Valve's Corporate Culture Could Teach Us a Few Things About Education

Educators can learn a lot from video games without ever delving into the controversial subject of gamification. Instead, we can look at the hiring practices and corporate culture of the companies that create these games to realize that we are preparing students to work for companies that don't want anything to do with them.

Valve is a video game development company based out of Washington, and they are the geniuses behind some of the most critically-acclaimed games in the last decade, including the Half-Life series and the mind-bending puzzle/platformer Portal. They are also responsible for up to 70% of the digital market for games with their Steam service, packed with more than 1500 games.

Needless to say, they're a successful company. And if they continue to make money and grow, they're going to need employees... but not just any employees, according to a handbook written for new hires that leaked onto the Internet this weekend.

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Get the Fear Out of Your Classroom!

Given the assignment of indoctrinating a thousand kids at a time, the embattled school administrator reaches for the most effective tool available. Given that the assigned output of school is compliant citizens, the shortcut for achieving this output was fear.

Love him or hate him for his no-holds-barred approach to delivering the truth about the public education system (and I've been reminded several times that he is not an educator but a businessman), Seth Godin does have the masterful ability to make you think long and hard about your attitudes towards life's most important institutions. His most hated adversary is the lizard brain, his catch-all explanation for why humans are fearful of anything that could result in discomfort.

His latest book, a short but powerful read titled Stop Stealing Dreams focuses entirely on education, undoubtedly a result of legions of educators begging him to elaborate on the points he made previously in books like Linchpin relating to school.

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Promoting a Growth Mindset Should Be Priority One

I've written about my own personal growth mindset before, the belief that most human qualities - intelligence, some elements of personality, work ethic, self-concept, etc. - can be improved (or, on a less positive note, degrade). It's my opinion that this is the only way that one can hope to live a happy, productive life.

An article in Wired magazine backs me up on this and then takes the idea one step further, to a point where it becomes apparent that the growth mindset is essential for teachers to nurture in their students.

Jonah Lehrer explains:

The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?

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Piling On: Teachers Hate Creativity, Supposedly

A study published in 1995 is being dragged out of storage to create all new incendiary headlines for the upcoming weeks, which will undoubtedly prove once again that teachers are awful. Right?

The study itself is not at fault, of course (and rarely is). I did take issue with the researchers putting teachers in the uncomfortable position of actually choosing their favorite and least favorite students and describing them. Sure, we all play favorites, but I'm already wary of these teachers' disposition toward education if they can readily name their least favorite student in the classroom. I'm willing to bet that you'll find little Johnny in the back of the classroom, possibly facing the opposite direction of his classmates and working on uncompleted homework from the day before. But I'll get back to the point.

The results of the first part of the study showed that these teachers described their least favorite students as more creative (as defined by a list of characteristics deemed creative). Their most favorite students, on the other hand, were described as less creative.

At this point, the study could go in a few different ways, analyzing the elements of the classroom and our nation's schools that might lead to such results.

But that's not what the headlines are going to say.

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The First Sign That You Are a 21st Century Teacher...

People love buzzwords. I suppose that makes sense, given the defintion of the word, but each year it seems like every professional field gets a whole new batch of them. Politicians love to spew them in 30 second soundbites, and corporations are always eager to add new and exciting words to their marketing campaigns (see: artisan-baked everything, including potato chips and pizza). And for those of us who are interested in the latest technology news, you're probably familiar with Web 2.0, gamification, content discovery, and 4G, 5G, and LTE wireless access. If it gets people interested in what you are trying to sell, where's the harm?

It's fine if you choose to eat more Domino's pizza just because you think it's suddenly more healthy for you. Go right ahead and subscribe to the belief that any discontent with the ever-widening gap between the upper and lower class in America is socialist thinking. And please, spend a few hundred bucks more on a smartphone that you think is going to download YouTube videos faster than yours does now. There's no long-term harm in any of that, besides alienating your more liberal relatives during the holiday season.

The field of education, however, needs to avoid adding any more buzzwords to its repertoire. And if there's one buzzword that really rubs me the wrong way, it's this one: 21st century learning.

How do you know that you are a 21st century teacher? Simple.

You live in the 21st century, and are a teacher.

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