Great, you may say. We came here to read about the future of education and you give us frameworks. One thing education is not short on is frameworks. There are frameworks to explain theories, pedagogies, competencies, outcomes and methodologies. There are even frameworks to explain frameworks. But when the OECD, The World Economic Forum and UNESCO all publish frameworks on the future of education, even the most framework-fatigued among us tend to stop and have a look.We are experiencing tremendous uncertainty right now, and the future seems anything but stable. The volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world ahead demands new solutions. Just seven pages into their recent report on "lost learning" from the COVID19 impact, the OECD's own report drops this particular bombshell:
"Results from OECD's PISA assessments show that there was no real overall improvement in the learning outcomes of students across OECD countries over the last two decades, with no pandemic, and despite many educational reforms and rising expenditure"
Learners have not necessarily "lost" learning during the pandemic. Learning happens all around us in myriad ways, and is not the sole province of schools and universities. What is perhaps true is that learners have lost progress towards outcomes which have already stagnated for 20 years regardless of circumstances.While grass roots learning theorists, agitators and thought leaders all clamor for change, two in five UK K-12 teachers say they will quit within a few years, and 55% of US College teachers this year reported seriously considering a change of career or early retirement. Much is changing bottom up through the relentless heroism of teachers and educators and a rising voice of the learner, but what about the view from the very top?We look at how the big three see education in the years ahead, and reflect on what that might mean for our learners in schools and universities.
The OECD's Future of Education and Skills 2030 initiative has come to a head with the dissemination of the Learning Compass. Why a compass? This is a nod to the need for learner agency and self-direction to navigate the challenges of the future. Truthfully, this is an encouraging start.They describe it as "aspirational", and aimed at individual and collective wellbeing. The OECD even acknowledge that this notion of wellbeing goes far beyond "the economic and the material". Are we moving towards ditching the pursuit of GDP in favor of Gross Domestic Happiness, as the Bhutanese have done for a long time? Time will tell.What stands out to us is that they say it is not framed by assessments and rubrics as it acknowledges learning can happen formally and informally anywhere and not just in school. They did just do a 150-page report about the huge extent to which learners "lost learning" by not being in school in 2020-2021, but hey.Let's give this one a chance. There is lots of good in here, even if it does fall short of addressing the wider systems of education that might support its integration. At least there is a focus on agency, wellbeing and crucially, wider community involvement. Have a look and see what you think.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3u1AL_aZjI&ab_channel=EduSkillsOECD
The fourth industrial revolution gets a section all to itself because, well, it is going to change absolutely everything. If education is preparing us for the world ahead and the professions we might follow, we cannot look at this without addressing the impending impact of technology.Technology has been changing our lives for years in numerous ways, but the pace is gathering. The WEF themselves tell us that the change will be exponential, fundamentally altering systems and governance the world over. Got your attention? It has certainly caught our imagination.The video below outlines 4.0 in more depth and detail, but with 50% of current jobs becoming automated by 2030, AI, VR, augmented reality and big data changing the way we learn and interact, education must be ready for this come what may. How does it effect education?
In a world of uncertainty, and where the jobs that will exist cannot currently be even imagined, we need to let go of our focus on knowledge and standardized testing. We need a focus on skills and competences and lifelong, liquid learning. Knowledge quickly becomes obsolete, but skills grow. Knowing something is great until it becomes useful, but knowing how to learn will serve you whatever comes around the corner.Any institution or organization that is not preparing learners in this way, creating space for learner-directed problem solvers and cognitively flexible adaptive thinkers, is not ready for the future. Dr John Baruch agrees, as he will tell you in this video about educating for the 4th industrial revolution.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l_THuN9QxE&ab_channel=TEDxTalks
UNESCO has a broader scope for the future of education, and a bolder one too. Full disclosure: the report will not be finished until November 2021, but we already know the parameters.The grammarians among us may have noted the plural use of "futures", and thought we had simply typed this pre-coffee. In fact, it is a deliberate acknowledgement that there are many possible futures as we enter uncertain waters.The age of the third industrial revolution did cause us a few small problems such as the wholesale destruction of our planet, and the idea that our education systems were basically factories to prepare learners for a future of contribution to the economy and the grand old GDP. Thanks.These times were, however, somewhat linear.
There was a vague sense of predictability. Governments fell, but others took their place. Economies collapsed, but bounced back. Not so with the next thirty years. The threat to our world through climate change is existential, and the changes through technology and shifting socio-political currents will need careful navigation.UNESCO has reached out broadly for evidence-based thinking on how we meet this world. And this means the whole world, rather than the privileged alone. They have asked the question "what do we want to become", and how learning can support that.In such pressing times we were disappointed to learn that the report's publication leads not directly to a global policy agenda but...a global debate! The policy comes after, and so we must remain patient. Take a look below at their vision. We admit, it gives us some sense of hope.https://youtu.be/7865y7hbehY
It is time for big ideas, but we also need action. At geNEOus (formerly NEO Academy) we talk every week to people in education all over the world, and we see such a push towards change from the bottom up. The view from the very top, it would appear, is beginning to swing around to agree with the changemakers and dreamers that advocate for a total transformation of education systems with great urgency. Companies are already on board, and have known for a long time that education needs a serious injection of the real world.In the middle, we have the policymakers at government level, and the heads of accreditation bodies. What must they think with change swirling all around them? When these scattered voices become a chorus, we may just find the harmony we seek. Will you add your voice to ours?
Rather than focusing on purpose at work, we have long tended to focus on function. This is simply illustrated in that oft-repeated question to children: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Do you remember being asked that question? Johnny wanted to become a vet because he loves animals, and Anja wanted to be an astronaut because her father found the idea horrifying. Johnny became a software engineer, and Anja makes jewelry in Bali and is studying to become a yoga teacher. That fixation with what we want to be is not much more than a way to create a funny memory. To laugh at having once wanted to become a professional wrestler when we ended up in financial accounting. The question itself might therefore be seen as harmless fun, but it does take the space of a much more important question: Who do you want to be?
If we take it as read that the jobs our young learners will end up doing are unlikely to even exist, yet then we can get down to the really important focus.
The more our schools and parents can support young people to find their Ikigai, and to feel supported in pursuing it, the more likely they are to figure out who they are at an age where their whole lives are ahead of them. This is absolutely not to say that their lives will be stress-free, but they will at least be more connected to heart and head, purpose, and passion.
Allowing learners to play, discover, fail, reflect, iterate, collaborate, test ideas, and truly grow, is the key to it all. This means a bottom-up model instead of top-down "tick these boxes and meet our outcomes" approaches, and things are shifting in that direction slowly but surely.
So what about those of us who are trying to work out our sense of purpose in our 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's? The generations that had to select subjects at school we had never even done, and study them for years with no idea how they could even be used? For those of us who never had anyone ask us "why", how do we begin to ask ourselves that question?
Discovering your core values has to come first. What is really important to you? From creativity to compassion, family to fairness, sorting through the values that you hold dear will be truly revealing.
There are a number of great ways to structure your reflection around this, and we like the step-by-step approach recommended in this Psychology Today article.
However, values are not static. As we encounter new experiences, we can grow through conflict, connection and collaboration. Our values can change with us, and so it is important to check in with ourselves every so often; especially following major life events or things that have impact on us from the external world, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Journaling can be one of the best ways to do this, and we find that the best way to avoid repeating the same patterns of thoughts and to find new revelations about ourselves is to journal from prompts written by someone else! The Daily Om's A year of journaling to uncover the authentic self is an example of a very effective approach.
Knowing yourself takes work, and listening to yourself takes practice. The allure of the job title that commands respect, the high salary that convinces us we can put up with things that don't feel right; it is easy to stray from what we instinctively know is the way forward.
Nobody wants to go through their professional life robotically, though many of us do. We might see "stability" in our job as at odds with the pursuit of something bigger than ourselves, but there is no reason not to have both. Sometimes, it is just a case of finding that perspective.
This could mean exploring the impact your work has on the people around you and the wider community. If and when you find a connection between that impact and your personal values, this can only be positive.
You do not have to be the Dalai Lama to make a difference. The supermarket cashier who values connection decides to smile and engage in conversation with customers; making all the difference to that one person who hasn't talked to anyone else that day.
Purpose, therefore, doesn't always show up in the job description. It can show up through mindful application of your own unique talents in support and service of your core values, and that can be anything from a flair for leadership to a simple authentic smile and sense of humour.
It is also important to mention here that sometimes work is a means to an end, and that end can therefore be where your sense of purpose lies. A construction worker that dislikes her work in the cold winter might only be able to volunteer at the after school club with local children because of the stability and regular hours her job affords her.
As those of us in the world of education know, however, there is only so long we can derive purpose from our contribution to people's lives, if we know there is a disconnect above us.
Humans are hard-wired to detect inauthenticity, and when we do, the reaction is visceral.
There is nothing more likely to disappoint and disconnect your team from the organizational culture, than to be inauthentic around values. Anyone can say they value something, and anyone can print those values on company stationery and the homepage of a website. Values, however, exist authentically in action. Every action must be consistent with those values, and when they are not, the false note will ring in the ears of the people who look to us for leadership. For an organization, that means making hard choices. Are you prepared to say no to business in defense of that inner voice which says "this is not who we are"? As employers, we also have a responsibility to help our team to find their purpose within the work they do. Transactional leaders with lofty speeches will not do the trick. Continuous and authentic communication and an evolving understanding of how we can all find meaning in the work we do is fundamental to a successful organization.
A question we often ask ourselves is this: how do we as adults live and work according to our values so that we lead by example for the next generation?
Brene Brown in her #daringclassroom initiative, reflects on the flip-side of this; namely-what happens when the strategy outranks the core values? She concludes that "if my work doesn't align with my values, I'm out of my integrity". It is as clear as that. Strategy follows values, and never the other way around.
By working with any school, college or university we can boost their enrollments, their engagement and their overall success. That, however, carries a weight of responsibility.
We believe passionately in an approach to education that truly prepares learners for the world of the future; innovative, learner-directed and purpose-driven. Our values of trust, integrity and creativity are at the heart of this.
That is where we find our purpose, in aligning ourselves with the institutions that share that vision. By helping them to grow and succeed, we support that vision with action.
This is not the easiest path, but it is the right one, and that will sustain us through whatever might be next around the corner. If you share that sense of purpose, and would like to connect with us, please reach out to start the conversation.
Is there anything more discussed in business schools (or on LinkedIn for that matter) than leadership? The research, the theories, the approaches, the language, the coaching practices; all of it seems to automatically equate leadership with the adult world.
But yet leadership, says Harvard, is something that can be developed from any age. As the traditional associations of leadership break up and broaden out to be far more inclusive, some schools and organizations are really supporting their learners to think about it in their early teens.
As education begins to move (slowly) out of the top-down industrialized model, and focus on empowering learner voice and choice, leadership development is a natural fit. So how does this look in practice? We feel that two particular approaches to leadership are most effective for K12 schools: values-based leadership and social leadership. So what is wrong with the way we do things now?
The way leadership has traditionally been approached for a long time now in schools, is simply to give learners more responsibility. This might begin with being class monitors at a young age, or being selected as organizers of a fund-raising event.
In high schools, learners might find themselves being invited to meetings of the school council, becoming class president, or perhaps a prefect. One thing that is noticeable in reading many of these role descriptions on school websites, however, is that the lists of responsibilities is not supported by and kind of mentoring or scaffolding to reflect and build competence in the leadership space.
Learners volunteer, or are voted into leadership positions. This naturally favors certain learners, for whom confidence, for example, is not in short supply. We are generalizing of course, but the point is that this approach to leadership is certainly not supporting young people to find out what is inside them and develop it. Instead, it identifies learners who fit certain criteria already and further validates those behaviors by conferring responsibility upon them.
There is a huge amount missing here, and more progressive approaches to leadership development are not focused on roles of responsibility. They are focused firstly on learning what is inside us and what we might have to offer the world, before we decide what to do with it.
Columba 1400 is an education charity working with Scottish schools for the last 20 years. Since day one, they have focused on "bringing out the greatness" inherent in each individual, by supporting them to discover their own values. They work with groups of around 15 learners each time; a diverse mixture of students, ranging from those who would readily volunteer for roles of responsibility, to those who would rarely speak up in class at all.
We have written about how central a role values play in everything we do at NEO Academy, and Columba 1400 are like-minded. Their own values of awareness, focus, integrity, creativity, perseverance, and service, form the core of the Young People's Leadership Academies they run on a remote Scottish island, and in the heart of local communities.
By supporting young people to develop an awareness of who they are, and what they want to offer, they can understand what it is they want to focus on. The Leadership Academy experience works its way through to the value of service, and this is where purpose connects to action. This, here, is the nexus of true leadership, for how can anyone give to others without knowing themselves first?
They return to the school community and are supported in partnership with the school to lead change within their community. This is not the tokenistic inclusion of "student voice" within the school leadership, but rather the learners themselves identifying where and how they feel they can best make a difference, and meeting that challenge head-on.
Reflection and collaborative practices are inbuilt so that self-awareness is developed in a way that will benefit these young people far beyond their school years. As Scotland is set to enshrine the UN convention on the Rights of the Child into law, the right to be heard, and to play a part in all matters affecting you as a young person, will settle the matter once and for all.
The society of the future is already here and desperately needs self-directed and purposeful young people to know where they can make an impact and who have the conviction to see it through and build something better. That can only ever come if you are first supported and given space to find out what lies inside you.
Social leadership is about putting your skills and knowledge into action to positively impact the community around you. Typical approaches to this form of leadership are in collaboratively identifying a need in the community around you, and working together to find a way to tackle it.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of focus is given to communication skills, as listening to others, building consensus and inspiring others to follow you is definitely going to require some rhetorical dexterity. Creativity is also a centerpiece of social leadership as you are generally involved in meeting complex challenges with a lot of moving parts.
But there's something else. Social leadership has a magic power, and that lies within the brain itself. It feels good to do good. Smile, and the world smiles with you. Yes, it is widely accepted that generosity and kindness produce a "helper's high" in the giver, as well as making the recipient feel pretty good too. Studies on the empathy-altruism quotient have concluded that helping others is positively associated with longevity and self-confidence.
This is why organizations like Entreamigos in Mexico provide young people from areas of multiple deprivation with social leadership training. Through sponsorship from a wide range of funders, young people can access mentoring and workshops (delivered by other social leaders) to build confidence and competence that turns into action. They are supported, and then support others in turn, so that the effect ripples outwards in their community.
The point here, and it is a crucial one, that for young people from challenging realities, rather than us finding ways to simply give support, we should go one step further. It is more effective to empower these young people to contribute to others. The sense of relevance and purpose, of achievement and belonging, of connection and contribution: we are hard-wired for this, and there is literally no downside.
There is always so much debate on what teenagers are "able" to do, and what they should be "allowed" to do. The furore over lowering the voting age to 16 has caused high blood pressure in a great many guardians of tradition. The question, however, is not what 16-year-olds are capable of organically, but rather who they might be given the space and support to flourish.
Is it that we remember ourselves at this age and project that construct onto the young people of today? Is it that we expect from them only what we ourselves might have experienced before the new age of technology or the progression in K12 education and social awareness?
The world is changing, and fast. Go to any learning environment where the learning is self-directed (or firmly learner-centered at the very least), and observe. Just listen to these young people at Learnlife in Barcelona, talking about their own learning processes with a greater awareness than many people their senior.
On climate change, social justice and education, we are not doing terribly well as adults. Let's admit that we need young people to show us the way forward; as yet unhindered by all of the cynicism and deeply engrained habits that we as adults must struggle to unlearn. When leadership opportunities are truly afforded to the next generation, and the torch is passed, they will not let us down. They are not too young, and they may yet remind us that we are not yet too old to change our own paths.
Since we wrote about adaptive learning and big data earlier in the week, we have had a few comments from our network telling us that they had never actually heard of adaptive learning before. Some had heard the name but didn't know how it worked or where it was used.
So we thought we would compile some videos that explore different aspects of the topic. There is an overlap here with Artificial Intelligence, which is another big topic in its own right, and we explore some aspects of that in our blog.
So let's get started with adaptive learning, and see what all the fuss is about.
NEO Academy Founder & CEO Alejandra Otero has been keenly interested in adaptive learning for a long time, and shares with us this video explanation of how it works. In this case, Alejandra has contextualized it within Google Education as an example, but it could be used within a number of bespoke and off-the-shelf applications.
Ok, so perhaps not "simple", but compared to the cross-institutional bespoke implementation options, software like dreambox is quite down to earth. We're using it here as a good example of how Alejandra's explanation above looks in practice.
Math is commonly cited as a "difficult" subject, whereas it's often the methodology of instruction that is the real issue. Adaptive learning is looking like a great solution to help personalize progress and support in an intelligent way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9aGYbsZEaI&ab_channel=DreamBoxLearning
Educause shares with us this interesting video, looking at adaptive learning from their point of view. Here we can see that it is not only about improving the learning experience, but also giving the institution insight into how they might better support learners in general. Retention is a huge issue in higher education, and it is hard to spot the signs of pre-attrition in learners in a high-enrollment class with hundreds of students.
Online learning is suddenly being taken extremely seriously by institutions all over the world. Some are struggling, by just trying to transplant traditional classroom instruction onto a Zoom meeting, and students will not put up with that for very long.
Those who are meeting the challenges of the post-Covid19 era with creative solutions might want to take a look at adaptive learning. Engagement online is not easy to maintain, and we know that letting go of the steering wheel and giving learners more control over what they do and when is the bare minimum standard we should aim for.
Adaptive learning in online learning is an elegant solution to the lack of personalization in lockstep online studies and gives learners a real boost by keeping content relevant and, critically, in their zone of proximal development. Here is how they do it at the University of Louisiana.
As we explored in our earlier article this week, adaptive learning can get pretty huge. The bespoke level software means a retraining of teaching staff to really work together with the data. In short, the teaching itself has to become adaptive, which really is a positive thing.
However, just as institutions are increasingly finding off-the-shelf LMS platforms to be pretty competitive these days in terms of their flexibility and constant evolution, ready-made adaptive learning platforms like Alta are gaining a lot of traction. After an initial plugging in of content, it is ready to go, and has a well-thought-out UX. This kind of solution will not give you the deeply rich data that adaptive learning is capable of, but more and more institutions are trying this out as a first step into a fully adaptive, big data environment.
We hope this was an enjoyable journey through the world of adaptive learning! At geNEOus (formerly NEO Academy) we are always looking for where the innovation is happening and where the conversation is heading, so if there is another area you would like us to explore, please do get in contact.
Our mission is to support and grow the success of institutions which are positively changing education, so let's keep the conversation going.
Big data and adaptive learning. Huge topics each in their own right, but combined they provide us with some exciting possibilities for the future of learning. We have alluded to all this in our article on AI in education, but there's a lot more digging to be done in such an important area.
First off, so that we are all on the same page, let's define adaptive learning (AL) as a tool or approach which "adapts to students’ proficiency levels with each interaction. Students don’t have to complete a formal assessment or diagnostic to get the instruction and practice they need — it’s provided just-in-time as students work to complete assignments" That's how Knewton puts it, and they are a company at the forefront. For those of us still getting familiar with it all, however, let's break down what AL actually does.
As a student works through the course, everything is measured by the AL tool or platform, and we mean everything. The time they take on one type of exercise versus another, the tools they use externally to solve problems, the bits they skip, and the bits they explore more deeply, the way they answer questions or approach tasks. All of this feeds back into a huge data pool that makes connections, detects patterns, and re-informs the algorithm so that future learning episodes are tailored to what the student might need most, and to how they prefer learning best.
That is where big data comes in. To build a model of student behavior like this, which not only reacts to you one step at a time but builds a picture and predicts future behaviors; that takes a lot of data.
Sounds good? Well quite possibly, but then, perhaps we have to ask ourselves a fundamental question: if we use big data to inform adaptive learning, what happens when we start changing ideas on what learning looks like to us? Is there a place for adaptive learning in a learner-directed model of education? We will come to that big question in part two of this article, but let's look first at how AL shows up in institutions.
You might already have guessed, but adaptive learning tools are not cheap. If we consider, however, that for courses such as an online business degree, AL can considerably cut down on the cost of real live humans to monitor learning progress and free them up for more strategic roles such as mentoring, rather than the constant correction of tasks.
These systems can be for whole institutions or even individual teachers, and off-the-shelf or hybrid. The hybrid models can be adjusted and adapted every semester to continuously improve. This is important, as a quick search of reviews for universities using adaptive learning, and you'll see hugely differing results. Some are loved, and some are...less loved shall we say. It can't be easy bringing AL to an institution, but there are good examples out there for us to learn from.
Brainquake produced an AL learning tool for mathematics, which reports great results in independent classroom studies. The tool is excellent at keeping students in their zone of proximal development: that is, "knowing" just when to push the complexity forward a bit, not too much that the lesson will be confusing, but enough to be new and motivating for the learner.
As a hybrid model, educators can customize tools like Brainquake. Whereas off-the-shelf tools might see an answer as "right" or "wrong", AL can be customized to recognize the part in the calculation or formula where things went off track and suggest the next learning opportunity that might address that.
This is just not something that can be done easily in a classroom or lecture theatre with 30-200 learners. This tool could be used by individual learners at home with data pooled collectively for evolution or implemented by individual teachers or institutions.
Big. That's the short answer. This is one of the main reasons why the uptake of AL is so slow by institutions; things get pretty complex when we are talking about human behavior, and machines can't do it all. Learning is not something you can just throw technology at.
Some things are more straightforward. A timestamp feature detects that a student is taking quite a long time to answer a question, and the platform offers supporting materials, prompts easier versions, or breaks it up into more manageable components. Trackers measure how long a student stays on task before watching "world's cutest puppies" videos for a welcome distraction, make assumptions about attention span, and offer more granular interventions next time. It might even offer a puppy meme as a reward for completion (that idea is copyright of NEO Academy). But what does a score on a test actually mean? What are the deeper conclusions about approaches to learning, learning behaviors, and task engagement that underpin the more simplistic data? That is when things get big. The algorithms which are used to build a learner profile of traits are hugely complex; not least because they will also feed into necessary UX improvements to make the learner experience better, and different iterations of content that the teaching staff have to figure out and produce. That gets fed in, and the data collection has to adapt to the new variables and, almost, start again. Our heads hurt just thinking about that. Perhaps it's time for those puppy videos. We'll see you in the next paragraph.
O.k. we're back. This is another big question in how AL actually works. Learning is not linear, and the way we measure it is anything but easy. AL can work really well with procedural knowledge in fields like engineering. Research has shown that AL used well in this area was "functionally acceptable and capable of representing an expert".
In other forms of learning, however, AL has work to do. Metacognitive learning, where learners are supported to become aware of what strategies are successful for them, is still complex even for the rich data modeling from the most sophisticated offerings out there. Learning to learn is something AL does every second, but recognizing and supporting that process in humans is not quite possible at present. Measuring "knowledge" and supporting its acquisition is something AL does great at. Measuring skills and competencies, less so, and measuring awareness of the learning process and effective strategies, there is much work to do.
If we are honest, it is tempting to conclude that AL has managed to be the perfect tool for the wrong age of education. If we were happy with the production line model where students memorize and repeat, declare knowledge without exploring how they actually acquired it, then AL would be the panacea and educators could shift to more targeted interventions, coaching and mentoring, researching and responding to the shifting data from the AL platform.
However, that is a lazy conclusion for one reason, in one word: adaptive. AL is just getting started, and there is huge potential for it to be as central to learning environments of the future as the blackboard and chalk were to the learning environments of yesterday. Check back in next week as we explore just what might lie ahead for AL in the future of education.
STEAM is still quite a recent development in education. Since the early 2000s, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths) has filtered into the education system in a great many countries, aiming to boost interest in professions that were likely to be in more demand in the future. Pretty quickly, it was noted that the creative element and the iterative approach were both missing, so Entrepreneurship was added in (sharing the "E" with Engineering) and the Arts completed what we now call STEAM.
But something else was happening. STEAM is not just science and engineering with the arts running along beside it, but rather an integral vehicle for what is sometimes called "21st-century skills". More than that, even, the STEAM approach is problem-based and project-based, and that naturally means that learners have to draw on a range of skills and knowledge across "subjects" to reach the desired outcome. Sometimes, that outcome is even open-ended, because STEAM is about the discovery and the learning journey, and not always the destination. That sounds a lot like the type of education that policymakers say "can't be done" on a mass scale. But like scientists with a capital "S" , STEAM initiatives are gathering a solid body of evidence to the contrary. So how are they doing it, and how might that affect the wider education system?
Most of us reading this article will have attended a school where different subjects were taught by different teachers in different rooms. Biology here, and English there, History down there, and business Studies up there. When pushing for traditional education systems to get rid of the idea of "subjects" and bring them together to be more like the real world, there is great resistance.
STEAM, however, has project-based learning at its core, and PBL invites everyone to the party. In one very STEAM example, young learners embarked on a project to build a steamship. They had to design it (art) calculate the understand the principles of how a steamship worked (engineering), source the right tools and materials (technology), calculate the heat it needed to produce (maths), calculate the costs to make versus what people might pay to own one (entrepreneurship and business) and present their findings to the class and parents (English, communication, presentation skills). Nobody said "ok stop science now. It's time for maths", because in the real world these fields are entirely interdependent.
The project is the focus and the problem has to be solved. As challenges present themselves, the learners turn to whichever areas of knowledge that can help them, and you can be sure that they will remember it far better if it is something they have already decided they need to know.
But not only is knowledge internalized in a deeper, more meaningful and connected way. Problems don't get solved with knowledge alone, and that's where skills come in. STEAM does skills like Celia Cruz does salsa music.
Let's get back to that steamship. It hasn't left yet. in fact, it's far from ready. Learners are sitting around the table comparing designs for it. Listening to each others' ideas, interjecting questions, preparing to let go of their own if another, better design is suggested.
Much of this takes support from the teacher or learning guide, but it's authentic communication development. Have you ever done a communication roleplay, or a case study? That is traditional education's best effort at authenticity. Nothing will ever come close to a real world problem. This steamship has to be designed well if it's going to work, and we are trying to be the team that wins the challenge, so let's figure it out.
The first iteration sinks. Back to the prototype, revise, review, redo, retest. Learning from setbacks is something you cannot "teach", but in these projects, learners will experience it first hand, and can be supported each day to reflect on how they felt, and what they learned from it.
Critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, giving and receiving feedback, conceptual learning and strong cross-disciplinary knowledge frameworks. All of this is in the STEAM DNA, if it is properly supported, and learners are given time and space to grow, discover and reflect. These skills are often "taught" as competencies tacked onto regular assessments. "We know that student A can think critically because they wrote X". We can do better, and STEAM is showing the world that it works.
The world around us is VUCA- volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Do we think we can prepare our learners for that world by creating artificial assessments, allegorical role play, written tests that try to evoke a display of critical thinking so the box can be ticked? The real world must be alive in education.
In this world, we need to know how to adapt, learn from errors, embrace adversity as part of the learning process, be resilient and aware of what we want and who we are. Generation X tends to figure that stuff out in their 40s, and suddenly change careers or move to Bali to go on a yoga retreat.
Imagine we could find out earlier, or at least be given the chance. The only way this will happen, is if we are supported to do it ourselves. Learner-directed education means a sense of agency that at least lets us step with some confidence into that bewildering world outside the school doors.
STEAM is not the solution to the existential crisis facing traditional education, but it is an important catalyst for change. For so many policymakers now, it is not possible to say "that just isn't practical and won't work in reality" when people can point to organizations like STEAM School and say "yes it does. It already is working".
As we discussed in our last #geNEOusChats episode, STEAM is the Trojan Horse; already inside the fortress of mainstream education, and bringing change from within. It's too late to lock the gates now. There's no going back. At geNEOus (formerly NEO Academy), we want to be part of this future of education, helping forward-thinking organizations thrive, and preparing learners for a world that just can't be found in a multiple-choice test.
