In a new video offered by RSA Animate, Matthew Taylor explores the meaning of 21st century enlightenment that is well worth 11 minutes and 10 seconds of your time.

RSA Animate – 21st century enlightenment

Specifically, what do the values that have shaped our world mean? Are they still working for us? Do they meet the challenges that we now face? Taylor argues that critical reflection on such matters is imperative if we are to continue to grow and thrive in a sustainable manner.

Empathic Capacity
What resonated most for me is Taylor’s observations on the importance of our empathic capacity. While the chain connecting inter-personal, communal and global empathy is complex, he suggests that “the stock of global empathy has to grow if we are to reach agreements which put the long-term needs of the whole planet and all of it’s people ahead of short-term national concerns.”

Clearly, if humanity is to thrive in a sustainable manner, we need to live differently in the 21st century. To live differently involves thinking and feeling differently. The powerful insights we are discovering about human nature, sustainability, civil society, inclusion, solidarity, often run counter to our intuition. This realization is what brought us to where we are today. But we are hardly finished.

Taylor suggests that “we are very, very bad at predicting what will make us happy and we are even bad at describing what made us happy in the past.” I have recently seen evidence of this in elementary school research on reflective thinking, wherein students are asked to write reflective essays and are unable to do so because (1) little time is afforded such a process; and (2) it isn’t being modeled very well (Beralt, 2010, under review).

Taylor theorizes that “21st century enlightenment should champion a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy that recognizes our frailties and limitations. This does not mean repudiating the rights of individuals. Nor does it mean to under estimate our unique ability to shape our own destinies.” Instead, Taylor asserts “it is only by understanding that our conscious thought is only part of what drives our behavior that we become better able to exercise self-control… and distinguish between our needs and appetites, and our amazing human potential from the hubris of individualism that is the basis of self aware autonomy.”

Taylor goes on to cite Robert Kegan‘s notion that “successfully functioning in society with its diverse values, traditions, and lifestyles, requires us to have a relationship with our own reactions rather than be captive of them.”

What a concept.

Yes We Can
Yes, we can expand empathy’s reach. Civil rights, social media have further enhanced our ability to put our selves in other  people’s shoes. Yet, has the process of widening human empathy stalled? Specifically, we should begin by exploring what enhances and diminishes our empathetic capacity.

If schools are to become intelligent communities, then we need to spend more time exploring how we come to know one another and how we can foster healthy public debate instead of unhealthy public disparagement.

The idea that “Education” (with a capital “E”) is the most valuable resource in our knowledge economy has become an airy cliche. Instead, Taylor argues that fostering empathic capacity is just as, if not more, important to “achieving a world of citizens at peace with each other and with themselves.”

This not to say a world of peaceful, empathic people will exist sans dilemma and contradiction. Instead, we as a human race should be willing to face these challenges and debate such substantive and ethical questions with knowledge and honor.

Remember: What we aim for can be as important to our well being as what we achieve.

The Role of Schools
How should schools focus on building empathic capacity of its students and citizenry? What role should teachers, administrators, citizens, parents, policy makers play in this discussion? What protocols should we adopt to foster and sustain such engagement?

This where I see the role of college’s of education leading. A college of education can do more than offer pedagogical blueprints. It can instead offer strategies, tactics, and forums for designing a sustainable future. Such a focus would require some retooling and rethinking but clearly the time to act is now.

Similarly, Taylor offers us a quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

As such, I encourage you to collect the colleagues around you that are passionate and committed to equity, learning, and social responsibility and begin mapping your ideas for developing a deeper empathic capacity within our students.

After all, if not you, then who?

My first response was a question: How do we monitor students taking tests here on campus?

This was not the answer my colleagues wanted to hear. Never mind that proctored exam halls still had cheating issues. Actually, the term security issues was how my esteemed colleagues dubbed the matter.

I was then asked to share what I knew about the latest digital lock-down systems which essentially shut off all other applications on a student’s computer except the exam software. These new software systems would record every key stroke, how long each student lingered on each question, as well as time stamp their entry and exit. There was even an option that required students to purchase a digital camera and have it turned on to record their every move (PCs were required by this system; Macs were verboten). The company offering the solution would manage this process or turn it over to us for a large, sumptuous fee.

I suggested to my colleagues that the real issue here was not a matter of security, that it was pedagogical issue. I suggested that the cheating that took place is a result of the way in which students’ knowledge was being examined.

At this point, you could hear a pin drop. Unfazed, I went on to show how research confirmed that most single-instance multiple choice exams did not lead to deeper student knowledge (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000) and how authentic assessments – cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) – were a much more robust measure of student learning.

After my brief explication, the elephant in the room introduced him/her self. Clearly, the faculty experiencing the security issue was not interested in authentic assessment. They were simply interested in assessing student work with maximum efficiency and at the lowest personal cost. This was/is a research university after all, where faculty are rewarded for their research abilities and not their teaching acumen. By inviting the distance learning expert, they were expecting a technical answer to what was perceived as a technical problem. Instead they got me – a guy with technical savvy and knowledge who is more interested in innovative and meaningful teaching practice.

Next!

So it was was with a certain level of dysphoria that I stumbled on this New York Times article titled To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery showcasing the ill effects of inauthentic student assessment. The comments offer some salvation and hope, yet overall the author of the article seems unfamiliar with the larger issue of pedagogically unsound assessment techniques practiced by many leading institutions across the U.S. While the article offers a report of the situation plaguing many higher education institutions, it fails to point to the real culprit: irresponsible assessment practice.

For educators
If you are comfortable assessing student work using multiple choice tests, comfortable in the belief that the tests you use accurately and meaningfully measure student knowledge and ability, then peace be with you. If you believe deep down that you are shirking your educational responsibility and are only creating more opportunities for students to cheat, leaving your class with (maybe) a superficial understanding of your content, then I suggest you investigate the topic of authentic assessment. Here, let me Google that for you: authentic assessment.

If your aim is merely to monitor performance then conventional, multiple choice testing is probably adequate. If your aim is to improve student performance, then the tests must be composed of exemplary tasks, criteria and standards.

As Grant Wiggins (1990) deftly notes, that while the scoring of standardized tests ” is not subject to significant error, the procedure by which items are chosen, and the manner in which norms or cut-scores are established is often quite subjective–and typically immune from public scrutiny and oversight.”

Clearly, genuine accountability does not circumvent human judgment. We regularly take steps to monitor and improve our ability to assess through training sessions, model performances, oversight policies, as well as through such basic procedures as “blind reviews” – as occurs regularly across professional, athletic, and artistic worlds in the assessment of performance.

Most importantly, authentic assessment provides parents and community members with “directly observable products and understandable evidence concerning their students’ performance; the quality of student work is more discernible to laypersons than when we must rely on translations of talk about stanines and renorming” (Wiggins, 1990).

In the end, what you assess is what you get. To improve student performance we must first acknowledge that essential intellectual abilities are not accurately reflected through conventional testing, and second, move toward more authentic systems of assessment that more meaningfully measure and represent student and teacher abilities.

References:
Darling-Hammond, L. & Snyder, J. (2000). Authentic assessment of teaching in context. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(5-6), 523-545.

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2).

Image: Cheating in Exam from crazy_foolish4u

RSA Animate – The Empathic Civilisation

Rifkin notes that the growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history. Thus, by extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, this “communication revolution” will provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand.

In what ways is this important for education?
Recognition that we are all in this together is a powerful concept–from cats and dogs, to children in Darfur, to bankers in Singapore. Recognition that each of our actions can have both a direct and indirect effect on each other is crucial in our flattened world. Empathy can help lower inhibitions and increase our sense of purpose as we seek to understand and feel what others are experiencing (emotive solidarity). The disadvantage of this approach in most school settings is that teaching students how to build empathy takes time and skill. I do not recall many opportunities for building empathetic skills in colleges of education, nor do I see it emphasized in any high stakes examinations. However, given the increased access to news and information and our increased ability to act and serve others in a crisis, empathy could be adopted within our current curricula frameworks as a form of social literacy–that is, the ability to read and understand people and situations.

Ultimately, learning how to empathize helps learners work more effectively with others and in teams. This in turn can lead to the development of such useful skills such as planning and organizing with others–a task that is essential in most social environments.

Reference:
Rifkin, J. (2010). The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” — Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models

After reading this quote from Shirky, I could not help but think of the current state of educational institutions across the U.S. The way most tax-based educational systems are constructed, there are limited ways in which these institutions can cut expenses below their revenue. Consequently, many educational institutions (read: schools, school districts, colleges) will fail and fail dramatically.

In Shirky’s analysis (based on the work of Joseph Tainter), complex societies and systems collapse because, “when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.” When schools and colleges are unable to provide the services, support, skill and content knowledge necessary to support a changing and evolving world, then these institutions will collapse.

The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. Schools and colleges need to recognize this shift and develop new ways of thinking how to engage and support learners and learning.

Given the communal nature of schools perhaps we can begin thinking of them as a community organization that supports learning from cradle to death. The school house can become a place that supports and nurtures socially responsible community values such as health, education, sustainable growth and development. School clinics can serve as public health clinics providing medical, psychological, and social services to the community. Schools can become a place generations can mix, learn, and support one another. In essence, why can’t a school be the place that serves the community and that the community serves in return?

If we do not take the time to re-imagine the role of schools in our society now, we will soon be left with nothing but the rubble of good intention. This process of recycling our schools into useful social institutions does not require replacing the professional administrators currently in office. Instead, it will require you and me and the people of our community. I am currently exploring sets of protocols that can provide a means to begin the conversation that in turn can lead to meaningful action.

As Shirky deftly points out, “it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” While this may appear as an over-simplification, until we get involved and work with these issues, we will never know. To paraphrase Shirky, when schools and educational institutions fail to respond to reduced economic circumstances and cannot create effective reform measures through orderly reflection and re-sizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. This is important for educational reformers to think about. Yet, more importantly, this is something we as members of our local communities must addresses today.

image: via csessums  http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2121/4506467325_36818326eb.jpg

Escape from IDEO on Vimeo.

Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!

Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.

Stay tuned!

The truth is, effective teaching is a complex art that requires the practitioner to be part subject matter expert, part psychologist, part instructional designer, part expert communicator, and part performance artist. While teaching and wisdom do seem to come more naturally to some than others, what is important to consider is that good teaching ultimately happens by design. The trouble is this design sense is often implicit in teachers. Many good teachers know how to effectively work with their students without being able to describe what it is that they are actually doing. This is turn sheds light on the trouble with many teacher education and staff development programs: teachers are not educated explicitly to be designers.

Thinking and acting like a designer involves more than the ability to teach students to work with graphing calculators. It requires an awareness of one’s belief systems, an awareness of the classroom culture, the social norms and subject matter norms. It involves an awareness of how instructional sequences impact learning and an awareness of the instructional tasks necessary that can lead to the transfer of knowledge and understanding on the part of students. It requires an understanding of assessment and the various ways one can assess student learning. Finally, it requires an understanding of the ways in which people learn.

Ultimately, Lemov’s taxonomy may be quite useful. From a design perspective, the taxonomy should not be considered a set of recipes for success, but instead they may be thought of as a way to help teachers select and apply the most substantive and useful procedural knowledge for specific tasks in their own learning ecologies. From a neuroscience perspective, it is important to consider that the taxonomy in and of itself can only be of limited use. Research has shown that the brain is good at interpreting information, not simply memorizing it. What might work best with such a taxonomy is an iterative cycle of learning, application experiences, and reflection repeated over an extended period of time to enhance long-term memory processes as well as the potential deepening of the practitioner’s understanding of how effective teaching and learning can be designed.

Teacher education will always present us with numerous challenges. Yet, it is important to remember how important this education process is. Teachers are the marrow of our society. They are responsible for inspiring and guiding learners and families that in turn act, guide, and inspire generation after generation. The more research and attention we can bring to this topic, the more we as a civilization will gain.

Reference:
Green, E. (2010, March 7). Can good teaching be learned? New York Times Magazine, pp 30-37, 44-46. Retieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

Image:

http://csessums.tumblr.com/post/308197313/school-greenbelt-maryland-1938-arthur-rothstein

Jenkins, et al. (2006) 21st Century Skills (pdf)

• Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Tony Wagner’s seven survival skills

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Collaboration and leading by influence
• Agility and adaptability
• Initiative and entrepreneurial-ism
• Effective oral and written communication
• Accessing and analyzing information
• Curiosity and imagination

As I look over these lists, I noticed one important skill was missing: empathy.

Empathy can be defined as “a sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself.” This is an important skill to posses as it permits us to work toward understanding perspectives and points of view different from our own. Empathy is an important social and emotional skill that requires us to practice listening, another important skill that can be easily overlooked as well. Empathy is also a function of cognitive maturity; that is, the ability to take another’s point of view requires a certain degree of cognitive complexity. In this sense, perhaps empathy falls under discernment wherein we learn how to detect feelings, ideas, sensations with our senses.

In look back over distance education literature, Holmberg (1996) noted what he called “the empathy approach.” Through empathy Holmberg suggests that “feelings of personal relations between student and teacher promote motivation, study pleasure and effectiveness” (Holmberg, 1996, p. 489). Such relations Holmberg insists involve a personal style of presentation by the teacher that engages students emotionally, asking them to share their personal reactions, views and experiences. Similarly, in Daniel Goleman‘s (1995) work on emotional intelligence, empathy is defined as a critical facet of social awareness and a key component to an overall feeling of success in life.

In light of such examinations, I feel that we should consider including empathy in our list of 21st century skills as a distinct category. Goleman’s (1995) research suggests that empathy is positively related to intrinsic motivation and effective problem-solving. The need for empathy is increasingly important in the workplace where teamwork and social competencies are a critical factor in success. Similarly, globalization, and the challenges associated with intercultural relationships, make empathy a important managerial competence.

References:
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam Books.

Holmberg, B. (1996). On the potential of distance education in the Age of Information Technology. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2(6): 484-491.

Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Wagner, T. (2009). The global achievement gap : why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need–and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Image: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/51/106509125_d686615fff_o.jpg