Future Resilience #2 — Adroitness
‘Adroitness’ — you probably needed to look it up and it doesn’t have the same ring to it as ‘agility’, I know. I believe adroitness is agility levelled-up. Adroitness adds a dimension of cleverness important for dealing with complex systems, an important element for Future Resilience.
Several research sources state some form of adroitness as a key real skill; Institute for the Future, The Foundation for Young Australians, Saxena, Epstein, and OECD 2030.
Students also will require skills to work in modern workplaces and changing and uncertain environments, including transferable skills in communicating, collaborating, critical thinking, problem solving, digital literacy, project management, creativity and innovation.
NSW Curriculum Report Interim Review, 2018.
Providing learning environments and encounters in which students can develop adroitness is a vital response to state of our changing world.
The world as we know it is no longer the stable, predictable, calm place we thought it was. Bennis and Nanus (1987) used the acronym VUCA to ponder the post-cold War world— volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
Educators must facilitate wicked learning environments to help students develop the level of adroitness our world now requires. In kind learning environments, there may be only 1 or 2 of the VUCA elements present at one time but, in wicked learning environments (such as in our changing world), all of these elements are present. A complex place indeed. Check out Loonshots by Bahcall for more examples of kind/wicked learning environments.
Developing adroitness requires a level of comfort with complexity in VUCA scenarios. Our students must be able to find the beauty in complexity. John Keats called it ‘Negative Capability’ — “… when a [person] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…”. Consider how you tackle a 1000 piece puzzle… at first it’s overwhelming and then, piece by piece, it comes together (more about this in my colleague’s post).
Complex and Wicked learning encounters require the ability to work across disciplines by nimbly choosing the most useful thinking strategies and toolsets according to the situation. According to Howard Rheingold, outside of school, this is more than bringing together researchers from different disciplines to work in multidisciplinary teams (as per complicated problem solving [see last week’s blog]). Complex and wicked learning encounters equates to scenarios that develop students who can communicate in multi-disciplinary languages— ie. mathematicians who have understanding of chemistry, chemists who understand linguistics, etc. These scenarios should develop both breadth in transdisciplinary understanding and depth in disciplinary understanding.
When young people can adroitly operate across disciplines and deeply within disciplines, they can build their T-shaped-ness. In many organisations, “T-shaped” people have become the ideal in the future work landscape — whilst having a deep understanding of at least one specialty and also having the capacity to converse in the language of a broader range of disciplines. “T-shaped” people are life-long learners; willing to absorb and investigate to broad extremes. As we look to have 17 careers in our life-times across different industries and disciplines, it will be particularly important for our young people to develop this T-shaped capacity. Check out Valve’s (a game company) this handbook for more about T-shaped people.
So, what are we doing in educational institutions to support learner adroitness? Short answer — Not much. Most of us are not even helping our adults to be adroit. Despite the need for our students to understand complex systems, our education institutions are organised in silos — the Mathematics Department, P.E., etc. Even our curriculum syllabuses are organised this way. To really provide learning encounters that build adroitness, we need to work smarter, not harder. Yet, according to FYA, only 1 in 10 teachers have recently participated in Professional Learning to help students develop adroit skills and understandings.
Something schools can do is develop opportunities for students that involve inter-relationships and systems. Students need opportunities to discover how concepts and elements can link and connect as part of a system within and across disciplines, in real life (outside of school — OECD 2030 report).
Here are some ideas you might like to investigate (in order of increasing difficulty):
- Creating interdisciplinary staff rooms, such as at Bribie Island State High School.
- Having a Project Nest for your subject or class is start to making complexity visible and seeing the interactions between different elements.
- Using Hexagonal Thinking can help to explore connections between clusters of information.
- Exploring connections between curriculum areas through hexagonal thinking. Check out the Steve Borthwick’s Organic Learning blog for more detail on this (great in interdisciplinary staff rooms).
- Give students Fermi Problems to solve — Fermi Problems require students to ask questions and focus on the process rather than product. Students need to use estimation, common sense and numerical reasoning to work out challenges that are difficult or impossible to measure.
- Look at de-siloing subject areas. Marcellin College in Melbourne has explored this in an interesting way through their Polaris program.
- Start using Design Thinking as a way to tackle problems.
The English Teacher’s Association NSW sum up this idea well in their submission to the NSW Curriculum Review:
Students need to develop the critical skills and knowledge that pertain to each discipline of study as the disciplines offer different ways of understanding and expressing the world and value various aspects of the world differently. In supporting what is distinctive in each subject, schooling should provide students with opportunities to identify and apply the particularities of the disciplines to address cross-disciplinary real-world problems. Equally, they need to experience ways that the disciplines are similar and overlap, and how knowledge, skills and processes from one may be used for creative effect in another.
If you missed last week’s #futureresilience blog about Complex Problem Solving, you can access it here.
