This week’s article summary is Skills in Flux (by David Brooks). Brooks--like Thomas Friedman—often writes about innovation, global change and competition—especially economically. I like Brooks because his op-eds are always provocative.
In the article summary below, he takes what has become a cliché
(21st Century Skills, e.g., the myriad Cs of Tony
Wagner) and comes up with a new take on what skills, attitudes, and habits matter today, different from yesterday.
For anyone in education, his intro story about how an unheralded teacher (according to the teacher evaluation checklist) in reality optimally supports her students was spot on to me.
As I read his list of qualities needed for today's world, I thought of many of you and how you possess them. I also thought of the qualities I find most important: to me, "opposability" and "cross-class expertise" seemed particularly important.
As I read his list of qualities needed for today's world, I thought of many of you and how you possess them. I also thought of the qualities I find most important: to me, "opposability" and "cross-class expertise" seemed particularly important.
Joe
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In part,
Lemov is talking about the skill of herding cats.
The master of cat herding senses when attention is about to wander, knows how
fast to move a diverse group, senses the rhythm between lecturing and class
participation, varies the emotional tone. This is a performance skill that
surely is relevant beyond education.
This raises
an important point.
As the
economy changes, the skills required to thrive in it change, too, and it takes
a while before these new skills are defined and acknowledged.
For example,
in today’s loosely networked world, people with social courage have amazing value. Everyone goes to conferences
and meets people, but some people invite others to lunch afterward. Then they
connect people across networks. People with social
courage are extroverted in issuing invitations but introverted in
conversation — willing to listen 70% of the time. They build not just contacts
but actual friendships by engaging people on multiple levels. They develop
large informal networks of contacts that transcend their organization and give
them an independent power base.
Similarly,
people who can capture amorphous trends
with a clarifying label also have enormous worth. Karl Popper observed that
there are clock problems and cloud problems. Clock problems can be divided into
parts, but cloud problems are indivisible emergent systems. Since it is easier
to think deductively, most people try to turn cloud problems into clock problems,
but a few are able to look at a complex situation, grasp the gist and clarify
it by naming what is going on. Such
people tend to possess negative capacity, the ability to live with ambiguity
and not leap to premature conclusions. They can absorb a stream of disparate
data and rest in it until they can synthesize it into one trend, pattern or
generalization. Such people
can create a mental model that helps you think about a phenomenon. As Oswald
Chambers put it, “The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you
something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the
truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.”
We can all
think of many other skills that are especially valuable right now:
Making nonhuman things intuitive to humans. This is what Steve Jobs did.
Purpose provision.
Many people go through life overwhelmed by options, afraid of closing off
opportunities. But a few have fully cultivated moral passions and can help
others choose the one thing they should dedicate themselves to.
Opposability.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the
ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the
ability to function.”
Cross-class expertise.
In a world dividing along class, ethnic and economic grounds some people are
culturally multilingual. They can operate in an insular social niche while
seeing it from the vantage point of an outsider.
One gets the
impression we’re confronted by a giant cultural lag. The economy emphasizes a
new generation of skills, but our vocabulary describes the set required 30
years ago.