Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

From PBL to PBW

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Adam Davidson on the “Hollywood model” of business:

A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands. This short-­term, project-­based business structure is an alternative to the corporate model, in which capital is spent up front to build a business, which then hires workers for long-­term, open-­ended jobs that can last for years, even a lifetime…Our economy is in the midst of a grand shift toward the Hollywood model. More of us will see our working lives structured around short-­term, project-­based teams rather than long-­term, open­-ended jobs.

If you want a justification for Problem/Project Based Learning, there probably isn’t any better than this: increasingly our students are going to be doing problem/project based work in their professional lives. According to a new report from Accenture, one-third of US workers are already primarily temping or freelancing, and that number is expected to rise steeply in the next decade. More and more, permanent jobs that feature pensions and insurance and other traditional perks are falling away. The future of work is going to be characterized by constant change, constant inquiry, and constant learning self-organized by the “worker.”

You getting your students ready for that?

But it’s not enough to initiate PBL. Students have to work in flexible, fluid teams, collaborating and adapting as they find solutions and then tackle new problems. They need to be working on projects they care about, projects that have a real purpose in the world. Projects like the kids in the NuVu School are tackling in a “studio” (think “Hollywood”) process. (See this great overview from Susie Boss as well.) Problems and projects that are pursued within larger school cultures of inquiry and design. 

More and more schools and classrooms and kids are doing PBL which is no doubt a good thing. But as always seems to be the case in schools, too much of it is still driven by curricular outcomes instead of student passions and real world relevance. If, as Dewey said, school should be real life, this modern definition of what work will look like for our kids better be a driving force behind our change discussions in schools. 

The Data of Work

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Michael Schrage in the Harvard Business Review blog:

Where ambitious project managers, team leaders and business unit heads once visited their alma maters to interview top talent, they’ll increasingly be going back to check out their school’s attitude/aptitude/high-performance assessment algorithms. Where organizations once demanded student transcripts, they’ll now demand access to schools’ “advisory engine” software. Ironically, the biggest impact America’s higher education system may have on business is less about the students they educate than the tools and technologies they use to manage them.

What’s happening in higher education assessment today will increasingly define the job and performance reviews of tomorrow. It barely took five years for the iPhone to displace the Blackberry as the corporate mobile device of executive choice. How long do you think it will be before the software used to assess college students will be entrepreneurially transformed into Amazonesque and Netflixed-like services “recommending” whether you deserve a raise or a promotion? Whether the economy improves quickly or sluggishly, the technologies of assessment are going to reshape both your compensation and your opportunities.

A “Behaviorally Different Species” of Learner

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Ben Williamson

In the traditional conception of school, the learner was invoked as a docile individual who turned up to school to be instructed in a core canon of curricular content and codes of behavioral conduct. Now, in our digital times, the learner is being reimagined as a more active, interactive, connected and collaborative individual—a behaviorally different species to the normalized learner of mass schooling. The contemporary connected learner travels continually between formal and informal sites of learning, building networks of knowledge through the use of sophisticated software and the real-world application of soft skills, positive attitudinal dispositions, and behavioral competencies. For such a learner, the behavioral competencies of communication, perseverance, interaction, thinking skills, emotional literacy, empathy, problem-solving, and other personal attributes are now increasingly desirable in a world where more jobs will be recruited on soft performance criteria such as relationship management and customer satisfaction.

I’ve been thinking even more about this shift away from formal (traditional) learning to more informal learning within the classroom. Could we at some point give credit (real credit) to a student for the development of those “soft skills” as they manifest themselves within her work to learn something she chooses, not something that we have assigned her to learn? 

Echoes of not valuing the immeasurable…

The Future of My Kids' Work

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So in case you don’t know it, I’ve got kids. They’ll be 12 and 10 this summer (omg) which makes me perk up when I run across magazine covers like this one from Time last week titled “The Future of Work.”

Throw away the briefcase: you’re not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won’t look much like your old one. There’s no longer a ladder, and you may never get to retire, but there’s a world of opportunity if you figure out a new path.

Welcome to my world. Seems I’ve stepped right into the future. What catches me, however, is that while I could never imagine making the shift back to the life I once knew (or some semblance of it), when I think of my kids, that description of their futures makes me shudder. Ironic, isn’t it?

Inside, Time says

We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world. It will be run by a generation with new values–and women will increasingly be at the controls.

Which would seem to me to suggest that we need to create a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative learning experience for my kids, right? If as the article states fully 40% of the US workforce is predicted to be independent contractors by 2019, shouldn’t we be rethinking what it means to prepare them for that?

What I want for my kids regardless of what school they are in is to be able to pursue their passion, to be problem solvers in the face of adversity, to be provided a different picture of their own working futures in light of this huge shift that’s taking place. Yet I wonder how many classrooms discussed that Time issue (or any other different visions) even in passing. And while I know Time’s vision may not come to fruition, I have little doubt that’s the way things are trending. Doesn’t feel like we’re doing much about it.