks to eat. I feel like the author of this piece has never set foot in a classroom of students.

THIS. This article is pathetic coming from a university. So intellectually dishonest, refusing to address the havoc of capitalism and poverty plays on academic success in life. How can they in one sentence use poor kids in an argument and never once address that poor children have access to damn near 0 of the resources affluent kids have? Draw me a picture and let’s talk about feelings lmao what a joke is that gonna put food in their belly so they can have the calories to burn in order to use their brain to study? What about quiet their 7 other siblings that they share a single bedroom with for hours? Is it gonna force the single mom to magically be at home and at work at the same time to cook food while you study and be there to throw an encouraging word?

Also the “parents don’t need to be a parent and be able to guide their kid at all academically they just need to exist in the next room” is wild. Its one thing if a parent straight up is not equipped but to say kids can just figured it out is…. wow coming from an educator What’s next the teacher doesn’t need to teach cause the kid can just follow the packet and figure it out?

Well then get a tutor right? Oh wait you are poor only affluent kids can afford a tutor for their hours of homework a day were they on average have none of the worries a poor child does. Does this address that poor children are more likely to also suffer abuse and mental illness? Like mentioned what about kids that can’t learn or comprehend the forced standardized way? Just let em fail? These children regularly are not in “special education”(some of those are a joke in their own and full of neglect and abuse) programs cause most aren’t even acknowledged as having disabilities or disorders.

But yes all and all those pesky poor kids just aren’t being worked hard enough lol pretty sure poor children’s existence just in childhood is more work, stress, and responsibility alone than an affluent child’s entire life cycle. Love they never once talked about the quality of education in the classroom being so bad between the poor and affluent it can qualify as segregation, just basically blamed poor people for being lazy, good job capitalism for failing us once again!

why the hell?

you should feel bad for saying this, this article can be helpful for people who has to write a essay about it

This is more of a political rant than it is about homework

I know a teacher who has told his students their homework is to find something they are interested in, pursue it and then come share what they learn. The student responses are quite compelling. One girl taught herself German so she could talk to her grandfather. One boy did a research project on Nelson Mandela because the teacher had mentioned him in class. Another boy, a both on the autism spectrum, fixed his family’s computer. The list goes on. This is fourth grade. I think students are highly motivated to learn, when we step aside and encourage them.

The whole point of homework is to give the students a chance to use the material that they have been presented with in class. If they never have the opportunity to use that information, and discover that it is actually useful, it will be in one ear and out the other. As a science teacher, it is critical that the students are challenged to use the material they have been presented with, which gives them the opportunity to actually think about it rather than regurgitate “facts”. Well designed homework forces the student to think conceptually, as opposed to regurgitation, which is never a pretty sight

Wonderful discussion. and yes, homework helps in learning and building skills in students.

not true it just causes kids to stress

Homework can be both beneficial and unuseful, if you will. There are students who are gifted in all subjects in school and ones with disabilities. Why should the students who are gifted get the lucky break, whereas the people who have disabilities suffer? The people who were born with this “gift” go through school with ease whereas people with disabilities struggle with the work given to them. I speak from experience because I am one of those students: the ones with disabilities. Homework doesn’t benefit “us”, it only tears us down and put us in an abyss of confusion and stress and hopelessness because we can’t learn as fast as others. Or we can’t handle the amount of work given whereas the gifted students go through it with ease. It just brings us down and makes us feel lost; because no mater what, it feels like we are destined to fail. It feels like we weren’t “cut out” for success.

homework does help

here is the thing though, if a child is shoved in the face with a whole ton of homework that isn’t really even considered homework it is assignments, it’s not helpful. the teacher should make homework more of a fun learning experience rather than something that is dreaded

This article was wonderful, I am going to ask my teachers about extra, or at all giving homework.

I agree. Especially when you have homework before an exam. Which is distasteful as you’ll need that time to study. It doesn’t make any sense, nor does us doing homework really matters as It’s just facts thrown at us.

Homework is too severe and is just too much for students, schools need to decrease the amount of homework. When teachers assign homework they forget that the students have other classes that give them the same amount of homework each day. Students need to work on social skills and life skills.

I disagree.

Beyond achievement, proponents of homework argue that it can have many other beneficial effects. They claim it can help students develop good study habits so they are ready to grow as their cognitive capacities mature. It can help students recognize that learning can occur at home as well as at school. Homework can foster independent learning and responsible character traits. And it can give parents an opportunity to see what’s going on at school and let them express positive attitudes toward achievement.

Homework is helpful because homework helps us by teaching us how to learn a specific topic.

As a student myself, I can say that I have almost never gotten the full 9 hours of recommended sleep time, because of homework. (Now I’m writing an essay on it in the middle of the night D=)

I am a 10 year old kid doing a report about “Is homework good or bad” for homework before i was going to do homework is bad but the sources from this site changed my mind!

Homeowkr is god for stusenrs

I agree with hunter because homework can be so stressful especially with this whole covid thing no one has time for homework and every one just wants to get back to there normal lives it is especially stressful when you go on a 2 week vaca 3 weeks into the new school year and and then less then a week after you come back from the vaca you are out for over a month because of covid and you have no way to get the assignment done and turned in

As great as homework is said to be in the is article, I feel like the viewpoint of the students was left out. Every where I go on the internet researching about this topic it almost always has interviews from teachers, professors, and the like. However isn’t that a little biased? Of course teachers are going to be for homework, they’re not the ones that have to stay up past midnight completing the homework from not just one class, but all of them. I just feel like this site is one-sided and you should include what the students of today think of spending four hours every night completing 6-8 classes worth of work.

Are we talking about homework or practice? Those are two very different things and can result in different outcomes.

Homework is a graded assignment. I do not know of research showing the benefits of graded assignments going home.

Practice; however, can be extremely beneficial, especially if there is some sort of feedback (not a grade but feedback). That feedback can come from the teacher, another student or even an automated grading program.

As a former band director, I assigned daily practice. I never once thought it would be appropriate for me to require the students to turn in a recording of their practice for me to grade. Instead, I had in-class assignments/assessments that were graded and directly related to the practice assigned.

I would really like to read articles on “homework” that truly distinguish between the two.

oof i feel bad good luck!

thank you guys for the artical because I have to finish an assingment. yes i did cite it but just thanks

thx for the article guys.

Homework is good

I think homework is helpful AND harmful. Sometimes u can’t get sleep bc of homework but it helps u practice for school too so idk.

I agree with this Article. And does anyone know when this was published. I would like to know.

It was published FEb 19, 2019.

Studies have shown that homework improved student achievement in terms of improved grades, test results, and the likelihood to attend college.

i think homework can help kids but at the same time not help kids

This article is so out of touch with majority of homes it would be laughable if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

There is no value to homework all it does is add stress to already stressed homes. Parents or adults magically having the time or energy to shepherd kids through homework is dome sort of 1950’s fantasy.

What lala land do these teachers live in?

Homework gives noting to the kid

Homework is Bad

homework is bad.

why do kids even have homework?

Comments are closed.

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Are High Schools Preparing Students for the Real World?

For today’s high school students, change is the only constant. They navigated a global pandemic that challenged their mental health and social structures . They will graduate into a job market filled with upheaval following the COVID pandemic. In the face of so much uncertainty, it’s more important than ever for our students to graduate with the necessary life skills to meet whatever challenge they’ll encounter.

We polled our community of students, teachers, parents, and employers from across the country about whether high school is preparing students for success in the real world. More than 300 people responded, and overall, most don’t think high school is successfully preparing students for real life.

This tracks with 2022 data from a survey by Cengage , finding that 65 percent of employers were struggling to find talent. The respondents revealed a contradiction: even though they required college degrees, they ranked skills training credentials (43 percent) and real-world experience (28 percent) more important than a two- or four-year degree (26 percent) when considering an entry-level candidate. High schools can play an important role in providing more of those experiences through internships, apprenticeships, and work-based learning.

We used the results from our audience poll to launch a series of conversations with different education experts about how high schools can better prepare all students to graduate with the skills and opportunities to pursue the futures of their choice.

Does school prepare students for the real world?

When we asked students in our audience poll to rank how prepared they feel for the real world on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest rating, only 30 percent rated their preparedness at a 4 or a 5. This is a low number, not even a third. That wasn’t surprising to the educators and researchers we spoke with, especially considering students’ recent lived experiences.

“‘The real world’ is undergoing rapid change, which can be daunting as well as exciting. Near the end of 2022, the world got an up-close look at how artificial intelligence can now craft essays and poetry, write code, even pass the bar exam. Imagine trying to envision the world in ten years, in 20 years, if you are a teenager thinking about how to prepare for the ‘real world’ after high school.”

– Craig Jerald, XQ Consultant and former vice president for policy at the College Board.

This uncertainty is clear in the job market students will face after graduation. A 2021 report from McKinsey & Company on the future of work after COVID-19  showed how jobs performed by humans are becoming increasingly automated. The pandemic accelerated this shift: the report found that up to 25 percent more workers than previously estimated may need to switch occupations.

At the same time, a significant number of high school students will graduate and immediately enter the workforce. A 2020 report from the National Center for Education Statistics  found a third of all high school graduates are not going straight to a two- or four-year college . This trend   appears to be on the rise as a result of the COVID pandemic, as even fewer high school grads head straight to college. Those students, in particular, will need to graduate with work-ready skills.

Do High Schools Prepare Students for Careers?

Yet, high schools overall have not adapted to the changing workforce. Most comprehensive high schools don’t provide adequate opportunities for students to gain real-world experience through career and technical education programs. As a result, students don’t get the chance to develop their skills or explore potential career paths. This might be why only 7 percent of the adult, non-student respondents to our audience poll rated high school students’ preparedness for the real world at a 4 or 5, the top two scores. They’ve experienced or witnessed the lack of preparation as employers, colleagues, or educators.

In school, students face outsized pressure to succeed on standardized tests. But these tests often do a poor job of reflecting what young people actually know and are able to do, while also failing to encourage the kind of meaningful, engaged learning students need to succeed in real-world situations. “Students are sitting in our high schools the same way that they did 100 years ago when we have internship opportunities, we have career pathways that can be explored in 9th grade,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in 2022 on the podcast version of “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”

“We’ve gone so far away from thinking about how students learn in community, how they learn in collaboration with one another independently. ​​I can’t tell you how often I’ve learned by arguing with somebody.”

– Jose Vilson , executive director of Educolor.

Vilson, a veteran New York City teacher at Educolor , agrees with other educators and labor experts who say high school should give students authentic opportunities to develop in-demand skills like critical thinking, adaptability, creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration. 

This need was amplified by the declining 8th grade scores in civics and U.S. history on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP (also referred to the Nation’s Report Card)—meaning they weren’t prepared for the higher level work required in high school.

The average score dropped 5 points on the NAEP US history assessment between 2018 and 2022. This continued a trend of declining scores that began in 2014. Just 14 percent of 8th grade students scored at or above the NAEP proficient level in US history. And the average score on the 2022 civics assessment declined by 3 points since students last took the test in 2018. Only 22 percent of 8th graders scored at or above the NAEP Proficient level in civics.

“Education leaders and policymakers must create opportunities for students to gain the knowledge and skills they need to catch up and thrive,” said Beverly Perdue, National Assessment Governing Board chair and former North Carolina governor when the results were released in May 2023. “The students who took these tests are in high school today and will soon enter college and the workforce without the knowledge and skills they need to fully participate in civic life and our democracy.”

In another distressing sign, the NAEP Long Term Trend assessment found math and reading scores for 13-year-olds also fell in the 2022-23 school year to some of their lowest levels in decades.

Are High Schools Preparing Students for College?

Why is it important to prepare for life after high school?​

High school should prepare students not just to meet the future but shape it. No high school curriculum can prepare students for every challenge they might encounter. But the experts we spoke to agree: by preparing students with adaptable, real-world skills and competencies, schools can set students up to pursue lives of choice and purpose.

Are High Schools Preparing Students for the Future?

XQ defines these skills through our research-based  Learner Outcomes : concrete, relevant knowledge and skills that students can apply to succeed in a 21st-century context. By designing learning around these goals, schools can prepare students to meet the future. Drawing on research, existing academic and social-emotional frameworks , and practical expertise, we’ve identified a set of competencies and sub-competencies  that align with our learner outcomes.

-Lauren Bierbaum, Head of Data, Research, and Evaluation at XQ Institute.

Washington Leadership Academy (WLA) , an XQ school in Washington, D.C., uses the learner outcome Masters of All Fundamental Literacies  to prepare students for high-wage STEM jobs. At WLA, all students take four years of computer science, with opportunities to build their skills through real-world internships. WLA also challenges students to take on meaningful issues in their community and supports them as Original Thinkers for an Uncertain World , another learner outcome. For example, one class of students focused on the question, “How do social justice movements work?” ultimately creating a guide for the next social justice movement. After four years of computer science, including computational art and computational music, 2022 WLA graduate De’Von said he felt “probably more prepared than any other kid in America” as he graduated and headed to Morehouse College.

De’Von’s experience is an example of what can happen when high schools design learning around relevant skills and competencies. XQ has identified six research-based Design Principles for successful schools—which include Youth Voice and Choice .

“Most high schools don’t provide students with much voice, choice, and independence in what and how they learn, nor do they ask students to work collaboratively in teams that tackle authentic problems or challenges,” said Jerald. He examined data on the 1,721 graduates of XQ’s 16 original Super Schools and found that “about 84 percent said they felt prepared for their future, and half of those students cited collaborative skills they developed in high school as a big reason why.”

– Keri Rodrigues , president of the National Parents Union.

Crosstown High , an XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee, prepares students for life after high school through a curriculum that’s built around competencies . Located in the Crosstown Concourse, Crosstown High shares space with businesses, non-profits, health facilities, and civic groups. Through close collaboration with community partnerships —like working with a local graphic designer to design logos for a student-run business, or collaborating with a local elementary school to design a sensory walk for kids—students gain exposure to a wide range of future options and develop a sense of their own future goals.

These experiences position students with the confidence and self-knowledge they need to meet the challenges of the future. As Crosstown 2022 graduate Ava explained: “What I’ve realized in my past four years here is that learning isn’t just English, math, science, and history. It really is learning about yourself, learning about how you interact with everybody else in the environment around you.”

How do you prepare students for the real world?

T hese are among the most important skills cited by the U.S. Department of Labor , which also lists professionalism, networking, and enthusiasm.

– Dan Domenech , executive director of the American Association of School Administrators .

T he best way to teach these real-life skills is to give students opportunities to develop them in real-world contexts. As noted earlier, schools can provide these opportunities through Community Partnerships   another one of XQ’s Design Principles . Through partnering with cultural institutions, local businesses, nonprofits, and colleges and universities, schools can give students the opportunity to apply their learning outside the traditional classroom environment.

– Chelsea Waite , senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education .

Waite has been studying different designs for learning at many types of schools with the Canopy Project . “The division of ‘high school’ and the ‘real world’ is a real culprit here,” she said when asked about the low levels of confidence students and adults in our poll expressed about the ability of U.S. high schools to prepare students for the future. “No one can be adequately prepared for a new stage of life when nothing about their current reality resembles what they’re about to encounter. High schools can, and should, be places where students are living and learning in the real world, and learning to navigate the systems and institutions they’ll encounter throughout their lives.”

This is why XQ encourages nontraditional approaches to when, where, and how high schoolers learn—a design principle we call Smart Use of Time, Space, and Technology . Schools can break away from science, history, and other single-subject periods, the way the XQ school  Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indiana has done, by combining different subjects in longer blocks with project-based learning and through partnerships with local industries and nonprofits.

Círculos —an XQ school in California’s Santa Ana Unified School District—uses community partnerships to prepare students to succeed after graduating, most of whom are first-generation Americans and qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Past projects have focused on public arts, reducing community consumption of single-use plastics, problematic representation of Black and Latino people in the media, and drought preparation in California. Students develop and pitch ideas for these projects based on community needs. In doing so, they develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills and practice communication by presenting their ideas to partners.

Rodrigues, of the National Parents Union, said more high schools should be looking outside their walls for ways to give students important learning experiences. “These are the skills that kids really need to be able to access opportunity” beyond their educational background, she said, referring to “the skills to keep a job and to be successful in a job, and to blossom and thrive.”

All the things that we want our kids to do, but we give them no practice,” she added. And frankly, having that real-world experience where [you see] what it’s like to actually be in the workforce and have those real-life examples, you also get the opportunity to figure out—is this what I really want?

Domenech pointed to High School District 214 in Cook County, Illinois as an example of breaking down the barriers between high school and the real world to give students valuable, hands-on experiences. The district’s innovative Youth Apprenticeship provides concrete job skills and training to students beginning their junior year of high school. Domenech described the goals of the program: “You want to go into medicine? Well, guess what? You’re going to spend a couple of days a week in the hospital, trailing a nurse or trailing a doctor and finding out what it’s really like.”

Students in the program receive paid job training, as well as college coursework and mentoring. Ultimately, students who complete the program receive an apprenticeship certification or a youth apprenticeship certification in addition to up to a year of college credits. Student Edin Hozic described a cybersecurity internship in an article for the district’s blog : “It gives us hands-on experience. We can really see what these industry professionals are doing and how they are using these programs to secure these networks and systems. I really value the overall experience we gain here.” 

More schools are following suit. Maryland will invest $12 million of pandemic stimulus funds into expanding access to apprenticeship programs in high school through a new grant program, Maryland Works . Currently, only 7 percent of Maryland high school students graduate with apprenticeship credentials; this investment will help Maryland meet its ambitious goal of graduating 45 percent of students with apprenticeship credentials by the 2030-31 academic year.

• Engage students in real-world projects with industry partners
• Use rigorous coursework to prepare students for real jobs
• Align design principles with internships

What skills do students today need to be successful in life?

– Yolanda Fordham Director of the Liberty Partnerships Program at NYU .

In New York State, the Liberty Partnerships Program (LPP) provides students with services designed to improve their ability to graduate from high school and enter postsecondary education and the workforce. This is especially important for students at risk of dropping out of school. Fordham, who directs the LPP at New York University, said, “Services begin with a socio-emotional assessment, followed by intervention strategies provided in partnership with the school. Personal Learning Plans (PLPs) are developed with students to generate academic, college, career, and personal goals. The PLP is revisited at least three times per year.”

This personalized approach to supporting students’ social-emotional wellness aligns with another XQ Design Principle: Caring, Trusting Relationships . “Research tells us that having even just one close relationship at school can do wonders for supporting students’ learning and development,” said Bierbaum.

For example, at Da Vinci Rise High School , an XQ school in Los Angeles, California, students build relationships with adults through advisory group meetings, one-on-one personal check-ins, and wellness hours. RISE serves students navigating foster care, housing instability, probation, and other disruptive circumstances. Focusing on relationships helps these students build real-world social and emotional learning  (SEL) skills around mental health and self-care, like meditation and mindfulness.

Schools can also empower students with real-life skills by giving them more responsibility for their own learning. That’s the idea behind youth voice and choice: giving students a say in what and how they learn. Experts believe students need a chance to develop these tools in high school in order to succeed wherever they go next.

“Consider that students from PK through 12 have their time more or less managed for them,” said Vilson. “And students are generally never too far away from the class that they have to go to next. So, they hear a bell, and they generally know that they have to go to another class and that they have to follow a program. …So then when they get to college, they’re pretty much told, ‘Hey, here’s the schedule, but there’s not going to be a bell.” 

At Grand Rapids Public Museum School (GRPMS), a district school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that partners with XQ, students take leadership over their own learning. Located inside the home of the former Grand Rapids Public Museum, the school’s students have a high degree of freedom in completing projects, often in conjunction with community partners. For example, students designed and built their own rockets while learning about the history of the Space Race. Learning at GRPMS is competency-based : students progress through content based on their mastery of the material, not the time they’ve spent in their seats, and students play a leading role in guiding and evaluating their own learning.

Jerald summed up the core tenets behind GRPMS’s approach to teaching real-life skills alongside academics: “Position learning within the broader community, require students to interact with adults outside the school as part of their learning, and challenge students to engage in interdisciplinary, collaborative projects with real-world connections. High schools need to do that as an integral part of their core instructional model, not as just one special class or an extracurricular activity.”

The success of this approach is borne out in the student experience. One 2022 graduate, Aeden, told XQ, “It would definitely help you develop more in your time management skills as well as … in your cognitive thinking.” He added, “From my understanding of traditional schools, that isn’t something that is usually emphasized a lot because there’s a specific structure you have to follow.”

Another GRPMS graduate, Christopher, expanded on this concept: “I talked with some people from research professions at Grand Valley State University and learned more about what they did to get where they are and what they do as scientists and just overall how they function in society,” he said. “And that’s helped me a lot just understanding how disciplined I need to be, working with time management, but also just preparing me to learn on my own, since it was a completely self-led project.”

The consensus from our community and from expert perspectives is clear: too many of today’s high schools aren’t preparing students well for real life. Their students graduate without the skills to set and achieve their goals for the lives they want to live, in terms of career, post-secondary education, or their role in their community.

It’s impossible to predict every challenge students will face when they enter the real world. But success stories from high schools across the country show that, with creativity and bold thinking, school leaders and teachers can set students up with the skills, adaptability, and resilience to meet whatever the future holds. To better prepare students for the real world, schools can:

• Build community partnerships that connect students with real-world contexts  
• Increase opportunities for self-directed learning, where students learn crucial life skills like organization, problem-solving, and critical thinking
• Integrate social and emotional learning (SEL) to support students’ mental health and cognitive development

At XQ, we’ve designed a series of open-sourced tools to help schools prepare students for the demands and challenges of the real world. Our research-backed Design Principles are foundational to the design of XQ schools across the country, and can help school leaders rethink how to better design their school structures. We have also developed the Design Principles Rubric to help teams assess where they are in their design journey. 

Likewise, the XQ Learner Outcomes are research-based, comprised of concrete, relevant knowledge and skills schools can use to support and plan student outcomes. XQ’s 37 Competencies can help educators identify the granular skills students will master as they prepare for an ever-dynamic, increasingly complex 21st century world.

To start a conversation about how to transform your school, watch this video and check out XQ In a Box .

For more on how high schools can prepare students for the future, explore our posts:

• High School and the Future of Work , a policy guide
• How Schools Use SEL to Prepare Students for an Uncertain Future
• ​​From the Classroom to the ‘Real World’
• ​​How LAB Internships Are Setting Up Scholars for Success Inside and Outside the Classroom
• How Youth Climate Activist Jerome Foster II Became the Voice for One Million Young People
• Project-Management for the Brain: Teaching Executive Functioning Skills for Students
• How Going to High School in the Pandemic Affected Us When We Got to College
• High School Graduates: Preparing for Your Next Step , tips for students

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Question of the week: Does school actually prepare teens for the real world?

In about five years I will better suited to answer this question as I have not yet experienced the real world.

Graduation is nearing but a collegiate career is in my future. While four years away from home is closer to the real world than high school is, it is still not fully fledged adult life.

With my current understanding of how the real world works, I believe that high schools offer every opportunity to prepare students for the real world. The difference of preparedness comes from the student.

Challenging themselves with a full schedule or tailoring their educational day to their future profession is what really prepares students for the real world.

While I believe that schools should be pushing students towards schedules that correlate with their future career, the decision to be prepared is ultimately the students’.

Senior year is a pivotal time for preparedness. This is the last 180 days that stands between being a high school student and hopefully being a productive member of society — regardless of career path. As students enter their senior year, they should consider how well their high school schedule will prepare them for their future aspirations.

Everyone’s personal view of success and preparedness for adult life is a little different, but all students can be prepared if they put in the work before life in the real world begins.

In the United States, one thing that almost everyone has in common is that they have attended some form of school or education. Many believe that this is to prepare us for the real world.

In my opinion, I believe that high school is essential in teaching us many life lessons, and preparing us for what may happen later in life.

Numerous times we are given a task to complete that must be turned in by a certain date or time.

This relates to the real world because life always has its responsibilities. Some of these responsibilities may include showing up to work, or even just paying your bills.

Some of the basic subjects in high school can become very beneficial later in life. For example, in jobs such as carpentry, or machining, you are constantly using math.

Not only do you use the basic math taught back in grade school, but more complex math taught in high school is needed.

These are just a few examples of why high school is essential in preparing you for the real world.

Learning life skills is a vital role that many high schools are lacking. Instead of being taught how build credit, apply for loans, pay taxes and keep a budget, students are memorizing algebraic formulas and vocabulary words that are forgotten minutes after the test.

As students, we no longer feel the curiosity and want that learning may have had in the past.

We are suffocated by the stiff curriculum that lacks of flexibility and interest.

It is drilled into our brains that we must meet a standard or we are considered a failure in many minds.

High school has shown us that to properly succeed we must see, memorize, forget, instead of learning in our own useful ways.

Being taught the necessary knowledge to thrive in the real world is vital, especially when it is learned and remembered by the students.

I do not believe that high school properly prepares students for the real world. Throughout the four years they are in high school, students spend the majority of their time in classes learning things that they will most likely never use again.

Meanwhile, classes that teach vital knowledge, such as home economics and consumer science, are not always accessible to all students and are not made a priority.

Students graduate high school having little knowledge of how to take care of themselves. Another common issue in schools is the idea that teachers are required to base their curriculum on standardized tests, rather than teaching essential knowledge that is needed to succeed in the real world. Some students are completely clueless to simple knowledge such as how to file income taxes, how mortgages work, and even why they need insurance. High school is leaving students unprepared and worried about surviving in the real world.

I feel that ever since they removed home economics from the education curriculum, teens have not learned anything beneficial for the real world. There is no doubt that schools prepare us for the workforce or college but, what about real-world situations? Like changing a tire or sewing? Forty percent of teens who graduated high school said that once they got to college, they felt unprepared for the real world. Many challenges are thrown at teens once they leave high school. Many students do start living on their own right after high school because they want to feel independent.

But, they are faced with minor repairs that they do not know how to fix. They would have to pay someone to come and fix it for them, therefore they are losing money that they could have saved if they were taught how to fix certain broken objects. Another challenge is money management. Unless you actually pick a finance class in high school, not any other class really teaches you how to do your taxes or pay your bills. Though schools do prepare us for a lot of things, I think that they are leaving out very important lessons in real-world situations.

High school is a pivotal time in a teen’s life, helping to pave the way for future endeavors. From building social skills to learning the quadratic formula, high school is full of a lot of new, uncharted experiences. With as many of these experiences that are going on, not many prepare students for the world outside of high school.

Post high school can be be a daunting time of trying to figure out what the next step is in your life. With all of the focus on education and not on real life experiences that happens in high school, how is a person expected to function in today’s society? While it is imperative that basic education is taught during these years, in the latter years of high school there should be more of a focus on skills needed in the real world such as practical money managing skills, self reliance and basic everyday tasks such cooking and cleaning.

In addition to specific life skills that high school graduates lack, other forgotten areas of exploration are diversity and acceptance. Many people lack understanding of other people and their ways of life. Whether it be race, sexuality or personal beliefs schools overlook the idea of inclusivity in everyday life.

An integral part of this question lies in what you consider the “real” world. While this might seem strange, the skills people need vary depending on their job, lifestyle and family dynamic. For example, compare a doctor to a farmer.

Future doctors find science and math classes helpful, but see no value in agribusiness, while for future farmers, it is the opposite. Neither subject is inherently more or less important, which is the cornerstone of a liberal arts education — to develop informed critical thinkers, problem solvers, voters and employees. Excellence in one field often requires understanding the basics of others, and don’t just take my word for it.

Sherlock Holmes, while fictional, is regarded as one of the best detectives in the world. However, he didn’t know that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and he had no desire to because he didn’t think such “useless” information could help him solve crime. But when he had mere seconds to identify a historically inaccurate supernova in a forged painting, this knowledge saved a woman’s life.

I can’t imagine most of us will ever be in this situation, but you get the point. Along with calculus and Shakespeare, I learned how to sew a button, write a check and answer interview questions in school. As Ben Franklin once said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” I tend to agree.

I believe that, for the most part, schools do an adequate job of preparing their students for the real world by providing a variety of paths that students can choose to follow whether that be vocational or college. However, certain life skills that may or may not be taught in the home are not as emphasized within high school as they should be.

These include financial skills, such as applying for mortgages and preparing taxes{&semispace}independent living skills, like cooking, cleaning and childcare{&semispace}and in some cases, health and hygiene. I think that in contemporary society, parents are not preparing their children for life on their own as they don’t expect them to leave the house until they are well into their 20s.

Therefore, if a school’s objective is to prepare its students for “the real world,” a curriculum shift will need to occur to teach the life skills that are often falling through the gap.

In my opinion, high school certainly assists in helping teens prepare for the real world. Whether or not it completely prepares teens for the real world is debatable, but if teenagers take advantage of the opportunities available in high school, and make the most of them, high school will definitely have a significant impact on preparing teens for the real world.

If a student chooses to make the most of their high school experience, it can be beneficial. For example, if one participates in sports, many valuable lessons can be learned, such as leadership, teamwork, patience, time-management and dedication.

High school students also have the opportunity to participate in activities and clubs like band, chorus, drama, forensics, student government, etc. Many valuable lessons are also learned in these areas. For example, officers of clubs learn management skills and members of clubs can learn teamwork. Students can learn a great deal from these experiences and how it molds their own creativity.

Most high schools offer dual enrollment college courses. Obviously, these classes are taught like college classes with college professors. If one decides to take advantage of this opportunity and learn from it, it can used as a great preparation tool for college. High school may not prepare teens 100 percent for the real world, but if we take advantage of the opportunities available to us, we will certainly be on the right track.

Peter DeWitt's

Finding common ground.

A former K-5 public school principal turned author, presenter, and leadership coach, DeWitt provides insights and advice for education leaders. He can be found at www.petermdewitt.com . Read more from this blog .

Preparing Students for the Real World

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Regardless of whether we are the Teacher of Record (TOR) or their scores on the high stakes test will affect our HEDI score, these students need us every single day that they walk into our classrooms and into our schools .

Thomas was one of six children in his family. All in all those six children had five different dads but they all shared the same mom. One of the dads was killed in a drug deal gone wrong when Thomas was in kindergarten. When his second grade teacher was getting ready for work in the morning he saw a local news story that Thomas’s mom got arrested for selling crack. His teacher assumed that Thomas would not be in school that day. That assumption was incorrect. He came in on time and tired stating that the “ police was at his door .”

This was not in some poor section of New York City or large metropolis like that when we hear these stories. Thomas lived in an apartment in a small city which had seen some hard times. When Thomas was in first grade he dropped the F-bomb a few times in class and got sent to another room for a “Time out.” In second grade, a few weeks after his mother was released on bail, Thomas’s mother and “her boyfriend from jail” came to pick him up from school. That is what Thomas called his mother’s new beau...he was her boyfriend from jail. His teacher did not realize that jail was also a dating service.

Thomas was raised in a house where using the F word was commonplace. It was not frowned upon or seen as rude or disrespectful. It happened at dinner or at night when he was going to bed. Most kids his age had a parent that tucked them in and kissed them on the forehead. Thomas did not have that luxury. His reality was very different.

Soon after Thomas’s mother did hard time, he moved to a new city across the river. It wasn’t far away from his old home but it was far enough away to take him to a new school in the middle of the month, in the middle of the year. Most teachers cringe when a new students moves in at that time of year. Thomas’s teachers often cringed after they got to know him. His behavior off his ADHD medication was legendary and often times his mother skimmed a pill or two off the top so she could make a few extra dollars. Thomas did not really stand a chance when he was born, and his real world was vastly different from his teacher’s real world.

The Real World It’s a comment you hear quite often and lately I have been thinking of it a lot. Michael Albertson, a frequent contributor to this blog recently wrote a blog called “ The Real World .” Michael wrote, “ Referring to “the real world” insinuates that our students’ lives are not part of “the real world”. It discredits their lived experiences and subtly promotes elitism: this way of operating -- my way of operating -- is how the world works. ”

I agree wholeheartedly with Michael. For full disclosure, Thomas was a former student of mine when I taught elementary school. The name has changed but the facts remain the same. There were so many nights that I walked away from school wondering how I could help Thomas. I wanted to teach him without judging his life which was not easy. His life was vastly different from my own.

Although Thomas sounds as though he made every day a terrible one, that could not be any further from the truth. Most days he wanted to make his teachers proud. I co-taught with a special education teacher and we both worked hard with Thomas and tried to form a bond with him. Deep down he had the same basic needs. It’s just that his home life was a struggle and he would sometimes come to class feeling self-destructive. It’s been years since I taught Thomas and I have no idea what has become of him because I moved as well but his realities have stuck in my head since he and I shared a classroom.

In the End When educators, politicians and other adults talk about preparing kids for the real world they are usually talking about technology or some sort of student-centered approach to learning which are both very important. Technology is very important but we have students who need much more than technology to make their lives better.

Adults have to understand that all of our students live in the real world. It’s just that their real world may be very different from the one we live in when we go home. It doesn’t mean we need to change our expectations but it does mean that we have to be empathetic to their needs.

Regardless of whether we are the Teacher of Record (TOR) or their scores on the high stakes test will affect our HEDI score, these students need us every single day that they walk into our classrooms and into our schools. We know that our students are more than a number because if we treat them like one, we are no different than the people outside of school who treat them like one as well.

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The opinions expressed in Peter DeWitt’s Finding Common Ground are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.

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Why Schools Need to Change Learning for Success in the Real World

Amanda Avallone (she/her/hers) Learning Officer (ret.) Next Generation Learning Challenges in Portland, Maine

Today’s learners face an uncertain present and a rapidly changing future that demand far different skills and knowledge than were needed in the 20th century. We also know so much more about enabling deep, powerful learning than we ever did before. Our collective future depends on how well young people prepare for the challenges and opportunities of 21st-century life.

Practitioner's Guide to Next Gen Learning

Preparing young people for life-long success through real-world learning

All students need to leave school—frequently, regularly, and of course, temporarily… To accomplish this, schools must take down the walls that separate the learning that students do, and could do, in school from the learning they do and could do, outside. —Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski, Big Picture Learning

In 2017 NGLC published the MyWays Student Success Series , a collection of reports, resources, and tools to support educators and communities to reimagine traditional definitions of learner success and redesign learning to help all students prepare for their futures. Inspired by the practices and valuable feedback from schools and districts in the NGLC network, the MyWays project has continued to evolve and expand to meet the needs of practitioners and their communities.

One area of particular interest for educators who are adopting broader definitions of success, like the MyWays Student Success Framework , is providing all students with authentic, real-world learning opportunities. Grace Belfiore, one of the principal researchers and authors of the MyWays report series, observes that, “One of the most striking implications of the MyWays’ research was the realization that it is difficult, if not impossible, to help learners develop these competencies and skills without going outside the classroom walls.” She also notes that, although some educators in the NGLC community have made real-world learning the cornerstone of their model, many others who have embraced next gen learning are newcomers to accessing the world outside of school as a rich source of student learning.

School lasts for 12 years, but students’ lives last a lot longer. What are we doing to develop people ?

For this edition of Friday Focus: Practitioner’s Guide to Next Gen Learning , I spoke to a variety of experts who are partnering with their communities to provide relevant and authentic student learning. This edition will also introduce practitioners to a new NGLC resource for this work, the MyWays Real-World Learning Toolkit . In particular, I’ll share:

• Why real-world learning is essential for student success
• Expert advice and resources to incorporate real-world learning in your classroom or school

Skills and Abilities for Lifelong Success

Early access to real-world projects is a springboard to seeing what success looks like outside of the classroom. —Natasha Morrison, director of real world learning at Da Vinci Schools.

The MyWays Student Success Framework and other 21st-century definitions of success share a fundamental understanding that the world has changed and continues to change at an accelerating rate. In addition to Content Knowledge, learners also need competencies within the MyWays domains of Habits of Success, Creative Know How, and Wayfinding Abilities to navigate through learning, career, and life. Young people need to experience learning that does more than prepare them to take a test or pass into the next grade.

Lindsey Stutheit, workforce partnership liaison at Laramie County School District #1 in Cheyenne, WY, expresses it this way: “For a long time, college- and career-readiness has really meant college, and that, in my experience, has meant preparing for the ACT or other state-mandated standardized tests. We spend a lot of resources and time preparing students for these tests, something fleeting and momentary. These tests are valid measures, but they aren’t geared around careers, personal skills, or adult skills. ” Lindsey and other leaders in her district recognize that young people need to develop capabilities that are life-long, life-wide, and life-worthy. “School lasts for 12 years,” she notes, “but students’ lives last a lot longer. What are we doing to develop people ?”

Casey Lamb, chief operating officer at Schools That Can , a network of schools that have embraced real-world learning, also argues for a more holistic notion of education and preparation. Real-world learning is, she says, “not just about the partnerships but about the outcomes, which move beyond what is usually tested in schools. It’s about developing whole humans.”

However, expecting schools to do this work alone, our experts tell us, is neither reasonable nor possible. According to Casey, one reason young people need access to learning experiences outside of school is that “the majority of teachers went to school to be teachers. They should not be expected to know everything about all of the myriad fields in order to prepare students for every career and opportunity. Real-world learning connects both students and teachers to people in the community who are working in different environments and have different perspectives, as well as to the skills adults use on a daily basis. ”

In this way, Casey explains, real-world experiences “ground students’ learning in the paths they will pursue after graduation. It better prepares them for those pathways, offers them choices, and gives them the ability to be successful there.”

Equitable Access to the World of Adults

Offering opportunities for young people to connect with the world outside of school is not new. Common activities like field trips, science fairs, model UN, theater productions, and extracurricular clubs can provide learners with access to adults in the community. Yet, as Lindsey observes, supporting young people to work side by side with adult professionals “is often teacher dependent and based on the connections individual teachers have. You also see the same students participating over and over.”

According to Lindsey, schools need to ensure that all students have access to support for wayfinding through education, work, and life, including meaningful connections to a wide range of adults from different industries and careers . This kind of social capital “is an equity issue for us and one reason it’s facilitated at the district level—to improve student exposure and reach.”

As described in MyWays Report 4: 5 Essentials in Building Social Capital , social capital is a developmental system of human relationships, including caring adults, mentors and coaches, and professional networks. According to the MyWays research, social capital plays two important roles in the life of young people: “as support in times of need and as social leverage to get ahead.” Significant disparities exist, however, between students of varying socioeconomic backgrounds in the opportunities to build social capital. Because both social capital roles are manifested in well-designed real-world learning, the MyWays Real-World Learning Toolkit includes a Social Capital Tool , which supports educators to design learning for social capital benefits for learners across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Real-World Contexts for “Whitewater Learning”

Real-world learning shares characteristics and benefits with other types of authentic, active learning. For example, both school-based and real-world projects can help learners develop Habits of Success , from initiative and perseverance to time management. However, real-world learning also provides the unique benefits, motivations, and opportunities of tackling real problems in the environments in which they occur, in all their messiness and urgency . As explored in the MyWays Key Elements of Real-World Learning Tool , well-designed outside-of-school experiences give learners the opportunity to encounter and respond to “whitewater conditions”—diverse challenges, complexities, and unfamiliar circumstances like those they will encounter as adults.

Skills like project management, collaboration, and problem-solving must be learned in a hands-on, high-stakes way.

Natasha explains that classroom experiences that simulate real-world learning are not enough, especially when it comes to preparing young people for future careers. “You can’t simulate social interaction. It’s not the same as an airline pilot using a flight simulator. There’s no substitute for engagement with the professional world. Attempting to develop career skills with virtually no real-world practice or feedback doesn’t achieve ideal outcomes . Partnership with industry professionals on real-world projects allows students to hone the skills they’ll actually use in the modern workforce. Skills like project management, collaboration, and problem-solving must be learned in a hands-on, high-stakes way.”

In addition to teaching a fuller range of competencies and facilitating connections to a wide array of adults, meaningful real-world learning provides learners with opportunities to make choices and practice self-direction. According to Grace, “ Experience in real and diverse situations is key to agency, and to help achieve growth, educators and youth advocates need to help students access and utilize a range of real-world situations .” Real-world learning can also foster identity development, she says, offering young people a vision of what’s possible for their futures.

Connections to the Wider Learning Ecosystem

Redesigning learning to be more like an apprenticeship for adult life can seem overwhelming. In part, that’s because educators have traditionally shouldered so much of this responsibility. However, schools and educators have numerous assets and partners for this work . Accessing the Wider Learning Ecosystem means leveraging the vast network of resources and experiences, formal and informal, that exist outside of school, including higher education, the workplace, and community assets like museums and libraries, as well as school-based extracurricular activities. Tapping into these assets is the focus of the MyWays 5 Zones of the Wider Learning Ecosystem Tool .

The 5 Zones of the Wider Learning Ecosystem

As featured in a Practitioner’s Guide about community partnerships , Natasha and her colleagues at Da Vinci Schools provide high school students with numerous real-world learning experiences throughout the Wider Learning Ecosystem. Partnerships with colleges, universities, and local businesses open up opportunities for apprentice adults to participate in dual or concurrent enrollment in higher education, job-shadowing, internships, career-focused boot camps, and other industry-based experiences. Educators at both Da Vinci Schools and in Laramie County stress that these experiences need to be well designed to achieve the desired impact. According to Lindsey, “Earning college credits should not be random. Credits should lead to students’ goals for after graduation.” Similarly, workplace experiences “can’t just be a job. They have to build career awareness and help students prepare for their futures.”

Though the kinds of experiences mentioned above are most common at the secondary level, building learner skills to be successful in a real-world learning context can occur at any grade , and educators can gradually integrate real-world learning elements over time. Casey defines real-world learning this way: “In its simplest form, it’s learning that is hands on, engaging, and connected with the world beyond school walls.”

When deeply implemented, real-world learning looks more like this: “All students access multiple opportunities and teachers are actively involved. Teachers have built relationships with the community and moved beyond offering a one-off project,” Casey explains. For instance, at the “leading level” of the Schools That Can Real-World Learning Rubric , “Real-world experiences are ongoing throughout the course of the year. Real-world learning is part of the fabric of the school and everyone benefits.”

For schools and educators new to real-world learning, Casey offers several ways to get started, such as by designing learning projects and experiences that are hands on and involve learning by doing . Maker education is one example. She also recommends inquiry-based approaches like Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), in which educators present learners with real-world problems and frame projects “as a big question to research and explore and build solutions to. Ideally, learning should be interdisciplinary as well because that’s the way the real world works.”

As a natural next step for engaging with the world outside of school, Casey suggests “having students present to authentic audiences outside of school or bringing experts or professionals into the school. They can be judges on work and help kids get a different kind of feedback. It’s an easy way to start those partnerships and build a mutually beneficial relationship.”

The MyWays Readiness and Preparation Tool acknowledges that many of the attributes of real-world learning are very different from the kind of teaching and learning that happens in more traditional schools. In addition to building educator capacity for designing authentic, hands-on, and student-driven learning, this tool recognizes that students themselves and members of the community will likely need assistance as they shift their mindsets and think about learning in new ways . Lindsey’s experiences bear this reality out. She recounts, for example, “When I tell a local business leader that simply coming in and talking about your business might be hard for a teacher to justify without an educational goal in mind, it can be really eye-opening. People from industry and the community may know little about education, but it’s not insurmountable.”

For that reason, the Readiness and Preparation Tool helps schools gauge the readiness of educators, learners, and external partners from the Wider Learning Ecosystem. It also provides suggestions and resources to prepare all three partners to co-create powerful and successful real-world learning experiences.

• The MyWays Real-World Learning Toolkit provides educators and their community partners with four tools to support the design of powerful and successful real-world learning experiences.
• The Schools That Can Real-World Learning Rubric (free to download with registration) serves as a guide to help K-12 schools reflect, set goals, and drive improvements around RWL.
• Part one and part two of the Practitioner’s Guide series "It Takes a Village" shares practices and resources from three school systems deeply engaged in real-world learning: Da Vinci Schools (CA), St. Vrain Valley Schools (CO), and Vista Unified School District (CA).
• “ Who You Know: Building Students’ Social Capital ” explores in greater depth why social capital is an essential part of young people’s preparation for life and how schools and educators can support students in acquiring it.
• MyWays Report 11: Learning Design for Broader, Deeper Competencies presents research, design principles, and case studies on key practices, like real-world learning, that support student development of agency, social capital, and competencies for success.

Photo at top, courtesy of NGLC: Students at Vista High School engage in real-world learning.

Amanda Avallone (she/her/hers)

Learning officer (ret.), next generation learning challenges.

Amanda retired from Next Generation Learning Challenges in 2022. As a Learning Officer for NGLC, she collaborated with pioneering educators and their communities to design authentic, powerful learning experiences for young people. She created educator professional learning experiences that exemplify the kind of learning we want for our students and she supported, connected, and celebrated, through storytelling, the educators who are already doing the challenging work of transforming learning every day.

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Why school doesn’t prepare us well enough for the real world

Larry Kraft

South junior Tiger Worku speaking in a political activity outside of school. Tiger is very involved in speaking and politics, saying “I’m a political enthusiast so I’d say that civic engagement is something that should be used in our schools more.” Civic engagement is a very useful skill that actually helps students find their passions and learn how they can become leaders of our society as adults. In order to give students these opportunities, schools should show the value of learning skills over content and give students more real-world learning opportunities. Photo courtesy of Larry Kraft.

Patrick Bruch , Staff Writer March 4, 2019

What we learn in school is different for all of us, but it is meant to provide skills and information that serves as a base for almost any career or life path. Although this is the idea behind education, the system doesn’t fully serve this purpose. It provides students with a concrete base of knowledge, but doesn’t really prepare them for meaningful work in the real world.

South junior Tiger Worku said, “Our education system wasn’t founded on teaching kids… how to be the next leaders of our society. It was founded to teach kids discipline and obedience.”

Many of the skills that we learn in school such as critical thinking, writing, speaking publicly, and the ability to discuss important topics in groups are very useful for careers in the real world, but much of the content we learn is often times not.

The skills we learn are useful for almost any career and in daily life. For example, you have to use writing skills when writing a formal email and when communicating professionally. Formal communication skills are also necessary for making calls, participating in meetings, conducting interviews, and much more in the working world. This is another use of the skills we gain through school.

Critical thinking is an especially important skill that schools teaches. It is applicable to almost all jobs, especially those that require problem solving. In addition, critical thinking is extremely useful when forming political and social opinions, which shape our world and laws. It challenges us to reexamine the lens through which we’ve grown up seeing the world by learning different perspectives and stepping out of societal norms. English teacher Mary Manor explained that “critical thinking [is] paramount — not just for “21st century jobs” but so that the workers of the world can consider their plight and begin to organize against the ruling classes… We are a country that can support billions, but we are instead pandering to billionaires. Only when we exercise our skills in analysis and synthesis — critical thinking — will we be able to come together as a nation and demand equity for all.”

However, in school we don’t always learn why these skills are important. We are mainly just given tasks in school without much explanation about how we will use them throughout the rest of our lives. For example, we learn how to do theoretical problems in math, but they often don’t connect to real life applications students care about.

While skills are useful, the content is often times not. For example, knowing the date of a certain historical event has no bearing on most career paths. While some historical knowledge is necessary for forming our ideas about the world, much of the specific information simply is not. Knowing the details and specifics of many subjects can be easily accessed online.

In order to learn more about real-world careers, students like Worku have taken their own initiative. “Politics is a field that I’ve been heavily interested in, and going to the capitol by myself, joining organizations by myself, learning tactics and strategies that will better benefit me years down the road, learning all that is something I had to do outside of school.” However experiences like Tiger’s are rare because it’s hard to find opportunities for impactful, real-world work and political involvement on one’s own.

Furthermore, schools do not make a strong enough attempt to cater to what students would like to explore, but instead give them a set of options to choose from that are geared towards economic industries such the STEM field. Many students are encouraged to be motivated by money and “successful careers,” rather than by trying to do something that would make the world a better place.

School also discourages students from finding their passions outside of school because of the pressure it puts on us. “I think the system is a little too strict and gets extremely stressful with the workload and lack of variation on the way we learn,” said junior Daisy Lavae. As she explained, almost every class structure is the same. We are given assignments, expected to learn certain information from these assignments, then we are asked to demonstrate our learning on tests. After that, we are given one of five letter grades to assess whether we learned what we were supposed to. So much pressure is put on our final grade and test scores that school can become a competition to be the best. The importance of learning skills for real life gets lost in this process.  

This can become even more grueling and stressful because this style of learning doesn’t work for every student. And unfortunately, our education system revolves around grading because it is the only way to prepare students for college. Grades are a huge part of how colleges determine who to admit, and so the fear of getting bad grades can rule a student’s academic life. Many feel that if they don’t get good grades, they won’t be able to “succeed” because they can’t go to college. This is a huge weight to put on students, and can distract them from actually learning for the sake of learning, since they’re just focusing on what they have to do to get a certain grade.

“For me [it’s important to] know what I want to do, tailor my education to where it best fits me instead of just going through the school system like a robot,” Worku said. Yet within the current system, if students really want to follow their passions and get anywhere in the world they will have to put in more of time outside of school. This can create problems, as they may not have enough time for keeping their grades up, which may not actually help students truly learn but are necessary accolades to get into college. In order to improve students’ academic experience, schools need to emphasize learning skills and helping students find their passions through engaging in real-world, meaningful experiences.

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Prepare students for the real world, want to prepare students for the real world.

We always say we need to prepare students for the real world, but do schools actually accomplish that? According to an infographic I found on Twitter, the answer is “kind of.” I watch social media closely and it's my job to share some of the hot topics on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other outlets that teachers, principals, students, and parents are contributing.

Part of schooling is about getting students ready for life after school. It's not always easy to prepare students for the real world though. Schools are starting to shift to policies that give teachers more opportunities to create lesson plans that reflect how a standard job environment would function, but only in some areas. An infographic posted by MindShift that was illustrated by Sylvia Duckworth with ideas from Alice Keeler illustrates some ways schools tend to fail when making their classes more like the standard job.

In some ways, schools are starting to adopt some of the ideas on the infographic. Recent studies have suggested homework doesn't help younger students and movements such as flipped classrooms make it so students spend more time working on activities where they can reach a teacher rather than doing worksheets at home. More classrooms accept cell phones and some even incorporate them into lesson plans. There's also a new focus on collaborative work.

However, not everything reflects the real world quite yet. For example, students still have to use scholarly sources to site or get their information. For some situations, this makes sense. However, I seriously doubt any of the jobs those same students will have will involve having to make sure they're on Google Scholar first. Most classes still assign hours of homework that is easily solved by a quick Google search every week and scantron tests still put a heavy emphasis on memorization rather than critical thinking.

What ways do you think schools are benefiting students by becoming more like the real world? What ways are they failing? What can teachers and administrators do to better prepare students for the real world than they already are?

Tori Pakizer is the Social Media Editor at SimpleK12.com. She writes regularly about the use of educational technology in K-12 classrooms, and specializes in how teachers use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media. You can follow Tori and SimpleK12 on Twitter @SimpleK12. If you have ideas for using social media in schools, please send your information or tip to [email protected].

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Schools aren’t preparing students for the real world.

Cameron Smale , Copy Editor June 3, 2019

One of the most memorable events in a person’s life is when they graduate high school and eventually college. After spending over a decade taking standardized tests and following directions from superiors, you are finally dumped out into the real world. But then what? Where do you even start?

The first step in acquiring a career is the interview. School was too focused on teaching students the Pythagorean Theorem to coach us on how to do a proper interview. Unless a student has an elective that does mock interviews, many have to learn the hard way of what being interviewed is like. This should be a required field in high school because of the usefulness it gives people who want to earn money in any given scenario.

After acquiring a stable job with fair enough income, congratulations; you’ve made it to tax season. Taxes can be either a saving grace or your worst nightmare; if a person knows how to do their taxes, they might make back a couple hundred dollars and maybe a couple thousand. Or you might owe money. In that case, you better watch your back because the IRS is now on your tail. If only those twelve plus years worth of education taught you how to survive tax season.

A few years into the real world, you will eventually start a family. Let’s be honest; was baking cookies in life skills class really enough preparation for raising and affording a family all while trying to figure out how to pay off your student loans? It can be rough getting thrown into the real world with no prior knowledge on how to balance out how to spend that hard earned money. The United States Department of Education seems to think learning long division is higher on the priority list than learning how to be a parent.

Take a car from the 1940s and compare it with one from the modern day; There’s a huge difference. If you look at a classroom from the 1940s and compare it with one from today, you’ll find that not much has changed, well besides the white board that malfunctions every couple of class periods. The car adapted to the modern world to fit our needs; schools need to do the same. Now I’m not going to be the person to ‘call for total school reform’ partially because it wouldn’t lead to anything, but mostly because the American education system has been due for some change for the past one hundred years or so. I’m pretty sure that school was originally intended for factory workers. Think about it, students are required to sit in a classroom, be quiet unless told to speak and follow direct orders from an assigned authority figure.

A student should be able to take classes that he or she will be interested in. If they aren’t interested then what’s their purpose in paying any attention? Why not just blow through the class? They’ll never learn the value of a class if they’re not interested in it. Students will take time to understand classes that interest them.

“If only those twelve plus years worth of education taught you how to survive tax season.”

— Cameron Smale

Students should be heavily encouraged to take the classes that will relate to whatever career path they want to follow. For example, if a student wants to do something related to the medical field, that student’s school should substitute a history class with a medical class. It would not cost any money and the student would only benefit from this.

The point I’m trying to make is that we all have to learn certain skills in life whether we learn them the easy way or the hard way. If schools took time to teach us about the unfortunate hardships in the world of work, we might have a better chance at succeeding in the future. Being in school for over twelve years should have been enough to know how the world works. But hey, at least we know the quadratic formula.

Cameron Smale is a senior on the Arrow news team who likes to write opinion pieces. He is a captain of the swim team, as well as a member of the tennis...

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The Key to Preparing Difficult Students for the Real World

Some of the best and most effective practices to motivate difficult students and improve their behavior at school are met with skepticism and even dismay from more than a handful of educators. These educators argue that using such practices fails to prepare kids for the real world.

The practices and objections include:

Important Differences Between School and Work

While preparing students for the "real world" is certainly important, there are important differences between the workplace and school. Students have no choice but to attend school whether they like it or not. While there, they are told what classes they must take, when they must take them, and how they have to perform in order to move to the next level. If they aren't very good in a subject, they have to either continue taking it or get remedial help until they pass. If they are unmotivated or disruptive, they may get suspended -- but they can't get fired.

By contrast, the real world allows workers to leave jobs they don't like or aren't good at, and employers to dismiss anyone who exhibits unsatisfactory performance. Most jobs require mastery of fewer things than school, therefore considerable success can be achieved even with numerous limitations. For example, I think of myself as a good teacher, writer, and speaker, but I can't do much else particularly well. Rather than spend my time trying to fix a toilet, build a shelf, plant shrubs, or repair a walkway, I call a plumber, landscaper, carpenter, or mason while I work at getting even better at my talents. Students don't have those options.

A More Realistic Goal

Since school success as represented by credentials like diplomas and degrees is now required for entry-level jobs in virtually all fields, make it really hard for students to fail school . Not impossible, just really hard! Common Core goals of career and college readiness can only be achieved if we make it hard for our lowest-functioning and least-interested student to fail. Along the way, make sure that students understand the connections between how their poor work habits, inadequate social skills, and/or inappropriate behavior may affect them if there is carry-over later on. Do what you can to impart important life skills such as a solid work ethic, promptness, patience, and getting along with others. Have rules and, as much as possible, "logical" consequences for unacceptable behavior. (For example: "Work needs to be completed. You can do it in class with others, at home, or during recess.")

Let the employer decide whether or not our uninterested student has a work ethic and set of skills appropriate to the job. Let the employer determine what strategies are necessary to get the best out of him. Ultimately, the employer will make hiring, firing, and salary decisions based on whatever criteria are used in that particular "real world." As the "school employer," I know that I am far more likely to motivate an uninterested student with poor attendance to show up, and therefore make it more likely that she will pass my class and graduate, by telling how much we missed her during her absence rather than by giving her a zero on missed assignments. For example, I might say:

Success in school does not always portend success in life. At the end of the day, if a student "irresponsibly" passes my class, she gets a better chance to find success later in life or perhaps experiences the consequences of failing to meet her job's expectations. Kids who are the "square pegs" that can't or won't fit into the "round hole" are better served if they can look at school in the rear view mirror one day while pursuing their own path to success. Isn't it far better to prepare kids for a "real world" they cannot yet understand rather than expect them to produce behavior they haven't yet learned?

I welcome your thoughts.

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Does college prepare students for the real world.

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Do you think university prepared you for your workplace and "real" world? originally appeared on Quora : the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world .

Answer by Eric Duffy , CEO of Pathgather , on Quora :

Do you think university prepared you for your workplace and "real" world?  No. And that’s why the university of the 21st century is really the workplace. Businesses need to take up that mantle, for their own self-interest and the greater good.

The traditional thinking has been that college is a time and place to develop an area of expertise, figure out a career path, and prepare for it. The idea is that those four years are your chance to develop the skills needed so that when you enter the workforce, you’re prepared. That model is outdated.

My experience makes for a perfect example. At Washington University in St. Louis, I majored in architecture. I wanted a career that would have an impact and also lead to something tangible.

In the four years I spent studying architecture, we did lots of sketches and learned about design. But we never built a building. We weren’t involved in the process of building one.

That resonates with a lot of university studies. There’s a great deal of theoretical learning, studying of history, and exploring of ideas. But if someone were to spend those four years in the job market actually doing the job, they would come out a lot farther along.

Obviously it’s different for doctors and other scientists, as well as some other professions. But for most people, the traditional college education doesn’t give you experience with workplace skills. It’s strange how universities spend so much money on manicured grounds, beautiful dorms and lots of mail sent out to attract applicants. It all seems so divorced from what should be the objective, which is to prepare people to excel in the real world.

This is a big reason that learning on the job is a crucial, growing field. You get a job working for a company, entering at the bottom if necessary. And when possible, you use the company’s online   talent development platform   to keep learning skills.

These are the real, tangible things you need to know -- how to use new software, piece through data, give presentations, speak in public, etc. The platform helps set you up for mentorship and peer learning as well.

Companies are discovering that they need to offer this in order to attract and retain the best employees with high potential, and to create an agile workforce for the future. (See   How competitive is America's Future Workforce? )

Some people argue that college prepares you socially. That it’s a chance to learn how to deal with other people in a way that you couldn’t in high school, when you were under the dictatorship of your parents. There’s also a common refrain that it helps you mature, become independent, and learn to take care of yourself.

I’m suspicious of that as well. The typical age for attending college is 18-22. During those years, you’re going to mature naturally just by virtue of aging. And the lessons you learn from working can teach you a lot. So I remember maturing a lot in college, but would I not have matured had I been out in the real world independent of the university? Perhaps even more so.

The preposterous cost of college is a huge factor to consider. These days, there’s so much free education available online. On summer breaks during college, I had a menial job: erasing pencil marks from music books, for a family business. During that time, I listened to podcasts.

The brick and mortar university system is never going to be scalable. It’s physically not possible. But digital learning can be scaled. It’s available to everyone.

None of this is to say that a university education is totally useless. It broadens your horizons intellectually, giving you a chance to learn about things, places, and people that you might never have discovered otherwise. I suspect that my mind has grown at least partially more narrow and closed off since college, as I’ve become focused on my business.

And college can help you learn how to use your brain in new ways. For example, I ended up choosing not to become an architect. But by studying architecture in college and having access to good professors, I learned about design thinking, which is all about problem solving. It’s applicable in my current work, UX design. And the fact that I’m focused on how to solve problems helped inspire me to create   Pathgather .

But once I made the decision to create a platform for digital learning at companies, I had to go learn how to do it. So I took online classes, including a Udacity course on startup methodology. I enrolled in an online program with the Founder Institute and learned about entrepreneurship. These are things I never would have learned in college.

Now when I hire, I almost never look at someone’s major in college. I’m much more interested in their skills and experience. But some employers still use degrees and majors as a crutch, giving starter jobs to recent graduates who have those elements on their resumes. So in that sense, a college degree can give you a leg up on the competition.

It just doesn’t do much to actually prepare you for the workplace and the real world.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter , Facebook , and Google+ . More questions:

• Jobs and Careers : How competitive is America's Future Workforce?
• Office and Workplace Culture : How should a new startup develop and sustain a strong company culture?
• The College and University Experience : Why exactly has college become so insanely expensive in the United States?

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High school does not teach students real life skills

Madi Wheeler , Online Editor January 29, 2018

Ever since we were little kids, many students couldn’t wait to grow up. From a young age, some of us knew what we wanted to do and many of us just wanted to get out into the “real world”. Now that we are in high school, growing up seems scary. We know how to measure density and how to write an essay in MLA format, which is all great, but when it comes to trying to balance my checkbook or do taxes, that is out of most students learning range.

Classes such as CADD, business classes and publications courses are all great classes for preparing students for a specific career, however FHS does not offer classes that prepare students for the things that will come as a surprise to many young adults, such as doing taxes and paying bills.

According to a survey released in 2012, 86 percent of 16 to 18 year olds would like to learn about money management in the classroom so that they can avoid financial mistakes when it comes to having to do them for real. While it is understandable that many people believe that these things should be taught by a parent or guardian of the teen rather than the school, the reality that these things are actually taught by a parent is pretty slim. While it is the hope that parents would teach their children these things, that reality is not always true.

With schedules changing for the 2018-2019 school year, it may be more difficult to add in a class that would teach such things like balancing a checkbook, doing taxes, or even paying bills. Perhaps these life skills could be incorporated into a math class or even Economy. An entire elective is not necessarily needed for a student to learn these, however if during one class, the first 10 to 15 minutes was spent teaching those life skills, it would benefit many students.

The opinion that high school prepares us for the real world, is true in a sense that it prepares us for a career, however it doesn’t prepare us for knowing how to do real life skills. Many students believe that high schools should be incorporating these skills into their teaching to help better students and prepare them for the “real world”.

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Raphaela Lee • Jun 30, 2020 at 12:29 PM

SCHOOL HAS TAUGHT US NOTHING! No matter how good the teacher, we will never be prepared for the real world. When in a day to day basis as an adult am I going to need the events of the civil war and the specific names of each battle in order? NEVER! The whole concept of school has turned into a series of memorizing, reciting, and then forgetting. Never once have I seen a job interview where they asked for the person to solve for the slope of xy. People have forgotten that school is about learning, not passing. Most of us students are not prepared for the real world in the least. I know how to write a five paragraph essay in forty minutes, but I don’t know how to file for taxes, buy a house, and I have no clue what a credit score is. People are saying that our parents and people out of school are supposed to teach us about real life, but isn’t the idea of school to help us become successful? To prepare us for real obstacles? Schools need to realize this.

Harshita • Jun 10, 2019 at 7:22 AM

I want 10 reasons that schools shouldn’t teach life skills in schools. It should be outside the schools.

Why schools should teach for the real world

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Does education prepare students for the real world?

04 June 2021

For all students, attending school is a fundamental part of life, a necessity in preparing us for experiences in years to come, product of the hours upon hours of often arduous exercises and experiences spent inside a classroom. Many have suggested that with numerous technological breakthroughs, and a significant rise in the opportunities offered in the education of today’s day and age, students are becoming increasingly more prepared for latter stages in their life. But is this development evolving at too slow of a rate? Does today’s education system effectively prepare students for the real world?

Ultimately, what good is learning if students don’t use this knowledge learned at school later on in life? It is evident that many parts of learning that students put meticulous time into mastering, with intention of benefiting them later on into adulthood, are simply inaccessible. An experiment by German psychologist, Ebbinghaus, revealed that students forget up to 95% of what they learn in school after just three days. 

Nonetheless, it is debatable that forgetting this content is not to the detriment of pupils; the vast majority of content pupils are educated on is in fact irrelevant to the world we live in.

This is because the world revolves around money.

A student’s knowledge in the field of business and finance is not enriched until the penultimate years of secondary education. Business and finance skills are essential in every adult’s day-to-day life, whereas other subjects that are prioritised many a time are disputably frivolous and far from necessary.

In a standard Dartford Grammar School week for Year 7s, students spend 150 minutes enrolled in Maths lessons despite there being only 80,000 mathematicians worldwide, roughly 1% of the population according to MathOverflow .

However, according to Salary.com , of the ten most populous jobs worldwide, only one of the listed occupations is educated to students at any point in their education period, this being accounting. 

Furthermore, the existing schooling system fails to educate pupils in several imperative areas crucial to a successful transition period of youth to adulthood, such as; negotiation skills, taxation, budgeting and investment skills, basic cooking skills and straightforward survival skills.

But, with a rise in prioritisation in one area comes a deficiency of prioritisation in another. There would undoubtedly be a multitude of different teaching organisations that would be very reluctant in letting go of traditional subjects of learning that they regard as valuable to every student’s education. For example, subject areas of focus such as Shakespeare or calculus are often considered indispensable in the nationwide curriculum. 

Traditional topics such as calculus and Shakespeare should not be neglected, but teachers should be able to ask their class, ‘Now, how can we use this lesson outside of the classroom? Aliezah Hulett, Windsor High School student and TED-Ed Club speaker

In addition to this, innumerable students have expressed a fear of independence and the responsibilities that come in the absence of a guardian. Teachers act as chaperones inside the classroom; restricting students in several ways, such as setting deadlines, creating rules, and generally ensuring that there is order in a class. This fails to prepare pupils for college, a significant step up in intensity- entirely unimaginable for many students.

On the other hand, school plays an essential role in a child’s development as an individual, expanding a student’s ability in numerous social and disciplinary skills, such as meeting deadlines, teamwork skills, attendance, punctuality and social interaction with people both similar and different to us.

For instance, whilst playing a certain team sport, a student is not solely indulged in the experience of the sport itself. The event was not merely to improve their skills in that certain sport, but to ameliorate their capability of acting as a team player. Every time that student loses; picking themselves back up again is more valuable than improving in that certain sport itself. Furthermore, it also advances their perseverance and persistence on the road to becoming the best that they can be.

The extensive range of activities a teacher assigns to a student are not simply to be forgotten after the ringing of the school bell, but to utilise skills required in becoming a flourishing, self-reliant adult, such as confident speaking, creativity and a healthy mind-set for personal development.

The endless number of annual events celebrated in school – Christmas, Chinese New Year, Anti-Bullying Day, etc. – are only enriched inside the classroom, and inform students about these events of celebration whilst developing a sense of community and enriching the school experience. The frequent days where students are necessitated to donate a small amount of money has become second nature to them, subconsciously furthering their moral inclination to donate to charity.

School is comprised of many principles akin to the real world; irrespective of a student’s lack of desire to go to school, they legally have to be present. Irrespective of how much a student detests a particular teacher, they are obligated to do as they are told and follow instructions.

Our (teachers) job is not to prepare students for something. Our job is to help prepare students for anything. A.J. Juliani, Founder/CEO of Adaptable Learning

Does education really prepare students for the real world?

It heavily depends on what you consider the purpose of school is.

School is the foremost fountain of knowledge children are exposed to. It gives a chance for them to acquire knowledge on various fields of education such as people, literature, history, mathematics, politics, and other numerous subjects. This contributes to cultivation in the thought process. Education World

Samad is a Politics and Education Writer, and student at Dartford Grammar School

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The Stampede

The Student News Site of Clearfield Area Junior-Senior High School

Does high school prepare students for the real world?

Summer Wynn , Staff Writer March 2, 2021

High school has always been said to prepare students for the challenges that they will face later in their lives. This is done by helping students use problem solving skills as well as thinking through issues in a logical way. But are students really being prepared for the real world after high school or is there more preparation that could be done to help them succeed?

When you ask an average high school student if they know how to file their taxes, most of the time they will look at you with a puzzled look and say: “We were never taught that.” If you ask the same student if they can prove a theorem for geometry or explain how to set up an MLA style research paper, chances are they will be able to. Although knowing theorems and how to set up research papers are very important to make it through high school, chances are a student will not have to use those skills past college.

But why do schools not teach students the skills that they need to make it through the real world? The answer is a bit unclear. On one side of things, most schools focus on academics rather than real-life skills in order to help students make it into college. Teaching students these important skills does not seem as necessary to schools since many real-world skills can be learned on one’s own.

Some schools do offer electives that students can choose to take that will help them learn a few skills that will help them survive on their own in the future. Here at Clearfield, that class is offered as Life Beyond High School and is not mandatory for students to take but is offered as an elective. Personally, I believe that all students should be required to take at least one semester of this specific class in order to help them prepare for the next chapter of their lives that are right around the corner.

Life Beyond High School teaches important skills such as how to manage and pay student loans, how to manage your income as a family, and how to read and file taxes. Many of these different ideas are not taught outside of this class in an academic setting, making this class very valuable. I found myself coming out of the class with more knowledge about the real world and how my life would soon be than ever before. Overall, I feel like teaching life skills that are not exactly “academic skills” is beneficial to students.

• Life Beyond High School

Hello! My name is Summer Wynn and I am a senior in high school. In my spare time, you can find me buying sneakers to add to my extensive collection, working...

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Jessica Grose

Most teachers know they’re playing with fire when they use tech in the classroom.

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

A few years ago, when researchers at Boston College and Harvard set out to review all of the existing research on educational apps for kids in preschool through third grade, they were surprised to find that even though there are hundreds of thousands of apps out there that are categorized as educational, there were only 36 studies of educational apps in the databases they searched. “That is not a strong evidence base on which to completely redesign an entire schooling system,” Josh Gilbert, one of the co-authors of the study, told me over the phone.

That said, their meta-analysis of the effects of educational app use on children’s literacy and math skills, published in 2021, found that well-designed apps can make a positive difference when it comes to “constrained skills” — things like number recognition or times tables in math, or letter sounds in literacy. Unconstrained skills are more complex ones that develop over a lifetime of learning and can deepen over the years. (It’s worth noting that many popular educational apps are not high-quality .)

Gilbert said that overall, “the range of effects was gigantic.” Because they were all over the place, “we have to go beyond the average effect and say, OK, for whom does the app work? Under what conditions? On what types of measures? And I think those are the questions that researchers, policymakers, school leaders, teachers and principals should be asking,” he said. “What are the best use cases for this digital technology in the classroom?”

In last week’s newsletter , I came in pretty hot about the pitfalls of educational technology in American classrooms. I’m convinced that since students returned to in-person school after the disruptions of 2020-21, there are too many schools that haven’t been taking a thoughtful or evidence-based approach to how they’re using screens and apps, and that it’s time for a pause and a rethink. But that doesn’t mean there are no benefits to any use of educational technology.

So for the second part of this series, I wanted to talk to people who’ve seen real upsides from using tech in their classrooms. Their experiences back up some of the available research , which shows that ed tech can help teachers differentiate their material to meet the needs of students with a wide range of proficiencies. Further, teachers report that students with disabilities can really benefit from the assistive technologies that screens and apps can provide.

Debbie Marks, who teaches third grade in Oklahoma, told me that her students’ school-issued laptops allow them “to participate in differentiated reading interventions designed specifically for them” during the school day. That differentiation allows her to better assess how each student has progressed and tailor her instruction to each student.

“So for example, we could be working on story elements and we’re working on characters,” she explained to me when we spoke. “One student might be at the point where they’re just trying to identify who the main character is. Another student might be trying to identify character traits while a higher-level student would be comparing characters or would be identifying how the character changes throughout the story based on the plot. So it really allows me to develop one-on-one lessons for every kid in my classroom.”

Marks works in a rural district, about 90 minutes away from Tulsa, and some of her students may be traveling 45 minutes to an hour just to get to class. She said that the use of devices allows her to better connect with her students’ parents and to get them more involved in what’s going on in a classroom that is physically far from them. Marks also said that screens enable her to do things like virtual author visits, which she says get the kids really excited and engaged in reading.

I also heard from several teachers who said that assistive technology has been a game changer for students with special needs. Duncan Law, who works as a special education support teacher in an elementary school in Oregon, put it this way: “Technology can be a necessity for students with special needs in accessing core curriculum/standards, as well as for fluency practice. In the best case scenario, learning via tech is guided and closely monitored by teachers, and students are actively engaged with feedback. For students with dysgraphia and dyslexia, word processing tools offer a meaningful way to demonstrate/assess their writing skills.”

Several middle school and high school teachers who said that tech was helpful in their classrooms seemed to be using it as an efficient way to teach students more rote tasks, allowing more class time to be spent helping build those “unconstrained” skills.

Doug Showley, a high school English teacher in Indiana who’s been teaching since 1996, gave me the example of how he has changed his quizzes over time by integrating technology. He used to just give straight-up vocabulary quizzes where students had to define words; now he and his colleagues have moved toward “diction quizzes,” requiring students to understand the nuances of using specific words in sentences.

Showley noted that it’s easier to quickly look up words than it was in the hard-copy dictionary days, and that his students “have access to online dictionaries” during these quizzes. They’re given four synonyms and are asked to figure out which synonym best fits into a sentence. “To determine that, they have to go beyond just that basic definition. They’ve got to get into the connotative meaning of the word and the common usage of the word,” he explained.

But Showley also said that he monitors the kids quite closely. When they’re doing a task that involves their laptops, he’ll have them set up so all of their screens are facing him. He estimates that usually only one or two kids out of a class of 25 really aren’t able to stay on task when they’re on the screens.

He also told me that his school has made the decision not to block A.I., including ChatGPT, though it is a hot topic of discussion. The challenge of dealing with A.I. is something that came up a lot among teachers in the upper grades, and the overall vibe I got was that no one quite knows what to do with it yet.

After we spoke, Showley emailed me to say that “we should carefully gauge to what degree and in what way tech is used at each level of education.” And he wrote something that I think really sums up both the promise and the peril of ed tech (and is also such a classic English teacher passage):

I couldn’t help but think of Prometheus defying the Olympic gods by sharing the first-ever technological advancement with humankind: fire. Fire, as with every other significant advancement since, both propelled society forward and burnt it to the ground. It enlightened our minds and souls, and it tormented them, just as Prometheus was perpetually tormented through his punishment for sharing too much of the gods’ power.

Perhaps deliberately, one of the popular digital whiteboards is the Promethean board.

The technology isn’t going away. We need to start creating better frameworks to think about how students and teachers are using technology in our schools, because the tech companies won’t stop pushing their products, whether or not there’s evidence that shows educational gains. CNN’s Clare Duffy reports that later this year, Meta “will launch new software for educators that aims to make it easier to use its V.R. headsets in the classroom,” though “it remains unclear just how useful virtual reality is in helping students learn better.”

In next week’s newsletter, I’ll write about solutions to some of the problems posed by ed tech, and how we might create a future where we can minimize some of the most egregious hazards of distraction and invasion of privacy, and realize some of the potential of technology’s most fantastic educational promises.

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

Poland says no more homework for its young students

• Omar Duwaji

Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk is instituting a series of reforms, with education being one of his targets. Under the new rules, teachers don’t have to give homework to children in the first to third grades. It’s optional until grade nine.

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