Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Healthy Discomfort?

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I realized the other day that I live in an almost constant state of discomfort.

Not a physical or mental discomfort; my life humbles me.

It’s an intellectual discomfort that just won’t go away. It’s a discomfort driven by questions that I struggle to answer. It’s a state of constant not knowing that I can’t seem to shake.

Honestly, I don’t think I want to shake it. In fact, I kind of like it.

It’s that discomfort that drives me to read and write and think and reflect every day. It’s what keeps me curious.

It’s what keeps me learning.

This is a moment that probably should cause all of us some discomfort, some healthy sense of not knowing. So many questions seem almost unanswerable today. So many feel huge and existential.

And that’s true as well for schools and education.

The difference in schools is that our student’s discomfort comes from not knowing the known, from not knowing the “right” answer or the “right” process. It comes from the evaluation and the judgement that follows.

What if instead of making students focus on what’s known, we helped them thrive in the unknown? What if we supported them in finding their own healthy discomfort, their own questions that matter? Wouldn’t that keep them more curious? More engaged?

Wouldn’t that keep them learning?

Time for Change

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If you want to make real, serious change in schools stick, don’t underestimate the time it takes to till the soil.

This week, another district in Maine decided to scale back its proficiency-based assessment regime and reinstate letter grades because the new system was “too hard to explain.” And so, understandably, parents were in an uproar. They demanded “a grading system that is accurate and understandable.”

Let’s be clear: proficiency-based assessment programs can be “accurate and understandable,” but only if we make them so. Only if we build the capacity of parents and teachers and students to understand why a change like that is beneficial to kids and how it operates.

But that takes time. Years. Many years, in fact.

The difficulty rests in the narrative that we’re all inured to in education. Success in school means good grades, plain and simple. It’s what shows up in the parent portal. Specifically, it’s numbers and percentages and averages. It’s not skills or portfolios or problem solving.

Right now, we’re in between narratives. That old one is on its way to breaking. But without a clear, more modern, more effective vision to take its place, we’ll cling to the old.

This is the work. Write a new story, then honor the time and effort required to make it take root.

Fail Harder

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What if every morning as your students walked into school they were met with huge sign that said “Fail Harder”?

And what if you were told to “walk in stupid” to your classroom every day? 

Might change the experience on school a bit, no?

Interestingly, those are the exact messages that greet the creatives at one of the most renowned ad agencies in the world.

Could it be that in a world where change seems to be happening faster and faster, our emphasis on “success” in school is misplaced? Since school cultures are so focused on avoiding failure and being stupid, have we limited our ability to learn? To try new things? To get out of our boxes? To see the reality of this moment clearly?

The beginner’s mind admits that he knows nothing and is therefore open to everything. The possibilities expand, the paths forward become more numerous. The opportunities to learn, and to learn from failure, multiply.

We can’t learn if we lack the courage and or the cultures to fail.

So, what if we en-couraged it? What if we changed the rules to read “failure is success, so fail harder. Much harder”?

I’m thinking it would make our kids much more prepared for a world in flux even though they may be less prepared for the test.

Saying “Yes” to School

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If you’re an educator and you haven’t read any John Holt, you might want to. His is an interesting, and provocative perspective on schools.

In Instead of Education, Holt writes this: “I have learned that no one can truly say ‘Yes’ to an idea, mine or anyone else’s, unless he can freely say ‘No’ to it. This is why, except as an occasional visitor, I will no longer do my teaching in compulsory and competitive schools.”

It begs the question, what can our students truly say “yes” to in today’s schools?

They can’t say “yes” to attending, for while some options exist, most are compelled to show up each day.

They can’t say “yes” to the curriculum because most of it is required and organized and paced by someone else.

They can’t say “yes” to being assessed because of our dependence on grades and scores to measure and rank both the kids and ourselves.

The impact of not being able to say “no” is far-reaching. Disengagement. Compliance. Dependence. Misplaced priorities and goals. (See the attached Tweet for an example.)

How might school be different if students were able to say “no,” giving them then the freedom to say “yes?” What might change if we honored their inherent agency to make serious choices about their learning experience?

If they opted in instead of acted out?

“C” is for Coping

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Stat of the Day: 77% of 14 to 29 year olds said they or someone close to them had suffered from mental health issues.

77%.

And the #1 issue for that age group? School shootings.

I’m thinking of all the supposed “C” skills that we’re supposed to develop in our students, it’s arguable that “coping” may now be the most important. As much so as creativity, curiosity, collaboration, or any of the others. If are kids cannot cope with the realities of the day, none of those others will flourish.

It begs all sorts of questions for educators and schools.

How are we adding to their stress? What current practices might ease their burden? (Think ending early morning sleep deprivation, taking the “high stakes” off the test, or giving them more opportunities to move their bodies and quiet their minds.)

Are we explicit in teaching kids coping strategies? Do they learn them implicitly from the cultures that we create in our schools? Do the adults model them purposefully?

Are we building capacity in our communities to support and nurture and care for our kids? Are we honoring the fears of our children every day?

As with everything else in life, this is a choice. Right now, most schools choose rigor and competition and immobility.

We have healthier options.

Misplaced Angst

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There is a lot of angst these days about kids and screens and schools. France has outlawed cell phones inside of the building. Many schools have strict rules around the use of laptops and iPads and whatever else. In most places I’ve visited that do hand out technology, uses by students are narrowed and constrained.

I wonder how much of the angst isn’t really about students as it is the disruption to the way things are supposed to work in school.

Kids aren’t supposed to have easy access to the answers on the test, or have a connection to experts who have more knowledge and experience than the adults in the room. They’re not supposed to have a potential audience of billions, or to be able to learn our curriculum on their own.

Now they do.

But rather than ask “How does this change us? How must we adjust?” most schools take the easier path which is to block, limit, and punish students when they refuse to be constrained in their learning.

I’m not saying we create a techno free for all in schools where anything goes. But I am suggesting that both students and schools need to learn some new dance steps.

We need to navigate this new reality together, with our students, as connected learners, creators, publishers, and problem-solvers. That too may cause some angst.

Good.

Grades are a Choice

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Grades matter for one reason only: Because we let them.

Lots of kids get high school diplomas without grades. Lots of kids learn lots of stuff without grades. (Adults, too.)

Believe it or not, students get into Princeton without grades. People become successful in life (in whatever way you choose to define that) without any grades to propel them.

I mean how many tombstones (or obits) have you read that highlight a GPA?

So, let’s not use the excuse that “other people” or life requires them. They don’t. It doesn’t.

Just own this: we choose to use grades in school. We don’t have to, but we do. It’s just easier that way.

We choose them despite what we know are the problems with handing them out. That they impact self-esteem. That kids start chasing them and gaming them. That they signal an end to something. That they are a snapshot.

So let’s just be honest, ok? Grades matter because we let them matter. Because we make them matter. Because that’s been the choice we’ve made in education for eons. Because we don’t have the stomach for changing it.

We could choose learning instead.

But I guess that’s just too hard.

Cut the Curriculum

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Here’s an idea: A Minimal Viable Curriculum (MVC). That’s what Christian Talbot over at Basecamp is proposing, and I have to say, I love the idea.

He writes: “What if we were to design MVCs: Minimum Viable Curricula centered on just enough content to empower learners to examine questions or pursue challenges with rigor? Then, as learners go deeper into a question or challenge, they update their MVC…which is pretty much how learning happens in the real world.”

The key there to me is that THEY update their MVC. That resonates so deeply; it feels like that’s what I’m doing with my learning each day as I read about and work with school leaders who are thinking deeply about change.

And I’d bet that resonates with anyone who has come to terms with the reality that we learn more in informal, real world environments than we do in formal, school based settings. When we pursue questions that matter to us, rigor is baked in.

Teachers and schools have a role to play in developing students as learners, no doubt. One of those roles to replicate the conditions under which powerful learning takes place in our day to day lives. Moving from a “BFC” (Bloated Forgettable Curriculum) to an “MVC” is a great step in that direction.

Connecting the Dots

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I heard an interesting new phrase the other day that someone used to describe the shift we need in schools.

She said “We have to move from collecting dots to connecting dots.”

I think that works.

So much of school is collection. It’s about delivering easily digestible pieces of content that we can then assess to see if they’ve been collected correctly. The calculus is the more dots we collect the better, even though we know that most of those dots don’t end up in any type of permanent collection.

Connecting the dots would require a different approach, especially because in a complex world, connections are rarely neat. Connecting dots would mean that we emphasize exploration, hypothesizing, testing, reflecting, and exploring some more. It would mean a culture of questions, not answers.

Obviously, those things aren’t “deliverables.” We observe those things, not test for them.

To be sure, connections are permanent either. And we obviously need some dots to connect. But dots collected without some sense of connection don’t lead to much real learning at all.

The bigger question is are we connecting the dots we’ve collected about school?

Changing the Rules of School

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One of the things I found myself saying over and over last year was that the one thing that students learn more than anything else in school is how to succeed at school. As a great book by Robert Fried suggests, it’s all about “The Game of School.”

So much so that when we do bring change to our classrooms, students resist.

I remember when once, on the first day of the semester, I told students in my Expository Comp class that I wasn’t going to grade their writing, and that we’d arrive at their course grades via a negotiation that reflected on their portfolio of work at the end of the course. Many of them freaked.* “What do you mean no grades? How will we know if we’re getting better?”

They were not pleased.

I hear similar stories all the time from other teachers who have tried to change the rules of the game. And it’s not just kids that get a little crazy. Often, parents don’t like it either when we divert from the script.

But here’s the deal: The main objective shouldn’t be learning how to win at school. It should be learning how to learn and how to thrive in a pretty complex world.

It’s time to change the rules, and the change the game of school. It’s time to make it less about winning and more about learning, the kind that really matters.

Global Education

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Politicians often talk about maintaining “local control” over schools. But more and more I wonder if that’s such a good thing, especially if those who control things locally don’t bring a global lens to that work.

The reality is that education is no longer local. In fact, a truly “local” education may be more of a detriment to our students than an asset.

And while it’s arguable that we never are truly educated until we actually get out into the world and begin to actually do things rather than just study them, any useful definition of being educated today must transcend place and curriculum. To be blunt, the whole idea that we shop an “education” as a product or an outcome that you “get” somewhere borders on irresponsible. Learning never ends.

While I have no doubt that most adults making decisions in schools truly want what’s best for kids, I worry that our lens for understanding what’s best is too narrow, too steeped in local history, tradition, and expectations. I worry that we’re failing to fully understand the global capacity that many of our kids (and we ourselves) are employing to learn in ways that leave local systems and structures increasingly irrelevant.

Today, we need less control and more freedom for our kids to learn about the world as it is, not as it was.

Resolved for 2019

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Happy New Year!

In case you’re an educator and you’re looking for one more resolution this year, how about something along the lines of: “In my classroom (or my school) this year, I resolve to be a learner first and a teacher second.”

Today, the most important role that an adult can play in a classroom is “Learner in Chief,” someone who is constantly learning about learning. Someone who knows more than anyone else about learning (which really has to be your expertise, now that the Internet knows more than you do about your subject matter.) Someone who knows deeply what learning is, how it really happens, and what conditions are required.

Sure, you can resolve to read more books and articles about learning. But a better place to start is to learn more about how your students learn. To talk to them about learning, about how they learn and about what they want to learn. To develop real empathy for how they experience it. To see them as young learning apprentices who seek to learn about learning from you.

In other words, this year, be the master learner in your classroom.

Every day in our interactions with kids we have an amazing opportunity for us to learn more about learning. Let’s resolve this year not to let that opportunity pass.

Sincere best wishes for an amazing 2019!

For 2019: Yes, It Is Possible

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So, as we put 2018 in the books, I want to leave you with some inspiration.
Too often, when we think about creating a radically different learning experience for students in schools, one that’s built on our beliefs about learning and common sense thinking about how classrooms might operate, we tend to end up feeling like it’s just too hard. Like there are too many obstacles or traditions or external expectations that make radically different too much of a risk.
But what if for 2019, we engaged in those conversations about radically different with the knowledge that yes, it is possible.
That’s what you’ll hear in our latest Modern Learners Podcast, an interview with Megan Power, a co-founder of Design 39 Campus which is a radically different public PK-8 school in the Poway (CA) Unified District (http://bit.ly/mlpod56 ). No, it’s not easy. And yes, it takes vision and courage and commitment. But as you’ll hear Megan describe the process that brought Design 39 to fruition, I’m betting you’ll be both more inspired and determined to make the changes our kids need and the modern world demands.
I hope 2019 is a year that we not only expand our understanding of what’s possible, but that we also deepen our urgency for creating radically different.
So, what are you going to do?

Learning Compost

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Here’s a goal for educators in 2019: Change the way you think about failure.

Instead of something to shy away from, make it something to be embraced. To cite an interesting metaphor I heard yesterday, treat failure like compost.

It’s not like we never talk about this. It’s not like labeling an effort (or a student, for that matter) a “failure” is something any of us feel good about doing. We know the damage that word can cause.

And we talk a good game in terms of “learning from failure,” but I wonder the extent to which our students really believe that. And I wonder what they actually learn. To study harder? To put more effort in? To avoid it at all costs?

Do we really show them how to reflect on failure, to get meta on it and see it as an opportunity to go even more deeply into the work? (This assumes, of course, that students wanted to do the work in the first place.)

So here’s my bigger challenge to educators: How will you model failure to your students? How will you show them the opportunity that failure presents in your own lives? What compost will you create?

If we really believe that failure is not something to avoid but something to build on, we need our students to see that we believe that in our own work as well.

Fueling Mastery

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In his classic book “Mastery,” George Leonard writes, “The modern world, in fact, can be viewed as a prodigious conspiracy against mastery.”

That’s why when we see it or hear it or sense it, we’re awed by those who have gained true mastery of a craft or a sport or a talent. Because while mastery is hard to begin with, its especially hard when “we’re continually bombarded with promises of immediate gratification, instant success, and fast temporary relief.”

I wonder often the role schools should play in helping students develop mastery of something. Anything. I wonder whether what we do in classrooms gives them even a remote sense of what is required to become a master of something. Anything.

Most students who travel the road to mastery do so outside the classroom. They are musicians. Athletes. Gamers. Dancers. They are often the privileged few who have not just found a passion but have been given the time and resources to pursue them at depth.

Truth is, students master little in school. They’re not given the time or the freedom to do so. They’re denied the agency to pursue their bliss. Most never get a taste of what mastery truly requires.

Truth is, schools conspire against it.

It doesn’t have to be that way. If we value mastery, create the conditions for it to happen.

Out of the Mouths…

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As 2018 winds down, I’m thinking back at what I heard kids saying about schools and education. A few quick stories…

Early in the year in Sydney, a woman with a troubled look on her face approached me after my keynote. “I have to tell you what my son told me this morning on his way out the door,” she said. “He said ‘Off I go to my six-hour interruption to my learning.'”

This summer when I asked a group of students at a respected international school what school would be like if they didn’t have grades, one girl looked at me and said, “Well, if we didn’t have marks, no one would learn anything.”

And late in the year, during a full day workshop with teachers and students, a young man came up to me at a break and said, “You’re right about school not being about learning. I wish it was more like the Internet.”

Certainly, not every conversation that I had with students went like these. But, honestly? The vast majority did. In fact that’s close to the top of my list of takeaways from my travels this year. We’re continuing to lose a slew of kids when it comes to the learning that matters to them and the passions and curiosities that drive that.

I wonder if my conversations with kids next year will be any different.

No doubt, that’s up to us.

Now, For the Teacher

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At one of the near non-stop family and friends events that happened in the days surrounding the holiday, one moment particularly stands out.

Adam, an 11-year old young man whose family got asylum from the Congo a decade or so ago, started cartwheeling his way through our house, with an occasional back walkover thrown in for good measure. That he had some gymnastics talent wasn’t a surprise; we’ve been shuttling him back and forth to the local club for about six months.

But then, Adam kicked his leg literally straight up in the air, caught it and held his knee to his ear, and did a pirouette.

My jaw dropped.

Among those watching was a friend with some connections in the dance field, and he immediately asked, “Adam, where did you learn to do that?”

“I watch YouTube videos,” he said, “and imitate what they do.”

These days, no one is surprised by that answer, I know. But it still kinda stunned me. At our request, he launched into a bit of an ad hoc routine that left all of us even more impressed.

We all agreed, he’s got some amazing raw talent. Now to find the other part of the equation: a teacher. For as much as watching YouTube can be a start, Adam needs someone to watch him as well.

On Learning and Common Sense

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As I continue my trek through some of the “classics” regarding learning and schools, I’m finding it interesting the belief systems that many authors take pains to articulate when it comes to answering my current favorite question “What do you mean by learning?” And while there are some similar overtones, to be sure, each comes at it a bit differently.

Carl Rogers, best known as a psychotherapist who championed “client-centered therapy,” was also a vocal advocate for one of today’s most prevalent edu phrases, “student-centered learning.” And this was 50+ years ago.

Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become is Rogers’ most focused work on education. It highlights the stories of three different teachers at the outset and their work to create conditions in their classrooms where students had a great deal of agency over the what and how of the learning they were doing. The stories are not unlike those you read from a number of schools who are currently reimagining what their practice in classrooms looks like. Later, Rogers goes into the practical aspects of facilitating classes like these, and dives into the types of relationships that teachers and students must have in order to develop kids as learners.

To that end, Rogers’ principles for learning interest me and resonate to a great degree:

  1. Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning. They are curious about their world, until and unless this curiosity is blunted by their experience in our educational system.
  2. Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
  3. Learning which involves a change in self organization—in the perception of oneself—is threatening and tends to be resisted.
  4. Those learnings which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
  5. When threat to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
  6. Much significant learning is acquired through doing. Placing the student in direct experiential confrontation with practical problems, social problems, ethical and philosophical problems, personal issues, and research problems, is one of the most effective modes of promoting learning
  7. Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process. When he chooses his own directions, helps to discover his own learning resources, formulates his own problems, decides his own course of action, lives with the consequences of these choices, then significant learning is maximized
  8. Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner—feelings as wells as intellect—is the most lasting and pervasive.
  9. Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance. If a child is to grow up to be independent and self reliant he must be given opportunities at an early age not only to make his own judgments and his own mistakes but to evaluate the consequences of these judgments and choices
  10. The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change. If our present culture survives it will be because we have been able to develop individuals for whom change is the central fact of life and who have been able to live comfortably with this central fact

Much to unpack in that, but as I said earlier, almost all of it resonates with my own thinking and that of others I’ve read. A couple of specific comments.

First, in my work with leadership, I see the resistance alluded to in #3 all the time. Robert Evans calls it the difference between “first-order changes” which deal try to improve the “efficiency or effectiveness of what we are already doing,” and “second-order changes,” which are “systemic in nature and aim to modify the very way an organization is put together, altering its assumptions, goals, structures, roles, and norms.” Substitute “individual” for “organization” in that last sentence as well. Very few leaders in my experience are willing to level up to take on with seriousness those second-order changes.

The whole “external threat” aspect of learning Rogers talks about in #4 and #5 is a huge barrier to learning, and change. Federal and state governments have placed explicit threats on schools and teachers, which in turn tempers their ability to learn. (And yes, we need schools that learn.)  It also speaks to the way we currently assess our kids and the consequences of “failure” that we place on them. Deep learning can be uncomfortable, and absent a supportive, nurturing environment, it does not flourish.

In #7, I love how Rogers uses the word “responsibly” and the stark distinction between his use of the word and the way it’s most often applied in schools. There, being “responsible” means acceding to the demands and norms of the system, as in do your homework, be on time, don’t cause a ruckus, etc. To Rogers, however, it means using freedom and agency to pursue personal learning in depth. Shifting the way we think about the word in schools would be a “second-order change,” no?

Finally, the one that resonates the most is undoubtedly the last. But it’s not just the goal of we the adults developing “individuals for whom change is the central fact of life.” It’s that we adults, especially in education, have to become those individuals ourselves. As much as schools have changed over the past 100 years, and they have changed a lot, present day school cultures are still resistant to change. It only happens when it has to, as a reaction to external edicts or pressures. I see little evidence of school cultures that embrace change, and act proactively to learn through it.

As with most of these lists of principles or beliefs, there’s little here that belies common sense.

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Our Skewed System

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From Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love:

What we airily label ‘creativity’ typically blends so many features: risk-taking, perseverance, problem-solving, openness to experience, the need to share one’s inner universe, empathy, detailed mastery of a craft, resourcefulness, disciplined spontaneity, a mind of large general knowledge and strength that can momentarily be drawn to a particular, ample joy when surprised, intense focus, the useful application of obsession, the innocent wonder of a child available to a learned adult, passion, a tenuous (or at least flexible) grasp on reality, mysticism (though not necessarily theology), a reaction against the status quo (and preference for unique creations), and usually the support of at least one person – among many ingredients.

In the throes of creativity, a lively brain tussles with a mass of memories and rich stores of knowledge, attacking them both sub rosa and with the mind wide open.  Some it incubates offstage until a fully fledged insight wings into view.  The rest it consciously rigs, rotates, kneads, and otherwise plays with until a novel solution emerges.  Only by fumbling with countless bits of knowledge, and then ignoring most of it, does a creative mind craft something original.  For that, far more than the language areas of the brain are involved. Hand-me-down ideas won’t do. So conventions must be flouted, risks taken, possibilities freely spigoted, ideas elaborated, problems redefined, daydreaming encouraged, curiosity followed down zig-zagging alleyways.  Any sort of unconsidered trifle may be fair game.  It’s child’s play.  Literally.  Not a gift given to an elect few, but a widespread, natural, human way of knowing the world. With the best intentions, our schools and society bash most of it out of us. Fortunately, it’s so strong in some of us that it endures. As neuroscientist Floyd Bloom observes:

“Schools place an overwhelming emphasis on teaching children to solve problems correctly, not creatively. This skewed system dominates our first twenty years of life: tests, grades, college admissions, degrees, and job placements demand and reward targeted logical thinking, factual competence, and language and math skills–all purveys of the left brain.” (245).

And remember, we do this not just to the kids, but to the adults in classrooms as well. How many schools have “creative cultures” for teachers? Or better yet “creative learning cultures,” not just teaching cultures?

We know this. Why do we do this?

The “Future of Learning” Isn’t

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Just read a headline that said “The Future of Learning to Be Revealed!”

And all could think of was, “fake news.”

This is the same tripe as when educators say stuff like “student learning has changed so much in the past decade” or “kids learn differently today.”

No. They really don’t. Nor will they learn differently in the future.

Learners have always learned, and will always learn in the same way. They learn what they are interested in. They learn what they need to learn. They learn those things that they want to learn more about.

Sure, the technologies have changed. Now the information is digital. The social aspects of learning have exploded. Knowledge is everywhere. It’s amazing, and it’s complex.

But can we stop with this line that says we have to change because learning has changed? It hasn’t. It won’t.

What has changed is this: learners now have more agency, more choice, more control over the what, when, why, and with whom of learning than ever before.

And if you’re thinking about the future of schooling, think more of that. More agency, not more technology.

Thinking About “Learneracy”

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From the “I’m An Ex-English Teacher and I Can Make Up New Words Department:”

We have a huge focus in schools on literacy, and deservedly so. Almost no one argues that kids don’t need to be able to read and write and do basic math. We measure ourselves by literacy rates. We create rubrics and tests and other assessments and label kids as “good readers” or “bad writers” or “competent at math.” We put literacy at the center of our work.

We don’t do that so much for other subjects or skills. Sure, we dole out grades in science and history and French. But those aren’t skills focused as much as that literacy stuff. I mean, my kids didn’t get a grade on their skills as a scientist or as an historian. It was more about the content, the knowledge.

All that said, it’s debatable today that being able to read and write and do math in the most widely held sense gets us even close to being literate today. Reading is no longer linear or solely text based. Writing is no longer local or text based. Math is no longer computation based.

I’ve argued in the past that through a modern lens that encompasses all of the new genres of reading and writing and mathematics, most kids are illiterate when they graduate from school. Most adults who teach them are illiterate as well. Most people in general would be considered literate in the most modern sense of the word.

We seem not to like to talk about this, however.

Literacy, unlike most other things in school, is in flux. It’s evolving. Quickly. And that makes it hard to teach. If we think of literacy as something to “learn” and get a grade for, it signals that we think it’s static. That it’s a box to check and move on, when in reality, it’s a new box every day.

I wonder if we wouldn’t be better off focusing our efforts on helping kids become “learnerate.” As the word suggests, do they have the skills and dispositions to learn their way to whatever outcomes they desire? Are they curious? Are they persistent? Do they embrace nuance and not knowing? Are they reflective? Can they create and vet their own curriculum, find their own teachers, and assess their own progress? (Add your question below…)

None of those things happen because of explicit teaching. None of those things are easy to measure. They are dispositions that already exist in every child and skills that are nurtured and developed tacitly in the process of doing meaningful, important, beautiful work with others. You become learnerate by continually learning, not by being taught and measured by a test or a competency, but as manifested in the desire to learn more. (We’re not learning if we don’t want to learn more, btw.)

“Learneracy” is currently not our focus in schools. But it should be. Especially today when each of us has so much more agency over and access to the things we want to learn, whenever, wherever, and with whomever we want to learn it.

Who Dominates Learning?

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Got an e-mail this morning that was titled “Google’s Dominance in U.S. K-12 Schools Revealed In EdWeek Market Brief Special Report.” According to the summary, Google is now a “bona fide education company” because it meets schools’ demand for “simple, easy-to-integrate products.”

Yay.

Over half of educators say they would hire Google to “increase student achievement.”

Forty-two percent said Chromebooks are the most used “instructional device” in their schools.

G Suite/Google Classroom is the “hands down favorite” when it comes to productivity tools.

And 75% say they will use Google stuff more or “a lot more” over the next five years.

Why the Google love? From the click through article:

Each of the companies has seen its fortunes shift in the fickle school market, where vendors of all sizes struggle to gauge what schools want, which administrators make buying decisions, and whether new products will dazzle educators and students, or simply frustrate them.

When the companies have made their biggest headway—as Google is doing now with Chromebooks and its classroom-productivity tools—it’s typically because they have introduced products that not only meet schools’ distinct needs, but also overcome their stubborn limitations.

Even the guy picked to provide the pushback misses the point.

“Innovation has suffered,” Friedlander said. The products turned out by the major tech companies do not amount to “groundbreaking stuff that propels teaching into some new realm because of the technology.”

Because it’s about teaching, achievement, productivity, ease of use, dazzle…

…not learning.

Who dominates that?

Change.School

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The first couple of months of this year, I’ve been focused on two things.

First, watching my kid play his senior year of high school basketball, which has been just awesome. (State Champs!)

But a close second has been my resolve to do what I can to raise the level of the conversation around change in schools, to push people past the dime a dozen adjectives (blended, personalized, flipped, etc.) and “Hours of…” this or that, and to put a laser focus on learners and learning instead of students and schooling. Along with my colleague Bruce Dixon, we’ve shipped a pretty challenging whitepaper. We’ve created a new podcast channel with interviews from change leaders doing high-bar change work from around the world. We’ve continued to publish our newsletter, (190 issues total.) We’ve regularly engaged in some really interesting conversation in our Facebook group. And my own presentations at conferences and schools have taken on a harder edge. In short, I just totally believe that it’s time to start a different conversation around change in schools. It has to be reimagination, not a simple rethinking of our work.

Today, Bruce and I and our new partner Missy Emler are taking the next step.

Introducing Change.School. (Yes…that is the address.)

You can get the details on the site, but in a nutshell, Change.School is an 8-week, inquiry-based online community and coaching experience for educational leaders anywhere in the world who are serious (and we mean serious) about truly reimagining their work in schools and classrooms. It’s all about raising the bar on the change conversations we’ve been having, and building the capacity to articulate and drive change forward in relevant and, importantly, sustainable ways. And it’s about using our combined 60+ years of experience in schools with the wisdom of a passionate global community to help leaders create a personal, unique playbook for change in their schools moving forward.

The reality is, the gap between change in the world and our capacity to contextualize those changes into our work in schools in relevant ways is huge and continues to grow. As we state in our whitepaper, the “Why Change?” question now has a pretty compelling answer. And as our 10 Principles of Modern Learning suggest, the “What Does it Look Like?” question is being answered in more and more classrooms around the world.

But the “How” question, as in “How do I create relevant, meaningful change in my school that sustains?” has always been the hardest one.

That’s what we’re aiming to answer at Change.School.

Look, there are a lot of people “reimagining” school by building new ones. And I’m in no way saying that isn’t good work. It is, depending, of course, on what they build. But the reality is that the vast majority of our kids will remain in traditional schools that will need to navigate the very difficult path to being really different, not just “better.” And that’s my passion, and Bruce’s, and Missy’s. How do we help existing schools with deeply rooted traditional narratives of schooling navigate the “How?”

For the record, Change.School is not a course. Change in the way we’re talking about can’t be taught, and there isn’t one, cookie-cutter approach that will work for all. We’re taking a limited number of leaders into our cohort because we want to do a lot of hands on, personal coaching in helping them design and develop change plans that are unique to their schools and districts. We know that 8-weeks isn’t nearly enough time to change a school, and that’s not what this work is about. But 8-weeks is enough time to dramatically build the capacity of leaders to run long-term, sustainable change projects on their own. That’s where we think can help.

Education is at an interesting, challenging place, not just here in the U.S., but around the world. And the conversations are shifting. But the work of real change in schools is really, really hard. We’re not offering any magic formulas. Instead, we’re offering a safe space for inquiry, passion, creation, and expertise to learn together and build solutions.

So, I’d love it if you checked out Change.School, and maybe shared it with a school leader that you know. Hopefully, we can move this work forward together.

The Condition of “Open”

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“The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.” ~Seymour Papert, (The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap, p45)

Right now, think about the typical classroom in whatever school that is a part of your life. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a superintendent, take an inventory right now of what “conditions” exist for kids in that room. Make a list. What systems or structures or roles or dispositions are in play when it comes to a student’s ability to learn?

Now look at the list. Does it support “invention?” Do those conditions create an environment where kids learn deeply, as in using that “learning” and wondering more about it long after the school day has ended? As in solving or “inventing” solutions to real problems that exist in the real world?

Or do they support “schooling” in the sense that we’ve traditionally known it?

Papert, who unfortunately passed away last year, argued for conditions that expanded kids’ agency to learn. And I’ve been really moved by that question of conditions for a number of years now. To me, it’s foundational. Those classroom conditions tell powerful stories about what the teachers in them and the schools around them believe about what learning is and how it happens.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of classrooms begin to change in terms of the conditions that are present. There is a move toward passion and relevance and making. It’s not a wave yet, but it is a ripple that’s growing. My sense is that current conditions in the world writ large will force that ripple to grow as more and more in education begin to understand the changes required by the profound shifts in technology, the environment, globalization, and more that we’re living through right now.

Few classrooms are “learning out loud,” however, a phrase that connotes the idea that openness and transparency are now essential conditions for learning in school. And there’s no one better than David Wiley to drive my thinking on that, and to make the compelling case for sharing our work online in the context of Papert’s “invention” idea:

As I’ve reflected more on the recent writing on open pedagogy, it’s led me to trace some of it’s intellectual heritage to constructionism. And while I realize that I’m significantly under-characterizing constructionism by saying so, and I apologize in advance for those of you who are more familiar with the work, if you’re not familiar with constructionism you might think of it as “learning by making.” When learners work to create artifacts that have real value in the real world, awesome things happen – and that awesomeness has nothing to do with open. But you can add the awesomeness of open to the awesomeness of learning by making to get a multiplier effect. Here’s specifically how I’m thinking about it (today):

Learning by making… Society gets to build on…
in the classroom. nothing.
in public (e.g., the artifact is posted on the web). the ideas expressed in the artifact.
in the open (e.g., the artifact is posted on the web under an open license). the ideas expressed in the artifact as well as the artifact itself.

I know that many in education are not comfortable with the “Society gets to build on…” part when it comes to student work, especially in K-12. But this now a modern condition for learning. We consume, we create, we share, and we learn as others read, think, add their context to our ideas and artifacts. And, importantly, we do the same for them. Today, given our connectedness, this condition of openness and sharing really isn’t an option. And when we allow our work to be remixed and repurposed openly, when we create it an then give it to the world to use without restriction, learning multiplies.

Just like in real life, there’s no requirement here to share everything we do in classrooms openly. For instance, we’re getting ready to offer an online experience for leadership that we’ll be asking participants to pay for. That’s part of our livelihood. But in school, “giving it away” is one way of nurturing even more invention. And as David says, it leads to new ways of thinking:

And that brings me back to the basic logic underlying my interest in and excitement about open pedagogy:
1. We learn by the things we do.
2. The permissions granted by open licenses make it practical and legal for us to do new things.
3. The ability to do new things will likely lead to new kinds of learning.

So, check your list. Is “open” one of the conditions you thought of? And if not, how might you add that amplifier of invention to the classrooms you care about?

Image credit: Alan Levine