Being an Active Participant vs. A Passive Recipient
A Conversation with Will Houghteling: Founder of Strive
Welcome to September! Not sure how we got here, but we’re here.
I want to start off by thanking everyone who’s given me feedback to date. It is both exhilarating and frightening every time I press publish. Receiving both positive and critical feedback helps validate the work I am doing; it’s a gift. (Thanks, Netflix ;)
Okay, enough about me. A day late, but this week I am in conversation with Will Houghteling, the Founder of Strive and long-time EdTech enthusiast. Having spent time in both Google and YouTube’s EDU orgs, as well as serving as a Managing Director at Minerva before founding Strive, Houghteling shared his unique perspective on:
The EdTech space at large;
Building a startup centered around upskilling;
What’s broken about the employment education system;
Learning in the flow of work;
Why communication will always be king; and
The value of active learning.
PLUS I’m excited to use my conversation with Will as a launch for a new feature this week. Look out for a list of additional resources at the end of our interview.
The model for employment that is built on the idea of training potential workers for four years and expecting them to work for forty is flawed. The math is off. The algorithm is broken.
As Will Houghteling, the founder of Strive makes abundantly clear, there needs to be a more equitable, dynamic relationship between education and work. Growing up in a family of teachers, Houghteling recognized early the outsized impact that education has as a vehicle for personal development and on one's life trajectory. Houghteling founded Strive with the goal to help those in the workforce who’ve already technically completed their education, but still have much to learn. Our conversation gets started at the beginning with childhood education.
Is the system really broken?
I’ve heard people say for years that the education model is broken. But what does this actually mean? Houghteling touches on a few glaring truths that make perceptions feel like reality. He simply states, “Look at the large discrepancy between jobs in the US that demand a college degree and the actual amount of college graduates.” In 2019 approximately thirty-six percent of women and around thirty-five percent of men had a college degree, while sixty-five percent of job openings in 2020 require at least a some level of college education or associate’s degree.
“Look at primary and secondary school, while everything in this world seems to be changing, school seems to be the one thing standing still.”
Using a common cliche from the tech world, Houghteling talks about pulling your great grandparents into modern America, imagining them seeing a day in your life as it is now. “You show them our houses and our cars, our supermarkets (how we buy food), and our smart phones and they're totally blown away. Then you bring them to a school and they say oh wow this is exactly like the school that I went to!” And he’s right. Most classrooms are still set up for lecturing, with a single teacher teaching the same curriculum to a group of students, at the same speed, regardless of aptitude or ability. Students are still graded primarily on test scores, and grouped based strictly on age. In this there is a divide between passive learning (students receive the same instruction from the teacher) and active learning (students are actively or experientially involved in the learning process). I ask Houghteling’s opinion on why the model of passive learning continues to prevail. Simply put, he says, there is a lack of trust in active learning. He goes on to list the following additional reasons for this:
Teaching a class using active learning methods doesn’t always appeal to the instructor. Teachers (and students!) falsely believe the idea that the more dynamic the lecture, the more notes students take, the more they’re learning.
Active learning loops really depend on being able to apply the skill. It’s not easy for the professor to know or teach all potential applications of a given skill.
Active learning is hard!
Houghteling has a unique ability to comment on active learning from his experience working at the Minerva school, witnessing first hand what happens when active learning is at the center of a curriculum.
“Active learning is about using information so you think about it deeply. The mere act of being engaged results in your remembering and learning material in a way that simply won't happen if you are sitting passively like some kind of a sponge trying to get something from a lecture.” - Stephen Kosslyn, the founding Dean at Minerva
Active learning should not be reserved for specialized schools or specific adult-ed programs. It should be leveraged from undergraduate programs through to on-the-job training. Houghteling envisions universities that look less like a stand-alone institution that you start at 18 and leave at 22, but instead start to function like a scaffold built around your profession, helping you move from one rung of your career to the next.
Active Learning as part of Learning in the Flow of Work.
Where some moments in your career you will be looking to up-skill, at others you’ll be looking to re-skill. Houghteling refers to this as “moving from A to A prime or moving from X to X+Y” respectively. This is what he and his team at Strive are focused on: professional growth and on transforming managers into leaders. Strive’s approach of Absorb, Practice, Apply, Reflect mirrors the active learning method, and one that can be applied to developing all sorts of hard and soft skills. By focusing on new managers and those who want to grow their people skills, Strive believes they are creating organization value while helping companies build a diverse bench of leaders. Why start here? This simple fact is true, it is hard working with others.
“How do you be a coach not a boss? How do you empower rather than micromanage your team? How do you have difficult conversations? How do you create spaces where people feel a sense of inclusion and belonging?”
Houghteling asks me these questions in a sort of rhetorical way. He speaks both of the efforts they are making at Strive to build platforms and programs to improve leadership development, but also his own efforts as a founder, CEO, and leader. When I ask him what skills he considers essential in his own leadership development he highlights two areas:
Functional: becoming a stronger Product manager and leader. Everyone needs to focus on a functional skill that will help them solve a specific problem.
Interpersonal: working on improving your EQ. Emotional quotients aren’t as sexy or easy to measure progress, but just as important in building effective leadership.
Houghteling is actively working on his own functional and interpersonal capacity through training, coaching, and seeking critical feedback. Proof that even as you’re building a company to help others learn new skills, you cannot become complacent about your own.
I take this feeling and message to heart as I navigate my own efforts to up-skill, to stay relevant and educated. It’s hard sometimes to juggle building a business with actively identifying and improving my skill set. But I am committed to practicing what (I am trying to) preach. I’ve decided to work on active listening and improving my story-telling ability, skills that have often been promoted by the very EdTech founders I’m connecting with. Now that I’ve shared my goals, let me know: What are YOU working on? Comment or reply back!
Did the interview with Will get you excited to learn more?! Check out these links for more information on the ideas we discuss above.
Actual learning vs the feeling of learning: A recent Harvard study exposing students to both traditional lectures and active learning, proving that student’s perceptions don’t necessarily match performance. What else might we be getting wrong? [Link]
The secret to being a good manager in a “quarantimes world”: How you can get data from text when visual cues aren’t available, how to listen for resistance, and why receiving live feedback can often hijack an employee’s amygdala. [Podcast Link]