 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the conversation. Please call us at area code 808-374-2014 or tweet us at thinktechhi. Today we're going to discuss a set of professions in which employers have difficulty, both in filling and in retaining talent in those positions. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics occupations are in high demand, but these industries are changing and employers struggle to find employees who are good fits for those positions. Joining us today is Dr. Ken Rossi, Ken's a professor of organization development and change at Hawaii Pacific University, and his professional experience includes working with scientists at NASA and a number of other high-tech industries. Today he's going to share his experiences and offer suggestions about how employers can meet their needs for talent and how interested individuals can prepare for STEM jobs. Welcome, Ken. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Tell us a little bit about your professional experience working with folks in STEM jobs. Well, I go back 30 years in the military dealing with technology, and a lot of what we did in the military were with technical base, math base, the ability to read clearly. As I left the military, I started getting involved with out-placement, placing people in those kinds of jobs. I went to work at NASA for a couple of years where I worked with the Human Resources Department dealing with training and development and preparing people to improve their careers at NASA, and unlike many places, NASA doesn't really have an issue with the talented people. They get the talented people, and the tech people they get, they come in with the skills, and they're in a position where they can train people who need the basic skills. Engineers and scientists come in with those skills. The gap I see is in your everyday computer technology company, the software design and development company. They're stuck with, I need technical people, not the engineers, not the high-price scientists. I need technical people to come in and do coding. Kids coming out of a lot of our education programs lack some of those basic skills to do that. So they need a fill-in to get the math skills to be able to get into coding and everything else, or they could get a job someplace where they'd be willing to train them. And too many companies say, why should I train them when I can go hire somebody with all the skills I need and just get them an H1B visa? And that's where this perceived gap comes in. Now, getting kids prepared to go into these jobs, we did it in the 60s. We did it in the 50s. Through the 70s, a generation of the education world is about 13 years. From the time a child end his kindergarten until they graduate from high school. So two and a half generations ago or so, there were changes in the curriculum that changed the approach to teaching reading and teaching mathematics. And this is where we began to see the fall-off in math scores, reading scores, the drop-down in reading level in students. That's what created some of this gap. Children graduated, they didn't have the basic skills in math to do the more advanced things, so they needed to be remediated. They had weaker reading skills. Not everybody, but there was enough to make a dent in the workforce. And we ran into this problem. We have community colleges do remediation. We have programs that do more remediation. And those kids took a couple of years to get into the workforce. And then they probably got hired without a lot of trouble. But depending on that lapse between that in given areas, they may not have those skills. Children who grew up during that time, this is where we saw the growth of programs that your child went to on weekends to advance their math skills and improve their reading skills. You know, reading and math boot camp for kids. And it helped a lot, but it was basically what the curriculum used to teach. And so we're seeing a change in that. That's beginning to change. And the growth in STEM education, we hear that all over the place. STEM education is going to be a real boon for that kindergarten through 12th grader. Once you graduate and you go into college, if you go to college, then you're going to get the education. If you are able to get into college, you're okay when you get there, especially if you want to go into the tech fields. But it's preparing the children to do that. And the neat thing about STEM is not only going back to preparing children with math skills, engineering skills, basic science skills. We're going to improve reading skills, which we've seen changes in that. STEM has now been extended to be called STEAM in many places. It's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics, because we don't want to forget the value of a basic liberal arts education. This is what provides the American workforce for generations with their creativity is that broad approach. We need to stop worrying about standardized tests, how we rank in the world. I was reading some material this morning on that. During the time we were putting people on the moon, we rated 20, we ranked 26th out of the top 30 countries in the world. We were down at the bottom because we didn't train kids to pass a test, whereas other countries do. They're very focused on the technical side of their education, whereas we have a very broad-based education. The goal of public education has always been to produce a well-informed citizenry. Math is important, science is important, but also history, liberal arts, social skills, psychology, reading. So we've got this broad-based education and we've brought back the approach to teaching these skills to kids that are really going to pay benefits at the end of this current generation of students. Because it's not only you go to math class, you go to science, biology, physics, whatever it is. What you do is you go in and you do project-based education. We know that from HPU. That's how we approach teaching our students. And students conduct projects where they have to do the mathematical calculations. They have to do the engineering designs. They have to look at the science involved in doing so. You bring all these skills together and then it becomes applied. I know my experience, I was terrible in math as a kid. I'm terrible in science as a kid. I really didn't get into any of that. I get into college because I got good grades in my SATs. I could take tests. I was an engineering major, which I lasted two years. I couldn't deal with it. But when I left and I started seeing an application for these things, all of a sudden it comes rushing over you going, wow, and that's what we're doing with the kids now. So these kids, when they leave high school now, if they enter the workforce, they're going to have the basic skills they need to enter the force, get their initial training and be productive. If they want to go to college, they're not going to have to worry about remediation. They're going to be in there with those sets of skills that help them plug into a college program. And as long as our college programs will continue to offer that 50% of technical background, 50% of their liberal arts background, we're still going to have the creativity and the innovation that we've kind of lacked over the last few years. You know, it's interesting you bring up the A or the arts within a STEM education because if we look at the leaders today in science fields, and I'm talking about folks like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was an astrophysicist, we look now at the current generation of astronauts who are working for NASA, Bill Nye, the science guy, all of these types of people who are really emerging as the leaders and the top thinkers in their respective science disciplines. Virtually every single one of them will say, I got interested in science from watching Star Trek or from reading science fiction books or science fiction movies, these kinds of things. And that was what got those people interested and being able to visualize themselves doing these professions. In fact, I have a friend who went to work for Ford Aerospace building, she's a bench worker, building little component parts for satellites who got interested in doing that as a living because she saw Star Wars as a young kid and decided she wanted to build at her own R2-D2. And so out of that came a very successful, very lucrative career in satellite development. But we now have a situation where the public schools anyway are actually looking for places to cut. Music used to be a required subject, we don't see it anymore. PE used to be a couple, two, three times a week, we're not seeing that anymore because people are saying that we need to have more instructional time. So how do we balance all of these things? How do we convince our educators that all of the aspects of a liberal arts education are equally important to future success and how do we get kids interested in wanting to pursue those professions? Part of the challenge that we run into is this drive to be competitive internationally with test scores. Right. We're competing against nations who teach kids to take tests. If you put your child in one of these programs that they have out there to help them get better in school, it's teaching them how to take a test. That's what they teach them to do. So we want kids to be able to pass a test to say, we rank up with the top international or national comparison units, or do we want kids who are smart who can do things, who can think for themselves? And that's the benefit of that broad-based education is taking music and we know scientifically the impact music has on everything else you do. It's logic, it's math, it's everything else. But because I can't see a direct connection between that subject, teaching a kid how to play an instrument, how to read music, how to be creative with music, we don't see a direct connection to that in that standardized test. They take the 12th grade in school and the 8th grade in school and the 6th grade in school. We need to stop looking at that. We need to stop looking at the value of the creativity that this brings. You know, Zuckerberg from what was his major in college? I don't know. Psychology. Oh, really? He's a psychologist. Not a psychologist. He was a psychology major. Broad-based liberal background. And what did he see? The need for people to be able to communicate better, to associate better, to open themselves up, so he created a technology that allows that. Depending on your view as an adult, as a parent, I think it's the greatest thing in the world, to watch my children when they were young, to be able to do communication unbelievable that we couldn't believe it. So this expands the creativity. And are they going to be able to do that if they're just very narrowly tracked into these things? If they don't see the application for math, when do they become tired of taking math? They see the connection between math and this thing they're building, this project they're doing. And the science base behind it, the physics behind making something happen, those are the things that we need to continue to stress. They still have to have the basic skills. And they're going to catch up now because of the change in the curriculum. Reading skills are going to be better. My son is a high school teacher, and he teaches ALC, which is Alternative Learning Centers in Hawaii. And these are programs for kids who get down to their last two years, and they don't have enough credits to graduate. Basically, credit recovery. And he's got this broad project-based program that he does where the kids go out and they did a project to build a pitching mound for the baseball team. Sounds like something, a portable pitching mound. So they had to go out there and measure the pitching mound, determine the size, how to put the stuff on it, cut it all out, screw it together, put the wheels on it, get it to move around, make it so that the dirt stays on it. And you look there and go, they take these on science, they're doing math, they're doing engineering skills. It's tremendous. And at the end, they've used all these skills to do something. He started them in the last couple of months of doing 15 to 30 minutes of sustained silent reading. Oh, wow. This is third grade stuff, but you've got a bunch of kids who have not performed well in high school get them reading again. So when they have to take tests when they're done, they'll be able to perform. And usually ALC's 60, 70 percent maybe will graduate. He's up around 80 or 90 percent because the things that they're doing connect them. He's got them out doing hydroponics out in Y and I Valley and planting native species on the old Barbas Point Naval Air Station. Right. You know, so you're getting this broad science education. Every day they do PE. And he has to have special PE programs for them because they're not allowed to do PE with the regular classes because they're in this ALC program. Right. It's a separate program. And so he has, you know, they work within their ability areas. They do weightlifting. They do running. They do all these other things. So they're getting this broad approach to learning and they're learning it. They're leaving. They're being able to become high school graduates instead of high school dropouts. And this is the creativity we need to see in the classroom. And once we take the, you know, that standardized test, I hate that. It's like, once you take that away and say, okay, who does public education belong to? Public education belongs to the people of Hawaii. Right. We choose what these kids need to know to become successful in the world. And it's a two-prong approach to the informed citizen that people understand what their, you know, what their elected officials are saying and what's going on and then prepared to enter the workforce. Right. But how do we convince public education that public education belongs to the public? Because we have heard critics here in the state DOE as well as at the national level talking about no one knows how to teach kids better than teachers. And I'm not, you know, and there is that pedagogical aspect to it. But the other aspect is knowing enough about your topic to inform a new learner. And, you know, that's going to be, you know, when you talk about complex change, that's the ultimate complex change, because you're not only talking to a group of elected officials or appointed officials who may or may not be able to spell education, but you're looking at an economical driver. Right. The economics behind testing and curriculum development drives a lot of what goes on. I know at one time it's probably still the same as most high school curriculum is based on California and Texas, because there's more students in California and Texas than anywhere else in the world. So if what they adopt, everybody else adopts, because you get a discount on the price. You look at some of the private schools, because they're usually not mixed into the federal data. The private schools, they do whatever they want to do, which is why somebody will leave, especially here in Hawaii, you'll leave an almost good-paying job as a public school teacher and take a pay cut, go teach at a private school, because we're reversed from the mainland. The mainland private schools make more money here. They make less. But to go in there and have that freedom to teach what you think the kids, in other words, you work with your staff, you work within the school system, and you create a curriculum that prepares kids to go to school, and you look at how they do. They perform very well, the ones who leave here. We've got small private schools that are putting 100% kids into college. And when you think about it, that's amazing. I mean, they're small schools, but they're not much smaller than the public schools that they, and it all comes down to somebody has to be in a position to have enough guts to say, this is what we need to do. We're not going to worry about these tests, and that means the federal government has to get out of it. Are we doing it? Keep talking about the federal government getting out of it. The federal government gets involved, and they make a decision that this is what we want, and that kind of goes against the basic philosophy of our public school education in this country is we decide what we want. That's the state thing. The federal government can have some big overarching things, like diversity and treating everybody fairly and equality and education, those things. But when it comes down to what we want our kids to know, what they need to know, they should really get out of it. And that's been the issue. When Big Brother decided that we weren't doing a very good job, they took over without looking at the systemic issue, which the systemic issue is what was the basic curriculum teaching, created a problem 10, 12 years down the road. They assumed it was bad teaching as opposed to we're teaching them the wrong things. It's like we don't teach to a test. And now teachers, in order to be successful, successful as a teacher, they have to start leaning towards teaching towards that test, because if the students don't perform well, the teacher gets zapped. But if they get taught the things they need to know, they need to know, they're the ones who want to go to college. They will be able to function in the tech world. And if we can have children, and I read it somewhere that if a child graduates from high school and can do calculus and read at the 12th grade level, they've got it made. And right now, most high school graduates graduate, maybe with Algebra II. Yeah, that's right. And so we're not getting into calculus, and they should be, because of the thought process that goes along with it. And calculus plays into a lot of things. And you don't think about it until you run into it. Out in the world, you begin to realize, oh, now I understand why that's like, you look at things and you read things and you go, now I understand. Now it makes sense. But for me, it was 10 years later. It didn't make sense then. And now this new STEM approach to education, especially at that level, where you tie in project-based education, it's going to make sense. Right. And so another generation from now, we'll start running into the issue of, are they trying to get H-1B visas because they're cheaper employees? And that may become an issue, but H-1B is for bona fide lack of skills. Well, that bona fide lack of skills will be gone eventually. We hope. Oh, it will, it will, because the shift in what's taught in the schools, and hopefully somebody gets smart and designs a test that says, this is what we want them to know, rather than what we want everybody on the face of the earth to know. Because again, we'll never compete against that, because there are national-level instruction systems that will teach to that test. And they're excellent test-takers, but their ability to think outside the box, they're framed in the box. They can't think outside of the box. Our kids all think outside of the box. They live outside of the box. That's one of the things that's so surprising working at HPU. You've probably seen it in your classes. I know I have in mind. And that's the issue of differing expectations among students from different parts of the world. You look at a U.S. kid with a undergraduate degree in something or other pursuing a master's, but then you look at someone's same level of education, but maybe from a society that stressed more on rote memorization or something other than imagination, application, evaluation, synthesis. And the differences are astounding. And I see it, my classes are... Okay. Tell us about your classes right after we take this break. We'll be back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veteran's advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey. Spend the time with us as we look through and discover all of the ins and outs of this journey through life. We're on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. And I would love to have you with us. Come navigate the journey. Welcome back to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, and we are talking with Ken Rossi, who is a professor of organization development and change at HPU, Hawaii Pacific University. And we are talking about STEM professions and change in the future. Now, Ken, you brought up an interesting point before we went on break, and that was what's happening in the classroom now to prepare folks for those leadership positions going forward. Tell us about how that's different, say, from graduate education in the past. You see a lot from the international students, especially European students. Their approach to education is you sit in a seat for three hours. Somebody talks at you. At the end of 15 weeks, you take a test. And that was the way we did it. The sage on the stage. Yeah. Sitting in the lecture hall with 500 people and all of that. But when you move from that to a project-based, problem-based education, students need to be applying. And so we have an expectation that our students will do a lot more preparation before they walk into class. They come into class as a quick explanation, and then they stop working on some sort of an activity. It's an interactive group activity, solving a problem. Going, I've had students go to an organization and do work. I took students down to the Department of Health when I taught in the health program to go do projects for the Department of Health, taking all the skills we taught them in the classroom. And it's interesting to look at some of the European students. They're like, you're not going to talk to us? I have to start doing something? Yeah, we're going to do this in class. And then getting frequent feedback. Feedback on a daily basis about how the group's doing. Formal feedback through periodic assignments like written case analysis or little project papers. And then maybe a paper at the end. I don't believe in multiple-choice testing because to me that's rote memorization. I have broad, almost like comprehensive exam kinds of questions at the end. And the students, after a while, they begin to catch on. They go, they like that because they're doing something. And at the end, they go, wow, I think I learned something. It's that flash that comes now as opposed to two years later after you graduated. Then you get that flash, now it makes sense. Now we're getting that earlier. And with the approach to that, to be creative in how you deal with these things, it requires that broad background. If you are purely technical, you have a very difficult time about being creative about solving a problem because I don't give my students a solution. Here's a problem. You figure out what the problem is, then develop a solution for it based on what you've come up with. And then we can look at the level of diagnosis and those things. And in the OD world, the world I work in now, and one of the things I did at NASA was being able to be that creative in how we handle these things because everybody's different. Every organization is different. Every class activity is different. And the students, we want them to learn to be that kind of broad, creative, innovative kinds of thinkers. And that's what they'll take to their business. That's supposed to be very good at coding, or very good at managing financial balance sheets. But can they understand where the organization can change and grow with making use of their financial capabilities? Or marketing, there's a whole different approach to marketing than what it used to be. And it's based on that creativity and innovation. So we know marketers have to have those broad skills. We think of technical skills, we don't think that they need to have those. And that's been part of the issue. And they really do have to be able to think out. So they've got to be able to read. They've got to be able to do research. They've got to be able to do that, understanding the history behind what they're doing. Where during history have we done things? We can learn a lot by not making mistakes again. The inclusion of that broad-based psychology, understanding people, sociology, how do people react to things? How do we impact society with the things we create? Not just make a new tool or make a new widget. How do we impact society with what we make? And that's the way we approach our education. That's the way we approach the class when we teach it. And I know almost every one of the faculty within our college does that. I know liberal arts, that's all they do. And I know the nursing programs are beginning to do that. The science programs are doing that. And now we're seeing this push into the K-12. And that's where the benefit comes from. And that's where we started. And that's where we're going to have to end because our time is running out. We have just a few seconds left. So Dr. Ken Rossi from Hawaii Pacific University, thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. And we will be back in two weeks with another episode of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Cheryl Krozier-Garcia, your host, and we will see you in two weeks. Bye.