Emergent Thinkers™

Earlier this year, talking with young people about careers and uncertain futures, I found myself using a phrase that has stayed with me: develop capabilities that travel well. I meant the things that retain their value even when we do not yet know exactly where we are heading: curiosity, self-awareness, confidence, collaboration, problem-solving, recognising possibilities and being able to create value from the experiences and resources already around us.

Some of the young people I was talking with worried that not knowing exactly what they wanted to do at fifteen or sixteen meant they were already behind. It seemed an important message to offer them: uncertainty now does not necessarily mean limitation later. As it turned out, I was about to have a rather good opportunity to turn the question around on myself: what travels well for educators?

Just a couple of weeks ago, I officially completed the first ISBE Mid-Career Development Programme, following six months of workshops, mentoring, Action Learning Sets, conversations and, perhaps most importantly, some deliberately protected space to think.

Most of my career has been spent developing other people, in one form or another: organisational learning and development, higher and professional education, enterprise educator development, and more recently, research into how educators actually experience thinking and reflection. Being deliberately back on the receiving end of professional development myself felt oddly exposing.

One thought has stuck: development isn’t always about adding more.

Of course, I learnt new things, encountered different expertise and came away with ideas I want to take further. But some of the most useful moments were harder to locate on a programme schedule. A mentor asking a question I could not immediately answer. Someone in an Action Learning Set looking at something I had become accustomed to and seeing it differently. A conversation connecting pieces of work I had previously held apart. Or simply having enough space for an unfinished thought to remain unfinished for a little longer.

A very genuine thank you to Dr Emily Beaumont and Professor Robert Newbery, who led the pilot programme; to Dr Kelly Smith, Professor Paul Jones, Professor Susan Marlow, Professor Eleanor Shaw, Professor Stephen Roper and Professor Gideon Maas, who brought very different expertise and perspectives to our workshops; and to the mentors, Action Learning Set colleagues and fellow participants who made the experience considerably richer. It reminded me that people participating in professional development are not simply its recipients. Under the right conditions, we become part of the developmental resource for one another.

Developing the people who develop other people

We ask a great deal of educators: to respond to changing technologies and learner expectations, work across disciplinary boundaries, connect learning with worlds beyond the classroom, and make increasingly thoughtful decisions about where AI belongs. Within enterprise education there’s another layer again. We ask educators to help learners recognise possibilities, create value, collaborate and act when the answer isn’t entirely known.

I’ve worked in and around that territory for a long time. But recent work has made me think differently about what it asks of the educator. Perhaps the entrepreneurial capabilities we want to develop in learners aren’t simply things educators teach. Increasingly, they may be capabilities we need to practise ourselves.

Sometimes the interesting work happens between things

Harmonious Heroes has probably brought this home to me more than anything recently. It began with a persistent question: what might enterprise education become if it was values-led, locally rooted and able to work with the reality of school life rather than adding another layer of complexity? The resulting projects have brought together schools, learners, businesses, creative practitioners and community partners around real local challenges [Real projects, real skills, real futures].

What continues to interest me is not simply what each participant brings, but what happens between them. A piece of curriculum meets a community story. A teacher meets a practitioner with expertise they did not know was nearby. A business encounters children asking questions it had not expected. A learner’s idea moves beyond the classroom because somebody else sees possibility in it. None of those ingredients necessarily has to be new. Sometimes the innovation is in the connection.

That feels like something that travels well: the ability to notice what and who is already around us, cross a boundary, make a connection and create the conditions in which something different becomes possible.

Frameworks don’t walk into classrooms by themselves

I have encountered a version of the same problem through years of working with educators around entrepreneurial learning. We certainly aren’t short of frameworks, models, research or policy telling educators what they might consider doing. I value many of them and have spent considerable time working with EntreComp and EntreCompEdu, helping educators explore entrepreneurial competences within their own disciplines and settings. But knowing the framework is rarely the end of the work. The interesting question usually comes next:

Yes, but what does this actually mean here? With these learners, in this subject, within this context and with the resources and possibilities we actually have?

That requires more than transmission. It requires translation, and I think that travels well too.

It is partly what has taken me increasingly towards reflection and lived experience in my research. My Cards of Insight grew from phenomenological work exploring educators’ experiences of facilitating higher-order thinking. Rather than simply sharing what the research had found, I wanted to return it to practice in a form that allowed people to encounter it, question it and make sense of it through their own experience. The cards have since travelled into very different contexts themselves, including Masters-level practice at the University of Malta. This journey has reinforced something I am increasingly convinced of: sometimes people don’t need another answer. Sometimes a good question does rather more work.

Staying with the unfinished

There is something else a good question can do too: leave us without an immediate answer. That has become harder to ignore as AI enters so many of our educational conversations. I’m fascinated by what these technologies make possible, but recent phenomenological work has pulled me towards another question: what happens to the parts of thinking that are slower and harder to see? The hesitation. The struggle to articulate something. The half-formed thought not yet ready to become an output.

Perhaps that’s why the moments in the ISBE programme when somebody disrupted my thinking, rather than resolved it, have stayed with me. Enterprise education has always asked people to work with uncertainty: opportunities are incomplete, ideas evolve through encounter, and sometimes we act before everything is known. Educators need to create enough safety for learners to experience that uncertainty without immediately removing it for them.

Perhaps one of the capabilities that will travel particularly well into whatever comes next is therefore the ability to stay with the unfinished.

So, what travels well?

A few months after first using the phrase with those young people, my current list for educators would probably include curiosity, connection and translation, the ability to work across boundaries, the confidence to say I don’t know yet. As well as enough criticality to question the frameworks and technologies we use rather than simply adopt them, and enough reflective space occasionally to notice what our own practice is already teaching us.

My recent experience has also reminded me that these capabilities don’t develop particularly well in isolation. The conditions around professional learning matter too. If we want educators who connect, where are the spaces in which they develop relationships beyond their immediate professional worlds? If we want them to experiment, where can they test things, get them wrong and think again? If we value reflection, where do we protect it from the endless pressure to produce? And if we want educators who can help others navigate uncertainty, where are the professional spaces in which they themselves are allowed not to arrive with the answer?

The ISBE programme gave me new knowledge and perspectives, certainly, but it also gave me new people to think with, some generous challenge and reason to look again at work and experiences accumulated over time.

For somebody who has spent years thinking about enterprise learners, enterprise educators and professional learning, being deliberately placed back into that developmental space has been a useful reminder that development is not always about becoming more. Sometimes it is about seeing differently, connecting something that previously sat apart, testing an assumption, returning to an old question from a new position, or noticing something valuable that was already there.

So, a slightly belated but very heartfelt thank you to everyone involved in the pilot ISBE Mid-Career Development Programme. I came away with plenty to take forward. I also came away with more questions.

Perhaps that is no bad thing.

What travels well for educators?…I suspect the answer will keep travelling too.

Felicity