Craig Vezina Interview with Dominic Register, June 13, 2020

Question: You’ve done an amazing job with the work you do of bringing different stakeholders together around tackling wicked problems and if you could just talk a little bit about what that looks like.

Dominic Register: Sure. My pleasure. So, I work as you know for an organization called Salzburg Global Seminar. We’re a strategic convening organization based in Salzburg in Austria. We were founded just after the second world war. And our core mission is to challenge current and future leaders to shape a better world and we do this across a whole range of different policy areas. But kind of the theory of change or the approach is reasonably consistent across the different programs, which is once we have a critical issue that we would like to spend time working on or work with funding partners to put the session costs together, reduce the cost of participation as much as possible and then start to research what would be the optimum group of people who are working on this problem from around the world who we can bring together who could share their insights and also talk quite candidly about the problems that they run up against in their specific section in the area of work and how can we look for solutions to those problems from within the group and from the wider networks that everybody brings to bear. So, the programs will almost all be highly interdisciplinary so we’re looking at people who are working on a common problem but coming at it from different starting points. They’ll be international and they’ll be intergenerational and trying to bring those three different groupings together we hope that we can make progress with some of the more seemingly intractable problems of our time.

Question: What is the biggest question on your mind right now around the future of learning or the future of work or both?

Dominic Register: I think one of the things that we have looked at with the work in Salzburg, and I do a lot of work with another initiative called Karanga, which is the global alliance for social emotional learning and life skills. One of the things that we have been looking at is the sort of mismatch between the inputs that go into education systems and the outputs that economies and societies are actually looking for. And I think the big question a lot of my work is focused on is how do you get a better match across those inputs and outputs? So, most of our work is focused on social and education work and Salzburg is focused on social and emotional learning. And when we started this phase of the education for tomorrow’s world series we really began with a supply and demand hypothesis. But what we were seeing on the demand side was all sorts of different education stakeholders who were looking to bring about change in education systems how they were managed and what they delivered and the outcomes they produce because what they felt was that the current reality wasn’t quite right for their needs. So, whether your starting point is an economic analysis and you’re looking at the skills that the workforce of tomorrow will need to do in order to do the kinds of jobs that won’t be automated in the near future or the kind of tasks that can’t be outsourced to AI and algorithms. Education systems in many, many contexts aren’t developing students, aren’t helping students develop those skills, but there is a really close correlation between the kinds of skills and competencies that social and emotional learning programs can help young people develop and the kinds of skills and competencies that organizations like the World Economic Forum or McKenzie or many others the OECD have identified as the kinds of skills that won’t be automated in the near future. So, these are skills and behaviors and qualities like compassion, like empathy, like creativity, like the ability to communicate complex ideas, the ability to work across diverse teams. So, you’ve got that sort of economic starting point separate to the economic analysis.

There’s also the kind of health and well-being entry point to this conversation. You’ve got the World Health Organization had said by 2030, and this is a pre-COVID-19 analysis, but by 2030 depression will be the largest cause of adolescent illness globally. So, there is a close correlation between the kinds of skills and competencies that social and emotional learning programs can help young people develop and the kinds of skills and competencies that can help young people grow up with the mental architecture to help them navigate their way through or around later life mental health issues. So, you’ve got a kind of very different entry point to the conversation from the health sector thinking about the kinds of skills and competencies that education systems currently help young people develop aren’t quite right for the needs of the societies of tomorrow. And you can carry this conversation on in lots of different ways thinking about education and identity, thinking about how young people make their way in more fluid societies or their sense of belonging or their sense of purpose and agency in the world. And in all of these cases what we see is a really interesting alignment of the skills and competencies the SEL programs can help young people develop and the kinds of skills and competencies that lots and lots of people want our education systems to help those young people develop. So, that was all of the demand side analysis.

On the supply side when we spoke to contacts in the different development banks or different UN agencies or ministries of education what we heard really consistently was that there were three really significant structural roadblocks that were preventing systems making these kinds of pivots toward being more SEL responsive. So, there’s a whole set of challenges around adult understanding of the topic and the way in which teachers are trained and teacher preparation. There’s a whole set of challenges around curriculum design and the recognition of extracurricular learning opportunities in this space. And there’s a set of ongoing challenges around the measurement and assessment of social and emotional learning. It feels like although the nuance is obviously different from Mexico to Ukraine to Bangladesh to Austria, broadly speaking those are the three significant challenges. So, what we have been trying to do with the work in Salzburg and what Karanga tries to do as well is bring together researchers or policymakers or practitioners who have insight and who are making good progress in addressing one or all of those three roadblocks, those three challenges and try and bring them together to help create a more connected community of like minded educators who see the importance of social and emotional learning who can share their own successful approaches to implementation and try and build up the kind of global movement around it.

We’re educating children to do jobs that don’t yet exist and the value of knowledge, which is transmitted to them in their classroom settings at the moment, it’s not going to be the same knowledge that they need in order to do the jobs that they’ll be going into in the future so it’s the aptitude for learning alongside many other behaviors and skills and competencies which is crucial. That’s one part of it. I think the other thing that’s really interesting in the assessment space, which is evolving, is you can’t have a single – you can’t have any effective single high-stakes test for gauging student’s progress with any of the social and emotional learning skills and competencies because so many other things can affect your performance. So, that’s looking at a more longitudinal way of gauging the consistency of application of behavior or how they can be developed over a period of time.

Question: Well, on that – I appreciate you prompting this in my mind because I wanted to ask you, on the question of assessment around sort of the real world superpowers this is difficult for many people, how do we know if we’re doing it well? What does it look like? And I wonder if you have any ideas on models for assessing social and emotional abilities?

Dominic Register: There’s a really interesting project that the Smithsonian Institute, the Smithsonian Center for Science Education, which is looking at the real world application of science curricular in the U.S. to the community interpretation of sustainable development goal challenges and how do you use social and emotional learning approaches to come up with solutions as a sort of citizens science project led by high school students where you look at a challenge that your community is facing, you map that against if you addressed it which sustainable development goal would it most speak to or be most relevant for? And then how do you use what you’ve learned in your science high school curriculum to actually build a solution to that problem in your local community? And you need to use a full spectrum of different social and emotional learning skills and competencies to take that project forward and build support for it and get community buy-in and things like that. I think the name of the initiative is Science At Home and that feels like a really interesting and very powerful approach to this.

Question: If you in all of your experience at this point in your life could go back and talk to yourself as a teenager and share anything you’ve learned that might be helpful, what would you share with your younger self?

Dominic Register: Many, many, many things I suspect. I think the sort of reconnection with the fact that learning can be fun and the process of learning is as important as what you learn. So, I was lucky in many ways in that I was able to study ancient history and history at university with a strong focus on Latin, which doesn’t have much of a real world application, but what’s really interesting is still really interesting. And it’s that process of learning rather than the acquisition of knowledge itself isn’t necessarily the most important outcome and I think to be able to remind a teenage self of that would be good.

My favorite quote about education that I’ve come across is from Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher. And she said pay [ph] for an education, as she defined education is the point at which you decide if you love the world enough to take responsibility for it. And I think that we’re seeing so many different manifestations of that at this moment in time with different educators or education stakeholders stepping forward and taking on more responsibility than we have in the past. This is a kind of really interesting and positive moment for the power of education.