Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Curiosity Is the Cat

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I’m becoming more curious about curiosity. I’m beginning to think it’s the only “C” that truly matters, and that it’s been badly disrespected in all the conversation around the 4Cs or 7Cs or howevermanyCs that people have been throwing around.

I mean really, when it comes to learning, what comes before curiosity?

Critical thinking doesn’t, because if you’re not curious as to whether something is true or fake or accurate or real, you won’t really think very hard about it.

Creativity doesn’t, because making stuff is borne out of the curiosity of “What if?” What if I try this note here? What if I apply this touch of paint there? What if I mixed these two things together, or built another arm on that robot, or…

Communication doesn’t come before curiosity, because if you’re not curious about your audience, if you’re not using curiosity-driven empathy to craft your message, it probably won’t get across.

And collaboration? Isn’t that rooted in the curiosity of what other people might know and contribute to your own learning? People don’t collaborate for the sake of collaborating…except in schools, of course.

Think of most skills, all the stuff that doesn’t show up on the report card, all the stuff that probably matters more than the stuff that shows up on the report card, and you’ll find they are steeped in curiosity. Problem solving, problem finding, persistence, cooperation, adaptability, initiative…(add your 200 more here). Which of those doesn’t require being curious first and foremost? Can you be any of that if you’re not?

Hard to find one.

Reality: Kids are curious as hell when they’re 3, 4, 5 years old. They’re not so curious any more when they’re 13, 14, 15, years old, at least not about what’s in the curriculum. And the discussion around why is long over: we kill it in schools.

Reality #2: The most “successful” (and you can define that just about any way you want) people moving forward will be the most curious. The ones who are constantly asking questions. The ones who are always wondering “What if?”

Reality #3: Connection amplifies curiosity. This Internet thing has been the greatest boon to curiosity ever. I mean think about having a connection and NOT being curious. Sad!

So, what are we doing in schools to develop curious, connected, learners? Because the first without the second ain’t gonna cut it in the modern world.

Image credit

Playing at “Agency”

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From the “Sometimes Your Read Something That Makes You Want to Scream ‘THIS!’ Department” I give you Sean Michael Morris:

“This is the right of agency. It does not give us power over another, but it gives us mastery over ourselves. And an education that does not encourage or facilitate this agency is not an education.”

Read and repeat. Without “Mastery over ourselves…” it’s “…not an education.”

“Agency” is one of those growing buzzwords now in education, which means that its true meaning is soon to be neutered in practice. Especially because “agency” is at the heart of everything related to serious, re-imagin-y school change. It is, I’ve come to believe, the only real measure of whether a school is truly about learning…or not.

Because it is so foundational to the work, you can already see “agency” being watered down. Students are being given “agency” over how to learn what’s in the curriculum (a la “competency-based education.) Or students given the choice the technologies they use to master (as in pass the test) the content in a course (a la “blended” or “flipped” learning). More often than not, “Genius Hour” is our feel good attempt to check the agency box. (If we really meant it, we’d have “Curriculum Hour” instead.) And don’t get me started on “personalized.” (Seriously…don’t.)

And make note of that word “given” which to me is what makes all the difference. In most conversations, we are to “give” kids agency over their learning. No, we don’t. We do not “give” agency to students. Similarly, we do not “empower” students to have choice as power is not ours to give. Instead, we create conditions under which “agency” can flourish, under which our students can create their own power and become powerful in their own right. Conditions under which students have “mastery” over themselves and their learning, not just the content. Conditions built on what we believe about how kids learn.

For all the talk of “transformation” in schools, none of it matters if we don’t start here. Forget buying technology if you plan to distribute it to students without allowing them to fully own it in a learning sense. Forget curriculum if we don’t see it as something as navigated by the learner on their own terms. (Remember that there is a huge difference between “having to learn” and “wanting to learn,” and that only one of those really leads to learning.) And forget, as well, assessments that aren’t driven by the learner in a quest to learn more deeply. Otherwise, it’s just a meaningless, contrived metric that says nothing about real learning beyond memorization.

As Morris says, however, “agency” doesn’t mean that adults in classrooms don’t have a role to play.

“In other words, agency doesn’t so much exert itself upon others as it does float within the intersection of freedom and authority. Enacting one’s agency is always a balancing act between doing what is within your understanding of your own power and working with the boundaries of others’ understandings of theirs. It is a cooperative, chemical interaction. Freedom delimited by others’ freedoms delimited by yours. In a classroom, this means that authority remains present. Sometimes, the authority of the teacher; but in the best situation, the shared authority of the group of learners (and the teacher).”

I love that phrase “the intersection of freedom and authority.” But he’s not talking about “authority” in the typical school sense. The traditional power relationships in schools suggest that the adults are the authority, both when it comes to curriculum and to behavior. Traditionally, students are bereft of agency in any real sense, because the efficiency model of education can’t deal with it. (The idea of kids with real agency over their learning makes our heads hurt.) But a teacher’s will should be limited by the freedoms of learners. It’s not our job to impose an education on kids. It’s our job to allow them to create their own with our guidance.

But here’s the thing, as Morris suggests. We’re in deep trouble as a society if we continue to either deny or play at the edges of creating classrooms where students are the agents of their own learning. Kids who are trained to wait to be told what to learn, when to learn it, how to learn it, and how to be assessed on that learning will grow into adults who are of the same cloth, waiting for someone to tell them what to believe and how to act and what to think and know without the critical lens that only freedom can nourish. In large measure in the U.S., we’re already there.

So, don’t say “agency” unless you really mean it, unless you truly intend to create classrooms where kids “have mastery over themselves” and the freedom to employ that mastery with other learners.

Image credit: Annie Spratt

The Future (and Present) of Expertise

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Yesterday, I ran across this quote from Degreed, an online credentialing site:

“The future doesn’t care how you become an expert.”

Now, is that a marketing pitch or a reality? Obviously, for some professions, the future is still going to care a lot about how people gain their expertise. As I’ve said many times, I don’t want my surgeon trained on YouTube. (And don’t laugh; that stuff is already starting to happen.) There will always be certain kinds of expertise that we will want to accredit through rigorous training and practice.

But there’s going to be a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t going to require a traditional certificate or diploma given by a traditional school. For lots of “professions” now, people will (and are) able to begin to cobble together their own credentials. And portfolios. And websites that display their expertise. And networks that connect them to other professionals or learners or whatever.

In other words, the potentials to roll your own career are exploding, assuming you have certain skills, literacies, and importantly, dispositions to do that.

In schools, we talk about the skills…a lot. To be honest, I don’t know how well we actually develop the skills since “learning” them is so hard to quantify. We love our data, and we hew to the quantifiable in the end. Testing for real world, in the moment critical thinking is hard and messy and time consuming.

And we cover the “literacies,” although again, I think you could argue that we don’t do a great job of it. Recent Stanford research suggests that at least.  I think it’s arguable that by modern standards, most students and teachers are illiterate, and that our practice around teaching literacy is in dire need of rethinking.

That all said, how do we do on the dispositions part? I know that a good chunk of how kids approach the world is hard wired or baked in by the environments they grow up in. But if the opportunity (expectation?) is that expertise is now something that you develop on your own, then how are we tackling in schools the development of mindsets to do that? How do we create conditions where kids will learn perseverance in non-oppressive ways? How do we help them remain optimistic in the face of some serious global changes and tensions? How do we nurture patience and healthy confidence with a significant chunk of extroversion?

The answer isn’t hard. It’s about culture and about a mission and vision that focuses as much if not more on the “immeasurables” as on the easy to measure stuff. What’s hard is actually changing culture and mission and vision to accommodate that need.

The next time you look at the students in your schools, ask yourself this: Will they be able to become experts on their own when they leave you? Will they be able to learn to the depth necessary, connect widely enough, and have the confidence to make their expertise known to a global audience?

They’re not all going to do that, I get it.

But they all should be able to.

Image credit: Steven Wei

Making “The Olin Effect” Your Own

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We talk a lot about “student agency” in these parts. But to be honest, most of what we label with those words are tepid substitutes for the real thing. As I Tweeted the other day, if these are the stories we’re writing in major education publications, the bar is set really low.

So, Thursday I sat in on a panel presentation that featured two students from Olin College of Engineering and two more from Hampshire College. The title was “Program Improvement Through Student Engagement,” which didn’t sound all that captivating. But since I’d heard about Olin a number of times, and since I had a younger family member who had just finished at Hampshire, and since my own presentation was scheduled for the next session in the room next door, I settled in to listen.

Really glad that I did.

For those not familiar with these two schools, they are outliers in the university narrative. Both give students almost total choice over the subjects they study and the ways the study them, to the point where kids create their own majors and most of their coursework. The kids at Hampshire then document their work in a digital portfolio, one of which you can see here.  Dig around…it’s pretty interesting, and it will make you think about the possibilities. (This blog post is indicative of the work being done in the program.)

The Olin students shared their work to redesign their school library, and they both talked about how immersed they were in the work. But it was when they started talking about “The Olin Effect” that I got really interested:
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The Olin Effect:
“The heightened state of engagement, creativity, and productivity that comes from taking control of your own education.”

Love. That.

I quickly snapped a picture of their slide and started creating a slide of my own to drop into my keynote (which, at that point, started in about 20 minutes.)

I found it interesting that one of the students from Olin said that what both amazed him and what he appreciated the most was the level of trust that he received from his teachers and his fellow students. He said it was without question the foundation for the good work that he and his team did.

At the end, I asked the panel whether or not they had had the experience of “taking control of your own education” before they got to their respective colleges. The two from Hampshire both came from very traditional settings in high school, but the two Olin kids said that they came from smaller schools that were somewhat innovative in their approach. Still, they hadn’t been granted the amount of freedom and agency that they found when they went to college. I followed up with “Would you have like to have had that in high school?” and they both said something to the effect of “Um…absolutely!”

When I got to the Olin part of my own presentation, since much of my talk was about student agency, I asked my audience how many of them had ever experienced “The Olin Effect,” that flow and good work that comes out of doing something you really care about. Something that you CHOOSE to work on. Almost every hand went up. And then I made the point that everyone of us also encounters The Olin Effect when we’re like five and six years old and we’re in charge of our own explorations of the world. That time when the adults look at us and marvel at how intense and creative and persistent we are with our own learning. There’s not one among us who hasn’t lived it. And, importantly, there’s not a kid in our schools who hasn’t lived it at some point and who can’t live it again, given the freedom to do so.

But that’s the problem, right? “The Olin Effect” is the exception that happens when the conditions for powerful learning truly exist: freedom, choice, relevance, audience, passion, etc. In schools, unfortunately, it’s not the rule.

So here’s an idea. Make your own poster like the one above, but instead of “Olin,” put the name of your school in its place. And then figure out what you need to do to make your own students feel “The heightened state of engagement, creativity, and productivity that comes from taking control of your own education.”

I mean, seriously. Why wouldn’t we do that?

The American Experiment

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Reading me some Neil Postman this morning as I continue to be drawn to thoughts about education that are at least a quarter century old. In reflecting on my own thinking about all of this, I find it fascinating the extent to which going back in time seems to inform the path moving forward more than anything else. I’m sad to say that for a long time, I missed some eternal truths about learning and education, truths that if I’d realized them sooner would no doubt have sent my thinking and work in bit of a different direction. But, as they say, better late…

Postman has always been a mix for me. Somewhat a contrarian on technology but also a champion for student “voice and choice” as we seem to want to call it these days. I think he’s aligned with Sarason who says “the overarching goal of school should be to develop students who want to keep learning more about themselves, others, and the world” when they leave us.

But in light of recent events, I found myself thinking about one particular chapter in “The End of Education,” one titled “The American Experiment.” There, he suggests that schools should commit themselves to helping students “acquire/develop a love of one’s country.” But instead of suggesting more rote patriotism a la the Pledge of Allegiance, he offers up four questions that all students should grapple with:

  1. Is it possible to have a coherent, stable culture that allows the greatest possible freedom of religious and political thought and expression?
  2. Is it possible to have a coherent, stable culture made up of people of different languages, religions, traditions, and races?
  3. Is it possible to provide a free public education for all citizens?
  4. Is it possible to preserve the best of American traditions and social institutions while allowing uncontrolled technological development?


Those are some heady starting points for debate. Sure, we could add others dealing with globalization, the environment, and more.  But as Postman says repeatedly, kids are not only intellectually ready to grapple with these questions but, in some cases, they are closer to them in their real lives than the adults.

At the end of the chapter, Postman writes:

I mean to say that this is a powerful story that is at the core of what America is all about. The story says that experimenting and arguing is what Americans do. It does not matter if you are unhappy about the way things are. Everybody is unhappy about the way things are. We experiment to make things better, and we argue about what experiments are worthwhile and whether or not those we try are any good. And when we experiment, we make mistakes, and reveal our ignorance, and our timidity, and our naïveté. But we go on because we have faith in the future–that we can make better experiments and better arguments. This, it seems to me, is a fine and noble story, and I should not be surprised if students are touched by it and find in it a reason for learning.

I’m not sure where we are with this American story that has taken such an unexpected turn of late. The experiment seems a bit more dangerous these days. But the only way to a better future is to engage in the messiness of the debate in all of its passion and, at times, ugliness. Schools can do much to help students develop as citizens able to do just that.

(Image credit: Gabby Orcutt)

Cultures of Perpetual Learning

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Over the years, we’ve heard a lot of predictions about what the future of work holds for all of us, not just our kids. It’s interesting now to see some of those predictions actually playing out.

Case in point is this post in the Harvard Business Review that summarizes the Herculean change initiative now underway at AT&T. It’s a fascinating read on it’s own, but it’s even more interesting when you start to align some of the findings to the work of schools. Or maybe more daunting.

The biggest takeaway for me? Professional learning is now the responsibility of the learner. I’ve harped on that for a while now, but AT&T pushes that idea in spades. For instance:

From the outset, AT&T was clear that employees interested in new roles would be required to use their own time for—and in some cases invest their own money in—their reeducation.

And:

Once employees have identified skill gaps through the self-service platform and in conversations with their managers, they take it upon themselves to fill them through online courses, certifications, and degree programs developed through a partnership between AT&T, Udacity, and Georgia Tech. Most employees spend five to 10 hours a week on retraining.

All of this works within a “culture of perpetual learning.” AT&T employees know that their roles will change, on average, every four years. In other words, if you’re not constantly learning, you’re toast.

7876968098_fee041d1e3_kSome of that learning is focused on skills like coding, data science, and cloud-based computing. But “many of these fields are advancing so quickly that traditional methods of training and development cannot keep up.” That’s where on demand courses, badges, nanodegrees, and even master’s programs come in. Perpetual learning is supported by the company, but the learners are self-determined (with the help of surveys and evaluations.)

Finally, the whole organizational structure is shifting as well. Instead of a corporate ladder, the new metaphor is the “corporate lattice” which supports “supports lateral, diagonal, and both ascending and descending career moves.” Which leads to this:

Essential to lattice thinking is the principle that individuals actively own their development, which fundamentally changes the social contract between employer and employee. AT&T is working to instill a mindset in which each individual becomes CEO of his or her own career, empowered to seek out new skills, roles, and experiences.

As always, I urge you to read the whole thing.

The implications of this for education are many.

Are we building cultures of “perpetual learning?”

Is there an expectation (supported by the union, as in the case at AT&T) that professional learning is owned by the educator?

Do educators in our systems see themselves as the CEOs of their own careers?

And, maybe most importantly, are we working to help our students understand what it means to be the CEOs of their own learning?

I see this all happening more and more in the places I visit and work, but in all honesty, most schools seem no where near to creating these types of cultures or framing their practice through these types of lenses.

(Image credit: Denise Krebs)

The One Word That Prevents Real Educational Reform From Happening

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Given the common sense arguments for learning that run counter to the current day structures and practices of schools, it would seem that a real rethinking of our education system would have happened long before now. It’s hard to argue that forcing kids to learn the same thing on the same day in the same place at the same pace with other kids their same age from their same neighborhood with the same teacher to be assessed in the same way is built on any sound theory of learning and not instead focused on being as efficient as possible in “delivering” an education to our kids. Kids don’t learn that way before they become school age, and no one learns like that in real life. Imagine, if you can, if we set the same conditions for our adult learning. We wouldn’t stand for it, would we?

But despite the obvious problems with the structures, we come up with all sorts of reasons for not changing. It’s because we can’t ignore the state assessments. Or we can’t change the structures. Or we can’t make the parents upset. Or we can’t ask the unions to change. Or we can’t risk our college placement rankings. Or we can’t…

And that is the word, “can’t,” that we use to quell any real discussion of change and reform. Real change is just not possible. It just can’t be done.

15519253863_2fc81c8dd4_bBut here’s the thing: in my travels, I’ve seen every one of the “can’ts” overcome in one school or another. A number of schools don’t give grades because they think they’re detrimental to learning, yet their kids end up going to great colleges if they so desire. Other schools have mixed age groups because they believe that’s a better condition for learning. There are schools that have created relationships with parents so that when change is needed, the community comes out in support of an at times even initiates the change. And there are schools who have stood up to the state assessors and asked for and received waivers to what they see as counterproductive policies and practices. Or, they convince constituents that the test scores are not where real learning and preparedness for the modern world resides.

If we’re honest, it’s not about “can’t.” Instead, it’s about “won’t.” We won’t do those things, even though common sense says we ought to, because we don’t have the conviction or the courage or, importantly, the conscience to do them. And so, we introduce cosmetic changes meant to soften the disconnect between what we believe and what we do all the while knowing deep in our learning minds that we’re trying to do the wrong thing right. (I know, broken record.)

Sure, real change that requires us to think differently about the experience we provide for our kids is extremely difficult. And it challenges centuries of history and practice.

But let’s be clear: it is not impossible.

It’s happening all around us.

If we want to resist real change in our schools, so be it. But let’s just own the fact that it’s not that it can’t be done.

It’s that we won’t do it.

(Photo Credit: Maurits Verbiest)

Why Do We Need to Teach Kids “Self-Motivation”?

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From the “Ways of Thinking About Learning That Drive Me Crazy Dept.” comes this article in the Miami Herald titled “Ways We Can Make Students Interested in School.”

Now, anyone who reads this space regularly knows that I don’t think this is a very difficult question. We can start by looking at schools where kids actually enjoy the learning environment and process and try to discern what makes it so. We can ask ourselves what would make us interested in school if we were students. Heck, we could even ask the kids.

Those don’t seem to be in the mix for the author of this article, however. No, instead, this author seeks to “fix” apathetic kids. We have to teach kids, wait for it, to be “self-motivated”. That needs to become “the new educational buzzword” that should shape our work.

guitar deleteWhat this means, of course, is that kids should be trained to be self-motivated to achieve “habits and discipline that will lead to academic success,” two things that “have all but gone by the wayside” in our consumer driven society (of which kids are a part.) We do this by getting kids to “sit in the front, take notes, ask questions, be organized, do all the work, and find a study partner.”

And, as I’m sure you know, this is important because “because at some point in every person’s life, either at school or in a job or in a marriage, he or she will have to buck up and say, ‘This is hard. This is boring. I don’t want to do this. But I’m doing it anyway. And I’ll do my best.”

I love that last part, because it absolves anyone in schools from doing anything to make schools less boring. In fact, we actually should make school boring so kids can deal with boring jobs and boring marriages and boring whatever else when they become boring grown ups. So, if you actually enjoy school, you miss this important life lesson.

But here’s the thing: kids are self-motivated to learn out of the womb. They are constantly learning without being taught. They are constantly asking questions and figuring out their worlds, creating their own lesson plans on the fly, learning tacitly with and from other kids. Most kids are learning sponges, with technology or not.

And then they come to school and over a few years we drive it out of them.

The irony of the argument in this article is obvious: we’re supposed to be putting back in what we took away in the first place.

There are millions of kids in this world who love to come to school because school is a place that allows them to maintain their self-motivation to learn and finds ways to make sure the school stuff they need happens in contextually meaningful and relevant ways. Those schools start their work with where the kids are, put an emphasis on maintaining and nurturing that learning disposition they already have, and create cultures where boredom is rare or at least creatively useful.

Unfortunately, there are many millions more kids who are stuck in cultures where the those conditions are replaced with the “buck up” mentality that says “School and learning sucks sometimes. You need to learn our stuff whether you want to or not. So, get over it.”

No school, no culture, no environment is perfect. But there are models. And it’s not rocket science. Just depends on what extent we truly value kids as learners and not the objects of teaching.

(Image source: Kychan)

Basketball is Life

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tuck2As some of you may have seen on my Twitter feed Saturday, my son Tucker and his teammates at SportsU won the Under Armour Association 16-U championship in Atlanta this weekend. It’s an elite team in an elite program playing an elite schedule, and I’ve never seen better basketball at the high school level than this spring and summer. (We’re on to Las Vegas this week for the last tournament of the season.)

I’ve been struck by all of the things that Tucker has learned in this experience, things that will serve him his entire life. Let me just say that while he is a very good basketball player, this team that he joined up with this year for the first time is just amazing. The starting five (who have been together for five years now) will almost certainly all be Division 1 players in college, and one is unquestionably an NBA prospect. Suffice to say, this was a real step up for him to play with these kids.

But he did well, was sixth or seventh man in most games, usually got a good amount of playing time against the highest competition, and had varying levels of success on the court. But it’s off the court that I just want to briefly focus on. Here’s his basketball “education” so far this year:

He took a risk. He could have played for any number of AAU teams, but given the chance to be on the best team and play at a higher level of competition, he took it.

He overcame adversity. There were moments this season that he had to prove himself, when things didn’t go as planned. He kept his head up always.

He showed resiliency. In those few really bad moments that almost every player experiences during a season, his reaction was “I gotta work harder.”

He assimilated to a new team and culture. Like I said, this team had been together for a while, and earlier in the season one of the other parents told me that they had been tough over the years on “new kids” joining the team. But she immediately said “They like Tucker, though.”

He gained confidence. Even though there were moments that I knew he wanted to play better, there were very few moments (if any) where he looked like he didn’t belong at that level. He’s much more in tune with his potentials now.

He deepened his passion. There’s no doubt any more what he’s working toward: a Division 1 offer.  He loves to play.

He learned to honestly assess his abilities. Sure, he got feedback from his coach and teammates. But mostly, he did a lot of reflection on what he needs to improve at.

He worked hard on something that matters. I’ll be very happy when he gets his license in about a month because as much as we don’t mind driving him to practices and gyms and games and everything else, he’ll have the freedom to set more of his own workout schedule. Regardless, he’s learning how much hard work it takes to succeed at this level.

And there’s more…lots more. But that’s a start.

And you know what I’m going to say, right? Why can’t he get all of those things and more from his time in school? All that stuff above, that is the stuff that matters in life, the stuff that he’s actually going to need to flourish, yet that’s too often absent with the work he’s being asked to do in the classroom. Please don’t tell me they’re mutually exclusive; they’re not.  And don’t tell me it’s not possible in schools; I’ve seen it. It’s just rare.

Look at how kids learn when they are engaged in things that matter to them. Isn’t that what school ought to be?

Regardless, I’m so thankful that my son has a deep love of the game. I wish all kids could experience that level of passion for something in their lives.

It’s Really “Personalized Teaching”

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We talk a lot about personalized “learning.”

But what we’re really saying is personalized “teaching.”

Either the human or the algorithm deduces the gaps and then supplies “personalized” curriculum to fill them. Either way, the student is the object of the personalization. Someone or something else is deciding what the student “learns,” and how it’s assessed.

And we know we’re teaching. We don’t really know if the learner is “learning,” however.*

Whether or not you want to use that technique, or purchase that software, let’s just call it what it is and acknowledge who is doing what in the transaction.

If the object is to move agency over the learning to the learner, to let the learner decide what questions are of interest, and what paths to take to knowledge, that’s truly “personal learning.”

Let’s do more of that if we really believe kids now need to be powerful learners on their own.

(* Unless you define learning as remembering something long enough to pass the assessment.)

Embracing “Rapidly Changing Times”

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If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I Tweet a fair amount about climate change, and how it’s something that we’re going to need to help our kids cope with on all sorts of different levels. From where I sit, this is now the work of schools, engaging students in the important questions we face and helping them develop the skills and dispositions to answer them and problem solve their way through it. I think of my own kids in this regard all the time. Are they ready? Will they flourish? Will the enjoy their lives?

Through our new Changeleader Facebook group, I found Superflux:

We work closely with clients and collaborators on projects that acknowledge the reality of our rapidly changing times, designing with and for uncertainty, instead of resisting it.

“A world in flux” feels totally right. Cultures around the globe are colliding with “historically unprecedented force.” We now have “local and global crises arising daily from our collective inability to deal with ever-faster change.” Political upheaval, racial tensions, economic uncertainty…I can’t think about it too long before I start feeling queasy.

179299295_1024a70998_bBut I do think about it. And we need to think about it with kids in our schools as well. We need to “acknowledge the reality of our rapidly changing times…instead of resisting it” in our classrooms, for the sake of our kids.

For instance, Superflux is thinking about “mitigation of shock” that will no doubt occur as the globe heats up.

The disconnect between scientific, data driven predictions of global warming, and the lack of immediately visible signs contributes to a space of cognitive dissonance, its implications unsettling and ominous. But it is also a space which offers the opportunity to confront our fears, to experiment with ways in which the shocks of the impact of climate change can be mitigated. It is in this space that we at Superflux have situated our research and design project: Mitigation of Shock.   We want to conduct experimental design responses to first world disasters that are likely to happen in the near future, by prototyping alternatives today. Tools, methods, materials and commons that individuals can learn, use and share in order to gain agency and capacity to mitigate the shock of climate change.

Tell me, why wouldn’t that be a worthwhile goal and challenge for our students? To “gain agency and capacity to mitigate the shock” of what is almost undeniably coming their way?

I know that these are difficult subjects to discuss with kids. But we resist at their and our peril. And we’ll all be better served if  the next generation is comfortable (as it can be), engaged, and capable with embracing uncertainty head on.

Asking questions that we don’t know the answers to would seem a logical place to start.

(Image credit)

Reflecting on #ISTE2016

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“Common sense” is an interesting term, isn’t it?

What’s “common”?

What is “sense”?

Just because something makes sense to me, doesn’t mean it makes sense to you. I get that.

But some things just seem so obvious to me:

Schools should be about learning, not teaching.

Technology should be about helping kids become better learners, not helping the adults become better teachers. (Someday, the learners will be on their own, right?)

School should be fun. It should be “genius” all the time, not just an hour a week. It should be about discovery and wonder and passion and good deeds in the world.

Learning is not centered in curriculum; it’s centered in creation. In composition. In questions and missions.

And we adults should do what we believe when it comes to creating the conditions for kids to learn deeply and powerfully with us, not from us.

Why we would do anything else?

If that’s not “common sense,” what is?

The Problem With the “Disciplines”

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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).