The Legendary Teacher of Silicon Valley

In my first post in this series I wrote about startups and how they’re shaping the future of work, thus becoming great training grounds for the skills that will be required to compete for careers at the companies of tomorrow.

In my second post in the series I explained how important it is to spark passion while building the soft and hard skills that will be needed later in life, at an early age. As Malcolm Gladwell says, outliers are so often given an early advantage. We need to give that advantage to everyone.

One important conclusion I have come to in working to inspire youth with education technology for a decade is that giving them age-appropriate “startup experiences” is an important way to teach soft and hard skills that will support any career path. This post is a case study in what it looks like to do that well.

21st Century Skills. It’s a term that, ironically, has come to feel old, even though it’s about the future. But let me be very clear: our ability to teach these skills to our youth will determine whether we succeed or fail as a nation and will shape the future of the world.

With manufacturing moving offshore, America’s rust belt has already declined into irrelevance. According to the Brookings Institution, more than 25% of jobs in the US are experiencing high levels of disruption due to automation - that’s 36 million jobs. What will we do about that?

New jobs must replace the jobs we are losing. What is the plan to prepare our youth for the jobs that require 21st Century skills? Right now I haven’t seen one. But there has to be a plan. Because what is at stake is whether we see swaths of the world descend into joblessness.

But there is hope.

I want to start with inspiration straight from the source: a school in the heart of Silicon Valley.

The Legendary Teacher of Silicon Valley

Esther Wojcicki is a bit of a Silicon Valley icon. She has so many stories of serendipity.

In 1972, a Stanford researcher put a marshmallow in front of four-year-old children to see if they could resist the temptation and delay gratification to earn another marshmallow. The now famous Marshmallow Test would eventually suggest an astonishing correlation between the child’s willpower at age four and his or her future success. The original experiment was conducted at Bing Nursery School at Stanford, where, it turns out, Esther’s daughter Susan was enrolled. Susan participated in the original experiment, and she was one the longest to wait.

In 1998, Susan bought a house in Menlo Park, CA. After a wedding and honeymoon, the newlyweds needed a little help with rent and offered the garage to two young guys studying at Stanford. Soon the garage was spilling over with servers and wires that were weaving webs around her house - the two students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were building the beginnings of Google.

But it isn’t the “small world” stories that made Esther the Legendary Teacher of Silicon Valley. As she puts it, “I’m just a teacher” - but of course, she is so much more. Her insights as a teacher are what I am most drawn to.

Turning off “Airplane Mode”

Esther started teaching journalism at Palo Alto High School in 1984. There were 19 students in her class. That first year, she saw all the ways the school system was completely broken. The kids were going through the motions, coming to class, listening passively and reading textbooks. Schools were preparing students for one goal: getting into college. Students learned to succeed by memorizing, following instructions and passing exams. The result was students who could ace standardized tests but who weren’t innovative and creative and prepared for real jobs.

She calls it “airplane mode.” So many schools in America have kids walk through metal detectors and sit in rows of small seats staring forward without interacting at all.

This is still happening today, despite the fact that employers are looking for creative employees, critical thinkers, good communicators, collaborators and independent learners. How can we teach these skills to our students?

The Media Startup Model

People learn by doing and by interacting. Esther asks, “Can you imagine learning to ride a bike just by watching someone else do it? Or how about learning to code by reading a book about it?” Einstein said that “Learning is an experience. Everything else is just information.” Esther describes that in the old lecture model, “students learn about required subjects instead of learning through interest-based learning or experience.” They need to learn through doing.

On the heels of her first year on the job, she decided that she had to either quit or throw away the textbook and risk being fired. She decided to do the latter (and avoided being fired), moving from “the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.” Nobody even noticed.

Well, not nobody. Her students were thriving. And three years later, her enrollment had tripled.

A few years later, Steve Jobs went to talk to her and interrogated her on her methodology. The following week, his daughter Lisa transferred to Palo Alto High and was sitting in Esther’s journalism class. Lisa went on to be an editor for Campanile, the prestigious school newspaper. Esther’s insights as a teacher eventually inspired Steve Jobs to turn to her for advice on his commencement speech. Esther was becoming legendary. Her model was getting attention.

Her idea is simple: provide students with a project that they can direct and let them do it. For Esther, the platform is the newspaper. She teaches her kids how to write for it, organize it, and publish it. She trusts that their interests back their skills, that they will pour their souls into the work because they care about the publication that they own.

So she leaves them to it.

In the process, they learn the skills that are necessary to succeed in the future: collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication (the “4Cs,'' she calls them). In her media and journalism program, students are entrepreneurs, journalists and publishers. They start magazines, newspapers, radio, television shows and websites. She says, “I don’t do anything other than teach the tools and provide support as needed. They do everything.”

There are effectively ten media programs (including magazines, podcasts, radio, and television) in the school, all run by students. The kids control every aspect of each publication, from writing and designing to selling advertisements and publishing. Her philosophy for the media program is that project-based, collaborative learning is the best way to prepare students for the challenges they'll face in the future, no matter their career. The world today requires all employees to have the 4Cs.

Esther talks about how schools need to go from looking like this:

To looking more like this:

What do good working teams in the real world look like? They often look like Esther’s classes. This is what a great working session in a startup looks like. This is what a group of high functioning adults leading each other through engaging projects together looks like. And this could be what the future of education looks like.

Today

Esther’s program is now the largest scholastic journalism program in the nation. It has 700-800 students, ten publications and four other teachers. In 2012, the city of Palo Alto supported a tax bond to build a 25,000 square foot Media Arts Center to create a huge home for the program. Esther is quick to say that she ran these classes in portables, basically trailers, for decades: "It is not the buildings that make the program, it is what is going on in those buildings that matters,” she said. “Anyone can do this anywhere - they just need to help kids take the leadership roles." Her classes have 60-80 students in them. It works because the students “are leading, working in teams, and doing the work.” Esther says, “I am facilitating the work, I am a coach on the side.”

Today, her own children stand as a testament to the power of raising kids with trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness. Her daughter Susan, the winner of the Marshmallow Test, is now the CEO of YouTube (perhaps there really is something to that Marshmallow Test). Another daughter, Janet, went on to be a Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF medical school, and her third daughter, Anne, is the co-founder and CEO of the DNA testing pioneer 23andMe. Esther recently wrote a book entitled How To Raise Successful People, to help parents and teachers everywhere in the world realize the power of project-based learning. She also co-founded a startup called Tract.app to help teachers everywhere implement project based, peer to peer learning around media. The world needs more platforms like this.

Conclusion

I recently saw Esther and she reminded me of the time that I flew down to Argentina to meet her along with a woman that I was interested in dating. Esther joked that she had to approve of Jenny. Jenny and I are now married. We were in Silicon Valley last week and had breakfast with Esther, this time with two children in tow. We spent the whole morning asking for parenting advice.

I pray, for my children, that I can absorb that advice. Both for raising them and for lessons that we can apply to scaling Esther’s model. Ultimately, our question is: how does one scale her philosophy of engaging youth in building real products as a way of teaching 21st Century skills? Startups for everyone! This is what I will explore in the posts ahead.