Having spent most of my career developing new products and new ventures for consumer products companies, I can appreciate the Herculean effort required to put that lander on Mars. The effort required a team with a mastery of science, technology, engineering and math at levels that most of us find difficult to grasp. In addition it required collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and innovation…all of the
21st Century Job Skills that industry demands.
Imagine what could be accomplished if teams with those skills and funding set about reinventing our K-12 school systems. Why would they be likely to succeed where our educators have been unsuccessful? They have very different skill sets. For NASA to succeed, it requires a team of people with a wide array of skill sets that result in a balanced team.
Our school systems and state Departments of Education are filled with exceptionally well-educated people who are exceptionally proficient at organizing, systematizing, developing processes, procedures and evaluation. School systems organizational design dates back to the time of the industrial revolution. The design of the school systems is precisely what industry wanted at the time. Conformity and uniformity were critical in an era of mass production. Industry’s needs remained unchanged until globalization of the economy caused a radical reevaluation of the manufacturing process. When the harsh realities of the problems of chasing the lowest cost producer around the globe became apparent, industry was forced to reinvent itself. As industry on-shored jobs, the skills, knowledge and attributes they wanted in their workforce had changed radically.
The global marketplace is so fiercely competitive that the reinvention of industry happened very quietly. In the course of the reinvention, management realized that manufacturing and management processes and procedures of the past were antithetical to their needs. Industry was so quiet and secretive about the transformation that the education community was and for the most part is unaware of the shifting needs. Industry is confronted with the lack of supply of highly skilled workers with STEM proficiency and 21st Century Job Skills.
Industry needs for highly skilled technical workers with the required skills, attributes and knowledge are largely unmet. They are a victim of a system their predecessors created. Industry in the past place high value on consistence and conformity. The resistance to change that is deeply ingrained in the education system was precisely what industry leaders of prior generations wanted.
The challenge ahead can be likened to asking the captain of a super tanker to turn around and go the opposite direction at a high rate of speed. The leadership of K-12 is listening to industry. The adoption of Common Core system that values interdisciplinary and problem based learning is part of the response. In most systems the Common Core launch is being treated like the introduction of a new text book. The state and federal K-12 leadership know the changes are needed, but find it almost impossible to visualize what classroom implementation will look like. And if those changes are not enough, the challenges of enhancing STEM education have the potential to overwhelm the teachers. In the rush to make changes, we could easily make things worse. In the new ventures world we refer to this situation as: Ready, fire, aim…catch the bullet! Yes…there is a lot of gallows humor when you work in new ventures and new products.
Teachers’ feet have been held to the fire to use methodology that has not worked for at least a half century. When it continued not to work, the call came for more rigor in the implementation. That only served to increase teacher frustration. Einstein was correct when he observed: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Not only have we totally frustrated our teachers, we also failed to ask the most important question. Why are students resistant to learning? The answer is painfully obvious. Students do not see the relevance of what they are learning. Most students find school boring if not painful. There in lies the core challenge.
It is interesting to think about how a NASA team might approach these challenges. Using the super tanker analogy, the NASA engineers would want to know if radical course corrections are now the norm in operating super tankers. If so they would likely change the design of the ship to incorporate a large bow thruster to facilitate rapid, radical course corrections.
In the case of the school systems, the NASA team would likely focus on addressing the most daunting problem first. How do you transform the classroom environment so that it excites and engages students and teachers? How do you help them find relevance in what they are being taught?
Like most new venture teams, the NASA scientists would search the globe for examples of successful implementations. Don’t invent anything that you don’t have to. They would do what my father and a team of scientists at Eli Lilly & Company did during WWII. At that time, Penicillin was being grown in wet milk bottles in a dark room. That process was totally inadequate to meet the needs of soldiers wounded in battle. The team studied cheese making, breweries and distilleries for ideas on how to approach the problem. They developed an early model for finding the best strain and developed a fermentation process that enabled them to make vast quantities of Penicillin during the war.
Applying that same thinking to the current education situation, we asked: Who is doing an exceptional job of exciting and engaging kids and teachers about learning? What kind of student outcomes are they achieving (graduation rate, college acceptance, % studying STEM fields). We then had to create a template that replicates the successful models and adapt them to the unique needs of each region. Business needs to be intimately involved in the design process. In a very real sense business and higher education are the customers of the K-12 systems. Customer satisfaction is critical in the design and implementation process.
We interviewed 92 customers of the K-12 system (Business and Higher Education CEOs). They are neither delighted nor satisfied with the quality of high school graduates. The current student evaluation instruments are not calibrated to assess the critical needs of the customers. Business engagement is critically important as a catalyst for the necessary transformation.
One of the greatest challenges in the change process is to find a way for business to engage with K-12 educators. Imagine if you will a NASA scientist collaborating with an 8th grade science teacher to bring real world NASA problems into the classroom in a way that causes students to learn the state standards for that course. Kids love to solve real world problems. They are natural problem solvers. Relevance is the key to student engagement and excitement.
We are collaborating with a number of school systems on ways to engage industry with K-12 educators to provide real world problems for course work, internships for students and teachers, job shadowing and apprenticeships. In addition, we have identified classroom and after-school STEM team strategies that are generating exception outcomes. The next challenge is to create a template for testing and then large-scale implementation.
We were asked to speak to Innovate Hampton Roads last week. They assembled a team that is passionately interested in making this vision a reality across their 18 county region. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that there were two people from NASA sitting in the front row. The diversity of the team they assembled was amazing. They had leaders from K-12, higher education and industry gathered in a glass walled theater on the top floor of the Dominion Enterprises building. It was the perfect setting for a visual overview of much of the geography that the group planned to transform. The passion, recruiting pain, questions and ideas that flowed out of the group was energizing. The concept of reconnecting the producer with the customer was enthusiastically received. It was no small irony that Dominion Enterprises is a huge marketing communications company that has exceptional expertise in connecting sellers and buyers. Their knowledge of strategic communications will no doubt be useful as the Innovate Hampton Roads team continues the journey. With the people from NASA, engineers and technologists from across the region, Innovate Hampton Roads has the necessary ingredients for an exceptional outcome.
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