Hello Homeschooling Families! We know that you’re making plans for next year so you enjoy the summer! We are, too! We’ll be sharing updates over the next few weeks as we gather what classes the community is looking for!
Have an idea? Reach out to us!
We wanted to create a business motto not just because our consultant told us to, but to create inspiration for anyone that we interact with. Our own staff members. Teachers, principals, and other staff at schools. Parents. Most of all our students! It unifies us all together that what we are not doing right now is not just for a letter grade on an assignment, class grade, report card grade, transcript, or even a diploma. We are educating For the Future. Jobs, careers, relationships, getting health care, keeping your sanity, and dealing with all life has in store for us, in the future.
It is a cognitive distortion to predict the future. So we won’t do it. Moore’s Law continues to hold true that technology doubles its abilities every two years, so just knowing how computers currently work will not be enough. Weather reports are barely accurate past three days. So how do we get ready For the Future?
It’s as simple as teaching to look at the weather forecast before deciding what to wear! Rather than an adult dictate some knowledge, teach how to find the answer and make a decision! It really is that simple, but it does take rethinking how teachers come off as the only validator of right and wrong (and how students resort to AI to hope it’s answers are right enough to sneak by).
By teaching a process, we create empowerment for our students. We create confidence that they can accomplish their goals. We give them the space to take charge of their own learning. And if they need guidance and support, we are always there when they need it. We are not the analog of online learning platforms where the binary nature of computers is right or wrong.
By teaching critical thinking, decision making, cause and effect, and other process skills, we are preparing our children to be ready for what ever problems that may arise in their lives. Life has known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. It is only by trusting our children with their own decision making that they will be truly prepared. Will they only know 3×4 is 12 or will they have a skill set ready to take on what ever the future may have on hand?
We invite you to learn with us, For the Future.
Individualized Educational Services is excited to let you know about our START program that will launch Fall 2021 for students STARTing their adult lives!
START is a blend of soft and hard skills to help high school juniors & seniors and college students start their transition into their adult lives. As you may have heard, “adulting” is hard. 15 years ago, we used to say that students would learn these as part of the null curriculum. Yes, null, as in nothing. Educators knew that there was a group of skills that students would learn in order to be successful. It was more or less walking quietly in a line behind the teacher. With the growing neuro-diverse population, researches from across disciplines have been identifying what these skills actually are and why the are so important. Executive Functioning skills is a quick name drop, but there are so many more domains.
We anticipate never having the same conversation twice with our START groups! The reason is that every set of students will have a different set of strengths and needs! We created the START acronym to set out our program goals:
We’re hoping to develop a cohort of staff and students that can learn START skills in the 2021-2022 academic year to start a college cohort at Santa Barbara Community College (SBCC) in the 2022-2023 school year! Cohort members can enroll in the same class and section with an IES instructor to receive additional supports to find success in college level academics! We’re hoping to spur the high school dual enrollment trend where students choose to enroll in college classes to earn full year high school credit from one semester of a high school class.
What a year this has been! As we are making plans to finish out the 2020-2021 school year and develop our summer planing, we kept wondering what the future would bring. With all the chaos of the past year, we found ourselves wishing for the best and trying to work with what we had.
Our discussions have been focusing on what education, and learning should be for the 21st century and beyond. How does technology integrate into the plans for us, and our students. What do we teach so our students can be successful? Why are we teaching those skills?
As we took an inventory of what our content and methodology should be, fell upon our new precept.
It’s about giving our children the tools they need to function in any possible future setting, not just memorizing what is needed at the moment.
The future is uncertain. Why memorize a list of math facts if you do not know how or why to use them? Why just teach science concepts when you can facilitate an understanding of the world and how it changes? Let’s teach a process that can be used and generalized to what ever the future brings.
We hope that you’ll join us on our quest to provide an education that sets your children up for the future. One based upon cooperative learning and doing rather than rote test taking.
