The Changing—and Unchanging—Landscape of Education

In recent years, schools have changed greatly. Formative and summative assessments have enabled the creation of longitudinal data sets and detailed methods for evaluating student learning. Accountability metrics have come and gone. Meanwhile, technology continues to get smaller, faster, and more prevalent in the classroom. But what is taught and the way it is taught have largely remained the same.

Certainly, some of the reasons for that permanence are wise. All students should learn to read and write, do math, understand history, perform scientific experiments, and so on. Moreover, schools need to be accountable for reaching these learning goals. Assessments of some kind will continue to be necessary, whether by standardized tests or by other means.

But the world itself has changed. Automation, which has already transformed millions of jobs, will remake —or replace—millions more as the capabilities of artificial intelligence leap ahead. Some predict that automation could take over about half of all activities performed by all workers. Of course, even in an A.I.-powered future, human students will have to know and recall many facts. They will need to know how to take square roots and execute other procedures asked of them.

Rote Training Is Not Enough

That said, rote training will not prepare our children for the future that is already arriving, in which they will confront very complex problems. To face these thorny challenges successfully, what will our children need? Various lists of 21st century skills have been compiled. An important subset is called the Four C’s: Critical thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, and Communication. With the coming of A.I., some have even called for what might be termed H.I.—uniquely Human Intelligence—to be valued.

Let’s cut the jargon. Our children need to be able to solve complex problems creatively, working in teams. How should education adapt to this need? Can our schools find room for new activities that truly enhance problem-solving skills, foster creativity, and enable effective teamwork? And can these activities reach as many students as possible, rather than just a fortunate few?

Complex Problems Are Tough (Of Course)

The complex problems for which we need to prepare students share one or more of the following characteristics:

Complex problems are tough problems in the real world. They’re “wicked issues.” For contrast, consider a stereotypically simple problem: “2 equations, 2 unknowns” from Algebra 1, particularly as the subject is typically taught. A simple problem of this kind has these characteristics:

Simple Problems Belong in School… And So Do Complex Problems

Simple problems have an important place in education. As a core part of their schooling, our children need to learn how to solve a great many of these kinds of problems in well-designed sequences. No matter what the future brings, students need fluency in large fact bases and catalogs of simple methods. And they need to be able to buckle down and do some boring things for “good enough” external reasons. After all, isn’t that part of life?

But don’t we need to teach our children how to solve complex problems, too? Aren’t they also part of life?

Consider the balance now struck in schools between simple problem-solving and complex problem-solving. Simple problems currently form the vast majority of work performed by students in certain subjects—in no small part, because individual performance on simple problems is easily measured. But shouldn’t at least a tiny portion of school time be devoted directly to complex problems, which differ from the simple kinds in so many qualitative ways—including in how interesting they can be?

How to Solve Complex Problems

To crack a complex problem, you need much more than a simple recipe. Here are key skill sets needed:

1. General analytic techniques that work across disciplines and in novel situations to develop fact bases and working hypotheses, such as a hands-on, flexible, and iterative form of the scientific method.
2. Meta-skills such as resilience, grit, and growth mindset, matured through well-coached encounters with tough, interesting challenges, to enable students to struggle through “productive failure” and reach solid answers.
3. Creative faculties that help generate brand-new possibilities and on-the-fly workarounds.
4. Teamwork skills that enable the team to function effectively and efficiently.

Yet we give little more than lip service to developing these complex-problem-solving skills and qualities in schools. A reason may be that historically, the ability to solve simple problems (which require these skills to a lesser degree) has been much easier to measure and include in accountability metrics.

Current programming in schools does pay some attention to developing skill sets #1 (general analytic techniques) and #2 (meta-skills like growth mindset), listed above. But if the students’ diet consists mostly of simple problems in careful increments, then instruction tends to focus on specialized recipes, failing to develop fully either general analytic techniques or resiliency meta-skills. And skill sets #3 and #4, creativity and teamwork, receive even less attention, though truly complex problems cannot be solved without them.

To develop creativity and teamwork, the first obstacle to overcome is the stubborn belief that they are inherent qualities (“you’re either born creative or you’re not”) or fundamental, immutable personality traits (“some people are good team-players, and others aren’t”). Many people no longer consider intelligence to be genetically fixed from birth but instead a mental faculty that can be improved. One day, creativity and teamwork will be regarded in the same way, as strengths that can be nurtured and grown with focus, dedication, and appropriate guidance.

Cultivating Creativity

Our future world will need a generation of creative leaders who can think outside the box, find innovative solutions, and adapt swiftly to evolving challenges, whether in aptly named “creative” industries pushing the boundaries of imagination, in technology startups revolutionizing the way we live, or in any other field or profession. As an example of the practical importance of a seemingly “pie-in-the-sky” quality like creativity, life-changing scientific breakthroughs have often occurred because curious scientists followed their noses, inquiring into mysteries and discovering creative solutions.

The bad news is that although we sorely need creativity, it doesn’t automatically correlate with traditional measures of intelligence that the educational system rewards so well. In other words, A-students aren’t necessarily the ones with the most developed creativity (which isn’t needed in most subjects to get A’s). Moreover, measures of creativity have been declining in recent decades, especially in early grades. This decline has been linked to the rise of standardized testing in those early grades.

The good news is that creativity can be cultivated, even among students who have unfortunately come to believe that they’re not creative (and are thereby limiting themselves). It’s not incredibly difficult, either, to foster creativity within our schools as they are structured at present. Radical change is not required, but at least a little clear space must be carved out for creativity development through guided activities that permit free association and unconscious incubation of ideas. This space should exist in addition to valuable endeavors such as art and music, where support for creative expression may now be largely confined.

Teaching Teamwork

Likewise, teamwork skills require cultivation. We all know that for a group to work effectively, it can’t just be thrown together and labeled a team. Unfortunately, all too often within academic schooling, “group work” can mean assigning tasks to random combinations of students with little opportunity for real coaching. It’s often only through extracurricular activities that children really learn about teamwork, and even in those arenas, effective guidance can be hit or miss.

As with creativity, true teamwork skills can be developed within academic settings, which can function as previews for professional workplaces where effective teams are highly valued. Among the many important sub skills are active listening, the asking of clarifying questions, effective brainstorming, and methods for running calm, honest discussions, coming to harmonious consensus, articulating agreed-upon points of view, and executing plans of action. As this incomplete list demonstrates, teamwork skills are neither personality traits nor feel-good behaviors that arise spontaneously in groups. They’re real skillsets that require true training.

Again, the bulk of current schooling, which concentrates on individual performance outside of teams, can remain unchanged. But space should be set aside in schools for explicitly teaching teamwork.

The Need for Psychological Safety to Take Intellectual Risks

No less an organization than Google has discovered, through extensive internal research, that solving complex problems creatively and collaboratively requires “psychological safety.” In other words, to crack the toughest problems, people must feel safe proposing ideas that might—and often will—fail. They must feel safe as they debate different positions, ask questions, change their minds, and finally come to agreement on a course of action. One researcher found that hospital-based teams “who reported better teamwork seemed to experience more errors”— but that was most likely because they were willing to report them. The teams that functioned worse were covering up their mistakes!

How do we create true psychological safety—this willingness to admit mistakes, offer out-of-the-box ideas, and think flexibly, creatively, and fearlessly—in schools? In an ideal world, classrooms everywhere would provide such safe oases throughout every school day. And of course, educators should strive to incorporate the principles of psychological safety into their standard practice.

But we also know the