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JUSTIN REICH: So the course Envisioning
the Graduate of the Future is about helping
schools develop what we call a graduate profile.
It stems from the idea that to do really good work,
you need to begin with the end in mind.
So if you're going to prepare people for their roles
in a democracy, for the future of work,
to be reflective ethical individuals-- if that's
the work that schools need to do,
they've got to be able to say to themselves,
what should a graduate be able to do?
What kind of person should they be?
What should they accomplish while they're
in a school setting?
And so a graduate profile is a document
that characterizes for a community
the hopes and aspirations that they have for their graduates.
As schools develop these graduate profiles,
they can then use it both as a rubric and as a blueprint.
So you can look at what you're already doing and saying, are
the kinds of things that we're doing going to prepare people
to be the kind of folks that we hope they are
and develop the skills that we hope they have?
If not, what can we do to change?
And as we think about new programming or new things we're
trying to accomplish in our school,
we can say to ourselves, OK, we have this graduate profile.
We have this type of person, this set of accomplishments
that we're aiming for.
How well is our work happening right now in order
to be able to prepare people to do that?
SARAH HANSEN: So it sounds like there's really
no one size fits all for these profiles,
that they're developed by local school communities.
JUSTIN REICH: That would be particularly true in the United
States.
In the United States, we have an extremely decentralized
education system.
So we have 50 different states.
We have about 13,000 school districts.
We have 130,000 schools.
In our country, we have a really strong tradition
of local control.
And so it makes sense, in our system,
that local communities, with their elected school
boards and things like that, would
do this exercise together.
In a big city like New York City or LA,
it might make sense for each different school
to go through this exercise together.
And other parts of the world have more centralized education
systems, in which it would make less sense
for individual schools to generate their own graduate
profile because part of what they're trying to do
is be part of a larger federal system.
But yeah, the way that we mostly frame it
for people in the United States in the course
is the idea that, when teachers do the work of schools,
it's just incredibly time consuming
and taxing to make these complex institutions run every day.
Today, some administrator had to call me
because I forgot to pack my daughter lunch.
And their teacher has to figure out,
what is this kid going to eat?
And that was one tiny thing that happened in one school.
And there were a zillion things like that.
What a graduate profile process does is it says,
OK, you've probably been just running your school
and just making it work for a while.
Let's stop and take a break for a second and say to ourselves,
is what we're doing leading to the outcomes that we hope for?
When we look at our students when
they walk across the stage in May or in June,
are they people that would make our community proud?
Have we taught them the things that we think
they'll need to be successful?
Because the world changes, it's important to revisit
those things periodically and ask new questions about--
as technology changes, as culture changes,
as the disciplines change, are we
doing the work to have people be really well-prepared?
SARAH HANSEN: Right.
And along those lines, how did you
structure this particular course to spark local change?
JUSTIN REICH: In all of our online course design,
our goal is that when people take our courses,
they leave and make a difference where they're at.
So we don't really care if they complete the course.
We don't care if they do our assignment.
I mean, we build a bunch of things to help them.
But the measure for us is not did you get a certificate,
did you pass the class.
The measure is did you go back to your local community
and feel empowered to make change.
So that permeates-- that question permeates everything
that we do in the design of our courses.
So for instance, one of the things we know
is that it's a lot easier to engage in change processes
when you have other people with you who are helping you.
So leading an initiative by yourself
is more hard than leading it with a couple
of other colleagues.
So from the very beginning of the course,
we encourage people to sign up in small groups
from their school and form what we call learning circles.
So we say, as you're taking the course, find a couple of people
that you can meet with regularly throughout the course.
A second thing that we do is that almost all
of the activities and assignments in the course
ask you to go out and start doing things in the world.
So the first activity that we ask you to do individually
in Graduate of the Future is to start
talking to different stakeholders
in the school about what they think
the best work in the school is or what
they think the most important things are
for students to learn.
So it's not the case that we say,
come take a six week online course.
And then at some point in the future,
go and do interesting things.
We say, as soon as you show up in this course,
start doing interesting things.
As you go out in the world and make these experiments
in your local context, create little artifacts, summaries
of conversations or data that you're recording
from experiments you're trying.
And bring that back into the course forum
and share that with other people,
in part because that's an accountability
mechanism for you, but in part we can stimulate some really
interesting conversations if we have people
all over the world saying, hey, I
went to talk to the stakeholders in my community.
And here's the kinds of things that they said were important.
Well, look, we see that some of these themes
cut across lots of different schools
in lots of different places.
And then you also have some things
that were really unique to your local context.
If you're a school that's on the coast of Massachusetts,
particularly if you have a strong fishing community
or something like that, the sea just matters to you in a way
that it's not going to matter to a town in North Dakota that's
going through a fracking boom that's thinking about the oil
and gas industries and things like that.
I mean, the places that we're located--
places that have extensive immigration
from different kinds of communities,
or don't, or are in rural northern New England where
communities are hollowing out because young people are moving
away--
all of these things make a difference
for how schools think about themselves and the work
that they need to do.
SARAH HANSEN: Right, right.
Tell us about the role of case studies then,
these very specific examples from different locations
from around the United States.
What role do these case studies play
in sharing these specific examples?
JUSTIN REICH: Great.
So we think one of the main virtues of online learning,
for school leaders, and other helping professions,
and teachers, and things, is that we can take you to places
where things are happening that would be hard for you
to see in your local context.
So there are definitely lots of schools across the country that
are engaged in some kind of graduate profile
process, envisioning graduates.
But if there's not one that's near you that you can go visit,
in our course we want to be able to take you there.
Teachers, like lots of other professionals,
they want to see people who are like them doing work
in contexts that looks like theirs, that
feels relatable in order to be able to say,
OK, this feels real.
This feels like not just some suggestions
that these academics at MIT are making.
But this feels like work that schools can do.
So we have these voices in practice case studies,
where we try to take people in our courses
to schools that are doing interesting things
and not necessarily doing the best or exemplary work,
but just places that are really deeply engaged in the work
and envisioning graduates of the future.
We happened to find three schools
that really different stages.
So we went to Washington Leadership Academy
in Washington DC, where they were just
starting to have these conversations as a relatively
new school about what do we want our graduates to look
like, how would a graduate profile help us.
We went to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts,
which was a suburban community, very much
in the middle of this process--
community group meeting happening in the midst
of creating a graduate profile.
And then we went to the Community Charter
school of Cambridge that had already
finished their graduate profile process
and was starting to use it to evaluate their current program
and curriculum and think about future program and curriculum.
So we can take the learners in our course
to these three moments of time and say, well, here's
what it might look like when you're at the beginning.
And here's how you get started.
Here are some of the things that come up
in the middle, and the exciting parts, and the friction,
and the challenges.
And then if you're successful, here's
how this can be a tool that can help you
with future kinds of work.
And seeing people who have their jobs,
look like them, doing this is really important for--
I mean, our learners often say that the documentary videos
that we create are the most powerful part of the learning
experience for them.
SARAH HANSEN: So this course moves away
from grades as the primary assessment tool.
Can you talk about that?
JUSTIN REICH: Sure.
So it would not be possible-- there's not really
a set of declarative knowledge that we want people to know.
I mean, we could have asked someone
a multiple choice of what is a graduate profile
or a few other things like that.
But mostly, we want them to engage
in a process that's customized for them
to their local community.
So we don't have enough staff to be
able to grade everyone's performance
on those kinds of tasks.
So the way that we do assessment in the courses
is we give people challenges.
Some of them are individual, reflective activities.
But most of them are go out in your school, collect some data,
try some experiments, do a new thing, and then come back
and tell us what happened.
And then we award people a certificate in the course
if, through an honor system, they
enough weekly checklists and enough parts of those weekly
checklists to do about 60% of the work in the course.
And then they can get a certificate.
An additional level of accountability that we have
is that when people do these assignments,
they create some kind of artifact around them.
So if I went and talked to a few stakeholders,
I would take notes on what I thought
were the most important ideas that came out.
And then we have people post that in the forums.
And then we ask people to give each other peer feedback
on what they're doing and what they're learning--
how do they take notes, what kinds of questions
did they ask.
When they do a first draft of the graduate profile,
what seems to be being communicated effectively?
What's unclear?
When they do a second draft, how are they improving it?
I mean, teaching professionals around the world,
they don't need us to hold them accountable.
They're going and doing the work of making schools
better every day.
They need our help, and support, and guidance,
and those kinds of things.
And we're not we're not trying to certify people
as having achieved a certain level of envisioning
the graduate of the future proficiency in the way
that other courses should.
An introductory computer science course
should certify you are reasonably
proficient at x number of things.
For us, assessment-- I mean, the most important thing
that our assessments do is they encourage, inspire, empower,
give permission to people to go out in the world
and start trying to make their schools better
through some process that we're helping guiding people through.
And for me teaching these courses,
I think some of the most fun, rewarding feedback we get
is something along the lines of before I took this course,
I didn't know it was my job to do this.
I didn't know that I could help lead a community conversation
around a graduate profile.
But there was nobody else doing it.
And when I started doing it, people
started going-- or the principal started going along.
Or my colleagues started going along.
Or the superintendent started going along,
or other things like that.
My colleague here in the Sloan School, Peter Senge,
who's worked in lots of industries, not just education,
says there's no one in an institution who
really feels empowered to make change by their title.
Lots of people feel like we're stuck in the world
that we're in.
But there are all kinds of people
around the world in wherever they
work who go, nope, I'm going to make this thing better.
And that's a real part of the spirit behind our classes,
is that sense that it doesn't have to be your job.
You don't have to be the superintendent
to declare that we have to have conversations
about what our graduates should be able to do.
You just start having those conversations.
And if you do it well, and if you do it
with enthusiasm, and with care, and with an invitation
to others, they'll start getting involved.
SARAH HANSEN: Yeah, it's interesting,
how you ask students to articulate--
I used to think this and now I think this.
And that brings to mind design thinking.
Could you talk about the role of design thinking in the course?
JUSTIN REICH: Sure.
So I would say all of our courses
that we build have a a kind of bias to action behind them,
which I think is one of the key tenets of design thinking.
So design thinking is a methodology
for understanding and addressing problems
that believes that good ideas come from iteration more
than any other source, that the way that you get to a good idea
is that you start with bad ideas,
or you start with lots of ideas, and you cycle through them as
much as you can.
So this course, I think, embodies this notion of we
want to get away from the idea of the graduate profile as--
well, before you can do any of this,
you're going to have to get everyone together in the room.
And you're going to have to have a two year
commitment to a process.
And our approach to it is more, what
is the smallest thing that you can do to start getting people
to think about, ask questions about, explore where graduates
should end up?
Anyone in a system can ask their colleagues, their students,
their parents, their stakeholders
those kinds of questions.
Anyone can start taking the answers to those questions
and synthesizing them, and putting them
on your classroom door, or bringing them
to a department meeting.
Anyone, having done that step, can
go to the next step of finding leadership, and trying
to get more resources, and more time,
and more support behind these initiatives.
That, I think, is the most design-inspired component
of it, which is that we're going to have people figure out
how to do this well not by studying it
for a long time in the abstract and setting up a long process,
but by saying, here's some ideas.
Get started.
Have some missteps.
Have some things at work.
And be continuously adjusting as you're going along.
SARAH HANSEN: I love that idea.
What is the smallest thing I can do to spark a change?
JUSTIN REICH: I don't remember if it's
in this course or another course.
Generally speaking, we refer to that as the Someday Monday
Problem.
If you really want to do powerful work in schools,
you have to imagine really different kinds of schools.
The institutions that we have now
are not doing the best possible job
they could preparing young people
for their futures as citizens, as reflective,
ethical individuals, as people prepared
for a changing world of work.
But also, all the kids are showing up tomorrow.
And some of them are showing up without their lunch, like mine.
And you can't fix all of those things.
You can't send the kids home for two years
and be like, let us retool for a little bit.
When you come back, it'll be great.
And also, as you're working towards these bigger
changes and someday you have to have these things that you can
try and implement on Monday.
What's the next thing that I can do
that gets me one step closer to this larger goal?
And actually, depending upon the time of year
it is, people are more or less receptive to more fine-grained
or more wider-grain things.
If we taught versions of Envisioning the Graduate
over the summer, we would do it in a way
that there's less about the day to day interventions
that you would do, because there aren't day to day interventions
to do in July in schools in Massachusetts,
and more about, all right, what is
some kind of longer term planning
that I might be able to do.
And this, we happen to be filming this right
before Christmas break.
There is no Someday work that gets done
right before Christmas break.
If you're going to make suggestions
to people in this time of year, it has to be like,
here's one more thing that you can try before you head out
for the holiday.
But do but do that one thing.
There's always one step that we can
try and take to get us one step closer to this broader
vision we have.
SARAH HANSEN: So when you think about facilitating
this course again, how are you thinking about iterating?
JUSTIN REICH: A big thing that we're thinking about is--
in the first runs of our courses,
we really focused on the idea of making an experiment,
making a change, starting some kind of process
as the central learning goal of the course.
And we still have that.
But the thing that we're trying to add to it
is, are we giving people enough tools and resources
to share what they're learning, to not just engage people
for Envisioning Graduates of the Future,
to not just engage people in the process of doing
a graduate profile exercise, but to be
able to share with a couple of other colleagues
here's how we're thinking about this whole thing.
Here's all the stuff that I learned in this course.
And you're not going to have time,
or you're not that into online learning,
you're not going to do the whole thing.
But let me share with you what I've learned about this
so that, if I'm a principal of the elementary school
in my town, I can show the five other principals
in the elementary school what I've learned.
And then all six of us can do this process together
in our schools.
So in subsequent versions, we're continuing to think about,
are we doing enough to empower our learners
to feel good about taking what they've learned in this course,
sharing it with others?
How do we make it more accessible, easier to share?
We've been experimenting with things
like creating workshop agendas for all of our courses.
If you wanted to facilitate this course in a face
to face setting, here's seven one our professional learning
community meeting agendas.
Here's two half-day agendas.
Here's one full day agenda for being able to do that.
Those are the kinds of resources we're
trying to generate more of as we iterate and do
more and more of these courses.
SARAH HANSEN: Right.
Those seem like such useful support.
It's not telling teachers how to do the work that they're
already doing, but it's providing support around that.
It's really, really neat.
JUSTIN REICH: Yeah, we're pretty sure that when
we share those agendas--
we have learning circles facilitators.
It's fine for us if people glance through them
and go, oh, that's interesting.
I'm not to do that, but I'm going to do this other thing.
But it's not clear to us how many people
take what we give them as training supports
and use them in the way that we give them to them.
But we see all kinds of ways that people take them and adapt
them into their own local circumstances
and make them make sense for them.
SARAH HANSEN: Is there anything else
that you'd like to add about teaching this course?
JUSTIN REICH: Well, it's just such a tremendous honor
and privilege to be able to have the time of the teachers
in the United States.
I mean, it's just a great joy to be able to support them,
to learn with them, to have them come up with new ideas.
I mean, in the first run of this course, a big idea
that I hadn't really thought of before
but came home to me listening to teachers was,
as they finish this graduate profile
process, a number of them said, look,
we basically made a document that describes
who we want to be as adults.
It wasn't just a graduate profile.
It was a community member profile.
It was an aspiration for who we are as people.
And we can use that.
That can help us think about how we hold ourselves accountable
to our behavior and to our engagement with students,
and the community, and those kinds of things.
And so that's what--
these courses are not built so that there's
a bunch of experts at MIT who know all the things
and go out and tell other people how to do stuff
and how to run their schools.
If we're doing this work in the best possible way,
we're inviting this dialogue with a community of educators
and saying, look, we're fortunate enough
to be able to just sit around all day
and think about how children learn, how teachers learn,
and to not have to worry about whether or not
somebody forgot their lunch.
And so that's what we can bring.
But the teachers that we work with know more
about their schools, and their community, and making schools
work than anybody else does.
And so we have to build learning experiences
that honor and incorporate that wisdom and experience.
SARAH HANSEN: Right.
And finally, what invitation would you offer to our audience
out there who might like to engage with this class?
JUSTIN REICH: So we try to make the courses so that they're
as accessible as possible.
So we usually run them in a facilitated way once a year.
And then the rest of the year, you can go and visit
the archived material, and take it, and use it however
you want.
There's a whole bunch of this unMOOCed material
that people can take and do whatever they want with.
We try to have regularly throughout the year
all of our courses running.
People can go to the Teaching Systems Lab website,
tsl.mit.edu, and sign up for our newsletter,
and hear about new kinds of things that are going on.
And we love having teachers engage with our work,
give us feedback, help us learn how we can do a better.
SARAH HANSEN: Great.
Thank you very much.
JUSTIN REICH: It was fun, Sarah.
Thanks for having me.