What does professional hockey have to do with public education? Well, surprisingly little. However, the greatest hockey player to ever play the game, Wayne Gretzky, offers a powerful metaphor. If you did not play or watch hockey, or have never lived in the country of Canada, there is the outside chance that Wayne Gretzky is unknown to you. I don’t think I am overstating this when I say that he was bigger to his sport than Michael Jordan was to basketball. Consider that his trade from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings in 1998 was debated in the Canadian Parliament as to whether they could block the trade of such a “national symbol”. Nicknamed the “Great One” during his career, Gretzky is the all-time leading point scorer in the NHL (he actually has more assists than any player has points) and the only player ever to score more than 200 points in a season (something he did four times).
When asked how he scored so many points, the Great One replied, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”
In US K-12 public education, the more recent embrace of Common Core Standards, blended learning, competency based and student centered school models are all important and dynamic changes to the apparatus we have devised for educating our next generation of future adults. However, I cannot help but wonder if we are playing where the puck is and not where it is going to be.
I attended a recent conference where a panel of some of the leading CEO’s in the country was discussing their future employment needs as it relates to K-12 public education. They were oddly at a loss to explain with any kind of clarify what our public education system should be preparing our students and their future employees for. They talked about how they used to hire for competence – whether the individual could perform the job being hired for and its related skills and tasks. While they still look for competence, because it is still a necessary requirement (i.e. an engineer must know how to build a bridge for example), it is no longer a sufficient requirement. They must also hire for capacity. Inevitably, the job they are hiring for will change in 12 to 18 months and if the employee cannot both adapt to those changes and exceed what is being asked they will be replaced, outsourced, automated or some combination of the above.
So where is the puck headed in education?
Tony Wagner, Harvard School of Education Professor and author defines the global achievement gap as the difference between what even our best schools are teaching and testing versus the skills all students will need for college, careers and citizenship in the 21st century. Just what are these 21st century skills? Well they can be summarized by the following 4 C’s: Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Communication.
How do we design education to generate the four C’s in our students both in terms of process and product?
“Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe is an excellent resource containing a very useful framework and template for Understanding by Design (UbD). The authors state, “Effective curriculum is planned ‘backward’ from long-term desired results through a three stage design process (Desired Results, Evidence, Learning Plan). This process helps avoid the twin problems of “textbook coverage” and “activity oriented teaching,” in which no clear priorities and purposes are apparent”.
Content mastery is the means not the end. Too many assessments measure just taught knowledge and never ask for genuine performance (knowledge and skill in context). The goal of any educational aim should be to understand. Understanding cannot be “covered” but has to be explored, considered and uncovered. Understanding starts by identifying the desired results (stage one), and then determining the acceptable evidence of those desired results (stage two) and finally planning the learning experiences and instruction accordingly (stage three).
If teachers can embrace this UbD framework and reverse-engineering approach to designing teaching for the intended goal of understanding, how then shall students pursue learning under this framework in ways that build, use and practice the 4C’s?
Here again, we look to a design approach. IDEO, arguably the world’s leading design firm has created a “Design Thinking for Educators” Toolkit specifically targeting K-12 classrooms (see accompany graphical image of the process). Students pursue real world problems centered around a driving question in a multi-disciplinary fashion, utilizing IDEO’s 5 phase design thinking process:
I. Discovery II. Interpretation III. Ideation IV. Experimentation V. Evolution
The 5-phase design thinking process encourages students to build insight from empathy, to generate several ideas at once (divergent thinking) and then pick one or two to prototype, test, refine (convergent thinking) and eventually present.
Why do we feel so strongly that this is where the puck is going?
The digitization, globalization and hyper-connectedness of our world is creating unparalleled demand for products and services that are innovative from start through finish of the inception-creation-distribution-use life cycle while at the same time radically shortening the time through which replication of that life cycle can and does occur. If Apple announces a new product feature on its phone (i.e. its recent fingerprint identity sensor on its iPhone 5S), watch how quickly its competitors replicate that feature. This competitive advantage today lasts days maybe a few weeks before it is replicated globally through its competitors’ product life cycles.
This puts a premium on innovation and those that possess the precursor skills to innovation (creative problem solving, critical thinking, collaboration and communication or the 4 C’s). Hence we must design backwards and forwards the means and ends by which our teachers and students alike become immersed in a design thinking process to solve problems of significance that transfer understanding.
