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Not many people would have the audacity to leave the comforts of their office and relegate themselves to doing field work so an endangered species does not go extinct. Dyan deNapoli is driven by so much love for penguins that she christened herself The Penguin Lady. She founded her educational business after leaving the New England Aquarium. As its Senior Penguin Aquarist for over 7 years, Dyan's experience equipped her with impeccable know-how on how to care and help penguins thrive. Her book "The Great Penguin Rescue" has earned the accolades of award-giving bodies. What saving 40,000 penguins could do! To read more about Dyan deNapoli visit www.thextraordinary.org

Understanding and identifying the barriers to creativity and the conditions which are essential for it to thrive is an important step in the process of ensuring our students leave school with a capacity for creativity at least equal to that which they arrive with.

If we are to cultivate the dispositions required in these times of postnormality and post-truth we need to establish cultures in our classrooms which will allow them to thrive. 

I am currently reading "Thank you for being late: An optimist's guide to thriving in the age of accelerations" and have found in this the answer to these questions. In essence we are confronting two types of change, one that we have always faced and one that is unique to our current times. 

 If the young people of today are to thrive beyond the walls of the classroom they will need to be able to cope with a world characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. The children of todays Kindergarten will enter the workplace in the fourth-decade of the 21st Century. We debate the merits of teaching 21st Century Skills and what they might be while teaching children who have lived their entire lives in that very century. The challenge is how will schools and individual teachers respond to this drive for urgent change.

How might we prepare our students for an unknown future? If we accept that we are living in times of rapid change and that the world our children will inhabit is likely to be very different from the world of today, or perhaps more importantly, different from the work our current education system was designed to serve, what should we do to ensure our children are able to thrive?