Joseph South on Purpose-Driven Expertise

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learning, media, communication and marketing, or are looking to build your next campaign, we are here to help. If you’re interested in learning more about our services and working with our team, email Jessica at GettingSmart.com or visit GettingSmart.com slash whatwedo. Joseph, what is purpose-driven expertise?

Purpose-driven expertise is the combination of two really powerful ideas. The first is the notion of purpose. Purpose has been around for a while, and it’s the notion of an intention that a person has that is both to accomplish something that is both meaningful to themselves and of consequence to the world around them.

It has to have those two elements to it. And expertise, I’m talking about in contrast to simple knowledge acquisition. Knowledge acquisition is what people do at school. You learn algorithms and you learn lists of facts and that sort of thing. But expertise is a practical application and mastery of a skill or a domain.

When you put those two together, if you can find that sweet spot where somebody knows what their purpose is, has a very strong sense of that, and then they’re given the opportunity to develop expertise that’s associated and aligned with that purpose, then you have a person who’s unstoppable as a learner. You’re listening to the GettingSmart podcast.

I’m Tom Van Der Rik and I have the pleasure of being joined today by Joseph South. He’s the chief learning officer at ISTI. Before that, he was the director of the Office of EdTech at the Department of Education. Joseph, it’s so great to have you on the podcast. It’s really great to be here, Tom.

Thanks. You know, we’ve interviewed a lot of the folks that were in the Office of EdTech. What an extraordinary legacy. People that not only understood technology, but have since blossomed in ways that really recognize the fullness of developing human beings.

I’m thinking of John Bailey and Susan Patrick and Karen Cater, your colleague, Rich Calada. What an extraordinary group of people. Really, I mean, I’m honored to be part of that legacy and was so lucky to be there at a time when there was an emphasis not just on technology, but on really what it meant for human development.

Joseph, in that tradition, you joined ISTI, but both you and Richard Calada, I think, have really a science-based view of what it means to help develop human beings. I think part of that has been your journey to understand the role of purpose and expertise. I’d love to dive into that and just understand your journey to purpose. I really started my purpose journey in high school.

I was a high school kid who was moving along like everybody else and memorizing a bunch of facts and just, I don’t know, existing. Then I discovered high school journalism. In our high school, we put out our high school newspaper twice a week as part of the local paper.

It went on the doorstep of every person in my community. When I joined the journalism team, suddenly I was writing editorials that were being read by the entire community. It was transformational for me because I suddenly had a purpose. I suddenly had something that was meaningful to me and was meaningful to my community.

I was developing expertise in writing and editing, in media design. I felt like a new person. I felt like I discovered myself for the first time. That pushed me forward in my life in ways that no amount of school or classes ever was going to do.

I had the experience. It was wonderful. Then I went on with life. I thought this is a cool thing that I did in high school. It was later on that I started to realize that there were elements for present.

I think the expertise part came for me because I was trained as an instructional designer. What you learn when you work with businesses is that knowledge is great. What they really care about is expertise. People who know stuff, I’m a dozen. People who can apply that in a context, hard to find.

They distinguish very clearly between those two notions. In the world of work, expertise is king. I spent a lot of time studying how do you develop expertise and how do you optimize for that. Then when my career took me back into formal school settings, I realized that something was missing there.

It caused me quite a bit of concern. Then at the same time, I had this great opportunity after I left the US Department of Education, the Obama Administration, to spend a year at IDEO in their Learning for Design studio. I had the great fortune to join a team that was working on something called the Purpose Project.

This was an effort that’s still ongoing that was really looking at changing the equation around whether we are pushing things onto young people when it comes to learning or whether we’re allowing them to pull learning towards them. I realized that we’ve been doing it wrong. School is a push system.

It’s literally telling people what to value, what the rewards are, and what they need to learn slash memorize to get the rewards. It doesn’t ask them what they value. It doesn’t ask them what rewards they care about. It doesn’t ask them what they want to learn.

As I did that work at IDEO, I realized that if you could combine these two ideas together, that you would be creating a fundamental flip in how our school relates to a learner. Instead of telling the learner what to do and how to do it, and then having the master knowledge that’s going to become outdated by the time they graduate in a lot of cases, you could instead have them being so excited about pulling learning towards them that it

would be hard for the teacher to keep up with the student versus the other way around. Joseph, I want to underscore the journalism story just by pointing to our mutual friend Esther Wozzecki, who for more than 30 years led the best journalism program in America at Pali. What I loved about her story, Joseph, is that it was really student-driven publications.

It was the combination of journalism but owning a publication and that sense of ownership, of working as a team. You talked about the importance of work that’s important to you and your community as being central to purpose. Then inside that journalism program were these skill sprints, right, of getting better at

writing, getting better at editing. But it was skill sprints with a sense of purpose within a context of developing leadership and journalism skills. So I just love her example. I know you appreciate it too.

Precisely. There’s no way you can overstate the importance of ownership in this process. In my experience in my high school, we own the editorial page. If we wrote something and the community didn’t like it, the advisor was like, what are you going to tell the community now?

She did not intervene. I think when we can’t ask students to own learning and not provide them the means to own it. Right now, we put them in a system where we own the grades, we own the outcomes, we own the topics of focus, and they don’t own any of that.

Without that, they’ll never develop a sense of agency or identity that they need to be successful. Joseph, in some of your writing, you talked about purpose-driven learning as having three components. You talked about goal-directedness, personally meaningful, and beyond the self orientation.

So I love those components. Maybe you could describe other settings beyond journalism where you might see those characteristics of goal-directedness personally meaningful and beyond self. So these can take on a lot of forms. So sometimes people find this in a debate class, a debate club.

Sometimes the drama students find this. Sometimes it’s in the band. But this can also happen on a very personal basis. So some of the students that we worked with when I was at IDEO, there was one person who was really interested in learning how to sew.

And as a part of the work we were doing, we said, great, learn how to sew. And no one had ever given her permission to do that before. And so she learned to do that from her mother, which created a bond between the two of them that they did not have before, because their worlds were quite different. She was a teenager, her mom was not.

And then she was able to expand that in an interest in fashion and upcycling. And then she started sewing clothes, upcycling clothes for a homeless shelter. And this all came from the mind and heart of a 14-year-old teenager. And it was just because somebody helped her connect her purpose to an expertise that she cared about that this came out.

And so I guess my point is that a number of settings can support this. Sometimes there are things like Model U.N., that’s another great example, where there’s a sense of purpose and you’re learning that hands-on expertise role-playing is a great methodology, as is problem-based learning, when the problems are authentic and relevant. But it can also be quite personal to the individual student.

Right. Our friends at Digital Promise call that challenge-based learning. We talk a lot about the work being done in Kansas City, sponsored by the Kaufman Foundation. There are 75 high schools that are creating blocks and opportunities for client-connected projects and entrepreneurial experiences.

So sometimes those sit inside in English and social studies block. Sometimes they include a science block, but there are opportunities typically embedded in pathways for this goal directed, personally meaningful, usually community-connected work that moves that locus from self to client or to customer or to community. Right.

And I think sometimes we forget that the very first step on this journey is to simply ask students what their purpose is. Right? You know, one of the most shocking things that happened for me as I started to do this work, is we would ask students, what do you want to learn about?

When I had students in high school tell me that they had never been asked that question before. No one had ever at school asked them, what do you care about? What do you want to learn about? And that’s just a travesty.

I mean, what are we doing? I mean, how do you leave that off the table? Yeah. I, you know, our friends at One Stone and Boise have an advisory program called Living in Beta.

And it starts with that simple question of asking young people who they are, what they’re interested in, what they want to learn about. Our friends in Cajun Valley do this from kindergarten through eighth grade, where they cycle through immersive units and then invite young people to reflect on strengths, interests, and values. And so imagine your whole elementary career being cycles of asking you, did that feel

like you? What are you interested in? What do you care about? What are you getting good at? What a cool opportunity to grow through cycles of reflection like that.

Yeah. And I really love the phrase prototyping your purpose, especially for young people, because sometimes you think that like, you know, your purpose is save the world from global warming. And I’m not saying that it’s a bad goal to have and that that won’t motivate you. But sometimes, you know, a smaller purpose that you’re trying on can help you just figure

out who you are. Yeah. Joseph, I was surprised in some of your writing to find expertise pop up. You talked about this in the introduction. I love how you think about the key to human development as purpose plus expertise.

But I’d love to have you talk about expertise. Like what is it? How do you think about it? Why do you why is it so important? Right.

So, so knowledge is unnecessary, but not sufficient condition for expertise. And so I’m really concerned that our schools are focused primarily on knowledge acquisition. And you know, I talked to students at a top business school in the country, and they said that one, they choose which classes they’re going to go to and which ones they aren’t. And they also choose which textbooks they’re going to buy and which ones they aren’t based

on whether they can get the same information on the internet. And this is flowery, because they’re paying a lot of money to be in those classes. And they said it was more important for them to go and found a business, to go and work on the board of a nonprofit, to go and network with their colleagues, than to sit in class. And what they were saying is it was more important for them to develop expertise than to master

the knowledge that was being pushed at them from the curriculum. So I think some of the differences that we don’t often talk about between knowledge and expertise is expertise comes from an applied setting. And that requires a different set of affordances for the learner. So number one, one of the most important aspects of that is deliberate practice.

They need the opportunity to develop deliberately. And that’s not just homework, it’s not just drilling, but it’s practice that focuses on their weakness. I think of it as M plus one, or sometimes we call it the zone of proximal development, where it’s something that’s just outside of their ability, but not so far outside that

they can’t master it. Then the second really important aspect is a mentor or a coach. Not a teacher who’s pushing content out them, but somebody who’s evaluating their application and giving them feedback. And it’s actually the third component is high quality feedback.

And it’s actually more important than an expert. So if I am less of an expert as a mentor, but really good at high quality feedback, then I’m actually more useful to you than if I’m the world’s expert and I can’t explain anything. And the example that I give is when I was in high school, I was struggling with an Algebra II problem.

And I looked over at my dad who has a PhD in economics and I thought, why don’t I ask my dad for help? So I went over and I’m like, hey dad, I’m trying to figure out this problem. And he looked at it for a minute and he wrote symbols that I’d never seen before on my paper and he said, oh, just use calculus.

And then he went back to reading the newspaper. And I’m like, okay, so that’s a case where I had an expert whose knowledge was tacit. And his feedback was not good. But if you can combine those things, deliberate practice, a mentor slash coach and high quality feedback and then a fourth one that we don’t talk about very much is a supportive community

that’s there with you. That’s how you develop expertise. And that’s different than how we teach in high school. But it’s exactly how you learn on the job. And I’m more interested in preparing people to get really good at learning how to master

expertise than I am in them learning any single domain in depth. I appreciate the way you describe adaptive problems and the importance of applying formative expertise to new problems. And you could call it the transferred problem of developing expertise but being able to apply it in a slightly different or even completely new setting.

And I also like how you describe the importance of relationships, of attachment, of a sense of belonging and so that there is the confidence to risk, the confidence to try from, but that starts from a place of safety and security that allows you to take a risk to attempt to apply expertise to a new setting or a new problem. Yeah.

And let me just talk about that for a minute. So Mary Helen, I’m going to say her name wrong, Inadino Yang who is an expert, both a neuroscientist and an education expert. She did a study where she studied the brains of young people who had grown up in the Montessori system and young people who had grown up in traditional public schools.

And they were solving math problems. And what she discovered is that when somebody who had grown up in a public school made an error on a novel math problem, a math problem they had never seen before, they took a hit in their brain. It was a negative.

But when somebody grew up in the Montessori system and they were working through a math problem, they discovered an error. The brain actually rewarded them for discovering that error because for them, they had been conditioned that that was a learning opportunity and that because they discovered the error, they were going to get closer to the solution.

And so we literally train our brains one way or the other. Either errors are bad and we try to avoid them or errors are good and we learn from them. And if you think of 12 years of training in our public schools, how do we want our children to be trained where an error is a reward that leads you to more learning or a failure that must be avoided at all costs?

So I want to wrap this part by just underscoring the importance of purpose and expertise. I love this quote from your writing, Joseph. By connecting purpose and expertise, schools can become meaningful, connected, engaging and relevant. Let’s talk about what does purpose have to do with identity and agency.

So just describe briefly how you’re thinking about identity, development, and what is agency and what does that have to do with purpose? So those are big and really important topics. So every young person is developing an identity that they own to some degree and that is also highly influenced by their environment.

And if you are insecure in your identity, it can be really hard to find your way forward in life. And depending on your background and the prejudices around you, there may actually be forces that are working against you, fully forming that identity and feeling secure in who you are and what you can contribute to the world.

And if a student is going to be successful in this, they need to have experiences where who they are and what they value are valued by the people around them. If that never happens for a learner, it’s very hard to establish an identity that they can count on and that they can build from. And so the problem with school is we really recruit a tiny sliver of a person’s identity.

It’s really the rules compliant, content focused, achievement oriented part of a person. But most people don’t function like that. Most people are really focused on compelling experiences rather than academic achievement. They’re more self-directed than rules compliant and they’re more interest focused than content focused.

And so if we don’t recruit that young person’s full identity to school, then they’ll never feel like that’s a place of belonging for them. And so what Purpose does is it asks the student to put their identity, their values, their intentions, their goals, their aspirations at the center and it communicates to them that we care about what those are and we’re going to support them in becoming who they

want to become. And once we do that, then school becomes a place of belonging, their identity becomes centered there and they feel like they’re going to be supported in becoming who they want to become. And that opens up all kinds of learning that just unlocks the world for them in a way that

is otherwise impossible. Joseph, I want to finish with a segment we call one to one and I want to start with the first question is who’s one person, maybe one more person that really helped influence your thinking around purpose and expertise? So certainly Bill Damon at Stanford Center on Adolescents was a huge influence for me

and on everyone who works in the expertise field. But one of the researchers who works with him, Heather Malin, wrote a book called Teaching for Purpose that really looks at bringing purpose into formal learning settings. And she was also an important influence as well. So two insights that I draw from our conversation and the writing that you’ve done is that school

can and should be organized as a set of skill sprints and projects. Projects that are usually connected to the community that are, you talked about important to the learner and to their community. And that both the skills, friends and projects which can be linked, right, that you can make the skills friends important because they’re linked to the success in the projects or the

blocks of inquiry that are often learned or directed. That both really have to be co-authored by the learner, but in conjunction with advisors and mentors. So skill sprints and projects connected and supported by advisors and mentors. What additional insight would you add to that?

Yeah, I think that’s important. And I think one thing we need to be open to is the breadth of advisors and mentors that can be brought into the learning experience. It can be anyone from a relative, a role model in their community, experts at a business or profession that they want to go into, but also peers.

And I think we sometimes overlook the power of a peer mentor, whether they’re at the same grade or whether there may be a couple grades beyond them, which allows them to play both a role model and a mentor role. So if we are expansive about that, then we can accommodate a lot more of a student’s interest. What’s one more resource where people could go to learn more about purpose-driven expertise?

So I’m still working on putting out some resources on that. If you’re looking at the expertise side, there’s a book called Peek, a secret from the New States of Expertise that I’ve drawn some ideas from. And then if you want to connect with me about these topics, I have a website called LearningExcelerant.com, or you can catch me on Twitter at SouthJoseph is my handle.

And I’d be happy to engage anyone who wants to talk about these ideas. Joseph, we so appreciate your leadership on this front. It’s really thoughtful and timely and important. We’re seeing schools all over the world adopt in just small chunks and in some wall-to-wall, this sort of purpose-driven learning.

I love how you’ve connected it to the development of expertise and expertise that’s portable. That’s really a durable set of skills. If you’re a clear sense of purpose and have a durable bundle of expertise, that’s a world-changing combination. I feel like it’s the best possible way to equip a young person for the future.

I honestly do. Thanks to Joseph South for joining us. Thanks to our producer and poet laureate, Mason Pasha. Keep learning and keep innovating for equity. Thanks for tuning in to the Getting Smart podcast today.

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