The Educator’s Dilemma: Engaging Students in Knowledge Creation

Rotman Management - Fall 2013

We are turning out an ill-prepared workforce, and the solution depends on people rarely involved in education reform: the students themselves.

by Hilary Austen

 

WHAT DO WE EXPECT OF A GOOD STUDENT?

A willing, intelligent mind diligently applied to coursework. Reliable and rapid recall. A calm, competent response to the pressure of testing. What else? Perhaps a disciplined mindset that assures homework will be turned in on time.The rigor to completework correctly. An attentive and cooperative attitude in class. In the prevailing model of education, that kind of student will make straight A’s all the way. Even in today’sMBAand executive programs, these studentswill move to the head of the class.

Over the last century successive waves of education reform have been focused on teaching and testing these best-and-brightest students. Yet surprisingly, using this outdated 20th century model, educators and students have lost traction. The good students, the ones who excel in the current system, are skidding when they hit today’s streets.

The trouble with the education system isn’t that it isn’t doing a good job. It’s doing a great job. At a greater rate than ever before, it churns out people who are good at being ‘good students’. But what if good students aren’t what the world actually needs?

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

In a recent Harvard Business Review article [“Reclaim Your David and Tom Kelley of IDEO and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design identify the four common and chronic fears that block innovation in organizations today:

1. Fear of the messy unknown;

2. Fear of being judged;

3. Fear of the first step; and

4.Fear of losing control.

These fears, they say, block the creative thinking that enabled the rise and continued success of countless companies, from start-ups like Facebook and Google to stalwarts like Procter &Gamble and General Electric. The Kelleys’ role in removing these fears, they say, is not to teach creativity, but to help clients "rediscover their creative confidence."

Evidently, the need for this rediscovery in the corporate world is pressing: IDEO and the Institute of Design are plenty busy these days, and similar offerings (including those at the Rotman School of Management) in the management-training industry are proliferating.

Think about what this trend tells us: our efforts at teaching and learning are producing a workforce that can’t get past debilitating fears that block the new products and strategies that organizations need to succeed. If confidence — in the face of uncertainty, exploration, discovery and evaluation — must be rediscovered after our school tenure, then something is very wrong in our thinking about education.

Reflect on the features of a good student described in the opening paragraph. Imagine these students, fresh out of school, taking a first step into a messy unknown situation, where they have little control, awaiting uncertain judgments to fall on their shoulders. Or imagine yourself as that student, as many of us have been. Remember entering, unprepared, a world filled with ambiguity, conflict, risk and failure.

What are the reactions of all those ‘good students’ who now populate organizations? As the Kelleys and other management experts describe at an ever-growing rate, these reactions include avoidance, defensiveness, conservatism and narrow-minded expertise—surprising and unintended consequences of education. The problem is, these consequences are holding us back from solving the problems that define our lives.

Can we really trace the fear and ineptitude with the realities of innovation, problem-solving, unstructured competition and failure back to our thinking about education? I believe we can. Driving the past century of education reform has been an unquestioned relationship between educators and students. This one enduring stance toward learning is the stubborn culprit, and to this day it remains remarkably resistant to change.

How We All Got Caught

The framing that has caught us in this ongoing shortfall seems innocuous enough on the surface. In it, educators frame themselves as ‘agent-providers’; students frame themselves as ‘passive receivers’. Educators know more; students know less. Educators are in charge; students are subordinate. Educators are suppliers; students are consumers. Schooling at all levels is set up with educators leading and students following. These roles are easy to assume. But here comes the trouble.

In his first book, The Responsibility Virus, former Rotman School Dean Roger Martin explored a cyclical, self-sealing dynamic that explains the origin of many unintended negative consequences. The idea of self-perpetuating structures in social systems has its origin in the research of organizational-learning icon Chris Argyris, as well as that of Martin’s contemporary Diana McLain Smith, a researcher and practitioner, and the author of The Elephant in the Room. Applying this concept helps make sense of the inherent weakness in our approach to teaching and learning. The basic idea is this: in any pair of actors, underlying ‘frames’ lead to repetitive interactions that create enduring

relationship structures — some helpful, some destructive. In his book, Martin focuses on a familiar, destructive management structure that forms around responsibility when bosses take charge and subordinates step back to wait and see.

It is common in organizations to hear managers say, “If my people would step up more, I would delegate more,” and subordinates say, “If my boss would let go, I would take more initiative.” In this classic relationship structure, as bosses become over-involved,

they create the very under-responsible employees about whom they complain. Likewise, as employees act with reticence, they create the over-responsible micromanagers about whom they complain. Persisting over-responsible and under-responsible frames become frozen, and soon everyone thinks, “This is just the way things are.” At this point, changing the structure is difficult — even impossible to imagine.

If we use a relationship-structure diagram to depict the similar dynamic in education, it looks like what we see in Figure One. This figure shows educators, framing themselves as ‘agents’, responsible for providing the best possible education. At the same time, it shows students, framing themselves as ‘receivers’, consuming what educators provide and waiting to be provided more. We become skillful in our respective roles of agent-providers and passive-recipients: educators refine their sending repertoire and test how well their students receive and students succeed at receiving—or they fail or drop out. Before long, alternatives to this interaction elude us. We come to believe that this is just how education works.

Failures and dropouts aside, here comes the unintended consequence of this relationship. In the classroom — surprise! — uncertainty and ambiguity are relatively foreign; hence, good students excel for 12 to 20 years in the relatively safe quarters that reforms have provided: access, quality and ease. What’s not surprising is that these same students fear, avoid and struggle with unfamiliar difficulties as they enter the realities of organizations.

So, how can they start to perform better? An advantage of analyzing education through this framework is that it reveals two new leverage points for improving it:

1. Either half of the dyad can initiate change; and

2. Changing the frame will lead to changes in both actions and consequences.

All of which leads to a new call to students: don’t wait for the next wave of reform. By reframing your role, you can make something entirely new happen in the world of teaching and learning.

Introducing: The Modern Student

Imagine the ‘modern student’: committed to being a responsible agent in the design of his or her own educational development. How would that student differ from today’s ‘good students’ who emerge from high school, university, vocational schools, professional-development courses or MBA programs? It’s difficult to imagine; still, there are places we can look to get an idea.

To thrive, today’s boutique consulting companies must offer their clients ideas, services, and especially people not typically available in the rank and file. I visited one such company recently: Jump Associates. Jump’s hybrid thinkers — none of whom exactly

fits the ‘good student’ mold — help clients turn both uncertainty and ambiguity into new business and sustainable growth.

Several features stand out about the people at Jump. As individuals, and as a collection, they are an eclectic mix of experience, expertise and personality that defy the traditional functional silos that drive schooling and business. They like asking big, fuzzy, open-ended questions, such as, “What is the future of water?” or “How can we reinvent health care?” While asking, they don’t share the usual good-student anxiety brought on by questions that will never have a single right answer. They accept the ambiguity that precedes new ideas, new strategies and new businesses. They use failure to generate more possibilities, rather than to justify a retreat to past successes. As a workforce, their

acceptance of uncertainty mitigates the emotional rollercoaster that ill-structured problem-solving often triggers in their clients.

When hiring, Jump looks for ‘rich thinkers’ whose life experience has spanned multiple disciplines — say, from Archeology to Physics to Marketing — not just for the range of content, but for the curiosity and flexibility of mind that this breadth suggests. Tellingly, they like to ‘grow their own’ employees, because there is virtually nowhere to hire game-ready people.

Jump employees are an example of the modern student in action. They embody the critical shift in framing: they actively create knowledge, rather than simply receiving it. By recognizing creative knowledge-builders, organizations like Jump can help define the change. But the student residing in all of us must now take part in redefining his or her own educational frame and agenda. This redefinition will mean students take it upon themselves to attain creative problem-solving capabilities, to work across disciplines, to actively explore conflicting ideas, and to build new approaches through personal trial and error.

More than resembling a classroom of today, the work of knowledge-creation resembles an extreme sport: it demands energy, courage, focus and grit. To become knowledge creators, modern students will need to develop their own new learning

capabilities by doing three things.

1. Playing the Whole Field

In a 2010 TEDx talk, neuroscientist David Eagleman declared, “It has never ever been true in the history of mankind yet, that we have had all the puzzle pieces.” And yet we stubbornly continue to act as if we do have these pieces in place. Nowhere is this more evident than in the classroom, even in the classroom of the U.S. Army.

In The Generals, Thomas Ricks traces a harrowing tale of how the U.S. Army failed to prepare its top officers for the realities they’d encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan. The training program created in the 1970s and 1980s — “which prepared soldiers for the known” — was for a Cold War-style conflict involving tank battalions between nations in Europe. A counterproposal to teach top Army officers “how to think about fighting”

was soundly rejected at the time.

Without a way to think about fighting, the worst fear of the training’s critics—“a whole generation of idiots who all know how to clean a rifle but who don’t know ‘why’ we have an Army” — was realized. The Army educated, in Ricks’s words, a generation of officers who, if tactically adept, were dangerously unprepared for vague situations, alien cultures, inadequate information and ill-defined goals. Sound familiar?

Thankfully, forward-thinkers in today’s Army are replacing the old ‘overwhelm and obliterate’ mindset with a kind of thinking they call ‘operational art’, which emphasizes openness to learning and adaptation. The modern student wanting to learn how to think about fighting, rather than just adopt available tactics, must think broadly across the field, rather than commit to an expert recipe or training manual, however powerful.

In any discipline, this means understanding contradictory opinions, exploring competing approaches and looking at outliers. Above all, it means testing your own thinking against a tough standard: do you respond effectively when surprising things happen?

2. Educate Your Imagination and Intuition

Albert Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Rhode Island School of Design President John Maeda would agree. Maeda wants to change America’s national S.T.E.M. education initiative (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) to S.T.E.A.M. by including the arts. This would be a big step toward reframing the student’s role. Why? Because, as Maeda says, “Art asks questions.” He’s not talking about those familiar single answer questions, but the open-ended kind of questions that so easily trigger confusion, fear and reversion to familiar comforts. In Arts curricula, students are disciplined about applying intuition and imagination to open-ended questions.

The traditional ‘good student’ doesn’t spend much time working like an artist. Unfortunately, without this practice, what works well today sticks to us like tarpaper. Stuck with ideas past their due date, or paralyzed by opened-ended questions, learners

can turn to intuition and imagination as countermeasures — but only if those capacities are developed.

If that sounds soft and fuzzy, don’t be fooled: the realities of using intuition and imagination to find new solutions are supremely demanding, because they entail experiencing real consequences. Siddhartha Mukherjee illustrates the potency of real consequences in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies, in which he relates the history of the early fight against cancer. Physician after physician, decade after decade worked in the dark, taking one false step after another, working to solve an incomprehensible problem. All the while, these doctors watched their patients fail. They surely would have understood the turmoil faced by an unprepared army fighting

an ‘unconventional war’, or the anxiety of executives working to imagine the unpredictable future of a vulnerable water supply decades hence.

Imagine the hazards experienced by doctors and patients, as the accepted treatments of bloodletting, cupping and leeches failed, and as radical surgeries and new drug therapies were first attempted. In one case, a foolproof anesthetic worked so well that a groundbreaking healer of the late 19th century, William Halsted, used the drug on himself to overcome exhaustion and pessimism. The anesthetic was cocaine. Years later, Halsted was treated for the resulting addiction with another enigmatic drug of the day — morphine — and struggled with the consequences for the rest of his life.

Looking back, Halsted and other visionary knowledge builders across history might strike us as reckless. However, this judgment is unfairly retrospective. Imagination and intuition drive knowledge creation, but they also bring on uncertainty, ignorance, and unpredictable consequences—on the way to generating breakthrough solutions. For the modern student, this is all in a day’s work.

3. Think for Yourself, From Day One

Parris Goebel, a New Zealand hip-hop dancer and choreographer born in 1990, and Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel Prizewinning biologist born in 1909, are two women separated by culture, social class, discipline and goals. Yet both women achieved fame for their mastery and originality of thought. Both know what most of us don’t: that the chances of thinking creatively are slim if you restrict yourself to a supervised educational journey from novice to expert. Each woman took an original path, outside

the establishment.

• A child of a blue-collar family, Goebel enrolled in tap, jazz and ballet classes as a young girl. But she left those classes before long. “I really couldn’t find a school that I felt was challenging me,” she said in an ABC interview. “So, I guess the only option left was to train myself.” At 21, the self-taught Goebel is now choreographing for Jennifer Lopez.

• A Victorian woman, Levi-Montalcini pursued her study of nerve growth while hiding in her bedroom and using makeshift tools, including sewing needles. Born into an aristocratic Italian family and barred from a normal course of scientific study, Levi-Montalcini was dismissed by the scientific establishment until the Nobel Foundation ac

knowledged her discovery of the protein nerve-growth factor. She was 77.

Traditional ‘good students’ rarely exhibit this fearless originality. Three tendencies—the cognitive bias of anchoring, the brain’s neurochemical ‘fatal attraction’ to certainty, and the learned fear of failure—often steal away original ideas before they have a chance to form. The modern student must start practicing original thinking early on to avoid the unwanted limits of existing ideas.

So, what does the modern student need to understand about originality? It turns out most original ideas are indeed wrong-headed; but that’s no reason not to practice having them. In fact, the opposite is true. The skill of formulating and working out new ideas, even when they’re wrong, is a prerequisite to knowledge-creation. Mastering this, you can better dodge the brain’s inherent conservatism, leave behind the day’s prevailing ideas, and prepare for the demanding journey when your great idea comes along.

While not all of us will undertake the problems of fighting an unconventional war, curing an enigmatic disease, or rolling the dice on self-directed originality, it is time to admit that most of us — educators and students alike — are startled when our version of this kind of problem appears. For too long, we’ve depended not on ‘good students’ but on a short list of volunteers for creative courage, many of whom were education’s failures and dropouts.

Students of every age and stage: take hold of your mental development as tightly as any other treasure that fully captivates you. Invest a higher level of responsibility; adopt a knowledge-building frame; and take a generative approach to learning. Your involvement can help move the learning relationship depicted in Figure One, towards the one depicted in Figure Two. Undeniably, students with new expectations and behaviours will have an impact on the other side of the dyad: the educator.

The educator’s dilemma is now how to be truly helpful in response. Rather than pull backwards towards the old norm, we ask you to help the modern student navigate the dark and the light realities of knowledge creation. Working together to build knowledge, students and educators can invent a very different cycle of learning.

In closing

What might this new cycle of learning look like? Perhaps standardized testing will become obsolete; maybe ambiguity will come to be seen as an opportunity, rather than an enemy; and maybe the creative confidence the Kelleys hope to reignite will come standard in our graduates. It is exciting to imagine the possibilities.

If educators and students can work hand-in-hand as partners in knowledge creation, theirs will be an enduring relationship that can transform education and, eventually, the world.

Hilary Austen is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School

of Management and served on the Dean’s Advisory Board

throughout Roger Martin’s tenure. She is the author of Artistry

Unleashed: A Guide to Pursuing Great Performance in Work and

Life (Rotman-UTP Publishing, 2010).

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