2015 11-04--learning for-the_future--saint_mary's_college[v2]
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This document summarizes a conversation about helping students develop skills for lifelong learning and employment. It discusses exposing students to habits of mind like critical thinking, research practices, and communication skills. It also suggests connecting students to professional networks through associations, conferences and using social media to build personal learning networks. The conversation focused on preparing students for an uncertain future by emphasizing adaptable skills over specific career preparation alone.
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2015 11-04--learning for-the_future--saint_mary's_college[v2]
- 3. A Conversation Facilitated by Paul Signorelli Writer/Trainer/Consultant Paul Signorelli & Associates paul@paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli., @trainersleaders Saint Mary’s College of California November 4, 2015, Moraga, CA Learning forthe Future: Habits of Mind and Teaching forLife Skills
- 4. Setting the Context: From Classroom…
- 6. A Different Approach to Working?
- 7. Pew on Millennials’ Approach to Learning Millennials “are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.” --Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next
- 8. Pew on Millennials’ Approach to Learning A portrait of a generation with a firm recognition of and commitment to the importance of education
- 9. Discussion #1 What have you read, seen, or heard from your graduated students about their learning at SMC that has helped them in the employment landscape they are encountering?
- 10. Discussion #1 What have you read, seen, or heard from your graduated students about their learning at SMC that has helped them in the employment landscape they are encountering? What are you reading, seeing, or hearing that makes you most concerned about your students’ lifelong employment landscape?
- 11. Predicting vs. Preparing forthe Future “Black Swan logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know.” --Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- 12. Shaping a Future …preparing for “a” future rather than “the” future…
- 14. Information Evaluation & Research Practice “Crap detection skills and the lack of them are a life-and-death matter for more people every day.” --Howard Rheingold, “Crap Detection 101”
- 15. Shared Inquiry
- 16. Written and Oral Communication
- 17. Discussion #2 How can we help our students prepare to match the skills we are teaching them in the classroom with what employers and customers/clients need?
- 39. Discussion #3 What steps can we take over the next few weeks/months/years to more effectively match what we are teaching with what our students need for long-term success?
- 40. A Visual Summary
- 41. A Visual Summary
- 42. A Visual Summary
- 43. A Visual Summary
- 44. A Visual Summary
- 45. A Visual Summary
- 46. A Visual Summary
- 47. Resources
- 48. Questions, Comments, and Next Steps
- 49. ForMore Information Paul Signorelli & Associates 1032 Irving St., #514 San Francisco, CA 94122 415.681.5224 paul@paulsignorelli.com http://paulsignorelli.com Twitter: @paulsignorelli, @trainersleaders http://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com
- 50. Credits & Acknowledgments (Images taken fromFlickr.comunless otherwise noted) Opening Screenshots of Student: From “A Vision of Students Today,” by Michael Wesch, posted on YouTube 10/12/2007 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o Collaborative Classroom: From DerekBruff’s photostream at http://tinyurl.com/pyd7rjt Collaborative Work Space (South of Market, San Francisco: Photo by Paul Signorelli Chessboard: Photo by Paul Signorelli New Media Consortium 2015 Summer Conference Black Swan Session: Photo by Paul Signorelli Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (Washington, D.C.): Photo by Paul Signorelli Black Swan Graphic: Detail (photograph by Paul Signorelli) of graphic facilitator Giselle Chow’s Black Swan design from the NMC Black Swan Ball (retreat) held near Austin, Texas in January 2015 Question Marks: From Valerie Everett’s photostreamat http://www.flickr.com/photos/valeriebb/3006348550/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Notes de l'éditeur
- Fair warning: Not all is what is seems to be in this screenshot from Michael Wesch’s wonderfully thought-provoking video “A Vision of Students Today,” which was first posted on YouTube in October 2007. What seems to be a hopeful statement from a student preparing to fully enter the world of life-long employment takes on an entirely different meaning when we put it back into its original context and show the second half of her statement… From “A Vision of Students Today,” Michael Wesch Posted on YouTube October 12, 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
- And there we have it: Acknowledgment, from some of our brightest learners, that change is going to continue to be a foundational element shaping the world they and we appear to be facing for the foreseeable future. From “A Vision of Students Today,” Michael Wesch Posted on YouTube October 12, 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o
- As we begin our exploration of what our students need to know about the world of work they are facing, it’s obviously a bit sobering to think about the learner that Michael Wesch captured in that video from 2007—before we fell into a game-changing recession. It raises a fundamental question: How do we prepare our learners (and ourselves) for a rapidly-changing world that appears to be as unpredictable as it could possibly be? It also provides some encouragement, since many of the situations and skills we are going to be discussing so clearly connect to what is already in place through Saint Mary’s College Habits of Mind approach.
- It’s obvious to many of us that the connection between learning methods and learning environments are critically important—just as the connection between workplace environments and what is produced within those environments is important. If we want students to develop the collaborative skills that serve them well here and in workplaces, we need to continue swapping out some of our lecture halls for learning environments that integrate collaboration into learning. The more we can do to support our students within learning environments that prepare them for what they will experience in the workplace, the easier it will be for them to make the transition from academic learning environments to workplace learning environments—particularly if we help them understand that learning doesn’t stop when employment begins. It’s also well worth noting that the more we can to explicitly help our students make connections between the Habits of Mind skills they develop here at St. Mary’s College and the use of those Habits of Mind skills in their workplaces, the easier it will be for them to hit the ground running when they make the transition from academia to work. What we hear employers saying they value: Creativity Adaptability/Flexibility Collaboration Skills Concrete/measurable results And that’s what we’re increasingly providing through the learning environments we create—like this one we are seeing on this slide.
- As we look at this collaborative workspace in a South of Market start-up business in San Francisco, it’s not hard to make the connection between what we’re working with in some academic settings and what many of our students will find upon graduating. They will be working in a world in which connections are valued (and valuable). They will hear—as we are telling them—that creativity is a driving force toward success. And they will soon be realizing that graduation doesn’t mean the completion of learning. As faculty, you need to foster that commitment to lifelong learning as a key survival skill as often and as effectively as you can.
- Let’s be explicit about what is happening around us: Work is fundamentally changing and, to be successful students have to look at their skill sets and workplace needs differently. We know students will change jobs several times during their careers, and they can expect to change careers a few times, as our student in the Michael Wesch video suggests. We need to prepare them to be ready and positioned to go where the work is at a moment’s notice—and that’s something that our youngest learners today seem to understand since that’s the landscape in which they are becoming adults. Again, that actually is great news for you as you help your students develop those Habits of Mind skills that will serve them in the work world we see evolving around us. This, of course, inspires another huge caveat: None of us can predict whether the changes we are currently seeing will remain constant throughout their lifetimes—or even what remains of ours. Accepting that as one possible future, however, does tend to push us toward being at the top of our game rather than waiting for the game to change out from under us and leaving us scrambling to find a new game. So, let’s look at how you, as teachers, can help students understand how the classroom skills they’ve learned translate into the flexibility and coping with constant change that they’ll be facing in the workplace. And let’s also see how prepared they already are to take advantage of that overall lesson.
- The opening lines of the executive summary to this 2010 report from the Pew Research Center suggest that Millennials—born after 1980 and currently 18 to 34 years old—“are on track to become the most educated generation in American history,” and the wonderfully nuanced report helps the rest of us understand why this may come to pass. This trend, according to those who produced Millennials, can easily be explained as one “driven largely by the demands of a modern knowledge-based economy, but most likely accelerated in recent years by the millions of 20-somethings enrolling in graduate schools, colleges or community colleges in part because they can’t find a job” (pp. 2-3 of the full report). Link to report: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf
- My own observations, posted shortly after the report was released: “What we’re seeing is a trainer-teacher-learner’s dream: a new group of employees and prospective employees attempting to enter the workforce with a firm recognition of and commitment to the importance of education; a highly educated and motivated group that remains optimistic in spite of some of the worst challenges to face young workers in decades; and a group that is going to keep the rest of us on our toes if we want to be able to serve them effectively to take advantage of all they appear to be willing to offer us and the organizations we support. It looks as if we, too, have challenges to which we must rise.” Link to reflections posted on my blog: https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/pew-report-on-millennials-a-generation-of-learners/
- We’ve noted the changing landscape and the skills employers are looking for. However, I know that your primary goal in the classroom is to teach students to master a subject or body of knowledge using skills that produce specific learning outcomes: Critical thinking Collaboration skills Creativity Let’s begin adding the wisdom of the crowd in this room to the conversation: What have you read, seen, or heard from your graduated students about their learning at SMC that has helped them in the employment landscape they are encountering?
- A complementary question: What are you reading, seeing, or hearing that makes you most concerned about your students’ lifelong employment landscape?
- As we talk about the rapidly-evolving workplaces our students are going to face sooner than later, we also need to address an elephant in the room—or, in this case, a special type of swan. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2008) walks us through some very fertile fields and leads us to some interesting conclusions—not the least of which is the idea that we’re far worse at making accurate predictions than we care to admit: That’s clearly something well worth considering as we implicitly direct our teaching at the future we are predicting our students will encounter. Taleb, in his book, is extremely specific about what a Black Swan is in the world he is describing: “First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable” (pp. xvii-xviii). Within our context of questioning our ability to see what’s coming our way, Taleb inspires us to think about how we can prepare for what we can’t even begin to imagine—those “black swans” that change our world view (and sometimes our world) when they do appear. It can be as simple as the revelation, to a Dutch explorer arriving in Australia for the first time (in 1697), that not all swans are white—something he has to acknowledge when seeing black swans face to face. It can be much more devastating, as when it becomes obvious to all of us one morning that terrorists can hijack planes and ram them into buildings we never imagined would be subject to that sort of attack. One major takeaway, I would suggest, is that we need to be spending at least as much time developing skills that can carry us through the most unimaginable challenges possible as we spend trying to predict a future for which we can prepare. And yes, these are skills we can address; they are among the skills you are addressing through your day-to-day work here at Saint Mary’s College of California with your learners—our future workplace colleagues, our future collaborators in nurturing the communities of our dreams. Link to additional reflections on Black Swans: https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/nmc-black-swan-ball-2015-teaching-training-learning-birding/
- All of this makes me think of R. David Lankes, a deeply-engaging colleague from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Dave, as you might guess from the title of one of his most recent books, is not one to sit back on his laurels or tolerate complacency from the rest of us. He’s warm. He’s witty. He’s inspiring. And, most importantly, he cares. This paraphrase of a theme he revisits whenever asked to discuss “the future of libraries” seems, to me, to be great guidance within the context of the conversation we’re having today about higher education and what we are doing to help our students develop skills needed for lifelong success. While he is specifically talking about libraries, he could just as easily be talking about the larger Black Swan world our students are facing—one with plenty of unpredictable elements, yet one that we can help shape from a variety of possible futures rather than one (clearly non-existent) set-in-stone future. Dave reminds us that we’re all partners in attempting to work with whatever comes our way—that’s what Habits of Mind prepares our students to do. And in the process of collaborating with each other at that level, perhaps we can even take the small, individual steps that offer guidance and cause for optimism among those who not only are looking for guidance from us, but who are also looking to become our collaborators sooner than later. Let’s use the foundations provided by The Black Swan and the encouragement to “expect more” to see how SMC’s Habits of Mind can offer hope where so many others might find despair.
- Critical thinking, as we probably all recognize, is an invaluable tool within traditional settings as well as within situations where things are not quite what we expect them to be. In a Black Swan world, we stack the deck (or construct the chess board) in our favor through continually honing those all-important critical-thinking skills. And the best of our employers/clients will be quick to scoop up those with a commitment to developing those skills to the highest degree possible.
- One of my favorite quotes on the Internet comes in several variations, including the following: “The problem with Internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy.” --Abraham Lincoln, 1864 I would probably be even more impressed if the attribution included a notation indicating that Lincoln said this in 1867—but then again, I don’t always look for the subtle jab. And when we finish giggling over that quote about accuracy in Internet quotes, we recognize the deeper issue as one addressed through information evaluation and research practice. Howard Rheingold is among those who cleverly and forthrightly addresses the importance of first-rate information evaluation and research practices through what he calls “crap detection” in his book Netsmart and in a number of other articles and presentations—and, in the process, reminds us and our learners how important information evaluation and research skills remain in the contemporary workplace. Additional reflections on crap detection at https://buildingcreativebridges.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/learning-and-misinformation-management-etmooc-digital-literacy-crap-detection-and-librarians-alphabetizing-spice-racks/
- While this image captures colleagues at work in a conference session at the New Media Consortium 2015 Summer Conference, it reflects numerous interwoven aspects of our world of work and learning and play. Note that participants in this interactive learning session are: Learning with each other Engaged in face-to-face conversation supplemented with online interactions (they’re actually using a shared Google Doc to capture key elements of their conversations so they will have access to that collaboratively-created content later) As capable of interacting this way in a conference room setting as they would be in a classroom or a workplace meeting room or a community meeting room or…well, you get the point. This is easy to replicate if we put our minds to it—and, increasingly, we are. We can obviously draw this back to what you, as faculty, support through the learning outcomes you are developing in students: critical thinking, collaboration, communication skills, etc. They—and you—provide your students with workplace skills they will need to cope—and enjoy—the future they will actively help create.
- At a time when so many people (mistakenly, I believe) talk about the death of writing and bemoan what they perceive to be diminishing oral communication skills, I think it’s refreshing and inspiring to be reminded that nothing could be further from the truth. We still have our great orators, our great writers, our great presenters, our great entertainers—and the best of them work consistently to hone their written and oral communication skills in ways that serve them as well as those they serve. And let’s be honest: have any of us ever seen someone fired because they could write well or present ideas in ways that others could easily understand? (That’s different, of course, from being fired for writing something others didn’t want to read or effectively presenting ideas that people didn’t want to hear—something our learners must equally come to terms with.) The students we’re seeing in your classrooms—physical and virtual—are part of a tremendous continuum of what makes civilizations great—and the more we can encourage them to build upon traditions while taking advantage of newly-developed tools, the more we ourselves play key roles in contributing to the strength and vitality of that same continuum.
- Understanding how to collaborate and work with others, even using others as resources in problem-solving, is a key current skill I’ve heard you all identify as something that you teach in the classroom. The good news for us is that it is a skill employers are looking for. Do you, as teachers, draw a connection between the group work you assign to students and the skills they’ll need to work in groups in the workplace? Do you draw a connection between the research you ask them to do and the ability to find organizations and associations that might have expertise or knowledge they need as they approach changing workplace demands for skills and knowledge? Do you model, as members of professional associations, how you use them to help your own teaching, research, and careers? Let’s quickly—spending just a moment or two on each of the following social media tools—see how social media tools available to students support what we’re doing in our classrooms and what our students will be doing in their careers.
- An interesting resource obviously grows from the social networks we’ve been discussing: the personal learning networks that support lifelong learning. Our learners’ personal learning networks can be lifelong, ever-evolving sources of support, and components of those networks come from a variety of sources, including: Online, as in the case of #lrnchat, a weekly hour-long tweet chat comprised of trainer-teacher-learners working for numerous organizations as employees and/or consultants https://lrnchat.wordpress.com/
- Connectivist MOOCs (massive open online courses), such as the Educational Technology & Media MOOC (#etmooc), which evolved into a self-directed and self-sustaining community of learning that continues operating nearly three years after the course formally concluded and has an impact on how teacher-trainer-learners are doing their work in several countrieshttp://etmooc.org/sample-page/
- The people the learners are meeting now—faculty, co-learners, staff, and others https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/ These personal learning networks also continue to develop through the act of associating through associations and the learning opportunities they provide throughout our lives.
- It’s never too soon for you to be encouraging your students to begin looking at the professional associations that will be their lifeline to continuing education opportunities, to cherished colleagues, and to the profession—or professions—they ultimately choose.
- On a parallel track, those associations sponsor the professional meetings and conferences that keep us and our students fresh within the professions we have chosen.
- Conferences sometimes offer engagement opportunities through poster sessions.
- Some conferences encourage student participation by offering discounted rates to students.
- Some conferences also offer discounted rates to attendees who are willing to volunteer at those conferences.
- Students might also begin paving the way for successful entry into the professions of their choice by becoming presenters at conferences.
- As you have probably gathered throughout these discussions, this is hardly a new theme for me—or for any of us. Our world is full of surprises, and they just keep coming at us…including the idea that we may be overlooking a natural collaboration. While I recognize that, in academia, there is a great deal of skepticism about trainers, I also recognize that many trainers, once they have earned their degree (or degrees—they are lifelong learners too), lose sight of all that they can continue learning from academic colleagues. I would suggest to you that all of us need to continue learning with and from each other for a simple reason: Our collaboration would better serve our students throughout their working lives. Those of us involved in higher education need to be better about keeping up with what students encounter in workplace learning programs—we might pick up a few tips from them. And those in workplace learning and development need to be much more aware of how and why their incoming employees have thrived in academic settings—it make make them more effective in reaching learners they way they want to be reached. If we are not all designing, delivering, and facilitating learning opportunities that meet students’ needs when they are in academic as well as workplace settings, we are missing a magnificent opportunity to be partners/collaborators in the incredibly dynamic lifelong learning environment that is developing around us. And that would be a loss for all of us—particularly our students, as they seamlessly move back and forth between work and lifelong learning.
- One great resource for us is the New Media Consortium’s series of Horizon Reports, covering ed-tech developments in K-12, higher education, museums, libraries, and other settings; reading a variety of them help us see where our learners are at various stages in their lives so we can more effectively serve them during those all-too-brief periods of time we share with them. [http://www.nmc.org/nmc-horizon/] I would suggest to you, with equal passion, that if you’re not continually in touch with learners who have graduated from your college and with at least some of the employers who have been smart enough to incorporate those learners into their own workplaces, we’re all missing out on important opportunities—exactly the sort of opportunities we’re pursuing today through this set of discussions. We do have the opportunity to help shape the futures that are possible for our students—and for ourselves—regardless of whether those futures are completely predictable (which, we know, they are not) or whether they provide levels of continuity between what has existed and what is yet to come. With diligence, creativity, first-rate critical thinking skills, a commitment to share inquiry, excellent written and oral communication skills, and an ability to effectively engage in information evaluation and research practices, we are setting up our learners—and ourselves—for levels of success we can only begin to imagine.
- We have identified ways that the learning outcomes you are teaching within the classroom can be made more directly and explicitly connected in students’ minds and experience to what they need in the workplace. We started off by setting a bit of context, with the reminder that our learners are facing a rapidly-evolving workplace.
- We spent a little time exploring how our learning spaces and the very nature of work are continuing to evolve in complementary ways.
- We saw, from the Pew Research Center report, that our students recognize the importance of lifelong learning in the work world they are entering…
- …and how preparing for the “highly improbable” is just another challenge they will have to face.
- We explored ways that the core learning outcomes of critical thinking, collaboration, and communication will help our students in the workplace.
- We talked about how the Personal Learning Networks they begin developing now while at Saint Mary’s College will provide the foundations for valuable communities of learning that will serve them throughout their lives.
- And we saw, at nearly every step of the way, that flexible, creative, collaborative approaches to everything we do can help prepare us for much that remains for us to do. With our support, and their collaboration, we have the possibility of creating something much closer to the world of our dreams than any of us can even begin to imagine.