Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

What is the Purpose of Schooling?

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Must read piece by Zoe Weil, who is more and more becoming a big influence in my thinking. It’s not that I haven’t had these same concerns, but she is articulating them in a way that I find really compelling. We must begin thinking about schools and schooling differently because, as she suggests here, verbal, mathematical and scientific literacy to compete in the economy is no longer enough.

Given the world we live in today – which is approaching 7 billion people (1 billion of whom are undernourished and lacking ready access to clean water); where species are becoming extinct at alarming rates dramatically reducing biodiversity; where over 25 million live enslaved; in which looming peak oil threatens to make the current recession seem like boom times; where climate change is leading to rising seas, desertification, flooding, environmental refugees, crop failures, and more; where nuclear weapons still proliferate; and where a trillion animals are brutalized every year for food in unsustainable and inhumane ways – it’s critical to seriously and carefully consider what knowledge and skills youth most need to acquire for their, and all our futures. In the face of the challenges listed above (and many others left out of this list), is literacy and the capacity to compete in the global economy a big enough goal for schooling?

At the Institute for Humane Education (IHE), we don’t think so, and the first question that we address in our teacher training programs is, “What is schooling for?” This is where we must begin before developing any reforms, curricula, schools, lesson plans, initiatives, teaching strategies, or policies. At IHE we believe that we need to graduate a generation with the knowledge, tools, and motivation to become conscientious choicemakers and engaged changemakers for a healthy, just, and peaceful world for all, but whether one adopts our goal or another, this core question is essential, yet it rarely comes up in discussions about school reform. By largely accepting without debate the assumption that the goal of schooling is verbal, mathematical and scientific literacy to compete in the global economy, we have failed in the primary task for addressing any reform: to determine the most pressing, appropriate, and meaningful goal.

"There are Some People Who Don't Wait"

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This quote from Robert Krulwich of NPR caught my eye yesterday:

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

He was talking about beginning journalists, but I couldn’t help thinking about the many teachers who I have met over the years who haven’t waited. People like Shelley Blake-Plock and Dolores Gende and Anne Smith and Kathy Cassidy and Brian Crosby and Shannon Miller and Shelley Wright and Jabiz Raisdana and a whole slew of others who had some type of hunger overcome them, something that made them jump right in and really change the way the thought about teaching and learning and classrooms. For some, I know, what’s happened over the past decade or so has simply afforded a way for them to do more of what they always believed, to give kids the reins and let them learn about learning. But for others, and I would count myself in this second category, the last 10 years have brought to life a way of thinking about education that is decidedly different from the lens we originally carried into the classroom. For us, this has been a real transformation, not simply a shift in methods or pedagogy.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of teachers are still waiting…for something. What is it? Permission? Direction? Inspiration? Enlightenment?

I know this is a crappy time to be in education. Maybe as crappy as it’s ever been. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, their benefits. The profession is being dragged through the manure. The onslaught of tests and data collection and standardization is doing the same thing to teachers as it’s doing to kids, driving the creativity and the passion and the enjoyment of real learning right out of them. I am not unsympathetic to these realities…not at all.

But we can’t use this moment as an excuse to continue to wait. Technology aside, our educational systems are not creating the learners that we want our children to be. And it’s not about layering whiteboards or blogs onto a narrow, one-size fits all curriculum that has marched along undeterred for what seems like forever. It’s about fundamentally changing what we do in classrooms with kids.

The good news is that many have acted on their hunger. They’ve put kids ahead of the system, redefined themselves as learners first, teachers second, found the courage of their convictions and made learning, not test scores, the focus. The bad news is that far too many teachers still don’t even know that the traditional model of education is failing kids when it comes to learning. But somewhere in the middle, there are those that know there is a different path, yet they won’t make the leap.

What, I wonder, are they waiting for?

Valuing Change

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The past couple of weeks have reminded me how hard it is for teachers to consider change when they don’t have a context for it and, most importantly, when they don’t value it.

Case in point: recently I was working with a group of teachers trying to help them re-envision their curriculum in the light of all this “new” social technology that some of us have been swimming in for the last decade now. And I had one particularly interesting and, I think, compelling exchange with a teacher who was finding it especially difficult to see any value to changing what he was doing in his classroom. Briefly, he shared with the group that one of his most effective lessons was built around helping students understand the political drivers of redistricting by asking them to redraw maps of nearby cities in ways that would make it almost impossible for an incumbent to lose an election. The way he described it, it was a great lesson that challenged kids to research, think, and create in some important ways, ways that the teacher pointed out were necessary to do well on the state assessment.

I tried to move the conversation into what I think can be called “doing both mode,” as in finding a way to engage students in understanding the concepts for the test but doing so in a way that teaches them to think more expansively by using online tools to go beyond the paper and pencil and learn about connecting and creating and collaborating along the way. And some of the other teachers in the room provided some great suggestions, using Google Earth or Maps, and adding multimedia resources that could articulate the reasons for drawing the lines where they were drawn. And with a little prodding, others suggested using Skype to interview people involved in the real process, or maybe even connecting with schools within the districts they were redrawing to get some sense of what the effects of those revisions might be in real life.

Throughout, the teacher was nodding his head in assent, but when I asked him how all of that sounded, he paused, and then he said “Well, you know, sometimes I think technology just adds a lot of bells and whistles, makes stuff look good without really adding to the learning. I mean, they don’t need to do any of that to get the concept.” And he’s right, of course. Students don’t need technology to pass the test; they’ve been doing it for years without it.

But here’s the thing: that teacher didn’t yet see the value of having his students make those connections outside the classroom even though no one was asking or expecting him to do it. In fact, it took about another seven or eight minutes of back and forth before I think he finally came around to the idea that the connections might matter even though no one was testing for them or writing curriculum for them or demanding that kids understand them. That we may want to consider adding the “bells and whistles” because the world our kids need to be prepared for is opening up in ways that go beyond the long-standing goals and objectives we’ve set up for them. That it’s not just about map making any more.

My sense of it is that teacher is still in the majority, and as teachers get incentivized to do even more test prep and one-size-fits all instruction, he’ll remain in the majority for quite a while longer.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

The New Story (?)

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(Offered for discussion, not as complete thinking…)

A few months from now, I’ll be marking my 10 year anniversary as a blogger. It’s been an amazing ride, and it’s been a surprising one in more than a couple of ways. Obviously, it’s changed my life, changed who I am, and changed my view of the world. For all of that I’m thankful. But it’s also been surprising in that so little has really changed in that time when it comes to schools and education. Sure, we have many more voices, and the community of connected teachers and learners is growing every day. There are lots more computers in classrooms, and we’re carrying around a heck of lot more in our pockets that can lead us to learning. But our collective ability to articulate a different vision for what to do with all of that stuff has still not manifested itself in anything cohesive, anything that we can point to that’s moved the needle on the conversation very much. Case in point, I gave a keynote to an audience of about 900 educators recently and only a handful (as in count ’em on my fingers and toes) raised their hands when I asked if they’d participated in social spaces online aside from Facebook. Learning in networks was not in their frame. And at most of my presentations, I still get this “I never knew” reaction from most of the people who sit in. Seriously, I’m thinking 90% of educators still don’t know that the Web is turning into a profoundly important place for learning and creating together, and even fewer students in this country are doing anything that resembles networked learning in their schools. Push back if you like, but I’m not sensing anywhere near 600,000 educators (10%) participating in these spaces. Not even close.

In these 10 years at least, the basic “story” of education hasn’t changed. Schools are where we go to get educated. With a very few well documented exceptions, it’s a planned, linear, for the most part standardized process, one that allows everyone to recognize what being “educated” means at the end of the day. We all learn basically the same stuff on the same day in the same way, take the same tests, get the same diploma. It’s that narrative most of us share, at least those of us who didn’t drop out or choose homeschooling as our option. It’s one that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and most everyone else who is trying to “reform” school still buys into. It is the best and easiest, most familiar story to tell, and it’s a deep part of our culture as Americans.

But it is a story that is slowly but surely going to go away. I really believe that. We’re seeing the outlines of a compelling “new” story to tell about learning and education, and it’s this: there no longer is one story, one narrative around how to become educated. Not to say there haven’t always been options to schools. But now there are a growing number of  stories, many unbundled paths to getting an education, and the future will be filled with many others as learning opportunities become more ubiquitous, more personalized, more varied, and more accessible through the Web. For now at least, this new story doesn’t exclude schools as an important part of the path,  but it demands different things from them. They will be nodes in a network of many different learning environments, and their charge will be to help students be, as Charles Leadbetter says, “investors in their own learning,” able to flourish by pulling in information and teachers instead of having those things pushed upon them as is currently the case. Teachers in schools will be master learners first, content experts second, connecting students to knowledge and mentors outside of the physical space, helping students acquire the skills and literacies to learn deeply on their own. Their focus will be to help students become great at creating and sharing and connecting around new knowledge as opposed to being great at consuming the old. As Stephen Downes suggests, schools will build the capacity in all students to create an education for themselves, not wait for it to be delivered to them. And all of this will, in the words of Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, “make us rethink the dominant role of K-12 schools in education.”

My sense of it is that not many people at the head of the “reform” movement really understand this yet. And it will take a whole heap of humility for schools to get this right. We can see this as a threat or as an opportunity. In essence, we need to be teaching ourselves out of our current jobs, empowering and enabling our students to do the difficult and joyful work of learning on their own, supporting and nurturing their individual and collective efforts as we learn with them. On many levels, it’s more important, more difficult work than what we currently do. But if we are to keep schools relevant in our kids’ lives as places where they are cared for and appreciated and loved, something I desperately want to be the case, we’ll need to get comfortable with this new role. And we’ll need to advocate for these shifts in even more compelling ways.

So, assuming this comes close to the “new” narrative of education, how do we do that? Tomorrow, I’ll share one idea that we as a community might work together on.

Who's Asking?

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1.

The thunder clap makes all of us stop. It’s one of those loud, long, rumbling ones, the kind that rolls around in your belly like when you hit one of those hard, deep potholes in your car. It shakes the window panes in the old house, and in that initial crack, we all duck into ourselves a bit, feeling that split second of doom that big summer storms in the Georgia countryside often cause. My kids are throwing the Frisbee in the downpour, and they freeze for an instant as well. I start to tell them to jump inside, here under the porch and wait it out, but before I get the words out they’re leaping the puddles, heading in my direction. Smart kids.

The weird thing is that on every porch that I can see on the block, people are out, watching the rain, listening to the thunder. I don’t know if they’re passing time or just immersing themselves in the strange beauty of the storm, the sheets of water, the muted light, the heaviness of the air. But we’re sharing it, my wet, dripping kids, the dog across the street who’s sticking his nose out from under the tar paper roof of his doghouse, and the old black man on the opposite corner, folded into his porch swing, puffing on a pipe. We’re all watching, and waiting for the break.

Eventually it comes; the thunder rolls are farther away, the rain abates. We pick up the conversation that the noise silenced, the one about our kids and their schools. Miss Frances isn’t listening too hard, I can tell, as she gently glides back and forth on her own porch swing. At 91, her concerns are elsewhere. But her son Mike is deep into the troubles of the school system. “They had to cut 15 days out of the school year ’cause they run outta money,” he says as he lifts up the brim of his dirt-stained John Deere hat. “They’re gonna keep the kids longer during the days, but they just can’t afford to keep everything running on those other days.” And before he says it, I know what’s coming next. Not that it means less educational opportunity for his grand kids. Not that it’s a shame to cut the art and music programs to save the football team. Not that there will be fewer teachers, less technology, less learning going on in school this year. Mike runs his hand through his hair.

“I just don’t know what we’re gonna do with those kids for those extra three weeks outta school,” he says.

2.

There’s no doubt, I’m not from around these parts. I’m just looking for a pack of gum at 7:45 in the morning in Sidney, Iowa, and as I drive into the center of town, in my white Hyundai rental, I’m not seeing a lot of open stores to choose from. It’s one of those old, small Midwestern country towns, one with the “we-really-mean-it” city square built around the county government building smack dab in the center of town. I’m looking for some signs of activity, and as I start to curl around the courthouse I spy it; a line of pick up trucks outside a small gas station-convenience store on the corner. I zip into the parking lot and, not seeing any spaces, park awkwardly in front of the double glass doors. I’m running late; I’ll only be a minute.

As I get out of the car, through the windows, I see them, a line of men, most north of 60 I’m guessing, coffee cups in hand. They’re regulars, no doubt, and before I even step inside, I feel their gaze. They’re all jeans and caps and country, and I’m beige khakis, golf shirt and a pony tail. A couple of them nod kindly as I give my own silent, demure “good morning,” and after a couple of heartbeats worth of pause to take me in, they go back to their conversation. “It’s the schools that should be doin’ that,” one is saying, and all of a sudden, I’m tuned in, listening over my shoulder as I reach for a pack of Dentyne Ice from the candy shelf beneath the counter. “They’re just not teaching it as much as they should be.” I step away from the counter, buy a little time by pretending to look closely at the chocolate bars down below, wonder what the system is so deficient in, wondering, maybe…

“These kids just don’t know nothin’ about managing money,” he says, and I hear various sounds of assent from the others.

—

So here’s the deal with the change that many of us in this conversation are clamoring for in schools: we’re about the only ones talking it. The townsfolk down at the corner store aren’t demanding “21st Century Skills,” technology in every student’s hand, an inquiry based curriculum and globally networked classrooms. By and large the parents and grandparents in our communities aren’t asking for it. The national conversation isn’t about rethinking what happens in classrooms. No one’s creating assessments around any of this. And in fact, outside of the small percentage of people who are participating in these networks and communities online, the vast majority of this country and the world doesn’t even know that a revolution is brewing.

And, while it’s no shocker to say it, that’s what makes it really tough to be a leader in schools right now. Because if you’re doing your job, you’re thinking about doing things that no one out there is asking you to do. Which is, after all, what leadership is all about, isn’t it? I love Seth Godin’s quote from Tribes: “Leadership is a choice; it’s the choice not to do nothing.”Especially if basically standing pat will get you by.  Given the current expectations for “student achievement” and adequate yearly progress, most school leaders can continue to get away with tinkering on the edges and not do anything to really upset the chalk tray. You want to make it into Newsweek’s top high schools list? Just keep pumping those AP courses and prepping those test scores. Constructing “modern knowledge” and sharing it with other global learners online? Not finding the check box for that.

I’ve said it before, you want to lead right now, as an administrator or as a teacher? You have to do both: you have do all of those things the parents and the town fathers and Newsweek (well, maybe not Newsweek) want you to do, but you also have to start shifting and seeing what the future holds for the kids in your schools, regardless if anyone else can see it. You have to, as the superintendent at my old school Lisa Brady has begun to do, lead your staff and your school community to the place where they understand the need for change as well, a place that’s not just about test scores and AYP, but that’s about student learning and literacy in new forms, forms that look much different from our own but that will be crucial to our kids’ success. You have to be an advocate, wherever and whenever you can, to convince people that while doing both is hard and takes time and effort, that it’s worth it, that it’s the right thing to do for the kids in our schools.

Because if you’re waiting for the conversation in the coffee shop and the porch swing to act, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

The Big Questions: Now What?

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So as of today, 220 of you were kind enough to vote on what you thought were the 10 most important questions from the list that we generated at Educon. Here are the “winners” at the moment:

  1. How do we support the changing role of teacher? 116
  2. What is the role of the teacher? 110
  3. How do we help students discover their passions? 110
  4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students? 109
  5. What is the purpose of school? 102
  6. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using? 100
  7. What does and educated person look like today? 97
  8. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning? 97
  9. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school? 92
  10. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity? 92

And here were the next three that didn’t quite make the cut:

  • What is preventing us from being adaptable to change? 79
  • How do you validate or evaluate informal learning? 77
  • How do we measure or assess the effectiveness of individualized self-directed learning outside of school? 68

You can see the complete results here. I think it’s kind of interesting what didn’t get many votes. Obviously, few of us think physical space schools are going away anytime soon. And there doesn’t seem to be too much worry about the level of commitment schools have to kids. No doubt, the wording of some of these could probably have been better, I’m sure, but I think these 10 capture the challenges pretty well.

So what next?

The “plan” I proposed for this last week was to tackle each of these questions individually in a blog post and ask for comments to extend whatever thin thinking I threw at it with the eventual goal of “crowdsourcing” or collaboratively writing a response to each one. (And let me be clear, I’m talking crowdsourcing the response in the way Wikipedia does it.) If we’re really game, we might put this together in some form that could serve as a conversation starter for schools willing to tackle some of these “big” questions in their own planning for change process. Maybe even publish it as a book on Lulu.

So I’m wondering two things: First, what your reactions are to this list, and second, what are your thoughts on how we can turn this into something more “actionable?”

"Willing to be Disturbed"

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Earlier this week, I wrote a post bemoaning the ways in which the system treats teachers when it comes to technology and I hinted at a different reality for one school I’ve been working with. Well, that school happens to be my old school, the place where I worked as a teacher and an administrator for 21 years before setting out for my current very different existence. And now, due to a somewhat sudden, imminent move to a new house, the place where in all likelihood my own kids will go to high school.

While I love what Chris Lehmann is doing at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the problem with the SLA story has always been that it’s hard to replicate. Chris is a visionary who was given the chance to build a school pretty much from the ground up, and I think just about everyone would agree that he has done an absolutely amazing job of it. If I could take SLA and clone it, I would. But that’s not possible. So, the tougher question has always been how do schools that have been around for 50 or 100 years begin to undertake the real shifts and real changes that are required if they are to move systemically to a point where inquiry-based, student-centered, socially and globally networked learning becomes just the way they do their business? In all honesty, I haven’t seen many schools that have fundamentally set out to redefine what they do in the classroom in light of the affordances and opportunities that social technologies create for learning. (If you know of any who have a plan to fundamentally redefine what they do, please let me know.) There is a great deal of “tinkering on the edges” when it comes to technology, districts that hope that if they incrementally add enough technology into the mix that somehow that equals change. I can’t tell you how many schools I’ve seen that have a whiteboard in every room yet have absolutely nothing different happening from a curriculum perspective. Old wine, new bottles.

That fundamental redefinition is hard. It takes an awareness on the part of leaders that the world is indeed changing and that current assessment regimes and requirements are becoming less and less relevant to the learning goals of the organization. It takes a vision to imagine what the change might look like, not to paint it with hard lines but to at least have the basic brushstrokes down. It takes a culture that celebrates learning not just among students but among teachers and front office personnel and administrators alike, what Phillip Schlechty calls a “learning organization.” It takes leadership that while admitting its own discomfort and uncertainty with these shifts is prescient and humble enough to know that the only way to deal with those uncertainties is to meet them full on and to support the messiness that will no doubt occur as the organization works through them. It takes time, years of time, maybe decades to effect these types of changes. It takes money and infrastructure. And I think, most importantly, it takes a plan that’s developed collaboratively with every constituency at the table, one that is constantly worked and reworked and adjusted in the process, but one that makes that long-term investment time well spent instead of time spinning wheels. And it takes more, even, than that.

I’m seeing a lot of that happening at Hunterdon Central, my old school. And you can take this perspective for what it’s worth since I feel like I played some small part in this process five years ago when we formulated a long-ish term plan for technology that started with piloting a teacher/classroom model for technology when I was there to today, when they are piloting a student 1-1 model (netbooks) for technology this fall. My good friend and former co-conspirator Rob Mancabelli is guiding the work, and he’s had amazing success in bringing teachers, supervisors, upper administration, community, students and others into a really “big” conversation about what teaching and learning looks like today, how global and collaborative and transparent it is, and what the implications are for the curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms. This is not tinkering on the edges; this, instead, is a deeply collaborative and reflective process for a small cohort of 30 or so teachers whose kids this fall will all have technology and a ubiquitous connection in hand, a process that encourages them to be creative, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to pursue their own personal learning as well. All of it as a first building block for the systemic, culture change that is hopefully to come in the next few years.

Tuesday, I had the chance to spend a few hours with a part of this group, and I came away just totally energized by the experience. The main reason? Lisa Brady, the superintendent. The cohort group had been meeting throughout the summer, focusing on learning about social networks, on making connections, reading blogs, trying Twitter and Facebook, and thinking about social tools in the context of their curriculum. The teachers come from every discipline, from math to special education to media specialists. And on Tuesday, now as the school year begins to loom large, Rob asked Lisa to address the group and make sure they understood their efforts would be supported. Lisa started by asking everyone to read Margaret Wheatley’s “Willing to be Disturbed.” I’d urge you to read the whole thing, but the first graph gives you the gist:

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally–our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don’t know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

I hadn’t expected to try to capture any of what Lisa said next, but as she talked to the teachers, I started writing some of it down. And I started imaging what it would be like if every superintendent walked into a meeting of teachers who are engaged in reaching beyond their comfort zones and learning something new and said things like:

My question to you is how willing are you to be disturbed?…We have to be willing to examine our practice, to be disturbed about what we think we know about teaching and learning…We don’t really know what we’re doing; we’re teachers, we’re supposed to know, but we don’t know everything…I’m as unsure about all of this as you are unsure, but I believe we are doing the right thing. It is of critical importance to this organization, of critical importance to our kids…Your classrooms are learning labs; we want you be exploring, looking, analyzing…You are fully supported in this work; don’t be afraid of what you are doing…at this school, we don’t change easily, but we change well.

It was really powerful stuff, the superintendent of schools encouraging teachers to take risks, to think differently, to be okay with not knowing, and to know that it’s a process, that it’s not going to happen overnight.  And this is the same type of message Lisa plans to deliver to the full faculty on the first day of school. (The Wheatley piece is being sent to all staff this week.) Already, Central has decided to end the practice of monthly full faculty meetings this year and instead engage in professional conversations around the question “What does teaching and learning look like in the 21st Century?” Since May, all of the supervisors have voluntarily been meeting on a regular basis to study and discuss the shifts around an inquiry/problem based curriculum delivered in networked learning environments. And the teachers in the cohort are archiving and communicating on a Ning site specifically for the work.

Now I know there are some caveats here and not all of this is replicable either. For the last two years, 99% of teachers at Central (3,200 students 9-12, btw) have had their own Tablet PC (for personal and professional use) with wireless connection to an LCD and wireless Internet in every classroom, part of the teacher model that Rob and I started before I left. I would defy anyone to show me a school that has a better customer service oriented technology support plan for teachers and classrooms to make sure everything works. The school has made a fairly substantial financial commitment to the work (with the support of the community…budgets pass). And, 99% of kids in the district have Internet access at home.

But despite all of that, what interests me more is the stuff that they’re doing that just about any school could do right now: have the conversations, begin to build a culture around change, encourage learning on the part of every segment in the school, and create a long term vision and plan that attempts at least to account for whatever deficiencies or roadblocks currently exist. I see so many schools (SO many) where huge sums of money are spent on technology without any thought of professional learning or thinking about what changes. It’s all haphazard, unplanned, unsupported. I talk to so many teachers who just roll their eyes at the newest initiative because a) they haven’t had a voice in the process and b) because they know the next initiative is right around the corner. There’s no thread that binds all of it together, that congeals into a fundamentally different vision of teaching and learning. As Chris often says (channeling Roger Schank) “Technology is not additive; it’s transformative.” But that transformation doesn’t come on its own. It comes only when the ground for transformation has been well plowed. Whether we have the budgets or the technology in hand right now, there is little externally, at least, that’s preventing these conversations to start, assuming we have real leaders who are willing to be disturbed at the helm.

I’m hoping to follow this story pretty closely this year, but I’m sure it’s not the only one. Would love to hear your take on what Central is doing and on other attempts at moving old schools systemically into new places of learning.

(Photo “Do Not Disturb” by Sue)

Personalizing Education for Teachers, Too

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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)

It's Riskier Not to Change–"Tribes"

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So if you agree that social Web technologies are causing some fundamental, “tectonic shifts” (Shirky) to many traditional structures in our global society, that businesses and media companies and political organizations are being forced to reinvent themselves in some pretty profound ways because of the ways we can network and connect, then this snip about the music business from Seth Godin’s book “Tribes” should resonate:

The first rule the music business failed to understand is that, at least at first, the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin. Soon enough, the new thing will be better than the old thing. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing that it’s going to be here forever. It won’t. (93)

Think education instead of music.

Then, consider this:

When the world changes, the rules change. If you insist on playing today’s games by yesterday’s rules, you’re stuck. (114)

And finally:

The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing. (111)

Godin talks about all of this in the context of leadership, of how important it is for leaders to fight through their fears, to actively seek ideas worth criticism, to fear the status quo. Fear is the reason we don’t change either individually or systemically. And I love the way he puts this:

In every organization, everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear. (44)

I know we talk about this ad nauseum, the fears that educators have and what to do about them. And I know the answers aren’t easy. The problem is when the music industry gets paralyzed it loses profits. When the education system goes that route, we lose kids.

One last quote:

“Established 1906” used to be important. Now, apparently, it’s a liability. (17)

(Photo “Yellow Crowd” by TwOsE.)

So What is the Future of Schools?

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So I’m home from Seattle today with some mixed feelings about Microsoft’s School of the Future Summit, which was really excellent in some respects but left me wanting in others. The best part without question (and not that surprisingly) were the conversations with folks outside of the session rooms. With 250 or so people from 31 countries, it was probably the most diverse setting (geographically, at least) that I’ve found myself in. I had some interesting conversations with folks from Norway, Chile, Hong Kong, Sweden, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, the UK and others that no doubt gave me a much broader perspective of what the conversation feels like abroad. And it was diverse in ideas as well. My sense is that we’re all obviously feeling the pressure to think differently about schools and schooling, but depending on cultures and circumstances, there were a wide variety of approaches to the shift. I heard about models that ranged from kids doing one subject per full day throughout the week (as in math on Monday, science on Tuesday, etc.) to ones that made real use of mobile technologies, to others that were entirely online. (More about that in a second.) I talked to folks who taught in schools where every student had a computer and to others whose few classroom computers ran on dial up, some who were integrating social tools with depth, others who had never really considered them. It was, to put it mildly, a very eclectic and by and large passionate group.

But after a couple of days of listening to speakers like Michael Horn (“Disrupting Class“) and Tony Wagner (“The Global Achievement Gap“) I can’t say that I feel any greater clarity in the conversation around just what schools of the future are supposed to be about. Horn said that in 15 years almost 50% of all courses will be delivered online. Wagner said that we need to reinvent schools but didn’t give a very cohesive vision on how to do that.  And while it was encouraging to hear Martin Bean of Microsoft talk about teachers and students learning in “media rich, socially connected” spaces as “content creators and knowledge starters,” it was less so when he seemed to define the idea of “nurturing powerful communities of learning” simply as creating portals to connect various constituencies. Admittedly, those snippets may not be totally fair to those speakers’ larger messages, but they were indicative of the general sense that I got, one that said “yes, we need to do something, but we’re not very close to having a cohesive vision around what exactly we should do.”

Or something like that.

All of which made Rob Paterson’s post that came through my Twitter feed in the middle of the conference yesterday so much more thought-provoking. In talking about the pressures facing universities from decreasing budgets and relevance, Rob says

It’s going to be interesting to see how this unfolds. The web offers a whole new way of restoring this way of learning directly from an expert rather than from an institution.

Rob offers up a vastly different “hang out a shingle” driven model for some seeking learning after high school, one which challenges the diploma driven status quo pretty compellingly. And it really got me wondering (once again) about the relevance of the pretty standard K-12 curriculum and assessments that are driving our systems. As I commented to Rob, I think I’m finally getting to the root of my continued frustration with my kids’ education which is the system’s inability to help them find and nurture the areas they truly have passion for. It would be nice if the institution were the place that connected my kids to the experts they desired and needed to support their learning, wouldn’t it? Again, I know it’s more complex than that, but you get the point.

As would be expected, much of the conversation was spent on the barriers to change, and at some point I found myself amazed at how deeply woven the reasons why not are ingrained in our conversations. At one conversation, someone said that many of her teachers didn’t feel like they needed to teach with technology at all since their students were doing just fine passing the tests without it. And I wanted to scream (but instead politely said) ‘then we gotta change the assessments.” Nothing in these conversations changed my view that to really change what we do in schools we have to first change our understanding of what it means to teach in this moment. That doesn’t mean than we throw out all of the good pedagogy that we’ve developed over the years and make everything about technology. But it does mean, I think, that technology has to be a part of the way we do our learning business these days.

Finally, I think the conversation that most blew me away was the one with Andy Ross, the VP of Florida Virtual High School. They’ve got almost 1,000 full time staff now and over 20,000 kids on their waiting list to take classes. They can’t hire teachers fast enough. Kids can take their entire high school curriculum online without ever meeting a teacher face to face, though there are plenty of phone calls and e-mails. Andy said that their research shows that those kids do better on the standardized assessments than kids in physical schools, primarily because of the deep alignment of the curriculum and the programmed delivery. Now I’m not saying that those are necessarily reasons to move everything online, but it was the one solid vision of a “School of the Future” that I got at the conference. Andy agreed to come on and do a UStream at some point in the near future, and I’ll be sure to be posting times and dates in case you’d be interested.

Anway, just some reflecting on an interesting couple of days…

(Photo “green tree core” by pbo31.)

Learning to Drive

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Nelson, New Zealand

Yesterday, we drove about four hours from a beautiful little town named Hanmer Springs (many Flickr photos to come) up here to Nelson which sits at the top of the south island. On the way, we stopped to zip line across a gorge, herd some sheep off the road that had gotten through an open fence, and roll some boulders out of the way on a one lane (barely) gravel and dirt (to be generous) mountain pass road that when we finally descended to the bottom turned out to be closed to all vehicles trying to come up the way we had just come down.

Pretty boring day.

What was occupying much of my brain power when we were on the two-lane, paved roads, however, was trying to stay on the right (or should I say left) side of the road. It took a while for my driving mind to get into some balance after the initial dissonance, and I was trying to pay attention to all of the things I had to “unlearn” in the process. For about the first hour, every time I went to signal a turn, the windshield wipers started up. Right hand turns were a real, real struggle, as you can imagine, surpassed in difficulty at the outset only by trying to navigate the roundabouts and always feeling like I was looking the wrong way. (A couple of times after going over one-laned bridges, I reflexively went over to the right hand side of the road only to have my kids scream “DAD! Wrong side!”) And the hardest part for me, at least, was getting in the habit of glancing to the left to see the rear view mirror. A bunch of times, cars that I didn’t even realize were behind me came whizzing by (on our right) almost causing me to drive off the road in the process. After a few hours, though, it all started to make sense in my head. No more wipers. No more screaming from the backseat. No more surprising passes. I actually started enjoying the view. (Actually, that part was easy.)

There is a point in here somewhere about unlearning and re-learning and fighting through the dissonance of change to come out the other side doing some things differently. Maybe a microcosm of what Sheryl and I have been over here prodding teachers to do. There is no question that they are further down the road in all of this than we seem to be, at least from an understanding that there are some technologies out there that are challenging the status quo of classrooms. And, from the standpoint of making it a national initiative to understand that stuff as well. New Zealanders seem to be much more in tune with the value of reflective assessment and the uses of assessment in general to help guide choices that kids make in addition to seeing what they “know.”

Still, it comes down to individuals getting comfortable with doing things differently. Driving on the “other” side of the road really isn’t so hard once you get used to it.

Accepting "Predictably Mediocre"

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Chris shook my brain awake this morning with his reflections on change and Shirky and I’m still trying to sort through some of his finer points. Suffice to say, that it’s among the best posts I’ve read this year because it articulates so clearly where much of this is at and, perhaps, where it needs to go.

The where it’s at stuff is easy to get to, but hard to accept. And, as Chris says, our collective fear of failure, both of our schools and of our kids, is at the crux of the problem. Most are content with “predictably mediocre” schools because the risks associated with change are simply not worth it at this moment. It’s this risk/reward equation that I keep getting drawn to as well, and I keep feeling more and more that schools will not change until the external expectations change, and that the expectations that matter most reside in parents. We need to reframe that lens, and we need to do it fast. And “predictably mediocre” as language may not be a bad starting point. (That’s not what I want for my kids’ school.) But until we can celebrate the successes of “riskier”, change oriented schools like SLA, until we can make a compelling case that not only are the risks a) not that risky and b) imperative for preparing our kids, those risks will continue to be unpalatable.

And then there’s Tom, who is helping me understand “The Role of Chris Lehmann in the Universe.” As Tom points out, there are other progressive schools that might fit that bill, but their efforts are not nearly as transparent as Chris’s in the context of the technologies and tools we use in this community. I love the exclamation point he adds when he suggests that there have been “whole books” written about these places! The idea!

Tom asks if this is a problem in any sense, the fact that these schools and their principals aren’t blogging and Twittering and going to NECC. I wonder in the context of Shirky’s larger point that group action is enhanced by the ability to connect online if it isn’t a problem on some level. I wonder if a transparent network of successful “high-risk” schools connected through social tools wouldn’t at this moment be a boon to the larger discussion of school reform. And this is one of the more interesting effects of all of this, that right now, connecting around books is simply not as easy as connecting around blogs.

Which brings things to the “where all this needs to go” part of Chris’s post which is easier to read but harder to get to. How do we, in Shirky’s parlance, act collectively? Chris offers up some great, concrete, starting points, all of which are daunting to think about on any number of different levels because they inexorably lead to that inherent friction between traditional organization and collaborative group effort. There are new models being built in this process as well. What structure would we build? To what extent can it be owned by the many and not the few? Wikipedia is struggling with this right now. Obama is. It would be an interesting, yet difficult road, one that, as Chris points out, would be easier today than it was 10 years ago. And it could be oh so amazing if we pulled it off.

Much to think about, no doubt.

One more thing: Yesterday, when I picked Tess up from shooting (basketball) camp, she was sporting a new t-shirt, on the back of which read: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Hmmm…

Adapting to Change

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A few disparate ideas and experiences funneling into this post…

Recently I heard Robert Garmston speak about the need to adapt in times of significant change. He wasn’t speaking specifically of schools but about any organization, and he made an interesting distinction between technical change (which is what most schools have been undertaking) and real, adaptive change. Adaptive change, he said means:

  • The implementation of almost all new practices as opposed to simply extending past practices
  • New organizational ways of working
  • Challenging previously held values
  • Requires gaining new knowledge and skills

And much of that work, he said, has to be taken on not by the “wise folks” at the top but by everyone, inquiring, re-thinking, re-envisioning within “professional communities learning” (nice twist on the phrase.)

I thought of all of that while reading “Rocks New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell” which talks about how the music industry is adapting to the changes brought about by these new technologies. Here is the money quote that I think captures much of the dilemma surrounding all of this:

Cliff Burnstein, co-owner of the management firm QPrime — which represents Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as smaller acts like Silversun Pickups — says the old major-label model is fading fast. “That’s definitely over,” he says, noting that Silversun Pickups, on the indie label Dangerbird, have licensed several songs for TV and do well on the road. “Silversun Pickups make a decent living,” he says, but adds that he wonders whether most musicians can put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape — or if they even should. “It’s hard enough to write a decent song,” Burnstein says. “That’s still the talent I’m looking for.”

That article was referenced by Paul Krugman of all people in today’s Times in a thought-provoking column titled Bits, Bands and Books about how business models and, specifically, books are trying to figure out how to adapt. The most interesting part to me is the way he covers the building debate over free content and intellectual property.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success. But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Which brought home a recent visit I made to a storied, venerated, old private New England academy that is successful by any traditional measure despite a very different approach to learning, one that has resisted (and is still resisting) technology as a learning tool (and even as a teaching tool). They are seeing the change coming in their students now, the ways in which they interact outside of class, the videos they are producing, the debates over intellectual property. The connections the technologies facilitate are seeping into their classrooms, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it. Some interesting conversations have started.

So all of that has me reflecting once again on how we think about changing this education model we’re always talking about, about what needs to change, and about how it all plays out. Not just in terms of how we do our own education business, but in how we prepare our kids to live in a world where many of the models for making a living ain’t what they used to be. I still think these changes “start at home” so to speak, with our own personal understanding of them.

And, to rephrase a bit from above, I still wonder whether most educators can (or are willing) to put the time and energy into negotiating the changing landscape, though I am absolutely convinced they must.

(Photo Be the Change by danny.hammontree.)