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In the future, learning is a team sport

In Basecamp's collaboration with the Beam Center (Brooklyn) and Bishop Kearney High School (Brooklyn), teachers learn together so that they can design similar experiences for their students.


What if schools prevent--by design--a key to successful participation in our networked, global community and economy?

If you look closely at the World Economic Forum Top 10 Skills for the year 2020, you will see that collaboration is a superskill, cutting across people management (#4), coordinating with others (#5), emotional intelligence (#6), service orientation (#8), and negotiation (#9).

So why have schools designed learning to be a single player sport when it really is a team sport? (h/t Jaime Casap, Google’s Chief Education Evangelist)

It is unfair, of course, to say that schools have designed learning as a single player sport. The truth is that schools default to isolating, sorting, and advancing individual learners as a carryover from 100 years ago, when the factory model prompted the rise of the Taylorist approach to school design.

But in an age of exponential technologies (e.g., virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, nanotech, genomics) the costs of that default model are enormous.

In the future, learning must be a team sport.

News flash: that future is already here.

What is your school doing to design for it?

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