Author: Alan Jones

      I devoted the last four Blogs to a McKinsey study describing for trends in the private sector that will dramatically change the world of work. For each trend, I explained how institutional schooling fails to prepare young people for successfully working in occupations that are radically different than the ones their fathers and mothers worked in. A follow-up to the McKinsey study on the four trends in the private sector working world, was a second study describing the five shifts industry leaders must undergo to reimagine their role in the digital world they now work in. I will devote the next five Blogs to applying these private sector leadership shifts to how school leaders should think about and enact school environments that will best prepare young people for successful working in a digital world.

      The FIRST SHIFT school leaders must undertake is what they FOCUS ON. Presently, main and central offices are controlled by a managerial mindset that values certainty over uncertainty; standardization over novelty; and routinization over innovation. To best prepare out students for the digital world of work, schools’ leaders must move beyond a focus on implementation to a focus on impact. Instead of reliance on the certainties of managerial routines, school leaders become comfortable with a visionary mindset that focuses possibility. From a leadership perspective, this transformation requires the following elements:

• Aligning people with a clear and shared purpose and aspiration;
• Defining the value to be created for community members;
• Contributing positively to a wider society and the natural environment;
• Encouraging and empowering people in small self-regulating entrepreneurial teams;
• Fostering horizontal transparency and collaboration throughout the network and beyond.

“New rules of attraction, retention, and attrition”

   “Organizations are tailoring employee value propositions to individualized preferences in ways that can help close the gap between what today’s workers want and what companies need.”

      The media had devoted a lot of time and space to the impact of COVID on student learning. Not only are achievement scores at an all-time low, but, absenteeism is at an all-time high. School officialdom appears satisfied with all the blame for deterioration of learning in our schools on COVID. However, in previous blogs on trends in the workforce, I have described a school system, that for the last two decades at least, has continue to support school organizations and pedagogies—one size fits all— that not only is in opposition to the values expressed in their mission statements, but, runs counter to a younger generation of employees who value training, development, flexibility, autonomy and opportunities to make a difference: they just don’t want to make money just to make money—they want to make an impact. These values became the norm during COVID when corporations were forced into working conditions that valued autonomy and flexibility. This new generation of students in subtle ways is sending a message to institutional schooling, that like their private sector counterparts, what organization environments they are attracted to and will perform well in.

Trend #3:    “True hybrid”: The new balance of in-person and remote work

   “Since the COVID-19 pandemic, about 90 percent of organizations have embraced a range of hybrid work models that allow employees to work from off-site locations for some or much of the time. It’s important that organizations provide structure and support around the activities best done in person or remotely.”

School Response:   “Our schoolhouse, is our sanctuary”

     The large-scale failure of at home learning during the COVID-19 pandemic taught the school community all the wrong lessons. Instead of seeing the potential for developing alternative instructional delivery systems, school officialdom doubled-down on the sanctity of schoolhouse building. Granted, most of the at home learning platforms schools rolled out during the pandemic were poorly designed and poorly delivered. That does mean, however, that well-crafted at home models, ones for example the private sector uses for training, are a model of learning that, aligns well with a technologically fluent population, provides unlimited options for course offerings and specializations, personalizes the learning experience, and, most importantly, has the ability to embed students into real world scenarios with real world feedback. If there is one glaring outcome to emerge out of the COVID-19 pandemic—one which the private sector now embraces—it is location matters little in conducting business. Training, negotiations, research, business transactions, meetings—all, can be done well in an office, as well as sitting on a subway train. Our children and grandchildren get this concept. Back in main and central offices, not so much.

“Making way for applied AI”

   “Companies are already using AI to create sustainable talent pipelines, drastically improve ways of working, and make faster, data-driven structural changes.”

School Response:   “Any evidence of plagiarism will result in an immediate zero”

      A common value expressed in all school mission statements in developing the educated mind. Developing the educated mind involves the mastery of certain cognitive tools—critical thinking, analysis, reasoning, explaining, justifying, outlining, describing—that, educators believe are best taught through immersion in an academic curriculum. Such a curriculum is composed of a progression of academic subjects—algebra, history, biology—that require students to master facts and processes taught to them by teachers and evaluated by academic assessment instruments–term papers, comprehensive exams, research papers, book reviews, journal articles.

      The table below summarizes the goals, content, and pedagogies schools have adopted for the last century. While academic learnings served a purpose in an industrial and post-industrial world, their pedagogical world no longer align well with the knowledge and skills required in a digital world where information is a keystroke away; where all problems are complex; where no one person is an authority; where location matters little in daily work routines; and where collaboration rather than competition has become an essential private sector value.

	SOURCE	TEACHING	LEARNING
INDUSTRIAL	Textbooks	Transmission	Replication
POST-INDUSTRIAL	The WEB	Facilitation	Performance
A DIGITAL WORLD	Social Networks	Personalization	Disruptive Practices

	GOAL(S)	KNOWLEDGE	WORTH
INDUSTRIAL	Preparation	Stable and Certain	Facts & Procedures
POST-INDUSTRIAL	Education	Contingent & Interpreted	Theories & Concepts
A DIGITAL WORLD	Inventiveness	Created & Shared	Big Ideas & Big Questions

A goal of schooling in our nation written into all district mission statements is preparing our sons or daughters for the world of work. Putting aside the argument over which goal of schooling should predominate —to educate or to prepare—let’s assume most school communities lean towards school organizations, curricular, and teaching methodologies that align with world of work. The next four blogs summarize the findings of survey conducted by McKinsey & Company on private sector organizational trends. For each private sector trend I describe how school organizations and pedagogies are poorly designed to respond to these trends.

Trend #1:    “Increasing speed, strengthening resilience”

“Half of the respondents in the McKinsey survey say their organization is unprepared to react to future shocks. Those able to bounce forward—and quickly—out of serial crisis may gain significant advantages.”

School Response:   “We are not learning organizations”

     The organization and model of teaching in our nation’s schools continues to operate on a turn of the century model of schooling that valued bureaucratic goals over learning goals (see tables below:

A Bureaucracy

Top-down decision making Role differentiation Impersonal environment Paper trails Technical competence Accountability

A Learning Organization

Collective sensemaking Role specialization Collaborative environment Performances Professionalism Responsibility

      The structure and goals of bureaucratic organizations are designed for stability and predictability. They are poorly designed to quickly and effectively respond to unpredictable shocks to their organization. How schools responded to the COVID-19 shock is a prime example of a schooling model unable to quickly transition to quality remote learning platforms and to create safe learning environments in their buildings.