Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Resolved for 2019

By Leave a Comment

Happy New Year!

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

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

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

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

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

Sincere best wishes for an amazing 2019!

Cultures of Perpetual Learning

By 3 Comments

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)

Risky Business

By 4 Comments

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)

The Wrong Focus

By 5 Comments

Train (v) – “teach (a person or animal) a particular skill or type of behavior through practice and instruction over a period of time.”

From CDGW’s EdTech Focus on K-12:

In a recent survey by Education Dive, sponsored by Sprint, 86 percent of respondents agree that teachers in their district need more training in educational technology. Unlike Price of LAUSD, 41 percent of respondents say they don’t believe their districts have an explicit plan that lays out for teachers how educational technology can be most effectively used in lessons and curricula.

6917574943_eb479afe70_bIf you want to understand more fully the larger problem we have in education, it is this: just like our students, teachers are waiting for someone to teach them something rather than just going out and learning it.

I’m not saying there isn’t value in teaching stuff or skills or other things in the moment.

But to suggest that more “training” for some future lesson is somehow going to transform the use of technology in classrooms once again misses the point.

This is not about teaching. It’s about learning.

If we’re focused on building plans that “lay out for teachers how educational technology can be most effectively used in lessons and curricula” then nothing will change. Nothing.

I ask this a lot: Anyone know of a nine-year old kid who was “trained” to learn Minecraft? Took a workshop in Snapchat? Why should we be ok with adults waiting for a workshop?  

Why should we be ok with adults waiting for a workshop?

Click To Tweet

If you really want to change things, focus on culture and on developing more kid-like dispositions in the adults to use technology to learn, not just to teach.

Don’t, as the CDGW article suggests, start by “making technology the focus.”

Instead, start by making learning the focus.

(Image credit: NWABR)

The Value of “Invisible Learning”

By 4 Comments

I spent 18 years teaching high school, 22 years total in a public school, and even though I left a decade ago now, I do remember this: Almost nothing I learned in college prepared me for the realities of the classroom. My first week of student teaching stressed me out so much that I got a total of around 10 hours of sleep Monday thru Thursday. The only reason I survived it was because my co-operating teacher had a party that Friday night at which he made sure to keep a fresh beer in my hand (among other things) until I gained some “perspective.”  When he felt I was “ready” to hear it, he slung his arm around my shoulder, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Will, you’re taking this much to seriously,” after which I somehow got myself home, poured myself into bed and slept for like 18 hours.

My “perspective” was much improved on Monday.

Anyway, my initiation into teaching is not the point of this post, at least not the major point.

17278203012_4890031d0d_cAs I was at ISTE in Denver last week, I started thinking about all of the presenters up there on the various stages or in the front of the breakout rooms, wondering how was it they arrived at that moment. Wondering how much of what they were presenting about had they learned in a formal, classroom, education-y setting. Remembering how I arrived at my first presentation in Dallas at the 2003 Journalism Education Association conference where three people showed up to hear my musings on “Blogging in the Journalism Classroom.” (First question: “What’s a blog?”  Sigh.)

When you look through the ISTE program list, you’ll find the occasional research study or paper being shared. But most of what you’ll see is people talking about practice, whether it’s tools or pedagogies, or projects or whatever else. It’s personal experience intended to help others understand the value to kids and how those in the audience might take it for their own.

I’m pretty sure those presenters didn’t figure out how to do the things they were presenting about by taking a course or a workshop and then writing up an application to present at ISTE. Instead, what they’re showing off is the fruits of their own personal (not personalized) learning labor over time, the results of trying, of failing, and of wanting to learn more. Of working with others, comparing notes, reflecting, collecting various forms of data…a soup of primarily tacit learning developed “on the job.”

That’s borne out by a highly scientific survey that I posted on Twitter this morning. Here are the results as I write this:

twit1

Fully 90% of the respondents say that most of what they currently do was learned “on the job.”

So, what’s my point? This: Learning for kids in schools should be much more “on the job.”  I mean if we ourselves have learned how to learn out of need or desire, in tacit ways with others, for sharing with real audiences, why wouldn’t we create the same conditions for kids?

I was reminded of this today when I watched a presentation by John Moravec, whose concept of Knowmadic Learning and his Manifesto 15 have both been influences on my own thinking. In this particular presentation, he talks about what he calls “invisible learning,” defined as “placing trust in learners and shifting the flow of power from the top-down to the learner-out.” He adds:

We learn more, and do so invisibly, when we separate structures of control that restrict freedom and self-determination from learning experiences.

I love that, and I have a feeling most of the presenters at ISTE this week were self-determined, “invisible” learners who had the freedom to pursue their interests in ways that they designed and structured. And now, they had a chance to present their learning to an audience of interested peers hoping to learn from them. That’s a pretty cool end to a natural cycle of learning.

But, I guess, not appropriate for our kids.

(Image credit: InUseExperience)

“Teaching Ourselves Out of a Job” Redux

By 5 Comments

1477899923_5fb736f33c_zFrom the archives, September 14, 2005:

What I realized more clearly last night is that for many teachers, the idea of teaching kids to be able to access information and find mentors and communities of practice basically means teaching themselves out of their jobs, at least as they know it. I mean, at some point, we’re going to have to let go of the idea that we are the most knowledgable content experts available to our students. We used to be, when really all our students had access to was the textbook and the teacher’s brain. But today, we’re not. Not by a long stretch. And we don’t need to be. What we need to be is connectors who can teach our kids how to connect to information and to sources, how to use that information effectively, and how to manage and build upon the learning that comes with it. That’s a much different role than “science teacher” or “math teacher.” Now I’m not saying that subject matter expertise is irrelevant and that there aren’t core concepts that discipline specific teachers shouldn’t teach. But they should be taught it a much wider context, not in the fishbowl this is our traditional classroom.

It still strikes me how little this conversation seems to have changed, over the past 11 years in this case. How many teachers currently see themselves as connectors? As curators? As models for learning?

I wonder what I’ll be writing about this 11 years from now…

(Image credit)

Raising the Profession…or Not

By

A few months ago, a tech director for a fairly large school district looked me straight in the eye and said “I’m not giving teachers desktop overrides to anything on our filter ’cause I know damn well they’d abuse it by going to eBay or somesuch or taking their students to places they shouldn’t.” (And that’s a quote that I wrote down right after the conversation.)

Serious.

I don’t want to make this another post about how bad the general reputation of teachers is in some places, nor do I want to make it about how much filtering is going on under the guise of “we can’t trust the teachers.” Nor do I particularly want this to turn into a State of the Web in Education type post. But as school districts around the country start gearing up for the new year, there doesn’t appear to be much of a shift in terms of the perception that teachers can’t make good decisions about using the Web, and, more importantly, that teachers should be supported as learners themselves in the classroom.

Case in point: Chicago. Read the comments the Alexander Russo’s post “No Social Media for CPS Teachers” and you’ll get a sense of how much fun it is to be a teacher there under the new district guidelines regarding teacher and student technology use. In the post, he quotes one teacher as saying

The message to me is strong and clear – innovative, tech savvy teachers should look elsewhere for employment...I guess this means that the interactive website I’ve spent this summer designing for my students with open-source WordPress is off limits. I can’t share video we create on our own. I can’t ask them to compare and contrast two of our own videos, or one of our videos with someone else’s, or two videos from elsewhere. I can’t solicit student responses on core content. I can’t post accessible calendar information. I can’t post a contact form for students who forget or lose my e-mail address but know the website we’ll use on a weekly basis. I can’t host interactive Flash tools that my students use on a regular basis.

And in the comment thread, there’s this:

I use technology extensively in my curricula. I’m just going to stop using it. In addition to the patent absurdity of the Board’s policy, I’m just not willing to risk my job.

Sad.

But the worst part is captured, I think, in this op-ed piece in the Washington Post by former teacher Sarah Fine. It’s titled “Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can’t Stay.” Aside from talking about the difficulties of teaching in the inner city, she also brings up a more general perception:

There is yet another factor that played a part in my choice, something that I rarely mention. It has to do with the way that some people, mostly nonteachers, talk about the profession. “Why teach?” they ask.

Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it’s unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it’s not for the ambitious. “It’s just so nice,” was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.

I used to think I was being oversensitive. Not so. One of my former colleagues, now a program director for Teach for America, has to defend her goal of becoming a principal: “When I tell people I want to do it, they’re like, ‘Really? You really still want to do that?’ ” Another friend describes her struggle to make peace with the fact that a portion of the American public sees teaching as a second-rate profession. “I want to be able to do big things and be recognized for them,” she says. “In the world we live in, teaching doesn’t cut it.”

I often feel the same way. Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it.

I know that’s not a universal impression, but there’s just no question that in many places across this country, teachers are not perceived as learners, as scholars, as leaders. They’re not supported in their own learning, and they’re not trusted to make good decisions about social Web media in the classroom. Without getting into a long drawn out discussion as to why that is, I’m wondering what we can do about it. Do social Web tools provide some opportunities for teachers to participate in ways that might raise the perception of the profession? If not in global ways at least in local ways? Just wondering…

The good news is that shortly I’ll be painting a picture of a district that really does get what it means to treat teachers as learners and support all the messiness that goes around that. Coming soon…I hope.

Personalizing Education for Teachers, Too

By

I finally got around to finishing up Sir Ken Robinson’s new book “The Element” which, for the most part, was a great read. He lays out a pretty compelling case for the power of passion in learning, and the absolute need for schools to help students identify their own passions through which they can learn just about anything they need. I’ve said in the past that the one thing I want from my own kids’ teachers is for them to help them find what they love to do more than anything else and then support them in their learning endeavors around that topic. Unfortunately, that is not something the current public school system was build for.

Toward the end of the book, Sir Ken lays out the case for personalizing our kids’ educations in the context of transforming (not reforming) schools:

The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of the each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions (238). The curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the  minds and souls of individuals–not in the databases of multiple-choice tests (248).

He argues that we should do away with the hierarchy of subjects and that we should work as hard as we can to customize, not standardize, each student’s experience of schooling. Oh, to dream.

As I thought about those points, I started thinking about how we treat teachers and their learning as well. So much of professional development is throwing everyone in a room and having them learn the same stuff. Maybe there is some choice in the offerings, but by and large there is very little attempt at creating a customized professional development curriculum for teachers. Yes, we have our PIPs, but those usually address deficiencies or weakensses, not passions.

The other day, I was having a conversation along these lines with a good friend who serves as the Director of Technology at a local school. We were talking about change, about how hard it is, and how long it takes. While he’s done a great deal to move his school forward in terms of open source and social tools and technology in general, from a pedagogy standpoint, he had been racking his brain trying to figure out how to support individual teachers in these shifts. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to create an individualized learning experience for each teacher, to take them where they are and mentor them, individually, to a different place. He’s in the process of surveying each teacher to determine what technologies they currently use, what their comfort levels are, and what they are most passionate about. Then, using those results, he and one other tech educator at the school are going to start going one by one, talking about change, looking at tools, making connections, and shifting the pedagogy.

Whoa.

It echoes Sir Ken:

Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof. The most successful systems in the world take the opposite view. They invest in teachers. The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities. This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many people’s lives. Great teachers have always understood that their real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students (249).

Teachers are learners. If they’re not, they shouldn’t be teachers. In a world where we can engage in our passions through the affordances of connective technologies online, we need to be thinking about how to personalize the learning of the adults in the room as well as the kids. This is not the easy route, by any stretch, but it’s the best route if we’re serious about moving the education of our kids to a different place.

(Photo “De Profundis” by Midnight-digital Not leaving! Just very busy)

Stat O' the Day: Teachers Scared to Teach

By

The January issue of District Administration Magazine has a brief titled “Who’s Keeping Students Safe Online?” (at the bottom of the link) that states this:

Fewer than 25 percent of educators feel comfortable teaching students how to protect themselves from online predators, cyberbullies and identity thieves, says a new study from the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) and Educational Technology, Policy Research and Outreach (ET PRO).

I would say that’s a problem. You?