What am I learning, again?
It’d help if you told me. It’d help if I knew.
Imagine if we lived in a world where the goal of life-long learning defined how we approach education. In this world we would care less about evaluating what we have learned and invest more in advancing our capacity to learn in the future. What if students got feedback on how they are learning not their recollection of course content. But this is a cheap shot right? We don’t need more questions that expose the failures of our current system…what we need is new ways of thinking about the challenges.
The importance we place on “life-long learning” and “learning on the fly” reflect the landscape we live in. Where change is rapid and people expect to regularly change not just their jobs but their careers. But you know this narrative. So why — if we agree on this — do we still let students leave college with a cryptic transcript as a “receipt” of their education? Why do we implicitly reinforce the misconception that a GPA is an indicator of individual’s abilities? No one thinks these records of learning translate to much. Yet faced with no alternative representation we have students double down on chasing grades.
I am a researcher with a design background so the way I address these questions is to dive into project-driven inquiry. These speculative design projects are not iterations toward a solution, but a designers take on a interviewing experts and writing up reports. For the designer the experts are the students and faculty, and the interviews are material conversations grounded in specific situations. The projects are props for interrogating ideas. An invitation to suspend one’s disbelief and ignore pragmatic concerns. Unlike the think tank that analyzes the landscape and writes up a report these provocations do not seek to prescribe a solution— they prompt generative insights so we can collectively imagine a preferred future.
How might we create a learning culture that promotes a student’s capacity for future learning? This was the question that framed a project I collaborated on with Jackie Cooksey. The project was ambitious in intention yet humble in scope. We designed a pilot study to see how we might amplify a college student’s understanding of their 21st century skills. Skills they were quietly acquiring yet were never the subject of feedback, assessment or grades. We had students engage in a collaborative challenge that ran the full gamut of 21st century skills. The challenge began with the students analyzing signals of current mobile phone trends, synthesizing the group’s ideas, and proposing how to use the technology for good in the future. Lastly, they created a narrative and shot a video of their idea. All in 90 minutes. We tested their flexibility and tolerance of uncertainty by throwing in wild cards and only revealing the next instructions at 20 minute intervals. At the end we sat down with popcorn and laughed our way through a screening of their playful and occasionally insightful 2 minute videos.
Still, before leaving we had one more task. Each student had to fill out a 20 minute self-report assessing the development of the 21st century skills that were embodied in the challenge. This is when it got interesting. For sure generating ideas for complex problems to course correct the future in the collaborative exercise grants a student a sense of agency. But it was the self-reporting act of reflecting on the past year of learning that highlighted the hidden value of the pilot study.
“I now get what I have really been learning —
and I suddenly feel better about my student debt!”
When a student called this out in the debrief I remember knowing we were on to something. Our goal had been to prime students with a challenge before asking where students developed the skills they had drawn on to do the challenge. But now the students were telling us that their newfound insights invited them to rewrite the narrative of their learning. No small thing. Students described how the reporting inspired a reframing of lessons learned from courses they’d got poor grades in, or collaborations that had fallen over. A course a class had written off as a flop because the external partnership had stumbled was retrospectively honored as a great learning experience on collaboration. This self-reporting had gifted the students an intentional framework for making sense of the learning that had taken hold.
It took a brief 20 minutes of reflecting on and accounting past learning to see his or her education anew. The implications of this seem huge. Think about it. Our self-report had unwittingly become a tool for helping students make sense of the oftentimes tacit knowing they will need access to in future situations. The meta review across the full spectrum of learning experiences (academic, co-curricular and in life) had mined an opportunity to amplify the students’ understanding of these hard-to-measure skills. If we could enhance a student’s ability to transfer knowing from one situation and apply it to another —then just maybe we could unlock the student’s lifelong capacity for future learning.
Our conclusion was that the study made a compelling argument for the ethical responsibility educational institutions have to surface the learning that runs between the lines of the transcript.
Jump forward five years and my focus is on records of learning. Finding new ways to visualize the learning that happens b’twixt and between the formal classes, the part time job and the co-curricular experiences. Forget records that privilege the classes we sit in on, the courses we submit assignments for, the credits we earn. Instead imagine a world where EdTech platforms illuminate our mindset for learning, the essential skills we practice and the habits we embody. Imagine a world where records of learning allow us to triangulate: the points of connection between informal and formal learning; the layers of understanding from intellectual to embodied; and the halo effect of core experiences. We don’t have to accept a probable future of more tracking, more accountability. We owe it to the learner in all of us to dream of the possibilities animated by a more preferable future.
For long after we’ve forgotten the professor’s or the course’s name we continue to build on to the meta learning experiences that taught us how to learn. The term MESH — an acronym for Mindsets, Essential Skills and Habits— characterizes the interwoven nature of embodied learning. A cross between 21st century skills and social and emotional learning MESH is the other-knowing that helps us survive the sophomore seminar and go on to thrive professionally and personally. These are the attributes that teach us to navigate the uncertainty of not-yet-knowing where a project is going, to accept the vulnerability of mid-term presentations, to build the habit of meeting deadlines, to learn when to speak up and when to let others speak, and to get over the defensiveness and start learning from all the red ink on the final paper.
To authentically narrate students’ learning experiences we need to begin with inclusive ways to represent the learning ecosystem. No one believes an education is the sum of the courses, credits, and hours attended. So a vision to create agile systems that use feedback as data to support mindful learning, decision-making, and future action begins with a commitment to record the whole student’s learning experience. The promise of these responsive systems would be threefold. The gift for students will be quality formative feedback that informs future action. For institutions the value will be a 30,000 foot snapshot that integrates a student’s courses, co-curricular and prior learning to make visible the substance of an education. Lastly, employers will gain insight into the potential future learning capacity of employees.
These attributes of feedback, integration and future potential are key to helping the learning ecosystem make sense of the contribution of MESH knowing. We grasp how we easily learn humility and ownership on the sports field or the theater stage. But MESH knowing is not limited to the co-curricular space. MESH competencies come from more than an intellectual understanding of things — they are a byproduct of experiential learning. This practice-based, applied learning promotes a kind of embodied knowing that changes not so much what we understand but how we act in the world. A deeper understanding of how we foster this learning will allow us to value the high-impact curricular experience of a civic engagement course as equal to the volunteer project initiated by an intramural club.
Think of the study abroad student. There she is in Rome simultaneously practicing her Italian to enhance her academic skills and experiencing cultural difference to foster her general education. More than that she is practicing the habit of gratitude when feeling homesick and enhancing a mindset for empathy toward non-native speakers once back in college.
This is the character building stuff employers are trying to decode between the lines of a resume and graduates describe as the heart of a college education.
The thing is…her grade only reflects the fluency of her Italian.That right there is the problem.
For when we focus on the wrong measure we just might miss what is most important.
Collective wisdom, scientific research and our professional practices point to a shared belief that course credits as a representation of ‘time served / exams passed’ offer little insight into what real learning has taken place. Faculty, parents and graduates all like to anecdotally narrate a civic conception of higher education that is less about domain knowledge and more about a way of participating in the world. All those TED Talks by academic researchers confirm our respect for non-academic knowing by highlighting the correlation between our personal / professional success and our mindset, emotional dispositions and self-regulation. Those Google interviews that privilege how you learn on the fly or practice humility draw out the question of where to acquire these sought-after dispositions. Weave these views together and we begin to see that the researchers, university faculty and employers all recognize that the courses taken and grades given are by any reckoning not the whole picture.
The learning sciences are investing in developing tools for measuring these dispositions and HR departments are refining hypotheticals to test for the possession of these attributes. The paradox here, is that the academy is the domain that fails to pay attention to how we might explicitly foster, give feedback and make visible the acquisition of these skills. I could make an academic and economic case as to why universities should be leading this work. But for now let’s stick with the baseline ethical argument that we owe it to our students to give them more feedback on all that they are learning.
This summer I had an invitation to be experimenter-in-residence at the d.school by the amazing people who led out the design fiction project Stanford 2025. The provocative ideas embedded in the 2025 project were the perfect platform for exploring a meta-learning record that would flip the transcript to surface the deep learning behind a degree education. Our goal from the outset was to stitch together an institutional snapshot, with peer evaluations and self-reporting to offer evidence of a students growth over time. The various sections of the record use: tags from classes and co-curricular learning; formative feedback to map the evolution of learning styles; and evidence of the informal skill-building a student curated to support their formal classes. The approach was more deep data than big data. The goal was not to compare students to each other but to find the small data points that would offer the student formative feedback course-by-course while disclosing a pattern over the duration of a degree.
Julie Zhuo eloquent argument for how we might unpack someone’s future capacity for learning became a guiding principle for the project. Allowing us to focus on how the record of learning might advance a student’s capacity to be self-aware and proactive. Whether we want to prepare graduates for the challenge of retooling between jobs, being change-makers, or ethical citizens the combination of explicitly knowing your strengths and weaknesses and being prepared to seek out what you don’t know seems a good place to start. The ever-expanding ecosystem of online vendors is here to provide the content and technical knowledge for just-in-time learning —but we need higher education to foster in graduates the mindset, skills and habits needed to amplify the potential for future learning. To do this work they need information, they need feedback.
I get it. Creating new records of learning is only one small move in the cultural shifts needed to see real change in education. However records of learning framed toward informing future action could be a potent force for disrupting the status quo. Maybe if we start measuring and give feedback on the skills we need to learn, unlearn and relearn over a lifetime we might change what we teach?
The more we invest in authentic measures for whole student learning the greater the chance that the feedback can be used to focus attention, clarify expectations, and promote accountability. And not just for the student but for institutions of learning. In making visible the amorphous skills we highly value in life we just might gift to students more reason to highly value their education.
I am grateful to the Institute for Urban Education and The New School for the funding for the pilot study and to Riverdale Country School for the funding for the meta-record of learning. I am also indebted to the residency opportunity at the d.school at Stanford University and the collaborative lessons of working alongside Yi Zhang, Kelly Schmutte and Jessica Munro.
