"Her real job"

Um texto dedicado ao meu parceiro das conversas oxigenadoras e à sua preocupação com a preparação das pessoas para a Industria 4.0.

Segundo ele, e julgo que tem razão, quase ninguém se preocupa com a preparação das pessoas para a Industria 4.0, o foco está todo na tecnologia.

"While Grosso understands that part of her official job is to transmit a body of content from her head to those of the students, she thinks her real job—her most important job—is to help students become capable of thinking in a complex and uncertain world. To her that means embracing the messiness of the world and not attempting to simplify it for students as if students can’t deal with messiness.
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That means helping them learn both how to build models (rather than handing them prebuilt ones) and how to build better ones together. She introduces them to the ladder of inference, a framework from business and education theorist Chris Argyris, which describes how humans reason, starting with selecting which data to take into account and then making increasingly specific inferences about the selected data—up the rungs of a metaphoric ladder to reach a conclusion on the subject of their thinking, at the top of that ladder. Grosso creates an exercise by which she writes different fragments of a story on a number of paper fish that she hides around the classroom. For example, the story may be about why she arrived at school grumpy one morning, and one fish may say “woke up late” while another may say “forgot marked tests at home,” and so on. Student groups go on a fishing expedition to find and collect the fish, and then attempt to come to a conclusion based on the fish that their group happened to find.
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Since different groups find different data-laden fish, the groups come to different conclusions. Instead of judging which conclusion is “right,” they explore how collecting different data means that each group might come to a different conclusion. Grosso highlights that although we can never collect all the data ourselves, we make our model more robust by being curious and asking questions of others who may have access to data that we don’t. By rejecting the need for one “right” answer, Grosso’s students become more confident. They gain the confidence to share their thinking, because if their answer is different from others’, it might just be because they collected different data or interpreted the data differently, not because their answer is “wrong.” The process also encourages students to make and think about connections—between what they and other students know—so that they can integrate multiple insights.
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Beth Grosso’s approach underlies the agenda I propose here for educators to help preserve American democratic capitalism and enhance its ability to sustainably deliver broadening and rising prosperity. The job of educators should be to prepare students for a complex adaptive system, not to make them capable of operating only a narrow part of a complicated machine. We need to equip our youth for a world that isn’t about perfecting a machine but rather about achieving a balance—an endless journey of transitory improvements rather than definitive solutions. That is the only way we will produce the citizens that we need and the business executives and political leaders to pilot productively. Currently, the formal education system produces overconfident reductionists who don’t see that they are operating in a complex adaptive system and are altogether too sure of the quality and usability of their piece-part solutions. The purpose of education needs to shift, as Beth Grosso illustrates, toward producing sophisticated yet humble model integrators. To do so, educators must do four things.
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Temper the Inclination to Teach Certainty
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At present, the formal education system predominantly teaches certainty; that is, that there is one right answer and many wrong ones”

Lembro-me da perplexidade da minha amiga Marina, que na altura estudava Biologia na universidade, ao perceber que tinha saído um artigo numa revista científica que desclassificava o que ela tinha aprendido numa aula na semana anterior.

Trechos retirados de "When More Is Not Better" de Roger Martin prossegue.

Acerca da Educação em Mongo

Ontem o @walternatez no Twitter remeteu-me para este artigo "Why Apprenticeships Are Taking Off".

Uma feliz coincidência com a leitura matinal de "Mass Customization and Personalization in Education and Training" e em linha com o que costumo escrever acerca do futuro da escola em Mongo. Voltaremos a modelos do século XIX onde os empregadores financiarão a formação dos seus trabalhadores porque a formação em massa do século XX será cada vez mais incapaz de motivar e preparar gente para um mundo cada vez mais heterogéneo.

"“ … we transformed education into mass production at around the time we invented mass production of industrial goods. Perhaps at the time, it was sufficient to learn the three “Rs” in order to lead a useful life, perhaps it was just the mass number of people that had to pass through the educational mill. In any  case, when we democratized learning, we lost something as well as gained quite a lot. … The problem is that we now require more than basics in order to function in society. The jobs are more intellectually challenging, and the terrain is shifting too rapidly. You won’t work in the same job for a lifetime almost no matter what you do. … We have the technologies to expedite individuality again. The real question is whether we can transform the teaching environment from factory work to tutoring. That is a complicated social and personal issue.”
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In the new paradigm, learning should be individualized, localized, and globalized with aims to create unlimited opportunities for students’ life long learning and for development of their contextualized multiple intelligence (CMI). Student is the centre of education. [Moi ici: Aqui sorrio ao recordar a faculdade que mudou o plano de cursos em 2015 e continua a não dar programação em Android, que é o que o mercado procura avidamente, para não deixar professores sem fazer nada. Por isso, continua a ensinar linguagens ultrapassadas] Students’ learning should be facilitated to meet their needs and personal characteristics, and develop their potentials particularly CMI in an optimal way. Students can be self- motivated and self- learning with appropriate guidance and facilitation, and learning is a self-actualizing, discovering, experiencing, and reflecting process." 

Quanto à falta de sex-appeal destes cursos, basta que mais estórias reais sejam divulgadas (como esta).

"“There is a stigma with this in the United States,” Kobes says, “in part by past practices of taking poorer and minority kids out of school and making them go to vocational school.”
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In Europe, apprenticeships are so widespread, they’re not seen as a lesser choice. In fact, the average age of someone entering an apprenticeship in Europe is 17, says Seleznow, compared with 28 in the United States."[Moi ici: Cá em Portugal é mais comum ouvir nos meios de comunicação social gente que está contra este modelo pois, supostamente, para eles o ideal é todos saírem da escola com o mesmo percurso escolar]