Town Hall Recap: The Landscape of Credentialing Experiences

In a recent Getting Smart town hall, the focus was on the concept of experience credentialing within educational settings, which involved discussions among various experts in the credentialing world. Nate McClennen moderated the event, which included a demonstration by Ian from Schooljoy, illustrating the practical application of AI in creating simulated learning environments. This highlighted a novel approach to integrating technology in education, specifically through AI-mediated interactions that allow for realistic and sensitive handling of complex social interactions in educational contexts, such as restorative conversations addressing classroom disruptions.

The speakers argued for a shift away from traditional learning assessments towards comprehensive evaluations that recognize a variety of educational experiences and competencies. This involves creating a more flexible and inclusive educational framework that values diverse learning experiences—from internships to project-based learning—which can significantly enhance a student’s readiness for both higher education and career opportunities. By credentialing these varied experiences, educational institutions can provide students with a more accurate and expansive representation of their skills and competencies, aligning educational outcomes with the demands of the modern workforce.

Transcript

Nate McClennen: Hello, everybody. Excited to be on with you all. It’s Thursday before Thanksgiving, and we’re here for another great Getting Smart town hall. We’re super excited to talk about experience credentialing. We’ve got a lot of great guests joining us from different parts of the credentialing world.

We’ll introduce them along the way. This particular town hall has a little bit more content than usual, but as always, make sure you put your questions right in the chat and keep the commentary going there. We’ll try to address them as they emerge.

Usually, we start with a poem. Today, we’re starting with a demonstration, and I’m not going to tell you anything about the demonstration except that I’m going to stop sharing my screen, and Ian from Schooljoy is going to jump on, and I am going to be the user in this demonstration.

Ian Zhu: Alright, thanks, Nate, and thanks, everyone. I’ll try to minimize the context as well, because for this part, I think it’s just best for all of us to just experience it. Nate happily volunteered to be a guinea pig, so we’re going to go ahead and enter what we essentially call a simulation.

So, I will preface by saying that Nate will be talking to AI. He’s not hurting anyone’s feelings. But it’s an important experience for us to all just observe. So, let me share my screen. And Nate, just to fully put you on the spot, you do have an option to choose. Alright. I’m starting from the bottom up.

You can choose to have a restorative conversation to repair classroom community, build a connection with a new student, rebuild trust after a classroom conflict, talk to a student seeking course planning advice, work with a student who has shown withdrawal symptoms due to gaming addiction, or help a student who seeks advice on peer conflict.

Nate McClennen: Let’s go to the very bottom one. The first one you showed. Alright.

Ian Zhu: Ready?

Nate McClennen: I’m ready.

Mel | AI: Hello. I’ll be playing the role of Mel, a 7th-grade student who’s been asked to have this conversation about a supposed classroom disruption, though I don’t think I did anything wrong. In this simulation, you’ll be my teacher attempting to guide a restorative process. Are you ready to begin?

Nate McClennen: I’m ready to begin.

Mel | AI: Okay. I’m going to enter the role of Mel now. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why am I here?

Nate McClennen: That’s a good question, Mel. Do you have any idea why you’re here today and why I asked you to meet with me?

Mel | AI: This is so stupid. Why am I even here? Everyone else was laughing, so what’s the problem?

Nate McClennen: Do you remember students answering questions during class?

Mel | AI: Yeah, I remember. But all I said was one tiny thing, and everyone was laughing. It’s not like it was a big deal.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, no, I understand that you think it might not be a big deal. Do you remember what you actually said during that time when people laughed?

Mel | AI: I don’t know. I just made a joke. It wasn’t meant to be mean or anything. My friends thought it was funny.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I hear you. Jokes can sometimes be funny. Do you think there’s any possibility, if you put yourself in someone else’s shoes, maybe someone who wasn’t laughing at your joke, that someone might have taken that the wrong way? Different from how you took it.

Mel | AI: I guess maybe she looked upset, but she always looks like that. Do you really think people felt bad?

Nate McClennen: The only thing I can judge is the way people look and perhaps if they say something after class, but if you thought that they looked upset, why do you think she might have felt upset?

Mel | AI: I wouldn’t like it if someone said that about me. It’s just, everyone expects me to be funny. I wasn’t thinking about how it would make her feel.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, no, I understand that you weren’t trying to make her feel bad. And I understand trying to make people laugh and wanting to be the funny person. Since you did, it looks like she was feeling bad. How do you think you could have done this differently?

Mel | AI: I don’t know. Maybe I could have just kept the joke to myself or said something else that wasn’t about her, but I don’t know how else to act without losing my friend’s approval.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. It’s tough. Teenage years are not easy, Mel. And so you’re jumping into this, and this is going to happen over and over again. I like what you’ve done here, which is you have reflected on, Hey, I might have hurt someone’s feelings. One of the things we can do as humans in life is try not to hurt other people’s feelings and find other ways to keep friendships.

Mel | AI: Yeah, I get that. I really don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I just need to figure out how to be funny without being mean. It’s hard, but I guess I can try to think more about what I say before I say it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, that is a brilliant thing to say for a seventh-grade student.

Ian Zhu: Alright, and I’ll answer the question as well.

Nate, thank you. That was great. Alright, so we won’t look at the score or anything, but here’s the transcript. And then we are highlighting some glow and grow moments for you. The first question and the most important question I often like to ask is, Nate, how did you feel from that experience?

Nate McClennen: So that one was more comfortable for me because I’ve spent a lot of years teaching and working with teenagers. I did one that you made me do before, which was around nursing, and I’ve never been a nurse, and that was harder. But it did feel real, and it was good practice, and so it was helpful, for sure.

Ian Zhu: And once we have a chance to talk about it, I think this is something that really stood out to us. This is not about AI. This is not about technology. This is about the human emotion that we can finally incorporate into a safe environment where we can practice. When we came across that nursing simulation that I just talked about, you alluded to earlier, we thought this was something that we just could not ignore because when was the last time we can interact with a piece of technology and feel something and be able to assess empathy. So down here, we incorporated some additional rubric assessing your ability and you did phenomenally, right?

So creating safety and trust, building understanding, guiding reflection, and fostering responsibility. So for us to now be able to go back and redo the simulation after seeing this rubric is really a new form of training and development that wasn’t quite possible before. So I don’t want to take too much time.

Nate, is there anything else that you want to add before I hand it back to the team?

Nate McClennen: I think this is the perfect context for thinking about how do we give young people in this case a lot of practice doing the things that they need to do to learn how to be a teacher, learn how to be any professional in the world.

So for me, as an adult, it worked great. I get a lot of feedback. I’m working and interacting with an AI. So as we think about credentialing today, and credentialing experiences, this is a good example of how we increase the frequency of practice using tools such as AI. So it’s never going to supplant me as a teacher talking to Mel in the real world, but it will give me a lot of practice.

So we appreciate that. And it’s a really useful, while there are some fears about AI, this is a really useful use case where we can increase the reps and really capture the things we’ve learned from experiences. Okay, why don’t you just give us a few data points to start out with our town hall.

In terms of indicators of why we’re doing this work and why we need to think about credentialing and credentialing experiences specifically, 58 percent of employers say recent grads are unprepared. 25, 50, 54 percent of Gen Z students lack engagement in school. So we have low engagement.

Employers are saying they’re unprepared. A lot, ASA did some great research and saying they 2 percent of students had completed a hands-on learning experience during high school, such as an internship, et cetera. But 79 percent are interested. That’s a huge gap. And then 44 percent of students think they can make a difference.

And the youth truth survey goes on to say that very few have the opportunity to do so many jobs will require post-secondary education and or training note that I’m not just saying college, but anything in terms of post-secondary education or training. And guess what? 39 percent of college students feel prepared.

Which means 61 percent feel that they’re not prepared. So employers say they’re not prepared. Students say they’re not prepared. The students aren’t engaged and they’re not getting the experiences that they need to help them get engaged and help them feel prepared. So that’s setting the stage. And Getting Smart over the last little bit has walked through a bunch of experiences.

And I want to invite Julie Lammers from American Student Assistance to just set the stage for us for a little bit, and then we’ll jump into the specific credentialing work that we did. Julie, handing it off to you.

Julie Lammers: Thanks, Nate. Great to be with everyone today. So I think looking at the report and the landscape scan that Getting Smart did really important information here and so much great, valuable, such a great, valuable resource as we’re thinking about how we expand these experiences.

So I loved this quote from the report that the, as the primary architect of schooling course taking must move into the background of learning experiences, pathways and growth progressions and the related skills assessment. Must become the priority. The question is, how do we do that? Because we know that what is measured is viewed to be what matters and that we really value the things that we have a good assessment for and a good understanding of the foundation for and so being able to really assess and validate these experiences is crucially important if we’re going to see a growth in acceptance of them as of sort of valuable part of the school and the learning experience and right now there are pockets of excellence.

Right now there are pet projects in a lot of schools that are happening and this work is beginning to grow. But because there’s not a really solid and consistent way of understanding how we evaluate them, how we assess them, how we credential them long term, they still really are that. There’s pockets of great work.

And what we need is to be able to scale them so that they’re in in, in every school. It’s an experience for every student. And then it’s valued from both the school perspective, but also into post-secondary education and on the employer side that there is an understanding of these skills and experiences that young people have that it is about their skill-building and their growth, not just checking a box to say that they’ve done some sort of they’ve taken a test and completed it, but really, what do they know?

And how does that translate into long-term career success? So we were really excited to sponsor this work with Getting Smart really started from a place a few years ago when we were having conversations with a lot of providers that are doing this work, that everyone is doing things a little bit differently that the way that they are credentialing the experiences is a little bit different.

And that’s okay. Fundamentally, as long as we have a good understanding of outcomes for students, that the types of inputs. It could vary by program, whether it is an internship or a project-based learning project, client connected learning project. What is important is how do we understand the types of skills and experiences, how do we understand the quality of those experiences, and what is it the student is gaining from it.

Those are really the important outcomes that we need to figure out. How are we ensuring we’re communicating those well, so that long term students can. Can articulate that these are the things that I’ve learned. And this is why it’s valuable in post-secondary education and into career. So we look at things like, where are the bright spots in this?

And a couple of, I think some of these partners are on the phone. I know Corey Moan is heckling me in the chat. So I know he’s here. Programs like Big Picture Learning, NAF, the CAPS Network that do these types of experiences, this experiential learning in very different ways. But have seen really great outcomes for their students.

A lot of these, this work is highlighted in the report that Nate did. And so if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, I really encourage you to read through it and see the different models that are existing to make sure that young people are getting these experiences. We are seeing great growth in these types of programs being adopted nationwide, and they’re excellent opportunities to provide young people with the types of hands-on learning that they really need to be successful.

When we’re thinking about the quality of programs, I think from an ASA perspective, the things that we’re looking at are not necessarily one model that’s going to solve this problem for everyone. It’s not going to be one type of internship, one type of career connect or client connected project, not, there’s not going to be one type of experience of entrepreneurial experience that’s going to fit the needs of every student in every community.

And so we’re really looking at, is there a continuum of experiences? Is it accessible to all students? Are we promoting choice and autonomy when we’re thinking about the experiences that young people are having? How are we ensuring transferable skills that are being developed or durable skills that are being developed?

And has the program really set clear measures and evaluation so that we can understand then how do we take that learning and put it towards some type of credential? And then look at And the report talks a lot about this is about how then do we translate that type of learning into something that is readily accessible to higher ed and employers as an understanding of what has been learned in the same way that a four-year degree has for a very long time been a signal to employers about the types of skills that a young person might have.

We know that is not a signal that employers are generally looking at these days. In fact, A study we did recently, 72 percent of employers said that is not a signal of identifying the skills necessary for someone to be in the workforce. So we need different types of ways of evaluating the skills and competencies that young people have.

Mastery transcript consortium is an organization that was highlighted in the report as building out a portfolio approach to understanding the skills and competencies that young people have and thinking about how we move away from just standard assessments to really looking at a portfolio of what kids know and can do long term.

So really interesting work happening there. So the report goes through these types of activities, really understanding what great things are happening? How are we measuring them? I think one of the big questions that we get a lot at ASA is where do I start when we’re thinking about this? If you’re a leader that hasn’t done a lot of this work, where should I even begin?

And Nate and team really laid out a really good case for portrait of a graduate being an excellent place to start with this work 17 states now have portraits of a graduate that understood that have brought together community leaders in the education community The employer community, higher ed community to really think what are the types of what is the basic grad framework for what we want students to be able to do to the types of skills that we want them to have the types of durable skills they need to have in order to be successful in post-secondary education and career that they need to leave high school with I think one of the things that we see and I, we would like more focus on going forward at ASA is the 17 states that have built out these fortress of a graduate.

Some of them, much a company’s strategic plan have been built are really well thought out, but then are being left on a shelf. There’s not a lot of implementation downstream of what’s happening. We see a number of states that have built, for example, A lot of conversation into their portraits of a graduate around the types of durable skills that young people have.

But if you look at their downstream curriculum, none of it is none of it has changed to actually teach kids those skills. Starting with the portrait of a graduate is really important, but we’re encouraging states to think broader than just that framework. And how is the downstream curriculum change being made to make sure that young people are actually being able to graduate?

With those types of skills. So I think that’s what we’re seeing largely from this report and the great work that Nate and team laid out here. I think there’s a lot of wonderful work happening throughout the country and really great places to begin. And I think this is lays out a really important framework for how we begin to change these systems to make sure that young people have the types of skills, have the types of experiences that will really get them to long-term success.

So happy to answer any questions long-term, but Nate, thanks so much for all of your hard work and the hard work of your team on getting this really important workout into the field.

Nate McClennen: All right. Thank you so much, Julie. Great overview, and I dropped in a link for some information on portraits. Also, Battelle for Kids has portraits note at the national level, you have I saw America Succeeds Durable Skills Team is on here, and they’ve created a great set of that could be used for portraits, set of competencies and skills that could be used for portraits.

Redesign has created them, XQ, the national level, and then there’s hundreds of districts that have also created portraits. There’s a lot of work, and as I put in the chat, We have to avoid the syndrome of poster on the wall which happens. You do all this effort, you create them, and then they end up being posters in the wall with no downstream work being done.

So what our path has been and really supported by ASA and a lot of these areas we’re grateful for and the field is grateful for is this idea of starting with new outcomes that Julie was alluding to. We talked about the portrait model. I dumped that in the chat. We then went into new experiences and thought about unbundled learning.

So how do we. If you have new outcomes as a North Star, what are those experiences that need to happen in the school and outside of the school to reach those new outcomes? And then how do you rebundle those experiences into new pathways, which was our one of our recent publications and initiatives.

And then finally, what we’re talking about today is So once the students accumulate all these experiences that they’re learning around and from traditional things like college credit or course credit to things like internships, apprenticeships, client connected projects. How do you signal that to employers, higher ed, post-secondary opportunities?

And we wrote one paper on this credential learning for all. And then we realized. We actually think we need to do another round of this. And so we thought we were missing some things when we first looked at it. We know that there’s over a million credentials out there. Fantastic. And the vast majority of those credentials sit in post-secondary opportunity, educational institutions, college universities, et cetera.

And high schools, as well as non-academic providers, apprenticeships, certificates, et cetera. They live out there. But we think that we’re missing something in this. And our core questions for this research came out, How can we increase access to valuable experiences? And then, should we credential experiences as well as competencies?

What we heard loud and clear during our research was that competencies devoid of the experiences that they were learned in are not helpful for employers and or higher ed when we’re thinking about either admissions or job opportunities. And then are they valuable? And then the long-term play is how on earth are we going to get to these things called learning and employment records?

Because we believe in Getting Smart. We think we’re getting some agreement in the ecosystem. There’s more and more signals that LERs are going to be the way of the future as we try to capture a much broader vision of what learners can be able to do. And so our methods like we do all the time, we did a lot of talking to people.

We wrote a lot. And we interviewed a lot of folks and as well as presenting and visiting a number of schools. So a couple findings for this first one. So we’re going to go through each one of these questions. I’m going to pause after each one to think about what do you all as a crowd are thinking about?

So a couple of ways that we can increase access. What we learned So, there are a number of states that are requiring access to valuable experiences in order to meet a graduation requirement. Ohio’s seals of graduation, or graduation seals, is a really great example. And if you look on the lower left here, or the left-hand side, the first and second are things that have always existed.

The third is these readiness seals, and students have to graduate. With at least two readiness seals and they’re in citizenship or our skill, workforce skills or whatever the case may be, there’s a number of them and we’ll put that in the report. You have a direct link to that. So great way you require it.

The students have to have an experience that opens up access for experiences. Same for Indiana graduates. Great work going on there with not only the traditional academic mastery and credentials, but they add experiences as a requirement. Real-world learning in Kansas City. 30 high schools that are requiring some sort of experience, they call market value assets, that count towards graduation.

All these approaches are ways to increase access. And second is that we’ve built this, we don’t quite have the name for it yet, I’m calling it the experience wheel right now, but this idea of how can we give a structure Or a model to secondary schools and perhaps middle schools as well, where students can actually start to create experiences that fill all of these buckets right here.

And it reminds me of Trivial Pursuit, for those of you who play Trivial Pursuit or board games. But this is what it reminds me of. And the vast majority of students are filling the orange Trivial Pursuit piece, the course class bucket in the upper right. But we know that they should be filling, and they get way more experience, and their employers want way more experiences in all these other buckets.

So we need to broaden beyond course and class into CTE, which most schools have CTE now, to fill all those other pieces of the experience bucket. So I’m going to pause for a second, and just give you one second to say, how can we increase access to valuable experiences? And so wherever you are, wherever you’re listening, One idea.

Intentional with planning and back mapping. Oh, I like that. From Brooke from NAF, really good idea of back mapping, back, back mapping with community and industry partners.

Big picture schools really have done a good job with creating internships two days a week for everybody, every single student. So by design, they’re creating this engagement, increased access, partnerships. So it all goes back to expanded learner ecosystems, right? Ah, yeah, Roman, great idea giving LMS access to those who serve youth, the out-of-school group.

Okay, all sorts of great examples here. Keep them coming. I’m gonna keep moving on. To make sure we get through everything. Wow. There’s some great work here. Thanks, Corey. That’s a good one to end on in all CAPS, let students lead. All right. So second question, should we credential experiences and competencies?

We knew the answer to this when we went into this, but one of the things we were wondering about is can we really create an ecosystem that’s. That should be credentialing experiences because often we’re not talking about credentialing experiences we’re credentialing a competency or credentialing some sort of compilation of classes that you earn a degree, etcetera.

So I tried to capture this in this slide where. We know that knowledge and core skills of they’re typically found in standards. Those are captured in a proxy, a credential. That’s a proxy called a diploma, right? All of us have earned a high school diploma or GED. Most of us and that captures, demonstrated competency and core skills and knowledge.

Technical skills are captured in certifications industry recognized credentials, IRCs, typically through CTE programs, which the vast number of high schools have CTE programs. And then we’re seeing more and more around performance assessment, capturing durable skills. And I know that America Succeeds is working on this.

Carnegie CTE, or Carnegie and ETS are working on this is how do you do this at scale, but also some employment platforms like immersion and body swaps education design lab has some really interesting products around how you measuring durable skills. So All these things are happening, and what we’re positing is, are we missing a whole piece called experiences, right?

And I put LinkedIn here not because LinkedIn is a verified place for experiences, because people make up stuff all the time on resumes and LinkedIn, but the idea is, could we create a credentialing system that captures competencies? And we know that that credentials are in high demand, And all credit, many credentials require experience.

And so linking these things is important. And finally, our conclusion here is committing to the learning. Everyone uses learning and employment record. That’s the common industry language. And we know it’s probably not going to change but internally at getting smart, we started talking about learning and experience records because not all experiences are employment.

And so how do we create a broader. Net to capture all learning and experiences that young people have or people throughout their life have and then dump them on to things like learn card, which is one of many digital wallets that are out there that can then be used to find good jobs, get higher ed opportunities, etcetera.

So I’m going to pass it off to Leigh Anne Taylor Knight from DeBruce Foundation, and she’s going to talk a little bit about the DeBruce work and answer how should we credential or should we credential experiences and competencies? Lay some more context. Leigh Anne, it’s all yours.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight: Thank you, Nate, and thank you so much, Julie and Ian, too, for this great introduction into this work.

For those of you, so we know some of you we are a national foundation located here in Kansas City, and we are committed to expanding pathways to economic growth and opportunity, and we Think about that very specifically with expanding career pathways. So today, as I share with you, I’m going to share both some research that we’ve done as well as a lot of tools that could be used on this pathway to being able to credential experiences.

And it was fun to see. Real-world learning here. CAPS here, Indiana. We have adoptions statewide adoption across Indiana and are working right here with real-world learning too. I think as you hear about some of these things today, my hope is that you’ll say, Oh, I want to take advantage of some of those tools and things that they have there at the DeBruce Foundation, where we’re helping people who are choosing and changing careers. And we know that all of you really are thinking about what’s that framework that we have to have that will help students, that will help educators, and will help employers.

And so a little bit of, if you ever have to convince somebody of why is this important Our employment empowerment framework, some of the research that we have done we’ve been able to identify two key elements to someone being employment empowered. Now, if you look over there at that formula and you think about, would you like to be able to help those who you are serving actually make more in annual earnings?

Probably yes. Would you like to Try to ensure that they would be less likely to be unemployed. And the thing about this for employers is it is desirable for the students who we are assisting to actually be stimulated and to want to consider jobs outside of their current pathway, right? So after they graduate from you and they’re going to change jobs multiple times, what is it that we have to instill that individuals have sooner rather than later?

So that they will do that. And so they will be that employment-empowered piece right now in America. Only about one out of three adults working age are employment empowered. And we’re committed here to thinking about how do we help back map and help earlier. Getting folks the things that they need to be employment empowered later.

Career literacy is one of those things. And all of you, everything that we’re talking here about credentialing and these kinds of experiences are ways that we help individuals increase their career literacy, having a vision of what they can do, getting practice at it, being confident in being able to share about those experiences.

Plus that network strength. And so so many of even the suggestions that you put in the chat earlier would help individuals diversify and deepen the networks that they have. So if this is the framework that we start from some of the tools that we have. That we hope individuals here and across the country will take advantage of is we have an agile work profiler.

So when we’re talking about students credentialing experiences, they’re going to be need to be able to talk about what happened in those experiences and in terms of the work activities that they did. And so by way of analyzing the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs that are in it, we actually have been able to boil down into An instrument that will only take them about 10 minutes to take they will know their top one through 10 agilities.

And these are work activities used in every single job in the economy, and they are a cross-section of what you like to do and what you do well. And what’s a little bit different about this is that you can grow and develop these. So when you take a look at these agilities and things like developing others, operating objects, managing, organizing, we can think back across our lifetime when we had those kinds of experiences that we’re talking about credentialing where we could actually grow our inspecting or we can grow our judging and estimating, right?

And so that’s what we would at the DeBruce Foundation say, yeah, it’s pretty important to not only just credential these, but also to give a language so that the students at the educators and the employers will be able to understand and be able to speak to those. So how do you translate those experiences into a work language?

How do you frame those skills? Both those technical skills that Nate has in. Their research as well as the America succeeds the transferable schools, the transportable skills, the durable skills, whatever you want to talk about or call those, you still need to be able to frame those up on your resume.

You need to be able to see those skills when you’re in that experience and getting that credential. And you need to be confident then. About being able to speak to it in interviews and to continue to develop those skills and say, Hey, I’d like to develop some more of those. Some of the research that we’ve done on working with youth.

We have a really cool, just four-page flyer out there about how to talk with youth about careers. And one of the things that they say. is youth with experience are more confident that they will achieve their career goals are more interested in researching future careers. We all want them to be doing that and to do a better job preparing for a career.

So some youth learn invaluable work-related skills and habits on their first job. But many of them talk about how difficult it is to Get that first job. So what’s the leg up that we can give them with this credentialing of experiences so that they can get that first job and they can begin to see what they like to do and what they do.

Just about a month ago with ASA’s teen voice platform. If you’ve not used it yet, you have got to use this. We were able to get 600 participants, again, nationally and across the nation, representative of different students. And we found that students are really confident when it comes to thinking about or knowing their future career.

And about eight out of 10 of them are somewhat to very confident about what that career choice is going to be. Now, we know that when they’re saying that when they’re 13 to 19 years old, there’s going to be some changes that happen. But while they have that level of confidence, would it surprise you to also learn that they really still need career literacy?

They need the things that we’re talking about today, and they need this credentialing of experiences. Because about one out of two have little to no idea about how to prepare for that career. And it’s these experiences that they have that we can credential that also lead them down that pathway to being able to see, Oh if I want to do that job three steps down the road, here’s how I better get to preparing myself.

Same is true. About only about one in two of them are considering two or fewer careers. Now, this is a group, you’re a group of sophisticated folks. You know that these students are going to have 7, 10, 12 careers across their lifetime switching and changing. And so we really need to spur them to increase that career literacy so that they will explore new and different careers.

So I do have a QR code and we’ll throw it in the chat too. But when we’re talking about the resources and the tools, allow me today to share. This is our charitable mission. We just want to give these tools to you so that you can help make those credentials a reality. meaningful, accessible, and aligned with real-world skills.

And so this is our gift as a charitable mission. There’s no catch here. You can get all of these free of charge. But is it important for those credentials to be happening? Yeah, I think so. And we’re really happy to be able to support that as a foundation.

Nate McClennen: Thank you so much, Leigh Anne. That was really good. I appreciate Camille dumping the resource in there. So feel free to reach out to that team with more questions, but really great information. And I want to pause here for a second and just the chat is there’s a lot going on in the chat right now.

And some things coming up around social capital and how social capital is really important. And I’m interested if see whoever was here, Brooke, if you can come off on off mute for a second and just talk a little bit about what NAF is doing in this area. Cause I think it’s interesting and worthwhile for the audience.

Brooke Rice: Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been doing work-based learning in our nonprofit for about 45 years. But over the past few years, we’ve really focused on how do we make sure that students are just participating in work-based learning as a check-the-box type of activity. But how do we make sure that they are that we’re designing work-based learning that is intentionally helping them develop their aspiration skills and connections.

And so we’ve reframed our approach. We’ve done tons of, free resources that are publicly available to anyone who wants them. But then we’re also collecting the measurement of individual student participation in work-based learning. And then those individual reflections of like how students are perceiving the impact of that work-based learning and those experiences on their aspirations, skills, and connections.

So it’s definitely a lot of really amazing work and it has really reframed for our educators and for our employer partners the work that we do at this level

Nate McClennen: No, I appreciate that and so so when we think about layers and it makes me think and here when we think about the model we’re presenting here and what we learned is Figuring out how social capital and building social capital and that reflection piece for work-based learning comes into play there the other piece that I just want to add is that It, it fits within this experience these experience categories around service.

But how do we really push not only are we pushing career engagement, career preparation, but we always have to partner that with civic engagement. And I think no matter where anybody sits in the political spectrum is that we need to make sure that young people are well-developed in both.

Set up for careers, set up for core skills, but also set up for civic engagement. And then I just want to call out that another part of the chat where we also have to remember that, that learning can actually just be for the sake of learning and this idea of joy and wonder and awe and.

I find myself sometimes having to remind myself of that because we’re so focused on careers and getting them ready to operate in the civic sphere and want to make sure that they lead really great lives because of the jobs they have. And we have to have them love learning at the same time.

So really important. Okay. We’re going to keep going here. So third question out of four. So are credentials valuable to higher education or employers? A lot of folks have alluded to this already. It’s showing up on chat. Ellucian did a great survey just talking about what is a better read of a job candidate’s qualifications 50/50 split on credentials versus degree MTC mentioned before by Julie they’ve worked with 514 different higher ed institutions that accept a non-traditional transcript so that’s a great move in that direction that higher ed’s starting to look at that and then of course we’ve we’ve all been tracking the news is that companies especially larger companies are saying who used to require some sort of college degree are saying you know what Maybe we don’t need that.

It remains to be seen if that’s going to change the hiring outputs, meaning are they going to hire more people without college degrees, but at least one of the barriers is down. Starting to see evidence that this is important, that credentialing matters to higher education employers.

Ironically, one of the things we also saw was that while The institutions say an institution like a higher ed saying we value experiences outside the normal classes. We’re going to document that on digital wallets. Admissions offices occasionally are the barrier for actually using these things in practice to go from secondary to post-secondary same for employers.

Employers will say, we want all these things and we’ll accept them. HR offices sometimes say, eh, just send me a PDF. Digital resume because I have too many to evaluate and that’s the best proxy. So there are some barriers even within those other parts of the other institutions.

And so valuable going back to our experience wheel here. We think that if students in secondary and even earlier than secondary can start filling out the different categories within these experiences. If we can credential them and store them into a learner’s wallet, learner wallet, and then take those.

And translate them out into competencies, a little bit like the demo, the skills extraction that we talked about right in the beginning with Ian in the school joy platform is how do we extract it from those experiences? And then turn them into valuable artifacts and valuable competencies that will then stack to higher education, stack to hiring, stack to upskilling.

The three major areas where we think this will be useful. So we’re taking experiences, putting those into a digital wallet. We’re taking the competencies through extraction, putting those into a digital wallet. Okay. and then using them in, into pathways into higher ed hiring or upskilling. Certainly a lot of platforms are working on this.

The U. S. Chamber Foundation had a whole Experience You pilot with a bunch of different platforms trying to extract prior experiences. You saw an example of Schooljoy, like I just mentioned, extracting from practice. And then LiveDex is another example in Colorado that’s translating student experiences via texts, meaning students writing reflections into college credit at local universities.

So direct translation of experience to college credit. These are great headways into this area.

And then finally, the other thing we ran into was How on earth do you discern differences between experiences and if you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, especially for young people, is that that young people who have, it feels like many more experiences in their career than I would as someone in my fifties every single experience that they’ve ever had is listed on there.

And some of them are two months. Some of them are four months. Some of them are 12 months. Occasionally they’re like two years, but a lot of them are short form, right? We also dove into the idea of how can we evaluate the quality of experiences? And we haven’t tested this yet, but it’s something that we’re interested in testing and looking around a couple of different areas of variability.

So what is the responsibility level in that experience? What is the complexity of that experience? So was it something really simple or was it something really multitask, multi-complex type of experience? And then what was the novelty of it? Did you start it and do it on your own, like an entrepreneurial experience, or were you just following someone else’s directions?

And it’s not to say that if you are in the yellow and all three of these areas with an experience it’s necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a different type of experience within the particular category. So making sure that we’re thinking about how do we evaluate this? We think there’s going to be a continued embedded performance assessment.

And then emerging external assessment with AI and AI-driven virtual reality, et cetera, et cetera, to really validate the experiences and competencies. Question from the group. I’m going to actually go to the next slide and then I’ll try to tackle that question. Take a pause here for about a minute.

Are credentials valuable to higher ed or employers? Where are the barriers? Where are the successes? Question from the group. To what degree do you think, do you all think that students might soon Own their credentials, experience, and degrees as part of blockchain technology. So really good question here.

I want to see who asked that question. Roman, you want to just voice that what’s your what’s your answer to that question your own question?

Roman Stearns: Oh, I honestly have no idea. I’ve heard murmurings of different folks in different places doing work around it. But the whole notion is that, rather than institutions owning students credentials that there might be ways to cobble experiences and courses and, whatever together in a way that could happen.

in a summative way become, in essence, qualifications for employment. And what that might look like, but I’m not about blockchain to be able to articulate the reality of that or, or the market to absorb it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. So really good question that the, my, my short take on that is the technology is available.

Someone put LearnCard in their credential wallet. There’s a number of. Free open source wallets and there’s a number of proprietary wallets that are out there, and some players especially in higher ed that are really working on this. So Western Governors University has a really robust digital wallet where they’re capturing and unpacking all college courses into Competencies as well as other experiences that the students could dump into a digital wallet and then from the blockchain perspective Despite all the world of crypto and the craziness that you see in the media, it actually is a really interesting way for people to own their own wallet and have what we call self sovereignty, which means it stays with you for as long as you want it.

And you get to control what you release to the world on that self-sovereign wallet. So the technology has advanced. I don’t think that technology is in a place where any high school could quickly adopt a digital wallet for every student. I think that’s to be seen and it remains to be seen. I am seeing more advances in higher education than perhaps the secondary space.

In this area. And we do believe we’re bullish that we think that’s the way to go. And we think that’s going to be the future as you’ll see in this last section here. And thanks for everybody. There are a lot of good podcasts on this as well to help learn more. So good question, Roman. Thank you. We’re gonna finish up with number four, which is a great segue is that will value increase when transcripts are replaced by learning and employment records. And we want to just walk through where we see the ecosystem. Now, as we did all this research over the last 6 to 12 months, and a lot of these conversations is the vast majority, especially in the K 12 space.

are in phases one and two here. So transcript phase one, so the end of secondary, you get something that looks currently in 2024, a lot like what you would have received in say 1920, right? Not much has changed. Sometimes the course descriptions change, but generally people are getting a transcript that says courses, grades, credit.

It’s very much a Carnegie unit. Based system. Some are thinking about how do we earn and create way more experiences. And I think that’s where we see the evolution of the space right now is that a lot of people on this call, like Correa, CAPS, et cetera, and now they’re trying to expand the possibilities for young people to get a lot more experience.

And so this experience category wheel that we put up there is a tool to help schools think about. Can every young person Get an experience that fills all these categories, not just course and class and not just in CTE world, but all these other areas as well. Those are earned, but they might not necessarily show on transcripts.

Most schools, secondary schools, high schools, are in that space. Transcripts are earned but not transcripted. Where we’re seeing the innovation is in 3 and 4. We’re calling 3 extended transcripts light. And this is where there’s requirements, but you might get your transcript and it might say you also earned.

You also earned the seal of biliteracy. You also earned a community service seal or something else on your transcript that says you did something beyond being in a set of classes for four years. Real-world learning, as we talked about, it’s another example of that. I just listened to a podcast on Elon university and higher ed.

And they have a really interesting extended transcript that is trying to capture way more of the college experience than just the courses. And then finally, the full LER ecosystem is out there and a lot of platforms working on it. Territorium, which has a huge footprint in Central and South America.

But it’s now moving into North America, and has a really robust digital wallet and connection of workforce and higher ed Greenlight Credentials, a digital wallet used extensively on in Texas. Alabama Talent Triad is a state-level effort. There’s a number of states that are trying to put out digital wallets that are trying to capture student experiences, link them to workforce potential and link them to higher ed or post-secondary opportunities.

So the whole triangle is connected. And then of course, MTC at the secondary level is our leader in this area. We think that there’s a small minority in the three and four space, but we’re really excited about what we’re learning from that space. And we’re hoping to move collectively as a group, try to get more folks earning and credentialing experiences so that they can then be put on transcripts, which can then be linked to employers and or post-secondary opportunities.

With that, and then we’ll open it up for any more discussion. Conclusion is that we believe that we should be credentialing experiences. And the competencies that can be extracted from them to increase opportunities for every learner. We’ve got a lot of signals that are saying this is important, and if we go way back to the beginning is that you create your North Star with a portrait of a graduate, you create a set of learning experiences, and you stack them into pathways.

And then we think about how can we credential a lot of this to make it valuable for learners along the way. 

Nate McClennen: Yeah, that’s great. No I really appreciate that. This is really about storytelling, right? And it’s about an individual young person. And as they get older, telling their story about their learning journey. I might just call out, Scott, I think from BrainPop, because we’ve been talking a lot about secondary, but you all are thinking about this K 8, and I wonder if you could just give a less than 30, like 30 second, 45-second just overview of what you’re thinking in that area.

Aysha, you want to come offline and just ask your question. It’s a good one.

Aysha Khan: Yeah. Hey everyone. I am Aysha Khan. I represent Runway Green. We are an organization in New York City. That are really interested in preparing students for green careers of the future. So something that we’re doing right now is trying to get our heads around this whole credentialing piece of work.

And what are the credentials that we want to offer students that prepares them and best sets them up for success in green careers of the future. So we. Are in this process of really trying to identify what our process is of like developing credentials and how we’re identifying the right credentials.

So curious to hear about how people have been tackling the process of developing or identifying credentials that they offer.

Nate McClennen: Aysha really good question. And we’re at the hour, but I will send you one of the really, I think you could learn a bunch, especially on green literacy. Is Colorado’s new seal of climate literacy, or I think that’s what it’s called, and they did a bunch of work to get that actually approved and actually went through the legislature.

to be the actual viable graduation experience. So I’ll connect you with those folks. And that might be a helpful place to start in terms of moving this stuff forward. All right, people, we’re at the end of the line. It’s an hour. Thank you so much for your time. Again, great chat, a lot of good stuff happening in the chat and all of you thank you so much for everything you’re doing for young people and trying to make good experiences possible for folks throughout their lives. Grateful for all the work you all do and for an amazing conversation. Thanks so much.

Links

• Expanding Access, Value, and Experiences through Credentials
• America Succeeds
• CAPS Network
• SchoolJoy
• The Portrait Model: Building Coherence in School and System Redesign
• New Pathways Handbook
• Durable Skills Advantage
• What School Could Be Episode with Andrew Culberson on What School Could Be Podcast
• Michael Horn’s Future of Education Podcast
• Free PD simulations
• Agile Work Profiler
• LearnCard
• Experience in Michigan
• Experience in Wyoming
• Seal of Climate Literacy
• Episode with Mahealani Jackson on What School Could Be Podcast
• Press Releases on Youth and Careers by DeBruce
• National Career Development Month
• AI in HR Tech Study by Northeastern University
• LAUNCH Program by Elmbrook Schools
• Suitable for Digital Badging by Ohio 4-H
• OECD Creative Thinking 2022
• BrainPOP