Why Adaptability and Risk Taking are Important

As we've seen in the first two weeks of this course, students need to develop different kinds of skills for success in the rapidly changing world of the 21st century. More importantly, students need to leave school prepared to continue to learn more new skills. It is now even more imperative that schools graduate lifelong learners than it has ever been in the past. But how can schools prepare students to learn skills that don't even exist yet? The only way is to help them learn how to learn. The foundation of any learning is the ability to change behavior, thinking, and mental models based on new experiences—in short, the ability to adapt. Therefore, students must develop a greater degree of adaptability in order to be successful in their future.

Similarly, if students are to learn new skills in new and unfamiliar situations, this will require a considerable amount of risk taking. For several years now, colleges and businesses have lamented the fact that more graduates are not comfortable with risk. At times it was the top students who were the most risk averse. If the expectations of an assignment (or job) were not clearly laid out along with clear instructions, the students (or graduates) were lost.

Students today are learning their risk taking skills outside of school; in video games, for example, success rests on trying something, failing, and then trying something new. However, when real world consequences are at stake, the same students who are happy to "die" in a game are often unwilling to risk the embarrassment of "looking stupid" or "sounding dumb." Schools must give students the opportunity to take more significant risks, to fail, and to learn from their failures.

In this segment you will be asked to define what adaptability and risk taking mean to you and why they are important for today's students.