Starting with the End in Mind

Author: Kathleen Almy

As educators, we’re taught to build courses and assessments by starting with the end in mind. If you’re wondering what that looks like, it’s pretty simple. First, you establish your goal. Then, you’ll need to work backward to determine how you’ll achieve that goal.

In a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education president Brian Rosenberg challenges higher education to create real change while addressing the current crisis. His suggestion is, to begin with, the goal.

Rosenberg asks, “What if, instead of beginning with cost, we began with the more profound question of impact? That is, what is the desired impact of higher education on the society we serve, and what form of education will have that impact? This would lead us, I believe, to the contemplation of some issues that are broader in scope than simply cost, for while affordability is inseparable from impact, it is far from its only determinant.”

“Instead of looking at what already exists in education, trying to fix every minute issue, what if we started with the end goal instead?”

To me, this makes perfect sense. Instead of looking at what already exists in education, trying to fix every minute issue, what if we started with the end goal instead? Doing so would provide immediate awareness and decipher what should be changed and how that change will come to light.  

From my experience, I know the importance of stepping back, looking at the greater purpose, and determining what is needed to achieve the objective. I do this every day with my business. To be successful, I can’t only think about the present. I ask myself questions, such as, “are we serving teachers and administrators the best we can?” and “Do our offerings make sense?” and “Are we helping schools move the needle?”.

Of course, hard decisions will have to be made about what currently exists, whether or not it should continue, or if it should be scrapped. When it comes to reform and change, this is always the case. But in no way does this mean that suddenly all people and areas are obsolete. While change may often get a bad rap, it can also mean a shift to better align with goals. 

Brian Rosenberg’s article, “It’s Time to Rethink Higher Education,” is thoughtful and astute, providing a unique insider’s perspective of the education field. As most of you know, higher education, like education in general, has many critics and saviors. Rarely do they know the internal challenges, traditions, structures, and unwritten rules that govern so much of how things work (or don’t work). Rosenberg “goes there,” as I often say, and calls out some of the elephants in the room, asking: 

• Are colleges and their content organized well? 

• Does our approach to time (class, course, year, etc.) still make sense?

• Are our instructional methods in need of an update?

I encourage you to read the article and then reread it a week later and then again. I’ve read the article multiple times, and each time it forces me to consider another aspect of higher ed that can readily be accepted as unchangeable or unfixable. 

As an education reformer, I know that significant change can happen when enough people are willing to let it proceed. In our society, we see this regularly. Higher ed is not untouchable and does not have to stay as it is. It can’t. The expression “evolve or die” is more accurate now than ever before.

While I don’t want to spoil too much of the piece, I’ll leave you with this, “It may be, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive more or less where we started and know the place for the first time. But if we fail to explore — if we fail to go beyond superficial change and interrogate our most fundamental assumptions about how and what we teach, how and why we organize ourselves in a current way — we will have no one but ourselves to blame if the system as we know it shrivels to the point where it collapses from within or is painfully disrupted from without.”

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