By Meg Stowe, M.Ed., LL ’14, LL Scholar ‘16, Director of Innovation at Rocky Hill Country Day School (RI)
Several months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit households around the world, I wrote a blog post for educators about getting comfortable with ambiguity. The unintentional foreshadowing in the piece fell short of describing the shifts that would bring entire economies, communities, and industries to their knees, as has happened in recent weeks. At the time, the piece was simply about partnering with and leveraging the outside world to propel education toward a model that seemed to fit where global society, the circular economy, and sustainable ecosystems were headed. It suggested narrowing the gap between preparing students for the real-world and the actual real-world in order to tackle today’s adaptive challenges together; the perceived learners alongside the learned.
Since the progressive era, many esteemed scholars and practitioners have written about and/or generated significant momentum to this end. These people are my gurus. However, in light of the immediate professional transformation happening for teachers and learners due to COVID-19, many of my gurus’ noteworthy recommendations might now be considered micro-pivots within the educational establishment. Or conversely, they found themselves on the “bleeding edge,” perceived as too far out-of-the-box in the absence of any significant levers, so as to justify their adoption. Meaning, without a lever of epic proportions (eg: global health pandemic), novel education systems are to be feared or avoided, lest we risk failing an entire population and ultimately tomorrow’s workforce, intended to shepherd our generation into retirement and beyond, by doing what’s safe and familiar.
A design thinking prompt How might we… comes to mind when imagining the ramifications, revelations, and reimaginations that could emerge, or better yet, be generated from this current global inflection point. This point in time just might provide the necessary fuel to upend our experience, not only what it looks like to do school, but also what it means to participate in this educational enterprise. How might we come to design a new set of frameworks and contexts in which we learn, explore, test, create, and collaborate? Who might be available to participate in these new frameworks? Who gets to determine what and how learning happens? How can we habituate a re-learning and growth mindset over time when it is no longer thrust upon us? This time in history is hurling an opportunity at us to engage collectively in this dialogue, with perhaps the greatest shift in personal and professional status and newfound reality in the last few decades. The pain points and opportunities for each stakeholder (including higher ed) have never been more evident.
Our current educational model was born out of a directive to efficiently level up an entire young workforce during the industrial era, delivered by instructors with specific teaching expertise within several specific domains. This model required the teacher to be present from 8:00 – 3:00 and delivered synchronous content to a group of learners with broad interests and talents. These students would then emerge productive in order to participate in the industrial workplaces of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and have remained as such with the more recent aim of college matriculation. Since then, just think of the transformation to industry, the global circular economy, exponential technologies, AI and now quantum AI, transportation, cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, the birth of entirely new sectors, massive environmental challenges, vertical farming, robotics, medicine, data science, media communications, the birth of social media, fake news, and the list goes on and on.
I am a parent with a college student (now home) and a junior in high school whose response on recent college tours (yes, we got some in before the pandemic hit in early March) consisted of asking tour guides to define and describe the vast array of new majors and departments, largely unknown to high school students. Her frustration when asked what she wanted to study or what career she was planning for was sometimes a bit too evident. How could she know if she couldn’t connect her high school classes to these foreign descriptions of sectors and industries emerging rapidly? There is a huge chasm here full of opportunity.
The future of work is already here. That is, each new year brings a new top 10 list for new inventions that are changing the world of work through technology and enabling continuous learning and mass adoption of these new tools, techniques, and practices at alarming rates. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity, commonly known as VUCA, are the new norm, and this is, in fact, the future of all work.
So, as the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, we find ourselves with another lever with the power to change education and the workforce delivering it. New skills are being acquired everyday by educators and their students in their virtual classrooms. With the sudden shift to distance learning, an entire workforce, largely not professionally trained in designing online learning environments conducive to deep learning and requiring the mastery of tech tools, is participating in their own development to succeed in this new reality. They are seeking and learning new skills and applying them in novel conditions. They are growing their networks because they have to. To survive this, they need to reach out, join collaborative platforms (some for the first time), and are navigating online environments with new cohorts of people with different backgrounds and across the world. Although some may engage in this with the belief that it is temporary, there is no doubt most will uncover a few new passions and interests that will endure. With new skills comes new mindsets and thus, unlimited opportunities.
Opportunity is knocking loudly. Perhaps the shifts to distance learning will reinforce the importance of ‘deep learning’ over ‘content covered,’ which is an additive, if not exponential proposition. In times of crisis, clarity emerges about what is most important. Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs reminds us of the value of human connection and the critical need for safety, security, and belonging within our communities. In schools, if we do this right, students are more likely to achieve the top half of that famous pyramid: loving “others,” self esteem, and self-actualization, with capacity for an altruistic mindset and contribution to the greater good.
As a result of our current reality, educators are becoming better equipped to harness platforms, technologies, and mindsets to solve real-world challenges. Through social media, we have seen many people modeling this, stepping up to share their knowledge, expertise, and perspectives with students leveraging digital meetups and through human interest stories populating our news feeds. Teachers have taken on the role of convenor and digital curator of learning experiences using what’s available to them, connecting what they have access to at home to the outside world for their students. Their toolbox is growing. This shift in the role of educator ushers in the opportunity to make relevant the big ideas and enduring understandings necessary to thrive in a volatile and uncertain world.
How might education leaders mine this current situation for new opportunities while maintaining the very best practices known to generate deep and meaningful learning, human connection, and real-world application? How might we shift the framework of how we do school with this generation of teachers, now more connected and armed with tech tools and critical skills, to facilitate learning with anyone, at any time? How might we lean into the intellectual capital and resources of other sectors to enhance learning while solving real-world challenges? Might there be room for a shift in how and where students spend their time learning as well as doing? Lastly, how might we take this opportunity to explore what we teach, aligning critical knowledge and process skills to more closely reflect a world for which we are engaging and preparing the next generation? How might the education sector navigate the aftermath of a global pandemic to identify opportunity and initiate a transformation thoughtfully, yet boldly, in service of humanity and our planet?
Meg is the founder of Girls Leadership Collaborative, a leadership development organization serving and developing youth, teens, adults, families, and schools. In 2017, Meg became the Director of Innovation at Rocky Hill Country Day School (K-12,) working to build a culture of innovation in education. In addition, she works with and advises a collaborative community of edtech and social enterprise startup founders. Meg has served youth for 20+ years in a variety of capacities including classroom teacher in lower, middle, and upper schools; youth and service learning leader; boarding school dorm parent; advisor; athletic coach; social entrepreneur; trainer and speaker; and is the parent of two daughters, one in college and another, a junior in high school. A graduate of the ’14 Gardner Carney Leadership Institute’s Leadership Lab, and a visiting scholar at the 2016 gcLi Leadership Lab, Meg is passionate about developing others through a strengths-based approach. Making the latest research in leadership theories, gender studies, neurobiology, human behavior, and group formation theory accessible to all, she works to help others uncover passions, identify strengths, and initiate change in their communities, organizations and schools. She holds a Masters in Education from Lesley University in adolescent education, leadership, and integrated curriculum design. In her free time, Meg enjoys making connections among disparate ideas, working in the family vegetable garden, being on the ocean, reading, learning, cooking, and building things.