February 3, 2022
from Dr. Bill Hudson, Head of School
As I walked to my post at the front entrance of the school Tuesday morning, the sound of jazz being played on the piano drew me into the band room where I happened upon the zero-hour jazz band class. The exceptional talent of the students and the beauty of the music they were creating together was a moment of pure joy for me as well as a moment of gratitude to work in a school that truly values music education.
Without denigrating the mastery of musical skill and ability, many of the students were unaware of other learning was taking place in the band room. While I am most certainly not a musician, I do know that that the unique interplay of harmony, rhythmic invention, scale, extended chords, and syncopation all speak to the complexity of jazz. In addition to musical ability, jazz also requires and fosters a number of valuable lifelong skills, including creativity, improvisation, collaboration, interdependency, problem-solving, risk-taking, humility, ideation, integrating and synthesizing information quickly, critical thinking, and navigating complexity.
For several years I taught a master’s level class at the University of St. Thomas on the foundations of American education. As a history buff, I loved studying the evolution of education in the United States and the various reforms instituted over the years. Rather than static, the idea of school has always been in a continual state of change. Educational reform has been the norm for education in response to the needs of students and society. However, our current system, created in response to the industrial revolution, is much the same as it was in the early 1900s.
I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the future of education, particularly now as we begin to emerge from the pandemic and begin the shift from the information age to what author Daniel Pink calls the conceptual age. While the industrial age focused on results and the information age focused on data, facts, and technology, the conceptual age will depend on high-touch skills like empathy and high-concept skills such as the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, combining different or unconnected ideas together. With information readily accessible and computers able to analyze it, our future depends on the ability to harness curiosity and creativity to create novel solutions to pressing challenges in our world. As educational reformer John Dewey said, “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.”
I have long championed the unique approach to learning at MPA, our distinct way of bringing together hands-on experiential learning with developing the whole child. Reflected in our motto “Dream Big. Do Right.” we understand that education has the potential to be transformative, not simply transactional. Transactional learning is centered in the curriculum, textbooks, and testing. Transformative learning is more than delivering information. It is creating opportunities for students to be the architects of their own learning and fostering skills like empathy, critical thinking, and creativity and applying them to solve complex problems.
Transformative learning requires the educational system to change. It requires not only what we teach to change but also how we teach. It calls for a move away from seat time and credits, traditional grades and assessments, and distinct classrooms and discrete subjects. Rigor that is most often defined as more work that is harder is redefined as meaningful and that matters. Curriculum and content are important, and so are the competencies and skills acquired through collaborative and project-based learning.
The World Economic Forum identified the top ten skills within four overarching competencies of problem-solving, self-management, working with people, and technology use and development.
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality, and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology is, monitoring, and control
- Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving, and ideation
The future of education is not the same thing as preparing students for jobs in the future. And yet I believe that skills like those identified by the World Economic Forum can also bring purpose and meaning. The interdependency of self and others and the re-centering of our humanity gives me great hope.
The first priority of 2024ward, our new strategic plan, is to empower students to live, learn, and thrive in our increasingly complex and globalized society. What does it mean to “live?” For noted psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it is “to live in fullness, without waste of time and potential, expressing one’s uniqueness, yet participating intimately in the complexity of the cosmos.” In this sense, living, learning, and thriving is not only at the heart of the future of education or of jobs but of life itself.
Please join me in the conversation here!
- What is your example of transformational learning from your school experience?
- What do you think is the future of education?
- What are the most important skills and attributes will be needed in the future?
- What can schools be doing to prepare our students for the world ahead of them?
