Our world and our future are said to be “VUCA” – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous.

The acronym VUCA was first used by military strategists and trainers who were trying to explain the change in military operations post the Cold War. Just the literal sound of the acronym is a little scary. The idea underlying it — that the world is unpredictable and overwhelming — brings up a prickly sense of danger.  After a year like 2020 where the only predictable thing was unpredictability, VUCA seems even more apt.

VUCA has become a popular term in business circles when discussing how management and strategy have to shift for this new world, and, even when it’s not mentioned directly, the sentiment is evident in our discussions about schooling. Phrases like the following suggest a VUCA perspective, and they can be found in most strategy, program, and mission documents discussing schooling:

• “Technology is advancing so rapidly we have no idea how our world will be organized in 20 years.”
• “65 percent of kids entering school today will end up in jobs that don’t even exist today. How can we prepare kids for jobs that don’t exist yet?” (to be clear, this is a made-up statistic – and not likely true – but you’ve likely heard one like it from education reformers)
• “21st-century skills, 21st-century skills, 21st-century skills….”

Essentially, each of these statements or questions asks: “How are we ever going to prepare students for such a VUCA future??”

The counterintuitive, but true, answer is: if we want students to be prepared to flourish in an unpredictable future, we shouldn’t be focused on the future at all: we should be focused on ensuring they flourish now.

You can’t predict the future.

VUCA may feel more true today, but it has always been true. Think of how much changed over the last century, how many wars and conflicts there have been — WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, Cold War, to name a few — and how many social movements — women’s liberation, civil rights, LGBTQ rights (amongst others!). Then, think about how VUCA would have felt living through the revolutionary war, or the French revolution, or the Copernican revolution, or the 1819 flu pandemic.

Predicting in 1940 that women would be graduating from universities in the 1960s and make up a higher percentage of graduates by the 2000s would have been nearly impossible. In 1980, predicting the effects the personal computer would have on work, commerce, personal and enterprise would have been nearly impossible. In 2007, predicting the effects of social media and smartphones on our behavior, patterns of interaction, and relationships would have been similarly nearly impossible. For that matter, who could have predicted in advance how the printing press would undermine the most powerful institution of the time – the Catholic Church?

The truth is that the world, and the evolution of human society, have always been volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. While it’s always easy to create a narrative of the past that makes it seem predictable and obvious, it’s because we eliminate most of the alternatives — it is impossible to accurately predict the future — and ironically this is even more true if we accept the (questionable) premise that it’s exceptionally VUCA now.

This point is less to do with schooling and more to do with the obvious for all of our lives — and the real point of the acronym VUCA — you cannot accurately predict how all of the different societal, economic, political, and environmental factors are going to play out. Full stop. This means if you use your imagined future as a guidepost to design your experience today, you’re likely to be wrong.

However, if you focus on making the right choices now, you’re likely to come out okay in the future as well. As Aristotle already knew in his VUCA time 2000+ years ago, our habits and behaviors today shape our future selves – which means focusing on doing the right thing today is usually the best preparation for our tomorrow self.

We already know much of what’s needed to flourish in the future.

It turns out that the basics of what it means to flourish as a human actually hasn’t changed that much since the days of Aristotle. While we might not know the job titles of the future, jobs are not the sole factor in flourishing.

By flourishing I mean when a person’s core needs are met, and they have the freedom and capacity to make choices about their lives, according to their values and interests, and work with others to make the world better.

Our core social-psychological needs remain (and have remained) constant. For instance, we have a need to form meaningful relationships with others — interpersonally and belonging to a larger group (relatedness). We have the need to apply ourselves, pursue our interests, and feel we can master our social and physical environments (competence). We have the need to feel we make choices for ourselves and are not oppressed or forced into our situations (autonomy). And, we have the need to create meaning out of our lives, whether through finding our purpose, through religion, living our values, or otherwise (meaning). This means that, for individuals, we know many of the “design principles” for flourishing, whichever way society changes.

Furthermore, regardless of which way our VUCA future unfolds, as a society, we will have to grapple with many of the same questions we have always grappled with. Questions like: How can we organize so our communities thrive? How might individual safety and freedoms be protected while maintaining a collective? How might we socialize and educate our children? How might we create just, equitable, yet adaptable institutions?

This means that, while we don’t know what the future will bring in terms of technology, environmental disasters, political maneuvers, or new social movements, we do know that our society always needs creative thinkers, humanistic perspectives, empathetic citizens, and deeply principled people who can face big, complex questions and collaborate across lines of difference.

From the crafting of our constitution to the civil rights movement, to the effects of globalization — our society depends on individuals who can develop nuanced understandings of the complex issues, grapple with tough questions, collaborate with others who hold other perspectives and values, and who are dedicated to maintaining a healthy community and society beyond themselves.

Individual flourishing and societal thriving are mutually reinforcing: When our societies and communities thrive, individuals’ core needs are met and they have the freedom to make choices that align with their interests and values. When individuals are flourishing, they are more able and willing to be the kinds of citizens who contribute to the collective, consider others’ needs, and are willing to sacrifice for the good of all.

The best way to achieve future flourishing is to foster flourishing today.

The best way to ensure students will flourish as adults (and that we can thrive as a society) is NOT to try to mold them into the perfect graduate profile or to prepare them incessantly for an unknown future.

The best way to foster future flourishing is to create environments and design experiences through which they can practice the capacities, character, and beliefs they need to be empowered, informed, and engaged citizens of the world today.

When we try to design school to prepare students for the future, we inevitably have to define a set of outcomes we think we are aiming for and through this process we implicitly or explicitly narrow our definition of ‘success. ‘Success’ in the future becomes, “getting a good job” or “having a STEM career” or “high SAT scores”.

Then, we use these narrow metrics to try to shape students’ lives to maximize those outcomes. We say, “oh, it’s okay if you’re not actually all that interested in these activities — you should do them anyway because they’ll look good on your resume” and, “oh, it’s okay if test prep takes time away from inquiry if it means you get into the right college” and, “I don’t care if art class or theater is where you come alive — it won’t help you get a good job someday.”

Focusing on preparation for the future makes it very easy to mortgage childhoods: we require kids to sacrifice their current wellbeing in order to achieve some kind of future outcome.

This returns back a bit to the intrinsic (defining means) vs. the instrumental (defining ends) distinction of the four different purposes of school. Many perspectives and policies in education implicitly use instrumental frames. An easy way to spot this is basically every time something says, “this is important because it might get kids a job someday” or “our economy is going to need xy skills so we should make sure kids can do x and y.” Both statements are implicitly declaring instrumental aims for schooling.

Preparing students for instrumental future outcomes is flawed logic both because of point 1 — you can’t predict the future or what is needed in it for an individual or a society — and also because schools can’t actually do these instrumental goals. A teacher cannot go into school every day and make sure a student gets a good job or gets into the right college. What she can do is create an environment in which students’ core needs are met, and design experiences through which they get to practice the capacities, character, and beliefs of being competent, curious, courageous, creative, and kind adults.

One way to assess if something is instrumental is to ask the question, “Is that really why it’s important to develop those skills?” What if employers tomorrow decide they actually need robotic or sociopathic-type humans to do certain work, would we still think that’s how we should socialize our children to be? I hope not.

Job needs should not drive the design of K-12 schooling — we don’t know what they will be, and schooling has much broader purposes than workforce creation.

Trying to design schools to shape kids for the future can be like a Ponzi scheme — kids invest their childhoods but very few will ever be able to cash out on their sacrifices in adulthood for increased flourishing. As John Dewey famously says, “When preparation is made the controlling end, then the potentialities of the present are sacrificed to a suppositious future. When this happens, the actual preparation for the future is missed or distorted.”

In other words, asking kids to live a school experience meant to prepare them for the future that asks them to sacrifice the now often just means kids are less likely to ever flourish.

What should drive the design of K-12 schooling is a deep understanding of how individuals flourish, grow, and learn, a vision of the kind of community and society we want to create together, and an explicit set of values that underlie that community. These you can continually create and live every day — we can live them today.

In Sum

To conclude by reiterating: the absolute best way we can approach preparing our children for a VUCA world is (and has always actually been) not by focusing on the future but rather by focusing on the now. Focus on the kids in front of us today — their strengths, unique perspectives, and interests — to best ensure adults prepared for tomorrow.

Create environments in which students are valued, loved, and seen — and design experiences through which they get to practice the capacities, character, and beliefs that allow them to make informed choices about their lives and experiences through which they get to apply their strengths toward creatively solving problems they care about today.

This kind of environment and practice will prepare them to bring all of their ability, curiosity, creativity, and habits of mind when they face future VUCA worlds we cannot even imagine, much less plan for.

For more, see:

• Equity in Education: We Don’t Need to Level the Playing Field, We Need to Change the Game
• The Seeds of Opportunity in Crisis
• Designing Schools for Human Flourishing and Thriving Democracy

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The post How do we prepare students to flourish in a VUCA future? appeared first on Getting Smart.

And we need it. An over-focus on test scores, attainment, and limited outcomes has frightfully de-humanized schooling.

This is true for nearly all students, but this is especially true for students in poor, black, Latinx, and marginalized communities who have borne the brunt of punitive disciplinary policies, hours of mind-numbing test prep, under-qualified teachers, high staff turnover, and limited resources.

We need more equity, yet the way we frame education equity is often undermining our ability to actually do it well.

Almost always, educational equity is defined in terms of future socioeconomic or school attainment outcomes — think “college and career readiness,” “college for all”, “jobs of the future,” or even “Race to the Top”. These reforms all suggest we need to “level the playing field.”

Well-intentioned reformers, educators, and especially politicians have largely interpreted the facts that 1) there’s increasing economic inequality; and 2) higher educational attainment has been correlated with higher earnings; to mean that their primary job is to ensure students are prepared to compete in the increasingly unequal economic marketplace.

This makes a lot of sense at a local level. I want “my” kids to be the ones with higher educational attainment so they don’t end up at the bottom.

But at a systems level, there’s a major logical flaw. From a national point of view, they are ALL “our” children and if 50% of jobs don’t pay a living wage when they graduate, then 50% will not earn a living wage. [Insert any percentage here, I’m just using 50 as a placeholder.]

Even if schools succeed with every student — let’s say everyone can do differential calculus, has “grit”, and gets a Ph.D. — it doesn’t matter at a macro system level. If we maintain an economically unequal society, then many people won’t earn enough to support themselves and their families, regardless of how much skill or grit they have.

Framing equity in terms of competition, attainment, and social mobility pits our students against one another for supposedly scarce resources — if there are some who race to the “top” it’s to the detriment of those who stay at the bottom.

We have forgotten that schools do not create socioeconomic equity — our socioeconomic policies do.

When we frame the purpose of schooling as social mobility and educational equity in terms of competition, schooling does become a highly refined sorting mechanism but it does not solve issues of inequality.

We end up doing things that are short-term rational but long-term irrational in order to “win.” Things like focusing on graduation or attainment over quality, replacing teachers with computers, cheating on tests, spending ridiculous numbers of hours in testing, and cutting programs we know are good for child development (recess, art, music, and creative projects) if they don’t immediately increase test scores.

No one “wins” this competition. As I (and others) have written before, neither wealthy nor poor students are currently “winning”. Worse, this framing makes it harder to solve the real problems because we’re running around solving the wrong ones.

When we organize schooling for children to compete in an unequal economic system, it obscures and undermines the true role schooling could play in promoting social equity: ensuring all children can effectively and actively participate in a democracy.

It is through political equality that economic inequality is most likely to be addressed in a democracy.

If “politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it,” then widespread participation in making the rules is key to ensuring they’re fair to everyone. This is the power of democracy — ensuring more people take part in determining the rules.

But there is a positive feedback loop between increasing economic inequality and increasing political inequality. Unfortunately, economic inequality has been rising in the U.S. since the 1970s, so it should come as no surprise that an increasing share of our elected officials are millionaires. And, it should also be no surprise that the rules they are making systematically discriminate against the already poor, and black, Latinx, and other minority or marginalized communities.

It’s not by accident the wealth gap has only grown over the past 40 years, it’s by policy.

Increasing economic inequality results in political inequality.

Schooling could be one of the most effective ways to interrupt that cycle. But only if school is organized for human development and democracy — not for competition.

In a democracy, social equity does not happen through better measuring of merit and more efficient sorting.

Social equity happens through a political process when enough people realize that an unjust society undermines everyone’s well-being and are willing to work together to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met and basic freedoms protected.

As citizens in a democracy, we should not be using schools as a proxy battleground for economic mobility by trying to equip kids to compete — it won’t work. We should be focused on engaging in our democratic processes to promote greater income and wealth equality, strengthen our social safety net, protect basic rights, and ensure our political processes are fair and representative.

And in schooling, we should be focused on true educational equity, rather than pursuing pseudo equity through competition.

But if we don’t reframe how we think about educational equity, we’ll never achieve it.

True educational equity is not about future test scores or graduation rates or wealth. True educational equity is not about the future at all — it’s about now — the environment and experiences students have that allow them to flourish today.

Designing school for true educational equity includes, but is not limited to: ensuring each child has a school that is safe – physically and psychologically; adults who care about them, value them as human beings and see their strengths; developmentally appropriate experiences in which they have sufficient time to play and create; an environment that is well-resourced for learning and exploration; and opportunities to practice the key skills and mindsets of democracy, like deliberation, perspective-taking, and collaboration in service of their communities. Read more on designing schools for human flourishing and thriving democracy.

True educational equity is not achieved when every child can compete within an unequal system — where they have an equal opportunity to end up in a few spaces on the top.

True educational equity is achieved when every child develops the knowledge, skills, character, and beliefs they need to reflect accurately on their world, make choices aligned with their values and preferences, and work with others through democratic processes to make the whole system more equal and equitable for all.

We don’t need to level the playing field so everyone can equally compete, we need to change the game — make sure our democracy works for all, and our schools work for our democracy.

For more, see:

• 100 Days of Conversation Project and The Importance of Community Agreements
• The Seeds of Opportunity in Crisis
• Designing Schools for Human Flourishing and Thriving Democracy
• The Students are Not the Problem: From Symptoms to Systems in Schooling
• Education Needs Less Critique, More Vision

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The post Equity in Education: We Don’t Need To Level the Playing Field, We Need to Change the Game appeared first on Getting Smart.

This is understandable given the multiple crises the past year has wrought that at times feels never-ending. Collectively, we are facing crises of Health, Economy, Natural Disaster, Democracy, and Systemic Racism. And then, within all of this larger context, there is the crisis in our schools.

Many are looking forward to a return to normal school next year post-pandemic—but do we want to return to the old normal?

Even pre-pandemic, the old normal was one in which only 54 percent of students feel hopeful about their prospects in future school or to achieve their goals; and, one-third of students report they are struggling or suffering. The old normal is one in which schools are responsible for making sure our nation’s children are fed. The old normal is not equitable nor just.

We are, hopefully, at a turning point for the pandemic. We are moving out of triage mode. Vaccines are being distributed, cases are dropping. While we are still feeling very much in the darkness, glimmers of light are beginning to signify the arrival of a new dawn, of a new spring.

This in-between moment offers us a chance to ask what these crises have taught us about who we are, who we want to be, and what we want to be the “normal” to which we return.

The Seeds of Opportunity in Crisis

In modern-day English, the word crisis simply means, “a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger.” However, the roots of our word “crisis” are broader. The word comes from the Greek word krisis ‘decision’, which is from PIE root *krei- “to sieve,” thus “discriminate, distinguish.” In Chinese, the word, 危机 (wéijī), is composed of two brush strokes or words: one brush stroke stands for danger, the other for opportunity.

Decision and opportunity.

In this moment of multiple crises lie the seeds of opportunity. Opportunities to make new decisions—to discriminate, to “sieve”—a.k.a. to retain the potential good and allow the rest to pass—to imagine new ways of being, and to take action to co-create those possibilities.

This has borne out in history. Consider that in the 1920s inequality was on the rise and there was very little social safety net. The subsequent crash of the stock market in 1929 and the Great Depression—true crises of epic proportion—provided the opportunity for reimagining our economic system and social safety net. The New Deal was created, which re-started the economy and created the Social Security Administration to ensure that those most vulnerable—the unemployed, the young, and the elderly—were supported.

There are seeds of opportunity in crises—but we have to create the conditions for them to sprout.

These conditions include:

1) Creating time and space for reflection.

We need to create time to reflect on the big picture is the antidote to scarcity and allows us to connect with ourselves and with others. We need guarded time to consider what is happening, what we’ve learned from this moment, and on how it relates to what we want for the future.

2) Reframing the problems as opportunities.

This time has been hard. And, while we have all been in the same storm, we haven’t all been in the same boat—it has been harder for some than others. What are the problems we can reframe as opportunities for new solutions and new ways of thinking and being?

3) Asking fundamental questions.

What does it mean to live a good life? What is a thriving community? Who do we want to be as Americans? As global citizens? We need to return to the fundamental questions of who we are and who we want to be before we rush to solutions.

4) Collectively re-visioning.

As Robin D.G. Kelley teaches us, “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.” After asking our fundamental questions, let’s look at our collective answers to see where we can create shared visions for how we move forward.

One Possible Way to Participate

These four conditions can be created in many different ways and do not require a movement—simply a person or two intent on sowing seeds together.

But collectively taking the time to reflect and learn from one another might be the most powerful way forward of all.

This is the goal of 100 Days of Conversations About School—an initiative that is catalyzing community conversations across the country about the future of school and society in a practice of democratic deliberation and re-visioning for the first 100 days of the new administration, from January 20th to April 29th, 2021.

Rather than count on our leaders to create the solutions, we believe it is the voices and perspectives of young people, families, and communities that should be centered in our new visions. For this reason the process is designed to center the voices of young people and educators—both in the conversations themselves and then in the policy and practice recommendations that emerge from identifying themes across the conversations.The 100 Days conversation experience itself is enjoyable, powerful, and connecting. The questions are pre-designed to foster reflection and connection—which has felt reassuring and needed in this moment of disconnection and isolation. 97.4% of participants have said the experience was either “extremely” or “very” positive for them, and 92.1% felt more connected with their fellow participants after the conversation.

Young people, in particular, have expressed they feel heard and respected in a way they rarely do and appreciate that the questions aren’t watered down, but rather they’re asked deep and meaningful questions and that they have their turn, just like adults. Listen to Juwaria, a.k.a. J.J., a high school student from Minnesota, talk about her experience. It also has humanized educator experience for them—getting to understand better what’s truly happening behind the scenes for their teachers. The real power of this project comes in combination of personal reflection and deep listening to others—and in what we can do together when we find commonalities and a shared vision.

Beyond the individual experience, the process is a powerful tool for organizational reflection. 100 Days partnered with Local Voices Network to make transcriptions of the conversations available to every participant, which makes this a unique opportunity for schools and organizations to learn about views of multiple stakeholders within each community. Teacher Powered Schools is hosting conversations in each partner school and then will look at the transcripts together to consider cross-school learnings. MN Young Champions and their new youth-led nonprofit, Bridgemakers, is organizing young people across the state of Minnesota to participate in conversations, and will use learnings to bring the voices of young people and educators directly to policymakers this summer. Both the small, rural town of Belgrade, MN, and the large urban district of Ferguson, MO are hosting multiple conversations with students, families, and educators as part of their student and family engagement strategy this spring.

Hosting with 100 Days of Conversations is easy and takes less than two hours of time—from signing up to facilitating to thank you notes. It happens in three easy steps:

1. Sign up to be a host.

2. Choose an adult and some young people (5-8 people total), then pick a time on Calendly to get a Zoom link. The Zoom link will automatically record so you don’t have to worry about downloading/uploading files.

3. Show up at the conversation with the facilitation protocol—it can be read verbatim.

*And if you want more information, there’s the step by step Host a Conversation Guide with everything from project goals to hosting to thank you notes!

Over 200 individuals and organizations across all 50 states have already signed up to partner to host a conversation, but the more people who participate, the more powerful the results. Consider ensuring your and your students’ voices are heard.

Ultimately, regardless of whether you host a conversation, organize with others, or simply take some time to reflect by yourself, each of us seeking the seeds of opportunity in this moment of crisis will prepare us to better emerge beyond the pandemic wall, and beyond this moment, not only victorious but transformed into new and better ways of being.

For more, see:

• Rehumanizing our visions for school
• 21 practical, research-backed strategies to grow your resilience
• How do Good Leaders Create Resilient Teams?

Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Smart Update.

The post Seeds Of Opportunity In Crisis appeared first on Getting Smart.