Mason Pashia

Michael Crawford and Chris Unger on Building Durable Skills 

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Key Points

  • Students are better able to recognize, describe, and grow skills like collaboration and critical thinking when schools name them clearly, track them, and reinforce them across classes, advising, projects, and internships.

  • Authentic, real-world learning is one of the strongest drivers of agency and career clarity. The schools in the study helped students develop confidence, professional identity, and informed direction by connecting learning to mentors, work-based experiences, reflection, and community-based problem solving.

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia is joined by Michael Crawford of America Succeeds and Chris Unger of Northeastern University to explore what it really takes to help young people build durable skills. Drawing on a 16-month study of 12 innovative high schools, they discuss how schools can make skills like collaboration, communication, and critical thinking explicit, visible, and measurable through authentic learning, reflection, advising, and real-world experiences. The conversation highlights the 3-4-3 framework for durable skills development and offers a compelling look at how student agency, professional identity, and informed career pathways are shaped when learning extends beyond the classroom.

Outline

Introductions & Origin Stories

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. Over the last few years, the topic of durable skills has become commonplace as the knee-jerk answer to: what do employers want? How do we navigate an uncertain labor force? And, increasingly, what should schools teach? However, if you talk to anyone about these skills, they will typically say they are incredibly difficult to measure and study, and exceptionally difficult to assess, signal, or scale. That’s why I’ve decided to have today’s guests on the podcast. They are both leaders in the observation and measurement of durable skills, and I’m super excited to dig into a few of their recent reports. I’m joined by Michael Crawford, who serves as the vice president of strategic initiatives at America Succeeds, and Chris Unger, a teaching professor in the graduate programs in education at Northeastern University and the director of the LearnLab. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Good to see you.

Chris Unger: Glad to be here.

Mason Pashia: All right, so Michael, how did you find your way into this work? I’ve seen your name in the orbit for a long time, but I actually don’t think I know your origin story.

Michael Crawford: Let’s go way back. Both my parents are public school educators, and I was fortunate to see the impact that they made on the learners that they taught. My mom was a PE elementary school teacher, and my dad was a high school math teacher, and both were coaches. I knew about the education field broadly, the education profession, teachers, school leaders, principals, et cetera.

And I knew, over time, that my skills were not necessarily best suited to be in those roles, but I wanted to make an impact in the same kinds of ways. I wanted to impact systems. I wanted to help young people become more effective and healthier adults. I still am of the belief that adults leave a lot on the table in terms of wellness and making good decisions for themselves and their families and their communities and beyond.

And so I felt as though if I had a better understanding of how learning happened, of how people made decisions, what institutions contributed, and how systems worked, then ultimately I could make some slight shifts in some of these systems that would have a big impact on young folks. And so my career has been focused in and around that in some capacity at a range of different places, in a range of different roles.

I worked at the Kauffman Foundation. I worked on a PhD in educational psychology. I worked at Real World Scholars, at a nonprofit, and tried to launch an ed tech startup, all with the hope and the goal of helping young people become better adults. And so I found myself fortunate enough to join the team at America Succeeds a little bit over two years ago.

And since then, I have been leading our research and working with different partners across the country to better understand where and how durable skills are showing up in their world and try to improve on the products and systems and programs and all the things that come along with it so that, again, young people and job seekers can build the lives that they dream of.

So that’s what brings me here today.

Mason Pashia: I love that. Thanks, Michael. Chris, how about you? How did you find your way into this wild world of work over a few decades in academia and elsewhere?

Chris Unger: Well, I grew up on the beach in Venice, California. Anybody who knows Venice now understands my mentality, how kind of crazy it is and different, I think, than normal. But we moved to Westport, Connecticut, when I was in high school. And at that juncture, Westport, if anybody knows it, Betty Davis actually lived down the street. Paul Newman was a mile away, and Martha Stewart was at the other end of town. And they wanted buses for all the kids to get around, and so they were Mercedes-Benz buses. So I went from having my head knocked in in middle school and trying to survive, with cop cars circulating around the middle school and people jumping the fence to get out of there before things went down, to Westport, Connecticut. And from Westport, I went to Wesleyan, and from Wesleyan, I went to Harvard, and I thought, “Well, I’m a really smart guy, but there are a lot of smart people in the world, and why is my trajectory like this and not everybody else’s?” So that’s why I went into it, to think about how schools could change or transform people’s lives and the opportunities they have.

And that has grown over time, and I still stay with that. I think what I really want to do is find ways to assist and support youth in figuring out who they are, where they want to go, and how they can navigate their lives to live the lives they want to live. Instead of feeling that life happens to them, they can design and pursue the lives they want.

Surfacing Evidence of Durable Skills

The 16-Month Research Study

Mason Pashia: You two kind of got brought together, it seems to me, around this recent research study. Is that true? Had you been working together for years before that, or?

Michael Crawford: I knew of Chris. It’s hard not to know of Chris in the education world.

Mason Pashia: Agreed.

Michael Crawford: I had spoken maybe once via Zoom a number of years ago. I was with a different team, but I had appreciated his writings and his newsletter and just the way that he thought and attacked education changes that needed to be made.

And then when I joined America Succeeds, they were like, “Hey, we’ve been talking to this guy named Chris, who we think is a great leader for this research from the outside. What do you know? What do you think?” I said, “Well, I know who he is. I would love to connect on this research project.” And so we didn’t start totally from scratch, but this is the first time that we have worked and collaborated.

Chris Unger: Yep.

Mason Pashia: That’s awesome. Yeah. So you recently concluded, as I alluded to, this 16-month research study where, basically, you were looking at 12 innovative high schools across the country, specifically with the goal of identifying how durable skills, which, if anyone in our audience doesn’t know what those are, are things like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, but focusing on how those are developed.

And I’m curious just to hear a little bit about the study. What was the actual mechanism that you were observing? How did you select these sites?

Chris Unger: Well, one of the things that I’ve been doing the last 15-plus years is trying to find people who are doing school differently. It’s interesting when you go around the country. If I say “high school,” everybody just sees exactly the same thing: a big concrete building, maybe with 1,000, maybe not in rural areas, but 1,000 to as many as 3,000 students. And, by the way, fun quick story. Working in Brooklyn, I think it was, I was assigned to work with a high school there of 3,000 students, all pretty much four or five stories of gray concrete with very few windows. And they had the gall to call it John Dewey High School. Right then I’m like, “You gotta be freaking kidding me.” It’s like, what is John Dewey about here? I don’t understand.

So, anyway, back to the scenario here. I’ve been reaching out. The reason I mentioned high school is because when I say to people, “Well, you know, you can do school differently,” people say, “What do you mean?” It’s, “Well, you know, you don’t have to have classes in classrooms.” “What are you talking about? No hallways? No kids rotating 30 desks at a time?” I mean, you know, so I just really got into that.

So anyway, I knew about Big Picture schools. Obviously, they came on my radar in the early 2000s. I was a fan from the get-go: one student at a time, getting kids out in the world, working with mentors, doing real-world things, things they’re passionate about, which I think is a great thing to do for high school kids. It’s much better than what Christopher Alexander, in a really wonderful book written in the early ’70s called A Pattern Language, said. A group of architects got together and started to create a language for patterns we see in the world. They got to the high schools and they said, “Why do we have these adolescent holding pens when they should be immersed in the world and not cut off from the world?” How do you learn how to be in the world if you’re cut off from the world? It just doesn’t make any sense.

So I knew Big Picture. Then we started looking around. Da Vinci came up. I think Michael might have found STEM School Chattanooga. Big fan of the CAPS networks. We already knew of Cedar Falls CAPS, and then they introduced us to Monett CAPS. Then I ran and found Building 21. A couple people at the EdLD program at Cambridge and at Harvard got together, came up with this idea for Building 21. They’re in Allentown and Philadelphia now.

So, in a nutshell, we went out of our way, by hook and by crook, through conversations and people we knew, to find out where we should go to find schools that are really assisting and supporting students to be in the world, to learn from the world, to learn about themselves as they are in the world, and then how that connects to durable skills. That was the question.

Michael Crawford: Because of Chris’s network, because of some of my past work as well, we had a sense for what kinds of schools might be doing work focused on durable skills. They may not be using those terms. They may not be explicitly thinking about career pathways necessarily, but they were doing different things.

They had different pedagogical approaches, or they were providing young people with different kinds of contexts to learn that were different from the conventional approach. And so we said, “Well, what are they doing? How are they going about their business? Why do we know of them through the networks, through podcasts like this one, through other places?”

They’re doing something unique. They seem to be getting different kinds of results. We need to understand what it is that they’re doing. How are they approaching this from a leadership perspective? How are they engaging the community more broadly? What are the pedagogical differences? How are they thinking about academic results or leveraging technology?

And so when we started looking around, we started talking to folks. We got some recommendations, we got some referrals, and that’s how we landed on the schools that we did.

Mason Pashia: That’s awesome. And so what did these 16 months look like? Were you focused primarily on the model, on the students? I guess illuminate that for our audience that hasn’t had a chance to spend time with the two really excellent reports that will definitely be linked in the show notes.

Michael Crawford: We approached it from a somewhat grounded theory perspective. We didn’t go as academically nerdy as to use that language, but we went in with an approach that allowed us to just observe and to allow the students and the school leaders and alumni and staff, all the different kinds of folks that we talked with and saw in the observations that we went on, to really drive what it was that we ultimately ended up looking at.

We didn’t go in with a predetermined set of “these are the four things that we’re going to focus on.” Instead, we said, “What is happening here? What are the patterns? What are we seeing across all of these schools?” Chris mentioned pattern language. What are the patterns that we’re seeing in these different schools that are coming from rural environments, coming from more affluent environments, serving different kinds of young folks in different geographies all across the country, some part of networks, some public schools, some profession-based learning programs?

Are there patterns? Are there consistencies? And so over the course of 16 months, we conducted over 200 interviews with staff and with students, teachers, school leaders, alumni, community advisors, and mentors to really try to understand what it was that they were doing. How were they doing this? What are they doing? Why was this resonating with the participants? Why was this resonating with students and staff, et cetera? What are some of the challenges that they encountered? What are some of the tools that they’re using?

So we really leaned on interviews. We were in person for some of them. We went and visited several of the schools around the country, spent time on the ground with them, walked through their classrooms, sat in the back of classrooms physically in their space.

And then we did a range of different interviews and focus groups from a distance over time to see, again, what it was that they were doing, what they were prioritizing, what language they were using, and really let them kind of drive the bus on that front.

Chris Unger: Yep. I think I would just add a couple of things about that. We took a little bit of a different approach in different contexts. We did some initial work early on where we were on the ground, then we expanded to more schools, and so then we started to use Zoom quite a bit more just because it was easier for them and for us to get as much information as we could.

I think an example of this would be what we did at Gibson Ek, which was over the course of an entire year. We were able to interview and talk with three of the educators every five to seven weeks and ask, “What’s going on? What are you working on? What’s happening?” And they identified four of their advisees across the grade levels.

So imagine, I feel I need to say right now, I just feel incredibly blessed to have been part of this research because being able to go to these places, have these conversations, and really think about these things and talk with the students is an extraordinary opportunity, and I feel very blessed to have been able to do that because I learned so much from all these incredible educators that are doing this incredible work behind the backdrop. We don’t lift up enough these stories of incredible educators and the students.

So there were three educators, and each of them had four advisees we were able to interview and talk with over time. So we were able to get a snapshot of what’s going on with this kid. I hope this is okay, but I’m an old man, so I can say this. What’s happening with these kiddos, right? What’s happening with this kid? And she’s a freshman. What is she feeling and thinking? There’s this kid who’s a senior now. What is he or she thinking? And how does the advisor see that? And how do we connect the dots?

And, you know, yeah, we didn’t want to be formulaic about our approach. We wanted to be very open and listening and asking them what they did and why they did that. What was of value to them? What did they observe? What did they see? How was the school impacting them? What experiences were they having? How are those different experiences impacting them?

What was it helping them to be able to do, how to think, and so forth and so on? But then, of course, we wanted to focus on durable skills. So on the back end, sometimes we would say something like, “Well, you know, we’re working on these durable skills. We’re wondering, let’s say critical thinking.”

So this is a fun little story, right? So there’s this kiddo who ended up working, I think it’s called Midnight Performance, it’s a high-end automotive place in Seattle, right? So this kid is working there his junior and senior year almost full time, and he’s learning a ton. He loves cars. That’s what he wants to do, so he got his internship, and he’s working there. And then I got to talking with him. I said, “Well, are you learning how to think critically?” And he says, “Oh yeah, I’m thinking a lot about how to think critically.”

Now, one of the unfortunate things, I’ll drop in here, is if you go around the country and you ask most kids, “Are you learning how to think critically in this school or in this circumstance or through these experiences?” “Oh, yes, definitely, I’m learning how to think critically.” So, “Oh, great. What does it mean to think critically?” “You have to think critically.” And it’s like, that’s the answer? You know, that is the answer, right?

So that’s the difference. For him, what I did is, he works at this automotive place, and at Gibson Ek, the kids are responsible for documenting and curating evidence of their development and their skills. And as you know, Big Picture Learning has five core competency areas, and they zero in on that all the time. And when they meet with their advisor, they’re talking about that all the time. How do these skills and competencies connect directly to your experience and what you’re learning? That’s how you make the connection.

But anyway, he started to show me his portfolio of work, and he was showing me how he was fixing brakes and diagnosing problems and coming up with challenges and how to solve them. So I have this half-an-hour video interview with him showing me this brake thing that wasn’t working and what he had to do to turn the rotors and reconstruct it and figure it out. So all the problem-solving, all the critical thinking was in there.

He wasn’t reciting a definition. “Oh, yeah, I know how to think critically. I learned this in my class, and here’s the definition,” and then rotely repeating it. This is where we know when kids have durable skills. They’re able to see it in the world, and they’re able to talk about how they apply it in the world, and they see the value of it beyond what they’re doing right now.

And so we would dig into that. How are you learning to think critically, collaborate, communicate? How do you show signs of persistence? How do you see yourself as overcoming challenges? So growth mindset. “Oh, do you have a growth mindset?” “Oh, yeah, I definitely have a growth mindset.” “Oh, really? What does that mean?” “Well, I’m growing all the time.” It’s like, well, no, tell me. What’s really happening here? And it’s, “Well, you know, I had this problem, and I could have given up, but I didn’t, and I asked for help, and I rethought it, and I did this, and I did this, and I did this.” So we were looking for actual evidence that these students were gaining these durable skills.

Mason Pashia: That’s something I’ve always really appreciated about this specific work, is the emphasis on the name it, claim it visibility, transparency, right? You really have to be able to see it in order to identify it, in order to name it, in order to confidently talk about it. This is pretty related to what you just said, but I’m curious: what did you learn about asking those questions in the process?

I think that, in some ways, every parent in the country is like, “I ask my kid how school is, they say fine.” It’s just like, how do we get past the fine? And I’m curious: beyond just asking a follow-up question, what did you learn about language as the question askers as well, to actually get an authentic piece of evidence from these young people?

Michael Crawford: I think you just touched on it a little bit, at least for me. I think asking about the how, right? Not necessarily how did they do something, which I think is part of it, but how do they know, right? So you ask them whether they were collaborating or they feel strongly about their collaboration skills, and they say, “Yeah, you know, I feel pretty good.”

And you say, “Well, how do you know?” Right? Sometimes they’ve been asked a version of that question, sometimes not so much, but they think it through, or they point to an experience they had, or they point to an artifact or something that they made or built. And so you can kind of see, for them, the gears begin turning when they have to articulate where it came from or how they know or kind of defend their statement from before.

And I think, for me, it’s not necessarily a fully new concept. It’s part of decent follow-up questions, I think. But there’s something about, to your point about name it to claim it, or name it to tame it, there’s something about making it explicit even in the moment, in the conversation, so that we can point at something, and we can look at something, and we can flip it around and kind of see it from different directions.

And so I think asking questions that help to facilitate that explicitness, that sort of articulation, is helpful. And the other thing is, it’s important to consider the language that they want to use, right? So we didn’t come in, again, with a forced, “This is collaboration. This is the definition. Do you do this?” Instead, it was through the conversations, through just some of the initial questions, where they began talking about working with others, and they might call it teamwork. And so you just kind of adapt to some of their language so that they can explain and articulate what it is that they did without having to translate or figure out if they’re giving you the answer that they think you want.

They’re answering in the way that’s authentic and honest and true for them, and that’s great. I think that’s how you know, in a sense, that what you’re getting is the real thing, because they’re using their own language, they’re comfortable in their experience. And so I think those are things that I’m thinking about.

Chris Unger: And Michael already mentioned this, but talk about the stuff they’re doing. Show me the stuff you’re doing. What are you working on? This Gibson Ek kid built a Tesla coil in his garage. Now I’m thinking this guy’s got to be… I mean, so I’m like, “Well, how did you build that? How did you decide?” You know, how do you know? So point to the work.

And also, Mason, I know you’re gonna smile when I say this: we’re story creatures. Ask for the stories. Tell me. You were designing, you were trying to put a new electrical engine on your bicycle and retrofit it. Tell me how you did that. Show me what you did. When did you have a challenge? What did you do to overcome that challenge? It will come because you’re asking for narrative, you’re asking for the stories.

That is the underlying, I think, factor of all this, is give me the story. But ask for the story so that you can uplift and show the evidence of the durable skills.

Michael Crawford: And just to add to that, I think the power of story in this way, or the power of interviews potentially, is that young people, and I guess adults also, don’t necessarily know the architecture or the underlying kind of structure of what it is that they’re doing or learning necessarily.

But through the story, they hit on many of the things that they sort of, as they’re telling a story, are leaving almost little trapdoor breadcrumbs for what it is that is actually happening kind of under the conscious surface, and those are the patterns that you can see across, right?

Everybody’s story might be a little bit different. Somebody worked at a bakery, somebody led a summer camp, somebody was a fitness instructor or something, and those are all slightly different stories. But the underlying connective threads are best articulated or illuminated through those stories, right?

And it’s up to us as researchers, as interviewers, to make sense of the patterns across all these different stories. And that’s a fun part of these kinds of stories, tying it all together.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I definitely could not agree more with the importance of stories and storytelling as both a skill and also just an innate way that we actually demonstrate learning. One thing that I think about a lot in this, and I’ve talked at least with Chris about this, Michael, I think we’ve maybe briefly touched on this in the past, is I have this fear that technologies will shift a lot of the actual cognitive recognition from the human and onto the machine.

So you’ll get to this place where a learner’s telling a story, and the machine will just be like, “Good job, collaboration. Good job, this thing.” And there’s actually real value in the learner doing that work. And so I think that the interview is really smart because you can make sure that you are giving kind of the right level of nudge back to say, “Oh, that sounds like you grew a lot in that period. What do you think changed?” And then over time, they can start to say, “I think I got better at collaboration,” or however they want to name it.

But I’m just curious how, within the world of an interview, and again, this might be what you both just said, but I just think this is really important in our sector right now as we’re going through some of these growing pains and adoption pains, how do you keep it so that the learner is doing this work of recognition? Because I do think that a lot of the value is them recognizing in themselves when something is happening so that they can see it again, rather than being told, “Congratulations, you’ve checked the box on collaboration because you worked in a group of three,” or something.

Chris Unger: Well, I’ll tell a story, and I’ve said this story many times, but I think it’s a good story, and I think it hits the mark. So you can tell me later if it did or didn’t, right?

I’ve often talked about this. Some educators and parents have been roped into, somehow, or maybe willingly, I’m not sure, taking a gang of adolescents down to Disney World. So you’ve got 15 or 20, and you’re chaperoning there, and you could spend three days at Disney World, and everybody has a great time. “Oh, it was fantastic.” “Oh, what did you like?” “I liked the Star Wars thing. I liked the princess thing. I liked the Pandora thing.” It’s just like, it’s really cool.

And we come back, and then I sit down with a kid and say, “So what did you learn about customer service?” And they’re like, “What?” What do you mean about customer service? What about it? Don’t you think Disney World had really great customer service? “Oh, yeah.” Well, when you think about it, yeah, it was pretty good.

But think of what would’ve happened, and I’m kind of tying the bow on this, because this is what Michael and I learned, if you go to Disney World and you say, “We’re gonna focus on customer service,” and then as you’re in the experience, you’re constantly saying, by the way, “Do you see it?” Now, the kids might not be doing that initially. The educators might be doing a lot of that. “Notice that person right there. Notice what he or she did. Notice they did that. Notice this thing. Notice how the person at the hotel responded. See how…”

And then you keep saying that and pointing to that. Guess what happens now? Students start to look at it and see it, right? Because they’re not naturally doing that. And then, if, I’m not saying this is the best way to do it, but at lunch or on the side or at dinner, you say, “What did people see about customer service?” “Well, I saw the princess reach down to the young girl, and she was crying, and she lifted her up…” Right?

So now you’re like… and so what is good customer service? It is a language thing. You can attach language around what customer service is, and then you also build exemplars in your mind of what customer service is. And once you start to have language around it, then you’re able to think about it.

And as soon as you start to see it in experiences and activities, then you begin to see that in the world, and then you start to say, “Oh, maybe I should have more customer service in the way I approach whatever I’m doing, and what does that look like?” So when you come back after three days, which is what happens, I think, in most high schools, and say, “Well, what did you learn?” they say, “I don’t know. I had a great time at Pandora World.” But they don’t connect the dots. There was a lost opportunity.

So the educators have to zero in. And I’ll just say this in service of the study: the thing we learned is you need to clearly identify what those things are that you want students to come away with, and then continually help them to see the connection between the everyday world and what they do and how they do it, and the utility of that moving forward.

And we do very little of that in schools. Although I will say teachers do a pretty good job if they’re forced to explain why we need to know the quadratic equation. We’re not talking about quadratic equations here. We’re talking about these durable skills. And I think that’s the other thing that we start to do with these schools, is you zero in on those skills that are actually going to have value to the students in the future, and you showcase what that looks like because you’re not pointing just to the future. You have them recognize it in the moment, in the actions they’re taking.

Michael Crawford: I would just say, just to build on what Chris said, from a maybe different angle, one thing that’s been in the back of my mind doing this research is this concept called the conscious competence matrix, and it’s this two-by-two with competence on the bottom and consciousness on the y-axis.

And you start, typically with skills in this case, at a place of unconscious incompetence. You don’t even know that you’re not good at something. And then as soon as you realize, or are told or are shown, that, “Hey, there’s this thing called collaboration, and it looks like this, and these are the components of collaboration,” you become consciously incompetent. You then realize, “Ugh, I’m not that great at that, but I can see it now.”

And over time, and with opportunities to improve, you move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence. Well, now it requires some thinking, but I can do this well, or I can see this more often. I’ve improved on this in a way that I’m a little bit more competent.

And over time, as you continue to refine and utilize that skill or build those muscles, you become unconsciously competent. It just becomes how you operate in a collaborative environment, for example, but you’re not thinking of the components of it.

And I think with skill development in particular, there’s something that, tying in your commentary about AI and maybe tools that can identify collaboration for a young person without them really having to build some of those muscles, you’re sort of skipping steps in terms of being able to identify. You could tell a young person that they’re a great collaborator through some AI tool, for example, but they won’t know and they won’t feel what that connection is. So I think that’s one key piece of it.

And also, skill development is not the same as kind of basic knowledge acquisition. If you can read a book about the War of 1812 and get a sense for when certain parts of that war happened and who was there, and you can memorize those things, that is very different than developing a skill of collaboration.

You can’t read a book about collaboration and then all of a sudden become a good collaborator. You need the scuffed knees, and you need to try things, and you need to learn, and you need to get feedback. You need to utilize different approaches, et cetera, over time. And so those muscles need to develop over time, and the identification of them, I think, from the beginning, like Chris was mentioning, is a really key piece.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. It feels super related to muscle memory. We keep using this idea of building that muscle over time, but the thing you were just talking about, the kind of unconscious competence, it feels like if I go to sit down on guitar and play a song, I could maybe tell you what I’m playing, but really it’s just happening. And that is, I think, a useful thing to think about.

Communicating the Value of Innovative Schools

Mason Pashia: One other question on language. I know I’m kind of just digging us further and deeper into this one hole, but something that we think a lot about is the demand for innovative schools. And something that I keep struggling with is that many schools, some of the ones that you studied, really don’t have a waitlist. They are a school that you could get into, but the way in which they’re communicated to parents and students, there’s either an othering function going on, that it’s, “Oh, it’s that school,” for some reason, or the outcomes that are communicated, for some reason, are not aligning with what the parent is in pursuit of.

Maybe that’s college readiness, maybe that’s a STEM program, maybe that’s whatever. And so I’m just super curious what you learned or encountered in this study about how to actually communicate this to not education designers necessarily, because my understanding is these are the demands from the workforce, right?

I always trace this back to, I think I was in high school at this time, when Google was like, “We want creative employees.” And I was like, “I’m a creative person, but how am I gonna ever show them that?” That seems impossible. And it seems like that kind of started in the early 2000s, has been growing the whole time, and now we’re in this weird place where the workforce wants it, parents don’t totally trust it yet.

They might not even think… I had a conversation on a podcast last week with the head of the National Parents Union, and she was like, “That’s not the role of school. They’re just doing literacies, and grit, resilience, collaboration, I do that. I teach them that.” And so I’m super curious just where this has emerged in your work, and kind of where you all sit on it, because it’s something that I keep bumping up against and bristling at in other conversations.

Michael Crawford: I think about it a bit from a sort of pain and progress perspective. An accidental alliteration there.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Michael Crawford: But, you know, I think most adults, and this is a bunch of generalizations coming at you, have gone through a conventional educational experience. They have an understanding, a feeling, an experience for what school means to them, broadly speaking, what the purpose is. It’s supposed to kind of get you equipped for the next level, whether it’s postsecondary or right into the workforce. It looks like desks and rows and an auditorium and physics and all the things that we could point to that are part of a conventional schooling experience.

And so part of what we saw, not everywhere, but part of what we saw in some of these places, some of the schools that we worked with and studied, is that the kids who were going there weren’t going there because they and their families saw the benefits of that particular environment and they were seeking it out for that purpose.

Instead, it was often kids who either were kicked out of the existing system or weren’t fitting or kind of weren’t getting their needs met through the conventional schooling options, and they were willing to try something a little bit different.

So I’m thinking of schools like the High School for Recording Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota, who have a sizable portion of their students who have been, I’ll call it underserved, and that’s saying it nicely, by the existing school system. They, again, were kicked out, were just not being served properly, and HSRA was an option for them, and they tried it, and it turned out that it was an incredible fit for the students who went there.

They felt seen. They were able to pursue things that they cared about. A range of different benefits. A similar school, I mean, we talked about Gibson Ek, but many of the students who chose to go to Gibson Ek went there because they weren’t exactly finding the kind of wellness or success or achievement or whatever it was through the conventional schools that they had been to previously.

And so I think part of it has to do with the fact that parents, generally speaking in broader society, have a vision of what school is, and these are different from that. They are a little risky, or it’s a risk to try a different kind of context that you’re not used to, even if that context has a ton of research backing self-directed learning, opportunities to get out of the building, opportunities to pursue things that they care about, right? Things that we know are beneficial from a human development, youth development perspective are just different than what parents are expecting. So I think that’s part of the challenge.

Mason Pashia: Chris, I want to tee you up a little bit for a response to how we can bridge that challenge, because I think you’ve had an interesting position sitting at Northeastern for a long time, seeing this take place in higher ed and really seeing the demands of higher ed change, and you all kind of leading the charge on, “We have this co-op model that is really real-world, authentic, connecting people.”

I mentioned this on a recent podcast episode, but MIT just declared that they want to investigate whether they want to start offering the co-op program. You’re seeing this really competitive spirit around this offering, meaning that it’s really working. A lot of people are seeing value. They’re feeling some demand, whether that’s student or parent.

Is it just going to take time for that same thing to happen in high school? What do you think you’ve learned at Northeastern from how to make that communicable externally, not just to the employers, but to families and students, that we could maybe apply in the high school setting?

Chris Unger: Mason teed me up to talk about the Northeastern co-op program a little bit. It’s the oldest and largest co-op program in the United States. We have about 11,000 students out on co-op at any one time with over 4,600 employers in 150 countries across seven continents. And students are spending a half a year to two years immersed in doing real-world work somewhere in the world.

And I don’t know if this is quite true, I should double-check myself, but I know that if not the top, we’re one of the top five repeatedly over the last several years: 105,000 applications for about 5,000 spots. I think a lot of that is both student-driven but also parent-driven. It’s, “I would like my kid to have a job.”

It’s, “Okay, what are you gonna major in?” “I’m gonna major in psychology.” “What are you gonna do when you get out of college?” “I’m gonna be a psychologist.” But it’s like, what does that mean? Does anybody know what that means, being a psychology major, by the way?

And so the idea that you could go to a university, and Boston’s not a bad place to go, although I don’t like the winters anymore, but Boston’s, you know, and get real-world experience. I mean, when we’re talking about real-world experience, this young woman, Julia, was a political science student at Northeastern, and she didn’t really have any particular interest in criminal law. But she ended up doing human trafficking law in Serbia. She was an assistant to the prosecutor at the Special Prosecutor’s Office of War Crimes. And as a result of that, and learning what that was all about and becoming highly empathetic toward the challenges and conflict impact of violence, she decided to turn her attention to the legal system, and she is now working as a paralegal with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office of Human Trafficking in New York City.

So you’re like, okay, now why would I go into that one detail? It connects back to our durable skills. We are seeing very specific outcomes when a person has real-world, authentic activity, action, experiences in the world. They can begin to see whether or not they want to insert themselves into that space and do something about it. It has to be real. It can’t be fake. That is why co-op is so helpful.

And I would say also, in our program, one thing we want to say in the durable skills research is that’s one of the things that the schools all did. They found ways to get kids involved in the real world around their interests and passions. That’s super important too. So now we see that outcome. Parents see the outcome. So yeah, I want to send my kid to Northeastern.

But then when you look at high school, it’s so different to say, “Oh, you mean my kid’s not gonna be sitting in class anymore? They’re gonna be working at the farm. They’re gonna be working at the daycare. They’re gonna be working with the…” I mean, this is a true story. They’re working at all these incredible locations, but they don’t see what the outcome is.

And the outcome for parents, at least the storyline, the narrative we’ve held high for many years, unfortunately, I think in many ways, is that you need to do well in high school so you can go to a good college. You need to go to a good college because then you’re gonna get a good job. And when you get a good job, then you can get the three-bedroom house, two-car garage, and you go to Disney World every summer. But nobody’s asking the kid what they want. Do I want to go to Disney World? Do I want the three-bedroom house? Do I want the two-car garage? I don’t know.

So the disconnect when we think about high schools as an entryway to the world, into finding their interests and finding and exploring their passions, into forming a professional identity, an identity they might want to pursue, is so anathema to the idea of high school that people have. Because I need the transcript, I need the straight A’s. Not only that, I need my kid to take five APs because I want him to go to this college.

The whole setup is upside down. And if we go back to my statement of high schools as adolescent holding pens, really, in adolescence, you should be introducing kids into the world and how they could be in the world, and that is just not where we’re at in our mentality as parents. “Well, that’s not what school is about. It’s supposed to do this.”

Mason Pashia: I think that’s a really important point that you just said in two different places, but I want to bring them together for a full statement, which is, you said, “What do I want to do?” Right? That was sort of the question that they’re asking. But then the examples that you gave are really more about lifestyle. It’s, do you want to have this house? Do you want to have this family? How do you want to show up in the world?

And I think really the question that durable skills answer is, what do you want to be like? And they also help you get a job. And I think that that is one of the things that I am most intrigued by. I tend to bristle when it’s just workforce demands. That is something that I think the workforce has, for a long time, had a shadow over school, and I think that’s actually part of how we got to where we are, right? It’s college, it’s work, it’s all…

Chris Unger: Oh yeah, totally.

Mason Pashia: And I think it really is about how should a person be. We want to start having a little bit more, not necessarily a point of view, but you want to create the conditions where a person can explore that and begin to name that. And so I think that that’s a really important addition into the durable skills conversation.

Chris Unger: Yeah, and I want to build on that real quickly. I think this is where the durable skills come in. We have no clue what the… I mean, everybody else has said this, so I’m not saying anything new. We have no clue what it’s gonna look like in five years, 10 years, 15 years. Even five years, we have no clue.

And a kid might be really interested in, like one young woman at Gibson Ek, veterinary medicine or automotive or whatever, or business or entrepreneurship, right? Three years later, they may want to veer off, which a lot of people are doing. They veer off into another direction. They try something else. There’s a new economic ecosystem that opens up. AI wasn’t around… well, AI’s been around forever, but not to the extent it is now. Two or three years ago, we had no clue. It’s like a brand-new thing, right?

So one way to kind of get at this is to say that parents and people should be worried about how to be gainfully employed. And I’m gonna say gainful in the sense that not only am I making money to survive, but I’m also making money in the ways I want to make money, hopefully doing it professionally and meaningfully, right? The durable skills are going to transcend any of these sort of domain-specific things.

So another case: I was working out in Western Mass, and this group of people were showing me their brand-new vocational building. They were super proud of it. They got a $20$20 million bond to build it or whatever it was. I’m like, “Well, tell me, what are you guys doing in that?” They said, “Oh, we got four programs.” Okay, cool. What is it? “Automotive, hair salon, food, and childcare.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” First of all, you have high expectations for your kids, but whatever it is, the most important thing is that you want young youth to feel like no matter what direction they want to go in and what they want to pursue and how they want to be in the world, they have the skills to navigate and do the things that they want to do, and I would hope also feel that they should contribute back to humanity.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. And it’s that they have the skills or they know how to get them, right? Because when you graduate high school, you’re not gonna be an A-plus critical thinker forever, right? Things change. AI comes out, media literacy becomes a whole thing that didn’t exist before.

Chris Unger: Totally.

Mason Pashia: So I think it’s having them and knowing how to get them. Chris, I love that you are so fundamentally a storyteller that they just ooze out of you all along the way, and so I really appreciate you practicing what you preach.

We want to bring us to a close here with a final question.

The 3-4-3 Framework

Mason Pashia: Give our audience a little teaser for what they could find in these reports by maybe just giving a quick overview of the 3-4-3 framework or something along those lines. We’ve talked a lot about the actual project, but maybe talk about that and then we can wrap it up today.

Michael Crawford: What we found across all 12 of these schools, having spent 16-plus months with them, the patterns that we found fall into our 3-4-3 kind of architecture of transformation. So three underlying principles that we saw across all 12 schools.

First is make skills explicit and trackable. So as we have been talking about in this conversation, it’s very important to name and tame the skills. What are they? What are you focused on? In different schools it looked different. They had overlapping skills in many of the cases, but also had their own uniqueness that they brought to the table. But the identification of those skills is critically important for staff and for students especially.

Secondly, build authentic, consequential experiences. So getting young people out of the building. It could be internships. It could be through self-directed projects. One Stone in Boise, Idaho, has client-directed projects where they’re working directly with local clients and solving problems and kind of building things for them as the client needs.

These kinds of authentic experiences with non-teacher adults are really important, these sort of authentic audiences that go beyond the school. It’s not just the poster presentation that goes in the trash on the way out. It’s consequential, important, impactful work that they’re doing. Those kinds of experiences are what best support durable skills development.

And then the third principle is that durable skills development needs to be fully integrated into the educational or schooling experience. So it’s not a one-off critical thinking course. It’s not just a poster on the wall. But instead, these skills are woven into rubrics, assessments, project ideas, internship opportunities. They’re woven throughout, and the math teacher is talking about collaboration, and the physics teacher is talking about collaboration, and the school counselor is talking about collaboration. They’re seeing it and feeling it everywhere.

Those are the three principles: make skills explicit, build authentic experiences, and fully integrate. That’s what we saw across all 12.

Now, one level above that is what we call our amplifiers. And across all 12 schools, each of the schools, some of them sort of did more of these four than others. Others really turned the volume knob up on some and maybe were a little lower volume on others.

But the four amplifiers are progressive complexity. So they started a little bit more simply and advanced over time. STEM School Chattanooga is a great example of this. They focus on three skills over the course of four years, and each year they have particular components that they focus on that build on one another. The experiences build on one another. The complexity of the particular skills changes a little bit over time. But they start simple, and they build.

The second amplifier is sustained relationships. So you can think of these as mentors, as advisors, as relationships with adults who can see them, who know them. For many of them, they may have had an advisor that they met with every single day over the course of four years at school. That advisor really got to know them. And so when students would say things about what they were interested in, and oftentimes the unsaid things that they weren’t saying that the advisors could pick up on, they were able to get the kind of support they would need. They were able to take risks because they knew that they were seen and cared for. So those relationships are critical.

Third, structured reflection. So it’s one thing to go out and execute on a particular task or be working on a particular skill. It’s another to be able to pause and sort of, I’m picturing Sankofa a little bit, like looking back and seeing, “Well, what was that that I did there? Why did I make that choice?” and be able to build on it moving forward.

So that reflection is critical. Different schools do it a little bit differently. Some had regularly scheduled reflection windows where they would complete something and submit it. Other times, it would just be in their own reflection journal. And one of the cool things that we heard is that students initially would reflect, and it would feel a little bit more like a chore. But over time, when they were at the end of the year looking back at their first reflections, they could see their growth. It’s another example of that kind of explicitness and making it visible and visual. And so that reflection is huge.

And then the fourth one has to do with context, attention to context. Inner-city Philadelphia looks different than rural Batesville, Indiana, which looks different than Boise, Idaho, which looks different than Miami, Florida, right? And so each of these contexts comes to the table with different characteristics. The young people are bringing different experiences and backgrounds to the table, different interests. And so taking that into consideration allows for the authentic experiences, allows for skill development to show up in ways that make sense right there. So context is critical.

And lastly, the second three of the 3-4-3 are what we describe as non-skill outcomes or beyond-skills outcomes. So these are agency. What we heard from young people is that through these kinds of experiences, this schooling experience, they began to see themselves as much more capable. They began to not only see themselves as much more capable, but take action. We had students who pursued internships and got 40 rejections until they finally found an internship placement that worked for them. In other contexts, in other schools, that level of rejection is much more challenging. But when young people develop agency and feel a true sense of self-advocacy around their future, it’s a different story.

The second beyond-skills outcome that we heard from young people is what we would call professional identity. They began to not only say, “I want to be a teacher,” but they would say, “I am a teacher,” because they had hours and hours of experience working in elementary schools with licensed teachers. They weren’t just sort of forecasting into the future. Instead, they believed that they were that today, which is big in terms of confidence and the ability to navigate into the future.

And the third one has to do with informed vision. It’s one thing to know that there are firefighters and lawyers and computer programmers. It’s another to have an experience in those contexts and learn whether, yes, I want to tack more toward that, or no, I want to tack more away from that and toward something else. That comes through authentic experience. It comes through being in those kinds of spaces.

So that was lightning speed: three principles, four amplifiers, three beyond-skills outcomes. We have a report that describes those in depth and kind of shines light on examples. We have a playbook where educators can kind of get a sense for where they are at their school and where it might make sense. If maybe they already have an internship program, but they don’t have structured reflection built into their work, that’s a place where they can incorporate it, and we provide some recommendations for that.

And lastly, we have 12 school profiles. So you can really dive deep into any one of these schools to get a sense of how these principles and amplifiers and outcomes showed up in that school. You get a better sense for context. Is it more like me, less like me? What can I borrow or steal from this example and bring back to my school? So we have the playbook, we have the report, we have profiles, all available at AmericaSucceeds.org.

Mason Pashia: There you go. Look at that. All right. That was awesome. Michael and Chris have both also written great pieces for Getting Smart in the last eight months on this topic as well, so I’ll link those in the show notes. But it’s been really great to have you both here today, Michael and Chris. Thank you, and everybody go check out the reports. Keep doing what you’re doing, and I look forward to next time.

Guest Bio

Michael Crawford

Michael Crawford is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at America Succeeds, where he leads the charge on proliferating durable skills, combining research, strategy, and implementation to ensure these essential skills make a real-world impact. Before joining America Succeeds, Michael served in research, strategy, and partnerships roles at VELA, Western Governors University, Real World Scholars, and the Kauffman Foundation.

Chris Unger 

Chris Unger is a Teaching Professor in the Graduate Programs in Education at Northeastern University, including the Doctor of Education program, and Director of the LEARN Lab. His work focuses on the design and proliferation of learner-centered, agency-focused schools and the support of change agents in education.

Mason Pashia smiling in a blue plaid blazer and white shirt against a white background

Mason Pashia

Mason Pashia is a Partner (Storytelling) at Getting Smart. Through publications, blogs, podcasts, town halls, newsletters and more, he helps drive the perspective and focus of GettingSmart.com. He is an advocate for data and collective imagination and uses this combination to launch campaigns that amplify voices, organizations and missions. With over a decade in storytelling fields (including brand strategy, marketing and communications and the arts), Mason is always striving to inspire, as well as inform. He is an advocate for sustainability, futures thinking and poetry.

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