The most dramatic and ultimately revolutionary change taking place in the world today is the rapid evolution of a global, social, neural network that connects every person with access to the internet, and, specifically, mobile digital devices. For the first time in human history, knowledge is accessible and transferable amongst individuals who never have met, nor will ever meet each other face-to-face. Nowhere will this evolution have a more universal impact, regardless of national and sub-national policies and traditions, than amongst those organizations that have, for millennia, been a primary source and focus of knowledge transfer: our schools. As raw knowledge becomes increasingly available in the pockets of young people in every country, our schools are in the process of transforming from an outdated model that focuses on the rote learning of content and short-term preparation for tests, to one of deeper learning that prepares students for success in a rapidly evolving future.
In the face of this fundamental challenge, our broad community of education stakeholders—learners, parents, teachers, administrators, and community builders—is faced with three big questions: “Why” should schools change? “What” does that change look like? And, “how” do we make those changes?
Thankfully, we are working our way through these questions. Some schools and districts are already engaged in significant changes to their core curriculum, pedagogy, and the roles of both teachers and students, what I have termed the “operating system” of education. Other schools are at an earlier stage of evolution, wrestling with the question of why schools should, in fact, change. They are grappling with the disruption, discomfort, and fear of the unknown that will become present to the community along the way. This type of staggered or uneven evolution is typical across many industries; one powerful tool the K-12 education has is our willingness to share with each other, which gives means schools and districts that are still wondering how to proceed do not have to reinvent the wheel.
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it was widely apparent that the rate of change across many human systems had dramatically eclipsed that of any other time in human history. The other major historical revolutions had evolved over millennia (the agricultural revolution), centuries (communication and transportation), or decades (the industrial revolution). By 2010, changes in technology, communication, global markets, and geopolitics forced us to adapt over periods as short as months or just a few years. Yet, over this time of radically increased dynamism in the world around us, our basic system of education has stayed remarkably static.
In just the last five years, we have seen a growing consensus amongst professional educators, students, parents, and community stakeholders—like employers and colleges—that we simply must update how our schools operate and how our students learn. For many education stakeholders around the world, this question of “why education must change” is, to be blunt, a train that left the station 5-20 years ago. To paraphrase John Dewey, our mission is to prepare our students for their future, not for our past.
There is an increasing convergence about what education looks like in a post-traditional ecosystem. This does not mean all schools are starting to look and act the same; on the contrary, we see a dramatic differentiation of school and non-traditional learning experiences from one community to another. But, some of the changes are inevitable and, in what we might soon be calling “the American model” of K-12 education, we see increasing focus on the long-term needs and benefits of the individual learner, and decreasing focus on standardized exams and rigid college admissions practices.
The most common theme is the major shift from “doing learning to learners” to “learning by and with the learner.” In the United States, over the last several years, we are increasingly coalescing around the term “deeper learning” to describe this learning experience. It includes a set of competencies students must master in order to apply their knowledge to problems in the classroom and on the job. In addition to mastering core academic content, these competencies include:
Educators, schools, districts, and countries will provide this learning in many different ways, and those who subscribe to the overall thesis generally agree there is no single path to get there (a more detailed articulation of how these six overarching elements are most frequently manifested in the classroom can be found in the free download Introduction of my new book, Moving the Rock, at the Deeper Learning Network, and on a “Deeper Learning Cheat Sheet,” which you can find on the Resources page of my website). The key point is that, in order to prepare our students for their roles in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world, these cognitive and non-cognitive skills become the backbone, not the by-product, of an effective education system.
In the last six years, as I have visited more than 150 schools and districts (mostly in the US, but in several other countries as well), and in interfacing with thousands of educators from around the world, it is clear that leading schools reflect converging trends around the big key question for the future: How can we transform the system of education at scale, a system that, in most countries, has a tremendous amount of historic inertia and fear of change?
Solutions show up in a number of ways depending on the community exploring the question. Many schools are able to transform without permission, empowerment, or additional resources from the forces that are largely responsible for the inertia in the first place. Instead, these successful schools and districts identified the freedom and resources already available to them and used them in brand new ways. In the words of Kaleb Rashad, principal of High Tech High in San Diego, “The revolution will not be authorized!” The seven primary chapters of Moving the Rock address each of these big “levers” that are successfully changing the school system in typical schools and districts across the country.
We also see a convergence of strategic and tactical steps that individual schools and districts employ to accelerate transformation; these steps to organizational change are applicable across many regions or countries. Many of these steps are influenced by and overlap with, those outlined by Kotter (2012) in the Harvard Business Review:
Schools that wish to outpace rivals and/or take advantage of the rapidly-evolving change in demands for students prepared to succeed in a post-information revolution world must adopt clear strategic objectives, not whittle at the margins. Strategy, as outlined by leading experts like Roger Martin and Michael Porter, must identify a set of clear, differentiated, organization-wide aspirations—what I call a “north star”—that is capable of winning the race for sustainable enrollment demand. They must choose what to focus on, and what to let go; successful organizations in competitive markets do not try to please every customer. And they must let go of the risky perception that small changes to a flawed existing system will somehow produce a winning value proposition in the coming years and decades.
The future is less knowable than it has ever been throughout human history, and it is getting “less knowable” all the time. This VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) is not what most educators would choose, but it is the hand we have been dealt. Those that embrace the discomfort of change, rather than running from it, will succeed. Those that allow fear and inertia to rule their decision making will disproportionately fail. Evolution, as a process, does not play favorites; it is neither fair nor kind. Schools and communities that recognize this, and the essential role that education plays in their own future, will heed this inevitability, transform their schools, and better prepare students to succeed after graduation.
Grant Lichtman is an internationally recognized thought leader in the drive to transform K-12 education. He speaks, writes, and works with fellow educators to build capacity and comfort with innovation in response to a rapidly changing world. He works with school and community teams in both public and private schools, helping them to develop their imagination of schools of the future, and their places in that future. He is the author of three books, Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Change Education; #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education; and The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School.
For fifteen years Grant was a senior administrator at one of the largest and oldest K-12 independent schools in California with responsibilities that included business, finance, operations, technology, development, campus construction, and global studies. Before working in education, he directed business ventures in the oil and gas industry in the former Soviet Union, South America, and the U.S. Gulf Coast. He worked close to center stage in the economic and political transformation of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and the historic opening of that communist-dominated economy to the outside world.
Grant graduated from Stanford University with a BS and MS in geology in 1980 and studied the deep ocean basins of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Bering Sea. He and his wife, Julie, live in Poway, California.
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