How we can L.I.F.T. Education
Growing up I was always told, as you may have been told as well, that “Knowledge is Power.”
Before the internet, that was true. Attaining knowledge was a valuable use of one’s education because knowledge was a limited resource only available to those who attained a quality education.
But in the information age, technology has made knowledge a commodity.
That may sound aggressive, but think about it. You can find millions of articles and videos on any subject at any moment from anywhere with an internet connection — and technology can find and filter it better than we can. In fact, Artificial intelligence can now pass university entrance exams, which include handwriting 600-word essays, with higher scores than humans.
The fact is, we can’t compete with artificial intelligence on amassing knowledge, so we shouldn’t spend our most creative years of life with the fewest liabilities holding us back (our primary education years) trying to memorize information that we can find online in a manner of seconds. The workforce has already automated information-based tasks, so what future are we preparing students for by testing and celebrating their proficiency in remembering formulas and dates that an elite group of standardized test creators deem are important? Denouncing memorization is not the goal, things that are repeatedly useful will be repeatedly looked up, and as a matter of practicality will be naturally memorized. I also understand that there is a base of knowledge necessary to be an effective member of society — everyone should be able to read, for example.
But I believe our education system requires a foundational shift in perspective in order to transform it into an engaging and relevant preparation for the exponentially changing workforce of the future — a workforce that will consist of jobs for our current students in industries that don’t even exist yet.
I believe we can and we must L.I.F.T. education as a society in four main ways to truly create positive and lasting change, and I hope you’ll join the L.I.F.T. Education Movement after reading this by sharing your thoughts on Twitter with: #LIFTeducation
1. Changing how we Learn in education
Main Takeaway: Experience-based learning > Information-based learning
The majority of public education is based on the industrial age model of education focused on obedience, completion of repetitive tasks, and acquiring an equivalent base of knowledge (Seth Goden goes into insightful detail on this model in his TEDtalk HERE if you disagree or would like to learn more).
However, the workforce has since evolved; repetitive tasks are now automated, and soft skills are prioritized with the aim of solving unique challenges. Tony Wagner from the Harvard graduate school of education listed critical thinking and problem-solving as the top skills needed in the future, along with adaptability, initiative, analyzing information, and curiosity.
But don’t take Harvard’s word for it — LinkedIn aggregated the top skills requested in 2019 from millions of job postings on its platform, and creativity, persuasion, collaboration and adaptability are the top 4 soft skills.
But don’t take LinkedIn’s word for it either, I talk with students who complete my company’s student leadership 3-day intensive training that is totally focused on experiential, relevant problem solving and I have been told time and time again by students that they have never learned so much in such little time. The beauty of that statement is that no one on my team has a PhD in education, none of us have any secret knowledge that we impart — our team simply facilitates an environment for students to take on experiential, relevant problem-solving, and the students learn from and with each other in the process.
The concept that we retain and apply information more effectively through experiences than we do through information transfer is self-evident when each of us reflect back on the experiences that we remember from our primary education (and backed up by research).
To illustrate the point, though, imagine taking a young group of boys who had never heard a thing about the sport of baseball. If your goal was to try and instill a lifelong love of baseball in them, would you sit them down and force them to memorize the batting averages of all the greatest players and recite all the technicalities of baseball’s rules? Or, would you supply them with a glove, a bat, and a ball, and take them to a field to play?
If we want to develop a lifelong love of learning, we need our students to be able to experience learning, not just hear about it.
This begs the question, how do we take students to the metaphorical field of play to experience their education? That leads us to our next point.
2. Changing how we Instruct in education
Main Takeaway: Presenting problems with no answer > Presenting answers with no problem
Galileo once said that: “You can’t teach a man anything, you can only help him learn something for himself.” While that concept is often referenced and conceptually understood, practically speaking when it comes to being stuck in a room with 20–30 students every day, it may seem easier to control silence than it does to facilitate discussion.
However, coming into the classroom every day and presenting to a group of hormone raging students who all learn at different paces and learn best through different pedagogies, and with an average attention span of 8 seconds — which is indeed shorter than a goldfish — is a herculean task to say the least.
If we believe that we can teach students to love learning in the same manner we would teach kids to love baseball — through experience — we must provide compelling problems to solve, not facts and solutions with no meaningful relevance.
To be clear, a problem to solve isn’t a hypothetical word problem, a problem to solve is something like world hunger, cancer, pollution, etc. Our world is facing unprecedented problems, and young people are the most creative problem solvers because they don’t have a lifetime of bias’s built up by society and they aren’t afraid to ask seemingly simple questions the rest of us may feel ignorant to ask. As a teacher you don’t have to have the answer to the problem, you don’t even have to know as much about the problem as your students, you just have to facilitate an environment where students feel empowered to explore what could be, and foundational educational content will be covered by necessity as needed.
If we spend all of our time in education teaching students about the known world, when will they learn to dream about the unknown, about what can be?
If, on the other hand, we spend the majority of our time facilitating students’ exploration of the unknown, won’t the relevant parts of the known world come to light?
In solving world hunger, for instance, don’t you think math will come into play when addressing scalability of solutions? And what about history to understand past attempts to provide for the impoverished? Won’t science and geography be helpful in determining the safety of potential solutions when shipped across the world and stored in different climates for long periods of time? How about the relevance of engineering in maximizing limited space to ship solutions? Couldn’t language arts and graphic design come into play in how to effectively communicate and translate how to use a solution to people with different languages and levels of literacy? And can’t those subjects be addressed to a greater level of difficulty as students progress in their education?
Even if the problem isn’t solved by the end of the class, the end of the semester, or the end of the year, how much more engaged will students be in trying to make a real impact? How much more engaged will educators be to learn with their students instead of repeating the same content to a crowd of disengaged stares year after year? And how much more prepared will students be to not only understand what problems they’re passionate about solving, but also understand how to deal with the unknown, push through uncertainty, and create solutions?
And while there are numerous global issues to be addressed, we don’t have to go far to find local businesses and non-profits in need of support as well. What if schools prepared students for the world by exposing them to it on a daily basis? This doesn’t necessarily mean more field trips, but it could mean more guest speakers, it could mean more community partnerships, it could mean taking action to solve more real, local problems. What if teachers were less instructors and more community connectors and fellow explorers with students on a journey to innovation?
Transformation often takes place on the journey, not at the destination, but who’s to say students can’t arrive at destinations beyond our wildest imaginations? Why wouldn’t we let the most creative minds among us tackle the biggest problems we face?
The answer to that question is largely because in order to receive funding, schools have to perform to a specific standard, which brings us to our next point.
3. Changing how we Fund in education
Main Takeaway: Equal Funding > Equal Choice
The current education system in America is funded about 8% from the federal government, and the rest is funded by local taxes (mostly property taxes).
Conceptually, giving control of education to localities sounds great, but funding schools geographically creates a dangerous vicious cycle. When schools receive funding based on local taxes, children who live in wealthier areas go to schools that receive more funding, and vis versa. Hence, the children who are economically disadvantaged at home — meaning that they are likely privy to less nutritious food to help them focus, fewer extracurricular activities to help them gain experiences and develop, and less likely to experience the emotional support and availability of a stay at home parent — these students then go to schools that have less funding and fewer resources. Let’s look at 3 potential solutions:
- One common category of solutions to this inequity entails allowing students to choose which school to attend (public or private), and having the tax dollars that student’s family pays go to the school they choose to attend. This essentially encapsulates the movements of school choice, school vouchers, and Education Savings Accounts (ESA’s). The creation of competition for schools and the expansion of choice for families in poor school districts sounds great, but the challenge is that the students who take advantage of these programs and leave schools in the poor districts are normally the highest achieving and most motivated ones there, lowering the number of positive peer role models, and — since tax dollars follow the students who leave — the schools in poor districts become even less funded.
- An alternative to having school funding follow students to better-funded districts would be to nationally or per state mandate how much money each student warranted for a school, regardless of what district the school is in. The challenge here is that funding in this manner would either require an increase in taxes, or a redistribution of current local tax revenue. Of course, nobody wants to pay higher taxes, and, naturally, wealthy districts (where lawmakers normally live) wouldn’t support giving their local tax dollars to a state or federal education institution in order for that institution to redistribute less funding back to them.
- A third option would be to redraw school district lines to include wealthy and poor districts. Redistricting is common practice for political districts after each national census in order to account for the change in number of citizens to represent. When political district lines are redrawn, attorneys are on standby in an effort to avoid gerrymandering, the process of segregating voters with similar beliefs into the same district to make that district easier to win.
Financial gerrymandering has taken place in educational district line creation, but why can’t redistricting take place that promotes inter-district financial and ethnic diversity? The technology exists to do so, we just need the political motivation to do so.
Of course, redrawing district lines won’t perfectly balance the scales of education funding, as there are rural school districts that don’t have a diversity of local wealth levels to balance out, and that’s where state and federal money can come into play through existing programs such as Title 1 funding and equalization grants.
I’m not suggesting this is a perfect solution, and I don’t know the ideal number of per-student funding we should aim for, but I am confident that we can make commonsense progress by facilitating diversity with how we redraw district lines.
4. Changing how we Test in education
Main Takeaway: Impact based evaluations > Knowledge-based evaluations
We need a uniform, unbiased, and clearly identifiable standard to which everyone across an educational ecosystem can be compared. How else can students move across counties or states and experience consistency of expectations? Or if a student gets a job with a certain type of degree, there should be an expectation for an employer of what that graduate knows and with what concepts they are familiar.
Knowledge-based evaluations are easy to quantify and rank. You either know what year Columbus sailed the ocean blue or you don’t. That question can be a multiple-choice scantron bubble that a machine can quickly score and rank, but in the workforce are you accepted as an employee or as a contractor based on your ability to answer multiple-choice questions on a company and its history, or are you hired based on what you have accomplished? Obviously knowing some company context is helpful, but a company is more likely to hire someone who has made a positive impact at other organizations over someone who knows everything fact and figure about their organization.
If we believe in the first point addressed in this article — that education should be based on problem-solving and creating real impact through real experiences, we need to test students based on the quality of their experiences, measured in the impact they created from those experiences.
Grading impact from experiences can be a quantifiable, standard system because the problem-solving process can contain clear steps.
For example, the following rubric could be implemented on a scale of 1–10 for every project and every class for every year of a student’s academic career:
- Ability to identify and communicate the problem
- Ability to identify and communicate the quantifiable outcome
- Ability to identify and communicate solutions
- Ability to efficiently and effectively implement solutions
- Oral and written reflection on metrics accomplished and lessons learned, as well as implementation of those lessons in future projects
- Ability to do all of these things as a team
We don’t need standardized testing; you can’t summarize one’s character in any amount of carefully crafted questions. A grading system that tracks a students’ impact over the course of their academic career is a much better reflection of who they are.
Students’ impact can still be quantified on a scale of 1–10 for each category listed above and averaged over the course of their academic career, and number of people impacted, monetary value of impact, etc, can help provide a quantitative framework for college application and metrics of success for this new system.
If the workforce is more interested in impact over knowledge, though, let’s not send our students into the workforce without the opportunity to create an impact and determine what impact most impacts them.
Summary:
Changing education won’t be easy, but it is worth the challenge, for a strong education system is the foundation of our society’s ability to solve every other challenge we will face.
If you’re still reading this, you must have some level of interest in changing education, and it’s up to all of us make the change that we wish to see. So, take action by simply engaging in conversation on Twitter whether you agree or disagree with what you’ve read. Just be sure to use the hashtag #LIFTeducation.
