The Future Belongs to Educators Who Shift

”The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
—Alvin Toffler, writer and futurist

Many factors have converged over the last 10 to 15 years to create a vastly different society, one that is technology and information driven, global in scope, multilingual, multicultural, fast, collaborative, interconnected and unpredictable. Education is not immune to the paradigm shift that has changed the learner, the operating environment and its requisite outcomes. The Internet has made information easily accessible, therefore to be knowledgeable is no longer the desired outcome of education. Skills, values and mindsets that allow students to leverage knowledge and information are the desired outcomes of education in today’s digital age.

ILLUSTRATION BY DAVE CUTLER

That we no longer live in a stable, predictable world means that we cannot assume that our future will be as comfortable, familiar or recognizable as our past. Our past successes, as individuals and as institutions, will no longer ensure our futures. In fact, our past successes are toxic in that they create a false sense of security, confidence and complacency about the path forward. Curriculum and programming that is heavily content focused (rote memorization, skill and drill) is not a winning strategy for the digital age, despite successes we have enjoyed with this approach in the past.

21st-Century Survival Skills

Tony Wagner, co-director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, offers an important framework of 21st-century survival skills, or new literacies for the future, in his book 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. To be relevant, valued and constructive contributors in preparing students for their futures, we, the adults on school campuses, must unlearn our past content-driven focus, learn the new ways of the technologically rich, connected and collaborative world, and relearn to impact wisdom and facilitate learning in the context of a new, fast-paced information age. Educators everywhere must become entrepreneurial, participating in and managing quick, agile cultures of innovation and responsibility, changing our schools from factory-like assembly lines to exemplars of intellectual curiosity and challenge, collaboration, and human potentiality in our students and in ourselves. To move, grow and change, we have to alter our approach to education, as individuals and as institutions, building it differently from what the operating environment calls us to do. In short, we, the adults on our campuses, must shift.

Shifting to become literate in this new era requires becoming comfortable, adept, even expert, in Wagner’s new literacies: critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration across networks and leading by influence; agility and adaptability; initiative and entrepreneurialism; effective oral and written communication; accessing and analyzing information; curiosity and imagination. To begin to develop in ourselves Wagner’s new literacies, we can engage in some essential first steps to jump-start our shifting and pave the path to accelerated and diligent continued learning.

Cultivate a Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, explains mindset as our underlying belief of whether intelligence is fixed or mutable. Your mindset is the story you tell yourself about your intellectual ability. A fixed mindset offers the rigid story that either one is born smart, or not. A fixed mindset believes effort doesn’t matter because intelligence is fixed, and therefore, effort is not efficacious. A fixed mindset can also tell the story that learning new things is not necessary because you are already proficient enough. A growth mindset, in contrast, offers the story that you are capable of learning anything even though it might take some effort. A growth mindset is one of intellectual curiosity, flexibility, agility, critical thinking, problem solving, entrepreneurialism, adaptability, and the deep capacity to change and grow. A growth mindset embraces and overcomes challenges, despite frustrations and setbacks. To have a growth mindset is to be a consummate learner, willing to adapt and shift to what is needed now. Developing this overt awareness of your own learning needs, ability and process is to engage in learning, unlearning and relearning.

Educators who care to shift must alter their understanding of the role of the teacher: My job is learning. We expect this of children in school, and we assess them and hold them accountable for their learning. But the adults in school often identify and inhabit the stance of an expert: I already know what I need to know; I am proficient. What would it be like if every adult on school campuses everywhere envisioned their job as learning? This would create a profound shift in attitude, motivation, joy, self-concept, esprit de corps and mission performance. As Bill Damon writes in The Path to Purpose, this self-defining statement of ”My job is learning” would reignite an amazing sense of purpose that would infuse our lives and professional careers in untold ways and reinvigorate our schools as learning communities. This willingness, sense of purpose and diligence about learning constitute a growth mindset, the first necessary step in continuous learning needed to develop facility and expertise in Wagner’s new literacies.

Engage in Self-Reflection and Assessment

”Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?” —Gary Hamel, management expert and business strategist

This critical question causes us, as individuals and as school leaders, to collocate the dynamic forces of culture with the skills, beliefs and behaviours of our organizations. It is mission-critical that we ask, Are we in sync with the many paradigm shifts that are both transforming the environment in which our schools operate and redefining what it means to be ”educated” in the 21st century? We must ask this question often and offer an honest, objective answer. We must use this question to inform the professional goals we set and work to achieve for ourselves each year. In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink suggests that we become competent in giving ourselves honest, meaningful, rigorous feedback because feedback informs us, as individuals and as school leaders, of our progress and of our remaining gaps. To be meaningful and helpful in our learning of new skills and attitudes, feedback should be frequent. However, the professional feedback offered most adults in our schools is infrequent (once a year) and usually not meaningful or useful in helping us achieve mastery.

Personal development and learning are a combination of feedback, self-reflection, knowledge and disciplined practice. To grow beyond current boundaries and current understanding, we must risk acting outside of our current comfort zones, current habits and existing mental models. The importance of developing ourselves, learning, is that changing ourselves will change everyone around us. Changing ourselves as teachers thereby changes our students. Collectively changing ourselves is collaborating across networks and leading by influence, part of Wagner’s new literacies, and the result is a change in the culture of our institution. This represents immense power and immense responsibility because the converse is also true: Staying stuck keeps everyone stuck. If we own the responsibility of becoming a more prolific and more effective learner, so will our team and relationship partners. If we hold ourselves to high standards, so will they. If we model a growth mindset, if we are positive, flexible,  adaptable, agile, curious, imaginative, open and communicative, so will they be. If we take initiative and act entrepreneurial in the scope of our work, so will they. This infectious interconnectivity is the beauty, the power and the possibility of our personal learning.

Develop Technological Competency

At first we used the Internet to display information digitally; it was an easily accessible and always available depository of resources. School websites were electronic brochures. Then Web 2.0 made the Internet more of a marketplace. We saw the growth of Amazon, eBay and other online retailers. Web 3.0 is a community, a place to read, write, share, connect and collaborate with people all over the world. The Internet is still a resource and a marketplace, but it is also a rich place of sharing and learning, a place of connectedness and conversations. It is a place where learning and teaching happen outside of time, space and cultural boundaries as we communicate in a variety of ways to collaboratively analyze and solve problems, share resources and information, and actively seek new people to join in our endeavours in an open-source way.

Rapidly evolving technology, especially those technologies we call social media, is driving the way we communicate internally and externally in our schools, as well as the way we share knowledge, teach and learn. Social media can be defined simply as those online tools or sites, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, where the user creates and interacts as he or she wishes. The power and potential impact of social media lies in the strength of its community. Users form conversational, supportive and sharing networks around their needs, passions and interests.

Even though it may not be our preferred way, the best way to learn to use social media is by jumping in. The good news is that most technologies these days are extremely user-friendly and do not really take a lot of effort or brain power to figure out. However, they do require time, commitment and a growth mindset to stick with them despite frustrations, setbacks and obstacles, especially at the beginning of the learning curve. Knowledge of a core set of technologies (such as Google Docs, Diigo, YouTube, wikis, Twitter, Facebook and a blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress) will enable us to more authentically explore the questions of how to use technology in teaching and  learning for students and how to guide students in communicating effectively for different purposes to different audiences. Only by developing our own comfort level and ability with a core set of technologies are we then able to guide and enhance our students’ ability to use and leverage these technologies to research, collaborate, connect, create and effectively communicate through written and oral means.

Start and Don’t Look Back

”In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

—Eric Hoffer, social writer and philosopher

There is great risk in not adapting, for ourselves in our careers and for our institutions, as citizens in the digital age because the adults in schools collectively are the heart and the engine of the institution. The best tactic is to accept that the world is vastly different and needs a different response from us, whether we like it or not. The world needs us to develop new literacies to then wed with our wisdom, experience and expertise in a new way in order to create a wholly new level of competence and professionalism that better serves the learner of today.

Start anywhere. Ask for help. Get over that entrenched love of the single right answer and the fear of making mistakes because that is how we are going to learn. Use the Internet to learn as fast and as widely as you can. You might surprise yourself and everyone around you. You will have taken responsibility for shifting and becoming competent in the new literacies that we must develop in order to guide our students toward their futures.

Personal development and personal learning are a journey of professional integrity and great personal leadership. To shift, make the commitment and start, and the possibilities are endless. The acquisition of new literacies for the digital age, becoming expert in their mechanics as well as their uses, begins with a growth mindset and the disciplined engagement in learning, one bit at a time.

[Jamie Feild Baker is a writer, frequent presenter and consultant who works with independent schools to help them become aligned to the 21st- century operating environment to ensure relevance and sustainability. She authors the blog Shared Leadership. Baker can be reached at jamiereverb@gmail.com]

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