Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

To Create the “New Normal” of Education, Start With the “Old Normal” of Learning

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As educators, parents, and students have scrambled over the past couple of months to figure out how to move school online quickly and at scale, I can’t help but be reminded of a pivotal scene in the movie Apollo 13. After having to abandon their trip to the moon due to an explosion, the three astronauts suddenly find themselves struggling for oxygen in their emergency home in a lunar module designed to support only two people. Faced with quickly rising carbon dioxide levels, engineers in Houston dealing with this totally unexpected crisis suddenly have to design a makeshift air filter using only materials that the astronauts can access and assemble in space. As the mission commander says, “I suggest you gentleman figure out how to put a square peg in a round hole…rapidly.”

That’s in essence is what schools around the world have been trying to do these past weeks thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, the very rapid transition from school buildings and classrooms to Zoom rooms and Google Docs over a period of just days has posed what may be the most complex problem-solving moment ever in education. As UC Berkeley historian Elena Conis said in a recent article in The Atlantic, “There is no precedent for a life-interrupting disaster of this scale in America’s current educational and professional structures.”

Thirty days or so in, the outcomes are mixed. Some schools where students have laptops and bandwidth have weathered the shift fairly well. Others where many students have little or no technology or access have been forced to close up shop for the rest of the year citing the unfairness of being able to meet some but not all of their students’ needs. Some have tried to totally replicate school online, complete with time schedules and having students wear their school uniforms to virtual “class.” Others have taken a more student-centered approach, relaxing curriculum standards and even eliminating grading. For most, school is “open” online, but it’s a far cry from the school that was open down the block.

Transformation?

To hear traditional and social media tell it, the “transformation” of schools is now finally, definitely, without a doubt, unquestionably, most certainly on the horizon. The crisis, experts say, will lay waste to much of “school” as we know it. Education will become more equitable, more “blended” with technology, more responsive to the needs of children facing an increasingly complex, uncertain future. With millions of parents gaining a new appreciation for the work of educators, teachers will be paid more, and they’ll gain more agency over what is taught and how. We’ll have an improved “new normal” when schools eventually do reopen in communities around the world.

Color me skeptical.

I don’t doubt that some things will change, but I wonder how much of that change will be truly “transformative.” Our collective, shared experience of school has deep roots. Change of any type feels especially risky when it has to do with our children. And as much as the Coronavirus has created a profound disruption to the system, I’m unconvinced that it will fundamentally shift the deep-seated power relationships among administrators, teachers, parents, students, policy makers, and curriculum and technology vendors in ways that will allow for a significant alteration to the fundamental day to day story of school.

If we are truly serious about real change in education, our conversations have to go much deeper than a focus on new technologies or tweaked teaching practices. If we sincerely want to create a better, “new normal” for kids in schools once this crisis is over, one that truly transforms the experience in ways that are urgently required to help them navigate what lies ahead, we need to start by embracing the “old normal” of learning first.

The irony is that schools were not built for learning. Research shows that very little of what kids “learn” in a curricular sense is remembered for the long term, nor is it relevant to or applicable in their daily lives. It’s an unpleasant truth that makes us uncomfortable. But it is a truth. Just look at the many recent blog posts and Tweets from semi-embarrassed parents-turned-teachers lamenting how little they actually remember from high school that they can help their kids with. Learning in school simply isn’t like learning in real life.

A Learning Moment

Take the current crisis as an example. Aside from being a moment of huge disruption for all of us, this may be the most profound moment of deep professional learning that any of us have ever experienced regardless if we’re in health care, business, politics, service, or any other industry you can name. Educators in particular are literally learning their way through the crisis, day to day, hour to hour, and the conditions required for powerful learning are obviously present: a deep engagement in meaningful, real-world problem solving that is driven by questions, is intensely collaborative, is challenging in productive ways, and isn’t constrained by a linear, dated “curriculum” that dictates what comes next. No one is doing this for a grade; we’re doing this for a goal, namely to try to serve our students as best we can under exceedingly difficult circumstances.

Those conditions and others like them are and always have been how all humans learn best. And all humans know it. Learning is as natural as breathing when there is a real purpose behind it and when we have the freedom to learn on our own terms, when we’re not confined and coerced by external systems and traditions. Yet, we humans seem to forget that when it comes to the experience our kids have in school. In school, we seem to think learning happens only when it’s age-grouped and graded, or when it’s chunked into time blocks and subjects and meets some predetermined outcomes. Students have “learned” it seems only when they have consumed a mandated bucket of information or content and been tested to make sure they consumed it adequately.

In other words, in schools, we seem to think learning happens when it doesn’t look like real life. Common sense and personal experience tells us otherwise.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that kids shouldn’t be in community schools, in classrooms with caring, supportive adults who can push them to create and connect and change the world in powerful ways that they might not realize on their own. And I’m also not saying that there aren’t important things for students to learn in school. No question, the future will require people who are expert communicators, who have a global lens through which to live their lives, who are expert “crap detectors,” and, most importantly, who are agile, motivated, powerful learners who have the skills, literacies, and dispositions to find and solve real problems with others on an ongoing basis. It will demand people who can learn just in time, not just in case. In that regard, schools have a huge role to play in the developing mastery in all of our children and communities no matter what the post-pandemic world looks like.

Difficult Choices

But as we have been making difficult choices in these weeks about schools and education as we transition online, we’ve been reminded of those things that we value most: relationships, community, the curiosity of kids, and the power of real learning. And we’ve been surfacing other things that are simply not as important. Grades have been suspended in many schools. College entrance exams have been cancelled or modified. Many states aren’t giving standardized tests. Schools are cutting curriculum and pulling back on homework. At a moment when we have record numbers of students feeling stressed, anxious, and depressed, those choices suggest a real opportunity to ask some difficult questions about what we truly want schools to be in the future. As in which of those things remain important, and which will we choose to put on our “To (Un)Do Lists”?

In moving schools online in the face of this crisis, most seem to have learned how to put that metaphoric square peg in a round hole. That’s not a bad thing, but as with the astronauts, it’s just life support, a way to survive this momentary disaster. But the discussions we have and the decisions we make when the dust finally settles from the Coronavirus disruption will determine whether or not our schools and our students will just survive this moment or whether they will actually thrive in the future. For the best chance at the latter, those discussions and decisions need to be held through the lens of how powerful learning actually happens in each of us in the real world, not how we have long tried to force learning to happen in this thing we call school.

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.

A New Phase

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When Bruce Dixon and I started Modern Learners six years ago, we had two aspirations. First, to help people, teachers, parents, and policy makers, better understand the ways in which the modern world provided different lenses through which to see education and learning, and to help them use those lenses to make better decisions for kids. And second, to create a business around it that would allow both of us to get off the road, spend less time on planes, and provide a model for other similar communities down the road.

While I think we did a pretty good job with the first part, the second part has been a tougher path. As we knew it would be. And in all honesty, over the past year or so I’ve grown more frustrated and impatient with the whole conversation around educational change. While more people seem willing to engage in these ideas and take steps to make change happen, the reality is that only very few are willing to truly interrogate the “grammars of school” to an extent that moves them to a real reimagination of the work. And even then it’s a huge struggle to shift the narrative.

“Damaging Effects”

The forces against change are powerful and deeply rooted in the way we think about schools and education. The tech companies, testing companies, tutoring companies, universities, PACs…all of them have billions of dollars invested in making sure that any change we make in schools is cosmetic. And honestly, most authors and speakers and consultants aren’t going there either. I get it. It’s hard. My favorite Alfie Kohn quote these days is “I’m still wrestling with how to discuss the damaging effects of traditional educational practices without making it sound as if I’m blaming people who rely on them.” But that is the work right now, I think. To bring the damage to light. You can’t do that by dangling the next adjective for learning as the cure for what ails education. Nor can you do it by just trying to make things “better” via pushing practices that create more “voice and choice” or “personalization.” Those are more efforts in box checking than gut checking.

That’s why most of the “success” stories I’ve seen have come about outside of the traditional public and private systems. Really visionary leaders building new schools for the type of modern learning that’s possible right now. Small independent or international schools that eschew the status quo. Some boutique, one-off schools that are built for small student populations in more progressive areas of the world. They are out there, and their numbers are growing, no doubt.

But in the public and traditional independent sectors where most kids go to get “an education,” these changes aren’t scaling. Reforms don’t cut to the core of the “unpleasant truths” that I always talk and write about, those things we do in education that simply defy common sense when it comes to holding our kids’ best interests at heart. Those things we do which are increasingly irrelevant for the world we live in today. Everyone nods in agreement when I point them out. Few actually have the commitment to find a path to change them. And sincerely, I’m not throwing anyone under the bus when it comes to those who actually make an effort. Like I’ve often said to the people who have chosen to explore this space with me, this is the hardest work they will ever do. It’s excruciating.

Transition Time

With all that said, I find myself in a period of transition. Not that I’m going to quit trying to make the case for real change to happen in schools. But I am going to think about other ways to do that. I want to keep working. I want to get off planes because until they become more healthy for the planet, we should all get off planes. (Zoom anyone?) I want to do more writing, maybe run some masterminds for leaders and another Change School and Big Questions Institute or two, maybe do more work on and with parents (who may be the real drivers of change), maybe more with coaching basketball, maybe something else. Whatever that may end up being, the news is that both Bruce and I have transitioned out of Modern Learners. It’s time. I’m proud of the work I did there. I think the 10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning and the audit got people to think really hard about their work. And I’m thankful and have nothing but admiration for all of those educators who over the years in spaces like Change School and our community have been willing to push themselves into the necessary discomfort that comes with this work and take steps toward real change. Working with them, coaching them, in fact, has been the best work that I’ve done in my professional career. It’s been a privilege.

So, on to…whatever. Sincere thanks to all of you who have supported us over the years. I hope you continue to support Missy as she carries on the work at Modern Learners. And I look forward to continuing to create new conversations around education and schools in whatever ways make sense. In this world of huge transition and uncertainty, I can think of no more important work.

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?

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.

Stop Innovating in Schools. Please.

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Too often when we talk about “innovation” in education, we point to that new set of Chromebooks or those shiny new Smartboards as examples of our efforts to change what we do in the classroom. That is, after all, what “innovation” is all about, to “make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.” Over the last few years, many schools in the developed world have done a pretty good job on the new products front, earning billions of dollars for vendors who sell their gadgets or code under the guise of “innovation” of some degree or another. We’ve definitely got more stuff. And it’s arguable that our methods are changing, even if just a bit; the Maker Movement in schools, when fully embraced, is one such example of shifting roles in the classroom.

But on balance, is all of this “innovation” really changing us?

Not so much. Our efforts at innovating, regardless of method, idea, or product, have been focused far too much on incrementally improving the centuries old structures and practices we employ in schools, not on fundamentally rethinking them. And the vast majority of “innovation” I’ve seen in my visits to schools around the world doesn’t amount to much change at all in the area where we need it most: using those new methods, ideas, or products to shift agency for learning to the learner. To put it simply, innovation in schools today is far too focused on improving teaching, not amplifying learning.

That needs to stop, especially now when the ability to learn at a moment’s notice is increasingly more important than the knowledge we carry around in our heads. As we approach 4 billion people in the world with Internet access, there’s little question any longer that those who are learners will have more opportunities for growth and success than those who are learned. And if our work in schools does not have a laser focus on developing our kids as powerful, passionate, persistent learners, we’re not preparing them for their futures.

But innovating through the lens of the learner means fundamentally changing the way we think about schools and classrooms, not just layering on technology. Ironically, it means setting aside the new and, instead, getting back to the old, to what author and educator Seymour Papert calls our “stock of intuitive, empathic, commonsense knowledge about learning.” As learners ourselves, we know that real, learning that sticks with us over time occurs when it’s built on passion, when it has an authentic purpose and audience, when it’s relevant to our lives in the moment and beyond, when it’s not constrained by time, and more. This isn’t rocket science. Yet generally in schools, we provide few if any of those conditions that we know are required for that type of deep learning to take place. We don’t let students pursue the questions most in their minds. More often than not, the sole audience for the work students do is the teacher, and it serves no real world, authentic purpose. Our kids passions and interests are ignored in favor of compliance to the curriculum.

The real innovation that we need in schools has little to do with technologies or tools or products designed to improve our teaching. The real innovation, instead, is in relearning why we want kids in schools in the first place. As author Seymour Sarason says, the overarching purpose of school ought to be that children should want to keep learning more about themselves, others, and the world when they leave us. Yet, Sarason writes, that purpose is mostly ignored. I’ve yet to find a school that has created an assessment to see if, in fact, students leave at least as interested in learning as when they entered. In all likelihood, they don’t want to know the answer.

Innovation in schools of any type needs to start with the idea that the goal is not to force kids to abandon their passions and interests for our curriculum when they come to school, which is what we currently do. Instead, as Sarason says, we must start with their questions and curiosities, and bring our world to them. If we are to develop and sustain the types of learner-citizens that we need in the future, we need to meld the worlds of school and of children, but we start with the children. In Letters to a Serious Education President, he writes:

“We have to change our schools, but if that is not preceded or accompanied by a change in our thinking, in our preconceptions, in how we regard what and where children are, in our imaginativeness and boldness — absent these changes we will again confirm the maxim that the more things change, the more they stay the same (123).”

Which is why despite the shiny new tools or the seemingly unending string of new learning approaches (flipped, blended, collaborative, personalized, project-based and on and on), nothing has really changed. Kids are still bored in school. We still assess the stuff that’s easy to measure at the expense of attending to the more important stuff that isn’t, things like creativity and curiosity and determination. Our cultures focus on teaching, not learning, and very little “innovation” as it’s currently constituted has impacted that at all.

How we innovate depends largely on how we define learning. If we believe that learning is defined by “student achievement,” i.e. test scores or GPAs, then the vendors peddling their gadgets and code will continue to reap the profits of selling into our desires for better. But if we believe that the most powerful learning that kids do can only be measured by their desire to learn more, then any innovation we introduce must focus on creating fundamentally different experiences for kids in our classrooms, with or without technology.

“Social Media Are a Trap”

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I’m not giving up on networks, but this is such an interesting articulation of the problems inherent in social media. 

Zygmunt Bauman:

The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you. Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap [Emphasis mine].

The 69%

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Doug Sosnik:

The country is undergoing the most significant economic, technological,
and demographic changes since the Industrial Revolution. Such change in
any one of these areas would test our ability to adapt. But the fact
that we are experiencing all of these shifts at the same time has
exacerbated Americans’ fears and fundamental distrust of those in power.
The public has concluded that our 20th century institutions are
incapable of dealing with 21st century challenges.

The accompanying chart is pretty staggering. Eight percent of people have confidence in Congress today. Only 31 percent have confidence in public schools. 

31%. 

I don’t think it’s arguable any longer that not only is change drastically needed in the way we think about schools and schooling but that the public is nearly ready to support such change. Not in the form of “personalization” as much as real, structural, pedagogical change that brings more relevance to the experience given the changes mentioned above. I know it’s not an overwhelming wave…yet. But as more and more public schools begin to innovate and change, and as those stories begin to get a wider berth, the conditions are ripe for that groundswell to occur. 

#PresentReady Schools

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Here’s my question: Why are we so concerned with being “future ready” when we’re not even “present ready?” 

I mean, do we really think that our students (and we ourselves) are truly literate in the current Web-centric information environment? Are we using the technologies we have right now to even a quarter of their power or potential? Do we fully understand the implications or privacy and security on our online interactions as they exist today? Are we well enough informed about the motivations of those who want us to buy their products, or the motivations of those who want our kids to continue to take high-stakes standardized tests? Can we say that we’re all good when it comes to the environmental, cultural, and ethical implications around the choices we make around technology and learning and schooling today? (Feel free to add yours below.)

Aside from never being fully able to get anyone to define what exactly is meant by “future ready,” my biggest frustration with initiatives such as these is that they shift focus away from what our bigger issues are right now. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that we should be talking about before we start trying to figure out what our future needs are. (And by the way, how can you really have a clue about the future if you’re not living in the present?) 

While I don’t agree with the whole thing, the summation that Jordan Shapiro gives in his latest post at Forbes resonates:

The point is that our children don’t need 21st century skills. Skills are easy to come by and simple to teach. Besides, those skills necessary to operate the current technologies and to participate in the current economy are certain to be obsolete by the time our children need them. What we need instead is a new kind of normalization—new classroom rules, new district wide administrative systems, new school designs and new educational customs that will break the cycle of winners and losers, haves and have nots, believers and heathens.   

We need to teach our children that the goal is not self-empowerment for the sake of the individual, but rather for the collective. They must learn not only how to identify and discover their unique gifts, but also how to offer them up in service to the rest of us.

That has nothing to do with being “future ready,” but it has everything to do with being ready for the future. 

From ACT to Acts

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There’s a lot to digest in the recent report Making Caring Common which has a slew of suggestions for bringing some much needed sanity to the college admissions process. The short version: stop putting so much emphasis on AP classes and SAT scores and, instead, encourage kids to do meaningful, sustained good work in their communities and families. In other words, stop stressing over the ACT and focus on acts instead.

No question much of this is in response to a flood of stories of late of rising levels of anxiety and stress in kids thrown into a fierce competition for academic recognition that businesses like the College Board and magazines like US News have been more than happy to promote. (Let’s never forget that the whole AP narrative has been pushed by those with a vested financial interest in the test. Always a good reason for a test.) And it’s about time. One of my favorite college presidents Leon Botstein at Bard has been railing about this for years. 

Anyway, read the report, and make sure you send it to everyone you know who is on the “high achievement” bandwagon. And when you do, make sure you share this quote as well:

Even the most advanced students may benefit from avoiding course “overload” and devoting more time for scholarly work that allows unstructured reflection and encourages the development of intellectual curiosity.

Wow. What a concept.

The Ability to be Taught

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“The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn.” ~Seymour Papert

I use that quote often in my presentations, because even though Papert said that 18 years ago, the environment we now find ourselves in today makes it even more relevant. And it’s not just the skills needed to learn, but it’s the dispositions as well. I’m not saying humans aren’t learners by their very nature, but there’s no question some end up being much more voracious than others when it comes to learning more about the world around them and their place in it.

But we don’t focus on being able to learn that much in schools, do we? Instead we put most of our attention on making sure kids are able to be taught. That’s what the systems and structures and policies support. To be able to be taught, students must learn to follow rules. To be able to be taught, they must conform to certain expectations. They must be grouped in certain ways, for specific amounts of time. They must get into certain routines, all of which develop them as “students” who depend on the institution to teach them what they need to know. This is our easiest path, to dictate and organize the entire experience. 

In the process, we basically ignore the skill of being able to learn. In fact, we may damage what learning skills and dispositions kids already bring to us when they start school. But the vast majority of kids end up right where we want them, being teachable. 

The irony is we’ve known this forever. We knew it when we were students. We perpetuate it as adults, as parents, as teachers, and as policy makers. 

Read the whole Papert piece. Hard to argue.

The Real Engagement Question

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Newsflash: “Student engagement” now seems to be rising as an indicator of school effectiveness, along with “hope” and “graduation rates.” It’s interesting that only one of those is easy to accurately measure; the other two are much more fluid, based on the opinions of students. That in and of itself is an interesting shift, and perhaps, an important one. (It’s also interesting to note that the percentage of kids who go to college really isn’t valued that much as an indicator.) 

But it depends on how you define “engagement,” right?  I wrote more about this at EML, but does it surprise anyone that “engagement” can be raised when learning is gamified? When getting the right answer becomes a race? When we throw technologies like iPads and clickers at kids? It shouldn’t. Kids, especially young kids, are easily moved by such tools and pedagogies.

But here’s the not so subtle question we need to ask: By doing these things, are we trying to get kids more engaged in school? Or are we trying to get them more engaged in learning? And yes, there is a big difference. 

Too often, the educators I work with have bought new technologies or implemented new practices in an attempt to make school more palatable to kids. That may bump the numbers up in the next Gallup survey, but in the long run, it won’t do much to move a child’s desire to want to learn more about whatever they’re clicking answers to in class. That requires a much bigger shift in agency to the learner in ways that we all know (but for some reason are loathe to implement) lead to more powerful learning experiences for kids.

Almost half of our kids and two thirds of our teachers say they’re not engaged in school. What they’re really saying, both the kids and the adults, is that they’re not able to engage in learning about things that matter to them. No technology alone is going to solve that. 

“Schooling Disabled”

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Eric Weinstein (@ericrweinstein), managing director of Thiel Capital, a Ph.D in mathematical physics from Harvard, and a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, during a podcast interview with Tim Ferris:

What you’re always looking for is an education which makes students unteachable by standard methods. This is where we get into the trouble which is, we don’t talk about “teaching disabilities,” we talk about “learning disabilities.” And a lot of the kids that I want are kids who have been labeled learning disabled but they are actually super learners. Learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower. And when teachers can’t deal with this, we label those kids “learning disabled” to cover up the fact that the economics of teaching require that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more  people in lock step. Well, that’s not a good model. (Around the 1:06 mark.) 

No, it’s not. Our system expects kids, all kids, to inure themselves to our structures, practices, and curriculum. The system pays little heed to their dispositions, passions, and personalities. I know that some kids do have real and serious learning disabilities, but a significant number of kids who we label with such are more than able to navigate the learning opportunities they encounter once they leave school. It’s too inefficient for us to focus our efforts on meeting kids where they are instead of the other way around. Yet, we’ve become tolerant of the collateral damage that ensues. 

“Constancy of Purpose”

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One of the biggest roadblocks to change in any institution is a lack of “constancy of purpose” to borrow a phrase from W.E. Deming. This is especially true in schools. The average superintendent of a public school in the US has a 3.5 year tenure, and more often than not, newly hired leaders bring in their own agendas, their own beliefs, their own measures of “success.” In most schools, there is no “North Star,” no articulated destination that serves as the benchmark for who gets hired next. We go from innovators and dreamers to managers and data collectors and then back again depending on the political or societal currents of the moment. 

The effects of this are harsh. Teachers and other leaders are less inclined to engage in any efforts to change, wondering if their work to do so will sustain over time. Frustrations rise as practices become even more fragments and misaligned. Money gets wasted, and students are caught in the middle.

What is your purpose? And how invested are you and the people around you in that purpose? Those questions are fundamental starting points for any discussions around change. 

Co-Schooling

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This weekend, we held an impromptu paint party at my house, about 20 people putting a sunset and purple flowers to canvas via the instructions of a YouTube artist. It was kinda crazy, not just because paint was flying all over the place, but because of who was in the room. We had friends and in-laws and the more standard crew. But we also had nine Rwandans, aged 10 to 75, some of whom had emigrated to the US and Canada, one who is living with us short term, and some of whom are heading back to Africa in the next few days. Imagine trying to engage in a conversation mixing English and French and Kinyarwandan. Imagine when some of that conversation turns to Burundi, where the threat of genocide is hanging over some relatives of those at our party. Imagine 15-minutes of hugs when everyone is leaving. 

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Over the years, we’ve had three sets of eight Tibetan Buddhist monks stay with us for 10-day stretches. We’ve had an old friend who is a lesbian live with us for a year when she was in the midst of some difficult changes in her life. I suspect we’ve had more diversity in our home than most, certainly more than my kids engage with in their schools. And in many ways, I think my kids have learned more about real life from paint parties and monk visits and our various boarders than almost anything they’ve done in school. We’re not perfect parents, by any stretch, but I do think the efforts we’ve put into “real world” learning have made our kids (and ourselves) much more ready for what’s to come in their lives. 

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I wonder, when we know that these are the things we remember and learn from most deeply, why aren’t schools driven to provide all kids these types of experiences? Why is it so hard for us to bring the real world into the school walls? Why wouldn’t we want to do that?

Learning Apprentices

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What if teachers looked at their students as apprentices? I mean, before schools, most of learning was hands on, at the foot of a master, at least for the masses. What if we tried harder to capture that in classrooms?

But what if the master/apprentice relationship was not focused on subject first, but on learning? That kids in schools were at the foot not of those who know the most about, let’s say, science, but of those who are masters at learning science. That the emphasis of our assessment would be on a student’s ability to learn science. Or Shakespeare. Or history. That they would learn to learn like scientists or historians or mathematicians. 

That kind of emphasis would remake school cultures. It would build skills and dispositions that would cross disciplines. And it would better prepare kids to flourish in this world. 

Teaching or Learning?

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Is your school culture one that’s focused on teaching, or is it focused on learning?

Depends on what you believe, right? If you believe that learning is measured by test scores, then odds are you’re focused on helping teachers become technically better at delivering the outcomes spelled out in the curriculum. The focus is on getting better. But if you believe that learning is measured by a desire to learn more, to continue learning, then the focus is on creating the conditions for that to happen. Doing real work that matters. Starting with kids’ interests and passions. Seeing the adults in the room as learners as well. The aim is to do things differently.

Culture is palpable. Listen to kids and teachers talk about their work. Look into classrooms to see who is in charge. Walk down a hallway and tune in to what you feel. It’s usually not hard to tell which you’ve got.

What’s harder is deciding which you want. 

A School for Modern Living

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“A laboratory for the working out of an elementary and secondary curriculum which shall eliminate obsolete material and endeavor to work up in usable form material adapted to the needs of modern living.”

That was the board of Abraham Flexner’s Lincoln School In New York in 1916, as quoted in Lawrence Cremin’s most excellent book The Transformation of the School. As one who has promoted the use of “modern” learning and schooling, I love the word choice. And I love the sentiment, especially the stuff about obsolete material.

A couple of weeks ago, a bit of a Twitter debate erupted when I linked to this piece about Roger Schank where he says:

“In fact, we should not be teaching kids anything. Nobody remembers what they were told. Parents don’t ‘teach’; they discuss things with their children.” He says we should get over the idea that schools are supposed to teach. The basic idea should be to make children think clearly and any good teacher can do that.

To me, that’s much of what “modern living” requires at any time, but especially now. Thinking clearly. Solving problems that matter. Being curious. Making stuff. Co-operating and working with others. It does not require “learning” obsolete material that will be forgotten as soon as the test is over, which accounts for the vast majority of what we teach kids in schools. 

So when Flexner set out to create a school for modern living, what did he do? He: 

“built a curriculum around “units of work”that would reorganize traditional subject matter into forms taking fuller account of the development of children and the changing needs of adult life.”

So, first and second graders built a play city as they studied community life. Third graders studied boats. Fourth grade worked on foods while fifth graders took on land transportation. Sixth graders studied books through the ages. In high school, seventh graders took on “man and his environment,” while the eighth grade studied “living in a power age.” Then it was “ancient and modern cultures” and finally, “living in contemporary America.” In other words, no disciplines per say. Projects. Problems. 

If you want a sense of what was learned in these “units of work,” see this enlargement of the photo below outlining the 4th grade boats work.

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And this:

“Each of the units was broadly enough conceived so that different children could concentrate on different aspects depending on their own interests and the teacher’s sense of their pedagogical needs; each of the units called for widely diverse student activities; and each of the units sought to deal in depth with some crucial aspect of contemporary civilization.”

So don’t miss it: Not every child learned the same thing. And the outcome was that Lincoln students scored as well or above their peers on comparison tests and did better than their peers in college. 

“At public school they jam facts into you,” one student insisted. “Here you really learn something.” 

It wasn’t perfect, of course. But the Lincoln school makes a powerful point, I think. We’re not limited to the traditional structures if we believe other architectures of learning might work more effectively for kids. 

The Best Possible Guarantee of Learning

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I came across John and Evelyn Dewey’s “Schools of To-morrow” recently (free pdf download.) It’s 100 years old this year. And as I read through it, I get inspired and depressed at the same time, not unusual when I’m diving into some of the more Progressive texts on education. Inspired because the Deweys (in this case, plural) get it so right. Depressed because we in education don’t seem able to tap into the eternal truths about learning that they and others write about. 

I know I’m not a brilliant guy. My education background is not Columbia or Stanford. I don’t remember all that much of what I read. And as I’ve written before, it took me until I was well into my 40s to really start to think deeply about learning and schooling, thanks in large part to the networks of passionate and smart educators I connected with online early on in the days of the social Web. But this is not difficult, esoteric, brain-challenging stuff. It’s common sense. Progressive ideas about education are built on the realities of learning. My love of Sarason and Papert and Dewey and others is because they stay true to the core of what learning is. 

When I read stuff like the extended snip from the Deweys’ book below, it kinda gives me goosebumps. And I wonder why isn’t this what we do? Why aren’t these the conversations we are having daily in our schools? Why isn’t this the foundation for the way we prepare our teachers? Why are we so afraid or so unwilling (or so unable?) to meet kids where they are, to make the focus of our work to make sure (as Sarason says) that our kids leave us wanting to learn more about themselves, their peers, and the world around them? I know of no school that even attempts to measure that, as difficult as that may be. 

The last line below really captures it for me. And it relates directly to what I’ve been preaching the last few months, that we really need to start connecting our practice in schools to our beliefs about learning. That shouldn’t be hard to do, but the cultures and architectures we’ve built in schools work against that in many ways. 

Anyway, maybe this will get you thinking this weekend. I’ve added the emphasis. 

“We know nothing of childhood, and with our mistaken notions of it the further we go in education the more we go astray. The wisest writers devote themselves to what a man ought to know without asking what a child is capable of learning.” These sentences are typical of the “Emile” of Rousseau. He insists the existing education is bad because parents and teachers are always thinking of the accomplishments of adults, and that all reform depends upon centering attention upon the powers and weaknesses of children. Rousseau said, as well as did, many foolish things. But his insistence the education be based upon the native capacities of those to be taught and upon the need of studying children in order to discover what these native powers are, sounds the key-note of all modern efforts for educational progress. It meant that education is not something to be forced upon children and youth from without, but is the growth of capacities with which human beings are endowed at birth. From this conception flow the various considerations which educational reformers since his day have most emphasized.

It calls attention, in the first place, to a fact which professional educators are always forgetting: what is learned in school is at the best only a small part of education, a relatively superficial part; and yet what is learned in school makes artificial distinctions in society and marks persons off from one another. Consequently we exaggerate school learning compared with what is gained in the ordinary course of living. We are, however, to correct this exaggeration, not by despising school learning, but by looking into that expensive and more efficient training given by the ordinary course of events for light upon the best  ways of teaching within school walls. The first years of learning proceed rapidly and securely before children go to school, because that learning is so closely related with the motives that are furnished by their own powers and the needs that are dictated by their own conditions. Rousseau was almost the first to see that learning is a matter of necessity; it is a part of the process of self preservation and of growth. If we want, then, to find out how education takes place most successfully, let us go to the experiences of children were learning is a necessity, and not to the practices of the schools where it is largely and adornment, a superfluity and even  an unwelcome imposition.

But schools are always proceeding in a direction opposed to this principle. They take the accumulated learning of adults, material that is quite unrelated to the exigencies of growth, and try to force it upon children, instead of finding out what these children need as they go along. “A man must indeed know many things which seem useless to a child. Must the child learn, can he learn, all that the man must know? Try to teach a child what is of use to him as a child, and you will find that it takes all his time. Why urge him to the studies of an age he may never reach, to the neglect of those studies which meet his present needs? But, you ask, will it not be too late to learn what are you ought to know when the time comes to use it? I cannot tell. But this I know; it is impossible to teach it sooner, for our real teachers are experience and emotion, and adult man will never learn what befits him except  under his own conditions. A child knows he must become a man; all the ideas he may have as to man’s estate are so many opportunities for his instruction, but he should remain in complete ignorance of those ideas that are beyond his grasp. My whole book is one continued argument in support of this fundamental principle of education.”

Probably the greatest and commonest mistake that we all make it to forget that learning is a necessary incident of dealing with real situations. We even go so far as to assume that the mind is naturally averse to learning–which is like assuming that the digestive organs are averse to food and have either to be coaxed or bullied into having anything to do with it. Existing methods of instruction give plenty of evidence in support of a belief that minds are opposed to learning–to their own exercise. We fail to see that such aversion is in reality a condemnation of our methods: a sign that we are presenting material for which the mind in its existing state of growth has no need, or else presenting it in such ways as to cover up the real need. Let us go further. We say only an adult can really learn the things needed by the adult. Surely the adult is much more likely to learn the things befitting him when his hunger for learning has been kept alive continuously than after a premature diet of adult nutriment has deadened desire to know. We are of little faith and slow to believe. We are continually uneasy about the things we adults know, and are afraid the child will never learn them unless they are drilled into him by instruction  before he has any intellectual or practical use for them. If we could really believe that attending to the needs of present growth would keep the child and teacher alike busy, and would also provide the best possible guarantee of the learning needed in the future, transformation of educational ideas might soon be accomplished, and other desirable changes would largely take care of themselves.

Simple, Complicated, Complex

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The whole video is worth a watch, but I love this quote from a recent presentation by Dave Cormier:

As we’ve gotten more abundant access to knowledge, we’ve reduced the complexity of the teaching. And, it’s been a trade off, because in one sense, more and more people have had access, but what we’ve given them access to has been less and less complex.

Dave makes some interesting distinctions between simple tasks (those with one answer,) complicated tasks (sometimes with more than one answer), and complex tasks (those with multiple, unknown answers.) He uses the examples of figuring out the capital of a country (simple), building a plane (complicated), and addressing climate change (complex.) He argues, compellingly, that the current structures of schools are well suited for the first (and maybe the second) but not the third at all. As he says, the primary reason is our need to assess, and the result is that we teach kids that “learning is something that gets done” as opposed to being a lifelong quest.

Bottom line: our kids need to be able to deal with complexity. In order to do that, our offerings in schools must be more complex, must be more focused on building “citizens who can look for answers…not the answer.” This is the great potential, Dave suggests, of the access we have, when we’re not just looking stuff up on Google but when were engaged with others in pursuing interesting questions that matter and that are complex. 

When the community becomes the curriculum, the what and the why of learning comes together…

The curriculum is not content, the curriculum of learning is actually other people.

Lots to think about here…

No Fun? No Learning.

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Just read this:

Telecommunications operator, Airtel Nigeria, has introduced a new application that allows children to fulfill the long-sought dream of learning and having fun at the same time.

Um, sorry, but learning has always been fun. As Seymour Papert says, it may be “hard fun” at times. But for most things*, no fun = no learning.

*(Of course, the caveat is we do learn much through real adversity and tragedy, normally not “fun” things. But in most cases…) 

The First Question

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Excuse the extended snip, but I think it’s time for some Seymour Sarason goodness this new holiday season (boldface mine):

How do you capitalize on and nurture children’s curiosity and questions about themselves, others, and their social world? There is a related question: How do we connect those characteristics to issues, values, bodies of knowledge, and skills that we in the adult world consider necessary and desirable for productive living? How do you begin to connect the “two worlds”? And by connect, I mean the forging of a seamless web containing both worlds.

Traditionally (and unfortunately) we have not started with these questions but rather with a predetermined answer. We have not started with “where children are and what they are” but with a highly differentiated, complex organizational structure in terms of age and the calendar, grades, curricula, testing, levels of educational authority and responsibility, and encapsulated schools. The rhetoric of what I call the culture of schools is organized for one, and only one, purpose: to further the intellectual and social development of children. And those who articulate the rhetoric are well-meaning people who truly believe that the structure and rationale of school not only can achieve their intended purpose but is the best way to do it.

But these good people also know that their intended purpose is not being achieved for the bulk of students. And that knowledge has always initiated a tinkering process, e.g., change the curriculum, develop remedial services, involve parents, employ new technologies, beef up preparatory programs for educators, and increase in-service training programs. 

One thing these people know for sure: “We are not reaching these kids.” What do they mean by reach? To me (and most people I assume), to reach somebody implies that you seek to establish a basis for connecting your world and their world. When these people say they are having difficulty reaching kids, what they mean is “we cannot get them interested in our world.” In practice–in the “real world” of schools–it is expected that students will conform to the requirements and purposes of the school world at the expense of giving expression to their world. So we have the situation where both students and educators know that there are two unconnected worlds (49-50).

My sense is that since Sarason wrote this about 15 years ago, that disconnect has grown (and continues to grow) because the abilities for kids to do productive learning on their own has exploded with the web. (And remember, according to Sarason, productive learning is learning which engenders “wanting to learn more.” Absent that, the learning is unproductive.) More and more, “our world” in school looks less and less like their worlds which are now stocked full of passions, interests, and things to create and make and share. 

If you agree with Sarason that the overarching goal of school should be that when children leave us they should want to keep learning more about themselves, others, and the world, then our imperative is to keep lit that flame for learning they bring with them to school. Our focus can’t be to “reach them” with our stuff as much as it is to develop them as learners via their stuff, with “where and what they are.” 

So, are you starting with the first question? “How do we capitalize on and nurture the questions and interests of students?”  Everything flows from that. 

Where Are You Going?

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Most schools try to tell a good story about who they are, what kids accomplish while there, and what sets it apart from other places of learning. Very few schools, however, have a good narrative, and these days, a narrative is more important than a story.

What’s the difference?

One of my favorite thinkers about the “Big Shifts” that we’re in the midst of is John Hagel, who with John Seely Brown has written a number of books and articles that have seeded much of my thinking about this moment in edu. In a post he wrote last year, Hagel makes the case that in order for movements large or small to occur, we need a “powerful and engaging narrative” at the center. But narrative is focused on what’s to come, not what’s already happened.

Stories are self-contained (they have a beginning, middle and resolution) and they’re about the story teller or some other people; they’re not about the listener. In contrast, narratives are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends on the choices and actions of the listener. As a result, they’re a powerful call to action, emphasizing the ability that we all have to make a difference.

I’ve written (and spoken) a great deal about the importance of articulating and sharing our beliefs about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply, especially as the starting point for conversations around change. And, obviously, what needs to follow is that our practice in classrooms needs to align to those beliefs as well. But just as important, I think, is that we as school communities articulate our aspirations, or as Hagel puts it, our “overarching narrative” around what we see as the new opportunities we seek moving forward. As Hagel is writing about businesses here, I’ve substituted “school” in all the relevant places:

An effective [school] narrative would identify an opportunity that’s beyond the reach of a [school] today, an opportunity not just for the [school], but for many, many others. An opportunity so great that it can’t be achieved in isolation but requires collective action. It would move others to join forces and take action in powerful new ways.

This idea is something that Joe Koss, a teacher at the Uruguayan American School in Montevideo, is also thinking about. In a recent blog post about thinking differently about evaluating schools, which he states are going through a “paradigm crisis,” he seeks a difference between story and narrative.

I have spent quite a bit of time using tried and true school evaluation techniques to look at where my school has been. But very rarely, if ever, have these evaluation measures began with and/or even focused on where the school should go. At the end of my current school´s accreditation process, combined with our curriculum mapping initiative, we will have spent over five years evaluating where we have been. I am not sure when we will begin to discuss where we need to go.

I know the future has always been uncertain, but I also know that because of the speed at which change is occurring, it’s more important than ever to figure out “where we are going.” And I think our focus now has to be grounded in what new potentials and opportunities the modern world of networks and connections allow us to imagine. To echo David Warlick from many years back, what is that new story that we want to tell, not just about education in general, but about our individual schools as well? What is it that we aspire to become? What are the opportunities our learners now have that didn’t exist before that must guide our conversations moving forward?

I wonder how many schools are thinking about articulating their narrative over telling their story. I would guess that schools serious about change are focused on both. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends…

Make a Difference That Matters

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I’ve read D. Scott Looney’s Why Hawken Must Lead essay  at least half a dozen times, but I always find this last part so powerful:

We live in an extraordinary period of human history, a time in which the challenges of human population growth, environmental threats, economic interconnectedness, and political instability appear to be moving us forward at unprecedented, exponential rates. At the same time, we are witness to a global economy that has seen poverty throughout the world diminish (in relative terms), incredible advances in medicine, technology, and communications, and successful, large scale, multi-national cooperative efforts. The future is a paradox – terrifying, but at the same time holding great promise. 

I am sure that throughout history, when looking toward the future, people have felt that they were living in an unprecedented time of challenge, change, and ambiguity. I believe, however, there is something fundamentally different  about today. The pace of change has begun to hit the vertical portion of the exponential curve, and, in our children’s lifetimes, the challenges now pose a real threat to the existence of our species. (Notice I did not say “all life on earth,” as we always can count on the rat and the cockroach.)

I have to believe that any individual or group of individuals who take on these daunting challenges of the future must first possess an extraordinary capacity to see possibilities in the face of ambiguity, and, second, a powerful sense of personal agency. Our mission promises that Hawken School prepares students to navigate a complex and dynamic world with self-confidence and determination, embrace challenges with disciplined analysis and creativity and engage  others with empathy and integrity.” In short, it calls for us to graduate students who are not daunted by the world’s challenges and who are equipped to be effective in the world. The promise of our efforts to move the school back to our original progressive intent is not just to provide students with terrific educational experiences and to make them ready for college; it is also to send them out into the world with the capability and moral compass to make a difference that matters.

The whole thing is worth it…

We’re Not Doing the Best We Can for Kids…And We Know It

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I’ve been reading me some more Seymour Sarason, one of the “oldies” who I wish were a “newie” in the “what-do-we-do-with-schools” conversations we’re having. The snips below are from an essay titled “An Overarching Goal for Students” from a collection titled The Skeptical Visionary. To me, Sarason is one of those people who just peels away all the bullshit about education reform and gets to the heart of things which, in short, is that we’re not doing the best we can for kids and we know it. In this particular piece, Sarason says our goal should be to foster in children “the desire to continue to learn about self, others, and the world.” It speaks to his belief that productive, sticky learning only occurs when the learner wants to learn more, a belief that totally resonates with my own experience as a learner and as a parent.

Sarason’s observation here is that kids are productive learners when they come to us, and over the course of 12 years, we pretty much turn learning into something they don’t want to learn anything more about. We make it unproductive and disengaging. It’s hard to argue with him. 

If there is anything we can say about the biologically intact, preschool child, it is that he or she is a question-asking, question-answering, questing, knowledge-pursuing organism, pursuing knowledge about self, others, and its world. That is truly a glimpse of the obvious but, remarkably, it is not taken seriously. Our schools (beginning in kindergarten), in a myriad of ways and with the best of intentions, require the student to make a sharp distinction between “what I am interested in and what I am supposed to be interested in, what I am curious about and what I am supposed to be curious about, what I know and what I am supposed to know, what kinds of questions I would like to ask and what questions I am told I should or it is permissible to ask.” Put more succinctly schools do a remarkably effective job, albeit unwittingly, of getting children to conclude that there are two worlds – the one inside of school in the one outside – and they have no doubt whatsoever about which of the two is intrinsically more interesting and stimulating…   

…That young children are question-asking, answer-seeking characters is among the most obvious features of human development. And that is true regardless of family, race, ethnicity, economic background, or where on this earth children are found. When children start school, a message is conveyed to them that is as influential as it is subtle and unverbalized: “forget or set aside your world of questions and interests. Your job, our responsibility, is to get you to learn rules, fact, and skills, without which you are nothing. School is not for play or for dreaming. It is work, serious work. And if you pay attention, work hard, some day when you are big, you will understand.”…  

…The overarching aim of schooling should be to recognize, capitalize on, and exploit the obvious fact that children come to school already possessed of the major psychological attributes crucial to productive learning. They are thinkers and doers before they come to school. They are eager to remain thinkers and doers, to integrate new worlds into their old ones – an integration not a separation. They already know that there is much they do not know and are eager to learn. Motivation is not a problem. They want to conform, but to them conformity does not mean giving up or setting aside the world most familiar and intriguing to them. There is a difference between willing conformity and an unwilling and puzzled submission. That children generally experience school as boring and uninteresting should occasion no surprise. What would require explanation is if they felt otherwise.

More and more, my lens for this change in schools conversation starts here: This is not rocket science. We know in our learner souls what is required for “productive” learning to take place, because we ourselves have learned productively. We know that kids are engaged when they come to us. We also know that less than half are engaged when they leave us. We do this to them, yet we seem to want to ignore that. Why?

I get that many feel powerless to change. The tests, the curriculum, the parents, the state, the … But here’s the deal. People are changing. More and more each day, I see child centered practices growing in schools and classrooms. It’s not a wave yet, but it’s a significant ripple. And I think we are waking up to the damage that we do to kids by thinking that they’re not already productive, powerful learners when they come to us. They are. We know it. 

Now we just have to act like we know it.