How might a school (and education, at large) become more agile, more adaptable on a larger scale and shorter time frame?
What if we explored recipes that combined ingredients of Collins’ Good to Great(the flywheel effect, “who” before “what,” and the hedgehog concept), Design Thinking and the Japanese concept of “kaizen” (continuous improvement through…Discovery, Interpretation, Ideation, Experimentation, Evolution), and Manuel Lima’s power of networks, which is closely related to Friedman’s flattened world?
Collins, Jim. “Good to Great.” Fast Company, October 2001. http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html
Could we re-imagine and re-purpose so that school becomes more of a quickly evolving ecosystem that better integrates learners with real-time, real-life, contextual learning and a developing citizen skill-content set that readies learners for the present and future more than for a past that is rapidly fading?
To move from the industrial age to the information age to the creativity age, must we synergize processes that can better develop creational momentum?
[“A piece of ‘why,'” A piece of ‘what,'” and A piece of ‘how'” are strands of a series on why school needs to change, what about school needs to change, and how schools might navigate the change.]
Tony Wagner from the Harvard Graduate School of Education interviewed over 600 CEOs, asking them the same essential question: “Which qualities will our graduates need in the 21st century for success in college, careers, and citizenship?”
Wagner’s list of Seven Survival Skills is a distillation of the outcomes of these hundreds of interviews and adds validity to the case we are making. They are:
Critical Thinking and Problem-solving
Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence
Agility and Adaptability
Initiative and Entrepreneurship
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination
The World Has Changed
In The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need – and What We Can Do About It, Tony Wagner argues that “in today’s competitive global ‘knowledge economy,’ all students need new skills for college, careers, and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today’s youth – and our country – at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven’t changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete – even the ones that score best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution.”
[from NAIS COA “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future”]
6. Changing what we get, because we’ve changed what we need
If school’s function is to create the workers we need to fuel our economy, we need to change school, because the workers we need have changed as well.
The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers.
No longer.
Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.
NOTE: I highly recommend studying all three of these resources in great depth. Of course, there are countless related resources, as well. ANd there are more pieces to the “why,” such as brain research, technology advancements, world conditions, etc. But if a faculty would commit to studying these three resources as a think tank of sorts, I believe that a group of committed thinkers and doers could reveal and experiment with many of the “whats” and “hows” to make this transformation in education.
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Works Cited:
Godin, Seth. “Stop Stealing Dreams: (what is school for?).” http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/StopStealingDreamsSCREEN.pdf.
Witt, Robert and Jean Orvis. “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future.” National Association of Independent Schools. 2010. http://www.nais.org/files/PDFs/NAISCOASchools.pdf.
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[“A piece of ‘why,'” A piece of ‘what,'” and A piece of ‘how'” are strands of a series on why school needs to change, what about school needs to change, and how schools might navigate the change.]
How are we doing on this list of “skills and values that will be necessary for students to succeed and prosper in these turbulent and ever-changing times?” (from Pat Bassett’s conflation of six resources as cited in “An Education President for the 21st Century,” Patrick F. Bassett, Independent School, Fall, 2008)
character (self-discipline, empathy, integrity, resilience, and courage);
creativity and entrepreneurial spirit;
real-world problem-solving (filtering, analysis, and synthesis);
How do you think schools are doing on this list? What are the exemplar schools that provide great models for ways to help such development happen? What are some exemplar models from other industries and organizations?
This morning, I discovered Kelli Anderson. She is brilliant, and I will be thinking for days on end as a result of watching her TEDx talk. Her designs leverage pathways between the expected and unexpected. [This makes me think of water and butter again.] In addition to being incredibly creative in their own rights, Kelli’s design philosophies seem to encourage re-examining the familiar and the everyday across many domains. Her advice and inspiration could certainly be applied to what we have come to expect from “school.” What if we expected more? What if we tweaked and re-designed to build something even more creative and purposeful for the next decade? What if we harnessed “disruptive wonder for a change?”
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