Vinay Ganti (00:00)
Welcome to Praxis Journeys, where we explore the paths of today's most influential leaders.

in education and the real world strategies they're using to drive lasting change. I'm Vinay Ganti. In each episode, I sit down with the people shaping the future of our schools to talk candidly about the big issues, teacher recruitment, leadership, innovation, school culture, policy, and more. Whether you're an educator, administrator, or advocate, you'll find fresh ideas and actionable insights to inform your own journey and help students thrive. Let's dive in.

Vinay Ganti (00:33)
In today's episode, we talked to one of our own, Laura Slover, Managing Director of the Skills for the Future initiative here at ETS. We discussed the importance of measuring things like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, you know, the skills like that are often called durable skills, and how that can be sort of better embedded in contexts like K-12 and elsewhere. and we get a little personal. We both talk a little bit about our own kids and

And sort of the opportunities that we wish that or hope to, they they might be able to have as a result of these new ways of measuring achievement and accomplishment that may not always be reflected in an academic transcript. So we hope you enjoy the conversation. Thank you.

Vinay Ganti (01:14)
Alright, thanks for joining today. Before we dive in, I'd like to give you a chance to introduce yourself to our listeners and viewers.

Laura Slover (01:21)
Thanks, Vinay. It's nice to be here. I'm Laura Slover. I am the leader of the ETS Carnegie effort called Skills for the Future, which is an initiative working with states to drive the adoption and measurement of durable skills. Durable skills are things like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, things that all learners need but aren't directly taught or measured, even though they're present in curriculum. So we're trying to

transform education both in the classroom and at the measurement level to make what is invisible more visible, both for learners, educators, parents, and then of course colleges and employers.

Vinay Ganti (02:07)
So, yeah, that's super interesting. And I would love to just, before we dive into the beat of this Goals for the Future initiative, love you to maybe hear from you first, sort of what drew you to this idea, what drew you to ETS.

Laura Slover (02:21)
I think I've been on a career long quest to help learners at the high school level find their passion and be prepared for life after high school, whether they go directly into a job or stop along the way in post-secondary education. I started my career as a high school teacher and a basketball coach and got to work with kids who were

super book smart and did had great grades and were going off to college and kids who might not have had great grades, but were super smart and capable and watching the divide between kids who saw great grades and thought they were smart and kids who didn't see great grades and therefore thought they weren't smart was heartbreaking. And so throughout my career, I've been in positions, whether it was at achieve or

Vinay Ganti (03:01)
Yeah.

Laura Slover (03:09)
Park or most recently CenterPoint that have been striving to help learners be prepared for the world so that they can take on whatever their dreams are.

Vinay Ganti (03:20)
Yeah, it's super interesting. mean, yeah, there's so many important points there, which is around, are we measuring the right things? And are the things that we're measuring have any sort of correlation to what we ultimately care about, right? Which is like making sure that every individual has the opportunity to be successful.

Laura Slover (03:36)
That's right.

Vinay Ganti (03:37)
important. A lot of things you just said around making sure we're measuring the right things and making sure the things that we're actually measuring has any sort of correlation to how successful these people are gonna be or enabling them to be successful in their future. I feel like anytime we...

talk about something new or innovative. Probably one of the most important things we can do is sort of establish like a common set of definitions or like baseline understanding. So obviously the word skills can mean a lot of different things. How are we, how are you all or how are we all thinking about skills here? And when we say skills for the future, is there a specific subset of those skills or specific type of those skills that we're focusing on more than others?

Laura Slover (04:15)
Yes, we are focusing on what we call durable skills. Durable skills are the things that are not specific technical skills that are developed in preparation for a particular line of work or a particular business. Durable skills are also known as transferable skills. They're things like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, adaptability, leadership, curiosity, creativity.

civic engagement and increasingly AI literacy and AI savvy. So those are the things we've been focusing on. And I think to your point, there's a general sense that like, I'll know communication when I see it. Or yeah, it's easy to tell who's a leader and who's not. But in fact, there's an undergirding science to the progression of how those things are developed and learned. And ETS has done a great deal of research

about what are, A, what are the skills that are most predictive of success?

not instead of academic content knowledge, really important. Math and reading still matter. But in addition to that, academics are critical but not sufficient. And particularly in this world we're living in, ETS has done pretty seminal research on what are the skills that are now A, most predictive of success post high school. And then from that list of things that I just mentioned, have begun to dive into each of those skills to say not just

what does good look like, but how do those develop over time? And so that's one of the first outcomes and deliverables of our awesome project is that we put into the world in January a set of skills progressions in collaboration, communication, and critical thinking that have had a lot of take up and now undergird a lot of the assessments that we're developing.

Vinay Ganti (06:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned communication because that is one of the ones where I feel as though like our familiarity with it can sort of sometimes work against us because everyone's like, well, I communicate every day.

It's like, but like, have you like, that's like, you know, we also drive every day. So specific set of skills around driving, right? Like, and, know, and there's like a huge amount of like, I think driving is a good example of like, there's also a significant amount of harm that can be done if you don't know what you're doing. That same thing is true for communication or, or any of these sorts of skills, right? So there's like the flip side of it that we oftentimes don't want to admit, right? Which is that, especially in a world that's increasingly like multicultural or

global in nature perspective or like and then sort of pluralistic like in the classroom, right? Like how is your communication style sort of impacting how people receive you, how you receive them, sorts of things. So it's, I could definitely see why these types of like things are much richer than people want to maybe initially believe, right?

Laura Slover (07:05)
That's true. like, just stick on communication. There's communicating one-on-one, like we're doing now. There's communicating with a group. There's communicating with a group that you feel comfortable with. And there's communicating with a group who are your adversaries. Like, there are a lot of different kind of contextual situations in which communication happens.

Vinay Ganti (07:09)
Yep. Yep.

Laura Slover (07:25)
It's sort of the case that we're always on a path to communicate differently and better depending on our audience and purpose. So why would we assume that kids just naturally get that? Those things have to be taught and continued to develop over time.

Vinay Ganti (07:38)
Right,

mean, especially like context is so important, right? So like, let's take it to the K-12 building, you know, something that a superintendent may be able to say one on one and the privacy of, you know, one of their assistants is very different than what they might be able to say in front of the board or in front of parents, for example. Right, so like context matters and how you communicate with how formal or informal, you know, the role of humor, for example, I think that's one of the ones I find incredibly

Laura Slover (07:58)
Absolutely.

Vinay Ganti (08:08)
nuance, but also critical because it's like one of the most, especially as we've like virtualized so much of our interactions, communication, like the use of verbal humor is like that much more important, I think, to relate to one another, right, in these contexts. But like you have to also be able to do it appropriately. Like there are certain jokes you can make in one context, you definitely don't want to make in others, right? So yeah, so there's a...

Laura Slover (08:23)
Yeah.

Right. Audience and purpose.

I'm a former English teacher and that is definitely like the really consistent message for my kids. Audience and purpose.

Vinay Ganti (08:33)
Yeah.

to.

So I think like, I think you've sold me, not that I needed to sold, I was already sold before today, but have you all been going into the field, you mentioned sort of like some of the pilots at launch in January and others and starting to get sort of the undergirding and like this wealth of like, of users and other things. How are you starting to like, how do you move from sort of like the 50,000 foot? Yes, we get this, like many states and districts have like ports of graduate where these are like,

know, integral sort of skills in that to actual practical like buy in from teachers, educators, district leaders, school leaders, things like that. So how have you been thinking about that?

Laura Slover (09:18)
Well, just to put a finer point on the point you made about the portraits of a graduate. 36 states now have portraits of a graduate and they are.

Different in every state. Every state has done their own work to build consensus around what they and the community members feel are most important. Most include things like communication, collaboration, critical thinking. Some include resilience or persistence. Some include civic engagement. There's a wide range and yet there's a lot of overlap. So that's one thing. As states are trying to shift from graduation requirements of old, which were just academic,

and assessment based and shift to things like that include more work experience or demonstration of skills. It's not, you can't snap your fingers and do it overnight. It takes real diligent work at the district and school level. The way that we've seen it working in states like North Carolina where we're involved in a deep, broad pilot, it's really the school leaders and district leaders who have to first of all jump in and commit.

and second of all then build out implementation capability and capacity in their districts. You can't just assume that adoption means implementation. You actually really need to work on the ground with your educators because this requires them to also think differently about how they're teaching and how they're developing their learner skills.

skills are already deeply embedded into most, if not all, curricula, but they're not necessarily taught specifically or measured specifically. So in our work, we're trying to help district leaders as they roll out their new expectations and then think about ways to assess them both directly and through authentic work. So one of the pieces I'm most excited about, Vinay, is that we are building capabilities to

upload student work, tag it and evaluate it against skills progressions, and provide insights back to kids specifically about where in their written or oral assignment did we see great communication and what did that look like. So again, it's not like, yeah, you did a great job, but you can point specifically to the places where young people have strong skills.

Vinay Ganti (11:33)
So yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, a lot of things you just mentioned is super, I think relevant to today, especially when you look at, you mentioned like AI literacy, for example.

And I think there's like this temptation right now. And I think this is oftentimes where a lot of the tension forms between sort of new ideas and like the actual people implementing it in the classroom, like the teacher in the room, which is like, that's another thing I need to figure out how to Another thing I need to figure out how fit into the lesson plan. Where instead it's like, no, no, no, no. These are all things that are already happening as.

part of the larger learning experience. We just want to help you figure out ways to better track and measure those so you can actually move the needle on those too, right? And I think sort of when you talk about durable skills, it's, you know, a well thought through lesson plan around learning math, for example, like in elementary school, hopefully we'll have some elements of interactivity not with not only between the teacher and the student, but also maybe amongst the students themselves.

Laura Slover (12:12)
Yes.

Vinay Ganti (12:41)
maybe not when they're in kindergarten, but like, you know, fourth, fifth, sixth grade as they get older, like where they're maybe working on times tables or other things or fractions together and they're problem solving together. And so like the whole idea of collaboration, communication, you know, being able to sort of work with other people, those all become sort of endemic to the larger pedagogical journey, right? And so it's, yeah.

Laura Slover (13:03)
Absolutely. I I

think that you hit the nail on the head there. Like, I'm a big proponent of the some of the OER.

high quality instructional materials like Yale Education's English Language Arts curriculum, an IM, Illustrative Math, and OpenCyED, which is newer, but just super, super curriculum. And those curricular are intentionally designed with skills thread through them. They're not absent skills. They are richly populated with skills. They just don't...

Vinay Ganti (13:29)
Bruh.

Laura Slover (13:33)
We as a society don't measure those explicitly. So we're trying to make the implicit explicit because going back to where we started, like kids bring a lot of strengths.

They're just not all visible on a report card. And going off into the world, it wouldn't it be great if they had a way through a transcript or a record to show, hey, I'm a really good communicator. I'm really responsible. I have shown these great leadership moments and here's my evidence of that. so I think it's, the work that we're doing is particularly exciting to me. One thing I haven't mentioned is our mastery transcript. The mastery transcript becomes this.

Vinay Ganti (13:46)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Laura Slover (14:12)
essentially a repository of student work, of student...

Vinay Ganti (14:14)
.

Laura Slover (14:16)
projects all tagged against skills so that they have this actual record. And the Mastery transcript is actually accepted now in over 750 institutions, higher ed institutions, colleges and universities. And so we're starting to see movement towards, hey, what happens in high school matters, A, and B, skills beyond the classroom are also part of a student's capabilities and need to be seen.

I'm psyched about that.

Vinay Ganti (14:43)
No, I think that's super interesting. like, it's, yeah, obviously, once again, we can measure it, but then we need a place to consolidate and report back on it and sort of give people an easy to understand way to sort of reflect and share that in other places.

Laura Slover (15:01)
Yeah, and because

one measure is less powerful than multiple measures and multiple sources of evidence. So it's like an evidence collection machine.

Vinay Ganti (15:10)
Yeah,

it's interesting. It's funny because like, you you hear like, for example, like the Adam grants of the world who are like, know, or psychologists who focusing on workplace areas. And one of the things that like, you know, people like them, they talk about a lot is like, you know, oftentimes the people who are most valuable in organization aren't necessarily the ones who are good at any one thing, but they're the ones who are like the connectors, the ones who sort of can see sort of like the bigger picture and like, oh, like,

this person over here, it would be really helpful if we brought them in and then, like, those are like the best managers or leaders. And going back to sort of the collaboration and other sort of things about making the implicit explicit, like, how amazing would it be if like one of our own kids, like, maybe doesn't sort of show up as clearly on the academic side of the report card can be like, no, but like, I'm an excellent connector or I'm an excellent collaborator, right? I have.

Laura Slover (15:41)
Yeah.

Vinay Ganti (16:03)
I've shown through demonstrated either through my extracurriculars or even in classroom work through like athletics or other sort of like organized activities. I've been able to measure and show and demonstrate that like when I'm on the field, metaphorically or physically, everyone around me improves, right? Like, you know, there's all like the shift in sports now, like around stats is all about these things like wins above replacement or like in basketball, like the stats around like, you know, how much

How many more points do you make versus give up when you're on the court versus others? like, there's all these complex, yeah, all these complex algorithms for like tracking professional sports athletes around like, what is their actual meaningful contribution to the team beyond just like points and other things, right? Like, is the team actually improving? Is the team on the floor with you actually getting better when you're on the floor with them, I think, versus not?

Laura Slover (16:38)
that's cool.

That's a cool concept.

I think my daughter plays lacrosse and she's sort of, she's a defensive player, but I mean, I'm her mom, but she's sort of the glue of the defense, I think. And you can see when different players are on the field, when she's on or off, like there's just a different way that they work together and they gel more. So yeah, I agree with that.

Vinay Ganti (17:06)
Right? Right.

Yeah. And so I guess along those lines, mean, obviously you all are just getting started. And by saying getting started, it's just getting started for the last couple of years, but like just getting started and sort of where this could go. Is there an area that right now or potential area that you're like really excited about where this could, where you all could take this Goal to the Future initiative? Is there a specific type area of measurement or a specific area of opportunity that's super exciting once you get there type thing?

Laura Slover (17:43)
Well, I'm excited about the whole thing. You mentioned that I was a CEO of another organization. I left that to come here and do this work because I think it's really very exciting.

I am both energized by measuring new things and measuring them in different ways, making the invisible visible, which I think is so important for the sake of making all kids feel like they've got something of value to bring into the world. I'm really interested in the out of school time and how to make that much more apparent. You talked about literally and metaphorically fields and young people playing sports.

Vinay Ganti (18:14)
Yeah.

Laura Slover (18:16)
We've worked with a number of superintendents who have a concern about attendance in the early part of the day because it turns out older kids, high school kids are taking their younger siblings to school or appointments and they often miss the first period or so. And that will show up negatively in their grade perhaps for that class.

Vinay Ganti (18:21)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Laura Slover (18:38)
What doesn't show up is that they are exhibiting responsibility, diligence, stick-to-itiveness, persistence, care, and that's like a way of bringing to life something that otherwise would go unnoticed. And so I'm really excited about that and how that can help us think differently about what it means to be an educated member of our society.

Vinay Ganti (18:50)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's almost like ironic. It's almost like showing up late after sort of.

to looking after someone else almost demonstrates more responsibility than showing up on time in some weird way. like, momentum is already there to just be like, well, I might as well just skip, you know, I might as well just like drag this out and not show up until lunch. Or maybe I'll just like hang out with you for the whole day because I'm already gonna be late for first period anyways, I think. So like having that self-discipline and be like, no, no, no. Okay, we've done this thing. Now I still have a responsibility as a 16 year old, as a 16 or 17 year old, right? To actually go to school.

Laura Slover (19:09)
it

Yeah, right.

Great, now I have to go to school.

Vinay Ganti (19:31)
There's something to be said about that. Yeah, that reminds me of like, so you and I have talked about it, Richard Reeves, he's sort of gotten a lot of attention for bringing to the fore sort of the crisis of young boys and men in the country and how that, know, sort of we need to sort of also be giving them as much attention today as we have been young women and girls.

You know, he talks about pretty openly, I think one of his sons, I think he has two boys and one of his sons now, I think is either didn't like drop these, like, pausing high school or maybe just graduated high school. And now it's like kind of doing like a gap year type thing. And he talks about how his wife is like openly concerned about that. But he like has picked up a job as like a landscaper. I think that's what it was. It's like he, didn't finish. He's not finishing high school or taking time off high school, but he's like, he's basically like pseudo.

running his own landscaping company or lawn company. And Richard's basically like, honey, like he wakes up every day at 7 a.m. He gets himself to the site on his own. He's like work and he's putting in a full day's work. He's like, he's going to be fine. Like he may not have his high school diploma right yet, but like he's demonstrating a level of self discipline and motivation and independence that like most parents, if you like abstract it, you don't, you don't tell them.

what he's getting up early for. You just be like, yeah, he gets up early every day. He shows up on time. Most parents would be like, my God, I'm so proud of him. But when you say, yeah, he's doing that, but he didn't finish high school, people are like, no, I'm kind of worried, right? Type thing. it's like, but what do we care about more? The underlying skills and behaviors that we want to incentivize in our youth to be proud of, or the actual outcome that's being applied to, right?

Laura Slover (20:58)
Yeah, great.

Vinay Ganti (21:13)
Both are important, but we need to give both equal weight.

Laura Slover (21:15)
important.

And I think that given that we're still recovering from COVID and job requirements have changed and the college.

value proposition is shifting. I think that it's a moment to really reevaluate for all of us what it means to be successful in and out of high school. What does that part of a young person's life look like? And success looks a lot of different ways. I think we all, part of my goal in figuring out how to measure this stuff is to make it more.

Vinay Ganti (21:31)
percent.

Yes.

Laura Slover (21:49)
Okay to you know have different strengths and abilities and think about it through like an asset mindset of like You're a really good communicator not your math brain is terrible You know like to really shift into thinking what everybody's got something that they're good at that they're passionate about like let's lean into that

Vinay Ganti (21:59)
Right.

So, yeah, and on the flip side, know, obviously you mentioned mastery transcript, like on the receiving end of all this, right? Sort of when it comes to like colleges or employers or other sort of recipients of all this amazingly new rich data around the candidates or on the individual, what are the sort of reactions or feedback you're getting on that side of the paradigm?

Laura Slover (22:30)
Okay, so two things, high schools that use the mastery transcript really like it. Kids are able to be very articulate about what skills they have and what they bring to the table. parents like it because they can see evidence. It's not just, okay, my kid got a B. It's actual evidence from their student work. the users like it, teachers like it too, because it engages students much more in their own like metacognition around their learning.

We're seeing that there's a growth in colleges accepting the Mastery transcript. Over the last two years, think a hundred more colleges and universities have accepted it. So we're on a slow path to my dream, which is really shifting the way that we think about college admissions from not just test-based to like, what am I ready to do? And what skills and capabilities do I bring? It's a long, slow journey because higher ed is a very, it's an old,

Vinay Ganti (23:06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Laura Slover (23:21)
system has been doing things the same way for a long time and so we're trying to make the case that you can get just as good or better outcomes if you have this richer information from students so now we just have to study that and validate my my belief.

Vinay Ganti (23:21)
Yes.

Sounds easy.

Laura Slover (23:42)
Anecdotally,

we do hear it anecdotally. didn't just make it up, but we don't have hard. We are now in the middle of studying that right now. ETS is doing a study on that.

Vinay Ganti (23:47)
Yeah.

You're

making the pudding so you can prove it basically. Yeah. And I guess for others out there maybe who aren't in K-12 directly or in higher ed directly, but are maybe developing things or putting things their own sort of spin on things and trying to come up with innovative solutions. What are sort of the lessons learned that you've you all have had when it comes to

Laura Slover (23:55)
Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Vinay Ganti (24:17)
getting people to buy into this on an early stage. I know you mentioned it earlier on the educator side, like when it comes to getting the pilots and initial sort of information, like say I'm, imagine I'm a different entrepreneur and I'm trying to like make it my own dent on improving the lives of students out there. What have you all sort of learned along the way here?

Laura Slover (24:37)
Well, you know, I've had a long career of learning lessons the hard way, that learning through things that don't work. But some things that do work are like start small, it out, start small, go slow to go fast. I continue to go fast and then realize, shoot, I should have gone slower. It's like a learned, I don't know.

I'm still working on that, but you build systems through careful patient mapping and articulation and rushing to get something in the field before it's ready just usually backfires. So slow and steady wins the race. Having educators at the table is the clearest path to success, whether it's your grade level teachers.

or your specials, but certainly the people who know kids the best have to be part of your implementation strategy. Other things I'd say is that it's hard to implement things at a district level when state level policy is not aligned or even when it creates barriers. state policy.

Vinay Ganti (25:34)
Yeah.

Laura Slover (25:39)
action matters and districts and state leaders should be working together. I think that's clear but worth saying. But there's a lot of flexibility allowed even in the toughest of state accountability systems. So districts just need to find that the creative way is to do what they want to do

Vinay Ganti (25:54)
Yeah.

Laura Slover (25:56)
around teaching and assessing skills.

Vinay Ganti (25:59)
Well, I think this has been an awesome conversation. I would love to just maybe give you one last sort of question around anything else we should know or hear before we let you go.

Laura Slover (26:10)
that's such a big, broad question. Well, we didn't, this is very personal, but my daughter's about to graduate from high school. And when I think about all the work I'm doing.

Vinay Ganti (26:11)
We're done.

Laura Slover (26:19)
and how I wish I'd been doing this five years ago so that she would have had this opportunity to think differently about herself and her, you know, the capabilities and strengths she brings. Again, she's had a great education. She has good grades and good test scores. Yay. But I think about what school could look like if it really valued these kinds of skills and dispositions and what a great and

Vinay Ganti (26:21)
Yeah.

Laura Slover (26:44)
a great opportunity will be for the kids of the future, including your kids. Yeah. Yes.

Vinay Ganti (26:47)
What's this going to say? Miner four and two and a half. So they might be actually, they may end up actually being at the right

timeline for when this thing, you super scale.

Laura Slover (26:54)
They

will be the right timeline. We're at the front end of a major education paradigm shift, and I'm excited to be part of it.

Vinay Ganti (27:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's an exciting time for sure. Well, Laura, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you being willing to take time out of your, what is an inordinately busy schedule to help our viewership and listenership better understand skills for the future and a lot of the other interesting work we're doing here at ETS. I look forward to having another one of these conversations on the road, especially as that pudding gets a little more set and you have some more data to share.

Laura Slover (27:27)
I would love to do that. Let's check back in August. Okay. Thank you.

Vinay Ganti (27:29)
Thank you. Sounds good. Take care, Laura.

Vinay Ganti (27:34)
Well, thanks for listening to Praxis Journeys. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know someone who would find this conversation helpful, feel free to share it with them. I'm Vinay Gandhi, and until next time, keep learning, keep leading, and keep working toward the kind of change our students deserve.