One Good Question

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1/10/17 1/10/17

One Good Question with Ben Nelson: Do We Actually Believe that College Matters?

Ben Nelson

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?”

Education matters. It sounds so banal and simple. Everyone in the world says this, but I argue that no one actually believes that education matters. Here’s the proof:Imagine a high school student that has the option to go to A) Harvard or B) some other less prestigious educational institution where they will get a better education. How many people are going to say don’t go to Harvard? Effectively nobody.If people actually believed that education mattered, then college rankings, curricula, and choice wouldn’t exist in these formats. Fundamentally, no one believes that the education matters, but that the credentials matter. People think “have credential, will travel”. And they’re wrong. Credentials actually don’t really matter. Credentials ultimately are put to the test when you get to the real world. The investment – whether dollars, human capital, time and money—from government, private sector, or families—the investment that returns the most in your life is learning. It’s not getting an education.

“You’re shifting the whole paradigm here – learning matters but learning institutions less so? I still believe in "school," so help me understand this.”

We need to make a distinction between getting an education, being educated and actually learning. One of the key elements to know that learning has occurred is the concept called far transfer. Far transfer occurs when people apply learning from one context to a problem/need in a radically different context. You know that some has learned when they say, “I’ve never seen this before, but I’ve seen all of these common elements. I studied XYZ and there are patterns developed between them that I recognize here. With certainty, I know that if I do ABC I will likely get positive results.So for families wondering where to invest in their children’s success? Invest in education, not the credential.

“How do you get people to shift their values towards “education” not credential?”

Hyperbolic discounting is the phenomenon that things get better with age. Among youth and adults—if you are told “you can invest $10 today and get $100 5 years from now” most people say they would rather spend the $10 today. Similarly, when you tell an 18-year old kid, you shouldn’t drop acid/do coke, because you’re going to have a lot of fun tonight, but 10 years from now you may ruin your life. They discount it. This is so built in to human nature to think about short-term reward vs long-term benefit.

It’s hard to admit that you don’t believe in our education system. When push comes to shove and you’re at the supermarket, run into your old friend and she asks where your kid is going to school, you want to say Harvard (or whichever university has status for you). You don’t want to say she’s getting an amazing education at "unbranded institution." You sacrifice the future well-being of your child to have an easier supermarket conversation. That’s how human beings behave.

How do we have a republic that works? People understand and are informed instead of responding to their cognitive biases. They actually commit to spending the time thinking about how not to generate irrational biases. That requires long-term thinking, i.e. I’m going to spend more time pouring through this article, so that my one vote will be a beacon of light and influence others. We’re not built to think that way, even though we live in a world that requires us too. That’s the problem we’re stuck in. We’re not designed for the modern world. We’re still designed to be hunters and gatherers. The only solution I see to our problem is long-term and systemic. Minerva exists to reform education systems all over the world. We believe that reform occurs when the most prestigious institutions reset. Ripple effect goes through the rest of the system. This is a process that will take longer than my lifetime.

Don’t divorce the election outcomes from what government policy has been over the past several decades. Republicans and Democrats have focused the last 50 years of higher education policy on: increasing access, increase completion, and more recently lowering costs. The easiest way to increase college access, completion and make it cheaper – is to lower standards. It’s the easiest way. Anyone can go, anyone can finish and it’ll be cheaper.

If you actually educate your citizenry, and not just drive people towards the same credentials, more of the population will be ready to take the next step. When you apply science of learning, students are more engaged and are ready to make informed choices. Completion rates then increase. Thirdly, as education institutions focus on education, then they can shed all of the outrageous cost levels that universities are currently in the trap of doing: sports, research salaries, campus museum and performing arts centers. The cost burden of creating these country clubs falls to students and tax-payers but what’s the ROI? If higher ed actually focused on education, then we could solve this. College access and completion rates are only symptoms. You have to treat the root cause.

Ben’s One Good Question: How do you enable wise decision-making in a world with unwise people? I don’t know the answer to that. I know how to make less and less wise decisions accelerate—social media, balkanization, knowledge migration – all these trends and realities are pushing us in the wrong direction.

Ben Nelson is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Minerva, and a visionary with a passion to reinvent higher education. Prior to Minerva, Nelson spent more than 10 years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from startup to the world’s largest personal publishing service. With over 42 million transactions across 22 countries, nearly five times greater than its closest competitor, Snapfish is among the top e-commerce services in the world. Serving as CEO from 2005 through 2010, Nelson began his tenure at Snapfish by leading the company’s sale to Hewlett Packard for $300 million. Prior to joining Snapfish, Nelson was President and CEO of Community Ventures, a network of locally branded portals for American communities.Nelson’s passion for reforming undergraduate education was first sparked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he received a B.S. in Economics. After creating a blueprint for curricular reform in his first year of school, Nelson went on to become the chair of the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE), a pedagogical think tank that is the oldest and only non-elected student government body at the University of Pennsylvania.

12/13/16 12/13/16

One Good Question with Connie K. Chung: How can we Build Systems to Support Powerful Learning?

Connie K. Chung

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

Different communities are investing in their young people in different kinds of ways. Who is deciding how the investment is made is also an indicator of what we value of the next generation. Young people’s voices and even teachers’ voices can be included on a larger scale. Going forward, given the rapid shifts of what we need to teach our young people, and the current emphasis on personalized learning, those two groups of people are essential to include in deciding that what future investments might be.

A good investment requires a diversified portfolio. We’re going to need a diversified portfolio to figure out what we’re doing for the future. Much of our current investments are in developing cognition. So much of how we have invested our money, energy, time, human resources, attention and discourse, has recently been around testing. I do think testing does help for accountability, transparency, and promoting quality to a certain degree. But it’s not enough. We need more investments in the following:

developing a more holistic vision and purposes for education, that is child-centered
developing systems that are responsive to the needs of the present and the future
strategizing and visioneering to create systems in which parts work together
obtaining consistent, impactful leadership. Average turnover for superintendents in the US is 2.9 years, which isn’t enough to develop sustainable, responsive, or adequate systems for what the students need.
creating adequate space, time, and resources for teachers to learn while they are teaching. The technology and content is changing so rapidly that it requires continual learning, even for teachers.

We need to develop systems to learn from each other. I know lots of great examples of powerful teachers, schools, and networks like United World College (UWC), EL Education, and High Tech High (HTH) doing wonderful work. But I don’t see a lot of investment in ways to systematically identifying, cataloguing, curating, and making transparent and transferable some of these processes for teachers, school leaders, and heads of systems. What might be sustainable models for teachers to continue to learn in their PLCs, schools, district and region?

“What’s keeping us from making that kind of investment in US?”

It would be helpful to enable cultures and conditions where teachers’ voices are heard. I’ve seen this at EL Education schools in the US. Many of their schools have restructured their school time to enable more teachers to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams and let students do projects in longer blocks of time. Some EL Education schools have even restructured the spaces within the schools for the collaboration to occur. So that work is happening, but it’s not happening at a larger scale. In those places like EL Education, they have leadership that is listening to teachers and thinking about how to establish the conditions so that the real learning happens. They’re not so invested in finding the next silver bullet, but in developing whole school cultures that enable continual learning and growth in community to happen.

“In Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-first Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations, one of your findings is that countries emphasize cognitive domains over interpersonal and intrapersonal domains in their K-12 curriculum. Why does that matter?”

Learning is cognitive, but it’s also social and emotional. For example, we can look at Tony Bryk’s work on trust in schools. The places where student achievement increased were places with a culture of trust. These are environments where people felt able and vulnerable to say “This is what I need to learn and grow,” and felt safe socially and emotionally to do that. And they have communities that supported that vulnerability instead of punishing and hiding it. Carol Dweck’s work is about not just growth mindset for students but could be applied to teachers as well. The process of learning is not just cerebral, but being vulnerable and humble, and takes place in supportive and collaborative school culture that, listens to and learns from, and challenges each other. The more we acknowledge and understand that, and then build our systems to support not just the development of cognition, but cultures, systems, and relationship building, that’s the hard work that needs to be done now. It’s not magic.

I’ve heard too many times about cases where school districts pivoted and adopted a curriculum that’s student centered and adapted to the 21st century but without other support systems and structures to enable that change. But as several educational leaders have noted, “Culture eats policy for breakfast.” Even in China, our colleagues also found that, in their innovative schools districts, their broader district culture embraces innovations and trying new things. We might continue to recognize and cultivate leaders who pay attention to how to build cultures and environments that enable students and teachers to do this kind of work. We need a shift in the kinds of questions that we’re asking, a shift in processes and frameworks, not just in acquiring a new curriculum.In a 19th century factory model, where we you want to get the process right for mass production, quality was defined by consistency. The 21st century model is a sharing economy in which people all have the ability to be creators. The ability to cultivate systems and cultures that enables that to happen, where people feel empowered and equipped, is perhaps just as important as paying attention to individual components like curriculum. I think the cultural piece can’t be emphasized enough – values, attitudes, relationships, and structures. How do we create that kind of environment?

“How do we do this without over-testing social-emotional learning?”

The ultimate assessment is: are we going to survive and thrive as a country? Have we created students through our school systems who are going to live well together and promote their own and others’ well-being? That’s the ultimate high-stakes assessment! We may have people who have tested well in schools but may well be failing this real assessment around whether we can create a sustainable future together.This goes back to the purpose of education, which is important to look at as a guide. We’ve overemphasized assessment to guide us. Assessment is one indicator for achieving our broader purpose, but we’ve disproportionally given power to assessment to drive the entire endeavor of education. It’s a tool, but testing well is just part, not the entire purpose and end goal of education – personal, social, and global well-being are. For example, OECD is driving towards these broader outcomes with their Education 2030 plan; it focuses more on creating positive value and well-being for example. UNESCO is also arguing for education being a critical part of building sustainable futures for everyone on the planet. If that’s the case, let’s figure out how we can build a better world together, using all of our tools, and not solely rely on narrow indicators.

Connie’s One Good Question: Much of what we think is necessary for students to learn is already happening, just only in pockets and for certain students and not for others. That said, I have a lot of questions! How do we rapidly make sure that all students are receiving and engaging in this kind of education? What roles could researchers, policy makers, teachers, parents, and social entrepreneurs all play in this? Are there ways that we can all work together to achieve this for a larger population and wider range of student? How do we collect and connect good people who are already doing this work to make it grow exponentially vs. linearly?

Connie K. Chung is the associate director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a multi-institution collaborative that works with education institutions in eight countries. She conducts research about civic, global citizenship, and 21st century education. She is especially interested in how to build the capacities of organizations and people to work collaboratively toward providing a relevant, rigorous, meaningful education for all children that not only supports their individual growth but also the growth of their communities. She is the co-editor of the book, Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations (2016), a co-author of the curriculum resource, Empowering Global Citizens: A World Course (2016), and a contributor to a book about US education improvement efforts, A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform (2011). A former high school English literature teacher, she was nominated by her students for various teaching awards. Connie received her BA, EdM, and EdD from Harvard University and her dissertation analyzed the individual and organizational factors that facilitated people from diverse ethnic, religious, and socio-economic class backgrounds to work together to build a better community.

12/6/16 12/6/16

One Good Question with Susan Patrick: How can we Build Trust in Our Education System?

This is the second interview 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?”

There’s a big difference in how you would fund the education system if you were building for the longer term – you would invest in building capacity and trust. We need to take a very honest look at our investments. If people and relationships matter, we need to be building our own sense of inquiry. That’s not at odds with innovation investments. We should be about innovation with equity. That way, we can change our own perspectives while we build new solutions.The debate about top-down reform vs. bottom-up innovation is tied to the same trust issues. In Finland, they made an effort to go towards a trust based model and it meant investing in educator capacity so that the systems trust educators to make the best decisions in real-time. If we don’t start investing in trust, we can’t get anywhere.

“When US educators visit other countries, we tend to look for silver bullet programs from the highest-performing countries. What are we missing in that search?”

During my Eisenhower Fellowship, I was able to meet with teams from OECD and UNESCO that gave me great perspective. UNESCO has just published an Education 2030 outlook presenting their global education development agenda that looks at the whole child. Their goals are broad enough to include developing nations who aren’t yet educating 100% of their population. When we read through the goals and indicators, the US could learn a lot from having our current narrow focus on academics. Our current education structure is not going to lead us to provide a better society. Are we even intending to build a better society for the future? We’re not asking the big questions. We’re asking if students can read and do math on grade level in grades 3-8. In Canada, they ask if a student has yet met or exceeded expectations. If not, what are we doing to get them there? You don’t just keep moving and allow our kids to have gaps.The UNESCO report specifies measures about access to quality education. Is there gender equality? Is there equity? They define equity as:

Equity in education is the means to achieving equality. It intends to provide the best opportunities for all students to achieve their full potential and act to address instances of disadvantage which restrict educational achievement. It involves special treatment/action taken to reverse the historical and social disadvantages that prevent learners from accessing and benefiting from education on equal grounds. Equity measures are not fair per se but are implemented to ensure fairness and equality of outcome. (UNESCO 2015)

Across the global landscape of education systems, there is a diversity of governance from top-down to bottom-up regarding system control, school autonomy and self-regulation and how this impacts processes and policies for quality assurance, evaluation and assessments. It is important to realize the top-down and bottom-up dynamics are often a function of levels of trust combined with transparency for data and doing what is best for all kids. In the US, let’s face it, our policy conversations around equity are driven by a historical trend of a massive achievement gap. Said another way, there is a huge lack of trust from the federal government toward states, from states to districts and even down to schools and classrooms. We ask, “How do we trust that we’re advancing equity in our schools?”

However, when you start to think about what we need to do to advance a world-class education for all students and broaden the definition of student success – you hit a wall in coherent policy that would align to better practices. There’s so much mistrust in the system given our history of providing inequalities across the education system, it is inequitable. In recognizing that our education system isn’t based on trust, therefore, perhaps we need to focus on what our ultimate goals and values for our education systems should be and then backward engineer how we get there, how we hold all parties accountable and how we could actually build trust in a future state. We need to consider future-focused approaches that work to build trust, transparency, greater accountability and build capacity for continuous improvement. We do need to assure comparability in testing to tell us whether we have been providing an equitable education. It’s just right now, this lack of trust is creating a false dichotomy of limited approaches to a future-focused education system. We’re defaulting that the only test that we trust is criterion-referenced standardized tests.We need to take a deep look at the implications that systems of assessments mean for the rest of the system. It seems that we’re only willing to trust education outcomes based on a standardized test, that we commit to locking students into age-based cohorts, and that we focus primarily on the delivery of content. What would be the long-term implications for creating better transparency, more frequent inquiry approaches on what is working best for both adults and children? Are there different ways to evaluate student work and determine whether students are building knowledge, broader skills and competencies they need for future success? Can we consider a range of future goals and backward map alternative approaches? All assessments don’t have to be norm-referenced. This is a familiar conversation with education experts globally. I’m afraid we’re not having that conversation in the US.

That’s what’s so interesting to me about iNACOL’s work. It’s global and focuses on future states for educators and practitioners designing new models using the research on how students learn best. We listen to practitioners working on next generation designs and then ask, is our policy aligned with actually doing what’s best for kids? What if you could set a vision for a profile of high school graduates that would ensure success? What goals would you want for redefining what students need to know and be able to do? And, how would you then approach aligning the systems of policy and practice with what’s right for kids? The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) law gives states the flexibility to come up with new definitions of students’ success. States can now use multiple measures — and still report data transparently. This is a really important time to engage in deep conversations between states and communities, families, local leaders and educators around what would we do for redefining success — but I’m not seeing yet any states that are having enough foundational conversations on the ultimate goals and vision of education WITH COMMUNITIES. I’m hearing educational leaders say, “All we know how to do is NCLB” . . . and wonder which other indicators a future accountability system might require. They’re uncomfortable thinking about alternatives. It’s a sort of “Stockholm Syndrome” of educational policy limited by the past. ESSA is an opportunity to engage in real dialogue with the communities we serve. Communities have been locked out of the process for years now. Community outreach has become a box that people check, but it’s an ongoing dialogue and should be about building understanding and trust. This is a really rare opportunity in the United States to engage in a broader conversation around student success with local school boards and communities. This would encourage innovation and provide a clear platform driven by communities on the clear goals and outcomes we hope to achieve in our education system for equity and excellence.

Susan’s One Good Question: Who asks the question is as pertinent as which questions they ask. Earlier, I mentioned that investment in the long-term capacity building of our education system would require building our own sense of inquiry. In other more top-down nationalistic approaches to education in countries outside the US, leaders do control the system so they are having strong “values-based” conversations about education in the context of societal goals, too. Because we are a strong federalist approach to education – this isn’t possible or even desired at a national level . . . the US Department of Education doesn’t have a federal role in that way, and quite frankly, we can’t have a national or even state-level values-based conversation in the same way. In a federalist approach, we have 13,600 school boards with local control. The unit of change in this country is the local school district (LEA means local education authority). School leaders, superintendents, CMO leaders -- they actually can drive the values conversation about what our educational goals, vision and values are and how we measure success transparently. We’ve stopped talking about values in the name of objectives related to literacy and numeracy. I believe literacy and numeracy are extremely important, but let’s not forget that foundation for reading and arithmetic (with all students having proficiency) is not enough in the modern world. For students to be successful it is a “yes, and . . . “ with literacy and numeracy being important but not enough. I don’t know how schools can address the extreme inequities in our education without having a values conversation and a re-framing of conversations around re-defining student success with broader definitions of student success.I think that our local communities should start asking themselves these two questions:

When a student graduates what should they know and be able to do?
What is our definition of student success?

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.

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?

9/20/16 9/20/16

One Good Question with Peter Howe: Are We Incentivizing the Right Behaviors for Teachers and Students?

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 trained as an economist (then an art historian, then an educator), so I’m fascinated by this question. In Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, he gives us the bad news first: economics is built upon the entirely false premise that people are rationale. The good news is that people are irrational in a predictable way. His experiments demonstrate how financial incentives to “do good” actually backfire. The implication is that, as soon as you provide monetary reward for “doing good,” the action becomes transactional. People’s sense of being valued is entirely different. When we think that we’re acting on behalf of shared humanity, we do more. When we anticipate compensation for the same behavior, we calculate our value and actually refuse to perform for lower compensation.

Earlier this fall, Paul Tough’s article in The Atlantic pointed out the distinction between teachers who raise test results and those who raise character attributes. The teachers didn’t overlap much across groups, they were either in one camp or the other. What he found was that the teachers who raised test scores were the ones being rewarded by their schools, but that the skills students really need for college readiness are the social emotional ones. That’s a great example of how our investments obscure what we project as the best outcome, in this case college persistence.When we apply Ariely’s premise to schools, the incentive should be placed on building community. If we build the real community expectation, all of our members are more likely to contribute to each other’s success. When we apply financial incentives for some members, for example compensating teachers for student test results, the teachers narrow their focus and supports, and as a result fewer students achieve at high levels. It’s literally a waste of money and creates the wrong incentives at the classroom level.

My favorite professor used Hegelian dialectics to teach a course in behavioral accounting. He would post on the door how well we were doing in recounting, connecting, synthesizing, and using connections to build something new—at which point you were at the pinnacle of learning. Even though our content was economics, he rewarded our thought process over discrete test scores. To go back to our example, make sure that the finances are rewarding the behavior that you want. Then you don’t waste money with incentive programs that go fundamentally against people’s needs. People want to feel valued and our investments should reflect that.

“If schools could only accomplish one outcome for all students, and could guarantee that outcome for all students, what would it be?”

Every kid has to have that sense of safety and security – however we define that. Research shows that the traumatized or stressed brain is not a thinking brain. Kids in poverty have higher indicators on the ACE scale of trauma and also higher suspension rates. Being a part of a community is the most important contribution to safety and security. Creating a sense of security isn’t only about environmental stress, but engendering intellectual safety as well. The classroom is not about individual student success, it’s about collective success. No student pisses me off more than the top student who stops coming to class close to the exam because they would rather study on their own. At that point, they’re no longer modeling engagement, and their peers don’t benefit from the tough or complex questions that would have been asked. How do we address needs on both ends of the spectrum? We should focus the first two months of the year on community building and not curriculum. Once you have the community established and students are in inquiry-based learning, the curricular work will move more quickly. All of the students will have that sense of safety, trust and willingness to admit that they don’t know something. That’s when learning can really occur!

Peter’s One Good Question: Why are you here ? I ask this to every student who comes to my office, which is usually in a disciplinary context. I think that you can extend the question to education institutions too – Why are you doing X? Why are you doing it in that way?

Peter Howe is currently Head of College at United World College’s Maastricht (NL) campus. He recently was appointed to the role of Principal of UWC Atlantic College in Great Britain, effective 1 March 2017. Peter joined UWC Maastricht after spending seven years at UWC Adriatic in Italy, four of which as the Head of the college. In the course of five years at UWC Maastricht, Peter has managed a student body of approximately 850 students, in a school that has grown by more than 40% since 2012. Peter brings an eclectic background to his position. Following an undergraduate degree in Finance and Economics and 2 years working at Procter and Gamble in his native Canada, he returned to study graduate Art and Architectural History for 7 years before embarking on his teaching career.

8/2/16 8/2/16

One Good Question with Fabrice Jaumont: How Parent Organizing Leads to Revolution.

Fabrice Jaumont photo credit: Jonas Cuenin

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?”

Part of my research, and the recent book that I have published[1], focus on philanthropy and American foundations, particularly those that make financial investments in education development in Africa. I also work with philanthropists on a regular basis through my work in bilingual education in the United States. I raise funds for my programs which provide services to schools and support the needs of dual language students in various settings. Coming from France, which has a tradition of state-controlled support to education, I have always been intrigued by the U.S. philanthropic culture and tradition of “giving back to the community”, which encourages people, wealthy or not, to contribute financially or by volunteering their time and expertise. This, I find, can have a tremendous impact on children, schools, and communities. I believe it creates better chances for the next generation and help it access quality programs, equal opportunities, and the right conditions to grow and play an active role in society. I find it inspiring to see people giving money willingly – on top of the taxes they pay - to improve a city’s or the country’s education system. The fact that these individuals want to make a difference through their actions and financial contributions is a social contract that I find worthy of our attention. If done well, with the buy-in of communities, it can have an impact on hundreds of thousands of children that would not necessarily have these chances - even within the context of a strong centralized system. This tradition of giving also sends a very strong and hopeful message which is carried on from one generation to the next. As a child, you might have received support from the generosity of someone, perhaps even someone who you never met. As an adult, you might want to be that generous donor and help a child experience things that he or she couldn’t experience otherwise.

We can criticize this tradition too. In recent weeks, a lot has been said about the Gates Foundation’s failure to improve education despite its best intentions, ambitious programs, and the billions of dollars that it poured into transforming schools and educational models. One could ask why, in the first place, foundations and wealthy individuals try to change school systems. Should we not tax these individuals more so that wealth be redistributed through a more democratic process rather than an individual’s pet projects? Surely, the future of our children should not depend on the largesse of the Super Rich.

Sometimes foundations are seen as having a corrosive impact on society. In my book, I analyze these critics’ views of U.S. foundations in Africa. I also provide a new understanding of educational philanthropy by using an institutional lens that helps me avoid the traps and bias that I pinpointed in the discourse of foundation opponents. In my opinion, grantors and grantees have an unequal relationship from the start. As a result, the development agenda is either imposed by the money holders, or “adjusted to please the donor” by money seekers who just want to secure the funds or win the grant competition. To reconcile this discrepancy, I propose that philanthropists and grant recipients place their relationship on an equal footing, and engage in thorough conversations which start with the needs and seeks input from all actors. This can generate more respect and mutual understanding, and strengthen each step of the grantmaking process: from building a jointly-agreed agenda to tackling the issues more efficiently.

“Too often in public education, language immersion and international education are only offered to children from middle class environments. The community of bilingual/dual-language schools in New York make an effort to promote immersion for students from diverse backgrounds. What could that choice of intentional diversity mean for New York's future?”

In several contexts of education, immersion and international education is too often reserved for children of the affluent. The community of public bilingual schools that I have helped develop in New York and in other cities provides access to quality programs to children of diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Dual language programs have existed for about 10 years and are gradually replacing traditional models of bilingual education programs which focus on teaching English to immigrants. This original model was created in the 1960s through the civil rights movement when immigrants asked that their children be taught in both English and their home language so that they were given equal chances to succeed in American society.

The new model of dual language education focuses on bilingual education for all. At least that is how I see it. Children of all linguistic backgrounds spend half of their school time in English and the other half in a target language. They learn to write and read in both languages as well as study content such as math, science, social studies through both languages. For the last ten years, I have helped linguistic communities create dual language programs in French, Japanese, Italian, German, Russian, Arabic and Korean. The families that I have met are motivated by a strong desire to maintain their linguistic heritage - more so than develop English which children are acquiring naturally through their surroundings. For these families, schools should put more value on children’s heritage language and culture, and help them make an asset of their bilingualism.

Also, I see an increasing number of American families - who only speak English at home - value the benefits of bilingualism, bi-literacy, and biculturalism. They, too, ask that schools help them grow multilingual competences in children, and encourage students to acquire new languages as early as possible, preferably through dual language or foreign language immersion. That's good news for any country whose citizens are willing to open their minds to the world and the world of others by mastering languages and discovering new cultures. In my view, this learning process has the potential to foster more respect, tolerance, and understanding of others. Ultimately, I believe this can foster more peace. Moreover, when parents demand that schools provide this kind of bilingual education, it becomes a true revolution. A Bilingual Revolution. And this is the title of my next book[2].

Fabrice's One Good Question: Through both my research on strategic philanthropy in Africa, and my work in bilingual education development in North America, my thinking has revolved around one good question: whether we help improve a public school in Brooklyn or a university in Dar es Salaam: How can we make sure that all actors in the communities that we try to impact are consulted and given an equal voice in the conversation, so that the solutions that we may bring are indeed conceived together and do correspond to real needs?

Fabrice Jaumont holds a Ph.D. in International Education from New York University. His research finds itself at the intersection of comparative and international education, education development, educational diplomacy and philanthropy, heritage language and bilingual education, and community development. He currently serves as Program Officer for FACE Foundation in New York, and as Education Attaché for the Embassy of France to the United States. He is the author of Unequal Partners: American Foundations and Higher Education Development in Africa (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2016). His book, The Bilingual Revolution, features the development of dual language programs in public schools in New York. More information: http://www.FabriceJaumont.net

[1]Unequal Partners: American Foundations and Higher Education Development in Africa (Palgrave-MacMillan)

[2]The Bilingual Revolution

3/22/16 3/22/16

One Good Question with John Wood: Teaching the world to read

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

Room to Read was founded 15 years ago as a little unknown startup. We boil our belief down to six simple words : World change starts with educated children. We truly believe that if you want to change the future, the biggest no brainer in the world, you start with educating your children. Traditionally, for parents, that means your own children. Those who have been given the gift of education then have an obligation to give back to kids in low-income countries. We have a duty to give back and an opportunity to change things forever. We all have an ancestor who was the one to break the cycle of poverty for our family. Once that cycle is broken, the benefit pays forward for generations. To me, you look at the world today with over 100,000,000 children not in schools, and 2/3 are girls and women. If you want to change the world, then education is the smartest place to start.

“Literacy and primary education have dramatic positive impact on life expectancy, overall health, and ending cycle of extreme poverty in developing nations. Beyond making books and reading accessible, the Room to Read model has created complex local education ecosystems that are highly responsive to local needs. What else does the ecosystem need to be sustainable for all children?”

One of the most important things is that the communities we work with are fully invested in each and every project that we do. It’s not plunking something down for them to use, but co-building something the community is co-invested in. We also need the government to be co-invested in the projects and have some skin in the game as well. Our model is one of local employees, it’s not Americans flying over to do durable projects and telling local people what to do. It’s local community buy-in as employees, volunteers, parents in the planning committee, and then the government providing the teachers and the librarians and paying their salaries. As a result of that ecosystem, and we have the data to prove it, the model is more sustainable over time.

“How are you getting government engagement ? What strategies could other international education NGOs adopt?”

For us, we had to prove that we had a scalable model. Government doesn’t want to work with an NGO unless they have a big vision, a scalable model, resources, and can impact serious scale. That’s what we’ve been able to deliver with the governments. Too many folks want to do one-off projects. What we’re saying is that we can invest impact change at the town, region, even national level.

John's One Good Question: My question is simple. If we know that education is the best way to change the future, and to impact subsequent generations, then why is the world not doing more about the fact that over 750 million people lack basic literacy?

John Wood is the founder of Room to Read. He started Room to Read after a fast-paced and distinguished career with Microsoft from 1991 to 1999. He was in charge of marketing and business development teams throughout Asia, including serving as director of business development for the Greater China region and as director of marketing for the Asia-Pacific region. John continues to bring Room to Read a vision for a scalable solution to developing global educational problems with an intense focus on results and an ability to attract a world-class group of employees, volunteers, and funders. Today, John focuses full-time on long-term strategy, capital acquisition, public speaking, and media opportunities for the organization. John also teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and New York University’s Stern School of Business and serves on the Advisory Board of the Clinton Global Initiative. John holds a bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Colorado and a master’s degree from the Kellogg School of Northwestern University. Follow John on Twitter @JohnWoodRtR.

3/15/16 3/15/16

One Good Question with Chris Plutte: Can Global Understanding Help us Address Race Issues in the US?

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?”

There’s a genuine interest in wanting to be global but folks don’t know where to start. When you ask someone how they’re working towards the goals of being global citizens, they are very few examples. We’re still a current event on a Friday at 1pm. That’s how schools go global. I don’t think we’re preparing kids for a global society at all. We’re failing at that. We are thinking about right now, but not 2030 or 2045 when we’ll be more connected than we already are. We’re not teaching the kids skills of communication and collaboration across countries. There’s a shift that needs to happen from competition against Finland and Singapore to collaboration with Finland and Singapore. Then we need to work backwards with the skills that young people need to develop for that new economy.

Personally, I come to this from a peace-building lens. How do you bring people together who don’t understand each other and are in perceived conflict with each other? We’re living in a world where people are bouncing up against each other and don’t have the skills to navigate that. Ten to fifteen years ago, we had diplomats sitting in capitals representing our values and cultures to other communities. We’re now side-by-side engaging and we don’t know how to do that intercultural communication. We won’t be able to do that until we engage whole communities—parents and educators to become global citizens. Give them the tools, experience, and opportunities to inquire about how the world is outside of their own city. Then they can be inspired to share those with the young people that they’re educating. The investment is really with the adults right now as much as with the students.

“You’re the first American educator in this interview series to bring up peace as a function of education.”

When we talk about race, there’s a conversation there about peace, but we’re looking for peace within our communities. I’m curious about how global can help local. I’m stuck on Einstein’s idea that no problem can be solved in the conditions in which it was created. The idea that you have to leave the environment to solve the problem. I wonder if there’s an opportunity to expand on that and talk about race issues and conflict issues. There’s such massive Islamophobia in the US. At Global Nomads Group, we focus on linking US schools and Muslim-majority countries. Part of it is building compassion and empathy for one another. That’s a muscle that gets developed. It’s perhaps easier to have a conversation around Islamophobia than race issue in your own community. Can you build that muscle globally and then pivot and use it to address race issues in the US? As an organization, we’re trying to explore that possibility.

When we think of global citizenship in the US, we think about teeing up Americans to be global citizens. But you can’t be a global citizen by yourself. There’s a perspective called Ubuntu-- I am me because you are you. You need the « other » to be a global citizen. Right now it’s a taking, how can we take from other places to be global? It’s not about taking. It’s about navigating within an ecosystem with others who are also global citizens and navigating yourself with different experiences. It’s a long-play. It has to be cultivated and integrated over years.

“What are the first steps to change?”

I need to articulate to people what the world actually is and be a bit of a futurist. When the educator or administrator sees themselves as a global citizen, then they can champion it. Peace Corps, Army Brats, and Third Culture Kids seek out Global Nomad Group to impact their classrooms. The big question is how do you move beyond those converted communities and get the larger community engaged in demanding it? That’s what we need right now. We need larger communities demanding it for their children and their schools in an authentic real way.

“So many educators in urban settings regard this work as esoteric or enrichment. How do you start from that perspective?”

Where we are, you have to work with the willing : networks, districts and charters who are willing to partner with you and can be an example to others. People need to be able to have some type of anchors and understand that they can do that too. I certainly felt in my fellowship that I was with these rock star educators who are trying to get kids to graduate high school. Who am I to say, By the way, you should also go global. I struggle with this. We have a problem here in the US, but in comparison to rural schools that meet under trees in the blistering sun, we also live an extraordinary opportunity. We can create a community in which people are engaging globally and that will help their local communities. That’s how I approach it with those folks: Problem-solving. For me, if you would weave that together with problem-solving and peace-building and race issues—that woven together often will resonate with the ed reform community. Not everyone, but enough entry points to move away from being the fringe in order to get a small place at the table. And we need those entry points right now.

“With Global Nomads group, you answered one of the fundamental questions about access to get youth in developing nations connected with their global peers. What student-led action are you seeing for youth on both sides of the experience as a result of their participation?”

All of our programs are project-based. So when you’re paired with a school, you have to identify a problem within your community that your going to help answer based on this program. We had a group in Pakistan focus on girls’ education and girls in their community not going to school. In the US, it was a recycling and environmental program for trash in their community. We work together and compare and contrast and offer ideas to each other. The results for the Pakistan students were that they actually did a community awareness about girls’ education, met with families of the girls, raised money and got scholarships for local schools to get the girls enrolled in schools. Just last week, a US school who is connected in Gaza actually planned a whole week(!!) to do a program around educating their community on Islam. The action was really inspired by the young people in the US hearing from their Palestinian counterparts on how their own stereotypes and stigmas impacted their community. That was a result of their programs.

Chris' One Good Question: How do I get global citizenship to be as important as trigonometry? How do I get the broader ed reform community engaged and demanding this?

Chris Plutte is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Global Nomads Group (GNG). Founded in 1998, GNG is an international non-profit whose mission is to foster dialogue and understanding among the world's youth. In 2008, Plutte worked overseas for Search for Common Ground (SFCG) as Chief of Party and Country Director for Rwanda. He opened and directed all of SFCG's programs in the country and oversaw cross border initiatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. During his two-years in the African Great Lakes region, Plutte introduced innovative programs for peace building using technology in the classroom and secured new funding for program growth and expansion. He rejoined GNG in 2010 as the Executive Director. Plutte received his B.A. in International Communications from the American University of Paris.

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.

2/16/16 2/16/16

One Good Question with Ejaj Ahmad: Why We Should Build Leadership Instead of Leaders.

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?”

Bangladesh became independent in 1971, and while the founding leaders were visionaries, I’m not sure they thought deeply about the kind of education that the next generation would need to take the country forward? That’s my gut feeling. Once you ask this One Good Question, you are forced to somehow link your input and process with the output that you’re seeking. As a country, we have not yet really explored the educational foundation that we need to put in place to create an inclusive and just society. I say this because we see it every day how the divided education system, namely English medium (British curriculum), Bangla medium (national curriculum) and Madrassa (Islamic studies curriculum), contributes to communal tension and violent politics. Young people from these divergent education streams grow up with differing values and ideologies and they rarely interact with people from other educational backgrounds. This is one of the root causes of many of the divisions we see in Bangladesh today. Moreover, the curriculum in school, college, and university relies primarily on rote learning which doesn’t foster creativity and critical thinking in students. As a result, most young people enter the job market with little prior training in problem solving.

At Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center, we aspire to see the next generation exhibit values of inclusiveness, tolerance, and compassion. We also want to see them develop strong critical thinking skills so that they can question deeply held values and assumptions. Therefore, our organization runs after-school leadership programs that unite high school, college, and university students from the three different educational systems and provide them problem solving, leadership, and communication skills and engage them in the community where they can translate their learning into action by designing and implementing service projects.

“You are committed to developing youth leadership and agency. Why does it matter?”

This question is powerful because more than 52 percent of Bangladesh’s population of 160 million is below the age of 25. Traditionally, we have always equated leadership with position. We use the word ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ interchangeably although intuitively we know that they are not the same. Leader is a person or a title, whereas leadership is an activity, which can be exercised from a position of authority or without a position of authority. Now imagine if every single young person perceived leadership as an activity and not as a position then the impact this shift in thinking can have in society. Young people don’t have titles and they don’t occupy public office. However, if they believe that they don’t need a title to exercise leadership and bring change then this sense of agency can have tremendous impact on society. We will no longer be waiting for elected officials to solve our problems; we can take ownership of our part of the problem and do our bit to make progress in our community.

Our youth leadership programs also take young people on a journey of self-exploration, which we also feel is critical for the world today. We need to help young people ask difficult questions, reconcile multiple identities and work across religious and cultural boundaries. This is especially relevant in today’s world where most of our conflicts happen due to differing values and identities. Yes, you are a Bangladeshi, or an Indian, or an American. But you are also a human being. What does it mean to be a human being in the 21st century? What are some of the values that we can all share across nationalities, cultures, and religions? I believe that good leadership education can make people curious and humble. If we can all learn to reframe our truths as assumptions and not hold a monopoly on what we believe to be true, I think we can do a better job of getting along with each other despite our differences.

Ejaj’s One Good Question: What values and habits from the past do you need to carry into the future? What values and habits were once useful but are no longer so? In other words, which part of our cultural DNA do we need to preserve and which part do we need to discard to create a better world, both for us and for the ones we love?

Ejaj Ahmad is an entrepreneur and an educator of leadership, who speaks and advises globally on leadership issues. He is the founder and president of Bangladesh Youth Leadership Center (BYLC), a nonprofit that aims to create a more inclusive, tolerant, and just society by training the next generation of home-grown leaders. Ejaj holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard University and a master’s of arts with honors in economics from St. Andrews University.

2/9/16 2/9/16

One Good Question with Tom Vander Ark: Can Design Thinking & Rethinking Scale Boost Ed Equity?

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?”

We’ve inherited a sedimentary system made up of a series of 100 years of laws and policies and practices that for us in the US are federal, state, and local. This is in contrast to an engineered system designed to produce a set of outcomes. So, that’s the first problem: our investments, speaking about our public education system writ large, is this product of a democratic process, and not a design system. It’s many and mixed intentions, it’s compromises both good and bad, it’s consequences both intended and unintended, working itself out over time.

The US has a number of anachronistic fixations with local control and reliable and valid assessments. This fixation has the advantage of vesting investments closest to the kids, but the disadvantage of it is linking it to community wealth. This is a great example of a well-intentioned design principle that has produced outrageous inequities in US education. Education funding and, to some extent, quality are now zip code specific because we vested power in local governments.When Arne Duncan announced his departure as Secretary of Education, I wrote a blog post suggesting that we mark that day as the end of standards based reform. From Dick Reilly to Arne Duncan, we had an unusual 20-year arc in the US, where federal government had unusually strong influence from a policy (NCLB) and investment standpoint (AARA, Race to the TOP). It was a great moment in US education that marked a national, bipartisan consensus for equity. As a country, we could no longer sit by and accept chronic failure for our nation’s children.

NCLB was designed as a framework for school accountability to make sure that every family had access to good educational options. In retrospect, almost everyone agrees that the steps and measures used were flawed, but if we had used an iterative development process -- kept what was good and fixed the obvious problem -- the country would be in a better place. One of the problems with NCLB, was that when faced with a choice between measuring proficiency or measuring growth, we latched on to proficiency because it was easy to measure with valid assessments. We largely ignored growth in the law and now we can see the consequences of it. NCLB had a strong focus on getting underperforming kids to grade level which created two unintended consequences: discouraged schools from teaching students who were furthest behind (over age, undercredited), and weaker administrators fixated on the test. Rather than offering a rich, full, inspiring education, they offered test prep. Not only did that not produce lasting academic results for kids, it led to educators trying to game the test, with examples of cheating and embezzlement in the worst cases.

“In the past few years we’ve seen funders, media, and eventually schools rally around the next big tech innovation (1:1, MOOC, coding, etc). How much does the next big tool matter for lasting academic outcomes for all students?”

The reason that I’m so passionate about public education and investment in innovation is because I think that it’s the fastest path to quality and access to quality in the US and internationally. In my previous Ed Reformer blog, I wrote about education reform, making the system that we have better. Getting Smart reflects the new imperative, for every family and neighborhood around the world, to get smart fast. Innovation is critically important to improving access and quality. It’s why I’m really optimistic that things will get better, faster in the US and accelerate international change as well.In the US, innovation investment allows us a design opportunity. The design experience that I’m most passionate about, is people who are conceptualizing LX+IT (learner experience + integrated information technology). They’re not just developing new school models but also integrating information systems and student access devices.

We’re still in the early innings now of new tools and new schools. There are thousands of good new schools, but there are only dozens of schools that are doing this fundamental design work of reconceptualizing learning environments and learning sequences and the tools that go with it. This is the opportunity of our time: to find ways to scale both the work and the number of folks benefitting from it worldwide.Internationally, we have the first chance in history to offer every young person on the planet a great education. When we first started investing in scalable models in the US, funders and founders had grand ambitions that assumed linear replication. Over time, we’ve learned that scaling nationally or internationally is much harder than maintaining strong regional programs and outcomes. We’re starting to see a shift in replication and inspiration across geographies. Take Rocketship for example. They run an amazing model that everyone has flocked to see in the past few years. Among the visitors, were two young MBAs from Johannesburg, who took the lessons learned from Rocketship and created SPARK Schools ins Johannesburg. SPARK is as good a blended learning model as I’ve seen anywhere on the planet. Rocketship didn’t have to cross the ocean for that to happen and now students in South Africa are benefitting from a model that was created in the US.Summit Public Schools has taken a different approach to scaling ideas before scaling schools. This year they have about 19 school partners with their Basecamp model and next year it might be 10 times as many. They have created a powerful Personalized Learning Platform, partnered with Facebook and Stanford to figure out how to scale it broader use, and now team with schools across the country to implement this pedagogy into existing models. We hope that hundreds of schools benefit from their fundamental design work. Seeing these types of growth gives me a tremendous sense of optimism that things can get better worldwide faster than most people realize.

Tom’s One Good Question: Will we actually achieve equitable education access? I’m concerned that things will get better faster for young people who have engaged and supportive adults in their lives. I’m worried about young people that don’t have engaged parents/adults in their lives. Parents who get powerful learning are raising confident, equipped well-informed young people.

Tom Vander Ark is author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, Smart Cities That Work for Everyone: 7 Keys to Education & Employment and Smart Parents: Parenting for Powerful Learning. He is CEO of Getting Smart, a learning design firm and a partner in Learn Capital, an education venture capital firm. Previously he served as the first Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Tom served as a public school superintendent in Washington State and has extensive private sector experience including serving as a senior executive for a national public retail chain.

2/2/16 2/2/16

One Good Question with Susan Baragwanath: The Only Way to Break Cycle of Poverty.

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 have never been into deep thinking on education and I am not much of a philosopher. As a practitioner for 37 years I saw immense change from rote learning to the touch of an iPad. Show me a young person who knows the times tables and can write a sentence in the imperfect tense? But does it matter when they can use a calculator and Google ? As a teacher I have always felt it was my duty to challenge a student to believe that they could do anything they wanted. It was up to me to provide the mechanism so they could achieve to the best of their ability. But now, in the 21st century, what mechanism is it exactly?

There has been huge investment in technology in recent years. This has facilitated both teaching and learning in ways that we previously couldn’t imagine. The change is so dramatic that the traditional teacher now struggles to keep up. We used to joke we needed to be ‘a page ahead of the kids’. Now the joke is on us. Older teachers, with all their wisdom, are so many volumes behind social media, fantasy games, apps etc etc they will never catch up. I see colleagues still trying to put coins into parking meters while a kid is paying with his smartphone.

Many countries have national curriculums and the Education Ministries are given a sum which is then passed on down the line eventually ending up in a school for implementation. Those curriculums which were once worked on by very clever and sophisticated people are now struggling in this technological world. Change can be slow and national curriculums can easily end up a dinosaur in their relevance to the next generation. But yet the poor teacher has to implement it and will have a performance review based upon it and may be under the regime of merit pay.

Perhaps we should distinguish between policy and law. The law in most countries is that every child is entitled to basic formal education for a number of years. But government policies create inequities in implementation of those laws. It can also depend on who is in power at the time and if they allow policy to take over. Most countries manage to run reasonable schooling systems within the constraints of bureaucracies. But one terrible example of a country that doesn’t [run a reasonable schooling system] is Yemen. Pre-1994, they had a half decent school system left over from the British. But then the President of the day said that young people didn’t have to go to school anymore. In other words basic formal education was ‘off’. One of the results is that the Yemen is the most dangerous and shambolic country on earth. Young people who should have had the benefit of a basic formal education now appear on our TV screens wielding guns and chopping off peoples heads.If we don't believe in investment and follow the law and make sure our teachers are given every assistance possible to be up with the play in the digital world, then we should remember the example of extreme and utter chaos of the Yemen, because it can get that bad.

“We have so many marginalized youth (teen parents, adjudicated youth, etc) who need different supports to access mainstream culture in order to break the cycle of poverty. What role can education — in and out of school — play to support them?”

In my experience the only way to actually bring a marginalized young person out of the cycle of poverty they live in, is to provide wraparound services via the school. In one college where I worked (the poorest in NZ with the highest Pacifika population at the time) we tried all manner of things to improve educational achievement. Most of it didn’t work because students came to school hungry and there was no government sponsored food program. You cannot teach a hungry child. The family would often be in crisis and children were regularly bashed up by angry or drunk parents who had no work. Communicable diseases (yes, even in beautiful, peaceful New Zealand) was rife. Scabies, boils, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis – I saw it all. Try to teach a troubled child from that background the history of the Tudors. You may as well bark against thunder.

In this extreme case, food, pastoral care, health care and education in that order became a solution to the problem of marginalized youth. It sounds easy, but I received a letter from the Minister of Education forbidding (strong word that) me to pay for food out of the ‘education’ budget. I was publically scolded by officials from the Department of Health for ‘making a scene’ over a scabies outbreak affecting 70% of the 800 students as they said that ‘scabies didn’t happen in winter’. It most certainly did as I and other teachers got it. It became so bad (many students became infected and hospitalized) they considered calling in the military. The blind eye approach to ‘no scabies in winter’ cost the country buckets of money to get it under control. It was real head in the sand stuff. I solved the pastoral care problem by hiring retirees who were not brain dead at 65 but tired of classrooms full of kids who were too distressed to learn anything.

Eventually in my own little world I managed to shame, cajole, shout, stamp etc and I got all those things above that broke the cycle. It took me ten very long years and I probably neglected a lot of other things including my own children (who thankfully have grown up into amazing adults) but you need to ask the question – why did it have to be so difficult and take so long ?

Once you get over that, education is filling that enquiring mind. And it is a joy to see the fruits of your labour.

Susan’s One Good Question : I am still thinking about it!

Dr. Susan Baragwanath works as an independent consultant. She was a career secondary school teacher and administrator who taught internationally. Dr. Baragwanath is the founder of He Huarahi Tamariki Schools, Maori for ‘a chance for children’. Her program plan was to provide basic formal education and training for teen parents to graduate from high school. These include high quality pre-schools. The highly acclaimed schools were honored and became models, replicated in more than 50 locations around New Zealand.

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.

12/22/15 12/22/15

One Good Question with Zaki Hasan: Move Bangladesh from Fashion Economy to Thought Economy.

Zaki Hasan, (photo credit: Mr. Saikat Majumder)

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?”

If you talk about the philosophy of education, in Bangladesh, we’re still like 17th century Europe – an industrial country focused on economic equities : jobs, food, survival. We’re not talking about which common social values the world should have. After I earn the money in my skilled job, do I understand the value of human life in this world ? Unfortunately, what happens when there is not enough employment or job security, people turn to unethical means to survive. There must be some global values system that we start talking about in education. Will that not be the number one problem when we’re trying to kill each other not from lack of money but due to lack of accepting diversity ? Who will solve this ? The medical system will not. The political system will not. Only education can do this.Bangladesh is a young country. Since the independence, I broadly categorize the generations into three: the first generation questioned the injustice and owned the country’s independence, the second generation questioned autocracy and has started the journey of democracy 24 years back , and now the third generation is questioning our journey without a vision and we are heading to a bright and shiny future. This journey would only be successful when our children are equally ready through education to make the journey. This generation and generations after this need to understand the values that the previous generations had started building this country on i.e. justice and democracy, which must continue to improve in creating a society based on equity.We need a different education investment framework and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals give us a reasonable starting point. There are some missing focuses though. For example, in the next 15 years, when we talk about basic literacy, it has to take into account how differently we have started communicating by using technology than what it had been so far in the form of in person communication and written scripts. The long discussed issue of digital divide is becoming a much more complex issue in the coming days. For example, a person with post-graduation education from Bangladesh today might have less exposure to new technologies than a typical elementary school child in the US. There has to be more investment in education, especially in the methods of communication, to decrease such the global achievement gap. The developed countries still have a lot to improve, but they are still focused on their immediate crisis of economic survival than equally having social value creation and even equally important aspect of transforming our children into thought leaders. Least developed countries need a radical restructuring of education. We’ll stay stuck in factories and providing good clothes to wear, but developing countries will continue to rise in thought economy. We have to change the education system to allow people to think freely and creatively.

“In Bangladesh, you've been instrumental in growing global education programming. How effective are western innovations/models in improving education gains in Bangladesh? Are there other US education initiatives that would advance education access?”

My visits to public, community schools in US were bittersweet. Children there have an assurance that they can go to school in their area. Common Core State Standards had just been rolled out and it was wonderful to see that federal and state system have agreed to core common standards and still had the freedom to apply them in their own way. The most beautiful moments I had were observing student-teacher interactions. I visited Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy and, at first, I couldn’t understand the role of the teacher and the student. Sometimes the student was leading the class and the teacher was in the back of the room. The roles seemed interchangeable and that made me happy.Here, going to school is like winning a lottery ticket. Even if you get access to a school, you cannot assure that the quality is maintained. In the classroom, many teachers are not trying to make learning interesting, they are trying to ‘teach’ children instead of making children interested to ‘learn’. Education can be important to empower students to take control of the class. The classroom environment that I saw in the US is something that would be beautiful. No one wants to feel inferieor, not even your 3 year old child. I don’t know how it happened in the US and how it could happen in Bangladesh. If the US reached consensus on CCSS in 2012, maybe we can do it here by 2022. If we can shift to more inclusive pedagogy, especially children-focused learning, the next generation will believe that more is possible in all schools.

Zaki’s One Good Question : Bangladesh has made lots of progress to educate more people in our society, but we see that the system is not yet producing a respectful society. Education is about creating global peace. Are we matching what we really want to accomplish through education ? Are we missing the way that education should be defined?

Zaki Hasan is currently serving as the Executive Director (ED) of Underprivileged Children’s Educational Programs Bangladesh (UCEP).He has worked in various sub-sectors of education including Technical Education, Early Childhood Development, Primary Education, Secondary Education, Adult Education, Girls Education and ICT-aided Education. He has been member in various boards and committees on issues/organizations involved in education. He has numerous publications including editor of more than 20 children books. He was also the founding Country Director of Room to Read Bangladesh. He has worked for several other non-profit international organizations such as Save The Children, ActionAid, and Helen Keller Intl. Zaki Hasan is an Eisenhower Fellow.

12/15/15 12/15/15

One Good Question with Saku Tuominen: Next 100 Years of Finnish Education.

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?”

What education expenditures tell us about Finland : we invest significantly in education because everyone in Finland feels it’s important. However, the discussion we refuse to have is why ? What is the essence of education, the purpose of schools?In Finland, we love solid hard work, but we tend to be risk-averse in our work, reacting to crisis well, but not developing longer vision when systems function well. I feel that even our Prime Minister should take the opportunity of our new curriculum to be visionary, and ask four essential questions to inform how we redesign education in our country :

What are the skills kids should learn at school ?
How should they learn those skills ?
Who should be the people facilitating the learning process ? Is it teachers and teachers only ? What is the role of young people ? Old people ? Companies ? Parents ?
Where should the learning take place ? Should it be only in schools ? In the city ? In the parks ? In society ? Via internet platforms ?

Based on the answers to these questions, then we should ask what governments, companies, and cities are responsible for doing to recreate our education ecosystem.

“In your Scool project, you've identified the biggest need as helping schools change and providing platforms for change at the student, teacher, school, and system level. Why do you think it can be difficult for schools to adopt change? What are the early learnings about where change is most impactful — at the student, teacher, classroom, school, or system level?”

In order for human beings to change, they must first believe that change is possible. In this case, we must believe that we can change the way we educate and how our schools are structured. Then we have to have the courage, the mental toughness and resources to do the work of change.We ask ourselves how we can be certain that the new things we try in schools will work. Well, the honest answer is that we don’t yet know, but how can we be certain that the things we do in schools today are relevant from the perspective of 2030 ? We don´t know that either. The best way to encourage change is to redefine failure. We are trying new things and none of the outcomes are failure if we’re learning from the results. In 2016, Finland will launch a new curriculum that includes freedom for teachers and schools to define teaching, but there has been no discussion about the evaluation system. This ambiguity fosters a disincentive to actually try anything new. If schools or teachers take the freedom to teach curiosity and creativity, but then students are only measured on maths and physics, there’s an inherent tension.With the Scool project, our mission is to help schools change. Culturally, not enough Finns are risk-takers and entreprenuers. Although the new curriculum encourages more teacher freedom, not all teachers are likely to exercise it. We need to do a massive empowerment campaign for teachers, showing them that it’s great to take risks, to make « mistakes. » The HundrED project of Scool is designed to support teachers risk-taking by giving them the best platforms to share new ideas and best practices in classrooms just like theirs.During our site visits across Finland, we’ve been to schools that are doing amazing things with average budgets. In one school, a teacher refuses to give any grades to any students, students themselves are giving the grades. The biggest problem is that the best kids hesitate to give themselves the best grades that they deserve. In another school, the teachers no longer purchase educational materials, and instead, they are creating their own with students. Teachers help guide the content and the context for book-making about the topic of study. In some instances, they may even sell the books to others as resources. In a third school, students took responsibility for a bullying problem. The school decided to take teachers completely out of the equation and gave the responsibility of solving this problem to the oldest students in the primary school. As a result of the student-led interventions, all of the difficulties disappeared. This is the area that is getting me most excited. Because if you can tell these stories of success within the same regular conditions, it gives more credit for other schools to try something new. These three examples illustrate the essence of the future of schools : putting students at the center of problem-solving for their own learning.What’s the key commonality in these schools ? It’s like what happens in any great company—you have to have a great principal in place. One teacher can make changes in one class, but over time it becomes more complicated. It’s all about principal leadership, because they inspire teachers to try innovations, and then they celebrate and share the gains that teachers have made with the greater community.

Saku’s One Good Question : My question is an extremely boring one: What is the point of school ? Once we answer that, then we can move on to the question of how to educate all youth.

Saku Tuominen is co-founder and creative director of Idealist Group : Entrepreneur, innovator, creative director, executive producer, author, keynote speaker, curator, olive oil producer, right wing (in ice hockey). I dream and do. Idealist Group is a production company of ideas, a platform for everything I do. The mission of the company is to improve the world with bold ideas that are executed well. At the moment Idealist Group concentrates on three main areas: the future of education, office work and video.

12/1/15 12/1/15

One Good Question with Noelle Lim: What STEAM Could Mean for Malaysia.

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?”

In Malaysia, education takes the lion share in the government budget, so it's clear the government is fairly serious about it. One reason is cultural, our society prizes good education, and another is that Malaysia relies on foreign investments, so it's an open economy that needs to have a globally competent workforce.Parents are serious about education too. For example, in Malaysia and developed countries of Asia, it's a norm for parents with the means to pay for their child to attend supplementary classes conducted by private tutors. However, I think parents pay for these classes, not in hope their child will become the next Nobel Prize winners, but to pass the national exams with straight As. It's assumed that if you do this, you can perhaps win a scholarship or get a place in a good university, and you'll be set for life.

“During your Eisenhower Fellowship, you came to the States to learn more about education entrepreneurship. How will your school design reflect learning and innovation from both countries?”

The PISA rankings show that Malaysia's education system is in the bottom one third (yet neighbor Singapore is number one), and TIMSS show that Malaysia is below average international standards (it was above average in the 1990s). It appears to be an uphill task for Malaysia to catch up. I don't think we need to aspire to be number one, but aim to be in the top quartile. And I think we're capable of doing that because our society values education.Malaysian schools needs to upgrade the content of what they are teaching. For instance, an online, centralized database of teaching notes with suggested pedagogy and updates could help the schools.Secondly, the current method of teaching in Malaysia, and indeed still in many countries, is done in silo. We don't help students connect dots, and there's a push for STEM in Malaysia. I believe the focus has to shift to STEAM instead and subjects to be taught in an interdisciplinary way. Finding solutions to complex problems in the world requires a more comprehensive way of thinking, and a combination of science and arts/humanities. Innovations too, for example the iPad is a marriage of tech prowess and design.In the States, I visited two schools that are shifting from STEM to STEAM and incorporating more holistic offerings such as entrepreneurship and liberal arts : North Carolina Math & Science and Illinois Mathematics & Science Academy. I chose those schools because the Ministry of Education from Singapore and Chinese frequently visit them. These public schools have strong academic performance, particularly in STEM, and selective admissions. At the North Carolina campus, the chancellor Todd Roberts, has a degree in English and believes in a well-rounded education. Illinois Math & Science is developing an entrepreneurship thread. They are mobilizing their alumni base and drawing them in to mentor students and provide internships in start-ups in Chicago. These are gradual processes, to move towards STEAM instructional expectations.Two questions that I asked almost all schools I visited were « What is the purpose of a school? What is the purpose of education? » Apart from ensuring children are literate and know their sums, I believe it's about helping the student discover a range of possible interests and to help the child choose which path to pursue and to arm him with the relevant information. This means schools have to give the child opportunities to work on projects of personal interests like capstone projects. Once the child finds his interest, there is no looking back. Many successful people I've interviewed, say that what they do is their passion and luck of course helps. Either they found their passion by accident or were drawn to it by a mentor. I think schools can play a bigger role in helping children find their passion.I also believe schools should produce people who will develop the agency, aptitude and desire to want to solve complex problems. It's not just to pass exams, but to create the next generation of scientists, artists, makers, entrepreneurs, and leaders.

Noëlle’s One Good Question : How well does our education system engage students? Ideally, I would specify "boys" rather than just "students" because boys are falling behind in Malaysia. Girls outperform boys in Maths and Science unlike international norms. And in public universities, girls account for 70% of the intake. Our education blueprint has highlighted the risk of "lost boys". It appears our education system isn't really working out for boys. Given the patriarchal expectations within conservative communities, I wonder what impact this achievement gap will have on the next generation.

Noelle Lim is a presenter and producer with BFM 89.9, Malaysia’s only business radio station, and heads its education division, BFM Business School. She is interested in the intersection of media, education, and technology. During her Eisenhower Fellowship, she investigated innovations in high school curriculum and pedagogy to inform her plan to start a school and to launch a project that prepares and connects low-income students in Malaysia and Southeast Asia to the best schools in the US, UK and Australia.

11/19/15 11/19/15

Tensions in Formal vs. Informal Education Solutions.

During the break-out sessions at the GNF Women’s Forum, I participated in “Leaders as entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs as leaders” and “Innovations & challenges in education” and was pleasantly surprised to hear how the conversations blended so seamlessly. Entrepreneurs from around the globe raised questions about the role of formal education in preparing youth to lead. “How can we teach our students differently? How can they learn to harness the opportunities in their environment? How can they learn to be entrepreneurs? In Africa, we can’t create jobs for all of our people. I wish that there was a way for the schools to give them the skills to create jobs for themselves. How can we give skills to students to make them more self-sufficient?”One of our facilitators, Irina Anghel-Enescu (EF, Romania), is on the jury for Global Teacher Prize and asked us directly if we thought the entrepreneurial ecosystem would be improved if educators taught these skills explicitly. All of the finalists for last year’s prize shared an entrepreneurial spirit—they created new models, founded schools, and expanded education access. While they are all highly impactful teachers in their parts of the world, what set them apart was their entrepreneurial mindset and how they took the initiative to change outcomes for all of their students.

There is a growing debate about the role of formal education vs. informal education to prepare this generation for the future. When our conversation took an overly critical turn of formal education, Pilvi Torsti (EF, Finland) of Helsinki International Schools reminded us that these are not competitions. Me & My City is a Finnish example of how formal and informal education partner in the best interest of learning. We have to invest in both levels for deep national or systemic change. She shared that Finland’s decision to invest in education was made when it was a poor agrarian country. Pilvi encouraged us to invest in our human capital now. All sectors need to make conscious decisions to value formal education and integrate role models from other sectors into the sphere.Our panel during the “Innovation in education” session continued to explore this tension. Bernardine Vester (EF, New Zealand) gave an overview of how the marketization and commodification of education has impacted New Zealand and asked what the growing privatization of education means for equity and inclusion. Amr AlMadani (EF, Saudi Arabia) shared his start-up success for how deep, intentional partnership of informal education (robotics and STEM competitions) and formal education is reinvigorating student interest and parent support in his country. Maria Guajardo (Kellogg Fellow, Japan) brought in cross-cultural perspectives on leadership and women’s empowerment. Common threads across their diverse experiences: formal education alone does not change social practices, expectations, or real-world outcomes.

“What’s missing is not the tools. Everybody is watching, but nothing is changing. Passion and love of the game is missing.” – Amr AlMadani

In Saudi Arabia, education has a high cultural value and high government investment (25% of budget towards formal education), yet those two high-level alignments have not inspired passion-filled teaching and learning. Instead of blaming teachers, parents, or cultural practices, Amr decided to offer a solution to the passion question and inspire learning and positive parent participation.Maria inspired our group conversation with her One Good Question : As we become more globalized, how do we lead across differences? How does leadership look the same or different? For her, the question of intersection—where leadership development intersects with culture and tradition— is essential. Education has to be the vanguard for leadership change.Like in every group of education thought leaders, our participants challenged each other to consider different lenses:

On questions of feminization and devaluation of formal education: It’s the economy, stupid. How can we look at the curve of where education attainment and economics meet (personal earnings and GDP)?
On questions of the role of women in formal leadership spaces: The perception of being a leader is different in various cultural contexts. You can be a leader outside of the home and inside of the home.
On equality/inclusion: Can we explore this more? Urbanization and growth of the middle class are all supporting the privatization of education. Does it have to be a negative view or is it an opportunity for more people to come to education? Making the whole system public doesn’t seem realistic at this moment at all.
On informal education: Are there growing demands within our countries where privates are stepping in to fill the gaps? Particularly where the state has failed minority/marginalized populations? Are we seeing this growth and is it a long-term positive trend?
In NZ we moved from social democratic state to one more focused on markets. I have not given up on public education, which is why I’m working with a nonprofit group to insure that t the best teachers end up in the schools with the highest poverty needs. The rising social inequalities arise out of the growing tendency to commodify education and marketize it. It’s no use trying to hold back the tide. How do you use the process to ensure that those who have the least get the most potential? Their potential is our future. Most of the students in Auckland are no longer white and middle class. They’re brown. WE have to do something about it.

11/16/15 11/16/15

Developing Student Agency Improves Equity and Access.

In the summer of 2006, I moved my family from Brooklyn, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri, and began searching for the right learning community for my children and myself. On the heels of teaching in Middle Years Programme (MYP) and Diploma Programme (DP), I found that most urban schools were expecting minority students from low socio-economic communities to consume knowledge and not inform it. I started my own inquiry into school design. What if we offered the most engaging, academically rigorous education to an intentionally diverse community and made it free for all students? What if all children had access to the same education as children of world leaders? If they all learned to be bilingual and see the world through different eyes? If they saw themselves as change agents in their communities now instead of waiting for others or older versions of themselves to take action?When I founded St. Louis Language Immersion Schools (SLLIS), our vision was to create a total immersion, IB continuum school network of public schools. Our first three elementary schools, The Chinese School, The French School, and The Spanish School are authorized for the Primary Years Programme (PYP), and the secondary campus, The International School has begun their candidacy for MYP. All schools represent an intentional commitment to diversity: Title I, ethnic diversity that mirrors or exceeds that of our region, language and country of origin diversity, and family composition diversity.

We expect our school community to be one where students ask, “Why are we studying this? What does it have to do with my life? I’m seven, what can I do about it?”

And our teachers respond with relevant text-life connections and extend opportunities for age-appropriate action. Our grade two students are given their first action challenge as part of their unit on rights and privileges. Teachers ask what rights the students want to advocate for. Students identify rights, who they would need to lobby (siblings? classmates? teacher? parents? administrators?), and then embark on a campaign for change. When our second and third grade cohorts make sophisticated arguments for changing the uniform policy, adding multi-stream recycling, or using lockers, our adult community encourages them and engages in real-time conversations for change.

Look where SLLIS’s staff come from!

One of our first fifth grade exhibitions opened with a student from The Spanish School asking about fear. She began with a pie chart that revealed the most common fears: clowns, barking dogs, abandoned houses, and scary movies. Number one fear? Abandoned houses. Then she adeptly shifted to a map of GIS data depicting the number of abandoned houses in our city and shared her first conclusion: this means that people are afraid to visit my neighborhood, and residents, may be afraid to come home. She then linked the census track with the highest concentration of blighted property and correlated it to personal crime that revealed higher rates of crime in these neighborhoods as well. She continued with examples of the same phenomenon in other urban areas across the country. What can we do about it? Invest in neighborhoods with services—fill the vacant properties with schools, community centers, art projects, give people something to come home to, all in the name of reducing their fears about urban communities.

Yes! This was exactly the type of reflection and attention that will prepare our urban student population for greater access and attainment of post-secondary studies and career paths.

When we talk about the success of IB World Schools in improving excellence and equity for a diverse population, let’s remember that this goes beyond performance metrics. What are the ways in our schools and classrooms where low-income and/or minority students are expected to lead purposefully? Where they are confidently challenging the text, their peers, their teachers, themselves? Where they are marrying analysis and action? Let’s share the stories of students who are changing their world because of inquiry-based learning. The agency and advocacy that students develop in PYP schools is an essential step in bridging the equity gap.

11/10/15 11/10/15

One Good Question with Marcelo Knobel: General Studies Reform for Brazil's Universities.

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?”

Sometimes there is an investment but the priorities are completely wrong. In Brazil we have significant investments--- the government pays for K-12 and university education for all students -- , but the priorities are not leading us to strong education outcomes. Our system and needs are really complex, but there are two existing investments that could be better leveraged for change : value of the teacher as professional and scalability of non-governmental education organizations. Our teachers are underpaid and not well-prepared for the work, and society provides no incentive to be a professor, or positive value of the profession. To change that, for the next generation, it’s necessary to have a really smart and fast plan to change this situation. This is where scalability of non-governmental organizations matters. There are philanthropic and social investment efforts here, but they aren’t as well developed as in the US. It’s difficult to keep an ONG runnning. There are a few ONGs run by the civil society or wealthy families, but their impact is very small in comparison to the need. Fundaçao Lemann is making some interesting programs, but the number of people that these programs can impact is small. Brazil should have 1,000 organizations like this, but we maybe have only 10. Scaling the impact of our ONGs would reach a much broader population than we can do currently.

“In your upcoming book, you posit that Brazilian higher education would benefit from offering general Liberal Arts Colleges among existing post-secondary institutions. What void will Liberal Arts Colleges fill and how will they transform access and success for the greater population?”

My main concern is to advocate for the cause of General Education in university. In Brazil 43% of the population completes high school, but only 12% has a post-secondary degree[1], so we’re already dealing with an elite population. The benefits for these elite is very clear—better salaries, better jobs. In our university system, we currently have no general education or liberal arts course requirements. When a student tests to enter university, they are only applying to a specific career strand : medicine, education, chemistry, accounting, etc. It may seem like a minor detail but it’s not. Some careers are extremely difficult to access. At UNICAMP for example, less than 1% of applicants are accepted into the medical program. If you are accepted and after one month you don’t like this course of study, you have to drop-out of university and start all over for the next year. A general studies or liberal arts base would allow students to experiment and learn more about specific industries before making a commitment to one of them.In the real world when companies hire engineers, they provide a 6 months training period for the specific content in that position. The ideal candidates are excellent learners and problem-solvers first, then content experts. Ususally companies prefer to hire people who can think outside of the box and have certain soft skills that we don’t learn here in Brazil at all. General education has been in place in the US for years. In the global market, companies and countries like China, Singapore, and Hong Kong are in search of more well-rounded professionals who can deal with problems and learn how to solve them across multiple disciplines. If you’re learning only content in university, within 10 years your content may be outdated.ProFIS created at UNICAMP is a hybrid of my general education vision. This is a pilot that I would like to see the entire university adopt. We recruit the best students from the local public high school, who wouldn’t normally attend university. On average 80% of students are living in poverty and 90% are first generation in the university. We’re automatically increasing social inclusion by making a space for these students in university.Even when these students are the best in their schools, they still have strong gaps in their basic education. ProFIS anticipates and supports academic and socio-economic gaps with an army of staff and resources: the best professors in university volunteer to teach in ProFIS, Teaching Assistants provide extra tutoring, Social Workers help with problems at home—if students don’t show up for one week, we call the home to get them back, and we pay students a minimum wage to prevent them from dropping out because they need to earn money for their family. Fifty percent of our students continue on to traditional university studies.The problem is that ProFIS is only a tiny drop in the bucket. We can only admit 120 students per class (about 10% of applicants) but we have thousands who have this need. If this program could be replicated in 100 universities, it could start making a difference. We need advocacy with the university system, the legislature, and large employers. If employers are clamoring for this particular employee profile with a well-rounded education, then our country will make changes. Politicians need to advocate the change. Universities need to replicate. We also need to educate the general population to know that this can exist so that they can demand it. My upcoming book will show how this is possible and trending all over the world. Brazil is out of alignment with this trend and we should make a difference to catch up.Read more here about the ProFIS model and impact.

Marcelo's One Good Question: This is hard. My question. Of course I have children, is it possible for them to have a better future ? I am seeing here in Brazil we face immediate threats to global warming. Strong period of economic depression. Huge problem in education. Do they have a good future ? Thinking more globally, will they even have any place to go ?[1] from BRAZIL – Country Note – Education at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators

Marcelo Knobel is Director of the Brazilian National Nanotechnology Laboratory (LNNano), of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (University of Campinas, UNICAMP). From 2002 to 2006 he coordinated de Núcleo de Desenvolvimento da Criatividade (Creativity Development Center, NUDECRI), of UNICAMP and from 2006 to 2008 he was the Executive Director of the Science Museum, also at UNICAMP. He was the Vice-President for Undergraduate Programs from 2009 to 2013. He was a 2007 Eisenhower Fellow to the US taking a deeper look at scientific culture and the popularization of science via science museums.