Author: Alan Jones

“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.

I will devote a number of forthcoming blogs to charts I developed for books I have published that compare various conceptual understandings of teaching, learning, and organizational behavior. The chart below pictures the two dominant paradigms of schooling that educators have written countless books in support of or critical of the schools structures described below. It should be noted that the old paradigm of schooling, one developed at the turn of the century, still maintains a hold on both how schools are organized and the pedagogy employed in most of our nation’s classrooms.

SCHOOL STRUCTURES	OLD PARADIGM	NEW PARADIGM
GROUPING	>Grouping by ability >Standardized tests	>Grouping by topic/interest >Student choice >Frequent reformation of groups
COMPETITION	>Zero sum game >Weighted grades >Ranking	>Teaming >Collaboration >Authentic
ASSESSMENT	>Using test data as a basis for competition >Grades >Bell shaped curves	>Using test data for diagnosis >Mastery >Authentic products
GRADING	>Normative grading >Deficit Based >Curving	>Criteria based >Strength based >Mastery
RECOGNITION	>Honor Rolls >Ranking >Weighted Grades	>Recognition of diverse talents, abilities and interest
STUDENT INPUT	>Decision made exclusively by administrators and teachers	>Opportunities for choice >Electives
CURRICULUM	>Subjects >Departments >Curriculum Guides >Textbooks	>Thematic >Interdisciplinary >Problem based
ACADEMIC TASKS	>Memorization >Recitation >Academic products (book reports, research papers)	>Real world products and tasks
REMEDIATION	>Pull-out programs >Retention	>Tutoring >Coaching

One of the themes that runs through all of my blogs is the question that is often posed in graduate administrative courses, but, is rarely asked in main or central offices. The question being: what are the aims of schooling. The aims that are typically presented in introductory educational philosophy course courses fall into four categories: vocational, civic, creative, and cultivating humanity—what is true, good, and beautiful.

      Although all four aims are written into school mission statements, the aim that school administrators announce at school open houses and the aim parents assume schools are pursuing is “preparation, “meaning, training for a job. As I suggest in the title of this blog, one which John Dewey spent his career elaborating on, is preparation is treacherous idea.

      From a Deweyan perspective, the treachery involved in preparing young people for an occupation that stunts the intellectual growth of the child. The aim of schooling, for Dewey, was growth, meaning access to as many different meaning systems or human activities as possible. Vocational pursuits will always limit or narrow an individual’s ability to make meaning of the world they live in.

      In the case of schooling or the last century, the curriculum and pedagogy has been designed to prepare generations of students for college and vague references that some of what is learned in these academic courses will be necessary to succeed in the world of work. Of course, what generations of students discover in the world of work is academic discourse patterns are non-existent. In place a static world of facts, figures, reports, PowerPoints, are methods of inquiry and habits of thought that value collaboration, disruption, performance, social networks, and most of all—inventiveness.

      Returning to Dewey’s definition of “growth,” the emphasis on a singular discourse pattern leaves students without the intellectual tools to grow their civic function, to grow their creative talents, to grow their understanding of the human condition. The other phrase Dewey coined for his distaste for the preparation function of schooling was his often-repeated comment that our schools should not be preparing students, but, rather, should be inviting them into a marketplace of ideas. That marketplace should fill their intellectual shelves with theories, concepts, and ideas from the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences that provide students with the intellectual tools and vocabularies to view the world from many different perspectives.

     This does not mean that Dewey was opposed to vocational pursuits. Any field of inquiry can be “vocationalized.” When a student decides that he or she wants to work in a particular field of inquiry the field is transformed from studying ends (meaning) into a means (how to), which is a different orientation and different approach to vocabularies and conceptual understandings.

      The danger, however, with vocationalizing fields of inquiry, are discourse communities that will work at building firewalls between ends and means of the particular occupational pursuit. The treachery of these firewalls for workers is draining the nature of their of work of the values that make a particular job function meaningful and worthwhile for both workers and society at large.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

      I have dedicated a number of blogs to discussing the goals of schooling and what types of instructional methodologies would best promote those goals. In this short YouTube video below, Neil deGrasse Tyson, best summarizes in his commencement speech what I have attempted to describe in a number of postings.