Advisor Spotlight: Louka Parry — Pt. 2
This is the second part of our talk with Learning Economy advisor Louka Parry. Read the first part of the interview here!
On Skills
Duncan: What do you think, as of right now, are some of the skills that could be most valuable to young folks?
Louka: Great question. In a sentence: it’s not about what you know anymore, it’s about what you do with what you know. It’s also about who you are as you use your skills in the world. The idea of having an ethical frame, rather than just “I’m gonna use my skills to make a whole bunch of money or to create a new product”. It’s also thinking about who I want to be. What kind of legacy do I want to have? It’s an ethical lens, a conscious lens for the things that I do in the world.
If we don’t consider that we’re all in this together, we can’t solve some of these significant global challenges that are symptoms of the models that have driven significant economic growth. So it’s about skills, dispositions, and knowledge as well. Those are the three, and that blend is what we need to be talking about in schools. Everyone knows that it’s just not about what you know anymore. Knowledge effectively has been fully outsourced to Google. One of the truly great questions to ask is a non Google-able question, a question that I can’t just get Google’s answer.
Additionally, there are the four C’s in education we talk about: communication, creativity, critical-thinking, and collaboration. You can have things like citizenship to that as well. Our democracy is being challenged now by big data and a pretty profound shift in the way democracy works ala Cambridge Analytica, with 45000 data points on on persuadable voters in the US. We need to be careful about how we design technology, not just how we use it, so these are the skills that we should be talking about. But it’s also about the disposition and the idea, “What does character in the 21st century look like?”
What does it mean to really consider character-education? The idea of truth and perseverance, empathy and perspective-taking. What connects us? It’s not just about valuing diversity but also about how are we the same, and how we can work together to overcome challenges.
On Social Emotional Learning
Duncan: In past calls, you’ve mentioned “social emotional learning” quite a lot. Tell me more about SEL.
Louka: SEL isn’t necessarily new, but what is new is the increasing momentum from all sectors of the economy and our society around this work. We like to say social emotional learning, but if I’m talking to business leaders I might say “soft skills”, if I’m talking to politicians I might say “21st century capability” or “skills for the new economy”, if I’m talking with UNICEF they’ll say “transversal skills”.
The point is all of these fields are connected. They do have different traditions but in many regards we’re talking about the same kind of skills here. Honing in on this focus I think is one way to correct the imbalance that we have had in traditional education about academics. “Academics” are what we’ve been measuring most, often because they’re easier to measure. Think about closed book exams? What are the facts that you need to remember, here are the facts, memorize them. Hash it out on the SAT, or whatever these standardized tests are that exist in most jurisdictions, but not all, around the world. Finland, for example is a pretty notable exception.
Basically, social emotional skills are a set of contracts for skills we could say are uniquely human. Things like creativity, things like critical thinking, like self-regulation and emotional regulation. How do I regulate my emotional state so that I’m not angry all the time? All of these things are important for us to be gritty, to persevere, to achieve our goals, to make sure we can live in harmony with others. School ultimately is where you learn to come together as a community of strangers.
The way we can focus and correct that imbalance on just the academic is by raising the profile and the importance of SEL. If we do that type of learning better, well guess what? The academics actually go up as well. This is counterintuitive. People think it’s either-or, but it’s actually integrated skills. If someone can regulate their emotional state better, they can persevere at tasks longer. They might be able to work longer on a particular assignment. If people can communicate better, they can collaborate in a team more effectively and that means they can achieve the outcomes of the project together. And so the idea of bringing these into the consciousness of educators, communities, and decision makers around the world is what the work of Karanga is about.
On Karanga
Louka: So Karanga emerged out of a Salzburg Global Seminar Series on SEL which has been going on for about three or four years. Salzburg Global Seminar is one of the stages to do intense intellectual work, and then get to know people in beautiful ways while hanging out. So that’s kind of the power of it. Bringing 60 people together that all have the same kind of passion and skill set, at the top of their game, can create powerful movements.
So we’re trying to create a global alliance for social emotional learning and life skills, and we want to do four things:
Number one is to advocate for this work. We know that there are people that are still not convinced that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence saying we should be doing these particular things.
Number two is to create a global, connected community. There is fantastic practice happening all over the world in lots of different languages. And yet it’s not well known, there’s no centralized database to know where the work is occurring, what it is and to scale it across borders in ways that connect the research community.
Number three is cutting-edge research. There are huge gaps in the research. A lot of research happened in North America, such as CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Fantastic work, twenty five years they’ve been working, in fact they kind of founded the term social emotional learning in the early days.
Number four is implementation support. It’s all well and good to have a chat. But how does that change behavior for educators, for learners, for leaders of companies and organizations that should care deeply about this? If you’re not enabling learning and social emotional capabilities, you’re not maximizing the human capital that you have in your organization, in your school, or society.
Karanga, it’s a pretty bold vision that we have. That every single learner on earth is equipped with the skills they need for learning and life. Funny enough life skills actually map back across to what the skills are for learning as well. That’s all we’re trying to do mate. Just a small little project.
Call to Action
Duncan: So how can I help implement social emotional learning in my life today?
Louka:
- Use the mood meter from from Yale’s Centre for Emotional Intelligence next time you are speaking with family, friends and colleagues.
- Undertake the Values in Action Survey to enable others to better understand the strengths in their character and bring this self-knowledge to their work and life.
- Be attuned to how people feel as this affects the quality of their thinking.
That’s all for this great interview with Louka! Beyond the included links, here are some great resources to learn more about SEL:
Karanga, the Global Alliance for Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills
Harvard Graduate School of Education Explore SEL
