How to Design Schools to Grow Thriving Adults: A Provocation
This post was first published on Getting Smart, in the LearnerStudio-sponsored series on Horizon 3 learning.
You’re a mom. A dad. A grandparent or godparent or stepparent or close family friend. What do you want for the children you care about?
Are you truly excited that they get all ‘A’s’ and high scores on their SATs or ACTs? Is that the goal in life? Or do you want them to be able to make their way in the world, deal with ups and downs, pick themselves back up, and keep going forward in ways that help them and the world thrive?
As a mom, to the extent that I wanted the former, it was because I thought it would help with the latter. Good scores meant a good college which meant good opportunities which (hopefully) meant good life outcomes. Everything was a proxy for something else – for the next step in life.
But what about life itself?
My child is now 26. I look back and see the most important things are:
I look back on the education he received. What, if anything, helped contribute to positive answers to this list of questions? Sadly, only three experiences stand out:
Note that there’s no mention of any core classes. Any traditional subjects that are the bread and butter of school. English. History. Math. Science.
Rather, each of the meaningful experiences were about the real world: about learning through doing, and doing via learning – in relation to other humans.
Core Subjects vs. Core Processes
The core subjects or disciplines have been with us for a long time. Their roots lie in the classical and medieval Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), modified in the 18th and 19th centuries as the scientific and industrial revolutions, as well as the nation-state and empire, expanded the number of disciplines needed to define (and conquer) the world. In those centuries we added biology and chemistry, algebra and calculus, anthropology and sociology, and foreign languages to the domains of knowledge.
Content knowledge is important. There is no doubt about that. But if your goal is to become something other than a college professor, you want to learn to do things with your content knowledge. To do things, you don’t just need to know ‘the what’ (content) but also ‘the how’, or, in other words, application processes.
In the past century, in addition to accumulating content, the human species has been busy building, testing, defining, and iterating on processes – systematic sequences of actions or methods – so that we don’t start from scratch every time we want to accomplish something.
Most of us learned the scientific method in school. It’s the process scientists use to produce and test scientific knowledge. Like the core subjects, it has ancient roots, updated by the Classical Islamic World, and then later Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment thinkers, with parallels in many other cultures.
In modern times processes and methods have grown even more prevalent.
A decade ago I started The Incubator School, an entrepreneurship-themed school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It survived for four years before politics shut it down, despite it being one of the most diverse and highest-performing schools in the nation’s second-largest district. Back then, we began designing a school based on the clear evidence that kids want to learn in order to create value in the world, not to do well on middle school tests that led to high school tests that led to SATs and college tests and so on. Kids told us this. They were excited by learning when they could do things with it.
We tried to break out of the subjects/disciplines paradigm and look at what knowledge kids needed to make their way in the world. We came up with IncSchool Fundamentals, a processes map that emphasized something we called solutions thinking: human-centered design, engineering design, mathematical modeling, and lean startup processes or methodologies.
The table below outlines four key processes that can help young people create value in the real world. Through repeating these processes to solve different problems in different contexts requiring the acquisition of different content knowledge, kids start to feel competent. When faced with a new challenge, they have a repertoire of process tools in their toolbelt. They can use these processes to go from nothing to something because they’ve repeatedly applied them and they know how to learn what they don’t know (the content and context of the new situation they find themselves in).
Because these are the same basic processes adults are using, they can more easily grow into competent adults – rather than those interns you have to train from ground zero because although they know stuff, they don’t know how to do stuff.
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Scientific Method
A systematic way of testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions based on empirical evidence. It involves making observations, asking questions, forming hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results.
Engineering Design Process
A series of steps that engineers follow to create functional products and processes that meet specific criteria and constraints. It involves defining the problem, doing background research, specifying requirements, brainstorming solutions, developing prototypes, testing and evaluating, and communicating results.
Design Thinking Process
A human-centered approach to solving complex problems by understanding users’ needs, generating creative ideas, prototyping and testing solutions, and iterating based on feedback. It involves empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
Lean Startup (Entrepreneurship) Method
A method for developing new products or businesses by validating assumptions and learning from customers’ feedback. It involves creating a minimum viable product (MVP), measuring its performance, and pivoting or persevering based on the data.
Breaking Free of the Content-Based Organization of School
I spent some concentrated time with ChatGPT4o to model what this process focus could mean for rethinking the core content structure of schooling.
All too often competency-based schools rely on mapping key competencies (usually some variation of the Five Cs – Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Citizenship) onto project-based learning powered by some version of a design thinking process. I argue that we need more, more robust, and more rigorous processes – with supporting activities, competencies, and occupations mapped to them. The table below is a sketch of what this might look like.
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#innovation #K12 #schooldesign #leadership
CEO and Leader focusing on executive teams, strategy, systems change and business best practices in public education with a focus on student well-being and economic mobility.
4 周Julia Bamba
Partner, Learning & Experience at Transcend | Leadership Development, Learning Design, Program Management | I help drive leadership & growth using the science of adult learning and human-centered design
1 个月The competencies linked to career pathways in the crosswalk is magic!
Founding Partner Arc Capital Development
1 个月This is an excellent article. It is the meaningful experience about the real world that matter--coupled with learning through doing.
Loved this provocation and the real-world examples, Sujata Bhatt !
Zero To One GTM x Product | ex founder, JFF, Reforge, African Leadership Group, Wharton MBA dropout -> Penn GSE Professor | bit.ly/davidfuconsulting
1 个月Loved the most important things questions about being able to take care of himself, make decisions, get along, to do things and build happiness. Underneath those is a sense of identity, self awareness, and confidence. Loved the example experiences that stood out (even if sadly it was so few). Loved ‘core creation processes’ that cut across occupations, and example competencies. Science and the scientific method is a great example of a core subject that has become much more about knowledge and narrow problem solving than more broadly helping people understand and appreciate problem solving and the scientific method of experimentation in a meta sense. One question always is even if core subjects and core processes, it's a nuanced discussion (as you know) about parsing systems/process from content and knowledge, and what are the applications and situations that will empower students to really get dirty with trying out these core processes in formative ways, while also building the fundamental skills (e.g., math, literacy, studying, planning, writing) up to levels of competency that enable them to access more and more career possibilities and agency.