by Issues Management Group Staff
From blended learning to STEM (or STEAM) to 21st century skills and work-based learning, there seems to be an unending stream of new buzzwords in education. With all this jargon, increasingly stories can read more like inside baseball rather than an intentional strategy.
At the root of these new education terms is a growing consensus that the future of work is changing and that new ways of teaching are necessary to ensure a successful transition from high school to college and beyond. But what does this shift actually look like in the classroom? Better still, do students feel prepared and are they showing real improvements in their educational and career achievements?
Professionals working in education need to be able to address these questions – not just amongst themselves, but also externally with elected officials, the media and other influencers. As new technologies and innovations shift the education landscape, the public is eager to understand how these methods actually work along with the actual impact on students. So, it is crucial for advocates of these approaches to bring them to life with concrete results or evidence-backed data. In addition, highlighting a school or a student’s success story makes a powerful case for the benefits of new teaching methods.
For communications professionals working in the education and workforce readiness arenas, it is important to recognize that there are a variety of ways to generate interest and tell stories. By pairing compelling data points with personal anecdotes, we can transform the alphabet soup of education jargon into a formula for success to more effectively convey an engaging message to the world.