I’m in the midst of noodling with a “Greatest Hits” presentation of sorts. In the past 20 years, I have provided a number of keynote addresses (12 by my count) at the ICCOC annual conference, as well as dozens of workshops and dozens more trainings for the faculty and staff. I cannot wait to see my friends once again, at the Iowa Community College Online Consortium conference.
They were there when my wife was struggling to live. They were there when my daughter was born. I was there when they changed leadership. I was there when they sought innovative solutions to outcomes management. In other words, these people and I have grown together as colleagues, friends, and much more.
This year, the consortium is celebrating their 20th annual conference and they have invited me to come back once again to provide a keynote and some workshops. But the request this time was a little bit unusual. Provide an opening presentation that looks back at where we have been and what we have done, but also looks forward to where we will (or perhaps should) go.
So, as I have looked back at the presentations I have given over time, I have been reminded of some really nice “bits” (as I would have called them from my stand-up days) that I used over time. From the story of my wife’s illness to illustrate Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory to the songs mash-up I use to illustrate the power of Create-Consume-Remix-Share, I have been strolling down memory lane.
As such, I have some times that my talks were predictive, if not actually prescient. One example of that might be seen as I was one of the first people to warn against putting too much faith in the MOOCs craze of the 2000’s, being interviewed by academic and popular channels alike.
But I also came across a few blunders I made along the way. I encouraged people to buy Flip cameras, en masse, so that they could finally use video in their classes, even as the iPhone came out. Those devices became obsolete overnight. Whoops.
Which brings me to an illustration that I was excited to re-find. In fairness, it was not my illustration, but a retelling of Malcolm Gladwell’s story of choice in the food industry as ushered in by Howard Moskowitz – a psychologist and trend consultant. Gladwell notes that “the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don’t want to know, necessarily, just how cancer works, we want to know how my cancer is different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. Howard Moskowitz stated, ‘This same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce’,” and he then proved it so soundly, he literally turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Howard had the epiphany that there was no such thing as a single, “gold standard” choice for almost any product. There is no “best” Pepsi, no “best” Prego tomato sauce, and no “best” coffee flavor. But back in the 1970’s that is exactly how industry had worked toward product development. They hired a person like Moskowitz to find the “best” product and then they put that out to market. But Howard, leaning on a growing body of psychometric work, realized it was far, far more lucrative for a company to find the 5 or 7 or even 30 “best” choices for people. Why? Because people are highly variable, but there are absolutely trends that fit into clusters for those variables.
I think of this with my own family and french fries. It drives my daughter and I crazy when FoodTV chefs tell audiences that the “perfect” french fry is a crispy, browned experience. Not for us! We like limp, soft fries far more than anything else! But my wife and her parents would much prefer the “standard” idea of best. And that is the whole point. By generating only 1 “best” option, a huge proportion of the population is left out.
The result in Gladwell’s rendition of the Moskowitz story is that we went from one variety of tomato sauce (almost exclusively Ragu), to Prego jumping ahead in the tomato sauce market, seeing the creation of 7 new sauces (until Ragu followed suit coming out with 36 different sauce varieties).
What was most interesting to me about this story, which I used to illustrate the importance of NOT standardizing our curriculum, classrooms, pedagogy, and more, is that the science behind it has gotten much more significant. I often write about the power of Todd Rose’s work (The End of Average, 2017). This book synthesizes centuries of work showing that a “standard” is a false pretense. Not only is the math wrong when trying to average things that are not the same, but it does a tremendous disservice when the thing being averaged is people.
Yet, despite genetics research and the ensuing sociological extrapolations to everything from insurance to pharmacology; despite Howard Moskowitz revolutionizing the choices we find in the supermarket; and despite Todd Rose’s evidence that averaging humans is a flawed, harmful process….education still ignores much of that research. We enroll based on averages, we cluster based on “best vs worst”, we assign grades against a norm, and on and on.
But just like Moskowitz discovered that fully 1/3 of the US market was displeased and underserved by a tomato sauce that did not include “visible solids” (what you and I might call chunky, which is not nearly as weird or gross sounding…), we have students who are just as unique, illustrating their intelligence in ways we do not measure and being boxed into processes that are not helpful. Our students are like tomato sauce. There is no single “best” student – there is no such thing as an “average” student. There are just students.
Congrats ICCOC! I can’t wait to share some of my “greatest hits” with you as we look forward to see where the next 20 years will lead us…
Good luck and good learning.