A Whole New Mind… A New Way of Thinking About Education

I went through a voracious reading stint a while back and just found some notes from one of those books I must have borrowed. Unable to remember which of the 3 or 4 books I had read through inter-library loan at our public library, I searched a quote I thought would reveal which book these notes came out of. I searched one of my favorite quotes that was written at the top of the page which read, “The world belongs to creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers," only to find out that I had paraphrased a section of Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind.

I sat for a few minutes reflecting on that book and could remember the basics. I decided to read it because a friend of mine had said it was a good book, but I didn’t actually read it until I was headed to a conference where Pink was going to be speaking. I can remember only a few of the basic things in the early part of the book because it was talking about right brained (creative, intuitive, and holistic) and left brained (logical and sequential) and I can never figure out which one I am. The idea that both sides of my brain work together makes me feel better because when you take those personality assessments, I am never strongly on one side or the other. You can see this strongly in my bipolar job as the district technology coordinator (in charge of the network, accounts, hardware, software, and troubleshooting), and an English teacher who loves to read anything I can get my hands on, write both creatively and informationally, and speak as a presenter for many different subjects and conferences. Pink helped me to realize that I am well-rounded and use as many parts of my brain as possible. This also explains why I could never take a standardized test, but I could write a paper, complete a project or put together an impressive portfolio.

Pink believes that we are becoming “knowledge workers” and we don’t necessarily use our physical strength or manual skills as much. We are changing into well-educated manipulators of information and deployers of expertise.” In one respect we could look at this as: we (as a country) are smart enough to get other people to do the manual jobs and leave us open to accomplish the more educated tasks. However, it also seems that “any job that can be reduced to a set of rules or broken down into a set of repeatable steps, is at risk.” There are so many things computers have made easier from home and tasks that we used to have to pay someone to do for us because they had the expertise we didn’t. Examples include tax forms have gone online, stock brokering can happen from your living room, web design by anyone, medical advice is online…

But on the other hand, it seems to me that even some of the “hard jobs” are even being outsourced (IT, accounting and other white collar jobs). So does that mean that Americans are being pushed to create jobs that don’t even exist, or will we be jobless soon? We need to do the jobs that “workers abroad cannot do equally well for less money to keep jobs in our country.”

So, my logical, sequential side of my brain is taking over to ask you are we preparing our students for this type of world? Are we as teachers preparing them for a world of outsourcing? Are we preparing them to be manual labor? Are we preparing them to be creative enough to create their own job of the future that may mix the outsourced skills and the manual skills that so many kids love? Pink talks about the six essential aptitudes workers need are: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning.

1. Design: “To be a designer is to be an agent of change.”

Pink believes that we must cultivate an artist’s sensibility. It is not enough to make it more beautiful because useful isn’t enough. It needs to have utility, significance, effective, transmit new ideas and emotions, functional, and be used as a means for differentiation and to create new markets. This means people need to learn how to work with people and be inspired by other people. Design is creating solutions.

2. Story: “Stories are therapeutic.”

Facts are always available, however finding a way to remember them is whole other task. “The ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact is better. Stories help relate old concepts to new ones. Stories encapsulate, contextualize and emotionalize facts.” Stories help explain by adding details to ideas. As you tell the story you often think it through ore and come up with solutions or new ideas. As people read stories they ask questions; they reflect on their experiences and they make new connections. We think about more than just the story.

3. Symphony: “This is the ability to put together the pieces, synthesis rather than analysis… to find relationships, patterns and connections between seemingly different disciplines is the key to symphony.” There are several different types of relationships: the boundary crosser (work in several realms/interdisciplinary), the inventor (combine unlike things), and the metaphor maker (helps with quest for meaning).

4. Empathy: Imagine yourself in someone else’s experiences and see their point of view. What are their facial expressions, emotions? People who can empathize are able to seek solutions because they can figure out what others need.

5. Play: “Laughter can improve health, increase our profits, and maybe even bring world peace.” People rarely succeed at something unless they are having fun doing it. Watch the people around you at work, do they enjoy their job? Can they find a way to have fun and make it enjoyable for everyone, or are they simply miserable and just trying to get through the day? People who can’t find joy in their job need to find a job they can enjoy, life is too short to suffer.

6. Meaning: Viktor Frankl said, “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.” We all seek to find the good in a life full of disappointments, fears and challenges. You have to find joy, satisfaction, and eventually enlightenment. “The quest for self-realization only comes when other more basic needs are met.”

How does this change our school systems? What will able to be automated? What can be REPLACED by a computer? What can be done cheaper from overseas? Pink explains that “Japanese education is moving to an age of ‘education of the heart’ which is explained as fostering creativity, artistry and play… away from schoolbook academics which is outdated.” Can we as teachers be outsourced? If another country is better at teaching our students math, should that be outsourced? If another country is better at science or technology do we want our students to learn from them? If another country is better with art, or finance, or economics, or writing, would our students be better off with them? We already know that technology can make this happen from anywhere in the world, so it is possible.

Knowing this, teachers can either be overwhelmed by these ideas so they react with either a “not in my lifetime” attitude, or they can be motivated to figure out what they should do to prepare their students before it is too late. This involves seeing more than immediate theoretical ideas, you have to begin to see the big picture.

To see the “big picture… the best prescription for overcoming being crunched for time, deluged by information, and paralyzed by the weight of too many choices is to distinguish between what really matters and what merely annoys.” Teachers will need to use empathy, sympathy, and first person experiences as a way of helping students to learn new skills. Teachers must embrace an ethic of caring and teach it to their students.. This is why education must change, we need to individualize and differentiate.

I look at that list of 6 skills and can see them in my lessons, in some way, shape or form. I can see design when I offer students the opportunity of choice to show or demonstrate what they know. They write, design, draw, video, record, create, animate, or anything else with their laptops to show what they have learned in any subject area.

I can see the element of story when I ask students to blog, to reflect, and write in their online portfolios. With the dramatic increase of searching skills on the Internet, symphony is something that almost required. I have purposefully changed the questions I have asked students in class to make them put more than one piece of information together to come up with new knowledge, otherwise they can just regurgitate the ideas of someone else. I have to admit that empathy is something many students struggle with. They are so absorbed in their own lives that they rarely take the time to think about others and the struggles they go through daily. Empathy is something I believe must be taught to the majority of students. They have it in them, but it must be cultivated before it gets forgotten in their busy schedules. The idea of play is not a difficult one for me either. I believe that students learn more when they play with a new piece of software, or use an online game or simulation to learn about a topic. I believe that students can related to teachers and adults who are a bit more fun, yet controlled, than someone who seems untouchable and all-knowing. And last, we all know that students and teachers don’t want to do busy work. We both want to put our time and effort into something that is meaningful and worthwhile. If we are working in dead-end jobs, we are unhappy. If we are doing assignments that don’t allow us to learn something new, we lose interest. If we are just going through the motions of life, we strive to find something new. If we aren’t happy, engaged, and interested in our daily activities and learning moments, we will find something else to do, even if it isn’t more productive for our future.

To avoid being outsourced ourselves, teachers need to figure out, “Is what I am offering in demand in the age of abundance?”