To provide a glimmer of hope that what is possible in our schools is actually possible, even probable, let us back go back twenty or thirty years ago and celebrate how far we have come as an industry. Let us be reminded how much better we are now at planning rigorous lessons, inspiring higher-order questions, and requiring a greater distribution of student responses.
This growth in instructional best practices is evident among our teachers, but also among our leaders. Our school principals and assistant principals are much better equipped today than ever before in observing teachers, providing meaningful feedback, reviewing academic data, and making instructional decisions around facilities, scheduling, hiring, and professional development. We have a long way to go (we always do), but don’t ever buy into the notion that we have not made some significant strides. That is why the industry may be ready to go all in.
As with all dramatic shifts in our schools, we cannot afford to tinker around the edges. We must drill deep into the core of our industry—teaching and learning. That must begin with a review of our current standards and curricula to ensure they are meeting the needs of our kids. The call for much broader twenty-first century skills has grown louder, though most schools have been slow to embed them in any meaningful way. Yes, the future demands that our students remain highly literate in reading and math, but are also competent in requisite career skills like flexibility and creativity.
Working with their business partners, district curriculum teams must agree on which of these new-century skills and competencies we want our students to master, and that work can begin right now. No matter what we decide, our curricula and lessons must keep pace with these changes.
Student work must become more personalized and outcomes must move beyond the current definition of achievement as those things measured on standardized assessments. In the new century, achievement will be characterized to a greater degree by the academic skills required to thrive in the real world, along with a blend of social constructs like pride, agility, and even dignity.
What Schools Could Be
It is not only accurate to say that our industry has evolved and improved over the past decades, it is also true that fresh thinking and broad strokes would not have been possible if not for that improvement. We were simply not ready twenty years ago to implement many of the new approaches being discussed, just as many of the ideas suggested today will be trumped by even more innovative solutions from our next-generation educators. What will not change is that our success in implementing more creative and systemic approaches will depend (as always) on the confidence and command of great leaders and (yes) in balance with state and national mandates that are ever-changing and unpredictable.
The good news is that the future of our industry has arrived fast under titles like “personalized learning,” “project-based learning,” “discovery learning,” and related concepts that we are all familiar with like “competency-based progression” and “culturally relevant pedagogy.” Whatever we name things in the future, our customers will demand immediate access to content and more control over their learning pathways and timelines. Our students and their parents will demand to be heard, to have a seat at the table, and they are not wrong. They will require of us a system that makes each child’s path unique within learning encounters that are dynamic and diverse.
If we can create such experiences in our schools, our leaders will no longer be fixated solely on pedantic tasks like getting kids to pass this class or that one and checking off graduation requirements. Instead, they will be lead learners of creative schools where all children meet minimum expectancies easily and where students arrive each day less focused on passing grades and more immersed in a marketplace of ideas, enterprise, and debate, where civility and citizenship are encouraged, and where struggle and resiliency are tested as a way of inspiring resourcefulness and even wisdom.
This yin and yang of hard and soft skills that our students must master requires us to review what we know about how children learn from decades of social science research in fields that range from child psychology to sociology and ecology. In education, that work cannot begin without a dedicated review of what we know from giants like Abraham Maslow (and others), who had it right all along in pushing our experiences beyond basic life skills toward the grander desires of self-actualization.
Whether we call this ultimate prize of the human condition “wisdom” or “enlightenment” or something else, our common desire to reach a deep level of understanding and consciousness is found within each of us. In the simplest of terms, this is where our schools and school systems have gone astray. This is where we have lost the soul of the system.
There are reports afoot that something is amiss. While students in the United States and around the world continue to get smarter with each generation based on intelligence (IQ) testing, the same trend is not found for things like creativity and ingenuity. In fact, a recent study of 300,000 scores from children on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) found that scores for American children increased each year (just like IQ) until about 1990. Since then, creativity scores have declined steadily. In a related finding, a poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as being the top leadership competency required for the next century (Po and Merryman 2010).
Engagement survey after engagement survey tells us that students are craving things like free expression, debate, discovery, and purpose (see National Center for Education Statistics). Interestingly, when our students report that they don’t find school relevant, it is not so much the practical application of the material they are talking about (like writing a resume). They are complaining about a lack of appreciation or social connection or even spiritual awakening.
We should all be reminded that our students are not coming to school only to learn facts and figures. Like the rest of us, they seek to be inspired. They come to us escaping the struggles of their families and neighborhoods, even among those students who live in relatively stable homes. They arrive most days searching for something much grander than we offer presently. Far too often, they graduate (or drop out) never having found it.
Students cannot always articulate what they feel, but they are trying to tell us that their interactions in school with our curriculum, materials, and lessons are too often rote and routine. They describe their discussions in school as disconnected and passionless. They find little alignment among the subjects we make them take and no pathway toward the wisdom and self-actualization that they seek.
This is why it is long past time for a dedicated repurposing of our curriculum. If such a thing were in place, our science teachers would not be concerned only with science. Subjects and lessons and standards would be overlapping and meaningful. Teachers would encourage student enterprise and community activism. Teachers too would find more meaning in their work, breathing energy and passion from their interactions with students and their colleagues.
What Students Can Be
No matter where we end, we must begin with an honest, unwavering belief that all children can learn at very, very high levels. No child is exempt from exceptionalism. What does this mean for us? What are the consequences at stake for our industry?
It means that many of the students who are underperforming in our schools are doing so because the systems we have established are not pushing them to greater heights. It means that some students are underperforming not because of something they have done (or not done), but because of what we have done in designing their schools, curriculum, and lessons.
For those who may liken these ideas to psychological gobbledygook, let us trot out a practical example at this time. Let us try to imagine what our schools would be like if they were not centered around distinct subjects but around lessons in literacy and numeracy that are connected to life skills like empathy and dignity or even social and economic issues like water quality or energy independence. How many windmills do we need for wind energy to be successful? Is there a cost in giving up that much land? What are the alternatives in broadening our energy landscape?
In fact, for many schools and districts, this type of work is not that far afield. We have tinkered with and tweaked ideas like this for years, though we have little to show for it. As for the traditionalists who say we that we must retain our distinct academic disciplines as we now have them, can we at least request that those disciplines be better aligned for students of the next century?
If Maslow were here, he would tell us that every human being can aspire to self-actualization (though it is rare to accomplish it) and that our studies should push us beyond things like safety and skill-building. In recording his observations, Maslow went so far as to study and name those who he believed reached the pinnacle of self-actualization during their lifetimes, including Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln. While most of us will never reach those levels of notoriety, our schools would be wise to consider how to establish systems that push students to loftier heights of academic confidence and personal clarity. In the final analysis, the question may not be whether our students can reach self-actualization, but whether our schools and systems can.
