Bridging Education and Industry: Exploring Durable Skills with Michael Crawford

Michael Crawford

VP of Strategic Initiatives, America Succeeds

Quotes of the Podcast: "We know more than we can tell" - Michael Polanyi

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Michael Crawford is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at America Succeeds, where he leads efforts to advance durable skills. Prior to this role, Michael held positions in research, strategy, and partnerships at organizations including VELA, WGU, Real World Scholars, and the Kauffman Foundation. He is a frequent speaker, mentor, and facilitator on topics like human development, entrepreneurship, and the future of learning. Michael holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan, an MS in Sport Psychology from Michigan State University, and a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Kansas. Outside of work, he enjoys time with loved ones, traveling, and reading voraciously across a wide range of topics.

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators.

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• Speaker on the Future of Learning
• Durable skills  - Pathsmith
• implications of AI on Durable Skills 
• Research Practice Collaborative [high school research])
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?” 

Podcast/ website/ book shoutouts

(podcast) 'Your Undivided Attention' by The Center for Humane Technology

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. Welcome back to Education Perspectives. We're so excited to have Michael Crawford, who is the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at America Succeeds.

Liza Holland [00:00:38]:
Welcome, Michael. So glad to have you aboard with us.

Michael Crawford [00:00:41]:
Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Liza Holland [00:00:44]:
Want to kick you off with our 30,000-foot question. So why do you think that we as a society invest in education?

Michael Crawford [00:00:54]:
Great question. I think there are a range of reasons. I think there are more individual reasons where we want to see the potential that every young person has, every young person that grows into an adult. We want to empower them to kind of be the best versions that they can be, discover who they are and, and what they're capable of. I think we also have societal reasons, more sort of civic-oriented reasons for investing in education. We believe that there are aspects of the society, whether they are formal rules or more mores and sort of general guidelines, ways of operating in America or in society more broadly, and we think that schools and education systems are ways of doing that. And I think there are economic reasons for investing in education, thinking about the creation of new businesses and innovations, opportunities for people to pursue the American dream or to make a life for themselves that they deem worthy of living, and equipping young people, learners, post-secondary folks with the skills and the dispositions and the relationships and the opportunities that they can embrace to create that kind of economic value that is a key component of our society. So those are a few, a few that come to mind.

Michael Crawford [00:02:31]:
I think often of a friend of mine, Dr. Erin Raab, who wrote her dissertation on the purposes of education, and I think about her work often when thinking about the purpose or purposes of education.

Liza Holland [00:02:47]:
Thank you. That was a great answer, and I'm now interested in, in reading Dr. Robb's work. She is, is right on target there because I think sometimes, particularly when it comes to assessment and whatnot, are we really measuring for what we're looking for? It's always a good question to kind of take that step back to go, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? So speaking of why are we doing this, you have a great background in psychology. What drew you to education?

Michael Crawford [00:03:17]:
I always wanted to make a positive impact on the lives of young people in particular, but people more broadly. I believe to this day, and it's— it was true back then, that I think adults leave a lot of potential on the table. I think there are choices that adults make, systems that adults build, decisions that adults wrestle with that are often not always in service of themselves and their communities and just the broader society. And I felt like if I could make a difference or make an impact on, you know, improving people's ability to make better decisions for themselves, you know, 1%, that that 1% across an entire population would make a big impact. Both my parents were public school educators, both worked, you know, 30-plus years. My dad was a math teacher and a PE teacher and coach at the high school level and My mom was a PE teacher in elementary school, and so I was very familiar with what educators— or I guess I should say, I thought I was very familiar with what educators did based on the conversations we would have and the different stories that they would tell. And I saw education as an incredible kind of context or space to make a difference, certainly with young people. But as young people grow and get older, they have chances to make decisions that are serving of themselves and their communities.

Michael Crawford [00:04:47]:
And so I didn't necessarily want to be classroom teacher per se. I think there are folks out there who that is their, that is their jam, that is their calling. They love being working with young folks and kind of, you know, bringing the best out of them. I felt like for me, working kind of up the system I don't know, path, I guess, would make more sense. If I could have an impact on a school system, a district, you know, a university system, even more broadly, that I could have a— that I could make a difference in a positive way. And so I started learning more about psychology. That's where my— I joke sometimes that I'm just collecting psychology degrees, degrees in sort of general psychology and then sports psychology and educational psychology. But education, the space where people learn new things about the world, about themselves, they get to try on different hats and experience different kinds of challenges and opportunities.

Michael Crawford [00:05:55]:
What an incredible place to spend time and invest time to help make the world a better place. So Long story short, everybody has some version of an experience with education, whether it's through a formal public school setting or homeschool or these days micro schools and unschooling. Everybody has an opportunity ideally to learn and grow. And so if I could intervene and have an impact in that space, then it felt like a worthy calling. And so that's what I've been doing for, I don't know, going on, I think we're in 15-something years or so working in and around education.

Liza Holland [00:06:30]:
Fantastic. For those of our listeners who are not familiar, tell us a little bit about America Succeeds.

Michael Crawford [00:06:38]:
Yeah, so America Succeeds is a national nonprofit. We've been around for a little bit over 10 years, originally started as a state nonprofit, started as Colorado Succeeds, serving as the business voice in education in the state of Colorado. We would listen and learn from what employers were what they were doing, what the future of work was, was starting to, what was starting to emerge there, and then work backwards through policy and research to build better bridges between the education side of the house and the employment side of the house. We started getting inbound interest from other states and was approached by a funder to say, hey, you should, you should take this nationally. There are other states and other entities that would be interested in the research and the policy guidance that we were putting out. And so we shifted a bit from being a state organization to a national organization and have been operating at that sort of national level ever since. Most of our work has been focused around, as I mentioned, policy recommendations and guidance and doing research. And so really trying to understand how to advance economic mobility and where and how education can kind of plug in and support the development of skills and relationships, uh, and allow people to kind of chart their own professional course.

Michael Crawford [00:08:05]:
Uh, about 5 years or so ago, we started hearing over and over from employers that they could find talent with technical skills, uh, the sort of domain-specific, uh, capabilities, but they had a much harder time finding folks who could speak effectively to clients or work with people from different backgrounds or solve complex challenges. And so we were curious about what they were both saying and sort of not saying. And so we dove into the research literature and ended up stumbling across this idea of durable skills, this sort of transferable, essential skills that last from job to job throughout a particular career journey. And I can say more about that, but the last 5 years or so, we've really been focused on durable skills and again, doing research and working with different organizations and universities universities and industry associations and school districts to help them better understand where and how durable skills show up and how to support their learners and earners in both developing the, those kinds of skills as well as articulating them and using them in their pursuits. So it's been great.

Liza Holland [00:09:16]:
Well, I'm so glad that you're doing it, and I tell you, when I first came across you all and, and learned specifically about Pathsmith, I've been so eager to talk to you because I have an initiative called Better Questions for Brighter Futures that plays in this space a lot, and that's kind of where I'm called to be, is building those bridges between business and industry and education. So kudos to you, very excited to learn more. So let's kind of dive in more to durable skills and what is Pathsmith and how can it make an impact?

Michael Crawford [00:09:52]:
Yeah, so as I mentioned, we initially started diving into this space having the term durable skills at the time. Instead, we're discovering taxonomies and skills frameworks such as soft skills and social-emotional skills and non-cognitives and 21st century and all the terminology that has been out there for a little bit as it relates to these sorts of skills. And in particular, soft skills. Soft skills emerged as a term in the 1960s and '70s from the US military, and it referred to the skills that were used when you weren't working with machines, when you weren't working with actual sort of physical objects. Those were called hard skills that you needed to develop there. And instead, soft skills are all these other skills that were included. And so we dove into the literature about 5 years ago, crosswalked a range of skills taxonomies, and what we discovered was that there tended to be overlaps in all of these different skills lists. And in working with an employer partner, Hearing them talk about skills that lasted, skills that could kind of last over time or through jobs.

Michael Crawford [00:11:05]:
And somebody in one of our focus groups said, it sounds like you're talking about durable skills. And we said, yes, we are talking about durable skills. That's a much better term. And so we are going to go with that term. And durable skills include skills like collaboration and communication and critical thinking and creativity. The skills that, again, are incredibly human and are useful and relevant and necessary across all jobs, I would say, in different degrees. And so we, in that crosswalk, we landed on 10 durable skills competencies. And then in partnership with MZ Burning Glass, which is now Lightcast, we said, okay, well, are these the kinds of skills that employers are talking about? And we worked with Lightcast to cull a list of 400 search terms down to 100, and then we attached the 100 to our 10 durable skills competencies, and then we ran those those 100 through 80 million job descriptions to really understand or identify, are these in fact the skills that employers are looking for? And it turns out that yes, they were.

Michael Crawford [00:12:12]:
At the time, 7 of the 10 most requested skills are durable skills. We've recently rerun the analysis, 8 of the top 10 these days are durable skills, and the top 5 requested Durable skills are requested almost 4 times as often as the top 5 technical skills. And so there is absolutely something here. These are the skills that employers are looking for. And so we converted that kind of discovery into a wheel, our durable skills wheel, which has the 10 durable skills competencies around the inner ring and the 100 subskills around the outer ring. And then we said, okay, if this is going to be useful for folks, then we need to better understand how these skills are developed and how these skills can be measured. And so we, in partnership with CompTIA, the Computer Technology Industry Association, worked with them and over 20 subject matter experts, folks from industry and universities and researchers, HR professionals, as well as more than 800 employers, folks as large as McDonald's and Intel all the way down to much smaller organizations, helped to co-create our Pathsmith Durable Skills Framework. So this is essentially a rubric, a performance rubric for what an early career professional should know and be able to do.

Michael Crawford [00:13:32]:
So it has our final count, 74 subskills across 4 performance levels from emerging, which is just beginning to use that skill, to exceeding, which is they can use that skill unconsciously at a high level, across multiple contexts, and we packaged that up into our Pathsmith framework and released that out into the world in January of 2024, which happened to be when I started at America Succeeds. And so our framework has been out for 2 years now. We have it in 2 forms. We license it to partners. So these could be state organizations, universities, product developers, implementers, all kinds of different organizations that want to embed a framework into their professional development offerings or their AI tools or their courses, that is available to license. And then we have a free version, what we call our starter edition, which is available for free to download. It is a limited version of the framework. It has all of the subskills at the applying level.

Michael Crawford [00:14:34]:
And that's available right now at passmith.org to go check out. You can see all the skills, you can see the definitions. And as long as you're not selling anything, you can use that framework in your classes or with your teams to be able to do that. And ultimately, there are a range of frameworks out there. People are able to define and create their own, their own frameworks, their own lists. And Pathsmith is America Succeeds' version of that. It comes with the lexicon, it comes with the definition, it comes with the rubric itself, and it was built through the analysis of 80 million job descriptions and more than 800 employers. And We're excited that it's out there and excited to, to work with folks who, who want to incorporate it into their work.

Liza Holland [00:15:19]:
Well, that's phenomenal. What an incredible research-backed, substantive initiative. That's just amazing. What are you finding as far as the uptick of people utilizing it at this point?

Michael Crawford [00:15:34]:
Yeah, so we have the starter edition that we released is a good indicator of some of the energy for what we have put out. Since it was released in January of 2024, there have been more than 2,100 people who have downloaded it. And these are folks from industry, folks from the K-12 space, you know, community college presidents to folks that work at state departments of ed to companies that want to, you know, that are doing work in soft skills or durable skills or essential skills and they want a framework to base their work on. So that has been, that has been exciting. And then we work with a number a number of partners who have licensed the full framework and have embedded it in their offerings. So for example, the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in Arizona State has built courses that have leveraged our framework. The folks at TNTP who serve schools and districts all around the country, helping them implement different kinds of initiatives, have licensed our framework and have built a durable skills implementation arm of their work. So any school or district that maybe is trying to make their portrait of a graduate from a poster on the wall to actual, you know, impacts on teaching and learning, can work with TNTP to help bring that to life in their school or district.

Michael Crawford [00:16:54]:
We work with this really incredible AI company that has built voice-based simulations that have our framework kind of undergirding it. And so you could have a conversation, for example, around, you know, being a hospice nurse, and that through that conversation, not only would it identify the technical skills required for a conversation around hospice, but also would then be able to provide an assessment of your durable skills, communication, empathy, active listening, things like that, and provide recommendations for how to improve on your durable skills the next time you go about it. And we're working with Nemo, that's the name of the AI company, across a range of different industries like healthcare and manufacturing and IT and things like that. And so there is a hunger for whether you call it a standard or a kind of agreed-upon set of these skills. And because ours is as research-backed and employer-driven as it is, we get a lot of inbound attention from folks who are trying to figure out how to bring these durable skills to life.

Liza Holland [00:17:58]:
Well, that is super exciting. Tell me, you know, talking about your Nemo AI partnership and whatnot, what do you think the implications of this whole new AI generation are going to have on durable skills?

Michael Crawford [00:18:12]:
We are seeing it already. There are headlines after headlines about the impact AI is having on the workforce, certainly as well in the education space, the impact that AI can have on what teaching means, the role of educators, the implications for cheating, things like that. As we think about durable skills, one of the things that we are hearing from others and discovering in our own work is that while AI is getting better and faster and more dynamic every day, the kinds of human skills, the durable skills that humans possess, are the ones that are being demanded more seriously. So, for example, things like judgment and decision-making and strategy that, you know, AI may get to a point where it can do those as good as human beings can, but in the short term, it certainly cannot. It's one thing for an AI tool or an LLM to be able to generate a project proposal. It's another thing, though, for the human part to— the human part of that equation to ask good questions or frame the project in a way that is actually useful or impactful or fundable or whatever the goals are. And AI can't quite do that yet. It can make suggestions, it can make recommendations, But the durable skills that a human has are, you know, what will allow the human plus AI to be able to navigate more effectively moving forward.

Michael Crawford [00:19:44]:
I've recently was listening to a podcast and the folks were talking about how right now a lot of people are thinking of AI as, as an efficiency tool, essentially. Like if, if, if it just takes 40% of the current workforce to deliver on 100% of the work, then we don't need 60% of our workforce. That's one way to think about it, and there are a lot of companies who are laying folks off because they are finding efficiencies based on AI. However, another way to think about it is that if you can get 100% of your current work done with 40% capacity, then what about the other 60% of your team's capacity, and how might they be able to leverage AI to do more than what they're doing right now, or different than what they're doing right now? Essentially, You know, thinking about folks as more than just their particular function, but instead as broader analysts or, or generalists that now with AI tools are able to deliver even more value. And the skills that will allow them to be adaptable, to be creative in unique ways, to work with others and collaborate, to see opportunities around corners, are not the technical skills, but instead are the durable skills, you know, exercising judgment and thinking strategically and working with new and different people. Again, AI, you know, one day may be able to lean into that. In the short term, it's not able to do that, broadly speaking. And I would say in the medium term, it's not really able to do that either.

Michael Crawford [00:21:18]:
And so really doubling down and investing in, you know, whether you are a learner or an earner or an employer or an education institution, thinking about where and how people can develop and demonstrate durable skills are going to equip them to be best positioned in a future that will only continue to be influenced by AI.

Liza Holland [00:21:41]:
Yeah, we're preparing all these students for jobs that don't even exist yet.

Michael Crawford [00:21:45]:
100%. And I think there will be, you know, there are jobs that don't exist yet. I think that is true. I think there are probably ways of working that don't exactly exist yet. There are, the ways in which we interface with technologies that are emerging, right? And we all now can send an email or, you know, open up a new tab, but for— and those are pretty basic, but for a little while, you know, people, we didn't know necessarily how the broader population or professionals are going to interface with computers or the internet or mobile. And I think that is— there's a version of that that's true with AI, and AI is even more dynamic than, than some of these tools that mention. And so, yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot to be discovered, we'll say.

Liza Holland [00:22:27]:
Absolutely. I feel very strongly that in our quest to adapt our education system to meet the needs of today, that we really need to be thinking about how we create lifelong learners. I was at a social entrepreneurship conference, and one of the CEOs there said, I need people who can learn, unlearn, and relearn at a rapid type of a pace because because things are changing so quickly that we just need that adaptability and the flexibility and all those things that, again, come back to those durable skill sets that regardless of the content, as it were, to use education terms, it's what processes do you use to be able to work through that information and think about it critically, et cetera, et cetera.

Michael Crawford [00:23:18]:
It is not the case for more and more people these days it's a straight line between where they are today as an early student and where their professional path will lead them. It is much more likely that they will need to be much more dynamic, much more adaptable. They will need to think differently about relationships and about when and where and how they learn and their own mindset around themselves as a professional and what it might— in the past, it was the case that you know, you went to school for a little while and then school stopped and all of a sudden work started. You were in a new train car, essentially. That is not the, the world that we are currently living in, and it will only continue to change in that direction moving forward. Learning and working and sort of the blurring of those, of those roles or functions, it will continue to get blurrier. And so someone who is able to pick up new technologies, meet and discover new people, think differently about where their organization fits in a broader, you know, all of those kinds of things that, that have always been available, I think, for folks are now going to find their way into more and more people's worlds. And so what are the implications for education systems? How do we think and talk about schools and education and learning? How do we talk about work? All these conversations that maybe have happened that, you know, in boardrooms or in, you know, academic spaces, uh, or futurist spaces are now finding their way into, you know, dinner table conversations, possibly.

Michael Crawford [00:24:57]:
Um, so yeah, it's, it's exciting, it's scary, it's daunting, and we'll see what happens.

Liza Holland [00:25:03]:
A little bit of all of it.

Michael Crawford [00:25:05]:
Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:25:06]:
Circling back a little bit to research, I understand you have a research practice collaborative that's kind of focusing on high school. Where do things stand there?

Michael Crawford [00:25:14]:
We do. Yeah, this project is wrapping up as we record this in late February. We have over the last year and a half, 18, 20 months or so, been working with high schools across the country to try to make sense and figure out where and how they are supporting durable skills development. The initial question was Basically just that. We know that durable skills are important. We know that schools are delivering on durable skills development in different kinds of ways, even if they don't necessarily use that term. Some schools have opportunity, more opportunities to support durable skills development than others. And we were curious about what it looked like.

Michael Crawford [00:25:58]:
What does it look like for a school to prioritize skill development, to think differently about career-connected learning, to embrace existing technologies? What does pedagogy look like? How are they thinking about leadership? What kind of language are they are they using? So starting in, we'll call it, 18 months ago, we started working with high schools. We went and visited, uh, 4 high schools around the country as a starting point. We wanted to talk to students and staff and leadership and parents and alumni to better understand how skills showed up in their world. How were they thinking about it? How are they prioritizing it? And we released our Phase 1 report, which was a deep dive into those 4 schools, in January of last year. And then since then, we have, we expanded the samples to 12 high schools across the country. And these are, you know, well representative of a diverse population. So urban, suburban, and rural, large schools, small schools, public schools, private schools, boutique schools, all kinds of different models. And all with the same hope and goal of, are there patterns? Are we seeing consistencies throughout these schools and programs as it relates to durable skills development.

Michael Crawford [00:27:13]:
We will have a large report that's coming out that describes our findings and how the findings are kind of connected to one another and some recommendations. We'll have profiles of all 12 schools that we worked with so you can get a better sense of the uniqueness and the context specificity that each of these schools embraced as they supported durable skills development. And then we'll have a playbook for educators and school leaders that want to integrate and embrace a durable skills development kind of approach so that, you know, every school and every context, every community is different. There's similarities, but there's differences. And so what might work, Liza, in your school district may not work in my school district, but what can I learn from you that I can apply in my space? And RPC Phase 2 report and playbooks will have that information. So we're really excited about that coming out for educators and school leaders to get their hands on it. My sense is there will be some things in this report that are no-brainers for folks, like, oh yeah, of course we want to ensure that young people have opportunities for self-direction and they can pursue projects and things that are interesting to them. Of course, no-brainers.

Michael Crawford [00:28:26]:
And there's maybe some things in there that are unique and different, thinking differently about the role of reflection, for example, or the importance of intentionality and being explicit about the certain skills that you're focusing on. How does it integrate throughout all of the school experience and not just in one class or in one grade? And so there are some really exciting insights that we'll, we'll have coming out in the next month or so.

Liza Holland [00:28:52]:
How exciting. Well, as soon as it comes out, I will make sure to link it in the show notes for this particular podcast so that everybody can dig into it the way that I plan to.

Michael Crawford [00:29:02]:
Great, thanks.

Liza Holland [00:29:03]:
So this piece of trying to integrate the durable skills into schools is the systems as they have been set up are not necessarily built to incorporate these things. So what kind of challenges do you see? What, what are the big challenges for you as far as helping people to adapt and integrate these skill sets and rubrics and pedagogies and whatnot into, into our old school sort of classroom?

Michael Crawford [00:29:37]:
Yeah, I think there are challenges and there are ways of overcoming them. So first, one challenge I would say has to do with an awareness gap that people may be familiar with soft skills. Maybe they've even heard the term durable skills, but depending on where you go and who you talk to, there are as many definitions and kind of key terms. And so I think one piece of it is really better understanding what are durable skills, what do they mean? And if you're thinking about a school or a district, the question then is, well, what do we mean by them? How are we defining these? How are we understanding these? So I think there's a, there's an awareness gap that doesn't necessarily require a whole, you know, it doesn't require new infrastructure or anything, major changes there. It just requires aligning and coming together and different schools and different communities have done this different. So I would say there's an awareness gap. That, that's important. The other is starting where you are and what you're already doing, right? So oftentimes what we have found is that, for example, to develop collaboration skills, it is important to have opportunities to collaborate.

Michael Crawford [00:30:52]:
And so different schools and schools probably all across the country, I would imagine, are, you know, using group work and they have projects where multiple students are working together on a particular project. So that's not something new that has to be developed, but instead where there could be a more kind of durable skills emphasis or approach would be to identify what are the elements of collaboration that are unfolding within a team setting, for example, and being very explicit about identifying roles and figuring out who manages time and what technology tools are we using and how should— can we raise questions and talk to one, you know, all the different elements that go into collaboration, making those explicit explicit so that when young people are engaging in group work, it's not just like, oh, well, we worked as a team, so therefore I developed collaboration skills. It's like, no, no, no, we were very specific about what we were already doing. So that would be a second thing is to kind of scan and take stock of what it is that you're already doing that are in support of durable skills and just be a little bit more explicit with it. I think, you know, zooming out a little bit, one of the challenges incorporating or integrating durable skills has to do with incentives and this, the kind of accountability structures that are in place at the moment at a systems level. So currently, public schools often get dollars based on their academic results, reading and writing and math scores, things like that. And they aren't incentivized to embrace or engage around durable skills. And so from a state policy standpoint, different states are doing this differently, but creating accountability and incentive structures that— it's one thing to speak highly of these kinds of skills, it's another to actually create the infrastructure and the accountability structures, you know, really sort of encourage, you know, where rubber meets road.

Michael Crawford [00:32:44]:
We can say, oh, we are prioritizing these skills, here is how we have decided to measure them, here are the— here's the growth that we have begun to see, and have it tie into accountability systems. And I think maybe the last piece that I'll touch on, and there are certainly challenges, although I think they are all surmountable, is the, what I would describe as a kind of acceptance gap or an articulation gap that right now we use things like transcripts and, you know, even at the employer level, resumes. And oftentimes the systems aren't really built to speak to one another. And so when I come out with a transcript and I have a 3.8 and it said I you know, played on the soccer team, a university or an employer is not able to ascertain my skill set, my capabilities based on the existing signals that we're sending. And so I think that's one of the challenges that at a, again, at a system level, thinking about signals and the sort of legibility of signals from, you know, sent by one side, received by another is something that we're definitely interested in, something that there's a challenge that exists in the broader kind of education, employment, landscape. And so I definitely think that that is a challenge worth, you know, worth pursuing. I mean, I know there are folks out there and ourselves as well that are really trying to zero in on, well, what are these signals? How can they become more legible? Thinking about infrastructure throughout the whole system. I think that's a, that's an exciting space.

Liza Holland [00:34:20]:
We'll say it sure is. It sure is. And you actually identified several, but And my final question is, what would you like for decision makers to know? And you can define decision makers however you'd like.

Michael Crawford [00:34:35]:
That is a good question. And decision makers is quite the term. I would say, maybe I'll say a few things and we'll see, we'll see where these land. I think, you know, I would start with the awareness and understanding that these are important skills. I think that more and more, quote, decision makers, whether they are school superintendents, whether they are employers, are coming to recognize that these skills are important. So I think that it's important for them to know that these skills are important. I suspect that they are starting to. The next thing I would say that decision makers should know is that these skills, durable skills in particular, are not going away.

Michael Crawford [00:35:17]:
You know, we say they're durable, but they are based on existing scholarship, what other employers are talking about, the sort I don't necessarily love the term common sense, but sort of common sense view of what AI is beginning to do in a workforce or in a workplace and what kinds of skills will allow somebody to thrive. I would say decision makers need to recognize that these skills are not going away, that investment in these skills is worth it, that these skills can be learned and developed and supported through different modalities of assessment, different ways of communicating and articulating these kinds of skills, they're not just, it's not just a black box, whether someone is, you know, a good communicator or creative or a good critical thinker. There are ways of understanding what these skills are. There are ways of defining them, of helping to develop them and helping people to demonstrate and articulate them. So I would say that there is hope here, that there is tremendous potential with investments in durable skills. I would encourage them to, to kind of dig in and dive in and figure out what that looks like in their context.

Liza Holland [00:36:30]:
That's a fantastic answer. So excited here in Kentucky. We currently in front of our legislature have a House bill that is including— they're calling them local indicators of quality, but the reality is it's durable skills and what the, the local accountability piece and Portrait of a Graduate is, and they're actually including it in their new version of an assessment system. So I'm just excited to see how that all plays out.

Michael Crawford [00:36:59]:
Yeah, and again, that, that is a great example of a state that is trying to wrap their arms around where the future is headed, the importance of these kinds of skills, thinking about what young people that they are serving actually need moving forward. Some states are a little bit further along in that journey than others, and Kentucky is certainly representative of that. So that's great.

Liza Holland [00:37:24]:
Well, thank you so very much for taking the time and sharing all this insight with us here on Education Perspectives.

Michael Crawford [00:37:30]:
Thanks for having me. I had a great time.

Liza Holland [00:37:33]:
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