Category Archives: education

Stop Praying for Education Reform

7 Replies

Stop Praying for Education ReformWhen it comes to education, we should adopt Nike’s famous motto and ‘Just Do It’.

In the United States (and probably many other countries around the world), it has become a popular pastime to complain about the state of the public schools. People complain about school funding, teacher performance, curriculum, class sizes, and more things than I care to remember right now.

And while the Gates Foundation and many other great organizations are trying to come up with new ways to make education delivery and administration better, the fact remains that education funding is likely to get worse (not better) and any reform is likely to take a long time to implement in the face of stiff resistance.

So what are parents to do?

Well, in my interview with Seth Godin at the World Innovation Forum (2010), he suggested that parents are going to have to take increasing responsibility for educating their own children at home AFTER they get home from school. The interview is one of many innovation interviews I’ve done, and is below for your reference:

But, I’ve been thinking lately that while parents may be interested in supplementing the education their children receive at school in order to help them succeed in the innovation economy (a topic for another day), they may NOT possess the knowledge, skills, abilities (or maybe even the desire) to succeed at this admirable task.

I have another idea.

It is time for us as parents and community members to stop praying for education reform, and instead take action. I’ve given you the WHY, now let’s look at the WHO, WHAT, and WHERE.

The WHO

You! Many people have knowledge and skills that they can share with kids. Skills and knowledge that will help prepare the next generation for the realities of a workplace that demands more flexible thinking, creativity, problem solving, and entrepreneurial skills.

The WHAT

Let’s face facts. Today’s schools are designed to mass-produce trivia experts and basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic (and maybe some history, science, and other important subjects).

But, to succeed in the innovation economy, the next generation is going to need to be proficient in at least these ten things:

  1. Creativity
  2. Lateral Thinking
  3. Problem Solving
  4. Innovation (of course!)
  5. Interpersonal Skills
  6. Collaboration
  7. Negotiation
  8. Partnerships
  9. Entrepreneurship
  10. And much, much more…

The WHERE

Our workplaces and our schools may be the most common places for citizens in our societies to congregate, but there is another place where we could come together to supplement our childrens’ educations…

Congregations: (a definition)
1. The act of assembling.
2. A body of assembled people or things; a gathering.

Now, the word is often used in a religious context, but not all people are religious (or even belong to a religious congregation). But, we have buildings all over the world that are designed for people to come together to study or pray together – or that belong to the government and can be used by the general public. We can use these buildings as gathering places to educate our children for the innovation economy.

Conclusion

We need to come together as societies and communities and fill the gaps in our educational systems that are unlikely to go away any time soon. We need to stop waiting for others to fix the problems and instead do what we can as individuals by coming together to solve this key challenge for continued prosperity. We must do this now.

Who’s with me?

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Costs of Reducing the Flow of Immigrants and Travelers to USA

Leave a reply

Innovation Costs of Reducing the Flow of Immigrants and Travelers to USA

September 11th was a traumatic event for the psychology of the nation but also for its innovation capacity. After 9/11 the United States started admitting fewer highly skilled immigrants, invited fewer students to come study here, and companies and consumers cut back on their travel budgets.

These factors, along with many others, combined to reduce the amount of face to face collaboration and created new innovation headwinds for the country.

In 2001, Michael Porter of Harvard Business School published a report ranking the United States as #1 in terms of innovative capacity. By 2009, the Economist Intelligence Unit had dropped the United States in its innovation rankings from #3 between 2002 – 2006 to #4 between 2004 – 2008. The most recent Global Innovation Index has the United States falling from #1 in 2009 to #7 in 2011 — behind Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, and Denmark.

If you’re the United States, not being #1 anymore is a definite concern. Innovation drives job creation, and any decrease in the pace of domestic innovation will ultimately lead to lower economic growth. As the United States slides down the innovation rankings, restrictive immigration policies suddenly look less smart.

The number of foreign student visas increased by a third during the 90s, peaking in 2001 at 293,357 before dropping post-9/11 by 20 percent nearly overnight. It took five years before foreign student visa numbers recovered to 2001 levels. Last year, 331,208 foreign student visas were issued.

But a drop-off in highly skilled immigration does not account for the entire drop in America’s innovation leadership. Another headwind that hit post-9/11 was the drop-off in travel in America. In August 2001, 65.4 million airline passengers traveled to the country. It took three years for passenger growth to resume.

Travel — both corporate and leisure — is important to innovation for three main reasons:

  1. People see and experience things that spark new ideas

  2. Face-to-face meetings deepen human connection and improve productivity and collaboration.

  3. Innovation partnerships and acquisitions are often made in-person.

The United States is at an innovation crossroads. We must commit to attracting more innovators to this country, and to traveling abroad more. Not doing so is guaranteed to exacerbate America’s slide from innovation leader to laggard.

This article first appeared on The Atlantic before drifting into the archive

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Narrowing the Widening American Skills Gap

Leave a reply

Narrowing the Widening American Skills Gap

Employers today are having trouble finding good workers and resent having to train them after the educational system is done with them. The skills gap – the difference between the skills needed on the job and those possessed by the applicants – is plaguing human resource managers and business owners looking to hire productive employees.

But will No Child Left Behind and a steep increase in federal education standards fix the problem or make it worse?

Most people would agree that our education system is no longer up to the task required for maintaining innovation leadership. The battle lines are drawn around exactly how to fix the problem. While China is focused on introducing more creativity into their educational curriculum, many in the United States feel that more Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education is the cure to what ails our innovation standing. The right path to take is not clear and so there are a lot of educational experiments taking place trying to find a better way forward.

But, we are approaching the skills gap in the wrong way. Employers need employees with more skills, not more education, and there is a subtle but important difference between skills and education.

Education comes through study. Skills come through practice.

We have a skills gap because our educational system is too focused on education and doesn’t focus enough on skills development. We need to focus more attention on teaching children that learning is an important and lifelong pursuit, and then teach them how to learn so they can easily acquire whatever skills they need through practice.

In an era in which almost any kind of knowledge work can be outsourced to India, the Philippines or elsewhere, we do our children a disservice if we prepare them for commodity work instead of the insight-driven, innovation-focused, highly-competitive workplace of the future. Our current education system is over-engineered around standardized tests and a single correct answer, and has very little tolerance for considering multiple “right” answers or why the right answer might be wrong.

We’ve re-architected our information technology infrastructure several times over the past few decades, yet our educational architecture remains unchanged. It is time to change the goals and expected outcomes for our entire educational system.

First, we must stop educating children and start educating families to close the gaps in basic academic skills, higher-order thinking skills, and personal qualities that face employers. Second, we need to spend less time memorizing data that can be easily accessed, and instead focus on extracting insights from available information and data.

According to Dr. Jacquelyn Robinson, a community workforce development specialist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, “Creativity, once a trait avoided by employers, is now prized among employers who are trying to create the empowered, high-performance workforce needed for competitiveness in today’s marketplace.” We too must invest in instilling creativity in our children.

We need to spend more resources towards skill building. We need to transform teachers into tutors, proctors into facilitators, and shepherds into guides that assist students in discovering where their passions lie and help them engage in collaborative, project-based learning that builds the lateral thinking and problem solving skills that will drive today’s innovation economy.

At the same, we need to stop treating children as fungible commodities and instead re-architect our educational system to provide equal measures of general education, skills development, and passion discovery/practice.

So we need to learn more about passion identification and find ways to help children maximize their inherent gifts.

To close the skills gap, we need to stop thinking about how to make the current education system better and instead define what we now need our education system to achieve.

We need to experiment to identify new methods and structures to underpin an innovative education system in this country, and then find ways to scale the most promising solutions.

This article originally appeared on The Atlantic but it’s gone missing

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Educating Tomorrow’s Workforce

Leave a reply

Not much has changed since 2010 when on Blogging Innovation (which has now become Innovation Excellence) we asked the following question as part of a series of Innovation Perspectives:

What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?‘.

Educating Tomorrow's WorkforceHere was my response:

When I first saw this topic I wanted to write about education innovation, but I resisted when a couple of the contributing authors chose this topic. I wrote about the publishing industry instead, but then in 2009 I came across a Phil McKinney article and had the opportunity to meet Sir Ken Robinson then too, and my passions for an education revolution were stirred.

We sit at the nexus of amazing new education technology capabilities, the globalization of work, and an incredible transformation in the needs of employers. The path forward is not the same as the road behind, but our education system is proceeding as if it were.

“We need our children to be Masters of Mystery and Einsteins of Insight.”
– Braden Kelley

Instead of pursuing the current education mantra of more, better, faster, we need to instead rethink how we educate our children because we need to prepare them for a different world. A world in which flexibility, adaptibility, creativity, and problem solving will be prized ahead of the deep technical knowledge that is fast becoming a commodity and easily available.

I’ve said here before that the keys to business success are insight and execution. We are ending an era of incredible business focus on execution excellence and are entering an era of an increasing business focus on insight. Excellent execution will always be valued and required, but more and more components of this execution are shifting from the developed world to the lower-wage developing world.

We are currently in a race to the middle when it comes to standard of living as the developing countries like China, India, Brazil and others climb up the pyramid and developed countries like the United States, Italy, Greece and others slide down. Those developing countries wanting to stay near the top of the flattening standard of living pyramid will have to re-tool their education systems to to prepare their populations to grab as big a share as possible of the higher-wage insight-driven jobs.

Here is an interesting chart from a Newsweek-Intel Study reformatted by Phil McKinney:

Innovation Skills for Children

Looking at the differences in perspectives between the American and Chinese respondents in the research, I came to two possible conclusions:

  1. I am Chinese
  2. The United States (and many other developed countries) are headed in the wrong direction and better change course on education fast

You may think that my views on education are too business-focused, but look, even the arts are being globalized (look at Cirque du Soleil).

I believe that we underestimate children’s ability to understand the real world and I think that the education system and the business world need each other more than they realize. We need to re-imagine our public-private partnerships and expectations when it comes to education, and we need to start educating today’s young kids for tomorrow’s world.

The fact is that we are pushing the limits of taking today’s understanding of science to improve productivity an standard of living. Going forward we will need to break through currently held physical and natural limits and an expanded understanding of our physical and natural worlds. This will require a new generation of scientists and workers who can synthesize approaches from different cultures and disciplines, that are masters of creative approaches to problem solving, and that have the entrepreneurial spirit to breakthrough perceived barriers. Are these the kind of students we’re educating?

What kind of students is your country educating?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

As an added bonus, if you haven’t seen it, I encourage to check out Sir Ken Robinson’s video on “Creativity versus Literacy” here:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation through the Eyes of a Child

1 Reply

I’m currently reading Creating Innovators and so I thought I would share the classic post from 2009 below.

In the first video, Gever Tulley describes our child safety-obsessed culture and the impact this has on the young minds of our children. He then speaks about the different impact you can have by teaching your kids how to play with dangerous stuff. He highlights five dangerous things to let your kids play with, but is working on a book that will highlight 50 dangerous things. Check out the video:

In the second video, Gever Tulley demonstrates the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School. When given tools, materials and guidance, these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats, bridges and even a rollercoaster!

On his blog he lays out the principles of kit-based learning, which are great things for teachers and parents to think about when teaching science to children. Parents have an incredible opportunity to supplement the achievement test-focused learning their kids receive in school, and have fun with their children, if they take on this kind of interactive learning with their kids.

Principles of Kit-based Learning

The goal of any kit must be to teach how to think about the principle concept – the understanding and internalization of the concept comes naturally from the process. Memorizing the gravitational constant is not as useful as grokking the notion of gravity and developing a personal understanding of mass (constant) and weight (varies depending on context).

1. Focus on the quality of the experience first

  • like a story arc, plan for successes and setbacks

  • all stages of the project should be engaging and driven forward by the participants

2. Allow for personal expression within the experience

  • design variability into the project

3. Leave something to be discovered

  • some questions unanswered

  • some capabilities of the kit unexplained

  • some implications unstated

4. Support failure, require tinkering to get it right

  • allow for incorporation of external materials (but don’t require it)

  • instructions should only get you close to a solution, how close depends on the target audience.

5. Focus on a concept, but connect it to the world and the sciences

  • relate it to actual things in the world that the participants can identify and recognize

6. The experience should transition smoothly to tangential or subsequent topics

  • consider the kit as a part of a larger experience

  • avoid a hard definition of “complete” or “finished”

You can find pictures of the first kit, here.

As we look to work our way out of this current crisis, the countries that foster innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in students alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic will be the counties that earn their place at the top of the economic pyramid. Those that don’t will continue to slide downwards.

For further reading, check out:

Innovation in Education

Creativity versus Literacy

Twitter in the Classroom

Can countries achieve competitive advantage by teaching their kids to be more innovative, creative, and entrepreneurial?

What do you think?

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Requires Diagonal Thinking

Leave a reply

Innovation Requires Diagonal ThinkingThe outcome of a back and forth of a dialog on Twitter with Scramray E. Pinkus generated a lovely quote worth sharing:

“Innovating is like thinking diagonally. A perfect combination of both linear and lateral.”

– Scramray E. Pinkus (@Easelton)

The conversation sprung out of a tweet I posted that postulated that when people use technology (iPads, smartphones, laptops, etc.) and television as child minders, that they are actually promoting linear thinking in their children at the expense of the lateral thinking that our society so desperately needs. We need strong lateral thinking to compliment the dominant linear thinking out there, so that together they can drive the social innovation the world needs to fix this mess we’ve made.

What do you think?

Technology as child minder, positive or negative effects on the innovative capacity of our children?

One of my proof points is this article from The Washington Post.

Any other proof points out there?

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Toronto Innovation Book Event

1 Reply

Toronto Innovation Book EventOn Tuesday, November 9, 2010 I will be speaking about my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire at a book event at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto as part of their Innovation in Business Experts Speaker Series @ Rotman.

TIME: 7:45 am to 8:45 am – Presentation and Q&A

PLACE: Classroom 127 (ground floor), Rotman School of Management, 105 St. George Street, Toronto

FEE: $49 plus HST per person; $39 plus HST per person for Rotman and U of Toronto alumni (fees include the session, 1 copy of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire)

TO REGISTER: Click Here

I will be speaking about my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose, answering questions, and signing copies of the book.

If you’re in Toronto I hope you’ll register for the event and I’ll see you there.

If you’d like to organize a Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire book event in your city, please let me know.



Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Multiplication

Leave a reply

I came across an interesting video with economist Alex Tabarrok talking about the incredible rate of progress in idea creation in the last 50 years and the prognosis for the next 100 years. His main premise?

“One Idea, One World, One Market”

Check out the video:

The video does a great job of visualizing part of the reason that the rate of technological advance is increasing – there are more people working to create ideas and solutions than ever before. Despite the incredible growth in idea creation over the last 50 years, Alex Tabarrok talks a lot about the need to increase the number of idea creators. Currently, less than 1/10 of 1% of the world’s population are scientists and engineers (1 in 1,000).

Innovation MultiplicationIf you think about the world’s population as one interconnected cloud computer, and follow that analogy through – billions of our processors are offline. If the rest of the world were as wealthy as the United States, there would be five times as many scientists and engineers.

The United States may be losing its idea leadership, but that is a great thing because it means that the number of idea creators is increasing.

For example, in the ten years from 1996-2006, the number of university students in China increased from 1 million to 5 million. Dr. Tabarrok didn’t present the data, but I imagine there was probably a similar increase in India during the same time period.

“We all benefit when other countries get rich”

  • greater demand for ideas

  • increased supply of new ideas

Who will be the idea leader over the next 50 years?

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Creativity versus Literacy

3 Replies

I came across this video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking about how schools kill creativity.

He contends that more emphasis should be placed on teaching creativity in schools, and that teaching creativity should be as important as teaching literacy.

Here are some of his other key thoughts and insights:

The great thing about children is that if they don’t know, at least they’ll have a go – “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Unfortunately, by the time we become adults, most of us lose this capacity.

“We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or we are educated out of it.” – Sir Ken Robinson

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

Every society has the same heirarchy of educational subjects:

  1. Mathematics and Languages

  2. Humanities

  3. Arts

    • Art and Music

    • Drama and Dance

As children grow up we start to educate them from the waist up, then just their heads, and then we focus slightly to one side. Meaning that the most successful people produced by this system end up being university professors who live in their heads and view their bodies as transport systems for their heads.

The public education system was created during the industrial revolution and primarily serves to educate the workforce and to serve as a protracted process of university entrance.

The consequence is that many brilliant, talented, creative people are left feeling that they are not.

At the same time we are going through a period of academic inflation – the jobs that used to require a bachelor’s degree now require a master’s and those that used to require a master’s now require a PhD.

We need to think about intelligence differently. Intelligence is dynamic, interactive, and inter-disciplinary.

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson has collected a lot of this thinking into a book called The Element.

What do you think?

Braden (@innovate on Twitter)

Twitter in the Classroom

Leave a reply

During Clayton Christensen’s talk at the World Innovation Forum about innovation in education and healthcare, Dr. Christensen made a point about how technology will move more of education out of the classroom and onto the Internet.

He was mostly speaking about augmenting home schooling, but also about school leavers earning their equivalency online, and online advanced placement courses for kids at schools who might not have the resources to provide these courses.

This sparked some humorous debate amongst those in the Bloggers Hub at the World Innovation forum about the possibility of teaching kids 140 characters at a time via Twitter.

Well, teachers are not exactly doing that, but they have been using Twitter in the classroom since at least January 2008.

At the University of Texas at Dallas, History Professor, Monica Rankin has been using hashtags for classroom discussion in the hopes that it would lead to increased student involvement. Here is a video made by film students at the university about the experiment:

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota has been partnering with Roosevelt High School to integrate Twitter and other social media tools into the curriculum to successfully increase student engagement. Here is a video that the University of Minnesota put together about their experiment:

Out here in Seattle, National Public Radio (NPR) recently did a segment on how a local private school is using Twitter to facilitate improved communications between students and parents about what is going on in the classroom. As a parent, this is probably my favorite example of using Twitter in the classroom. You can hear the four minute audio story here (sorry, link broken) and see examples of The Meridian School‘s classroom tweets above.

For teachers considering the use of Twitter in the classroom, you should also check out this blog article on thirteen ways to use Twitter in academia (sorry, link broken).

So, does Twitter have a place in the classroom?

I think so. What do you think?

Braden (@innovate on Twitter)

Build a Common Language of Innovation

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.