Comments About What I Heard When Academic, Industry, and Military Leaders were asked to discuss what they expect from high school graduates today.

By Dan Lake

Recently my department hosted a panel of local people who agreed to address the topic:  What are the key skills necessary for young people to enter and be successful in their workplaces.  The panel consisted of several college teachers, a college freshman student, an industry executive, and a Lieutenant Colonel in the NY Air National Guard.

I found it interesting that during our panel discussion, one consensus among all the panelists was that a much-needed skill for all future workers and students was the ability to work in groups. The academics on the panel agreed that working in groups was not much desired by their students.

Discussion centered on the topic of group work and how important that was today.

Yet this was not totally understood by the audience of educators and administrators, as they discussed how after-school activities, sports, and well-managed classroom projects could provide good group work skills.  True.  BUT….

What they missed was an early comment by the industry leader (let’s call him “Todd”). Todd talked about how when he worked for IBM in the early 80s, he had all the people on his sales team IN THE ROOM with him. He could interact and discuss actions and outcomes, and generally communicate face to face, on a daily basis.  This describes what USED TO HAPPEN in his work environment.
Todd went on to discuss how doing group work today involves working with a team that is widely dispersed.  His managers and sales people do NOT come to an office and share face time.  They reside on the West Coast, the East Coast, and even in Brazil.  He uses many technology tools, such as video conferencing, email, shared online storage places etc to work with his team.

This reminded me of my son, who is a lead with a team of “testers” who put newly created video game code through a rigorous usage process before it is ready for the sales market.  The team he leads consists of testers in India and Mexico, with some of the software engineers with whom he must communicate working in Norway.  My son is working like the industry leader -  in a different type of work environment.

What struck me was that later in the panel, Todd described how technology could enhance group work, and he used an example of how a girl who could not attend class was actually included via a video link.

He, like the audience, was interpreting group work as SYNCHRONOUS work.  Yet, much of his present work was done over many time zones.  My son obviously couldn’t video conference with his team easily.. if at all. 

The industry leader worked in a National environment, so he could mix some synchronous meetings in, but it is probably still a fine balancing act to bring East and West Coast together along with his Brazilian colleagues!
The issue is this:  Group work is essentially seen in schools as SYNCHRONOUS work. Yet in the real world, much of our work is shifting (time-shifting!) to an ASYCHRONOUS group work model.

Thus, we need to be training our students to be able to work in environments in which time must be managed in the larger context, and in which the work is done in a totally different way.  Teams of students/workers must complete tasks by dates given, but the actual shared work is done within that given frame of time, BUT NOT AT THE SAME TIME.

Related to this idea is another major theme of the panel.  This was that students often fail because they are not taught how to MANAGE tasks set to be accomplished by a determined time, but in an independently determined manner.  Once a teacher or adult is NOT there to push and pull, to set checkpoints in time for work to be done, many students fail to accomplish goals within set time parameters.   This was judged, alongside the inability to accomplish group work, as a major need with skill training.

This is why I am so enamored of wiki tools.  The use of a wiki online tool can teach students how to work within a dispersed work environment, and give the teacher the ability to assess both quantity AND quality of work as students learn and apply group-working skills in an ASYNCHRONOUS environment.

My colleague who set up the panel discussion as part of a series of talks, knows how this works.  He established note taking as a collaborative, wiki-based activity.  Students were given a matrix of topics with the charge to fill in information in blank cells within a “given window of time” (his language!).  He then allowed those groups who completed the matrix to use it during summative assessments given after that time.
I would suggest an extension of that activity, even though the activity is in itself very innovative and changed my colleague’s assigned note-taking processes.  A rubric that is developed to be used by each group to assess their own group behavior in the wiki would be teaching group skills integral to the content material being learned/reviewed.

Imagine an activity in which the students are asked to assess their group process something like this:

The charge given is to determine the distribution of “extra” credit points given the group for their work.
Imagine the conversations and discussions and how awareness of the group process through self-analysis would help them learn the skills desired by the panel members.

Perhaps one could go so far as to use a wiki to do the activity above without face to face interaction?
The point is to overtly teach how to strive to be equal partners in a group enterprise and to understand the dynamics that cause success or failure in the group.  Discussion of roles could be added, as could varied tasks that use different quality guidelines according to desired roles, products or outcomes.

Reviewing of timely submissions by looking at day and time-of-day stamping provided by the wiki would also allow discussions of “last minute” or inefficient timings for work, not to mention varied work habits that would be evident.  How many times do we see students posting work at 2 AM the night of a project due date!   (I remember my consternation when a graduate student, given a midnight deadline for submission of a project, submitted her project at 12:04 AM.  What lesson was I going to teach if I accepted that work?  If I did not? )
As we look at varied work situations, and investigate what jobs students may aspire to, we can use technology to help them understand the nature of dispersed workplaces and many time zones. At the same time, we can apprise them of the dynamics of group work in these varied settings.
 

And most important, we can re-think our understanding of group work as being synchronous only!

As an aside….  Someone at this same panel meeting mentioned that Verizon indicated that it was experiencing much more TEXTING traffic than VOICE traffic. This surprised most in the audience.  But .. texting fits an asynchronous messaging model and fits our mobile lifestyle much more than voice, which is a form of synchronous communications.  And texting in public is quiet!!  So it does not surprise me that texting is being used more than voice by our students today!!  -- but that is another topic.