In my role as Customer Success Manager for Adepto I was constantly asking customers what success looked like for them, co-creating that success and regularly iterating our approach based on metrics and feedback. This isn't dissimilar to working as a teacher and coach where I collaborated with students and staff to achieve the best possible outcomes for students. But if I'm honest, although I fought against the dominant model, I mostly told students what their success looked like through grades and summative assessment rather than co-designing their learning experience and providing formative assessment and regular feedback.
Interestingly, the customer in schools isn't students, it's parents, and parents often don't actually know what success means for their child. We all have a perception of what school and education should look like based on our own experience. Unfortunately, for most of us this experience was in a system that has not changed enough to keep up with the exponential developments in society, technology and culture. Students are the end users of a machine that is ostensibly the same as it was when it was invented, and the customers, parents, are mostly removed from the experience. Generally, parents don't know any better and neither do students. And unfortunately, neither do a lot of educators, having been educated in the same system they are now working in.
The machine is designed to perpetuate itself and the massive trust placed in schools to ensure the education and safety of young people means that "risks" are almost always mitigated or entirely avoided. This moral imperative has been bolstered by the threat of litigation so the reluctance to doing things differently in case we "break" children means the disruption necessary to make education relevant in the 21st century is unlikely to come from within.
However, I argue that the risk of not doing things differently is far greater than the risk of trying new things. In "good" schools we have students quietly and politely disengaged; in "challenging" schools, students exhibit all types of negative behaviour. In all schools, mental health issues are rife and growing and I would argue this is in part because students are forced to come to a place for six hours a day, five days a week which is disconnected from their reality. Social media and digital collaboration tools like Google Docs and Trello are blocked in most schools, so even if teachers know how to teach these effectively, they are unable to. Although they might not know what needs to change, students know something's not right and this is highly confusing.
Frustratingly, teachers and students often don't seem to want to change. One of the main precursors to change is a sense of urgency but when a young person's outcomes from school aren't known until well after they leave Year 12 (and it's very rare that schools follow up with their graduates), despite the obvious exponential shifts in society and the world of work, there isn't any immediate reason for schools or teachers to alter their practice. (Although recent events in America may give rise to change)
The great irony of schools is that they are supposed to be places of learning but they are actually places of education (and these two concepts, while often conflated, aren't the same thing). My aim with my learning journey platform BreakthrU (or Tiger Wings as it has been newly named by my conspirator Josh), is to decouple learning and education and give the agency, enjoyment and skill of learning back to young people.
Education - "the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction"
Learning - "the acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience, or being taught"
Breakthru/Tiger Wings had to take a back seat for a while while I transitioned to my role at Adepto and will probably need to remain there while I find new employment but my passion to disrupt learning hasn't gone anywhere and this part of my entrepreneurial journey will definitely continue.
As Customer Success Manager for Adepto, I used my existing skills to educate customers about the product and developed skills I'd been working on in design thinking, agile and project management. I also had to learn a whole range of new skills including onboarding and customer relationship management. Despite my time at Adepto coming to an end, learning is what success looks like for me, so I'm excited to take my next steps from intrapreneur to entrepreneur and am looking forward to my next challenge.
