What are your priorities as the Chief Academic Officer?
As the father of two amazing daughters, I spend a lot of time thinking about two questions. First, how do my wife and I equip and empower our girls to not just succeed, but thrive in a future that remains amorphous and ill-defined? Second, how do I provide or create impactful experiences that will ignite my daughter’s passions and enable them to not just find their future but to seize it? As Envision’s Chief Academic Officer, these questions also shape my approach to the design and delivery of our programs. Fundamentally, I advance the organization’s commitment to our mission to enable every Envision student to turn their career and life aspirations into a reality through the development of a relevant curriculum, a rigorous instructional model, and a multi-dimensional research and assessment capability. This means that we need to deploy a learning ecosystem that engages students in the learning process; equips them with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors they need to thrive; and empowers them to take responsibility for their own future and make an impact on their community.
What learning model does Envision implement in its programs and what do you see as the primary benefits of this approach?
Envision implements a comprehensive experiential learning framework that we call “Academy, Lab, Arena”, which is shaped by three major approaches:
1. Hands-On Learning – We value, implement, and consistently evaluate a learning design that is dominated by active, multi-sensory engagement throughout the learning events in our programs.
2. Inquiry Based Learning – We stress exploration, questioning, and guided dialogue and use these pedagogical approaches as the primary tools to shape our instructional design as opposed to a pedagogy dominated by didactic instruction. Problem Based, Project Based, and Competency Based education models among others make up the majority of our instructional approach.
3. Personalized Learning – Our pedagogical DNA is grounded in a growth mindset that incorporates a pedagogy that can be individualized and differentiated, and empowers self-regulation of learning that enables each student to transfer knowledge and skills and apply them to new challenges.
Research demonstrates that this approach fosters both cognitive and social/emotional skills and behaviors like critical thinking, communication, tenacity, creativity, and collaboration skills that positively impact students’ success in school and confident transition into a career and life as a productive adult. Most importantly though, this foundation in research and best practices, enables every Envision program to be immersive and fun. Envision students live their dreams: conducting mock trials, diagnosing patients, building robots, investigating crime scenes, creating video games, producing and directing films, planning international development, or preventing international conflict. Ultimately, Envision students enjoy real-world experiences within the safety net of an Envision program environment. They discover their own ability to solve complex problems while collaborating with peers and mentors. They gain a unique opportunity to practice and sharpen communication skills and creatively solve problems—skills that are imperative in today’s increasingly complex world.
How important will access to career exploration opportunities be in the coming years for students?
Access to career exploration opportunities will be essential in an age where nearly 50% of current work activities can be automated with existing technology and when by 2030, approximately 375 million workers may need to change their occupation category. In our current globalized, post-industrial, knowledge economy I often observe that the very real risk of disruption is unfortunately fostering an overly utilitarian, realistic, and prescribed approach to career planning. What is most ironic about this situation is the predictions of the recent FutureWork report from the US Department of Labor. Simply, 65% of today’s primary students will have careers that do not currently exist, yet we continue to often require that those very students pick an existing career. Simply, the future will be different—really different. Compared to the present and the past, it will require different skills, different behaviors, and different mindsets. While the next twenty years will be defined by disruption on a historic scale that will redefine the world of work and life, it will also create a period of incredible opportunity for individuals who can innovate, think critically, collaborate, and communicate effectively. At Envision, our students aren’t simply exploring career pathways, they are developing competencies and behaviors that will enable them to actually shape and redefine those pathways—and this opportunity will be critical to success in the 21st Century.
What are the most common barriers you see to career exploration and what can teachers do to help students ignite their passion?
I think Ayah Bdeir, the founder of littleBits, was exactly right when she noted, “What we want to do is help ignite kids’ passions, unleash their inner inventor, build up their own confidence so that they can be the ones to invent the world they want to live in”. I believe the biggest barrier is that we continue to employ 20th Century practices in the hope that it will prepare students for a 21st Century world. As educators, we need to empower our students with a design thinking process that allows them to create their own solution and their own career, rather than simply providing them with a menu of careers and skills from the past. At Envision, we have found that helping students ignite their passion through the amplification of their curiosity enables those very students to find a sense of purpose that gives them direction within the ever changing list of career potentials. Most importantly though, we need to first ensure that our students develop strong social, emotional, and high-level cognitive skills and capabilities as these are difficult to automate and can transfer between occupation categories. Second, we need to prepare our students to become innovators and problem solvers by fanning the flames of curiosity and permitting them to fail while they iterate on new solutions to old problems. Not to mention, this approach to teaching and learning is a heck of a lot of fun.
How can educators get involved in the Envision mission?
As a former classroom teacher myself, I would first encourage teachers to join the Envision Mentor Network. Not only will you have the opportunity to join a community of educational professionals that are committed to preparing students to thrive, you will also have access to professional development opportunities, experiential curriculum that you can use in your classroom, and witty and insightful (at least we think so) commentary of cutting-edge challenges and opportunities facing our profession. Second, actively join us in our mission by nominating students to Envision programs or taking a summer to serve as one of our instructors. In addition to making some extra money, you will have the opportunity to immerse yourself in a summer of experiential pedagogy that will hopefully improve your impact in your own classroom back home.
background-image: a building with the American flag in front of it