One Good Question

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11/29/16 11/29/16

One Good Question with Susan Patrick: What Students (and Schools) can do if we Stop Ranking Them.

This is the first of two interviews with Susan Patrick for the series “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

From a student-centered perspective, what are the investments being made in the learning environments? In a rapidly changing world, we need to examine the foundations of our education both for the purpose of education and its results. Are we preparing every student for the world they are entering, or are we investing in a factory model of education designed as an assembly line? The old model of education is under question and is being challenged by educators around the world with questions of appropriateness and whether it is fit for the purpose of preparing all students for success in today’s world. The investments made in today’s education system are often reinforcing the basic traditional structures to grade and sort students, with limited exposure to one class at a time, one subject at a time, one textbook at a time, with one teacher at a time — with inevitable outcomes of ranking students. The premise of our society’s investments in an education system that is based on sorting kids remains for the most part unchallenged – rather than examining how funding could follow the student toward ensuring equity and supports to ensure every child reaches mastery of the same high standards and develops competencies for future success. The urgency of school funding debates need to consider what designs are better suited to ensure each and every student has access to the best educational opportunities, and making a case for investments in a transformed system, rather than tinkering with a system that sorts and ranks kids – designed for a world that no longer exists.

We have 13,515 school districts in the US making investments in education approaches and environments. The traditional system is based on Carnegie units and seat time, providing varying levels of learning on an A-F grading system, and whether the students have gaps or not, the clock marches on. Are these investments that we’ve been making for past 10-20 years designed to innovate and ensure student success? Are we making investments for each student to be able to have access to innovative models for equity? The investments in modernized education includes the learning spaces, but more importantly, it’s the pedagogical experience for what’s happening in learning.

We have been historically funding a system based on minimal exposure to subjects, with one way of approaching learning and it is easy to manage through a bell schedule and calendar dictating how much learning might happen. The inverse would be to realize, in a given hour of time, there might be variable amounts of learning – thus, we need to design for supporting the maximum learning in each hour – not the minimal. How do we design for how kids learn best? We need to know their readiness level, existing competencies, and how to meet them where they are. If we ask about how investments reveal what we believe about education, investing in a system that ranks and sorts kids means that we are okay with this approach. I’d argue that we should invest on identifying what every student needs and ensuring the investment reflects an approach that maximizes every student’s potential and future success. Right now, we’re not investing on understanding where every student is when they enter school. What is their academic readiness level? What are their social, emotional, needs? How do we address the whole child and their learning experiences? Today, we’re having an entire conversation in the United States about investing in summative testing as an autopsy at the end of the year instead of addressing the very needs of the students from day one.

We talk about college and career readiness as part of an important goal in our K-12 education system. Our system is designed to rank and sort kids (GPA and a class rank) to determine their college access. Is that not telling us that the system is built on an institutional fixed mindset? If we had an institutional growth mindset, we would hold the bar high for all students to learn to reach the same high outcomes. What does it take to get all students to the 4.0 GPA? This end goal would be a worthy investment for our future and our society’s future.

“How do we innovate our system for all students to be successful?”

During my Eisenhower Fellowship in New Zealand, when I walked into every school, I could see that they were focused on meeting students where they are. When I looked around the classroom, I could see the articulation of the curriculum frameworks on the importance of 21st century skills, a broader definition of student success, visibility of the language of learning about rhetoric, context, thinking critically and solving complex problems. The wall posters actually had reminders to teachers: creativity and entrepreneurial thinking, communicating and collaborating, making sense through the use of knowledge, research and synthesis, understanding the information and opportunities to identify new ways of doing things. Are we asking bigger questions on what we want our students to know and be able to do? The language of learning in modern classrooms with redesigned curriculum asks the “big questions” about core concepts of learning and it is all around you—whether in primary school or in secondary school – and the language of learning is targeted at the appropriate level. Students from a young age are learning from a metacognitive perspective: What are the ways I am thinking about this? Am I developing skills for a changing world? How is this relevant to how I might participate and contribute to a fair and just society? They ask themselves: Am I analyzing? Am I learning how to function and self-manage? Am I learning new ways of working, new ways of thinking and skills that I will need to make sense of the world?

In some New Zealand schools, they have multi-grade classrooms and the students have clearly identified learning objectives posted across multiple levels. The teachers are constantly working with every student to identify their learning goals, assess their performance on evidence of their mastery, and co-design the next steps as students move on to the next learning objective once they’ve demonstrated that mastery to the level of proficiency. Each student can see what they need extra help in and can go to other students to get help. Every school and classroom was referring back to questions about how teachers can best meet students’ needs, how to personalize instruction, how they better identify students needs, which research-based practices are most effective, and how they can improve what’s working and not working. It was a culture of inquiry in a personalized learning environment.

David Hood, former head of NZQA, has described the traditional model of K-12 as the paradigm of one: One teacher, teaching one subject, to one class, at one time, for one hour. In New Zealand in 2007, they created a different curriculum that asked what each student needed to learn and do with a broader definition of student success. It gives a lot of flexibility to teachers and students in how they reach those goals and hold all students to the same high standards. The five key competencies are: Thinking; Using language, symbols, and texts; Managing self; Relating to others; Participating and contributing. Then Secretary for Education Sewell wrote, “The New Zealand Curriculum is a clear statement of what we deem important in education. It takes as its starting point a vision of our young people as lifelong learners who are confident and creative, connected, and actively involved. It includes a clear set of principles on which to base curriculum decision making. It sets out values that are to be encouraged, modeled, and explored. It defines five key competencies that are critical to sustained learning and effective participation in society and that underline the emphasis on lifelong learning.”We know through learning sciences that all students can learn, all students can develop a growth mindset. We actually can create learning environments that will dramatically improve outcomes and do so in a way that empowers students’ own passions and interests. The education system in New Zealand includes many schools that have been designed around personalized learning and are working intently on closing the achievement gap and raising the bar for all students. The goal is that all students are not only meeting literacy and numeracy skills, but ultimately, when they graduate, they’ve built a whole set of knowledge, skills, competencies, and dispositions that will lead to them being contributive in society and help contribute to the free and open society. New Zealanders’ cultural values are deeply reflected in their education work. Maybe that’s easier to do when each school is autonomous and school can set their values clearly.

“New Zealand schools have more local control than the States, don’t they?”

Absolutely! Some education systems are top down, others are bottom up in terms of their governance and control. In New Zealand, each school is autonomous and self-managed with their own principal and each has its own elected board of trustees from the community. They set values, goals and set the accountability framework for results and metrics. How community values tie into local control is interesting. New Zealand is really a case study in empowerment of local schools and local families setting their own accountability goals. The opening presentation, of the first school that I visited, was about their annual goal to reach 1.5 years of growth for each student. That goal was set by the community. Everyone was on the same page, clear and transparent about that target and what they needed to do. All families have choices for the school they attend and they choose to go the school. It’s a nice balance in New Zealand where the top-down is having the Ministry of Education work across all schools to design a curriculum framework that will ensure a broad definition of student success and ensuring the bar is the same high bar for all students. The top down approach is simply examining the research on a world-class education to set that bar high to make sure the curriculum is right, but the empowerment is bottom-up — creating capacity for educators and practitioners to design learning activities around the research on how students learn best.I also observed how local control impacts their governance. In the US, our unit of local elections is with the local district’s school board. Anyone can run and anyone with political aspirations can be elected to the local school board (if they win the vote) as part of further political aspirations. In New Zealand, you’re only eligible to run for Board of Trustees of a school if you’re nominated by a teacher or parent in that school community. It is an interesting approach to building community engagement and capacity.

“In the discourse about preparing youth for jobs that don't yet exist, educators fall into two camps: skills-focused (STEM, design thinking, makers, etc.) and people-focused (critical thinking, global sensitivity, socio-emotional learning). To what extent are we creating a false dichotomy?”

I think it’s a false dichotomy. Learning is an incredibly humanistic pursuit. We’re talking about helping each and every child work to their full potential which is tied to relationships, understanding student interest, student goals and how to to achieve it.In the world that we live in today, you can access a lot of content—it’s all available to you. But what’s more important is having a baseline knowledge on how content fits together and how you can approach critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving and questioning the ideas and perspectives presented to you. That’s really important in terms of being relational and contextual in the idea of people focused – how do we challenge or explore ideas effectively? Cultural responsiveness, global sensitivity, and social-emotional learning (SEL) are becoming more important than ever. Having those deep people-focused skills doesn’t mean that you can’t also be approaching STEM or creative design or “makers” together.

Back to New Zealand, I visited schools with more interdisciplinary approaches to learning. Students are able to identify big conceptual projects, design learning experiences that respond to community or students’ needs, and then map which standards and subjects they’ll be addressing in these projects.For example, in one school, I walked over to the closest student, a 15-year-old boy, and asked him about his project. He said he was studying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and he explained his full plan to me: he would first conduct a literature review on how AI has evolved over the past 30 years; then, we wanted to explore what trends were likely to occur in the next five years in AI; and, finally he wanted to finish the project with an analysis of the societal and ethical implications of AI in the future. He explained how he would be able to be evaluated across many of the key competencies and develop mastery of standards — he shared that he is mapping his project to the attainment of science standards, some math standards, some English/text/communication standards, and social studies standards for the ethical implications. The variety of ways he was able to build an understanding of the world, but at the same time earn attainment of competencies and credits for his qualifications toward a degree. That’s a great example of how an education system can be both skills-focused and people-focused with interdisciplinary approaches using multiple perspectives contributing to deeper learning – that is highly personalized for each student.

Even in their elementary schools, I witnessed New Zealand’s teachers asking students to take on big questions and build the capacity for learning in their own classrooms. This means really giving students agency and empowerment with the language around learning through analysis, perspective, and ethics. It was really amazing how young students were very focused on knowledge and the range of skills that they were developing. As David Hood noted, “Literacy and numeracy do include the ability to use language, symbols and texts; but these are only tools – it is the ability to use these interactively, in a connected way in context, that the OECD identifies as most important, as it does in being able to sue both knowledge and information, and technology, in interactive ways.” Teachers were trying to not only give students the language, tools, and strategies to address academic issues, but the strategies that would help them solve more complex problems and ultimately be successful in college, career, societies and their communities.

Susan’s One Good Question: I’m a positive person with a positive outlook, but the future of our country has never been more at stake. We have some hard decisions to make right now. We have successfully under-educated our population in such a significant way that we really need to address this gap. We’re investing a lot of dollars in education but is it based on the research for how students learn best? Are we investing toward a more open and just democratic society in a global context where issues will become more messy, more challenging than ever? Will we be investing in the capabilities of thinking critically, creatively and problem-solving with the deep cultural responsiveness we will need to navigate an increasingly changing world?

Susan Patrick is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL). iNACOL is a nonprofit providing policy advocacy, publishing research, developing quality standards, and driving the transformation to personalized, competency-based, blended and online learning forward.She is the former Director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education and wrote the National Educational Technology Plan in 2005 for Congress. She served as legislative liaison for Governor Hull in Arizona, ran a distance learning campus as a Site Director for Old Dominion University’s TELETECHNET program, and served as legislative staff on Capitol Hill. Patrick was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2016. In 2014, she was named a Pahara–Aspen Education Fellow. In 2011, she was named to the International Advisory Board for the European Union program for lifelong learning. Patrick holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from Colorado College.

8/23/16 8/23/16

One Good Question with Aylon Samouha: Is There a Silver Bullet for the Future of "School"?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question (outlined in About) and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Thankfully, there is a lot of investment in education, both public and philanthropic dollars. The sheer quantity of investment is a clear signal – we believe that our generation plays a critical role in the future world and deserves deep investment. That siad, where does it go? There are lots of human capital investments that funders are making in all sorts of ways to attract, evaluate, and train educators. These investments are animated by a critical need in creating great learning environments ; namely, kids need caring adults around them who are effective at teaching, coaching, motivating, etc.On the other hand, human capital funding by itself may unintentionally reinforce the idea that the only or best way for kids to learn is through teacher-centric models where students have little agency over their own learning. With School in the Cloud, Sugata Mitra challenges the role of educators in the learning process. Basically, he was a web developer who said « What would happen if I just put a computer in the wall here? In a low-income neighborhood in India. Kids started using it and they had never touched a computer before. They looked up stuff and started learning things. Then he said, let me do it somewhere where there aren’t a bunch of techies around. And this time he gave the users a question to figure out. When he asked for their feedback, they said We have to learn English in order to use it. And they actually did learn English to figure out how to keep accessing the tool!

This is an extreme but very instructive example that, with the right tools and motivations, students will self-direct their own learning. So we have to ask ourselves, is it enough to invest in human capital when the underlying traditional model, by its design, under-leverages the innate motivation of students to self-direct their learning ? And what might that say about how we conceive of their place in the world ?Another important and laudable category of investments go towards scaling good schools. This comes from a very good place and should continue – if we’re seeing a good learning environment in one place we should try to replicate that in more communities especially where educational opportunities are poor. That said, an unintended consequences of scale investments is that half-baked things grow before they’re really proven and successful operators sometimes grow faster than the quality can keep up.

Scaling education models is an efficiency play and lots of students and families have had significantly better education choices and experiences as a result of these investments. Counting and expanding quality seats is critical work. That said, what unintended narratives might animate these investments? To what extent are we saying that we need quality seats so that our students can be competitive in the global marketplace? Instead, how might we expand quality seats while reinforcing a narrative that an American student from New Orleans should be working with her brothers and sisters in China to make the world a better place and not merely trying to outcompete them? And when we scale into new communities quickly, to what extent are we going fast alone vs. going further together? This is all a tricky balancing act and I’m heartened to see so many in this work asking these questions more often and more publicly.

“Education leaders around the world are asking themselves « What’s next ? » Our industrial model of education is no longer preparing youth for today’s careers or knowledge economy. Is there a single answer, silver bullet that will emerge in the next iteration of school?”

I definitely don’t think there is a silver bullet in terms of one type of school or kind of pedagogy. But there are some very provocative ideas and shifts that I think will help us massively improve learning across the world. Right now, I’m enthralled by Todd Rose’s work and The End of Average. I won’t do his work justice but a core premise is that « any system that is trying to fit the individual is actually doomed to fail. Waking up from what he calls the « myth of average » seems critical to redesigning the traditional model which essentially holds the average student as a foundational principle. And just like there is no average student there are likewise no average communities. Taken together, we need to build models that respect and leverage the uniqueness of each student ; and, we need to scale those models and ideas in ways that communities can adopt and adapt into to fit their unique values, assets, etc. Generic, cookie-cutter replication may work for enterprises where people have very basic expectations and where the stakes are low (i.e., Starbucks, Target). We don’t want schools or learning experiences to be like that. Communities creating and adapting school models for their context – school models that provide students to adapt and create learning for themselves…maybe that’s a silver bullet?

Relatedly, I’m getting more and more excited about the potential of truly leveraging learning science to advance the way that we construct learning experiences. Research on learning and motivation point to new insights every year -- and we need to systematically use these insights in real daily learning environments! To do this right now, educators – who are already stretched in terms of capacity – would need to wade through endless research papers, discern the usable knowledge and then figure out how to apply that knowledge with students. What would it mean for us to systematically create the bridge between research and application? What if people designing learning experiences could benefit from and contribute to an ever-growing learning agenda for the field ? What if more learning engineers were building and iterating school model components based in the science that educators could readily adapt into their communities? Ok, maybe that’s another silver bullet after-all!

Aylon’s One Good Question: How can we ensure that schools are wildly motivating for all students?

Aylon Samouha is Co-Founder of Transcend Education, a national non-profit committed to building the future’s schools today. Transcend works with school operators across the district, charter, and independent school sectors. They provide and develop world-class R&D capacity that supports visionary education leaders to build and replicate breakthrough learning environments. The co-founders and founding board members published Dissatisfied, Yet Optimistic to put forward their theory of change.Prior to co-founding Transcend, Aylon was an independent designer providing strategy and design services to education organizations, schools, and foundations. Most recently, Aylon has been leading the “Greenfield” school model design for the Achievement First Network, which is being piloted in the 2015-16 school year. He also led the field research for Charter School Growth Fund and the Clay Christensen Institute for the 2014 publication, "Schools and Software: What's Now, What's Next". In 2013, Aylon pioneered the Chicago Breakthrough Schools Fellowship in conjunction with New Schools for Chicago, NGLC, and the Broad Foundation.

3/8/16 3/8/16

When Women Succeed, the World Succeeds. #IWD2016

In honor of International Women's Day/ Journée des Droits des Femmes, a look back at Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka's talk "When women succeed, the world succeeds."

We need to get decision makers to stop seeing women as the problem or charity case. We will not overcome inequality or poverty or sustainable peace if we do not improve the lives of women. There are only 20 women heads of state in the world. if we had more female leaders we would not be in this state. Women are part of creating the world we all want. We have to invest in women. When you leave women out, you compromise the rest of the nation.

What it will take for more governments, institutions, schools, etc. to understand that improving the lives of girls and women will increase opportunities for the entire society?

3/1/16 3/1/16

One Good Question with Vania Masias: How to Disrupt the Victim Mentality when Investing in Youth Agency.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

One of my dreams is that our methodology through arts becomes public policy in the public schools. That’s my dream because every day I see the empowerment that our youth leaders have thanks to dance or arts. I think the government, and people who have never danced, have no idea how powerful this tool is. I just came back from Trujillo, another state in Peru. I went with one of the “kids” who is 21 and has been with Angeles D1 for 5 years. Five years ago, he was in to gangs. He finished his public school, but school gave nothing to him. He was emotionally devastated. He was into drugs, gangs, and jail. Today, he just did a Tedx talk and he’s a leader of more than 200 kids in one of the most difficult communities in our region. He is a teacher and one of the best dancers in our company. He learned to know himself and to start loving himself just as he is.

When you dance you are just you — you are not your name, the daughter of so-and-so, the girl that went to this school. When I dance, I am not in a social level, it’s just me, my soul, myself, my truth. That’s really powerful.If I were to tell people where to invest in education: creativity, culture, arts. I believe, because I dance and I choreograph, that every human being has a jewel. We are so beautiful on the inside and through arts it's a beautiful thing to bring that beauty out. Our education system was focused on the British empire, and that established norms around knowledge. In that system, if you’re not good with math or literature, you’re kind of a pariah. At Angeles D1, our focused education gives empowerment to the kids so teachers can see their potential and bring it out. The arts allows you to bring those other gifts to the forefront.

“The Angeles D1 model has been heavily informed by the youth participants, their needs and vision. Your lessons on youth agency were very organic. How would you recommend that adults planning programs for marginalized youth intentionally incorporate these lessons into their work?”

The first advice I will give is to get rid of guilt. Growing up in a country where you have everything and then you see others who have nothing, that’s difficult. One big mistake I made when I started the program, was that I thought I had to give everything to the youth without asking anything in return. That mentality creates beggars and welfare dependency. Don’t give the toys, teach them how to make the toys so that, afterwards, they can make it and sell it and it’s a development. Otherwise, they will say “Poor me, I’m a victim,” and they will keep begging. You further the stigma that says you are poor, you won’t make it, so I’m solving your life. I had to learn that and it was kind of difficult. I felt guilt all the time and they knew that. It was not healthy.I remember one day when 4 or 5 of the first generation dancers started stealing from the company. That day, everything changed. They weren’t stealing things, they stole the choreography that we made as a group, and they went somewhere else and charged for it. I kicked them out of the group because that didn’t respect D1 values.

Last week, on the way to Trujillo for the Tedx talk, we saw the same kids who stole from us. They were in the exact same place, dancing under the same street light that they were 10 years ago. I just turned and looked at our youth leader and started crying. OMG. There we were, a few blocks from the airport and he’s going to speak to a crowd of 200 professionals about his work yet we saw his peers in the exact same place. We said nothing to each other. It was evident. They made the decision to not grow. They wanted that life. They just wanted to stay there. It’s not wrong. It’s not good. It’s just their decisions.When we want to communicate, we only see our side of things. A question that helped me was “How can I reach them and generate confidence?’ I decided to go through urban culture to reach our youth. I put myself in their place. I tried to see what are they looking at and understand what’s gong on with them. I hadn’t studied psychology, sociology, or anthropology to know what was going on with them. I believed in dance. When they moved, they were communicating something to me. So with that information, I could understand what they were seeing. They put their eyes always down, they would never look at me. That gave me a lot of information and then I designed everything around that. Let’s do clowning and get them to feel ridiculous. We never saw the other, to see and look is different. We’re in such a rush, we never see each other. When that happened, everything changed.

Vania’s One Good Question: One of my lead dancers dreams of becoming mayor of his hometown, Tumbes, in northern Peru. I see D1 as “The Hobbit” for him, a safe place that will support and encourage him. As social organizations, can we develop the leaders of tomorrow to be pure and uncorrupted?

Vania Masias was born in Lima, Peru. She graduated from Universidad del Pacifico and is a professional ballerina. She was the principal ballerina in the municipal ballet for 7 years, with the most important roles in the classical repertory. She then began a modern dance career with the Yvonne Von Mollendorf company, with international residencies in Europe and the Caribbean. Vania was a principal ballerina in the National Ballet of Ireland and was selected for Cirque du Soleil. In 2005, for family reasons, she returend to Lima and founded the Asociación Cultural D1 (de uno) and is currently the Executive Director.

1/19/16 1/19/16

One Good Question with J.B. Schramm: Is College Still Relevant?

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

Every school success paradigm I’ve seen involves similar components: excellent educators, school leaders, data and measurement, standards, etc.—but what you never see is “students” as part of the solution. We have this sense that students are vessels into which education is to be poured. In order to move forward in our communities, we need young people from our communities to take charge. They need to have confidence and be equipped as critical thinkers, problem solvers, strategists, and risk takers. They need the motivation to challenge power structures and be problem solvers in the broader community. We don’t win, and our nation doesn’t become a more just place, simply by informing students. We need to offer them the responsibility to take charge of their education and future.The fact is, young people are most influenced by their peers. Young people today are taking responsibility for more and more parts of their lives, either because adults are abnegating obligations, or because technology is giving youth more opportunity to control their own communication and networks. Young people influence young people, tremendously. We are missing a huge opportunity when we define students as the objects of education. The key that we need in our investments is to show that young people can be drivers of their education. They can take charge of improving achievement in their schools. The paradigm changes when you start with the premise that the young people are on your side, that they can be driving education gains not only for themselves but also for their classmates.I learned these lessons working at College Summit, the nonprofit championing student-driven college success. They coined the phrase #PeerForward, which means to find and train a community’s most influential students in college access and leadership so that they run campaigns with their peers to file FAFSA, apply to college, and explore careers. In this model, the peers are owning the outcomes, not just following adult voice. That’s a very powerful model. We all care more when we own something. When you’re talking about under-resourced institutions, the most powerful resource that schools need is already there in abundance – the students!! They can solve their problems. They want to achieve and they want to be challenged. For teenagers especially, just when they are hungry for greater challenge, we so often keep them in the same sort of structure as elementary school. Let’s take off the training wheels and give them the chance to take on bigger challenges.

“Given all of the contemporary discourse about the ways that traditional K-12 education is not preparing students for the new global economy, is college still relevant?”

A year ago, I co-authored a white paper with Andy Rotherham and Chad Aldeman that outlines today’s post-secondary paradox. On the one hand, college is more valuable than ever. In immediate term the wage premium is about 70%, the highest it’s ever been. From a medium term perspective, the number of jobs requiring postsecondary education is climbing. Today, just 45% of Americans have a post-secondary degree, and by 2025, 65% of jobs will require one. If you want to be in the running for that set of jobs, education beyond high school is essential. (For more information, see Lumina Foundation’s A Stronger Nation report.)At the same time, college is riskier than ever, with historic debt loads, and employers questioning the value of many postsecondary programs.So how can students handle the post-secondary paradox? Young people need to be smart shoppers about their post-secondary education. You can no longer blindly get a degree from anywhere. Some colleges do a much better job of educating and graduating students than others; plus students need to navigate a wider array of options for quality postsecondary education today. You can no longer meander across majors, without considering career goals. That’s not to say students should lock into a career path in 9th grade. Teens are not going to all of a sudden know what they will want to do in 20 years; data suggests that they change jobs even more frequently than previous generations. Students benefit when they consider careers that interest them, and the economic potential of those fields, and then thoughtfully explore them.As smart shoppers, students can consider which range of careers intrigue them, which postsecondary programs will get them on the right path, and which institutions most effectively graduate students from similar backgrounds. Unfortunately due to budget crunches, school districts are dedicating fewer and fewer resources for college and career planning. Just as the postsecondary paradox leaves students more in need of college-going know-how than ever before. Not surprisingly, college-going rates are down, especially for low-income students.

Students, parents and community organizations need to step up, help schools prioritize college and career planning, and access the resources—including influential students, recent college grads, and volunteer mentors — close at hand. (Check out: College Advising Corps, College Possible, and iMentor)The need for postsecondary education, and in fact deeper postsecondary education, becomes more pronounced the farther out we look. Some labor theorists predict we’re on the verge of the greatest workforce shift since the Industrial Revolution. Over the next few decades, large employment sectors will disappear, they say, due to automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, etc. How can we prepare for a world like that? I think we need to be skeptical of hyper-focusing on training students for what the job market requires right now. Narrowly directing students to fill today’s job gaps may lead to employment and aid certain industries in the short term, but it’s not in the service of our kids, nation or industry in the long term. Rather, we need to raise the conversation about the future of work with students, employers, education innovators, and technologists. Also, I believe it’s a smart bet that this brave new world will favor people who can lead, create, problem solve, work in teams, and persevere. We call those attributes Power Skills. These are the skills employers cite today as being most in demand. The most effective colleges develop Power Skills well, as do challenging work experiences, and demanding community service work—for example, we have seen Power Skills develop in College Summit Peer Leaders running peer campaigns in their high schools. For America to prosper relative to advancing economies around the world, we need to develop this kind of deeper learning in all students, in every corner of our nation. The question isn’t “whether” postsecondary education. It’s which kind of postsecondary education. Now is not the moment to soften ambitions, especially for students from low-income and under-represented communities climbing uphill. Nor is it time to resign ourselves to status quo postsecondary education. We need to challenge our students, educators, employers and technologists to stretch, figuring out better ways for students to learn and take charge of their future.

J.B.’s One Good Question: How can young people drive their education and improve student achievement in their communities?

J.B. Schramm chairs the Learn to Earn initiative at New Profit, a venture philanthropy and social innovation organization that provides funding and strategic support to help the most promising social innovations achieve scale. J.B. leads the organization’s ecosystem innovation work for college access, postsecondary education and career, helping colleagues in the field equip 10+M more Americans for career success by 2025.

1/5/16 1/5/16

One Good Question with Anu Passi-Rauste: Education to Build Talent Pipelines.

This post is part of a series of interviews with international educators, policy makers, and leaders titled “One Good Question.” These interviews provide answers to my One Good Question and uncover new questions about education’s impact on the future.

“In what ways do our investments in education reveal our beliefs about the next generation’s role in the world?”

I’m really encouraged that we’re starting to see our education investments shift to include different projects and initiatives in which students are part of a bigger ecosystem and instrumental in designing our future. The new generation needs to be a part of collaboratively solving world problems. We don’t know what the jobs will be in the future because the world is changing so rapidly. I want to see the future as a sustainable world, where people are empowered to grow and learn for their own success.We see those expectations in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and on the national level in Finland. To transform our education system is a long process. Fifteen years ago, when I was a teacher, I experienced that the most fascinating way to teach was to learn together with the students. What I saw then was that, when students had problems that they were interested in, they were self motivated to dig deeper. As an entrepreneur, I have learned that the best part of my work is that I need to learn every day. We are social learners. The best part of being an entrepreneur is that we need to test all the time and validate our process. The scientific method is part of my daily life and part of my adult learning process. Education practice is slowly starting to incorporate this method into general pedagogy. The real positive inspiration is that you get interested by yourself and you start to follow some fields or topics and then identify what value you can bring there.Although we focus on skills and competence based education, those competences aren’t the only means to developing students for the future. Schools are still silos—they are physically isolated from society and within the buildings, school lessons are still divided into one-hour topics with related projects. We’re still learning for the test and valuing extrinsic motivation over instrinsic motivation. My entrepreneurial career is focused on how the school is part of the big community and creating opportunities for schools and students to work together with companies, organizations, and civic groups. Organizations can learn from the students and give students meaningful problems to solve. It also gives forerunner companies the possibility to enhance their learning about next-generation employees and consumers. As a result, students get relevant learning beyond classes, more experience and opportunities to find their own passion and motivation for learning.

“Your past projects have centered on student agency in innovation and problem-solving. What does it mean for greater society to have today's youth be an integral part of entrepreneurial solutions?”

Today’s learning is organized around problem-based learning, challenges and case studies. What if this could be done in close collaboration in our actual economic ecosystem ? If we can bridge this gap, it helps us to employ the young graduates and build their courage, self confidence, and attitude for lifelong learning and self trust. We can create opportunities for students to feel integrated and valuable in greater society. We help students with their ideas and have industry experts who are willing to listen and coach them. In the end, students come up with brilliant solutions to company-based challenges or their own ideas for start-ups. This model also increases democratic opportunities for the broader population.One thing that I’ve learned is that, when students are really working on their own ideas, they want to be responsible for their own learning. It doesn’t mean that they don’t need support, but that they can then identify the supports that they need. That’s what creates a critical role for teachers, facilitators and companies to respond to the students’ needs. Access to community-supported learning needs to be a right for everybody. We still have work to do to refine the models that connect the employers and students. Under our new venture, LearnBrand, we want to give students an opportunity to apply the knowledge that they’ve learned, which is a critical part of the learning process. We focus on actionable learning where we engage people during their college and university studies. We give them real world assignments and experience. We build a bridge between learners and employers and help both sides equally; students grow their practical skills and employers manage their future talent pipeline.

Anu’s One Good Question : How do we empower our students to keep their curiousity and growth mindset throughout their lives ?

Anu Passi-Rauste, an avant-garde educator and leading expert in digital learning, challenges educators, students, and policymakers to adopt innovative approaches to education in K-12, higher education, and corporate training settings. Her latest venture, LearnBrand, strengthens business partnerships for college and university students.

10/12/15 10/12/15

Le but de L'enseignement.

“Un enseignement qui n’enseigne pas à se poser des questions est mauvais.” - Paul Valéry

9/17/15 9/17/15

Throwback Thursday: Finland Offers Lesson For Building Student, Teacher Agency.

Rhonda Broussard is the founder of St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, a charter management organization. In 2014, she traveled to and explored the education systems of Finland and New Zealand as an Eisenhower Fellow (full disclosure: I was also a 2014 Eisenhower Fellow). As I listened to her discuss her travels this past May in Philadelphia, I was struck by how relevant some of the insight she had gained in Finland were for those creating blended-learning schools that seek to personalize learning and build student agency. What follows is a brief Q&A that illustrates some of these lessons.

Michael Horn:

Your observations around student agency in Finland and how it stems from the great trust the Finnish society has in children are striking. Can you explain what you saw and learned? Do you have takeaways for what this means in the context of the United States?

Rhonda Broussard:

What amazed me most during my school visits in Finland is what I didn’t observe. Finnish schools had no recognizable systems of “accountability” for student behaviors. Finnish schools believe that children can make purposeful decisions about where to be, what to study, how to perform. Whether via No Excuses or Positive Behavior Intervention Support, American schools don’t expect youth to be responsible for themselves or their learning. When I asked Finnish educators about student agency, they responded that the child is responsible for their learning and general safety. When prodded, educators responded that the child’s teacher might send a note home to parents, speak with the child, or consult their social welfare committee about destructive or disruptive behaviors. Despite the fact that Finland is the second country in Europe for school shootings (they have had three since 1989), none of the schools that I visited had security presence or protocols for violent crises.My first trip to Finland was during the immediate aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting. When I juxtaposed those events with the high trust I observed in Finnish society and schools, the reality of micro-aggressions in our schools became more apparent. In my piece “Waking up in Helsinki, Waking up to St. Louis,” I cite a few examples of what trust looks like in Finnish schools. The absence of trust in American schools requires educators to police our youth daily, and do so in the name of respect. Many U.S. peers respond to my observations with, “But our kids are different, they need structure.” Our country, society, and expectations are different, but our kids are not. American hyper-attention to accountability reinforces the belief that people, young people in particular, cannot be trusted.

How can average American public schools shift toward more student agency and decrease disruptive behaviors? Predict and provide responsive supports for academic, social-emotional, and physical interventions. Fifty percent of Finnish students receive academic interventions before 10th grade, adolescents study courses in social needs, all grades break for physical activity after 45 minutes of instruction, all school meals are free regardless of income. These shifts allow schools to meet the immediate needs of students that pre-empt distracting or destructive behaviors. Starting point? Ross Greene’s Lost at School.

Horn:

The level of personalization or customization in Finnish schools is much more extensive than I realized. Even siblings in the same school might attend school for radically different hours. Can you give some examples of what you saw? How does the system work, and how are families able to handle the different starting and ending times?

Broussard:

Children are expected to know their own schedules, and parents rarely manage drop-off and pick-up. Finland is a country of latch-key kids where:Students attend their neighborhood schools. Societal trust in education means that families do not shop neighborhoods for the so-called best schools;And students take themselves to school—they walk, bike, sled, ski, or take public transit—unless they live in an urban area and have a special need or great distance for transportation.In my “Hei from Helsinki!” blog post this fall, I noted that, “Within any individual elementary school, classes, grades or cohorts of students report for different periods of time. First graders will typically have shorter school days and may go home alone at 1pm while their older siblings are still in school. Many schools have aftercare programs for 1st and 2nd grade, but by 3rd grade everyone goes home at the end of their daily schedule. Kids call/text their parents to check in. If you have three children in the same elementary school, they will likely have different start and end times from each other and may have different start and end times for different days of the week. Students are expected to know their specific schedule and manage their time accordingly.”Below is a sample primary student schedule from a photo I took showing different start and end times by class, by day of the week:

Horn:

The agency and ownership doesn’t just extend to students it seems. Do teachers have similar expectations from society and for themselves? How does this manifest itself in the way that teachers improve their craft?

Broussard:

In Finnish Lessons, Pasi Sahlberg explains that, “Teachers at all levels of schooling expect that they are given the full range of professional autonomy to practice what they have been educated to do: to plan, teach, diagnose, execute, and evaluate.”Administrators know that teachers have the professional training to be successful in the classroom—all teachers have a research Masters degree before beginning their teaching career—and the professional curiosity to identify their own growth areas. Schools have no expectations of teacher mentors, instructional coaches, peer observations, or continuous improvement feedback. The Finnish education system distributes power and responsibility to create ownership and personalization at the school and classroom level. The Finnish National Board of Education defines the courses and standards, municipalities then write an aligned curriculum, and teachers write the lessons and assessments. Finnish teachers engage in similar professional work as Americans—curriculum committees, student support, school culture events, clubs—but they are organized more by teacher impetus and less by administrative edicts.

Originally appeared on Forbes.com Leadership

blog by Michael Horn