Last spring, I decided to teach a group of seniors the novel Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. For those of you who haven’t read the book, my seniors recommend it highly, saying that no other text had ever felt so relevant. The novel’s protagonist is a blogger, and the novel includes blog posts in its prose, a device that my students found refreshing — and in which they could see themselves and their generation. When I think of what a 21st-century education looks like, I think it includes novels like Americanah. When I think about what it means to teach writing as a 21st-century skill, I think about using writing as Adichie’s protagonist does: in real time, for real-world audiences, and expecting real-time feedback.
What surprised me, then, was the degree to which my students resisted the very skills I was trying to cultivate. I had asked my students to blog, with the requirement that posts focus on observations and experiences relevant to the senior year. I encouraged the use of images and other media and asked each student to comment on at least two other classmates’ posts each week. Even after the first week, however, my students were writing formal essays instead of blog posts, and they were not making use of the intertextuality that online writing allows.
As it turned out, my students had been so well trained to write for school that they struggled with the notion of writing for a public audience. They didn’t think of writing as dialogic or intellectual discourse; they thought of it as something one does to pass English class each year. In my students’ minds, the “new skills” — of blogging, but also those on which this issue of Independent School focuses — contrasted with the skills in which my students had been schooled.
In 2009, Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel published 21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times. Although not the first of its kind, the book defined, in part, what we mean by the phrase “21st-century skills” as creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. I remember responding to the text somewhat defensively when it first came out, certain that I already taught these skills and that very little distinguished them from those with which I was educated.
This defensive stance is troubling to me today. What we know about the specific contexts that foster, for example, creativity and cross-cultural understanding, moves far beyond the well-intentioned aspirations of an earlier version of myself. If the above vignette describes one version of a 21st-century learning experience, it suggests the possibility that while these new skills and those that came before them may not be in direct opposition, their differences, in terms of pedagogical and assessment practices, may be more significant than we — or at least I — initially thought.
A Problem with Nomenclature
The degree to which teachers perceive these new skills as new is complicated by the language that has been used to describe them: 21st-century skills, noncognitive skills, inter- and intrapersonal skills, and soft skills, to name just a few. Nearly all of these phrases imply some kind of character education, a notion that has been at the heart of schools and schooling for centuries, if not longer. Yet the term 21st-century skills suggests that these skills are relevant today in ways they previously were not. Let’s start with an obvious point: We’ve been living in the 21st century for 15 years and began using the term 21st century in the late 1990s. If we aim, in the next decade or so, to hone our schools’ abilities to foster these skills, I’m not entirely convinced by the term 21st century — or skills, for that matter.
In a recent article in Educational Psychology, Angela Duckworth and David Yeager distinguish the term skills from the dispositions, mindsets, and attitudes that we now know impact student learning.1 I make this distinction by thinking of the evolving set of skills, such as complex problem solving or clear communication, that get my former students jobs, and the dispositions, such as self-control, discipline, and the willingness to take risks, that allow my students to succeed in those jobs. While the term skills has long been used to make a distinction from academic content, these dispositions center themselves there, increasing our ability to help our students not just learn content but also realize their fullest potentials as learners.
The term noncognitive has also been used to identify the above-named dispositions; however, in both denotative and connotative meaning, the term shifts the discussion of these skills away from learning. According to Duckworth and Yeager, we know that “every facet of psychological functioning, from perception to personality, is inherently ‘cognitive’ insofar as processing of information is involved.”2 For example, when a student resists the temptation to use social media while doing homework, she has likely associated some kind of reward with the completion of her work, a process that relies on both working memory and executive function.3 To say, then, that self-control is a noncognitive factor seems to undermine the very process by which the skill is acquired.
And then there is the issue of perception. If we broadly define cognitive skills as those that involve reason and memory as applied to learning, then it’s no wonder that the “non-cogs” have also been called soft skills: those that remain on the periphery of our curricula, that we don’t directly access, and that we haven’t had the training to understand fully. Put simply, if we continue to think about these skills by what they are not, we marginalize what may be some of the most complex processes of the adolescent brain — the very processes that have been linked to increased SAT scores, college and career readiness, and overall quality of life.
So how do we solve this problem of nomenclature? Researchers, think tanks, and nonprofit organizations offer their own rationale for the terms they ultimately use. In my own research, nearly every report and significant paper I’ve come across offer disclaimers for their rationale. Ultimately, the problem with nomenclature makes it too easy to use these terms without knowing what they mean and, as a result, devalue them even as we try to bring them to the forefront of our schools.
You Get What You Assess
When I told my seniors about the blogging assignment, I had a few who were disappointed. “Couldn’t we just write a critical essay?” they opined, and rightfully so. The essay is the genre in which they had been trained for the last four years, if not longer. I questioned my own commitment to the project, as well. Would it inflate grades? Was it somehow less rigorous? Was I championing the appropriate skills for students on the brink of college? I recognize in my own questions the nagging insecurities teachers and administrators carry as they make curricular decisions in the face of student, parent, and college expectations.
Here is why I would give the same assignment again: The assignment didn’t inflate grades or feel less rigorous. In fact, students found that the assignment kept them feeling genuinely challenged during a time of year when they had mentally checked out in other classes. Nor was the assignment focusing on an inappropriate skill set. Rather, blogging, although a different kind of writing than my students had done to date, required my students to be concise, cultivate their own voices, and draw difficult and hard truths from their observations. Beyond these writing skills, the assignment also had the function to motivate intrinsically, create meaning, and have long-term relevance for my students. Ultimately, the assignment generated some of the most compelling, honest, and original prose that I’d seen from my students that year.
Still, one success story cannot singularly justify the kind of change that our schools need. Nor does my vignette honor the complexity or range of what it means to teach and acknowledge the role of the “non-cogs” in our schools and curricula. But the story hardly exists in isolation. As featured in the film Most Likely to Succeed, schools around the country are being designed to teach these new, emerging skills and to foster the dispositions that we know allow students to realize their fullest potentials. Interdisciplinary programs such as NuVu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are rapidly partnering with high schools locally and abroad to give students opportunities to learn about the design-thinking and creative process. Even Pixar, in its recent film Inside Out, makes mainstream some basic concepts about how what we say and do to young people impact their desire to be their full selves in the world. Indeed, if this be the case, independent schools ought to find their way over the hurdles that prevent us not from only defining these terms clearly for ourselves and our students but also designing our school cultures and curricula around them.
Perhaps the largest hurdle of integrating new skills into our curricula is assessing them. Just as we know that frequent feedback improves student learning in the disciplines we teach, research suggests that the same is true for improving student learning with competencies such as collaboration, grit, and the like. Current documentation of student progress leaves little room for such assessments; generally speaking, most 9–12 independent schools continue to publish semester or trimester report cards, organized by discipline and including letter grades and narrative reports that vary in the degree to which they include inter- and intrapersonal qualities. These reports communicate values that, by and large, contradict our mission statements and portrait-of-a-graduate documents, in which we, generally speaking, name qualities that we hope an education at our schools cultivate: resilience, creativity, innovation, goodness, etc.
Equally important, when we write in narrative comments that a student is resilient, creative, or innovative, how do we really know? Is observation of student behavior our only indicator, and if so, how reliable can it be? In 2006, Robert Sternberg and colleagues developed a series of tests to assess what they call “successful intelligence,” a combination of creative skills, analytical skills, and the ability to apply both to real-world contexts.4 Using a combination of multiple-choice questions and performance-based tasks, their study revealed that performance tasks, such as asking students to write captions for cartoons or narrate a story based on a series of images, were more accurate at assessing specific skills — such as creativity, for example — than multiple-choice questions. They also found that their tests increased the prediction of first-year college success by 50 percent more than the SAT and reduced ethnic-group differences in test results. Developed in 2006, the tests have had wide implications on college and independent school admission processes and beyond.
Recent literature on the topic guides us to move cautiously, however. In their 2015 article, Duckworth and Yeager offer a rich analysis of the limitations and merits of performance assessments, questionnaires, and rubrics, including the very grit scales that Duckworth has developed in the last decade. While these tools can be valuable indicators, they can also yield faulty conclusions. With regard to questionnaires, for example, Duckworth and Yeager suggest that both student and teacher respondents are susceptible to misinterpreting the questions and the behaviors that the questions aim to assess. Factors that contribute to these misinterpretations include a student’s perception of his/her self, a teacher’s connection with a given student, and/or a student’s academic performance in a class. A student who performs at high levels, for example, might believe that he or she is more prepared for class than he or she actually is.
Thus, Duckworth and Yeager underscore the importance of using instruments that measure across singular data points. They similarly encourage the development of instruments that aggregate data for the purposes of increasing reliability and accuracy.
The Mission Skills Assessment (MSA), a collection of instruments being developed by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in conjunction with the Independent School Data Exchange (INDEX), attempts to do just this. The test triangulates data across a variety of instruments: student surveys, multiple-choice questions, and teacher observations of student behavior.5 Currently, the test is being used primarily in middle schools and provides a comprehensive report that schools are leveraging in different ways. Based on case studies provided by INDEX, the value of the MSA’s report seems to be its ability to indicate not individual student progress but rather a school’s progress toward cultivating particular skills.
What becomes clear from these resources is that developing such instruments, be it to assess school programming or individual students within a school or classroom, is not as simple as it might appear. The instruments we use to assess disciplinary skills — tests, quizzes, report cards, and the like — are fundamentally inadequate for assessing the range of skills and mindsets that we have come to value. And relying merely on our own anecdotal observations yields, at best, an incomplete portrait of our students. If independent schools are to lead in this field, we need more collaboration among our schools, educational think tanks, and researchers in the field of cognitive science. In short, we need to assess our own assessments, ensuring that they function as we intend them.
Challenging the Paradigm
When I said to my students, “I want this assignment to mean something to you,” as opposed to, “You need to cultivate the skill of writing for real-time audiences,” I made an informed choice. Might a former version of myself have made the same choice? Perhaps, but for reasons based on good intentions and the desire to connect with my students — qualities that, while certainly not outdated, are based on intuition rather than documented research about how we teach and learn.
In truth, what we might have done intuitively as educators 10 or 15 years ago no longer feels ethical. When we know that students’ beliefs in their own ability to learn can positively impact their academic performance, or that reflection on learning can deepen understanding, or that the frequency and nature of our feedback can either shut down or inspire further learning, intuition alone, even very good intuition, will inevitably fall short of helping us realize our students’ fullest potentials.
At Milton Academy (Massachusetts), we have begun to rethink our curricula through the lens of three domains of competencies — cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal — with the understanding that one domain doesn’t necessarily exclude the others and that a competency includes the dispositions and mindsets that Duckworth, Yeager, and others have helped us better understand. We are imagining a curriculum that cultivates these competencies not just alongside the teaching of traditional academic content but rather at the heart of it. To date, we have developed a series of core teaching principles that we believe foster key competencies in our students and engage our faculty with the research behind these principles. We are beginning to observe how we currently teach and assess these competencies in our classrooms, dorms, advisories, and cocurricular activities. Various groups of faculty have been instrumental in designing and implementing each of the above, and we have identified one distinct group that is charged with completing a comprehensive review of our curriculum by January 2016.
What exactly will this review unveil? Perhaps the need for us to reconsider how we use time at Milton; perhaps the path for how we integrate interdisciplinary work more consistently; perhaps the policies to assess our students in ways that support their developmental needs better than our current model. While the recommendations from the review will certainly affirm values that have sustained our community, they will also challenge us: to rethink, redesign, and reimagine the possibilities for a Milton education. Are these processes more challenging for independent schools than our charter and public counterparts? I think many of us would say that they are, perhaps because families tend to choose our schools specifically for our academic programming and, consequently, question anything that feels less than academic. As illustrated in the blogging vignette, my own students had similar questions and, in making a shift toward the teaching of a different genre of prose, so did I.
And let us not forget the college admission arena, which, though increasingly interested in the above-named skills and mindsets, hasn’t yet made substantive changes to its criteria for admission or its admission process.
Ultimately, though, our students’ needs are what should drive curricular and school change. When we serve our students well, results tend to follow. The more we educate parents on the behaviors and dispositions that improve student learning, the more able they are to support our work. Also, the greater our commitment to teaching and assessing beyond academic disciplines, the more possibility we create for our students, certainly with the college process, but also far beyond it.
If independent schools become caught in the grip of cultural anxieties, we risk miseducating a generation of young people and losing our own identities in a rapidly responsive and adaptive educational landscape. Even 10 years from now, my guess is that we will be defined not by the degree to which we cultivate these habits and mindsets but how we do so — and not just in classrooms, but in the very structures, real time and online, in which our students’ learning takes place and the processes, from admission to graduation requirements, that powerfully define school culture.
Notes
1. Angela L. Duckworth and David Scott Yeager, “Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes,” Educational Researcher Vol. 44, No. 4 (2015): 237–251.
2. Ibid., 238.
3. Ibid., 238.
4. Robert Sternberg, “College Admissions: Beyond Conventional Testing,” Change, The Magazine of Higher Learning (2012).
5. Jim Soland, Laura S. Hamilton, and Brian M. Stecher, “Measuring 21st Century Competencies,” RAND Corporation (2013): 32–33.