Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Has This Crisis Really Changed Schools?

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

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

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

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

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

Has schooling become more equitable across society?

Has the definition of “success” changed?

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

Has technology amplified learning instead of teaching?

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

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

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

School as Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

In-Between Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Function of Schools

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

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

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

Yes. That.

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

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

The Consequences of our Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

What We’ve Lost

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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 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)

Risky Business

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Reading this most excellent post by Ira Socol this morning got me thinking about the word “risk” and its use in a learning context. So often I hear that we in education need to “take more risks,” or that our kids need to do that, that “risk-taking” is an important part of learning.

And I totally agree.

But what is “risk” exactly? I mean, what’s the bar for “risk-taking?”

surf deleteAt it’s most basic level, as Ira suggests, it’s just doing something different, changing up the lesson, changing the environment, or trying a new technology. While I may not see these as “risky” practices at all, I understand how hard it is for some to do even that much. (Actually, maybe I don’t understand that, unless the adults feel no sense of a culture that supports (or expects) at least these kinds of minor tweaks.)

At it’s most extreme level, I would assume taking a risk would mean to put kids in harm’s way. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of someone doing that, regardless of how you define “harm.” (I’m sure someone will share a story of such “risk-taking” now that I’ve said that.)

So what is the “risk” that we’re really talking about?

Is it the “risk” of failure?

The “risk” of losing control?

The “risk” of not having permission?

I’m sure that’s a part of it, but it’s arguable how “risky” those things really are.

But my sense is this: The real risk people feel in education is around letting kids make decisions for themselves and have agency over their own learning. It’s also a risk to let teachers do that stuff, too, to let them be learners in their own right. That’s just not the way it’s done. We don’t trust “them” enough to learn with us instead of from “us” however you define those groups.

I wonder what we risk by doing that, by not making it about the learning rather than the teaching. I wonder what we risk by not creating cultures where learners are trusted, at every level, from the board to the administration to students to the community, to find and pursue meaningful and interesting questions that matter to them.

I wonder what we risk by not taking risks.

(Image credit: Anton Repponen)

Our Empathy Problem

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delete kidEmpathy and “design thinking” and attending to the “end user” are all the rage these days, and with good reason. They are responses, I think, to the increasing separation we’re feeling in our world between the haves and have nots, different races, different political persuasions. Everywhere, the fault lines seem to be expanding, and we seem to be searching for ways to close the gaps by attempting to understand “others” more deeply, by walking in their shoes, as it were.

This is really hard, of course, because all any of us truly understand are our own lived realities. Everything else is a guess, educated or not.

I’ve been thinking about that lately as the events in the U.S. over the last week have caused most (many? some?) of us to seek deeper empathy and understanding for others in order to try to make sense of the killings and violence. How well can we fully know the lived experience of another, of another’s culture or heritage, of another’s profession? Can “empathy” ever be reached fully? And how do we live empathically in our day to day lives?

That’s not to say that seeking understanding isn’t a worthwhile effort. We should aspire to start with the “other” whenever we can.

On some level, perhaps our difficulties with living empathically begin in schools. When we first greet five and six year olds at the door, how well to we design their experiences with a respect for their own lived experiences? As they go through school, are we continually asking “Who are you?” “What do you care about?” “What motivates you to learn?” “What do you need?” Do our students feel that we are fully seeking to understand them as individuals? Do we, as Seymour Sarason (and others) have asked, bend our practice to their needs and desires, or do we ask them to bend their practice to ours?

The answer is obvious. And the effects there are obvious as well.

If we started with the “other” in mind, if an attempt to respect and understand outweighed our own deep-seated narratives and fears, perhaps we’d see the gaps disappear all together.

(Image credit: Shannon Kelley)

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).

The “Normal” School Year Should Be Anything But

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16414436262_4a4ded9c85_cYesterday, I noted that much of what we think and do around learning in schools defies common sense.

Today, I’m reminded that the kids know it too.

In Muscatine, Iowa, over 700 students are participating in a two-week summer program called College for Kids. They’re building things with Legos, messing around with oobleck goo, and using all sorts of tech to make robotic cars, and much more.

The program coordinators describe the need:

Students get ‘hands-on learning experiences they may not have time or resources to have during the regular school year…We fill in the gaps that a normal school year can’t do; it gives them a chance to be creative, use their imaginations, think outside the box.’

The goals are clear.

We want them to walk away with loving to learn more…they are learning, not just hands-on but technology, we have iPads, computers, projectors.”

Teachers love it.

Our teachers that come here, they also get the opportunity to teach a lot of things they don’t have a chance to and they love it.”

Kids love it.

We’re using fun kids toys with science, to make fun learning,” one student says. Others say “they liked having a chance to build projects on their own and follow the instructions themselves.”

But, the kids also get it.

It’s hands-on so you get to build it instead of just the teacher building it and you just answering a question,” one student said [Emphasis mine].

Ugh.

Common sense would say that if you’re doing something that kids love, that teachers love, that promotes wanting to learn more, and that accentuates the growing discontent with “regular” classroom learning, you might want to think about doing that stuff full-time instead of just for two weeks in the summer.

Think: “Our Curriculum Hour” instead of “Their Genius Hour.” Make the “genius” stuff the norm and carve out some time for the curriculum when necessary. Heck, they’ll get most of the curriculum through their genius anyway.

The worst part? Kids have to “score a 75 percent or above on the Iowa Assessment to qualify, or be recommended by teachers.”

Does that make any sense to you?

(Image credit: m-shipp22)

The “Common Sense” Argument

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Last week I spent a chunk of time talking education with a couple of family members, one of whom is a teacher at a “high performing” district in Connecticut. It was a pretty aimless conversation, but it kept coming back to a certain question: “Why do we do that, again?” And a certain response: “It just makes no sense.” We must of said that at least a half dozen times in a 45-minute conversation.

I know I’ve riffed on this before, and I don’t want to do a deep dive into it again, but it still astounds me the extent to which we in education look at our practice and fully acknowledge that it’s hard to justify in a developing-kids-as-learners context, but we just keep doing it anyway. Easier for us vs. better for kids. Trying to do the wrong thing right. Etc.

Today while I was working with a group of educators in Central Pennsylvania, I decided to use that as the starting point for a discussion on why we need to rethink, really rethink schools.

Mechanicsburg

And the ensuing conversation reminded me that the “Why?” question is really not so much about why we do the things we do…tradition, nostalgia, training and more. We all get the history.

The real “Why?” question is “why do we keep doing the things we do?”

Especially today.

Required: Rethinking Curriculum

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What percent of what we learn in our adult lives is learned via a curriculum that someone else explicitly put together for us vs. a path of content and people and whatever else that we create on demand for ourselves in the moment? Especially now with the Internet?

In my life right now, I’d say it’s 90%-10% in favor of the self-created path. I’m guessing most people reading this are nodding their heads.

Now ask that same question of kids in school. In my own kid’s case, he says it’s almost the exact opposite.

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It’s not hard to see that our focus in schools isn’t on learning as much as it’s on making sure kids become learned about the “best-guess” curriculum we put in front of them. Similarly, it’s hard to argue that that approach is getting them ready for the 90%-10% world of self-determined learning that we all know they’re going to live in.

Here’s truth: We now have access to more uniquely relevant and interesting resources for any given child to learn from and with than any organizationally selected curriculum could possibly offer.

Which is why the school curriculum should now be an act of creation instead of a highly scripted package of content for completion.

To quote Dave Cormier:

I’m starting to believe, more and more, that given THE INTERNETS, content should be something that gets created BY a course not BEFORE it. Our current connectivity allows us to actually engage in discussions at scale… can that replace content?

Interesting question…

(Image credit: Evelyn Giggles)

On Chaos, Order, and Learning

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5982121_3428d4180d_o(This is my latest “Shifting Conversations” column at ModernLearners.com. Link to full post at the end. Free registration required.)

Lately, I’ve become more and more interested in organizations in general, and the organization of school in particular. Much of this comes from reading Seymour Sarason and his thoughts on the power relationships in schools, how real, kid-centered change in schools is almost impossible because we neglect to democratize the culture of schools to the extent that real change can actually take place. Too many fiefdoms. Too many personal agendas. Too many egos concerned primarily with pushing their own easy-to-measure world views and narratives onto others instead of engaging in conversations around what’s best for kids.

The more I think about that, the more I think Sarason is right. Obviously, there are many barriers to change, but the power struggles between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, parents and teachers, board members and admins, etc., may be the most difficult to sort out to the benefit of students. As we’ve said many times in this space, it’s almost always about culture. Is the school about teaching, or is it about learning? Is it about “achievement,” or is the focus on the pursuit of passions? Is it about the adults, or is it about the kids?

All that and more is what I’ve been thinking about as I read a somewhat obscure book on organizations that was Tweeted to me recently, Birth of the Chaordic Age…

(Click here to read the full post.)

“The Pain of Returning Home”

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8487922940_9855d0aebc_b“Nostalgia is a real thing. It serves many positive functions, but it also functions as a defense for -at times- things that defy logic.” ~Ira Socol

I love that. It reminds me of something I’ve written about before, the idea that educators now need to “redefine rational behavior in education.” That we can’t keep perpetuating ineffective, irrelevant practice in schools for the sake of staying within the bounds of our own personal educational histories.

But the pull of nostalgia is strong, for both teachers and parents. I know both. Redefining practice in the classroom is inherently risky and difficult without a culture of innovation to support it. Advocating for a different educational experience for your own child requires some courage in a world which appears, at least, to still value traditional pathways and outcomes. It’s easier to couch our actions in what’s familiar, even though we know it may not be what’s best for our students or our kids. In neither case are we prone to experiment or to move down a different path.

How appropriate is it that the two Greek roots of the word are “nostos” and “algos,” as in “return home” and “pain.” Let’s let that just sink in for a moment, ok? Ah…the layers…

And this is about more than our individual histories; this is societal nostalgia that continues to be advanced through policy as well as practice. Even in this tumultuous political season here in the States where everything “normal” and traditional seems to be up for debate, has anyone heard a peep about a bolder, more democratic, more child-centered, more passion-based vision of learning for kids in schools that strays even an inch from our collective nostalgia for the school experience? Something “different” instead of something “better?” The “right thing” instead of the “wrong thing right?” 

Not one peep. 

As Ira goes on to write: “Our kids deserve better than nostalgia and 180 days in a museum of 1990.“

They do, and we know it. 

(Image credit: greg westfall)

School, as Told by Kids

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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. )

Technology as World Language

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Over the weekend, this video came out. Take a minute to watch.

We already have tools that translate text pretty well (though not perfect.) We have apps that allow you to point your camera at text in a different language and read it in English (if that’s your language of choice.) And we have apps that translate speech through the phone.

Now we’re wearing it.

One of our big elephants in the room when it comes to schools is that pretty much all of us know that you can’t learn a second language with any real fluency or stickiness without being immersed in a culture that speaks that language. And classrooms are, by and large, not built for immersion. We spend hundreds of hours over four years of high school, and five years after graduation, we retain very little of what we learned, especially if we never had occasion to actually use that language in every day life. (A rare event for most.)

I’m not saying that learning a foreign language isn’t a great thing to do. It is. But learning it in school simply isn’t. And now, that argument gets even harder. More important than speaking a foreign language is being understood. That’s getting easier and easier.

Needed: Educator Inventors

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invent deleteEdith Ackerman:

“Educators in particular will need to invent new ways for their students — and themselves — to safely and successfully venture off the beaten paths, without losing their grounds and bearings.”

Ira Socol:

“Inventors need to understand the need for invention in order to begin.”

“Invent” is a powerful word, right? It means to “create or design something that has not existed before; to be the originator of.” 

If we apply that high bar definition to education, what have we invented lately? Sure, there are new software programs and platforms that increase our efficiency, and some clicker-y tools that supposedly help us teach “better.” But from a practice perspective, what’s really “new?” Flipped classrooms? Blended learning? Hour of Code?

Not much. 

It’s getting harder to argue that we don’t need high bar invention in education right now. But in order to invent with relevance, we have to be clear about the problem we’re trying to solve. As Edith suggests, there’s a growing urgency to “rethink the raison d’etre of schools.” As Ira suggests, the lack of  teachers who themselves struggled in school has led to a narrowing of thinking about change. There are bigger questions, more complex contexts that the inventors “need to understand” in order to design the new systems and experiences our kids need. 

That’s Job 1 in schools right now: Identifying, discussing, grappling with the bigger questions.  Understanding the need to invent.

Image credit: Jeremy Thomas

Norms for Learning and Why You Need Them

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Ira Socol:

“One of the things that is clear is that every single thing kids see, hear, feel, smell, taste, sends a message about your school. Every single thing. And many of the messages schools send are as awful as they are unintentional.”

“Unintentional” is the key word there, at least to me. As Ira suggests, I don’t think we spend enough time in schools really thinking about the “user experience” of our students. Instead, we continue to do what we’ve always done, given the long standing architectures that are so familiar, like classrooms separated by walls, annoying bells at passing time, desks in rows, dress codes, and a general lack of student voice and choice to name a few. I forget who pointed out to me (or where I read) recently that schools are the most undemocratic institutions in our society (probably a Sarason or Ackoff book,) but think of the message THAT sends to the kids we serve.

We’re better off being “intentional” in the messages we send. And we’re better off if we construct those messages with a large grain of empathy for the user. (When was the last time you shadowed a kid in school, for instance?) Even better is if we create those messages with students’ help and approval.

Case in point: Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta. Instead of a mission, they state their intention: ““We are a school of inquiry, innovation, and impact. Grounded in Christian values, we prepare all students to be college ready, globally competitive, and engaged citizen leaders.” And a part of what could be called the MVP DNA is “We are habitually paying attention to our intention.”

Read that again. “Habitually paying attention to our intention.”

So, are you? Do you know what your intention is and are you constantly putting that at the forefront of your work as a teacher or a leader? And have you been clear with students as to how you plan to get there? Have you, as MVP has, declared a set of “norms” for the school and the classroom? Like:

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Being intentional about norms like these send a powerful message to students. Without clearly articulated norms, students will guess at what you want, and some of those guesses will be, as Ira says, “unintentional and awful.” And that goes for the adults in the room as well.

So, what messages are you sending to your “users”?

Adapt. Fast.

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bikes2 deleteStewart Hase:

The ability to learn, for both individuals and institutions, is critical to survival. While it has always been so, adaptation in the past could comfortably take place over a long period of time. Now, that is no longer possible.

One of the biggest challenges to schools is that the timeframe for “adaptation” is speeding up. If you don’t believe that you need only look at the current U.S. election cycle and how, at least on the Republican side, the traditional playbook has not only been tossed out but may have been totally erased from the political hard drive. Or look at the early but quickening effects of climate change on our societies. Businesses, medicine, science…everyone seems to be in “perpetual beta” when it comes to figuring out what to do next.

So when we talk about “modern learning,” we’re not just talking about the learner; we’re talking about the institution as well. And while the learner (Read: kid with a smartphone) is doing an ok job of “adapting” to this new environment, schools and “education” seem to be struggling. Adapting doesn’t mean overlaying technology on top of traditional practice when learning with technology defies those practices . It doesn’t mean hewing to traditional power relationships at a moment when modern organizational hierarchies are flattening. And it also doesn’t mean installing a maker space or a “Genius Hour” or a coding class and calling it a day.

Right now, schools that learn understand that their central function is changing.

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Right now, schools that learn understand that their central function is changing, that “an education” is no longer the delivery of a set curriculum but, instead, is about building the capacity for individuals and groups to learn deeply and powerfully in the world. That moving forward, an “education” will be determined by the learner as they play out their lives, not by an institution attempting to predict what may or may not be relevant or useful in the future. That’s a significant rethinking of practice and architecture required to make that happen.

The fact is, few schools reflect the ability to learn. Few have cultures where the emphasis is on questioning and wondering and iterating new practices for the new contexts that now surround us. Instead, schools are focused on doing the old stuff better. Better policies. Better assessments. Better practices, not new.

The question then is not whether schools who don’t learn will survive. In the short term, most will;  there is an important child care function that’s not to be overlooked. The more pressing question is will the students in those schools survive and truly flourish in their lives as adults who are constantly being asked to adapt, and not given much time to do it.

Image credit: Maico Amorim

Most Parents Have No Idea What Their Kids Are Learning In School

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Serious question to all you parents out there: What are your kids really learning in school? I don’t mean what grades are they getting. I mean what are they really learning? What’s sticking with them that they will actually use in their day to day lives to become more successful or more fulfilled as they grow older?

My answer to that question comes from reflecting on the combined 22 years of schooling my own kids have had. Sure, they’re learning how to read and to write. Their learning some tidbits about history and science and math and other things that may stick with them into adulthood. But more, they’re learning how to figure out what each teacher wants, how to team study with their friends to prepare for tests, how to read the very least they can in order to get a good class participation grade, and how to talk to members of the opposite sex, just to name a few.

It’s funny, but when I dive into the “Parent Portal!” (to be read with a loud, deep, echoing voice), that stuff doesn’t seem to be noted there. I can see that Tucker got a 19/20 on his “Molarity and Solutions Lab” in Chemistry (I think I got a 17/20…), but only a 40.2/50 on his “Argument Unit-Multiple Choice” in AP Lang. There’s nothing in there about talking to girls.

And, shocking as it may sound, Tucker really doesn’t share much with us about what he’s “learning” in school. (Adolescence, I know.) He doesn’t seem to be making or creating much in school. Nor has he (ever) been out in the community doing work that he can point to when we drive by it and say “I did that!”

So, I’m left with 17/20 and 40.2, which tell me literally nothing about what he’s learned in a curricular sense. Zero. Nada. (Hopefully, he learned how to do better on the next multiple choice quiz.)

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a bad parent.

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Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m a bad parent. Maybe I should try harder to get him to report out all that he’s learned in class. Maybe I should be calling his teachers on a regular basis and ask what that 40.2 really means in a learning sense. And even more, maybe I should be calling them and asking what they mean by “learning” in the first place. I mean, what would he get on his “Molarity and Solutions Lab” two years from now were he to conduct it again?

Point is, I don’t think parents in general have much of a clue at all what their kids are “learning” in school, and to be honest, I think that’s just the way schools like it. The less info on that the better. It’s just less complicated. And parents are complicit in this, right? I mean what parent wants to admit that, just like themselves, their kids are really “learning” very little of the curriculum for the long term, and that the real learning is the stuff that doesn’t end up on the report card? That what they really care about, more than anything else, is the grade?

Since there’s no room in the parent portal for more than just numbers, I’m not expecting this to change any time soon…

(A bit of a riff on this piece by John Warner.)

(Image credit: Ryan Tauss)

We’re Trying To Do “The Wrong Thing Right” in Schools

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Whenever I think about the way most schools are structured today, I always come back to the same question: Do we do the things we do because they’re better for kids or because they are easier for us? For instance: separating kids by age in school. Is that something we do because kids learn better that way? Or do we do it because it’s just an easier way organizing our work? I think all of us know the answer to that. And there are quite a few other comparisons like those that are worth thinking about:

  • Do kids learn better when we separate out the content into different subjects, or is it just easier for us?
  • Do kids learn better when we have every one of them pretty much go through the same curriculum in the same way, or is it just easier for us?
  • Do kids learn better when we have them turn off all of their technology in school, or is it just easier for us?
  • Do kids learn better when we we assess them all the same way, or is it just easier for us?
  • Do kids learn better when we decide what they should learn and how they should learn it, or is it just easier for us?
  • Do kids learn better in 50 or 90 minute blocks, or is it just easier for us?

To be sure, these are not new questions, nor are they unique to my thinking. Many of us in the edu online community have been writing about these things for years. As with much of the “we need to change schools” conversation, it’s another part of the repeatedly articulated argument that appeals to common sense but hasn’t much moved the needle when it comes do doing things any differently in schools.

So why bring it up yet again? Well, for me at least, two words: Russell Ackoff.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to some serendipitous surfing online, I came across this 10-minute snip of an interview with Ackoff, a pioneer in the field of systems thinking who was a professor at the Wharton School prior to his death in 2009. I was staggered a bit after watching it because he was able to articulate something I have been feeling for a while now but had been unable to find the words for:

“Peter Drucker said ‘There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.’ Doing the right thing is wisdom, and effectiveness. Doing things right is efficiency. The curious thing is the righter you do the wrong thing the wronger you become. If you’re doing the wrong thing and you make a mistake and correct it you become wronger. So it’s better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Almost every major social problem that confronts us today is a consequence of trying to do the wrong things righter.”

Here’s the video.

I’ve been thinking about Ackoff pretty much consistently since I watched it, and the application of that lens to our current practice in schools is profound. Can there be a more apt example of trying to “do the wrong thing right” than in schools? Look again at that list above. Are we in search of efficiency, or effectiveness?

I think the answer is obvious. If you watch the clip, you’ll hear Ackoff dive into the education issue head on. He says, and I agree, that the system is not about learning (effectiveness). It’s about teaching (efficiency). And believe me, I understand why we have that focus. Given our devotion to an overstuffed curriculum, standardized tests, “college and career readiness” and more, about the only way we can see our students navigating the school experience is to “teach” it, to organize it, pace it, and assess it in some way that allows us to confer the adjective “educated” to each student. This despite the obvious truth that the vast majority of what we “learn” in school is quickly forgotten, and the truest “education” for our life’s work comes on the job, not in school.

Sadly, “doing the right thing” for our kids in schools is difficult. In education, our structures, our histories, our nostalgia for trying to do the “wrong thing right” runs deep. Regardless of how we got here (and the story is complex,) we are profoundly wedded to what now constitutes this “education system” that dominates our learning world. The roles and expectations of students and teachers and administrators and parents are so clearly reinforced by our own experience, our cultural representations, and by those who have millions of dollars invested in the status quo that any serious suggestion that we might be doing the “wrong thing” is simply layered over by a new initiative, a new technology, a new curriculum, or a new success story to avoid having to grapple with the more fundamental question.

But that will not work for much longer. The contexts for learning and education have changed. As Ackoff says in his book Turning Learning Right Side Up:

There is no way that the vast majority of teachers, whatever their training, can ever hope to match in their classrooms what students can receive at will from sources of their own choosing (14).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of schools I’ve visited continue to try to do the “wrong thing right.” While few teachers or administrators really believe that learning happens best when kids are grouped by age, or when they are all forced to learn the same things on the same day in the same way, or when we chop up what we’ve chosen for the content into 50-minute periods and different subjects, we do that stuff anyway. And, if you look at the recent Gallup survey of engagement of almost 1 million students across the US, trying to do the “wrong thing right” is having devastating consequences. Of high school juniors, just 32% say they are “involved and enthusiastic” in school, 17% say they have fun at school, 17% say they “get to do what they do best,” and 16% say they “will invent something that changes the world.”

Read those numbers again, and ask yourself can we possibly be doing the right thing? Can we possibly label our current practices as “effective?”

As with most addictions, the first step to changing this is to admit we have a problem. The signs that we are reaching “peak education” in the traditional system are becoming more and more apparent by the day. (More about that in a later post.) And while I’m not naive enough to suggest that policy makers and vendors and many educators are at all ready to begin the process of moving away from a focus on efficiency toward a focus on effectiveness, that shouldn’t stop individual teachers or school systems from starting down that path.

Doing the right thing in schools starts with one fairly straightforward question: What do you believe about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply in their lives? Once you’ve answered that as an individual and as a school community, the question that follows is does your practice in classrooms with kids honor those beliefs? In other words, if you believe that kids learn best when they have authentic reasons for learning, when their work lives in the world in some real way, when they are pursuing answers to questions that they themselves find interesting, when they’re not constrained by a schedule or a curriculum, when they are having fun, and when they can learn with other students and teachers, then are you giving priority to those conditions in the classroom? Are you acting on your beliefs?

I’m working with districts where this is the root question, and where the answer is the fundamental driver for every decision made within the system. It’s a recognition that the roles and responsibilities of the system have irrevocably changed due to the shifts in the world we’ve seen over the last two decades. And it’s also a recognition that we have to approach our work with children from an entirely different angle than what we are accustomed to. But make no mistake, it’s a long, difficult process of change to endure.

This is not the first time in our history that we’ve faced such a seismic shift in our needs regarding schools and education. As Ackoff writes:

Here, a culture declaring itself to be the protector of individual liberty, and affording seemingly boundless opportunities for the expression of personal freedom, the challenge of creating a large, docile population that would accept the dominance of the factory system in their lives was enormous. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, it became clear that the only way to succeed with industrializing (and hence modernizing) this country was to find a way to break the inherently free human spirit during childhood (Kindle 177.)

As we are confronted with “modernizing” this country once again, it’s a focus on that “inherently free human spirit during childhood” that is once again at the core of our work. But instead of finding ways to break that spirit in children, this time around we must “do the right thing” and allow it to flourish in profound and beautiful ways for learning.

As Parents, How Should We Assess Schools?

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The other night at a friend’s holiday party, I started picking the brains of people who had kids going to school at the local high school, the one that my own kids are scheduled to attend in a few short years. I got a variety of responses, most of them pretty positive. It”s a smallish country high school, about 950 students 9-12, mostly white middle class, and probably typical in most aspects. I don’t think anyone would rate it as outstanding, but it’ not near the bottom by traditional measures either.

It’s those traditional measures that struck me in the responses I got. One parent, who is a classroom teacher at another school, said “well my daughter scored really well on the PSAT’s, so they [the school] must be doing something right.” Another parent said “well, they’ve got like 10 AP courses which is pretty good.” And a few others commented on the fact that their kids were doing well socially and had a lot of friends. I was struck by how kind of programmed the responses felt. Almost like, it’s a school, what more can you say?

Ironically, I ran into an old friend right before the party who had recently retired from teaching at that school, and he articulated his assessment like this: “If you want your kids get the best experience, you have to advocate for them.” In other words, I’m going to have to find ways to help them get the “best” teachers and to be active in steering them through the program. “Look,” he said. “It’s like 25% of the teachers are great and your kids will learn a lot. Another 40% are fine, and they’ll make it interesting. The rest? They’re just doing their time. Not much different from anywhere else.”

Did I mention there is a board seat opening up this spring? Hmmm….

Finally, one of our good friends went and visited a Waldorf school nearby and spent the day watching students and teachers interact. It was interesting to listen to her talk about the experience. “It was amazing,” she said. “The kids were engaged, making things, talking to teachers. It was totally different.” They had a compost bin, too.

Now I know it’s not totally fair to make comparisons here, but I wish I would have heard more of those types of responses about the high school. I wish I would have heard stories of kids changing the world, of pushing through personal barriers, of creative expressions, of challenges met, of real work for real purposes. I wish it had been more than PSATs and AP tests.

So I’m wondering two things. How are you advocating for your kids? And more importantly, how are you assessing your kids’ schools? If you’re reading this, I’m thinking PSAT scores and number of AP courses probably aren’t too important. (Or are they?) In the 21st Century, what should we be demanding of our schools?

(Photo: “Rows Upon Rows” by natashalcd.)

Dealing With the "Skills Slowdown"

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New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks writes about the pretty dire state of education in this country in his piece “The Biggest Issue” which ran yesterday, and it cites some interesting research about the relationship between education and technology. Namely, not so great things happen when the pace of educational progress slips behind that of technological progress, which is what is occurring right now.

The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Now I know that “educational progress” in this instance is being measured by how much of an education most people get, a rate that peaked (in graduation terms) in the late 1960s and continue to decline. But can we really measure educational progress on the basis of graduation rates these days?

Two other points from the essay: First, the bottom line is that family environments, “which have deteriorated over the last 40 years,” have a great deal to do with the potential success of any given student. Second, it appears, at least, that the candidate better positioned to deal with this situation is Obama, given his emphasis on early childhood education.

Here’s another nugget to chew on:

It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

I’m still doubtful that either campaign will push these conversations to the forefront even though, as Brooks suggests, they represent “the biggest issue facing the country.”

Tale of Two Schools and Some Questions

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Probably the most learning I’ve done since I hit the road full time almost two years ago now (dang…has it really been that long?) is around how diverse individual districts are in this country when it comes to access to technology, having a vision for its use, and understanding the transformative nature of what the Web is offering these days. And I’m not talking so much here about the real inner city schools that are struggling mightily just to make AYP. I’m talking about schools that “pass the test” so to speak. A couple of districts that I’ve worked with in recent months provide representative examples:

The first district is in a middle class suburb of a major city that serves about 6,000 students. Teachers and students have very limited access to technology. There is one LCD projector per school in the lower grades, computer labs are being disbanded to provide at least one station per classroom, and Internet service is not much better than dial up. (There is limited wireless.) In the last seven years, exactly zero dollars have been allocated for administrative professional development, and technology budgets have been capped at 1987 levels. A new administration is trying to start some conversations about technology, and the group I met with for a day was interested and worked hard to grasp the ideas and the tools, though many were reaching for the Advil before it was all over. (By the way, two of the administrators who were supposed to be at the session, however, took personal days rather than attend what I assume they felt would be a waste of their time. Oy.)

The second district is in an upper middle class suburb of a different major city and serves a much smaller K-8 population. Here, technology is ubiquitous. Every teacher has a MacBook as do all students 4th through 8th. The superintendent has a plan for technology integration that, despite feeling like he’d gotten “a wake-up call” the day I was there, calls for the deep integration of collaborative tools into the curriculum. The teacher workshops were filled with probing questions, creative ideas and conversation. It was a very different place, and it was a place where I just had the sense that technology was becoming simply a way they do their business. (Yet, here’s the rub: kids move from this district to a high school where there are no laptops and where an “anti-technology” faction in the community holds sway over much of what the school board does. Oy.)

These types of contrasts are everywhere I go and what I find most striking about all of this. There is just so much inconsistency from district to district, place to place. It’s really unsettling on some level to see the vast disparity that our kids have to deal with.

All of this, of course, is framed in the EduCon weekend sense where we saw something that I think most of us would agree we want for our own kids yet don’t quite know how to make happen in our own places. And I talked about this with Chris and Gary for over an hour right after the Sunday morning panel. What are the things that SLA does that are replicable? What needs to be in place for systemic cultural change to occur? I tried to use the domino metaphor (apparently without much success) as in what does the first domino have to be that tips all of the others? And what is the second domino and the third? If we had to create a general roadmap for change, a recipe of some type, I think we could probably do a good job of identifying the ingredients (and technology would be down the list.) But what would be the order? Is there one?

My own impression after visiting hundreds of schools is that the first, key ingredient is leadership, that nothing happens without someone who can inspire serious conversations about what can be, regardless of the roadblocks. (Yes, read Chris Lehmann.) But what after that? Money? Autonomy? Parental support? Technology?

I know that, as is my wont, I may be grasping for something that by it’s very nature resists a clear process. I’m also sure much has been written on this that maybe I haven’t read yet. (Links please.) Maybe we need a wiki…

(Photo: “School’s out for Summer!” by Conspirator.)

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