This piece first appeared in the Horizon 3 Blog Series in Getting Smart, sponsored by LearnerStudio.
You’re a mom. A dad. A grandparent or godparent or stepparent or close family friend. What do you want for the children you care about?
Are you truly excited that they get all ‘A’s’ and high scores on their SATs or ACTs? Is that the goal in life? Or do you want them to be able to make their way in the world, deal with ups and downs, pick themselves back up, and keep going forward in ways that help them and the world thrive?
As a mom, to the extent that I wanted the former, it was because I thought it would help with the latter. Good scores meant a good college which meant good opportunities which (hopefully) meant good life outcomes. Everything was a proxy for something else – for the next step in life.
But what about life itself?
My child is now 26. I look back and see the most important things are:
- Can he take care of himself?
- Does he know how to make decisions responsibly?
- Can he get along with others?
- Is he able to do things in the world?
- Is he able to build happiness alone and in community?
I look back on the education he received. What, if anything, helped contribute to positive answers to this list of questions? Sadly, only three experiences stand out:
- Competitive Soccer. Where he had to make hard choices about personal success vs. team success and how to get along with – and make things happen with – kids from a wild variety of different backgrounds. And enjoy their company. And learn from them. How to work hard – brutally, demandingly hard. How to celebrate success and pick yourself up from the misses and losses. And most importantly, how to show up day after day even when your mind and body were saying, ‘Do we really have to?’
- Running an AirBnB. Where he learned how to make a business work. How to please customers, take responsibility for the product and service. Deal with problems and crises (why do showers break so often?). Look at revenue. Feel satisfied about getting Superhost status. Wanting to maintain Superhost status.
- A Data Science Course in College. Where he learned how to scrape social media and use ArcGIS to build something he cared about: a map to the Nipsey Hussle memorial murals being created across the globe in the aftermath of the rapper’s murder. This was his way of taking pain and grief and transmuting it into tribute and community.
Note that there’s no mention of any core classes. Any traditional subjects that are the bread and butter of school. English. History. Math. Science.
Rather, each of the meaningful experiences were about the real world: about learning through doing, and doing via learning – in relation to other humans.
Core Subjects vs. Core Processes
The core subjects or disciplines have been with us for a long time. Their roots lie in the classical and medieval Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), modified in the 18th and 19th centuries as the scientific and industrial revolutions, as well as the nation-state and empire, expanded the number of disciplines needed to define (and conquer) the world. In those centuries we added biology and chemistry, algebra and calculus, anthropology and sociology, and foreign languages to the domains of knowledge.
Content knowledge is important. There is no doubt about that. But if your goal is to become something other than a college professor, you want to learn to do things with your content knowledge. To do things, you don’t just need to know ‘the what’ (content) but also ‘the how’, or, in other words, application processes.
In the past century, in addition to accumulating content, the human species has been busy building, testing, defining, and iterating on processes – systematic sequences of actions or methods – so that we don’t start from scratch every time we want to accomplish something.
Most of us learned the scientific method in school. It’s the process scientists use to produce and test scientific knowledge. Like the core subjects, it has ancient roots, updated by the Classical Islamic World, and then later Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment thinkers, with parallels in many other cultures.
In modern times processes and methods have grown even more prevalent.
A decade ago I started The Incubator School, an entrepreneurship-themed school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It survived for four years before politics shut it down, despite it being one of the most diverse and highest-performing schools in the nation’s second-largest district. Back then, we began designing a school based on the clear evidence that kids want to learn in order to create value in the world, not to do well on middle school tests that led to high school tests that led to SATs and college tests and so on. Kids told us this. They were excited by learning when they could do things with it.
We tried to break out of the subjects/disciplines paradigm and look at what knowledge kids needed to make their way in the world. We came up with IncSchool Fundamentals, a processes map that emphasized something we called solutions thinking: human-centered design, engineering design, mathematical modeling, and lean startup processes or methodologies.
The table below outlines four key processes that can help young people create value in the real world. Through repeating these processes to solve different problems in different contexts requiring the acquisition of different content knowledge, kids start to feel competent. When faced with a new challenge, they have a repertoire of process tools in their toolbelt. They can use these processes to go from nothing to something because they’ve repeatedly applied them and they know how to learn what they don’t know (the content and context of the new situation they find themselves in).
Because these are the same basic processes adults are using, they can more easily grow into competent adults – rather than those interns you have to train from ground zero because although they know stuff, they don’t know how to do stuff.
Scientific Method
A systematic way of testing hypotheses and drawing conclusions based on empirical evidence. It involves making observations, asking questions, forming hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating results.
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Engineering Design Process
A series of steps that engineers follow to create functional products and processes that meet specific criteria and constraints. It involves defining the problem, doing background research, specifying requirements, brainstorming solutions, developing prototypes, testing and evaluating, and communicating results.
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Design Thinking Process
A human-centered approach to solving complex problems by understanding users’ needs, generating creative ideas, prototyping and testing solutions, and iterating based on feedback. It involves empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
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Lean Startup (Entrepreneurship) Method
A method for developing new products or businesses by validating assumptions and learning from customers’ feedback. It involves creating a minimum viable product (MVP), measuring its performance, and pivoting or persevering based on the data.
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Breaking Free of the Content-Based Organization of School
I spent some concentrated time with ChatGPT4o to model what this process focus could mean for rethinking the core content structure of schooling.
All too often competency-based schools rely on mapping key competencies (usually some variation of the Five Cs – Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Citizenship) onto project-based learning powered by some version of a design thinking process. I argue that we need more, more robust, and more rigorous processes – with supporting activities, competencies, and occupations mapped to them. The table below is a sketch of what this might look like.
Crosswalk of Core Processes with Key Competencies, Related Occupations
This is a clear roadmap from a finite set of processes expanding outwards to the key supporting activities those processes entail, to how those processes and activities grow the five core competencies, and last but certainly not least what careers and professions use them. I specifically asked ChatGPT4o for 20 occupations per row, with a mix of hands-on, caring, technical, and high-growth professions. Of course, there are many more.
When I asked it for ‘core creation processes’ that cut across occupations, ChatGPT4o also suggested some other more specialized ones such as Agile Development (Scrum/Kanban), Digital Transformation, Six Sigma, Service Design, and Supply Chain Management.
You could imagine 15-25-year-olds choosing to explore these as they became more comfortable applying some of the more crosscutting ones, as they understand their own interests better, and as they become ever more aware of what sorts of things they do (and don’t) want to do in the world. And along the way, they’ll pick up the content they need to get things done.
As the world changes, particularly with the implementation of AI in all aspects of work, these processes may shift and new processes may become important. The future is not going to be constant, and grounding an education system in process rather than content can enable agility.
