Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

“Never”

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“Never,” was the answer.

The question?

“Do you ever have conversations in school that touch on the changes that are happening in the world that will affect your life outside of school?”

Honestly? Not shocked.

That student is a part of a diverse team we’re working with in a school that’s trying to figure out its path forward at a moment when every path feels pretty murky. And it came up because that same student said she felt a little unnerved by the picture we were painting of the world we’re all trying to navigate. Climate, AI, challenges to democracy, equity and justice issues…the list goes on.

A lot of things are unnerving right now.

But I wonder why we’re not talking with kids about these things in age-appropriate, real ways? (I’m assuming that student’s experience isn’t an outlier, I know.) If our job is to “prepare them for the world they will live in,” which is what everyone seems to say it is, then isn’t it also our job to talk with them as candidly as we can about what that looks like?

And isn’t it also our job to then focus on the dispositions that our children will need to develop in order to learn their way through all the messes we’re leaving them?

We’ve heard in other groups that many students seem more angry now, more willing to push back against the status quo of school. We’ve heard that enough for us to wonder what might be the cause. The pandemic, sure. And the stress of the world that kids absolutely feel.

But I wonder if it’s a response to “never.” I wonder if it’s this increasing divide they feel between school life and real life, and they’re sensing our inability (or unwillingness?) to bring real life into the conversation.

We’ve never been in a moment where our kids engage with the world in ways that are so different from the ways most adults do.

Maybe they’re wondering where we are.

My 2023 “Tech Cleanse” Has Begun

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Goodbye Twitter. Goodbye Chrome.

Neither was easy.

I was there for early-Twitter, and it was love-hate from the beginning. I loved the ease, the networking, the linking, and, yes, the learning. I hated the fact that I knew blogging in the way that I’d been practicing it for about a decade at that point was done for. “Micro-blogging” didn’t leave space for deep thought, complex ideas, and extended attention. I really regret that I didn’t keep up with my longer-form writing, something I’m trying hard to recapture now.

My break with Twitter has been coming for a while. My Twitter politics addiction in 2016 nearly drove me to therapy. While eduTwitter was always pretty respectful, it’s been feeling lately like metaTwitter is just too much of a toxic stew to remain a part of. Elon didn’t help. So, I’m choosing not to feed that beast any longer, mostly because I don’t see it actually making any of us better. And Mastodon as a replacement? Meh, for how.

On the flip side, my replacement for Chrome, that privacy-killing, tracking and data-collecting browser monster from Big Tech is making me regret not getting off that train much sooner. Arc (arc.net) is a wonderful new browser. Private. Innovative. Pretty intuitive. From a company that has better intents. It has absolutely changed the way I browse and write and interact with the web. I’ve been committing a few minutes a day to diving into its intricacies, and I’m pleasantly surprised on a regular basis. If you have a Mac, give it a shot.

All of this is a part of a path I’m on to step away from technologies that aren’t serving the greater good and my individual wellness and ethics. This year will be one where I really interrogate how I’m contributing to the challenges we’re facing and how I can help mitigate them. So much of my tech life doesn’t feel like it squares with what the world needs right now. So…

My phone is next. (Ugh…)

Is anyone else out there thinking about their tech use through a lens or making themselves and the world a bit healthier?

Five Themes for Educators in 2023

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(1/4 Newsletter Repost)

First, Happy New Year! May 2023 bring us all good health, deeper relationships, and as much joy as we can handle!

With those aspirations in mind, we want to tee up some of the themes that will be most on our minds here at BQI over the coming year. We see the year ahead as a complex mixture of reckoning and opportunity, of deceptively fast change, and of increasingly urgent, fundamental questions and conversations about the future of education.

In other words, just another boring 12 months ahead!
Kidding aside, while there are too many topics to mention in one post about what we might focus on in this new year, we want to share five themes that will comprise much of our attention as we continue to try to make sense of this complex moment we find ourselves in.

Artificial Intelligence – The second half of 2022 was literally breathtaking in terms of how quickly advances in generative writing, art, and other AI tools have taken hold. It’s not hyperbole to suggest that nothing will have more of an impact on how we think about the practice and outcomes of education moving forward.

Regenerative Design – It’s a hard reality to acknowledge, but it’s now clear that our environmental challenges are becoming more and more difficult to overcome, and that our students will be living as adults in a period of great disruption and hardship. There is now a compelling argument that schools must redesign their most fundamental systems, practices, and pedagogies to focus on the regeneration of all life on the planet.

2043 – Given the uncertainty of what’s ahead, it’s more important than ever to develop cultures and systems that have “one foot in the future.” School communities must engage in building the collective capacity to develop a futures lens through which to make every decision about the experience of school they create for students.

“Epistemic Humility” – With the increasing scale and complexity of the information we are being subjected to every day, individual educators and school communities must now learn and employ new strategies for separating fact from fiction, determining truth, and creating and contributing knowledge in ethical and effective ways. The very nature of literacy is in question.

Urgency – The last few years have taught us that we no longer have any time to waste when it comes to a focus on relevance, wellness, justice, and sustainability in schools. 2023 may very well be an inflection point where we either commit to interrogating our current missions and visions and move to articulate new ones, or we risk being overwhelmed by the existential challenges that now face teaching and learning and education writ large.

We know this is a pretty heady list. But we also know that these are the realities of our times. There are challenges, for sure, but there are also opportunities to do great and meaningful work this year. We hope to engage in these and other topics in ways that continue to make you think, and, importantly, act.
Thanks for being with us on this journey.
(Visit the Big Questions Institute to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter!)

Schools in a Time of Chaos

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(Note: I originally wrote this in July, 2016. I wish I could say that we’d evolved since then into a much more sane, loving, enlightened, literate, just society. But as you’ll see, almost all of it could have been written this week. What will we do to make sure this post won’t be relevant four years from now?)

To try to capture the last week in the U.S. would be folly. Police shooting and killing civilians. Civilians killing police. Live-streamed death. FBI probes, Congressional hearings, riots in the streets, political sniping, racial invectives. It’s sad, scary, and fatiguing all at once.

And, it’s disorienting. As George Saunders wrote in an amazing essay in the New Yorker:

I’ve never before imagined America as fragile, as an experiment that could, within my lifetime, fail. But I imagine it that way now.

(And that was written before last week’s shootings had occurred.)

I’m nowhere near eloquent or smart enough to offer some sweeping analysis that puts this moment into some sensible context. It feels as if the symptoms of our illness are pointing to a difficult diagnosis for which there is no known cure. Yet giving up on a fix is not an option because the alternative is, well…

And there are layers to this that transcend sense-making, rooted so deeply in our histories, our dreams, and our disappointments that they are beyond any clear articulation. It’s not just that the illness has no obvious cure; it hasn’t a name either. It would be easier if this was just about race, or just about class, or just about political illiteracy, or just about technology. Instead, it’s about all of those and more, a thousand-piece puzzle that comes without the picture on the top of the box to provide a sense of what “whole” looks like now.

The scariest part is that it feels like we are ill-equipped as a society to deal with what’s being unearthed. We are, to quote Alvin Toffler*, “grotesquely unprepared to cope with” the overwhelming shifts that we’re experiencing. We are not talking at length or with reason about our differences, be they red and blue, black and white and brown, or rich and poor. Perhaps we are unable to now at a time when social media pulls us to our own little information bubbles with increasing ease, where anonymity provokes the worst in our natures. The digital literacy divides that surround us make it exceedingly difficult to hear the “other side” much less understand it. At a moment when we most need to listen and engage in respectful dialogue, we’re content to just be stunned as to why everyone doesn’t see the world as we do.

It’s a moment captured brilliantly by Katharine Viner in the Guardian, who writes:

Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.

What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.

The chaos, across the world, has begun.

I’ve been wondering a lot about education’s role in creating this moment, but even more, its role in fixing it. Ever since Donald Trump blurted out the line “We love the undereducated” in a victory speech a few months ago, I’ve been thinking about the extent to which the current education experience has tilled the soil for what we are currently reaping. We’ve been hell bent on sending kids out into the world that are “college and career ready.” But are they “community ready?” “Country ready?” Are they aware of the pressures and challenges of our democracy? Do they have the tools to express themselves clearly and respectfully about difficult issues, and an empathic disposition that allows them to listen with focus and understanding? Have we allowed them to grapple with these big issues in our presence, with our guidance and modeling to the point where they are able to be thoughtfully engaged?

And can our children truly be “college and career ready” if they are not first “community ready” to their core?

Further, we in education have done rather abysmally when it comes to understanding the profound effects of technology on the basic functions and literacies of our lives. We continue to run from all of those unknowns, those powerful affordances that recenter individual learning and creating and communicating in the world today, instead of embracing them and seeing them as, now, the fundamental focus of our work. As I’ve said before, we would never revisit a physician who disdains a fluency in the latest technologies to treat his or her patients. It doesn’t really matter if that person is afraid or doesn’t have time or feels beset by change. Professionals seek innovation. Professionals understand that the best way to serve their clients is a mix of old and new. Professionals adapt. By any measure, we have not conducted ourselves professionally on those terms.

Is there any question that we have sacrificed many of the life literacies that we all could certainly use right now in our worship for standardization, ranking, data, and those things that are easy to measure? The ability to feel empathy for others, to discuss difficult topics with those who disagree with us in ways that don’t end up in a viral video, to “cope with” change and, importantly, to adapt to new realities of every shape and scale. We’d rather teach the safe stuff, the state bird, multiplication tables, the Battle of Antietam, and Shakespeare, in the safe way, where none of it gets co-mingled and messy and iterative. The black and white version of schooling that predominates now leads our students to an “education,” yet leaves them “undereducated,” illiterate in modern contexts, and deeply resistant to complexity.

And so the question remains, only with even more urgency as chaos reigns: Will we change? Can we?

Which brings me to an essay by Larry Paros, an 82-year old former high school math and social studies teacher who reflected in HuffPo this week on schools in chaos at another time in our history, back in 1968. Faced with racial strife, political unrest, a protracted war, civil disobedience and more, Paros and his colleagues at Yale decided to forge a different path in terms of schooling.

These students were as confused as we were as to the meaning of the events unfolding before them and how best to respond. The external turmoil reflected all too accurately the inner contradictions of our staff and students, bringing sharply into focus the conduct of individual lives as well as that of the nation.

For us it could not be business as usual. One could not simply seek refuge from these forces at our schools and universities. Schooling was part of and not apart from society. Rather than simply sit by idly, reflecting on these events, our schools were morally compelled to step forward—to generate new thinking, alternate visions and active approaches to the events of the outside world consistent with the needs and demands of its students. This was the stuff of a real education, intellectually challenging and spiritually and politically transformative.

As with all of the links in this post, I sincerely urge you to read the whole thing. Instead of running from chaos, Paros and his peers embraced it. Instead of resting on “success,” school became a laboratory, a place to try to answer the unanswerable. A place to, perhaps, work on a cure. It’s an inspirational vision of what school ought to be. And without overstating it, it may be a vision that ultimately saves us. Only, however, if we recognize the urgency for change right now.

Lest we forget, schools, like democracy, are an experiment that carries no guarantee of success. But much like democracy in this moment, there are entrenched stories that we tell about what schools are that make it difficult to negotiate what schools ought to be. We are disoriented as much as the next institution, yet instead of embracing it, instead of taking on the heavy lift of figuring it out because we teach kids (#guilttrip), we’re doubling down, spending billions on gadgets that put a modern sheen on the status quo, hewing to the test, waiting for everyone else, parents, universities, policy makers and vendors to reset the bar for us.

If we continue to do that, we are not just setting ourselves up for institutional failure in the long term. We are failing our kids, and the society we deliver them to, right now.

(* As quoted in this essay by Farhad Manjoo)

(Image credit: Justin S. Campbell)

Has This Crisis Really Changed Schools?

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With respect to those who stand in awe of all that’s changed about schools in the past few months, I would ask “what’s actually changed?”

I don’t mean to minimize the incredible work that educators around the world have done to respond to this crisis. It’s amazing the scale and speed with which we moved from physical space to remote schooling.

But aside from the venue through which schooling is happening, how else has the overarching narrative truly shifted?

Have power relationships between students, teachers, parents, administrators and policy makers really been significantly reoriented?

Are students now at the center of determining what, when, and how they learn?

Has schooling become more equitable across society?

Has the definition of “success” changed?

Aside from turning to technology to deliver the curriculum, has anything about the curriculum really changed?

Has technology amplified learning instead of teaching?

Has our long-term thinking about assessment shifted in any real way?

Do kids find the experience of school more relevant? Less competitive? More empowering?

Maybe it’s early to ask these questions. But, aren’t the answers to these questions (and others like them) the better measure of what, if anything, has really changed?

To Create the “New Normal” of Education, Start With the “Old Normal” of Learning

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As educators, parents, and students have scrambled over the past couple of months to figure out how to move school online quickly and at scale, I can’t help but be reminded of a pivotal scene in the movie Apollo 13. After having to abandon their trip to the moon due to an explosion, the three astronauts suddenly find themselves struggling for oxygen in their emergency home in a lunar module designed to support only two people. Faced with quickly rising carbon dioxide levels, engineers in Houston dealing with this totally unexpected crisis suddenly have to design a makeshift air filter using only materials that the astronauts can access and assemble in space. As the mission commander says, “I suggest you gentleman figure out how to put a square peg in a round hole…rapidly.”

That’s in essence is what schools around the world have been trying to do these past weeks thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, the very rapid transition from school buildings and classrooms to Zoom rooms and Google Docs over a period of just days has posed what may be the most complex problem-solving moment ever in education. As UC Berkeley historian Elena Conis said in a recent article in The Atlantic, “There is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.”

Thirty days or so in, the outcomes are mixed. Some schools where students have laptops and bandwidth have weathered the shift fairly well. Others where many students have little or no technology or access have been forced to close up shop for the rest of the year citing the unfairness of being able to meet some but not all of their students’ needs. Some have tried to totally replicate school online, complete with time schedules and having students wear their school uniforms to virtual “class.” Others have taken a more student-centered approach, relaxing curriculum standards and even eliminating grading. For most, school is “open” online, but it’s a far cry from the school that was open down the block.

Transformation?

To hear traditional and social media tell it, the “transformation” of schools is now finally, definitely, without a doubt, unquestionably, most certainly on the horizon. The crisis, experts say, will lay waste to much of “school” as we know it. Education will become more equitable, more “blended” with technology, more responsive to the needs of children facing an increasingly complex, uncertain future. With millions of parents gaining a new appreciation for the work of educators, teachers will be paid more, and they’ll gain more agency over what is taught and how. We’ll have an improved “new normal” when schools eventually do reopen in communities around the world.

Color me skeptical.

I don’t doubt that some things will change, but I wonder how much of that change will be truly “transformative.” Our collective, shared experience of school has deep roots. Change of any type feels especially risky when it has to do with our children. And as much as the Coronavirus has created a profound disruption to the system, I’m unconvinced that it will fundamentally shift the deep-seated power relationships among administrators, teachers, parents, students, policy makers, and curriculum and technology vendors in ways that will allow for a significant alteration to the fundamental day to day story of school.

If we are truly serious about real change in education, our conversations have to go much deeper than a focus on new technologies or tweaked teaching practices. If we sincerely want to create a better, “new normal” for kids in schools once this crisis is over, one that truly transforms the experience in ways that are urgently required to help them navigate what lies ahead, we need to start by embracing the “old normal” of learning first.

The irony is that schools were not built for learning. Research shows that very little of what kids “learn” in a curricular sense is remembered for the long term, nor is it relevant to or applicable in their daily lives. It’s an unpleasant truth that makes us uncomfortable. But it is a truth. Just look at the many recent blog posts and Tweets from semi-embarrassed parents-turned-teachers lamenting how little they actually remember from high school that they can help their kids with. Learning in school simply isn’t like learning in real life.

A Learning Moment

Take the current crisis as an example. Aside from being a moment of huge disruption for all of us, this may be the most profound moment of deep professional learning that any of us have ever experienced regardless if we’re in health care, business, politics, service, or any other industry you can name. Educators in particular are literally learning their way through the crisis, day to day, hour to hour, and the conditions required for powerful learning are obviously present: a deep engagement in meaningful, real-world problem solving that is driven by questions, is intensely collaborative, is challenging in productive ways, and isn’t constrained by a linear, dated “curriculum” that dictates what comes next. No one is doing this for a grade; we’re doing this for a goal, namely to try to serve our students as best we can under exceedingly difficult circumstances.

Those conditions and others like them are and always have been how all humans learn best. And all humans know it. Learning is as natural as breathing when there is a real purpose behind it and when we have the freedom to learn on our own terms, when we’re not confined and coerced by external systems and traditions. Yet, we humans seem to forget that when it comes to the experience our kids have in school. In school, we seem to think learning happens only when it’s age-grouped and graded, or when it’s chunked into time blocks and subjects and meets some predetermined outcomes. Students have “learned” it seems only when they have consumed a mandated bucket of information or content and been tested to make sure they consumed it adequately.

In other words, in schools, we seem to think learning happens when it doesn’t look like real life. Common sense and personal experience tells us otherwise.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that kids shouldn’t be in community schools, in classrooms with caring, supportive adults who can push them to create and connect and change the world in powerful ways that they might not realize on their own. And I’m also not saying that there aren’t important things for students to learn in school. No question, the future will require people who are expert communicators, who have a global lens through which to live their lives, who are expert “crap detectors,” and, most importantly, who are agile, motivated, powerful learners who have the skills, literacies, and dispositions to find and solve real problems with others on an ongoing basis. It will demand people who can learn just in time, not just in case. In that regard, schools have a huge role to play in the developing mastery in all of our children and communities no matter what the post-pandemic world looks like.

Difficult Choices

But as we have been making difficult choices in these weeks about schools and education as we transition online, we’ve been reminded of those things that we value most: relationships, community, the curiosity of kids, and the power of real learning. And we’ve been surfacing other things that are simply not as important. Grades have been suspended in many schools. College entrance exams have been cancelled or modified. Many states aren’t giving standardized tests. Schools are cutting curriculum and pulling back on homework. At a moment when we have record numbers of students feeling stressed, anxious, and depressed, those choices suggest a real opportunity to ask some difficult questions about what we truly want schools to be in the future. As in which of those things remain important, and which will we choose to put on our “To (Un)Do Lists”?

In moving schools online in the face of this crisis, most seem to have learned how to put that metaphoric square peg in a round hole. That’s not a bad thing, but as with the astronauts, it’s just life support, a way to survive this momentary disaster. But the discussions we have and the decisions we make when the dust finally settles from the Coronavirus disruption will determine whether or not our schools and our students will just survive this moment or whether they will actually thrive in the future. For the best chance at the latter, those discussions and decisions need to be held through the lens of how powerful learning actually happens in each of us in the real world, not how we have long tried to force learning to happen in this thing we call school.

The Parent Opportunity

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Right now, we have millions of parents shouldered up to their children trying to help them do school. I’m reading a fair share of both funny and sad accounts of parents who are trying to navigate this new role of surrogate teacher or coach in terms of setting schedules or giving feedback or making the technology work or just getting “coverage”. Frustration levels are high, and my sense is that most parents can’t wait for this to be over and will be happy to send their kids back to school. Not all, but most.

For progressive educators who are looking to this “crisis” as a way to make real change happen in schools, the opportunity right now is not to change practice but to change minds. Now is not the time to figure out what parts of the school experience are truly broken and what we need to create as an alternative. As an old friend reminded me recently, now is about “getting thru,” about making sure that we survive the disruption not just in a curriculum outcomes sense but in a health and wellness sense as well. People are grieving. Forced change like this is stressful to the max. We need to minimize the upset, not create more.

That said, I think all of us would be remiss if we didn’t use this moment to begin to build a different conversation around learning. Again, all these millions of parents in close proximity to their kids, observing “learning” right in front of them. It’s a moment that will be relatively (I hope) short-lived, yet it’s also a moment where we if we seize it, allows us to reflect deeply as school communities about the central commitment that we share for our kids, that they become powerful learners in the world. It’s a moment where we can begin to change the larger story of school.

Getting Meta

In other words, now is the time to get meta with parents, students, and teachers about learning. And we can do it in the service of learning about learning. Whether through survey or live Zoom discussions or email or whatever else, right now is when we need to be asking these questions and engaging in these conversations:

  • When is your child most engaged with their online school experience? Why? What drives that engagement?
  • When is your child bored or disengaged? Why?
  • When do your children feel joy in learning? What circumstances lead to that?
  • What are you learning about your children during this experience? How does that learning happen?
  • How are your children’s learning skills improving during this time? What’s changing about them as learners?

I’m sure there are others, and we can vary them for the audience, but you get the idea. We can collect and share these answers at the appropriate time as a way of sparking a larger conversation about what learning really is, what aspects of school really aren’t working, and how we can bring more joy and love of learning to “real” school moving forward. And it would be a spark built on our personal, collective experience as qualitative researchers asking relevant, important questions about our kids.

Let me say it again: we need to do this work now. I really believe this is the real opportunity of this crisis for those who have been itching to reimagine school. Real change has to start with a community-wide, shared understanding of what learning actually is, how it happens, and what constrains it. This moment, when so many families are huddled inside together trying to make sense of school, we can be creating a powerful conversation about learning that will serve us all when we’re done “getting thru.”

More on Stories, More on “Goods”

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I’ve been thinking more about story since writing this recent post, and I’ve come across some more reading and thinking that I’m trying to make sense of. (If you haven’t read that post, this one will make much more sense if you do.) So in the spirit of blogging my way to greater understanding…

Next week marks the release here in the US of a new Will Storr book titled The Science of Storytelling, and from the reviews that I’ve come across so far, I’m intrigued enough to have queued up the download on my Kindle when it comes out. One of the most interesting reviews of the book comes from Big Think, where I was struck by this particular description of Storr’s thesis:

In his latest book, “The Science of Storytelling,” journalist and novelist Will Storr opens with a simple yet disconcerting message: “Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it.” This is why we’re all hallucinating. We’re not living reality as much as constructing one based on personal history and environment. Over 7 billion human animals walking around, telling ourselves stories about ourselves, using them as emotional shields to guard against the ravages of an indifferent universe. That’s how powerful stories are.

I think the reason that “Humans might be…” part strikes me so much is that it’s unpleasant truth-telling, which is pretty obviously the phase that I’m in when it comes to life and particularly education. And because it again goes back to that Harari quote from my previous post about almost everything being a fiction. It’s all narrative. And we create the narratives and fictions we need to find some in the moment meaning to our existences, even though one outcome to all of this could very well be that we’re all just dust in the end. (Which, while somewhat depressing is also somewhat freeing.)

Our Stories

Anyway, it’s good to be reminded that we are always telling stories about ourselves, and that our stories really are the way that we make sense of life. Without story, it would be a pretty bleak existence. Thing is, we choose the stories we tell about ourselves and one another and our institutions. If you’re a Bernie supporter, you’ve chosen a much different story from all those Trump supporters out there, and vice versa. And that’s because the story you’ve chosen resonates more closely with your own personal framing. But neither is necessarily “right,” although it feels like we need one or the other to be. In the case of schools, if you think an education is something you “get,” then you tell the traditional story of school. If you think an education is something you “learn,” then your story is vastly different. And honestly, I’m not sure there’s more space in-between those two than there is between Bernie and Donald.

Good stories require that a character (or an institution) changes. At some point, according to Big Think’s review, “the protagonist faces an ultimate challenge which forces them to confront life-altering change.” And I can’t help but think about schools as I read that. I think schools are on the brink of an existential challenge, one that goes to the heart of “Why School?” It doesn’t get more foundational than “Why do schools exist?” yet I don’t think many educators are asking that question. And I don’t think we can effectively craft a new story until we’ve done that. If you go back to my previous post again, I talk about David Labaree’s distinction between two narratives of schooling, that of being a “public good” whose role is to help children become good citizens and problem solvers and humans, and that of being a “private good” whose role is to create or maintain status and access to a greater degree of personal success rather than societal improvement.

That in and of itself is great conversation to be having in schools right now. Not just in the sense of articulating as a community which story you want the school experience to be about but also owning which story you are actually living. (So much discomfort there.)

Ambiguity Sucks

Storr also writes about how we can’t live with stories that are incomplete. Our brains require us to fill in the gaps because we just hate ambiguity (especially true when dealing with stories that revolve around our young.) And, importantly, he says that we want to be in control of the story, even though, again, control is just a fiction as well. Our fatal flaw as individuals and institutions is that we don’t understand that we really aren’t in control of much of anything, and not acting with that understanding. I mean, do schools act as if they understand that they really aren’t in control of what kids are learning?

It’s interesting, and there’s more that I’ll try to sort out in later posts, perhaps after I’ve actually read the book itself.

But I want to briefly capture one other molecule-shifting idea that I found this morning after tracking down more information on a mention Storr made of “eudaimonic happiness” in his TedX Talk on “The Science of Storytelling.” Defined, a eudaimonic life is “to be had whenever we are in pursuit of fulfilling our potential,” which leads us to finding “more meaning and purpose in life.” It’s based on the Aristotelian view that we are innately driven to pursue our potential, to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.

But here’s a bit of an extended snip from a Psychology Today article that focuses on “eudaimonic happiness” with some added emphasis:

But to realize our potential, we need what Aristotle called “real goods.” By real goods, he meant those things necessary for the development of our potential, such as shelter, clothing, food, and friends, but also arts, music, literature, and culture. In the modern world, there are certain things that we need to be able to do in the pursuit of fulfilling our individual potential, and, in this sense, real goods are defined by their necessity to us as individuals.

The obvious example is that we need money, and so it becomes a real good. But there is also what Aristotle referred to as the “golden mean,” which is the right amount of the good: too little and we are in deficit of what we need to pursue our potential, as in times of famine when people’s potential is literally thwarted; too much and what was a real good becomes an “apparent good”—something we don’t need.

Apparent goods are the things we simply don’t need. They may give us pleasure, but we don’t actually need them. The important thing is not to confuse them with real goods, which can lead us to think we do need them.

Modern-day positive psychologists are now taking these ideas based on ancient Greek philosophy very seriously in their quest to understand what seems most important for a good life.

The eudaimonic view is a different way of thinking about happiness than the view we are bombarded with in our daily lives by advertisements that seek to define modern life and sell us apparent goods as if they were real goods. Seen this way, modern life makes it hard to find happiness because we end up striving for, and investing our energies in the quest for, apparent goods. In short, we seek pleasure and joy at the expense of meaning and purpose.

Is anyone else seeing the connection here to what David Labaree has been writing about? The tension between public/real goods as the most important needs and aspirations in our work and private/apparent goods as the things that we don’t really need but which our stories tell us we do? Anyone?

Honestly, I’m still trying to think this through. But there is some resonance there. At the core, what is actually necessary for us to develop our potentials? To engage in true “eudaimonic happiness”? And how do schools support those “real goods”? Or do schools cater to the “apparent goods” which may provide “pleasure and joy (and status) at the expense of meaning and purpose?”

One More Thing…

In the current edition of the Atlantic, the inimitable George Packer has a piece titled The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions. And yes, it’s pretty scary. And yes, you probably are already in that story tent if it does feel scary.

But in the midst of all of the stories of how much has and is changing under Trump’s regime, I couldn’t help but stop cold on this line that was describing one reason why so few people saw these changes coming:

But the adults’ greatest miscalculation was to overestimate themselves—particularly in believing that other Americans saw them as selfless public servants, their stature derived from a high-minded commitment to the good of the nation.

I can’t help but wonder the extent to which the “private good” drivers that we have in our schools today is a huge reason for this miscalculation. The “good of the nation” intentions that schools were first formed around have been “re-formed” by the consumer’s desire for “good for self” outcomes. So why should we be shocked when so many don’t see a “high-minded commitment to the good of the nation” as something to be admired and respected? That’s not been our emphasis. That’s not what we’ve been living in schools.

Whew.

Thoughts?

On Power and Climate Change

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At some point in the last couple of months, someone recommended that I read Seth Kreisberg’s 1992 book Transforming Power: Domination, Empowerment, and Education.

To whomever that person is, sincere thanks. It’s an amazing read. And it’s connecting really deeply with my recent thinking about the tension between schools as a public and private good and the greatest aspirations we have for students as they experience school.

Real fast here, I just want to riff a bit off one paragraph in particular from the last chapter which was written by editors after Kreisberg died suddenly at the age of 33 before finishing the final manuscript of the book.

A Challenging Future

It’s difficult not to be concerned with how our kids in school today are going to cope with and thrive in their futures with the effects of climate change bearing down on them. It’s equally difficult to look at the future with a sense of hope, not just for the world but for the ability of schools to actually make that the focus of our work.

Kreisberg’s book tells many stories of teachers and students who were involved in a group called Educators for Social Responsibility which was founded in 1982 to address the concerns of both students and teachers about the possibility of nuclear war. It grew to be a “national grassroots organization of teachers and other educators who believed that schools can help students develop the values, insight, skills and commitment to address contemporary problems and to shape a more peaceful and just world” (92). In other words, it was a group dedicated to pursuing the “public good” potential of schools (as opposed to the “private good” that I wrote about in my last post.)

So, here’s a snip from the book that talks about the work of those educators under the threat of nuclear war. But I’ve taken the liberty to replace “nuclear war” with “climate change” because the sentiment holds. And it’s pretty powerful.

“The omnipresence of climate change is sufficient to make anyone feel helpless, overwhelmed, and speechless. The problem seems huge, above and beyond us. Young people in our society have lived their whole lives under the threat of climate change, and many of them believe that the effects of climate change will only worsen. The problem makes them and us feel small, nearly invisible. In addressing the threat of climate change, these educators found themselves addressing the issues of power in our society, in their daily lives, and in education. They saw that there was a relationship between addressing the problem and how they acted toward one another. Further, they saw that education could play a role in addressing the threat of climate change and changing relationships; but for students and teachers to do so, they both had to become empowered and emerge from the invisibility and silence into which they were relegated. The struggle against the threat of climate change was not separated from the struggle against the social conditions that disempower people. In struggling against the threat of climate change, they transformed themselves, others, and the pedagogies they brought to their classrooms” (214). [Emphasis mine.]

While daunting, I read that last line as hopeful. The idea that we can “transform” ourselves and our practice around the urgency of a collective and existential challenge is a hopeful frame. But only, only if we choose that path.

Climate, Democracy, and Power

I worry, however, that we are failing to understand the significance of this moment. I worry that we will wait to begin to address both the intellectual and emotional aspects of climate change until some curriculum writer or policy wonk decides it’s appropriate. And I worry that when we do begin to embrace this challenge in schools that we will do so with a disregard to the larger context of how power relationships in our society really hold the key to whether or not we’re going to solve it.

As Kreisberg’s editors write, schools don’t take democracy seriously, and that has much to do with power. Democratic communities are places where “people enter into critical inquiry characterized by mutual support, cooperative decision making, and synergistic learning”. Yet schools are places “characterized by human isolation, competition for scarce resources, and relationships of dominance and submission” (215). Harsh words, but true nonetheless.

Fact is, unless you are a technological determinist who believes that some app will save the day, we will only solve this crisis if we dive into it headlong in schools and choose to make it the primary context for our work. Not just the context of climate, but equally the contexts of democracy and power as well.

Thoughts?

School as Fiction

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I’ve been expending a lot of bandwidth lately reading and thinking about the meta story of school, not just the history of the system and of pedagogy, but, more specifically, the motivations behind the story we’re currently living and how they effect the potential for deep and powerful learning that we all say we want for kids.  That means diving into some new (to me) edu-historians and thinkers and trying to connect what I’m learning to others who have been tweaking my thinking for a long time. Frankly, it’s a lot to make sense of, but I think it may be time to try. Feedback welcomed.

Let me start with Yuval Noah Harari, who has been stuck in my craw for the last few years after I read his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The other day, a lengthy, fascinating piece about Harari popped up in the New Yorker, and one idea in particular jumped out at me. The author of the article is talking here about Harari’s most famous book, Sapiens:

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” Harari further proposes that fictions require believers, and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists.

If you recognize schools as “social constructs” which, of course, they are, that’s a provocative idea, no? Schools don’t exist in nature. We’ve constructed them to meet some type of societal need, primarily to collectively educate our young. We see them as a public good, aimed at perpetuating democracy (at least in the US) and creating a more just and livable world. (More on the purpose of schools later.)

The idea of schools as “fictions” is bracing at first. But if you flip the idea over a few times, less so. The narrative of schooling runs deep, but it is simply that: a narrative. A story. One that depends on our “communal belief” in it to wield the power it does. (And no one doubts the power of the school narrative, right?)

In-Between Stories

Importantly, Harari’s work highlights another idea that is relevant here, and that is that in this moment, almost everything is in-between stories. Think about media, business, politics and even the ways we meet and fall in love. Less and less seems to be abiding by old rules and norms. In 21 Lessons, he writes that we are particularly stressed because of this:

“We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one.”

I think it’s fair to say that many are losing faith in the traditional story of school, primarily because it doesn’t serve all kids equitably and it’s increasingly out of step with how the modern world operates. But while there are some indications as to what the new story might look like, (more child/learner centered, focused more on skills and dispositions than content, etc.,) we’re nowhere near any “communal belief” in it. It’s not clear enough, yet, that there is a new story to fully “embrace.”

Still, the new story that is emerging feels much more in tune with the natural, biological rhythms of learning, which, by the way, are not a “fiction.” This is the point that Carol Black has so eloquently made in her amazing essay A Thousand Rivers (which I’ve glossed many times.) If you want the punch in the gut quote from that, here it is:

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.”

Our current fiction about schools attempts to take the very natural process of learning that is a part of all of us and make it happen in the very unnatural setting of the classroom where few of the conditions that all of us know are needed for learning to occur actually exist. It’s our greatest unpleasant truth that schools are not really built for learning. And if you read the rest of Black’s essay, you’ll get the gist of just how harmful that current fiction can be to the well-being of kids.

The Function of Schools

I think this whole idea of “fiction” resonates with me more deeply today due to my recent introduction to the work of David Labaree, a recently retired professor from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. I can’t remember how I found it, but a few months ago I came across his essay from the Journal of Curriculum Studies published in 2012 titled “School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage.” Let’s just say that it’s been rocking my thinking about schools ever since.

In a nutshell, Labaree’s thesis is this: we may say that we want great schools because they are a public good, because (as I said above) they serve the purpose of preparing children to live in a democracy and to hopefully improve society. But what we truly value in schools in the private good they offer in terms of promoting privilege and the current meritocracy, and in the assumed role of providing access to “a better life.” Here are his words from the top of the essay:

The US is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. Society wants schools to express the highest ideals as a society and the greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since one does not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. Schools are asked to promote equality while preserving privilege, so perpetuating a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. The focus is on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage. As a result the system continues to lure one to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating one’s ability to meet these goals. Also, a simple cure cannot be found for this syndrome because no remedy will be accepted that would mean giving up one of the aims for education in favour of another. [Emhasis mine.]

Yes. That.

Seriously, the whole piece is important because it paints with an historical eye to explain school reform movements and why almost all of them have failed. It makes a compelling case that the true reform of the original system was the one that was driven by the consumers of education, not the creators and purveyors of it. While we say that schools and education are the most effective way to attain our highest aspirations and ideals as a society, schools are also the primary way that we accomplish our greatest individual ambitions and “stave off our worst fears.” And that last part, in fact, has become the primary motivation behind the story in schools that we’re currently living.

In short, we choose to build our narrative of schooling around the “private good” of schools and education in order to maintain access to social standing and individual opportunity, rather than as a “public good” which emphasizes citizenship and civic mindedness at its core. And that is a challenging, “unpleasant truth” as well.

The Consequences of our Fiction

That narrative has many deleterious effects, as I was reminded last week in Johannesburg when I reconnected with David Gleason, the author of At What Cost? Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools. A school psychologist, David is researching why it is that our students are now reporting record levels of stress, anxiety, and depression and what schools can do to alleviate it. Educators at “prestigious” schools that David has interviewed are very forthcoming about how their schools contribute to those issues. They freely cite things like putting too much emphasis on college, assigning too much homework, rewarding “achievement” over all else, and not honoring the normal mental and physical development of adolescents, among other things. (In other words, they’re acting in service of the “private good” over the “public good.”) But when he asks those same educators what would happen if they stopped doing those things that they know contribute to the problem, they respond by saying they would then be seen as lacking rigor and excellence, that they would lose their reputations as elite schools and their enrollments along with it, and more.

This “bind” that David discusses so powerfully in his book is the same “bind” that Labaree sees as well, this idea that we are trying to balance two things that are in opposition to one another, and that right now, we are deferring to the consumer’s need for credentialing over students’ well being or society’s noblest aspirations. It’s the same tension that Black feels between the natural needs of children and the unnatural needs of schooling.

Which all ties into a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times titled This Is How Scandinavia Got Great: The power of educating the whole person. Brooks argues that the reason Scandinavia got it right is because they dedicated themselves in the late 19th Century to educating the whole child, that it was more about lifelong learning. That it was more about connection to community and home. It wasn’t about status. Money quote:

“If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses.”

When we choose (or allow ourselves) to be motivated by pragmatism and individualism over idealism and collectivism, we run the risk of ignoring what’s best for our kids and for our society and world.

What We’ve Lost

I’d argue we’ve lost a great deal because of the system as it’s currently constructed and the motives that drive it. And this idea that schools are meant to serve the individual over the collective is at the root of many of our ills. This is what we get when we focus on grades. On being right. On knowledge and not learning. On delivery instead of discovery. We get kids who see others as competitors, not collaborators or cooperators. We don’t want to work with them as much as work to overcome them.

The fiction of schools says we can teach kids things that they don’t internally care about. That we can measure long term learning with numbers and letters. That following the rules is the way to success, at least at the game we call school. The fiction also says that we know what you need to know. It says that you as a child should just acquiesce to our choices. That acceptance of this fiction is the path to an education and, ultimately, personal success.

And yet, we all know this just isn’t true. The vast majority of what we measure in schools, those things that count, literally, are most often quickly forgotten, never again used, and a barrier to the conditions that great learning requires. Our emphasis on “outcomes” and grades creates real emotional stress that is absent when we are learning the things that matter to us. I mean, what kind of emotional stress and anxiety do you feel when you are learning something that you find deeply and powerfully important and useful?

Our greatest challenge as educators is to write a new story of “school” that more effectively serves our students and our society given the moment in which we live and whatever future we can glean. Acknowledging that that too will be a “fiction” may actually make the work easier. But more than anything, understanding and acknowledging the motives of the current story will make that work more urgent, more relevant, and hopefully, more powerful.

A New Phase

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When Bruce Dixon and I started Modern Learners six years ago, we had two aspirations. First, to help people, teachers, parents, and policy makers, better understand the ways in which the modern world provided different lenses through which to see education and learning, and to help them use those lenses to make better decisions for kids. And second, to create a business around it that would allow both of us to get off the road, spend less time on planes, and provide a model for other similar communities down the road.

While I think we did a pretty good job with the first part, the second part has been a tougher path. As we knew it would be. And in all honesty, over the past year or so I’ve grown more frustrated and impatient with the whole conversation around educational change. While more people seem willing to engage in these ideas and take steps to make change happen, the reality is that only very few are willing to truly interrogate the “grammars of school” to an extent that moves them to a real reimagination of the work. And even then it’s a huge struggle to shift the narrative.

“Damaging Effects”

The forces against change are powerful and deeply rooted in the way we think about schools and education. The tech companies, testing companies, tutoring companies, universities, PACs…all of them have billions of dollars invested in making sure that any change we make in schools is cosmetic. And honestly, most authors and speakers and consultants aren’t going there either. I get it. It’s hard. My favorite Alfie Kohn quote these days is “I’m still wrestling with how to discuss the damaging effects of traditional educational practices without making it sound as if I’m blaming people who rely on them.” But that is the work right now, I think. To bring the damage to light. You can’t do that by dangling the next adjective for learning as the cure for what ails education. Nor can you do it by just trying to make things “better” via pushing practices that create more “voice and choice” or “personalization.” Those are more efforts in box checking than gut checking.

That’s why most of the “success” stories I’ve seen have come about outside of the traditional public and private systems. Really visionary leaders building new schools for the type of modern learning that’s possible right now. Small independent or international schools that eschew the status quo. Some boutique, one-off schools that are built for small student populations in more progressive areas of the world. They are out there, and their numbers are growing, no doubt.

But in the public and traditional independent sectors where most kids go to get “an education,” these changes aren’t scaling. Reforms don’t cut to the core of the “unpleasant truths” that I always talk and write about, those things we do in education that simply defy common sense when it comes to holding our kids’ best interests at heart. Those things we do which are increasingly irrelevant for the world we live in today. Everyone nods in agreement when I point them out. Few actually have the commitment to find a path to change them. And sincerely, I’m not throwing anyone under the bus when it comes to those who actually make an effort. Like I’ve often said to the people who have chosen to explore this space with me, this is the hardest work they will ever do. It’s excruciating.

Transition Time

With all that said, I find myself in a period of transition. Not that I’m going to quit trying to make the case for real change to happen in schools. But I am going to think about other ways to do that. I want to keep working. I want to get off planes because until they become more healthy for the planet, we should all get off planes. (Zoom anyone?) I want to do more writing, maybe run some masterminds for leaders and another Change School and Big Questions Institute or two, maybe do more work on and with parents (who may be the real drivers of change), maybe more with coaching basketball, maybe something else. Whatever that may end up being, the news is that both Bruce and I have transitioned out of Modern Learners. It’s time. I’m proud of the work I did there. I think the 10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning and the audit got people to think really hard about their work. And I’m thankful and have nothing but admiration for all of those educators who over the years in spaces like Change School and our community have been willing to push themselves into the necessary discomfort that comes with this work and take steps toward real change. Working with them, coaching them, in fact, has been the best work that I’ve done in my professional career. It’s been a privilege.

So, on to…whatever. Sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us over the years. I hope you continue to support Missy as she carries on the work at Modern Learners. And I look forward to continuing to create new conversations around education and schools in whatever ways make sense. In this world of huge transition and uncertainty, I can think of no more important work.

On Telling Truths

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So, it’s been a while.

For someone who has had a blog for almost 20 years in one form or another, I’m wondering what happened last year. Started off with a bang. Posted fairly regularly elsewhere. But I think the white space here for the last year or so captures a larger struggle that I’ve been having with my place in the world and what I want to say and how to best say it.

Not to say the struggle is gone. But it feels like it’s abating a bit.

And I’m thinking it’s time to go back to the blog. For me. To air my brain out in public again on a more consistent basis. To write.

Today is the last day of January, and I’m happy to say I completed the “write every day for a month” challenge at 750words.com. But that’s the silly or private or even stupid stuff that comes with a Writing Down the Bones approach. Filter-less, which all of us could use, I think.

These days, however, I’m feeling the need to think out loud more than I have been, even though “out loud” is nowhere near the mostly happy, supportive, let’s learn together space it was two decades ago. Not that it ever got that bad in these parts.

But the thing is, I’m feeling like I’ve got more truths to tell about schools and education and the world. Seems like the more I read and think and reflect, the harder those truths seem to get. The harder those truths seem to hear.

Telling Truths

A piece in the Atlantic by George Packer is what tipped me into this post. A piece that while talking about writing in general, I think captures the state of affairs in the Trump era all too well. And it’s not good for writers, who find it easier to accede to the expectations of the tribe than to try to engage them in shifting those expectations when needed.

The education world is right there. I’m not sure we’re telling enough truths in the education space. We’re afraid, because some of those truths are really hard. We’re too concerned with gaining “followers” by telling them what they want to hear, in many cases by giving them what’s appealing to them emotionally instead of challenging their worldviews.

Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers. In the most successful cases, the cultivation of followers becomes an end in itself and takes the place of actual writing.

Can we even remember the days when we wrote not for likes and followers but for engagement and conversation? When implicit at the end of every post was the question “Here’s what I think; what do you think?” and the expectation that the answer would be thoughtful and seeking to deepen rather to end the conversation? When numbers didn’t drive the messaging?

Packer suggests that writers have become afraid.

It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

And that is an existential problem for a writer.

A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.

I am many things: husband, parent, educator, author, speaker, consultant, podcaster, curator, lover of basketball, environmentalist. But I’m also a writer. I always have been. I always will be.

My choice now is what to do that.

I choose to tell truths.

More soon.

Standardized Personalization

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Just for the record, if you’re an advocate for “personalizing” learning, then you need to do more than just offer some options for how students might work their way through the curriculum.

That’s just a starting point.

If you really are serious about honoring a student’s interests and dispositions and individuality, then you’re going to have to also honor a “personalized” version of “success” and “achievement.” You’re going to need to honor what fulfills the individual, not what fulfills the institution.

I mean, remind me again the point of “personalizing” a path to “standardized” outcomes?

Of course, this requires that we seriously give up control over where a “personalized” path may lead. But in the service of developing kids as deep, curious, persistent learners, that’s a small sacrifice. Especially when being a deep, curious, persistent learner is now the coin of the realm.

Right now, we can only imagine what the experience of school might be if we put learning fully in the hands of learners.

My guess is it would be more joyful, more hopeful, more relevant than what most kids experience today.

On Learning…In School

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New rule: Whenever we talk about learning, we should distinguish between learning in the real world and learning IN SCHOOL.

For example, the work of John Hattie is cited daily as research that can help us improve student learning. All good, as long as we remember that his research is about improving learning IN SCHOOL as measured by very narrow, quantitative indicators.

That’s an important distinction because the reality is that IN SCHOOL we’re trying to get kids to learn things that they haven’t chosen to learn, that they’re not always interested in learning, that they see little reason for learning when it comes to real life application, and that they forget much of as they move through their lives.

So when we read things like “teaching is the most important factor impacting student learning” IN SCHOOL, that doesn’t necessarily mean that teaching is the most important factor impacting learning in the world. In fact, teaching in the traditional sense in many ways inhibits the deep, powerful learning that we want all kids to experience.

I’m not saying teachers don’t have a role or that they don’t have value. But we have to decide what our aspirations really are when it comes to our kids. To be successful at school, or to be amazing learners who thrive in the world?

What Matters?

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Do we value what works more than we value what matters?

Peter Block has me thinking about that. In The Answer to How is Yes he writes:

“The phrase ‘what matters’ is shorthand for our capacity to dream, to reclaim our freedom, to be idealistic, and to give our lives to those things which are vague, hard to measure, and invisible.”

We’re so scared by things that are “vague, hard to measure, and invisible,” aren’t we? But that’s where real learning happens. I mean how much of what you have learned happened in a particular moment when you were absolutely aware that something was changing? If you’re like me, not many at all.

So, tests “work.” A set curriculum “works.” Compulsory standards “work,” even if they’re often irrelevant and short-lived. Limiting freedom and choice and passion “works.”

But do those things “matter?” And, might other aspects of life that aren’t as cut and dried matter more?

Talking about what matters turns out to be uncomfortable because we know so much of what works doesn’t matter in the end.

And remember, if we don’t measure what we value, we’ll end up valuing what we measure.

We choose.

Cut To the Test

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Final exams, SAT and ACT, pop quizzes, state standardized tests…

Why?

Why do we need a test to show us what our students have “learned”?

Seriously. I’m asking.

It would seem to make more sense that what students learn should be transparent from day 1, not just captured in a number or score on day 45, or 180 or 2,160. I mean, shouldn’t we be able to see their learning inform and enhance their practice? Shouldn’t we be focusing on them doing something with what they’ve learned rather than simply telling it back to us at some predetermined hour?

Apparently, we don’t know what they’ve learned until they take that test and get that score. Until they’ve studied or crammed or been tutored or, in some cases, cheated their way to a number.

Because apparently, that makes us “accountable.” That’s what makes it “count.”

We’re sending some pretty unhealthy messages to our kids when we make it about a snapshot in time rather than a lifetime of learning.

Whose Mission?

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I spend a lot of time talking to educational leaders about mission and vision. Without a clear sense of what larger purpose you want your school to serve in the world, and an equally clear picture of what it takes to achieve that purpose, schools are, in a word, incoherent.

And let’s just say, incoherence abounds in education.

But I was thinking the other day that it’s not just about OUR sense of mission and our picture of how to get there. I wonder how many of us in education know what our students hold as their current mission in life and how they plan to achieve it.

I’m not talking about asking them what they want to be when they grow up.

I’m talking about what they want out of this class, this year, this school experience thing. And then helping them create a plan to get what they want.

I wouldn’t be shocked if many (if not most) kids answered that mission question with something along the lines of “I want to get an A” or “I want to graduate.”

But you’d hope that most kids would answer with “I want to learn more about this” or “I want to improve at this.” You’d hope their mission would be to answer some question that’s important to them.

Either way, their answers might just change the way you think of YOUR own mission and the vision you have to achieve it.

Hand it On

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One of my least favorite phrases in education is “hand it in.”

Why, instead wouldn’t we say “share it with the world”?

I mean I know that much of what students create isn’t ready for prime time, that it’s a draft or “in progress.” But why at a moment when we can share so easily and widely with audiences around the world would we still be asking kids to “hand in” final work to just the teacher?

“Hand it in” means it’s finished.

“Hand it in” means the teacher is the only judge of the merits of the work.

“Hand it in” is a rule in the larger game of school.

“Hand it in” limits agency and passion and desire to learn.

I remember back when my kids were in 2nd and 4th grade we created the “Hand It In” pile, the place where we put every piece of paper that came home each week in this thing called “The Friday Folder.” In less than a year, that pile grew to almost three feet high.

Three feet!

And the kicker was my kids never looked in that pile again. Once it was “handed in” it was out of mind.

I get it. We don’t want kids publishing everything they do online. But surely it would change the whole interaction if our kids were doing real things for real audiences that mattered.

So what if we moved from “hand it in” to “hand it on”? What might change?

Sunday Snip: Russel Ackoff

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Your Sunday Snip:

“The common view, one that underpins almost all educational enterprises that have arisen over the past 150 years, is that motivation must be instilled from without, by a pedagogically sophisticated educator. This view is understandable when education is considered a way to enforce a particular social agenda on children. From the realization that such coercion inevitably arouses antagonism came the need to convince children that society’s agenda is actually their own agenda, too; only then would children in school be able to learn effectively. The primary activity of schooling became pedagogy, instilling in children motivation to do what the school authorities wanted them to do (or, in plainer terms, seducing children to think they love spinach by looking for ways to cook it that would make it seem delicious to them).

The reason this has been such a dismal failure, especially as the information age unfolds, is that seduction is ultimately a poor tool for a long-term relationship—in this case, between a person and an area of study.”

Russell Ackoff in Turning Learning Right Side Up

Growth Needs Fear

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Professional learning may be about expanding our own skillset, but professional growth is about testing our own fears.

Change is scary, especially in schools. It’s the unknown. It takes courage to do something new, to try an approach that you’ve never tried before.

Or, importantly, an approach that we’ve never tried before.

But to never feel scared, as an individual or as a community, there is no growth. There is no change.

When we have a clarity of purpose and a deep belief that we are doing the absolute right thing by students, change actually gets less scary than if we were setting out on our own. When we are fully clear on the “why?”, and when we have a shared vision that we’ve articulated clearly and resolutely, testing our own fears becomes a natural path to growth, as an individual and as a community.

And, importantly, it creates a safe culture for students to test their own fears, to grow with us.

No doubt as individuals and systems and communities, we need to keep learning. But it’s only by continually stepping out of our boxes that we keep growing.

Live the Mission

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One of my favorite stories about living the mission is the one about John F. Kennedy’s visit to NASA a year or so after he announced that we would be going to the moon by the end of the 1960s.

The story goes that as he was touring the facility meeting the engineers and executives, he happened upon a custodian who was cleaning one of the hallways.

Kennedy walked up to him, extended his hand, introduced himself and asked the man, “So what do you do here?”

Without a hesitation, the man looked at the president and said, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon.”

No question that “putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade” is about as clear a mission that you can have. Honestly, most mission statements in schools are not nearly as succinct or to the point.

But just having a clear mission isn’t enough; that mission must drive the work in every part of the school down to the support staff, maintenance crew, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers.

Creating profound learning environments and experiences for kids means making sure everyone not only knows the mission but understands their role in achieving it.

So, if you’re a school leader, ask the people in your building, “What do you do here?”

See what they say.

See if they’re living the mission, or just reciting it.

Choose Not Knowing

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When we’re caught in a moment when we really don’t know what to do next, isn’t it safer just to do what we’ve always done?

Like, let’s just keep creating the five-year plan even though we have little idea what five years from now will look like.

Or let’s keep teaching the same curriculum even though the existential conversations and contexts in the world today are rendering much of what we teach irrelevant.

Let’s just keep competition at the core of the school experience even though it’s clear the arc of the world must bend toward cooperation.

And by all means, let’s constrain and limit our use and understanding of technology even though technology is impacting almost every aspect of our lives in both good and nefarious ways.

What would happen if, in response to not knowing, we did something different? What if we met not knowing with more not knowing?

We don’t know what would happen if we ditched the plan, cut the curriculum, stopped the ranking and sorting and grading, and worked to open access rather than close it. But that strategy would certainly generate all sorts of new learning, learning that may just help us make more sense of what to do next.

Because when everything around you is breaking, standing pat probably isn’t the best strategy.

Announcing: The Schools of Modern Learning Audit

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So today, my team and I at Modern Learners are excited to release our “10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning Audit.”

It’s a 5-7 minute survey tool that we’ve developed as a companion to our whitepaper of the same name. If you want to get a quick snapshot of how you compare to schools around the world that are changing the experiences and environments for learners to more effectively prepare them for the world as it is, I hope you check it out.

Depending on where you score, we’ll email you some great next steps to take to close some of the gaps that you may have.

And if you have any feedback or questions, please e-mail me directly at will@modernlearners.com.

Really hoping you’ll find this audit to be a valuable tool in your work to create relevant, sustainable change in your schools!

Shamed Into Learning

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From the “Stories I Never Thought I’d Read Department” comes this little discovery from Yahoo News:

A high school that requires some students to wear ID badges announcing their failing grades.

Yes, you read that right.

At Mingus Union HS in Cottonwood, AZ “upperclassmen who struggle in classes must also wear red badges (aka “scarlet badges” of shame) with numbers that indicate their repeated grade level if their marks don’t improve.”

I don’t even know where to start.

I’m trying to imagine that leadership team meeting where someone said “Hey, I’ve got an idea…” and others went “Let’s do that.”

I’m trying to imagine educators so far removed from a basic ethic of care for children that they would think humiliation would be a great motivator for learning.

I’m trying to imagine how a school community could go so far off the rails to accept a policy and a culture like this.

Shame on all of them.

I’m hoping this school is an outlier. But how many other practices and policies are there out there that don’t start with a deep sense of concern for the children we serve? How many others don’t comport to the supposed values and beliefs that our learning environments are supposedly built on?

Might be time for a review.

A Full Contact Sport

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Here’s your “Sunday Snip:”

“It is impressive, on one level, that we spend billions of dollars and innumerable hours creating this perfect, practice-based environment in which children’s abilities to sit still in classrooms are honed. Furthermore, we have built a reward structure to praise those students who can sit in classrooms better than anyone else. We let them run our planet. However, given that this model is economically running economies into the ground and obesity is a global epidemic, it may be time to collectively build and reward different skills. Learning is a full contact sport. To learn something new, a student has to do something new and often be somewhere new…

Rather than viewing and treating students who want to do something new as troublemakers who need to be fixed, we should recognize that they will be the engines of improvements in our standard of living. Point of fact, they always have been.”

~Clark Aldrich, Unschooling Rules