Read time: ~5 min
Author: Michaela Horvathova; Co-Founder & Chief Education Officer at Beyond Education
Editor: Rouxbin Smit, Editorial & Community Manager at Beyond Education
Image generated using Dall·E
Article originally posted on Medium and on Michaela’s LinkedIn.
ChatGPT has just added another convincing argument for why changing the traditional classroom is overdue. When knowledge is easy to come by through the likes of tools such as what ChatGPT is proposing, education has to adjust beyond its limitations to be of meaningful value for the 21st Century. After dedicating my career to pushing education beyond its traditional structure, I’ve noticed a common thread in the discourse around ChatGPT: soft skills.
The chatbot’s ability to churn out perfect essay responses to prompts spanning a wide range of subjects has sparked fears among some schools and educators that their writing assignments could soon become obsolete — and that the chatbot could encourage cheating and plagiarism. Many schools around the world are cancelling written exams and homework as teachers can no longer recognize the written work done by ChatGPT from student’s own work.
ChatGPT’s powerful ability to generate human-like text in real-time has the potential to transform many industries and revolutionise the way we work and learn. It forces us to ask foundational questions. What is the relevance of current education systems? What is worth teaching and what should be removed? How can we emphasise what makes humans human and differentiate ourselves from machines? How can we best prepare our students for this constantly changing and complex world?
“This will lead to much-needed education reform,” says the article in Atlantic where it mentions the heavy toll this sudden transformation is going to take on education and its many branches (e.g. standardized testing, admissions, educational software, etc.). In the same article, a teacher says that the most essential educational shift will be “helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things.” Another article in Nature mentions that “academics could respond by reworking written assessments to prioritize critical thinking or reasoning that ChatGPT can’t yet do.”
Many mainstream articles seem to come to this same conclusion, there is an urgent need for an educational transformation that emphasizes the importance of 21st century competencies/ soft skills like Critical Thinking, Metacognition, Resilience, Ethics, and more.
Moreover, decades of research has already established a strong evidence-base and new studies further confirm that the development of 21st Century Competencies (also known as social-emotional skills) positively impacts children’s lives. The latest proof points come from a new study spanning an estimated one million students from 2011 to 2020. Forthcoming research from Yale University will also share findings across more than 400 studies, reflecting over 50 countries, and more than 250 social-emotional learning (SEL) programs. Both confirm what hundreds of independent studies have consistently shown: SEL supports academic learning, mental wellness, school safety, and more.
So how do we break the mold and shift?
First we have to understand the potential of ChatGPT and while the AI narrative is ripe with predictions, from apocalyptic to comparing it to the impact the calculator had, one thing seems clear for the short to medium term. While ChatGPT may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it lacks the capacity for sound critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success. Developing these competencies, however, is a challenge unto its own that I have dedicated my career to understanding and that, as a research field, is only recently starting to gain traction.
When I studied International Education Policy at Harvard 10 years ago I was fascinated by the innovation in education and 21st Century Competencies. It was driven mainly by my personal experience as a student in a school in Slovakia, where I was taught a wide variety of topics in every subject but despite studying hard, I felt that I was not really learning. I had a curious and inquisitive mind that wanted to better understand why things are the way they are. I wanted to question and go beyond the surface of traditional knowledge. However, going beyond wasn’t encouraged in my school and it is still not encouraged for many students around the world.
After graduating from Harvard, I worked at the OECD on the Education 2030 project that provides a framework for countries to redesign their education systems and shift towards competency-based curricula. When the project started in 2015, only a few ‘open-minded’ and innovative OECD countries joined. Over time the momentum grew and now most of the OECD member countries are part of this project. Every country is at a different stage of conceptualization or implementation but it just shows that an increasing number of countries understand the need for their education systems to change and better prepare their future generations in the context of recent societal and technological changes.
However, education systems have a strong inertia and are not easy to change. After leaving the OECD, I worked as an independent consultant helping several countries with the implementation of their reforms. There I realized the main challenge is that competency-based education is very new and abstract, for both policy-makers and practitioners, and there is a lack of effective tools to support this big transformation.
This served as a motivation behind creating Beyond Education, an edtech start-up that offers programs and assessment to develop and evaluate 21st Century Competencies and supports schools in their efforts to move towards competency-based education. At BE, we passionately encourage students to think critically, to question and to evaluate sources of information, to collaborate effectively, to lead ethically and be aware of consequences of their actions, and to learn how to learn, among others. A vital part of competency-based learning is evaluating competencies and we are really proud of the evaluation tool we developed! It’s the first scientifically validated assessment that reliably measures the levels of competencies at a student and school level and is based on the Four Dimensional Education Framework of the Centre for Curriculum Redesign.
As we all know, what gets measured gets treasured so to bring more attention to the aspects of education that truly matter, we need to assess them. If only recently released, ChatGPT has already thrown a spanner into the educational machine; schools need to deeply rethink what is relevant to teach. For what is to come, we can only hypothesise, but we do know that we will continue to live our lives in conjunction with AI and that its most ambitious challenges remain in the complexity and nuance of human interaction. Education systems have to move away from knowledge-based curricula and develop students’ 21st Century Competencies so they can equip people for a world where society walks alongside AI. This task is enormous and it could hardly be more urgent. The clock is ticking.
How do you think we can break the mold?