SingularityU South Africa Summit 2021 Highlights: Rapelang Rabana - The Path to Transformational Education Outcomes
The SingularityU South Africa Summit Day 1 took place yesterday with an insightful mix of keynotes, workshops and roundtable discussions.
Image supplied by SingularityU South Africa
Internationally lauded technology entrepreneur, Rapelang Rabana presented a keynote talk, titled “The Path to Transformational Education Outcomes” at the SingularityU South Africa Summit Online 2021.
Here are a few key highlights from her presentation.
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Nelson Mandela is quoted as having said that education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. My focus is on re-education: the path to transformational education outcomes. If you, like me, love this continent, you’ll agree how much in need we are of a skilled and productive workforce to achieve the levels of prosperity and economic growth that we seek. That means we have to upskill and capacitate people faster than we have ever done before.
We’re all familiar with the limitations of our education system. For too long we heard “Just go to school, things will work out and you'll secure your future.”
If that was true, it would mean for every year of education and schooling, the individual would have seen an increase in economic returns. Statistics have shown us that someone's employment prospects do not necessarily materially improve with each year until they get a diploma or a degree.
Traditional schooling made sense when the future of work was predictable and you were able to prepare people for the next 40 years. However, this way of schooling doesn't make sense anymore. When things start looking unpredictable, we don't know which jobs are going to be required in the future and that’s changing all the time.
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Many educational leaders agree that we do not have clarity on how to truly assess someone's ability to critically think and collaborate. There have been many developments in terms of creating incredible new solutions that cover the entire range of the education value chain, including digital content, online videos, great classroom tools, school administration systems and the kind of work that we do that help rekindle learning in terms of personalised, micro learning. I still have to ask myself:
“Are we truly optimising the learning system and the education system to build for the skills of the future?”
It isn't just about what we learn, but also about how we learn.
We are the product of both the what and the how. If you look at the South African curriculum regarding the “what”, it's not actually that bad, but there's no guidance on the “how”.
That is where the major problem lies: the kind of skills we want. The mindsets and behaviours that we seek are built through experiences, exposure and tackling challenges through experiential learning. And this is where the investment in education is required. We can start to draw on the learnings from neuroscience that is becoming a lot clearer in terms of how we develop people and build these kinds of complex skills. The big idea here is that through a series of just right experiences or challenges that isn't too simple and too easy, they can then achieve an “I can” moment. We now have to transition from curating great content to curating great experiences.
From the time you're born as a child, you actually accumulate a lot of these experiences. If you're lucky enough to be stimulated at school or at home, your neural pathways will develop incredibly quickly. What of those who don't have that level of privilege and stimulation? If we’re not working towards the creation of these “I can” moments in education, we're missing a big part. The neuro-plasticity concepts really speak to our ability to alter our minds through the kind of experiences that we have. This is the shift in paradigm that I believe learning and education has to fully grasp. The key here is that when we struggle, but only just the right amount of struggle, then we're able to build those neural pathways and come out of our comfort zones.
Luckily for us, some people, like the local organisation ATB Transformation, have been thinking very hard about these kinds of concepts. They started thinking about classes of challenges and how we might be able to grade the complexity of challenges. It's about grading the underlying brain functions, behaviours and mindsets that are happening.
We now need to apply that same curation ability to more academic subjects and the skills that we're seeing are needed for the future. Let's think about a practical application like teaching a child how to ride a bicycle. When you look at the first level of a one, the child can sit or hold on to the bike, yet they keep falling. They don’t know how to make the bicycle move and they realise that. If it appeals to them, you suddenly open up the motivation to learn. If you think about our education system, we often don’t make sure that we start with creating that motivation.
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The key thing that ATB teaches us is that learning should be recognised and observed by how someone is behaving in each of those stages. The next frontier of education is understanding the classes of challenges we need for people to develop creativity and critical thinking system skills through the curation of experiences at different points along that line.
We start to see how it relates to stages of learning and levels of consciousness, as well as our locus of control and what we need to develop on a behavioural mindset level to get from A to B… from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence. We actually do understand the behaviours people display at each of those stages. We combine those stages of learning with our brain function of analysis and synthesis.
The historical understanding was left and right, but we now know that's not so accurate. What we need to understand here is that our education system focused a lot on the analytical, as opposed to the synthetical, the zooming out that allows you to see the bigger picture. We haven't spent enough time understanding how we make sure we integrate your lower brain functions so that it doesn't override your higher brain functions.
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One of the biggest complaints by employers has really always been that people can't figure out what to do. You've got to give them instructions. Graduates are not able to figure out the problem and decide on the solution from there. This starts to show us how, with only half a brain consciousness of typically analytical skills, we don't build that whole brain function. Lastly, locus of control speaks to whether you believe life is happening to you as an external locus of control, or whether you believe you're directing your life outcomes with an internalised locus of control. How often do we prime people to believe and develop an external locus of control when we encourage them to only do stuff on instruction? to do,
The big question is: How can we articulate how we build creativity, critical thinking, advanced cognitive skills at each of these levels and what are the toolkits we need to give people in order to be able to tip them to that next level of development.
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