Futures Forge
Skills for Success - Introduction
“Just do it!. You’ll learn more in 2 weeks than in 2 years of high school. You learn so many useful skills that you never learned in high school and you meet lifelong friends."
-Zeybek, S4S 2024
The Futures Forge Skills for Success Course is a 2-week residential intensive course that helps high-aptitude students aged 16-18 to improve their ability to perform in cognitively challenging future endeavors in school and work. In the course, students develop cognitive, psychological, and interpersonal high-performance skills that schools do not teach.
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What students learn in skills for success
Through hands-on project-based challenges, presentations, coaching and feedback, reflection, and cognitive exercises, students improve their ability to perform in cognitively challenging future endeavors in school and work.
Skills for Success helps to develop all 12 high-performance skills. Students have highlighted that they grew the most in:
Teamwork and leadership
Complex problem-solving and critical thinking
Communication and presentation
Adaptability, personal motivation, and grit
Learning from giving and receiving feedback
The Course exists to give students an introduction to developing key skills and increasing their rate of learning throughout their lives. Over these two weeks, students are stretched far past what they are accustomed to in school. With their facilitators and coaches, students practice these skills “in battle,” find where they can improve as teams and individuals, receive direct feedback and coaching, and iterate quickly. This leads to tremendous growth in two weeks as well as the foundation for further growth during high school and college.
Students consciously practice and reflect on using these attributes throughout the course to accelerate their development for years to come.
The Skills for Success pedagogy
Skills for Success leans on Futures Forge’s Catalytic Learning pedagogy, every day scaffolding students through rapid growth with two core motions:
- Complex, team-based challenges that simulate real work, and
- Peer/team feedback, dedicated coaching, and reflection on the day’s performance and what could be improved tomorrow
Students that engage deeply with this system see rapid improvement every day.
Challenges
Each day, a Challenge stands as the centerpiece of learning and growth. They run a gamut of business-like topics, including strategy, marketing, project management, product development, operations, etc. Each challenge roughly looks like:
A novel business-like or engineering-like goal, problem, or objective, and a minimum set of boundaries
A limited set of resources (time, money, etc)
Guidance on where to begin learning what to do and what it takes to win
Students have broad leeway and high responsibility for iterating and succeeding in each challenge. Facilitators use the Socratic method and spot feedback to help students maximize learning and not get too stuck.A few examples include:
- Build a physical device to consistently achieve an objective, with highly limited building resources and time
- Help a simulated startup fix product-market fit issues
- Learn and fix why a bunch of employees are leaving a company
- Reform and upgrade the Boston recycling system
- Diagnose and fix a car that won’t start (without a mechanic)
Students attack and solve the problem, present their solution and approach to peers and facilitators, and discuss how they’ll incorporate feedback into the next day’s challenge.
Feedback and coaching
Students are each assigned a coach for their team and themselves individually. Coaches are present during challenges and modules to provide immediate feedback and take notes. In the afternoons and evenings, coaches meet with teams and individuals with two goals in mind:
- Help teams incorporate direct feedback and learning from the challenge in order to iteratively improve their performance the next day
- Help the individual students overcome their own psychological barriers to growth, and help them find their inner motivation
We draft our coaches from top universities such as MIT, Tufts, Dartmouth, and Exeter. We train them in the feedback and coaching methods used in top management consulting firms, and continue coaching them throughout the program.
An ethos of responsibility
Underpinning this learning system is an ethos that students own their progress, results, experience. Students quickly realize that adults will not coddle them or clean up after them. There is neither punishment nor absolution: students experience the consequences of their actions.
This activates parts of the mind that are dormant in learning environments that are more controlling, prescriptive, and directive. We have found that most students are capable of more responsibility and higher performance than adults allow them. When they are motivated, they rise to the challenge, and reap the benefits in their development.