Hard Skills, Soft Skills?

As educational leaders, we should ask ourselves a simple question: How well do we understand the hard skills that guarantee our students a secure and productive future in the coming three decades? It's a question that is at once almost impossible and simple to answer.

What's impossible? Knowing what skills will be in demand over the next three decades. Jonathan Bein, a brilliant computer programmer (and now marketing consultant) in Boulder, Colorado once quipped to me that "the technology shifts about 20% each year. I got my Ph.D. only five years ago, so as of this year, I'm officially stupid...I need to re-learn the whole field." Jonathan was just about to sell his first of three business at that time, so he must have known something. Possibly something simple.

Jonathan's simple lesson was that there is really only one skill worth having, namely, the ability to adapt and acquire new talents. We could do a tremendous service to our students by giving serious attention to a curriculum that develops the habits of mind needed to learn, innovate and adapt to change. In place of recalling information, we should encourage asking questions and drawing inferences. Instead of solving equations, students should be challenged to demonstrate logical relationships. Rather than present, students should be graded on their ability to collaborate, to communicate and to persuade.

If you are interested in one model of excellence for schooling, then have a look at the work that Amir Abo-Shaeer is doing in California. Abo-Shaeer is a physics teacher who created a four year engineering program in his public high school, the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy. His students get hands-on experience building machines that swim, navigate obstacles and interact with the world around them. While the technology they employ is cutting edge, it will one day become obsolete. That's OK. What remains are the true lessons that an engineering curriculum delivers: How to work as a team. How to define complex problems. How to think outside the original frame of a question. How to identify and acquire new skills. As we have all come to learn, this last talent is possibly the most critical of all. The MacArthur Foundation recently recognized Abo-Shaeer for his work with a 2010 Genuis grant.

As we build our academic programs, we should recognize his genius as well.