Prepare your children for the future!
Make sure they can compete in the world of innovation
Traditional Schools
The traditional school system in many countries is making students “swallowers”, swallowing school material in the curriculum. They become pure receptacles of information, not agents who use information to solve problems. (Nassim Taleb in “Antifragile”)
Innovative Thinking
The Innovative Thinking School will not replace the traditional schools (yet) but extend the students skills by focusing on areas which are important for innovation but not covered in the traditional schools:
- problem solving
- real world problems and solutions/practical issues
- First-Principles Analysis: creating superior results by breaking down a problem into its components
- Second-Order Thinking: anticipating the consequences of actions by mapping the possible effects
- logic
- scientific thinking
- computer thinking (no coding)
- handling (and avoiding) complexity, interacting with systems that have many interconnected relationships
- handling risk, making wise choices by managing the possibility of suffering substantial loss
- effective team thinking
- ethics (personal and in relation to others)
- decision making
- active learning: build students confidence and communication skills. Focus is on the process of exploration and reflection, developing their own hypotheses and improve through iteration. (reflective thinking, double loop learning)
- team dynamics: how to create high-functioning teams that are greater than the sum of the individuals
- Negotiation: How to work with other people to create win-win outcomes for all parties
- fast thinking vs slow thinking (Ref Kahnemann)
- mental models
Most of the discussed problems do not have a single solution. The focus of the education is on the thinking process instead of the result, the ability to reflect on ones own thinking and to learn from other students thinking process. It is about thinking what the future would look like and building that future.