Who are just joining. My name is Veronica Parker with CAEP TAP. For today's webinar, the topic is Andragogy for the 21st Century with Grace Sauser. The PowerPoint presentation is available for download, so please be sure to access that.

In addition, for those of you who are just joining for this webinar, please have access to several pieces of paper for writing purposes throughout the exercises. Also, please use the following Google Drive to access resources during this webinar. And those resources are located in the chat pod.

If anyone's experiencing any technical difficulties, please be sure to let me know, and I will assist you via a private chat. If you have any other questions, please be sure to also include those in the chat pod. We will address them throughout the duration of the webinar. If Grace is unable to answer your question immediately, please be patient, and she will address your question.

This webinar is being recorded and will be available on the California Adult Education website. And I will be sure to post a link to the page where the website will be posted in the chat pod, as well as the resources. So both will be able to access later on today.

Again, if you're experiencing any technical difficulties, please be sure to let me know. And at the end of this webinar, an evaluation will appear on your screen, so please be sure to fill out this evaluation to let Grace know what you thought about today's webinar and if there are any additional technical assistance or professional development needs you have at this time.

And one last thing. For those of you who are just joining, if you are in the room with multiple people, please be sure to let us know. We are taking attendance during this time and want to ensure that we account for everyone in our attendance roster. Now I will turn it over to Grace who will get us started with today's webinar. Grace?

Hi, and welcome, everyone. I see a couple familiar names already participating. So hi to my friends, and to all of my new friends that hopefully I will get to know through the adult ed world over the course of this year and the next couple of years.

So today, we are talking about andragogy, which is a word that I didn't even know existed until I came into adult education. And I know in talking to a lot of my colleagues that it's a word that may be unfamiliar to some of you as well. So we're going to be talking about that.

And we're specifically going to be focusing on how we can transform adult education to meet the needs of our 21st century learners. And even the learners that we don't even know that we have yet, because we know that it's an ongoing and living and breathing process right now in how we educate our students.

So I always like to start any presentation, class, any kind of opportunity where information is going to be shared thinking about the bigger purpose of the presentation. And one way of doing that is by having an essential question.

So our essential question for today is, how do we transform adult education to meet the 21st century needs of our learners and prepare them for present and future demands? And under that, we have three kind of sub questions, and these are going to inform the arc of this presentation, OK? So we're going to be talking about each of these things. And I'll make sure to come back and mention how they fit in with each part of the presentation as well.

So under that, we're going to be looking specifically at the skills. What are the things that we actually want our students to be able to do? And what are the attributes that we want them to have if they're going to be successful in the 21st century world?

What role does their own personal choice, their autonomy play in empowering them to understand their world better? And how can we differentiate effectively to make sure that we are meeting the students where they are when they come to us, but at the same time, challenging them to move beyond their comfort zone?

Because we know a lot of them come to us having had maybe some negative experiences with education, they may have not been tremendously successful previously in education, and we want them to have a positive experience with us and also feel like education is something that they value for the rest of their life, because we want them to be lifelong learners.

So I'm going to come back to these essential questions in a minute. So if you're trying to copy them down right now, don't stress. You will get another opportunity. But I'm actually going to have you use a very specific format to capture the information from today's webinar. And this is actually the format that we have our students use when they are recording information from their research, and that's the Cornell note-taking format.

Many of you may be familiar with Cornell note taking. It's called that because it was developed by a professor at Cornell University who noticed that his students, even these super high-performing students, were not good at studying, and that they were using really ineffective and just not very efficient studying methods.

So he said, OK, how can I fix this? And he came up with the Cornell note-taking format to help students not only capture the information that they were learning, but also to process that information.

And I highly encourage you on your own to research the Cornell note-taking method. There's also a PowerPoint in the Google Drive that you can use as a resource if you want to learn more about it yourself, or if you even want to modify it to use it with your students, if you want them to start using Cornell note taking. But it's a very, very successful strategy. I actually use it in every single workshop that I attend, every meeting that I attend now even as an adult learner.

So what you're going to do is you're going to take your peace of paper, and you're going to divide it 2/3 on the right-hand side and one third on the left-hand side. So you're just basically going to draw a line down about 2/3 of the way down the paper, dividing it one third on the left, 2/3 on the right.

And you're going to capture the information on the right-hand side. And that left-hand side is going to be your processing section. So that's where you're going to write questions that you have. I'm going to give you some main ideas to write over there on the left-hand side. And it's basically just going to serve as a frame for the information on the right.

And then at the end of the presentation, I encourage you to use your summary section, your processing section, to write down a couple thoughts that you have. Because if you're anything like me, you've got a million things going on in your world every day, and it's really easy to go through a webinar like this, have lots of great ideas, and then if you don't write them down right away, they go away. And then a couple days later, going, oh, man. What was that great idea that I had? So that's a really good use for that processing section at the end of the presentation.

So go ahead and set your paper up. I'm going to come back to those essential questions. And I don't want you to write it out word for word, because one of the note-taking skills that we teach our students is how to paraphrase and to summarize and abbreviate. So for your main essential question, which is going to go at the very top of your paper, just basically capture the idea that we are talking about adult education and the 21st century.

And then on that left-hand side, I want you to just write three words, but you're going to skip a couple lines between those words. I'd say skip about four or five lines between each one. So on the left-hand side, you're going to write skills. That's going to cover the sub question number one. What skills do graduates need in the workplace, college ed, and life? Skip about four lines.

And then you're going to write autonomy or choice, and that's going to capture that second sub question about how their choice is going to help them understand their world better. And then you're going to skip another four lines and you're going to write differentiate for that last question about how we can differentiate for our students.

And that differentiation, as you know as an adult educator, is so, so important. Because we have students that are coming to us that are fresh-- 18. They just turned 18 yesterday and they're coming to us. We have students that are in their 80s coming to us.

And so they all are coming with this very broad base of experience, and that differentiation is often what's going to make the difference to make sure that the education is relevant to them. I'll give you just a couple minutes to make sure you have those three words written in the left-hand column and a paraphrased version of the main essential question at the top.

OK. Let's go ahead and jump in. And don't stress. At any point I'm going too fast, just give me a little note over here in the chat pod, and I will slow down. I tend to talk fast, so no problem with you reminding me.

OK. So Andragogy. As I said, this is a term that was new to me. May be new to you, so I want to make sure we're all on the same page about that. When we're talking about andragogy, this is basically pedagogy, but for adults.

And it's a term that actually was coined in the 1970s by a man named Malcolm Knowles, who has since become known as kind of the father of adult education. He was the first one to really say, now, wait a minute. We can't treat adult learners the way that we treat child learners. They have different things going on.

And I discovered andragogy because when I first came into adult education in 2013, I was also entering my master's program. And I had to choose a master's thesis topic. And I thought, well, what better thing to research than adult learning theory, considering that it was a new thing to me as well. I actually came out of the K-12 world myself.

And what I learned in researching adult education is, number one, there is very little research out there about the type of adult education that we do. There's a lot of adult education research about community colleges. There's quite a bit of research about English learners, but most of it is related to children who are English learners. And there's really a dearth of information about what we consider to be public education for adults.

But what I was able to find was that there were basically four main needs that adults have. And this is the cornerstone of everything that we have done at my school to try to adjust to their 21st century needs.

The number one thing that they need is they need flexibility. We know that our adults have very busy lives. A lot of them have full-time jobs. They may have children. They may be caring for aging parents. They have to pay bills. They have a lot of responsibilities that kids don't have. So the more flexibility we can give them in time, in space, and in their tasks, the better off they will be, and the more successful they will be.

The second thing that adults need is they need to see relevance. These are people that have life experience. Unlike when we're working with kindergartners where they have limited life experience and so everything is kind of new to them, for our adults, they have a ton of life experience. And so they need to see that what they're learning with us is actually relevant to that life experience that they have.

How does this apply to me? How does this apply to my life? And that is critical for them to stay engaged in the material, and to find it useful and something that they want to pursue on their own.

The third quality that adult learners need is they need to have autonomy. They need to feel like, I am the driver of my own vehicle. Not be necessarily told what to do. Now of course, guidance is always good for anyone, but they need to feel like they're being respected for the knowledge and the expertise that they already have, and not talked down to or treated like a child. So that autonomy becomes really important for their motivation to stick with it.

And then the fourth thing that they need-- and this is really true of all human beings, I think, but it's especially good for us to remember in adult education, because we do have such a different model where we don't necessarily have these students for eight hours a day, five days a week like we would in a K-12 setting. They need to feel connected. They need to feel connected to each other. They need to feel connected to us, to the school. And that can be fostered in a variety of ways.

But if we neglect that connectedness, that's why we see a lot of times really low persistence and very spotty attendance with our adult learners, because if they don't feel like they have some ownership of that school process, then what's the point in showing up to class, you know? Oh, you know, something else came up, or I'm just-- I don't feel like it. I'm tired. Whatever.

But if they feel connected to us, then they want to be there because they know that someone cares about them and about their success, and they don't want to let that person down. I have found that this connectedness piece has made the biggest difference in our persistence, attendance, credit completion, graduation rates of all of the things that we have modified at my school, so I don't want to diminish the importance of that piece.

Are there any questions at this point? Or is there anything that really resonates with you or that you have experienced yourself in these areas in terms of adult learners?

OK. It looks like we're good on there. But by all means, if something comes to you and it just pops into your head, feel free to write it in the chat box, because we learn so much from each other, and I am by no means the expert on all things. This is just one thing that I really care deeply about.

I see that Jean says, definitely agree with connectedness, especially with evening adult students. Oh, yes, right? Because these are students a lot of times that are working all day. And we know how we feel when we've been at work all day. The last thing we want to do is leave our house and go to school. I know it was really hard for me when I was going through grad school to get that motivation at that end of the day. So when they feel like they're coming to a place that feels like family to them, that makes it much more attractive.

OK. David, excellent question. What are some of the things that we have done to promote connectedness in our school? I am going to talk very, very specifically about that actually a little bit later in the presentation. So I have noted your question, and I promise that we are going to come back to that. So thank you for that question, because definitely want to get into the nuts and bolts for sure.

OK. So I'm actually going to have you do an exercise now to start thinking about what you want for your students. What are your goals for your students? And I want you to think about this also in terms of, we live in a wonderful democratic society where students or human beings in general have a lot of freedom and they have a lot of choice. And we want to make sure that we're all working productively towards that goal of having the ultimate society that we want, right? And our graduates are going to be part of that plan.

So I want you to think about, what are the characteristics of the ideal graduate? So when a student leaves your program and they're going out into the world, what skills do you hope that they have? What attributes do you hope that they have? And what behaviors do you think that they would exhibit if they really are that model student that we would love to see at the end of our program?

So I'm going to have you do a quickwrite, for quickwrite. And you're going to do this on your paper, because I see some of you are ready to type it into the chat. But I actually want you to do it on your paper first, and then I'm going to have you report out some summary pieces from that.

So on one of your pieces of paper-- not your Cornell note paper. Could be on the back of that, but on one of your other pieces of paper, I want you to really think about this, and I want you to write continuously for two whole minutes without stopping.

The reason I'm having you do it this way is because we have blocks in our brain that when we think too consciously, sometimes it actually blocks out some of our best stuff. And it's often when we just kind of let those blocks go and we force ourselves to just kind of-- I call it, like, puking on the paper. We just throw up our ideas onto the paper. And whatever form they come out in, we actually get some of our really best stuff there, OK?

So what I want you to do is to put your pen to paper, think about this question, and I want you to write for two minutes continuously. Even if you get off topic, even if you start writing about what you had for breakfast or whatever it may be, just keep on writing continuously. And we're going to see what emerges from that. So ready, set, go.

You've got about 30 seconds left. So right now, we're doing our quickwrite on, what are the characteristics of the ideal graduate? And go ahead and stop.

All right. Now, read through what you wrote and underline the key words or phrases that you think really exemplify what you want students to have in terms of their skills, attributes, and behaviors.

And then if you could please type in one or two of those skills, attributes, or behaviors that you came up with in the chat box so that we can all see and see if we have some that are similar, see if some came up that were really unique. Because sometimes, someone-- when I've done this presentation before, someone will come up with something that I never thought of, but that's absolutely something that we should be thinking about.

So I see Jared said self-advocacy. Absolutely. That is so, so important. They need to be able to advocate for themselves. And especially if they have special needs, that becomes especially important. I see Susan said persistent and responsible. Yes. Definitely. They need to be able to stick with the task.

Hillary said critical thinkers. We know how incredibly important critical thinking is. That's why we're focusing on those college and career readiness standards. They need to be able to speak fluently. That's especially important for our English learners and our immigrants to really work on that pronunciation, because we know that that's going to be important when they're going to get a job and when they're communicating.

Kim says confidence and skills to keep learning. That comes right back to that persistence. So very important. David says, be able to access resources. Oh my goodness. So important to remember that, because there are so many resources. Almost too many, right? Now with 21st century. And helping them to be able to wade through all that is really important.

Alejandra says, good follow-through. Yes. Again, back to that persistence piece. Cecilia, independent lifelong learners open to differences and crazy English. Ooh, that's a fun way to describe that. I like that.

Guadalupe, eager to learn. Yes. We definitely want them to have enthusiasm. Again, coming back to that idea that some of them may have had negative experiences, and we want them to see us as a catalyst for them to get excited about learning again.

And Aha says, persistence. Being able to navigate the systems. Ooh, yes. Those systems can be quite challenging, especially for immigrants or for students that have not had a lot of access to various different things. And they need to be able to advocate for themselves for sure.

And Hillary, appreciate diversity. Yeah, we have a very diverse culture, and diverse in a lot of different ways. And we are all better off if we can't appreciate that diversity and see it as an asset as opposed to a deficit. And she also said, lifelong learners. Definitely. We want them to be lifelong learners.

And Oga Oygar-- I'm so sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong-- motivated, arrive early. Yes, being punctual is so important. Does extra success-driven hard skills. Bethany, strong problem solving skills. Will, confident. We definitely want them to feel confident. David, those communication skills. We're going to come-- a lot of these you're going to see are going to come back a little bit later in the presentation. Actually, on the next slide.

And Morella says, responsibility, leadership. See, now, that's a new one, but that's very, very important, right? We need them to be leaders in society. And reliability. Jean says not intimidated to try new things and eager to learn. Teresita, communicate-- communicative, competence, and good job skills. Guadalupe says discipline. And Branka also mentioned discipline, especially in relation to time management.

And then we have-- Robert says become citizens. Yes, that's also important, right? For a lot of our EL learners especially and a lot of our immigrants and refugees, that's a big step for them, and that's going to open so many more doors for them. And then Teresita says innovative. Yes, absolutely.

So we're going to look at a couple of skills that have been identified as fitting into this idea of the ideal graduate. And my district actually went through and we created a graduate profile for our entire district using student input, teacher input, community input.

And what was awesome was that we had already decided to focus on these 10 skills, which come out of the work of New World of Work. And there is a link here, so when you go back into the PowerPoint if you want to know more about New World of Work, which is a completely free resource-- I highly recommend checking it out-- you can go to that website there and find out more about it and get access to the lessons.

But we had already decided that we were going to use New World of Work skills as our frame. And then our district went through this whole graduate profile work. And what was awesome about it was that what they came out with at the end for their graduate profile and the top 10 employability skills from New World of Work actually matched up perfectly, which was just so lucky for us.

But it makes sense, right? Because if we look at the list of things that you guys listed, a lot of those things come up here, right? Adaptability. That's that ability to have an open mind and know that things aren't always going to go the way you think that they are. But when they don't, you're OK with it, and you can adapt to it.

That analysis/solution mindset. That comes back to that idea of critical thinking, right? That you can see a problem and you don't just automatically go, oh, it's a problem. I give up. You go, OK. What are some different ways that I can try to approach this?

We know collaboration and communication. Those have been around for a long time, right? Those are some of those cornerstone skills in the Common Core college and career readiness standards, is that collaboration and communication. People need to be able to work together and they need to be able to understand each other.

Digital fluency. That's something that certainly a lot of our parents or grandparents didn't have to worry about, but our students are in the thick of it, right? They've got computers and cell phones and webinars and all these different things that are kind of new, even though they've been around now for a little bit. Still feels like they're new for some of us. And it's just part and parcel of their daily world.

Empathy. This was one that really surprised me. I had never thought about empathy as being a key skill for graduates. But once I started to think about it, I realized how important it was. And it actually ties in with this social diversity awareness.

And someone in the chat pod was saying how-- let me see if I can find it here-- Hillary was talking about appreciating diversity. I think empathy and appreciating diversity go hand in hand, because it's that ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes. And also, recognizing that just because someone isn't the same as you in every way doesn't mean that you can't have things in common or that you can't learn something from them, so I think that's a really important one.

Entrepreneurial mindset. OK, think of who our big names are these days, right? We've got Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, the guy that invented WhatsApp who happens to live next door to my cousin in Santa Clara. It's crazy. This guy was 26 years old or 24 or 26 years old. Sold his company for multi billions of dollars at 26 years old.

These are the kinds of things-- or these are the kinds of people and role models that a lot of our students see. But we want them to see themselves as having the opportunity to also have that entrepreneurial mindset.

Resilience, being able to bounce back from a setback. A lot of our students come to us with trauma, with a lot of life setbacks, with a lot of challenging family situations. Just everything you can imagine, right?

Our students-- a lot of times, I feel like a social worker. I don't know if you guys ever feel that way, but a lot of times I feel like a social worker because not only am I working on educating these students, but I also want to be there for them, because they have all of this baggage a lot of times that they come with.

And what we can do for them is we can help them learn resilience strategies so that when they have those little setbacks, it doesn't stop them. They can keep going through them.

Self-awareness. I know somebody talked about that up here as well. Self-advocacy. That is a part of it, knowing where you need help and being able to advocate for that.

So I think you'll see that a lot of these things actually are things that you guys mentioned. So awesome, right? We're all on the same page here. And we can see that we're doing the right work. We have the right ideas here.

Yeah. Oygar says, and the students share their baggage with their teacher sometimes more than we would like. Yes. So true. I can't tell you the number of days-- and I'm sure everyone can identify with this-- that I've gone home sobbing because the weight of the worlds of my students is just sometimes overwhelming, right? But we can't just ignore it. It's there, and we definitely have to find ways to help them cope with some of that stuff.

So I asked you to write a couple things on your left-hand side. And the first one was skills. So we've talked about the skills. And I think it's also important to remember that there's no right answer here. So I highly encourage you to work with your staff, whether you do it district-wide like we do or if you just do it with your own adult school staff to have a conversation about, what are the skills that you want your students to leave with?

Because that's really critical, right? We want to know, what is the outcome we're looking for? And it's not just that they get a higher score on the CASAS test or that they get an NRS functioning-level gain. We really want them to become awesome human beings, and that we want to help with that process.

So have this conversation with your staff. Have it with your colleagues, even if it's just with the teacher or the teachers next door to you. Hey, what are the skills that we really want these students to have? And put some thought into that.

We know some are really common, like we talked about collaboration and communication. Some are-- frankly, they're hard to teach. Skills like empathy, skills like resilience, these are things that may take some creativity. And that's why I encourage you to go to the website for New World of Work, because they actually have lesson plans for those skills, which was just mind blowing for me. I was like, wow. I never would have thought of how to teach that, but there's some really, really good stuff there.

So we're going to move off of skills for a minute here, and we're going to move to that next bullet on your left-hand side, which is autonomy, that idea about, I am the driver of my own vehicle. OK?

And one of the things that we want our students to see themselves as is a divergent genius, because this is how they're going to match their skills to the 21st century needs in the workplace, in their life, if they choose to go on to college. And divergent thinking is really what we see as the cornerstone of a lot of those people that I mentioned earlier, the Zuckerbergs of the world and the Jeff Bezos of the world. They had divergent genius, and that's why they were able to take their idea and turn it into something that now every single person in the world practically uses something like Google or Facebook. So divergent thinking is the ability to look at a particular problem and propose multiple solutions.

So there is a test for this, and this test was actually developed by some scientists at NASA, because NASA said, we want to try to figure out who would make a good scientist or a good engineer for NASA. And one of the things that NASA scientists need more than anything is they need to build a think outside of the box.

If any of you have seen the movie Apollo 13, you may remember that they had a major catastrophe on their space capsule. They had a major malfunction with one of their systems. And they're up there in space, so there's nobody that can help them. They can't go to the store and buy a replacement part. They had to figure out with what they had on hand how they were going to fix the problem so that they could safely get back to Earth.

And it was a life or death situation. So that took an incredible amount of divergent thinking to be able to look around them and say, OK. What do we actually have that could possibly fix this problem?

So the test that these NASA scientists came up with to test for divergent thinking was, how many uses can you come up with for a paperclip? So I want you to actually think about that for yourself. And nobody gets to say, to put papers together, because that's the obvious one, right? We all know we use paperclips to clip papers together. So you have to think beyond clipping papers together.

And I want you to type into the chat pod anything that you can think of that you could use for-- that you use a paperclip for. And really think broad. What are some possible uses for a paperclip?

OK. I see some coming in. So Hillary said, hair clip. Absolutely. In fact, I've actually done that. So that's one that I can attest to. To open a door. Yes, like to pick a lock. Both David and Oygar both said something similar. Open a door. Pick a lock.

To make jewelry. Susan, excellent. In fact, my daughters who are nine came to my office last week, because it was one of those situations where childcare was challenging. And what did they do? They took all my paperclips and they made necklaces and earrings with them. So yes, absolutely. Making jewelry or making earrings, as David said.

We got another pick a lock from Hillary. To clean your nails. Yes. Definitely. Let's see. Hillary said reset something on a toy. Oh, yes. Absolutely. That little reset button, you have to have something tiny, pokey, and that paperclip is often the key for that.

Will says a bookmark. Yes, definitely a bookmark would be a great use for a paperclip. Teresita says, it can be used as a hook to pull things. Yeah. Like if you're trying to pull wires through the wall or something like that, you could use it for that.

Hillary says reset an electronic device, which we came up with-- was similar to reset something on a toy. Branka says, use it to open the container for the Sim card on your mobile phone.

OK, so here's the sad thing about that. You have to have a super, super, super, super tiny paperclip. But yes, you absolutely could do that if it was tiny enough, because they almost intentionally designed that little hole to be too small for a standard paperclip. But yes, if you had a small enough one, you could definitely do that.

Let's see here. Oygar says temporary keychain. Yeah, for sure. And Alejandra also said keychain. David said for a zipper. Yeah, if your zipper falls off, you can hook the paperclip on there instead. Hillary said to take off earrings. Interesting.

Robert says a straightened paperclip could be used for book binding when wrapped around the punch hole. Oh, that's a great idea. So if you have a bunch of three-hole-punched papers, you don't have a binder handy, you could actually use paperclips to put those together.

Alejandra said, clean the Keurig. Yeah, see? Sometimes we have to think outside the box because our modern technology will present us with challenges that there isn't an easy solution for. So yes, I've done that myself. Clean the Keurig with a paperclip. Oygar says, hotwire a golf cart. [laughs] OK. I think I know some of the things that Oygar does in the spare time there. OK.

Guadalupe says, remove earwax. Yeah. Gross, but absolutely totally works. David says, to hang a painting. And Morella says, to hang up tree ornaments. Yes, they work just like the little ornament holders. And much cheaper, probably, to buy paperclips than to buy the ornament holders.

So let's see how many we had altogether so far. We've got one, two-- four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. 19. If we take out all the duplicates, I think we probably have about 15 here, which is a great start.

But I'm going to tell you that to be a divergent genius-- now of course, each of you was only presenting one idea, and I didn't give you a lot of time to think about it. But you to be a divergent genius means that you could come up with 100 or more uses for a paperclip, OK? And I like to call this divergent genius idea the MacGyver principle, because if you've ever watched MacGyver, either the old or the new one, you know he's always coming up with unusual, out-of-the-box ways to solve a problem.

So there's one group of people that actually regularly scores at the genius level for divergent thinking. One particular type of group of people that regularly scores at-- close to 100% of this group scores as a genius in divergent thinking. Does anybody want to guess in the chat pod who that group is?

Oh, some of you are cheating. You already knew the answer. [laughs] OK. I've got Bethany said kids, question mark. Hillary said, little kids. Kim said kindergartners. And Hillary said mothers and teachers. Well, I think all of us that are parents can probably attest to-- yes, absolutely. We have to be very creative, right?

Robert said blue collar workers. Gail said engineers. We have a couple more people coming in. Don't want to give away the answer until you guys have had a chance to guess. Computer programmers, says Teresita. David, lazy people. Oh, lazy people are some of the best at coming up with really creative ways to get away from actually doing what they need to do. We know this for sure.

Oygar says Norwegians. Very possible. Could be a certain culture. Alejandra, nerds. And Bethany said winners of Survivor. Yes. We would think that they would definitely be on the divergent genius scale.

But there was actually a correct answer here, which is kids. Very, very young kids. We call these the preschool-age kids or the beginning-of-school-age kids.

So these results were done over many years with the same group of kids, OK? So this was a longitudinal study of 1,600 children. They started with them at four to five years old, and they found that 98% of them scored at that divergent genius level for imaginative thinking.

By the time they were 10 years old-- remember, this is the same group of kids-- only 30% of them were still scoring at that divergent genius level, could come up with 100 or more uses. At 15 years, it drops down to 12%.

And then when they did it with this same group of kids, over 1,000 of the original 1,600 at age 31 years, only 2%. Why? Why do you think that would be? What's going on between age four and age 31 that's causing this diminishing of their divergent genius?

Bethany, I see that you have two of these at home, and their divergent thinking wows you daily. Yes. I can say the same for my children. I think all of us that have dealt with small children see how incredibly creative they are and how imaginative they are.

Oygar says education. Robert says too much indoctrination. Will says boundaries are put on them in the school setting. So that kind of relates back to that idea of education. I see Guadalupe is typing.

So you're all-- oh, I see Guadalupe said, being corrected frequently. Yeah, right? Because if you're constantly being told, oh, that's not right, you'd have to do it this way, that can become discouraging, and then you don't want to try something that's new or innovative because you're worried that it's going to get shut down or shot down. So yeah, I think that's a big piece of it for sure.

And Alejandra says, schools do not allow for creative thinking. And Bethany says advertising. There's a special product for everything. That's true. It's a much different kind of world that our kids are growing up in now than 100 years ago when the best toy that you could find was a stick and a can, right?

Now our kids have video games and they have their tablets and they have their electronic toys and television, and so many things that are much easier than using this imaginative thinking. And Kim says, schools seem to reward compliance more than divergent thinking. Yeah, absolutely.

So that's exactly what the researchers found. They found that the big X factor that caused this diminishing of imaginative thinking was schooling, was traditional education.

And this came back to the idea of why we started public education in the first place. So if we think about why our early thinkers in the United States were encouraging the idea of all people being educated, most of it had to do with conformity, right? During the Industrial Revolution, which is when compulsory education came into being, we had the factory model, and we had to prepare students-- or human beings-- to work in factories.

So they had to be accountable to a particular time, showing up at a particular time and staying until a particular time, punching that time clock. They had to be accountable to a particular space and work in an environment that was set for them, but they didn't have very much choice over. They had to have routine. If you're on an assembly line, everything is about routine, routine, routine, and repetition.

Then you had the idea of all of the immigrants, right? Because we knew we had a huge influx of various different types of immigrants over the 20th century, and integration was a major issue. And if you read some of the early writings of Horace Mann, for example, who's considered to be the father of public education, he talks about the role that public education, universal and compulsory public education, can play in helping immigrants integrate into American values and to learn the English language.

We also had that idea of uniformity. Everybody has a common base of knowledge, even if it's just rudimentary reading and rudimentary math. If everybody has that uniform knowledge, then we'll have a more functional society. And then of course, democracy pretty much demands that you have an educated populace, because you need voters to be somewhat informed, and you hope that they at least can read.

I found these two quotes from Thomas Jefferson that I think are very instructive as to why education was set up the way that it is. In the first one he says, "It is highly interesting to our country and it is the duty of its functionaries to provide that every citizen in it should receive an education--" and here's the kicker-- "proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his life." So this is that idea of tracking to some degree that certain students deserve to go on to college and make more choices in their life, and certain students are just going to get the bare necessities to be able to go and work in that factory.

And the second quote really defines that as well. "The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes, the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties. The learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements."

OK. So the laborers, all they need is the basic, basic, basic so that they can do their job in the factory. But the learned, they get to expand upon that. It's a foundation for whatever they choose to do, whether they want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a politician or a real estate mogul, right?

And I think it's important when we're thinking about changing education in the 21st century that we at least look back at why we are where we are, and why we have not progressed farther along that continuum already. And it's very intentional, if you really think about what the original purpose of public education was.

Now, that doesn't mean that these guys were bad guys. They also had some really wonderful ideas, and they had some really wonderful aspirations for the people of this country. But they were looking at it through a lens that was very classist, very white, very male at the time. And this informed how they thought about the idea of an entirely educated populace. It wasn't entirely philanthropic on their part. Let's say that.

What's important to note is that success should not be predetermined, right? We should not be saying to our students, well, your father was a farm worker, so you have to be a farm worker. Or your dad is a plumber, so you're going to be a plumber. We want to make sure that they know that they absolutely can follow in the footsteps of their parents, their ancestors, if that's comfortable for them.

But we also want them to know that all doors are open, and that they can choose the path that is best for them, because we want them to see themselves as individuals. Again, coming back to that idea of self-awareness and self-advocacy.

So we know what this process looked like, right? Play is the basis of imaginative thinking. It's why our littlest kids have the most divergent genius, because they start out with that paperclip could be 100 feet tall, and it could be made out of foam rubber, or it could be made out of clay so that it could be molded into different shapes.

And then through the process of schooling, we value conformity. And many of you said that in the chat box, so you're absolutely right about that. A lot of what we do with the way that we structure the school day, with the way that we have the molded desks, the way that we have the classroom set up, the way that we have our rules in the classroom, the way that the teacher has primacy in the front of the room and the students are sitting facing the teacher, a lot of that has to do with conformity.

And that conformity eventually leads to kind of a drone mentality, right? That kind of, I'm just going through the motions. I just want to get in the least amount of trouble possible. I want to check all the boxes. But I'm not necessarily going to challenge it, or I'm not going to necessarily push the boundaries.

The really ironic part about that is that the most pushing boundaries ages are this first stage when they're really, really little and they don't know that there are boundaries yet, and this 16-year-old stage where it's all about pushing boundaries. And what happens to 16-year-olds is when they push the boundaries, they get a lot of pushback, right? They get suspended. They get sent to the office. They get detention.