TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION: ENGAGING AND EMPOWERING THE LEARNERS OF TOMORROW

How should we teach in an age of uncertainty, when two-thirds of today’s school children will work in jobs that don’t yet exist [1]? In an age where artificial intelligence will equal their own intelligence by the time they finish school [2, p. 16]? In an age of mass education, when more students over the next thirty years will graduate than since the beginning of recorded history [3, p. 136]. How can instructors efficiently and effectively manage such an incursion? Also the next generation of students are the first true digital natives, they take in information instantaneously and lose interest just as fast [4]. They are more likely to look for a solution on the internet than to ask for advice and are accustomed to watching online lessons to learn, yet still value a university degree [5]. How can we meet their expectations and engage them meaningfully? This paper looks at teaching methodologies that can be implemented in order to enthuse the next generation of students. It looks at ways to improve student agency, engagement, motivation and encourage higher-order thinking skills, ultimately aiming to empower them with the competencies that they will need to succeed. It sees the role of the instructor as a guide rather than a gatekeeper to knowledge, after all, knowledge transfer today, and therefore traditional teaching methods, have been outsourced to the likes of YouTube and Netflix [2, p. 59]. Finally, it ties all of the research together into a concrete teaching approach that can be directly applied in the classroom.