Catherine Millett gives opening remarks at Education Futures: Shaping a New Education Story session
"Good afternoon! Welcome to Salzburg Global Seminar and to “Education Futures: Shaping a New Education Story.” My name is Catherine Millett, and I am a Senior Research Scientist and Strategic Advisor in the Policy Evaluation and Research Center at Educational Testing Service (ETS) of Princeton, New Jersey, in the U.S.A.
Shaping a new education story is an immensely important subject, and I’m excited to be here to explore it with some of the best minds in education.
But as important as that is, let me first say how wonderful it is to be back here, in person, at Salzburg Global, after a forced two-year hiatus. Something about a global pandemic.
ETS and Salzburg Global have worked closely over the past 12 years. In the beginning ETS was the sole funder of education programs. Our collaboration helped launch what is now called the education and work program strand, through which we have developed invaluable partnerships and friendships. We are delighted to have such partners as Qatar Foundation International, Wise and Porticus Foundation here with us. We are also thrilled to have new partners with us today —Big Change and The LEGO Foundation. And, we are excited to welcome back returning Salzburg Global fellows — and to welcome new Salzburg Global Fellows.
And congratulations to Salzburg Global on celebrating its 75th anniversary and on the appointment of Ambassador Martin Weiss as its next President. On behalf of ETS, I want to extend my deepest gratitude and well wishes to President Salyer, who has been so supportive of our work, and such a potent force for positive change throughout the world, and congratulations and well wishes to Ambassador — and in August, President — Weiss.
As it happens, ETS is ALSO celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, and will soon have a new leader. Next month, Amit Sevak officially begins his tenure as ETS’s seventh president and chief executive officer. Tomorrow afternoon ETS and Salzburg Global will sign a new partnership agreement to collaborate on five seminars.
So thank you all for joining us. I cannot wait to begin working with you on ways to address one of the signal challenges facing humankind: transforming education systems throughout the world so that they are organized and equipped to prepare every young person for THEIR futures — and for our COLLECTIVE future.
But no pressure.
Seizing the Opportunity of a Crisis
As excited as I am about making this vision real, I confess that I’m also apprehensive — not about the challenge since we all like a challenge, but about sustaining the sense of urgency transformation requires. In the United States, the masks are off, the restaurants and bars are full, and schools are back in business. And here WE are, participating once again in in-person seminars. Those are all causes for joy and relief. And yet …
In the darkest days of the pandemic, many of us pointed out that for education, the flip side of the COVID-19 crisis was the opportunity for TRUE transformation — for change beyond the incremental reforms of adjusting curriculums, test content, and professional development.
Will we lose that momentum and urgency now that the pressure has eased, and revert to norm? Has that already happened? Here’s how the authors of the Big Change report “A New Education Story” put it:
The drive to restore and reinstate what was there before the pandemic is understandable … However, undeniable inequalities that existed in learning were also massively accelerated by the pandemic. In many places, gaps widened; progress was halted or reversed; and the impact of poverty amplified, adversely affecting millions of children — was laid bare for everyone to see.
Two of the authors — Caireen Goddard and Eva Keiffenheim — are here today. As they and their co-authors pointed out:
Education systems around the world are at a crossroads; a moment of huge challenge and opportunity when, perhaps more than at any other time in living memory, decisions made now about what happens next for learning, will have deep and lasting effects for the future.
Elements of a Functioning System
My organization, ETS, exists to create opportunity through research, assessment and the development of products and services to improve teaching and learning. That mission is what brought us together with Salzburg Global to develop the “Education for Tomorrow’s World” series.
The series has brought together researchers, scholars, educators, practitioners, policymakers and thought leaders from around the world to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and bring insights and ideas back home. What we have brought back to ETS has been invaluable, especially in such areas as:
• the use of test data to accelerate creativity in learning and societies
• the cultural and educational role of language learning
• education and workforce opportunities for refugees, migrants and displaced populations
• the impact of climate change on education
• and the fundamental importance of social and emotional learning
Those are among the hallmarks of a high-functioning education system aligned with the needs of the 21st Century.
At the same time, advances in the learning sciences and development of new technologies are opening vistas into how learners learn and think, and giving us opportunities to design assessments that support learner-centered learning; that are meaningful teaching and learning tools in and of themselves; and that empower learners with ownership of their lifetime learning journeys. Digital credentialing and comprehensive learner records are just two examples, and I hope we get a chance to talk about them.
But technology can also be a destructive thing, especially for young people still in the process of developing their sense of self and where they fit in relation to peers and the world at large. The human brain develops more slowly than advances in technology. The lag time is fraught.
In the United States, we are experiencing a sharp rise in teenage mental illness and suicide, a trend that predates the pandemic. It would be wrong to blame it on Snapchat, Tiktok, Instagram and iPhones. But there’s no doubt that social media and screen time are interfering with learners’ social development and emotional wherewithal, and creating emotional pain.
As our colleague Alex Beard puts it, “[I]n this age of AI, we’ve to turn our attention away from our devices and instead invest everything we have in developing ourselves.”
So it is good to see our friends and colleagues from Karanga: The Global Alliance for Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills, to remind us that being told to choose between academic skills and social and emotional skills is a false choice. Happiness and success in school, work and life require both. And after spending time with our colleagues from The LEGO Foundation last week, I appreciate the false choice between having to choose between academic skills and play.
Transforming Assessment
If we are going to transform education, then we are going to transform assessment. For assessment to serve personalized learning, it needs to recognize that learners learn and express their knowledge and skills differently and in their own time.
At ETS, we are moving beyond high-stakes, summative tests, and focusing instead on supporting learner-centered, competency-based, and culturally and socially relevant teaching, learning and assessment. Personalized Systems of Instruction consisting of formative, diagnostic and instructionally embedded assessments have shown to be far more suited to the academic and workplace demands of the 21st Century than the traditional, hidebound systems of the past — more likely to strengthen equity, and more likely to promote learner success.
At ETS’s Policy Evaluation and Research Center where Michael and I work, we are developing several projects in this area:
• We are working with Vitae, a public charity in the UK, to introduce and promote use of its Researcher Development Framework in the U.S.. It will aid prospective and current graduate learners in understanding the skills they will need to develop; document their command of those skills; and present their skills and knowledge to tertiary education audiences, employers and other important stakeholders.
• In the U.S., we are working with the Mastery Transcript Consortium to learn more about a rising movement to turn away from reliance on transcripts as we largely know them — dry, sterile documents listing course names and grades — and toward a more multi-dimensional, holistic reflection of learners as unique individuals, and the goals they set out for their learning — all in a format and medium that best conveys what they know and can do.
• In formative assessment, we are working with AREA9 Lyceum in Denmark to develop a new tool we call Abubble. It uses formative assessment questions and data points on engagement and meta-learning to continuously assess both the learner’s knowledge and confidence; help determine what content the learner should meet next; what activity to deliver to the learner; and how best to help the learner when help is required.
• And finally, in higher education, we are collaborating with numerous institutions and stakeholders on improving admissions in the U.S. through such approaches as holistic assessment of applicants.
A Shift in Perspective
The starting point for student-centered learning, however, is not on an external tool or test. It is within ourselves: To transform assessment and education, we need to shift our traditional frame of reference — ranking and sorting students — to a learner-focused perspective and an understanding of the importance of learning how to learn.
Dr. Edmund Gordon, our frequent collaborator, put it this way in the 2013 report “A Vision for the Future of Assessment,” commissioned by ETS to help reconceptualize the entire assessment enterprise:
The pedagogical challenge will be less concerned with imparting factual knowledge and more concerned with turning learners on to learning and the use of their mental abilities to solve ordinary and novel problems.
Time for Change
In the United States as elsewhere, we have devoted enormous resources over at least half a century in the effort to achieve equity in education for ALL learners, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, culture, family income or geographic location. And yet demographically based gaps in performance and opportunity — in school, work and life — persist, at great cost to individuals, families, communities and countries.
It seems that the current system of education has reached its limit in the ability to produce equity across population groups. That being the case, if and when the COVID-19 virus fully recedes, I hope that education and assessment aren’t among the things that return to normal.
If you have not read it, the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Pandemic Is a Portal” is a powerful and poignant statement of the choice we face. Despite “this terrible despair” brought by the pandemic, she writes that the pandemic “offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”
As with previous pandemics through history, this one, Roy says, is a “portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
So much of what we have worked on, toward and for here at Salzburg Global and in our home countries has prepared us for seizing the opportunity of this crisis so that we CAN walk lightly, with little luggage, to a better place. We know what works, we know what doesn’t work. And I look forward to our work together to make education work the way it SHOULD work for ALL learners.
Thank you very much for your time and attention. I look forward to meeting each and everyone of you this week."
