Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

  • About
    • About Will
    • Contact Will
    • BIG Questions Institute
  • Blog
  • Speaking
  • Coaching
  • News
  • Books

Standardized Personalization

April 29, 2019 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: EduZen, General

The Shaping of Institutions

July 22, 2016 By Will Richardson 3 Comments

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading this week.

Brown, Davison, and Hagel:

In previous generations of institutional change, an elite at the top of the organization created the world into which everybody else needed to fit. The institutional changes ahead will be quite different. These changes will be driven by passionate individuals distributed throughout and even outside the institution, supported by institutional leaders who understand the need for change but who also realize that this wave of change cannot be imposed from the top down. The new institutional model will involve a complete refocusing: Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs. The success of institutions will depend on their ability to amplify the efforts of individuals so that small moves, smartly made, can become catalysts for broad impact (7-8).

 

Filed Under: EduZen

“The Fatal Disconnection of Subjects”

July 15, 2016 By Will Richardson 5 Comments

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading this week.

Alfred North Whitehead (1916):

The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children—Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory. Can such a list be said to represent Life, as it is known in the midst of living it? The best that can be said of it is, that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world, and has not yet determined how to put it together.

Filed Under: EduZen

Technology as the Object of Our Inquiry

July 8, 2016 By Will Richardson 14 Comments

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. As always, would love your thoughts:

Neil Postman in The End of Education (1995);

What we needed to know about cars–as we need to know about computers, television, and other important technologies–is not how to use them but how they use us. In the case of cars, what we needed to think about in the early twentieth century was not how to drive them but what they would do to our air, our landscape, our social relations, our family life, and our cities. Suppose that in 1946, we had started to address similar questions about television: What would be its effects on our political institutions, our psychic habits, our children, our religious conceptions, our economy? Wouldn’t we be better positioned today to control television’s massive assault on American culture?

I am talking here about making technology itself an object of inquiry, so that Little Eva and Young John in using technologies will not be used or abused by them, so that Little Eva and Young John become more interested in asking questions about the computer than in getting answers from it.

I am not arguing against using computers in school. I am arguing against our sleepwalking attitudes toward it, against allowing it to distract us from more important things, against making a god of it.

What questions should we be asking about our technologies?

Filed Under: EduZen Tagged With: Neil Postman

The “Achievement Gap” vs. The “Relevance Gap”

July 1, 2016 By Will Richardson 6 Comments

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of Eduzen to think about over the weekend. As always, your thoughts welcomed.

Harvard’s David Perkins in Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World:

We might consider another gap alongside the achievement gap. Let’s call it the relevance gap. The achievement gap asks, “Are students achieving X?” whereas the relevance gap asks, “Is X going to matter to the lives learners are likely to live?”

If X is good mastery of reading and writing, both questions earn a big yes! Skilled, fluent, and engaged reading and writing marks both a challenging gap and a high-payoff attainment. That knowledge goes somewhere! However, if X is quadratic equations, the answers don’t match. Mastering quadratic equations is challenging, but these equations are not so lifeworthy. Now fill in X with any of the thousands of topics that make up the typical content curriculum. Very often, these topics present significant challenges of achievement but with little return on investment in learners’ lives.

Here’s the problem: the achievement gap is much more concerned with mastering content than with providing lifeworthy content.

So why don’t we see more attention to the relevance gap alongside the achievement gap? Well, attention to the relevance gap upsets the apple cart of conventional practice much more than attention to the achievement gap. The achievement gap is all about doing the same thing better. With the achievement gap as our target, we want to do a better job imparting skills and understandings we already try to teach. But embracing the challenge of the relevance gap asks us to reconsider deeply what schools teach in the first place. Topics and themes that have been part of typical curricula for centuries might get displaced, reduced, or reframed. Textbooks might need rewriting. Teachers would find honored parts of their disciplines under siege and new and tricky content knocking at the door— barbarians at the gate! To borrow from Al Gore, the problem of lifeworthy learning that so pervades typical curricula is an inconvenient truth. As with our planet’s precarious situation, ignoring an inconvenient truth is a dangerous way to deal with it (30-31)!

 

Filed Under: EduZen

The Problem With the “Disciplines”

June 24, 2016 By Will Richardson 1 Comment

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of EduZen to think about over the weekend. Your thoughts welcomed. Enjoy!

Russel Ackoff:

There is no longer the slightest justification for introducing children to the idea that human thought is a collection of fragmented “disciplines” and making that idea the center-pin of the educational experience for students in their schools. As a historical curio, this idea might make for an amusing aside in a general discussion of the evolution of human thought, but as a notion that is productive and useful for developing minds it is, at the very least, counterproductive. Children grow up seeing the world as a whole. Their greatest challenge—one that continues to be the central task of every person throughout life—is to form a worldview that makes sense out of the multitude of their experiences. Indeed, human sanity depends on the integrated nature of a person’s worldview; fragmented psyches are generally considered ill-adapted to the needs of adult survival” (Kindle 950).

Filed Under: EduZen, learning, schools

School, as Told by Kids

May 20, 2016 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

Here’s your Friday moment of “EduZen” to think about this weekend:

If you have a spare 30 minutes this weekend, watch this video done by Rachel Wolfe, a Scarsdale High School student two years ago, and at the end, ask yourself this question: What did I learn about the school experience that I didn’t already know?

(Note: I fully realize that Scarsdale does not represent “the real world” in many ways. Obviously, there are a slew of kids that never come close to the opportunities that Scarsdale kids have by virtue of where they live and their socio-economic circumstances. But I think the aspirations of “getting good grades” and “going to college” and the narratives that surround them are shared regardless by most parents and teachers.)

(Note #2: I keep thinking about how much time and effort Rachel put into this process, and the personal passion that drove it. If you want to explore some more of her work and thinking, check out her blog. )

Filed Under: EduZen, learning, On My Mind, schools

Find More Old Things to Say

May 13, 2016 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

zen deleteHere’s your Friday moment of “EduZen” to think about this weekend:

Zac Chase and Chris Lehmann:

Schools would be better off finding a vision in which the desired practice of a school can truly take root and then seeking ways to embody that vision in every action of every individual on the campus. Once that has happened, the next step is not to find a new way of saying what you believe, but rather to deepen the expressions of those beliefs and values key to your institution’s identity. We are better off figuring out how to say the things we believe and actually do than finding new things to say. Coming to terms with what a school believes as a learning organization is a strong first step toward making the change. As with so many journeys, it is the steps that follow that determine what you will become. When vision is put into practice, when who we want to be is constantly reflected in our practice, then we can move closer to the better versions of ourselves and our institutions (Kindle 576).

Too often, we find “new things to say” about education and schools and classrooms, and in the process, we ignore the eternal truths about how real learning happens.

We need to find more old things to say.

Filed Under: EduZen, Vision

Seducing Children to Learn

May 6, 2016 By Will Richardson 4 Comments

zen deleteHere’s your weekly moment of “EduZen” to think about this weekend:

Russell Ackoff:

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 (Kindle 414).

If you were building it from scratch, is this what you would build?

Filed Under: EduZen, On My Mind

The One Required Outcome for Schools

April 29, 2016 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

zen deleteA “Moment of EduZen” to contemplate this weekend.

Seymour Sarason:

In educating our youth, what do we owe them? We want them to acquire knowledge and skills, but that is not enough. We want them to be prepared for the world of work, but that is not enough. We want them to graduate from our high schools and colleges, but that is not enough. None of these is enough unless we have, in addition, given students, implanted in them, the desire, the need, willingly to pursue over their lifetimes a deepening of their understanding of the world they live in. Is there anyone who would deny that the God-created human is a question-asking, questing, curiosity-powered organism? Is there anyone who would dispute that what distinguishes us from all other living creatures is that we are always trying, seeking, struggling to meld our pasts, presents, and futures? An educational system that does not capitalize on our uniqueness is a system that is shortchanging our youth (119).

Kids have a deep desire to learn when we first meet them. They want to understand not just some things but every thing about the world around they live in. Can we honestly say that is the case when they leave us? And if not, why not?

Filed Under: EduZen, On My Mind

Recent Posts

  • “Never”
  • My 2023 “Tech Cleanse” Has Begun
  • Five Themes for Educators in 2023
  • Schools in a Time of Chaos
  • Has This Crisis Really Changed Schools?

Search My Blog

Archived Posts

Copyright © 2023 Will Richardson · All Rights Reserved

Follow me on Twitter @willrich45