Designing for educational outcomes
A large part of the formal education landscape across the world, and also in India, is based on what is called Outcomes Based Education, or OBE for short (nothing to do with the British Empire). But the way it gets implemented on the ground is sometimes mind-numbingly tedious and only promotes a toxic compliance-driven culture, rather than nurturing a culture of inquiry.
One of the first mistakes we do is to equate "outcomes" with "exam performance" and argue for all of education be designed around examinations. We even hear weird axioms like "assessments drive learning". It is one thing for assessments to assess learning-- but once they start driving our learning, we have lost the very reason why we are educating the population in the first place. This culture has also completely taken out the emphasis on learning, in classrooms. Most of our courses today start as a contractual agreement where we first present the assessment model, exam pattern, etc. and students make a decision based on how well prepared are they to "crack" this course exam.
I remember in one of my classes on distributed computing, many years ago, there was this student who had scored very high marks, who was sitting in the first row. He seemed to be visibly distressed by my teaching. When asked what is the problem, he blurted out, "But what kind of questions can you possibly ask from what we are learning now?" I had to let him know that I was not even thinking of the exam at this time.
At the core of this insane mess that we are in, stems from our inability to understand the notion of outcomes. We often equate "outcomes" with either "outputs" or "capabilities". Outcomes is not the same as outputs or capabilities. A quick Google search will reveal several articles and videos contrasting outcomes with outputs.
How do we understand outcomes? Here is a quick definition of the three:
- Outputs are what we produce
- Outcomes are what we become
- Capabilities are what we are able to do
Increased outputs do not necessarily mean better outcomes. Even high-quality outputs also need not imply good outcomes. An organization may be producing a lot of high quality output-- but in order to produce high-quality output, it may have turned into a toxic and exploitative place to work in. An organization may produce a lot of output, but what it becomes as a result, is a different question altogether.
So, designing for outcomes is not the same as designing for outputs. While outputs do play a role in manifesting the desired outcomes, they are not equivalent to one another. We cannot replace outcomes with outputs.
In an education setting, it is not what the students produce which should be our focus, but how they are themselves changing and transforming as a result of their educational journey.
Similarly, outcomes are not the same as capabilities. When educators sometimes understand that outputs are not the same as outcomes, we often see them focusing on students' capabilities instead-- and equating that with outcomes. This is done using frameworks like the Bloom's Taxonomy that categorizes learning abilities into different levels.
What a student is capable of doing, is not the same as what they have become, or how they have transformed as a result of their education. A student may have acquired several skills and capabilities during their educational journey, but in this process they might have also become disillusioned, cynical, resentful, and manipulative. We can only imagine how they would put their capabilities to use, based on what they have become.
So what exactly can we use to design for outcomes? What is the transformation that we seek to manifest in our students as they go through their educational journey?
To address this, we have to first ask what is the role that education plays in a society. The succinct and most general answer that we can give for this is that the role of education in a society is to create an empowered population.
What is meant by an empowered population? Is it about a population that can earn their livelihood? Is it about a population that can solve problems? Is it about a population that can live independently? Is it about a population that thinks creatively? Is it about a population that can organize, cooperate and build civilized societies?
Empowerment includes all of that and more. But without a framework to think about empowerment, the above would just be "hand wavy" rhetoric without giving any insight as to how to we design for empowerment.
In order to address this, we have developed a framework that we call the "empowerment lattice" which is shown below:
Empowerment Lattice
This framework presents different stages of "becoming" or "transformation" that we can expect from a learner as they go through an educational journey.
When a learner starts their educational journey, we can think of their state of being as "novice" or beginners. When we provide novices with some skills, they become "capable" of doing something. The entirety of Bloom's taxonomy, including a student's ability to analyze, synthesize and create, are all about capabilities, which is but just the first step in the long journey to empowerment. For someone who is capable of something, we can now provide them with insights and practice. A capable person obtaining insights will become "knowledgeable", while practicing one's capabilities makes the person become "talented". A person who is knowledgeable and talented, can now apply their knowledge and talent in different settings, leading them to become "experts".
Expertise is what I would call the "base camp" for empowerment. We cannot build an empowered population without building expertise first. Expertise is also the point of independence. All other outcomes below expertise would primarily serve to augment existing workforce in different forms. Some occupations primarily look for capabilities-- be it for laying bricks or writing a program, while some other occupations require knowledge and talent. All outcomes below expertise serve to cater to the needs of different occupations. But someone who is an expert in something, is in a position to choose their occupation and even operate independently.
But expertise is not the same as empowerment. Acting alone, an expert cannot effect much change. When experts are provided with an inter-disciplinary environment that enables them to operate autonomously, eventually we can expect this population to become empowered to effect some changes. Empowerment is about inter-dependency rather than about independence. An empowered population comprises of several experts coming from different areas of expertise, with a sound understanding of not just their expertise, but also their limitations. Such a population collectively ends up addressing a larger issue and bringing about desired changes. An empowered population cannot be formed by experts forming their own fiefdoms, operating in isolation, and trying to grab territory from one another.
Any major challenge that we face as a population-- be it poverty or illness or climate change or whatever, requires an empowered population of inter-dependent experts enriching one another and collectively tackling the challenge. This is what educators need to aim for,
Education is called a noble profession for good reason. As educators, we not only get to see but also get to affect how students are transformed in their educational journey. It is tempting to use the capabilities and talents of students to serve our own professional goals or our standing in the peer community. But at all times, we need to be mindful of not just what the students are producing-- but also how are they transforming-- what are they becoming.
The journey of transformation is not simple. It is full of unexpected twists and turns and is a deeply personal journey. To foster transformative journeys for students, it is important for educators to foster a collaborative environment among themselves within and across institutions and countries. Competition is for businesses and athletes-- not for educators. Educators across the world should meet-- not to compare their personal scorecards-- but to enrich one another to help build an empowered humanity.
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