Are We Preparing Graduates for the Past or the Future?

“Are we preparing students for the past or the future? A truly powerful question that forces everyone involved in education (and the business sector, for that matter) to rethink the essential skills needed for success outside of the classroom in a job market where most students are preparing for a job that probably does not exist yet. The answer to the question is ‘no’! Despite the valiant efforts of teachers and administrators, the students are not prepared for a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future. Carol Carter at the Huffington Post shares her views on education and its need for change. She also shares wonderful resources to further study the needs of students now and in the future. ”

via Huffington Post

Two weeks ago, I spoke at the International Habits of Mind Conference in Malaysia alongside college and K-12 faculty from Southeast Asia and countries like Iran, New Zealand, and Australia. Outside of the conference, a question came up among some of the speakers:

Are we preparing students for the past or the future?

This question leads to even more questions: If education paradigms don’t shift to meet tomorrow’s needs, will high school and college graduates have the skills to find or create employment opportunities? Do schools and faculty have a responsibility to realize and adapt their lessons to our new economy’s needs and demands? If students aren’t in a learning environment where their gifts and talents can flourish, will they be able to participate in the rapidly changing global economy?

To understand how the working world has changed over the last few decades, let’s look at a typical work culture of the past:

• Orderly, predictable
• Single-skilled employees
• Hierarchical
• Big company based
• Individual-minded
• Corporate
• Local/national
• Hired for life

Now, compare that to aspects of the new work culture:

• Uncertain
• Multi-skilled employees
• Equal and flat structures
• Small business and start-up driven
• Collaborative
• “Work and lifestyle entrepreneur”
• Global
• Discrete jobs and tasks “for hire”

When comparing these two lists, I was reminded of a TED Talk by Dr. Randy Borum. He explained the changing demands we have for employees with the analogy of the hedgehog and the fox. Hedgehogs are anchored in their ways and will resize new ideas to fit their determined and singular way of thinking. In school and the working world, a hedgehog is someone who is knowledge focused, whereas a fox is someone who is learning focused. Borum further distinguishes how these two animals think using the following characteristics:

Hedgehog

• Has one organizing theory
• Deeply knowledgeable
• Self-confident
• Determined

Fox

• Can see through many lenses
• Broadly focused
• Self-critical
• Adaptive

We cannot be certain which specific skills the future will demand, but we can be certain that the ever-changing world will require people to navigate uncertain territory, often without a compass. This is why, Borum argues, the fox is more apt to succeed in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) future.

I agree with Borum to a point. Big business can’t rely on the same business method that grew success in the past. Large companies will have to value entrepreneurial thinkers and give employees the license to be “nimble and agile”–realizing opportunity in a timeframe that small companies can make happen — within the structure of a larger company. This will happen through partnerships, inter-company business incubators, and other novel approaches to foster ideas that promote change and growth.

Schools and colleges also need to add value to a student’s skill set by producing graduates who are agile thinkers. Today, the flipped classroom provides opportunities for students to prepare outside of class while using class time to collaborate, connect, and share their ideas with their peers as the teacher plays the role of coach. In the future, we’ll likely move beyond this model to real-life learning labs where students learn through experience; actively participate with content; match their learning with their interests, talents and abilities; and discover career paths that align with their strengths.

Dr. Peter Capelli, Director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School and Professor of Education, questions the future of the hedgehog mode of thinking in his recent article, ”Focusing Too Narrowly in College Could Backfire.” Capelli says that while some students choose career paths based on economic predictions, we simply cannot predict the future. Capelli believes that choosing the wrong career path can be worse than choosing no career path. A student who gets a degree in an emerging technology that pays well today, may find herself out of work in the future when her position is replaced by the next new wave. In theory, a communications major is more nimble – like a fox – with his transferable thinking skills and has potential to be more adaptive across the industries.

Where I differ in opinion from both Borum and Capelli is that the fox and the hedgehog analogy cannot be either/or. Instead, it is both/and. You want a brain surgeon who is a hedgehog, but you also want your brain surgeon to be adaptive, communicating options as a medical partner as well as expert. Or take the student pursuing a technology degree. She can both have a successful technical career and be nimble in adapting to new technology standards in her field. We need students who possess core knowledge in math, writing, and reading skills. But employers say they also need new hires with critical thinking, interpersonal, and problem solving skills. To produce graduates who are both knowledge and learning focused, we need faculty to teach core academic skills in the context of their students’ personal and professional worlds. Without these practical connections, we will continue to produce ill-prepared graduates.

If we can foster more students and graduates who develop ingenuous ideas and are undaunted by what they don’t know, support them with mentors to coach and challenge them, and encourage within them a bold vision backed with adaptive and strategic thinking, soft and hard skills, then we will have the players who can create a thriving, dynamic economy. When students and graduates with these qualities encounter setbacks, they will have the inner faith and wherewithal to regroup and forge a new path. If they can cultivate the “dispositions of success,” a phrase from Art Costa and Bena Kallick’s new book, then they will be ready for anything in the professional world regardless of their SAT score, where they went to college, or what their first job was out of college. If we can make these shifts, we can strongly prepare students for anything they might face in a VUCA future.

In my next blog, I’ll share how we can transform our schools to reflect this both/and thinking. I invite you to answer in the comments, are we preparing our graduates for the past or the future in traditional K-12 and college classrooms

Dan Pink: How Teachers Can Sell Love of Learning to Students

In his new book To Sell is Human, author Daniel Pink reports that education is one of the fastest growing job categories in the country. And with this growth comes the opportunity to change the way educators envision their roles and their classrooms. Guided by findings in educational research and neuroscience, the emphasis on cognitive skills like computation and memorization is evolving to include less tangible, non-cognitive skills, like collaboration and improvisation.

Jobs in education, Pink said in a recent interview, are all about moving other people, changing their behavior, like getting kids to pay attention in class; getting teens to understand they need to look at their future and to therefore study harder. At the center of all this persuasion is selling: educators are sellers of ideas.

Whether a teacher is presenting to her board or pitching a crowd of 12-year-olds on why Shakespeare was a genius, it’s all the art of persuasion. Though his new book has only been out a couple of weeks, Pink said he’s already received many messages from teachers who agree that, “Yes, I sell. I sell students on poetry, on calculus, on biology.”

In fact, the business world has a lot to learn from educators: what motivates people, how to inspire people to perform well. But educators can also take a lesson from the commercial world: namely, teaching the complicated skill of finding problems. In a recent study, Pink said school superintendents rated problem-solving as the top capability they wanted to instill. Corporate executives, however, rated problem-solving as seventh on their list of attributes in employees, but rated problem identification as the single most important skill. That is, the ability to suss out issues and challenges that aren’t necessarily obvious. And this is where students could benefit from educators — learning the process of identifying a problem.

“Standardized testing: totally easy, totally cheap, and scales. Convenient for politicians and taxpayers.”

“The premium has moved from problem solving to problem finding as a skill,” Pink said. “Right now, especially in the commercial world, if I know exactly what my problem is, I can find the solution to my own problem. I don’t need someone to help me. Where I need help is when I don’tknow what my problem is or when I’m wrong about what my problem is. Problem solving is an analytical, deductive kind of skill. The phrase ‘problem finding’ comes out of research on artists. It’s more of a conceptual kind of skill.”

So how do educators help kids become problem-finders when they don’t know what the problem is or where the next one might be coming from? “A lot of people hate this word but I think we have to take it seriously, which is relevance,” Pink said. “There’s something to be said for connecting particular lessons to something in the real world.”

For instance, application of math principles, which has real relevance in the real world. “Even with my own kids, to some extent I see math has become an abstract code designed to get a right answer rather than seeing that math explains why this building is standing up, or why the traffic is going slow right now, or why the 49ers are kicking a field goal rather than going for first down.”

DANGERS OF STANDARDIZATION

One of the big topics Pink tackles in his current book is the idea of moving from transactions to transcendence — to making something personal. That’s the best way to “sell” students on what they’re learning, Pink maintains. This has been a recurring theme in education: connecting what’s taught in classrooms to students’ personal lives. But, as evidenced by current school dynamics, that’s not the way the tide is moving.

“Most of our education is heavily, heavily, heavily standardized,” Pink said. “So, 11-year-olds are all together in one room. No 10-year-olds, and certainly no 13-year-olds. And [assuming that] all of those 11-year-olds are the same, we’re going to put them all together in a 35-kid classroom. Every educator knows that doesn’t work well. Every educator knows about differentiated instruction. The idea that you treat everybody the same way is foolish, and yet the headwinds in education are very much toward routines, right answer, standardization.”

Why is it moving this way? One of the reasons, Pink said, is the “appalling” absence of leadership on this issue. “One of the things that I see as an outsider is that so much of education policy seems designed for the convenience of adults rather than the education of children,” he said. “Start time is a perfect example. Why do we do that? It’s more convenient for the teachers. Why do we have standardized testing? Because it’s unbelievably cheap. If you want to give real evaluations to kids, they have to be personalized, tailored to the kids, at the unit of one. Standardized testing: totally easy, totally cheap, and scales. Convenient for politicians and taxpayers.”

With big changes coming in the form of Common Core State Standards, some fear the idea of standardized “one-size-fits-all” will become even more deeply embedded in education policy. While mastering a core set of literacies makes sense if it can turn students into effective citizens by becoming numerate and literate, Pink said the manner in which Common Core is implemented will determine its value. If Common Core is the only curriculum presented to students, then it runs into the danger of becoming “all about cramming facts.” Knowing for a test that the 5th Amendment is about self-incrimination does not necessarily result in good citizenship.

The same principle applies to the big trend in games and learning, which sometimes results simply in rewards for rote knowledge and memorization. Games have the potential to make math more relevant or engaging, Pink said, but if they lead to standardized thinking about getting to the one right answer, that can be problematic. It’s the carrot and stick thinking vestigial of a bygone era. If the only aim of a game is for points and badges, the game has little benefit for the player. For a game to be compelling and a good source of learning, it should be capable of providing rapid, robust, regular, and meaningful feedback. Social gaming, such as Minecraft, is one instantiation of this kind of salient feedback, Pink said.

The standardized model of education is in dire need of an upgrade, producing students with skills that won’t serve them well outside the boundaries of school. Students who are driven by external rewards (grades, trophies), will be fare worse than those who are self-directed, motivated by freedom, challenge, and purpose, Pink wrote in his earlier bookDrive.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “We have a lot of learned behavior of compliance, and hunger for external rewards and no real engagement. We have this belief that people perform better if we hit them with this endless arsenal of carrots and sticks: If-then motivators. To get to that engagement, people have to unlearn these deeply rooted habits. I defy you to find a two year old who is not engaged. That’s how we are out of the box.”

WHAT DRIVES US

As a student, Pink said he did what everyone else did — he wrote a paper for a class, wrote it neatly, on time, and for a grade. But when he started writing for the school newspaper, things shifted in his mind. He realized it would reach his peers, and suddenly he was motivated to improve his writing. The same goes for any student, he said. “Those clues are right in front of us,” says Pink.

That’s what Big Pictures Schools, a network of schools across the country, on which Pink serves as board member, are attempting to do. New students at these schools are asked questions about  their interests. They could be interested in martial arts, ballet, baseball. Then teachers take the information, and build a curriculum around those particular interests.

Another way of personalizing learning, among many others, are DIY report cards. Even a fifth-grader has the wherewithal to say, “This is what I want to learn; this is what I want to accomplish; this is what I want to get better at.” Then he can look for ways to get feedback on his performance, so he can see that he’s making progress and see that he’s getting better at something.

“An educator in upstate New York did these DIY report cards, and they changed the way he taught,” Pink said. “When students assessed themselves, they held themselves to a higher standard. This changed the way he looked at the kids.”

Explore: Dan Pink

Teaching Computers Common Sense

“Meet NEIL, an acronym for Never Ending Image Learning. NEIL’s advanced technology is the focus of an AI research project at Carnegie Melon that has it searching and comparing a wide database of images. The purpose? To see if NEIL can develop a little common sense! This Stuff article from Kevin Begos has more.”

via Stuff.co.nz

Researchers are trying to plant a digital seed for artificial intelligence by letting a massive computer system browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean.

The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for Never Ending Image Learning. In mid-July, it began searching the internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other. The goal is to recreate what we call common sense – the ability to learn things without being specifically taught.

It’s a new approach in the quest to solve computing’s Holy Grail: getting a machine to think on its own using a form of common sense. The project is being funded by Google and the United States Department of Defense’s Office of Naval Research.

“Any intelligent being needs to have common sense to make decisions,” said Abhinav Gupta, a professor in the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.

NEIL uses advances in computer vision to analyse and identify the shapes and colours in pictures, but it is also slowly discovering connections between objects on its own. For example, the computers have figured out that zebras tend to be found in savannahs and that tigers look somewhat like zebras.

In just over four months, the network of 200 processors has identified 1500 objects and 1200 scenes and has connected the dots to make 2500 associations.

Some of NEIL’s computer-generated associations are wrong, such as “rhino can be a kind of antelope,” while some are odd, such as “actor can be found in jail cell” or “news anchor can look similar to Barack Obama.”

NEIL uses advances in computer vision to analyse and identify the shapes and colours in pictures, but it is also slowly discovering connections between objects on its own.

But Gupta said having a computer make its own associations is an entirely different type of challenge than programing a supercomputer to do one thing very well, or fast. For example, in 1985, Carnegie Mellon researchers programed a computer to play chess; 12 years later, a computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match.

Catherine Havasi, an artificial intelligence expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said humans constantly make decisions using “this huge body of unspoken assumptions,” while computers don’t. She said humans can also quickly respond to some questions that would take a computer longer to figure out.

“Could a giraffe fit in your car?” she asked. “We’d have an answer, even though we haven’t thought about it” in the sense of calculating the giraffe’s body mass.

Robert Sloan, an expert on artificial intelligence and head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, said the NEIL approach could yield interesting results because just using language to teach a computer “has all sorts of problems unto itself.”

“What I would be especially impressed by is if they can consistently say ‘zebra, zebra, zebra’ if they see the animal in different locations,” Sloan said of the computers.

Gupta is pleased with the initial progress. In the future, NEIL will analyse vast numbers of YouTube videos to look for connections between objects.

“When we started the project, we would not sure it would work,” he said. “This is just the start.”

Neither Mountain View, California-based Google nor the Office of Naval Research responded to questions about why they’re funding NEIL, but there are some hints. The Naval Research website notes that “today’s battlespace environment is much more complex than in the past” and that “the rate at which data is arriving into the decision-making system is growing, while the number of humans available to convert the data to actionable intelligence is decreasing.”

In other words, computers may make some of the decisions in future wars. The Navy’s website notes: “In many operational scenarios, the human presence is not an option.”

NEIL’s motto is “I Crawl, I See, I Learn,” and the researchers hope to keep NEIL running forever. That means the computer might get a lot smarter.

Or it might not.

10 Must-Watch Videos for Flipped Learning

“Meris Stansbury has compiled an offering of 10 great videos for fostering flipped learning, in the following eSchool News article. Is Pluto a real planet? How vast and uncharted is the world inside a drop of water? What do we really know about Vatican City? What if the Death Star actually existed? These burning questions and more are answered in the videos below.”

via eSchool News

From STEM videos to history lessons, YouTube can be a one-stop shop for flipped learning

If must-implement educational trends were narrowed down to a small group, flipped learning would be among the top contenders. But flipped learning doesn’t have to consist of videos of a hand on a whiteboard, and it doesn’t have to discuss how to multiply fractions in monotone—after all, there’s a whole YouTube world out there.

Part of the fun of flipped learning is introducing brief questions on relevant curriculum topics that students can discuss or use to create projects during class. For instance, based on historical definitions, should Pluto be a planet? If some products in the U.S. are identified through numbers, could replication of those numbers be made illegal? In other words, could a number itself be illegal?

It’s these types of short videos, based in research and made for education (with interesting animations and vivid explanations), that can be a solid foundation for inquiry-based learning. They also can provide real-world examples of what’s being taught in schools.

Do you have a favorite video you show your students? Do you think flipped learning can help in inquiry-based or project-based learning? Let us know in the comment section below.

1. Life in a drop of water (Science): A drop of pond water viewed through a microscope; filmed and edited with a smart phone. Ask students to try and identify what they’re seeing in the drop.

2. What if the Death Star was real? (STEM): Using dimensions and design specs from the Star Wars website, imagine how the Death Star might impact Earth. A bit of fun with Professor Mike Merrifield from the University of Nottingham.

3. Illegal numbers (Civics/Math): Could some numbers be made illegal in the U.S.? This video features Dr. James Grime:https://twitter.com/jamesgrime

4. What if you were born in space? (Biology/Health): Delve into how gravity and other natural forces can affect the body once in space. Provides a look at current science research.

5. CrashCourse U.S. History Part 1 (History/World Culture): A very animated historian discusses the Native Americans who lived in what is now the U.S. prior to European contact. John Green also discusses early Spanish explorers, settlements, and what happened when they didn’t get along with the indigenous people. The story of their rocky relations has been called the Black Legend.

6. Vatican City explained (History/World Culture): Using drawings and historical photos, this historian simplifies world issues in a fun way, allowing for open discussion.

7. Super expensive metals (Science): Inside a Noble Metals factory, where even the dust on your shoes is too valuable to ignore! Make the Periodic Table of Elements come to life.

8. Grammaropolis noun song (English/Language Arts): Think of this as an updated Schoolhouse Rock.

9. Negative numbers introduction (Math): Khan Academy incorporates real world examples into a very basic math concept explanation.

10. Is Pluto a planet? (History/Science): Learn about how Pluto came to be called a planet based on historical definitions and scientific inventions, to its eventual fall from the planet category.

Facebook, Twitter, YoutTube Videos by Jeff Piontek

Check this out “conversation” between Diane Ravitch (http://www.dianeravitch.com/) and USDOE Press Secretary….AWESOME

Diane thanks for keeping up the fight for our children and our future.

Superintendent has the RIGHT IDEA!!!

Photo credit: Illustration by Christopher Serra |

McGill: Rating won’t help teachers or kids

The State Education Department has mandated a new evaluation scheme for New York‘s teachers. In what Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo describes as a “groundbreaking” move, everyone now will be rated on a 100-point scale that relies heavily on classroom observations and students’ test scores.

What could be wrong with that?

Pretend you want to evaluate 150 people in your organization. You have three objectives. Assure a high level of effectiveness. Constantly improve everyone’s performance. Screen out anyone whose efforts aren’t acceptable.

You want to base your evaluation plan on several principles. You know that performance improves when people collaborate and when they get good coaching. Good coaches take information from multiple sources and use it to give considered feedback. Their charges get ample opportunity to practice under supervision. Evaluators also need standards and strong evidence to hold employees accountable.

Most of the people in your organization want to succeed. A few are truly exceptional. A larger number have mixed strengths and weaknesses. A smaller group is less competent. Everyone works independently much of the time. You don’t have the resources — enough supervisors or time, for example — to give everyone the continuous, thorough feedback needed to change complex behavior intentionally. So you focus your energies.

Some of your people are relatively new. They need more support and mentoring. You get several supervisors to collaborate in observing these newcomers and in working to bring them along. You’re less interested in comparing them than in whether each is becoming fully proficient — and then getting even better .

Some people are more expert. You check in on them less often to be sure they’re meeting core standards, cooperatively plan for their development, and offer them opportunities to hone their skills and absorb emerging knowledge about their field. Again, you’re less interested in how they might rank and more in their staying vibrant and continuing to grow.

You know from your periodic checks and from informal feedback that some folks aren’t measuring up. Supervisors either collaborate to help them upgrade their performance or develop extensive evidence for their dismissal.

That’s effective evaluation in a rational world. Not in the world of Albany. Albany wants to rank people relative to one another.

But why?

If the point is to help them improve, they need insightful advice and good coaching, not numerical rankings. If it’s to screen out less competent teachers, the only relevant yardstick is whether performance is up to standard. Who cares whether Ms. Jones is number 34, 35 or 36 out of 150?

The state’s rationale is that the metrics will drive people to compete for better scores. But what’s the point when the numbers lack meaning? Everyone knows that standardized tests aren’t good measures of who’s a good teacher, for example. Few, if any, researchers believe they can be used to make fine distinctions among practitioners, as the state plan tries to do.

Regardless, quantification is the name of today’s game. Student test results or classroom observations determine at least 71 points of a teacher’s score. The local schools control the remaining 29 points, but they have to be divided up in some set way: so many for planning, so many for taking part in professional activities, and so on.

This numbers game already drives teachers to spend increasing time prepping their kids for exams at the expense of other learning, and to play the system so they can amass points strategically. It’ll discourage collaboration, as well. As one veteran recently said, “Why should I do anything that could help someone else get a higher score than I do?”

Meanwhile, no rigid scoring formula will anticipate all possible situations. Let’s say Ms. Smith’s special needs kids are constantly the brunt of her dark sarcasms when nobody’s watching. That’s unacceptable. Whatever her strengths, credible student and parent feedback should lead supervisors to judge her performance inadequate. In Albany‘s 100-point world, however, she may well pile up enough points to be “proficient.” All she has to do is deliver a coherent lesson in front of an observer, produce decent test scores and strategically get a few more points here and there.

In short, the supposed strengths of this one-size-fits-all approach are really weaknesses. The “objective” numbers don’t judge people accurately. One state-wide evaluation framework doesn’t make sense for every school, and this one restricts the human judgment that’s essential to effective evaluation.

This is teacher appreciation week. In place of well-meaning sentiment, New York State should appreciate its teachers meaningfully. Rather than impose its uniform evaluation template on everyone, it should enable districts to develop their own plans and their capacity to evaluate effectively. A real service to teachers would be to help them understand whether teaching is the right career for them and, if it is, how to do an even better job of developing the determination, initiative, and thinking skills standardized tests can’t measure.

Michael McGill, superintendent of the Scarsdale Public Schools, is participating in a panel about the misperceptions and realities of the state’s teacher evaluation system on Saturday, May 12, at Bank Street College in Manhattan.

The daily scoop is out!!!

Hawaii Recession Infographic

Presentation at Alaska Society of Technology Education–Using Web 2.0 Tools to Meet the Needs of the 21st Century Learner

Presentation Details:
Title: Venturing into the Clouds: Using Web 2.0 Tools to Meet the Needs of the 21st Century Learner
Time: 8:30 AM AST
Duration: 00:58:53
Description: The Future of Cloud Computing: Innovation, Service, Sustainability, Performance and how it Affects Educational Outcomes for our Students. Economic uncertainty and competetive pressures are fundamentally raising performance demands n all aspects of education. From students and teachers to parents and administrators, the pressure to succeed has never been greater.

Success hinges on developing talent to focus on innovation and growth n the global economy. Businesses are now basing their trust and focus on cloud technologies because they offer freedom, reduced cost, and sustainability, whereas education has not. This keynote intends to show advantages of simplification and standardization to support utilizing the cloud to its fullest potential in an educational setting.