Friends School of Baltimore Private School Blog

Last week, I attended a conference sponsored by the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a network of public and private schools dedicated to reimagining the way student achievement is assessed and represented.  Friends joined MTC one year ago so that we could help shape the groundbreaking conversations taking place in this country around the traditional high school transcript, developed more than one hundred years ago, and its limitations in the modern world.

At this conference, held at Northeastern University, we each received a copy of the book Robot-Proof by Joseph Aoun, Northeastern’s President. In it, Aoun articulates the need for an “updated model of higher education,” for the age of artificial intelligence, one that “refits (students’) mental engines, calibrating them with a creative mindset and the mental elasticity to invent, discover, or otherwise produce something society deems valuable.”  “Instead of training laborers,” he writes, “a robot-proof education trains creators.”

The premise of Aoun’s argument is, as his title suggests, the threat AI poses to work that we once thought could only be performed by actual humans. He cites as evidence of this coming change an “oft-quoted 2013 study from Oxford University (which) found that nearly half of U.S. jobs are at risk of automation in the next twenty years.” Developments since 2013, including large-scale usage of AI to automate work in such fields as law, finance, and other lucrative sectors of the economy, suggest that such a forecast is not far-fetched.  What, he asks, needs to change about our model of higher (and by extension secondary) education in order to prepare our children to thrive in this rapidly shifting environment?

According to Aoun, the cure for what ails higher ed is an approach that he labels “humanics,” which develops mastery of relevant content as well as the “uniquely human cognitive capacities” that defy automation.  The content to which he refers includes many traditional fields, but to these he adds “data literacy, technological literacy, and human literacy.” The human cognitive capacities (roughly akin to the habits of mind in our Teaching and Learning Paradigm) that he believes to be essential include systems thinking, entrepreneurship, cultural agility, and critical thinking.  Perhaps not surprisingly, from the President of Northeastern, a university that has long promoted hands-on learning through its co-op program, he believes that in order for these qualities to become deeply ingrained, students “need to experience them in the intensity and chaos of real work environments such as co-ops and internships.”

For me, reading Robot-Proof is profoundly affirming of the direction we’ve charted for teaching and learning at Friends School.  We, too, believe that the mastery of content is only one component of a world-class education and that it must be complemented by the cultivation of a critical set of habits of mind and interpersonal skills.  We, too, are eager to have our students take the knowledge they’ve created out into the world and put it to work in settings where they can see its value and appreciate its impact. And we, too, acknowledge that as the world around us becomes more automated, the value of uniquely human qualities is heightened, not diminished.

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Are Robots Competing for Your Job? -- The New Yorker (Feb. 25, 2019)

The Workforce of the Future: The Skills Challenge Becomes More Apparent -- Forbes (Jan. 22, 2019)

This past week, several of my Friends colleagues and I traveled to Long Beach, Calif. for the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) conference. The theme for this year’s gathering was “Reimagining Independent Schools” -- a subject that is near and dear to my heart. (It is also central to our School’s strategic direction, Friends Connects,

Over three days, speakers argued for the urgency of education reform, citing the startling resemblance today’s schools bear to those of a century ago (“How confident would any of us be if our hospitals operated much as they did 100 years ago?”) and offering compelling rationales for re-examining our assumptions about education. Two of the developments undergirding this argument are the easy accessibility of knowledge we have as a result of technological advances and the groundbreaking brain-based research about learning now available through functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which allows researchers to monitor in real time how the brain processes information.

Consider that just 20 years ago schools were the primary repositories of knowledge, the source, through teachers and printed materials, of nearly all our students’ factual information. Today, the average teenager (or younger!) carries the accumulated sum of human knowledge - quite literally - in the palm of their hand. This epochal shift in the ubiquity of information - both accurate and dubious - demands a similarly dramatic change in the model and practice of modern education. As one aptly titled conference session asked, “If the Answer Is Googleable, Is the Question Worth Asking?”

Rather than memorizing and summoning discrete pieces of knowledge as we have in the past, students must now learn to critically navigate the barrage of information they encounter and must constantly assess, apply, and synthesize it in creative and collaborative ways. Cultivating these skills in our students requires a shift towards more problem-based and experiential learning, a direction we have consciously taken at our School.

It also requires that we embrace the burgeoning science of learning, in our teaching and our professional development. At Friends, we are guided in this work by our partnership with the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, an institute that helps teachers understand and apply the latest brain research in order to enhance student achievement. Our efforts to deepen student-teacher-family relationships and our move towards greater personalization of the educational experience, for example, are informed by proven research that a feeling of connectedness to the adults with whom they’re working and an enhanced sense of individual agency both lead to improved student performance.

The NAIS conference theme of “Reimagining Independent Schools” is a direct echo of our promise in Friends Connects, to “reimagine the very purpose and shape of School, given the rate and complexity of change that is taking place in our world.”  Tackling this daunting goal involves a willingness to question our long-held assumptions and an openness to reconsider such fundamental structural elements of our work as how we assess student achievement and how we use our time on, and beyond, our campus. Our recent decision to join the Mastery Transcript Consortium allows us to be part of a network of innovative schools and educators who are at the forefront of the national conversation around these issues and who are collaboratively developing a new paradigm for modern education.

Change is never easy and as my NAIS colleagues will attest the challenges of reimagining school are great. Friends is fortunate in that we are a Quaker school; A commitment to “continuing revelation,” through new ideas and possibilities, is steeped in our institutional DNA. We will need to draw upon this foundational tenet as we move forward on this exciting path.

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Starting at Zero: Reimagining Education in America - American Enterprise Institute - June 22, 2018)

The Truth About 'Crisis' in American Education - Forbes (Dec. 31, 2015)

Educators Innovating Learning - Edutopia (April 13, 2015)