Ready?

I’ve been on the road the last few weeks, mostly speaking at fall-semester convocations. I just love these kick-off events for colleges, universities, and school districts. It’s a great time to hear about their successes, challenges, and innovations.

One of the conversations we explored on these campuses surrounded the speech series Ready?: Dramatic Change and Transcendent Learning. Check out the sample presentations here to see a more full description. You can also download my white paper from SAS Press to explore this transcendent learning framework—critical, creative, social, and courageous learning—in more detail.

What was fascinating about these dialogues was the near unanimous contention that our students will have to learn more, more quickly, and more often than previous generations—and that we’re not sure they’re ready for it. Moreover, they’ll need the courage to learn, to break out of comfortable patterns, if they truly want to transcend—go to the next level—throughout their careers. Remember, we talked about this here a few months ago. Most important, however, was the also near unanimous sentiment that one of the best ways for them to develop the courage and capacity to learn more effectively is for us to model it as we work through the change issues in our institutions. In short, we need to bring critical reflection, creative solutions, civil dialogue, and courageous learning to our efforts or we seriously undercut our lofty learning lessons.

Are we ready? Are they ready? These folks argued that we’re best served by getting ready together!