education Archives - Page 2 of 18

Towards a “New System of Education”

October 1, 2015 By Will Richardson

If the limitations of bureaucracies continue to be imposed on or accepted in schools, the only alternative available to those who desire a high quality education will be to create a new system of education outside the range of the state and federal bureaucracies that now dominate public schools. Indeed, such a system is likely to function outside schools more generally, as most private schools are structured on the same organizational premises that guide public schools, and thus are based on assumptions that are not valid in a world where digital learning opportunities abound.

If schools both public and private cannot become more adept than they now are at absorbing and supporting disruptive technologies – and it is clear that digital technologies properly exploited, will be disruptive in bureaucratically organized schools – then customized, commercially provided education is likely to replace both public and private schools, at least for most students. Those left behind will be the children of the poor, who will be trained in state-run bureaucracies rather than educated in outstanding schools, making even more real the social class divisions that are tearing at America’s social fabric (21).

I’ll have more to say about this down the road I’m sure, but I spent an hour talking to one of the co-founders of the Princeton Learning Cooperative yesterday, which is a place (not a school) that helps structures the homeschooling option for parents. Built on the idea of North Star in Massachusetts, it strips away almost all of the bureaucracy of school as we know it and just focuses on kids and learning. The more I dive in, the more sense it makes.

The key, however, is the willingness of both parents and students to shed the traditional narrative of how kids become successful in the world. These kids don’t get grades, don’t take courses, don’t take the tests, self-organize 95% of the experience, and…wait for it…still go to great universities if that’s what they choose.

Go figure.

I’m not saying that this is the “customized, commercially provided education” that Schlecty refers to here. But it is no doubt part of the “new system of education” that is already taking root in lots of places around the country and world.

On Criminalizing Kids

September 19, 2015 By Will Richardson

Jared Keller:

If this boilerplate response sounds all too familiar, it’s because police and school administrators use it all the time after arresting students for completely moronic reasons. A 12-year-old girl was taken into custody in Texas for spraying herself with perfume. Another student in Texas was arrested for throwing paper airplanes in class. In New Mexico, a 13-year-old boy was arrested for burping in class; another student was ordered to strip down to his underwear with five teachers watching because he had $200 on his person. A 12-year-old girl in New York was arrested for doodling on her desk, while an eight-year-old boy in Massachusetts was administered a psychological evaluation because he drew a picture of Jesus in class. And let’s not forget the Oklahoma math teacher who made a citizen’s arrest on a student for possessing a permanent marker, which apparently came in violation of “an obscure city ordinance.”

Broken windows has come to the American schoolyard.

While Ahmed’s incident comes with a sheen of Islamophobia (to wit: this list of students who brought homemade clocks to school and weren’t arrested), it also speaks to a broader question: When did we start criminalizing innocent childhood antics?

Great question.

How Schools are Stuck

September 17, 2015 By Will Richardson

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot of late about the belief systems that schools have (or don’t have) about student learning, and as I was digging around for some shoulders to stand on (as usual) I found this powerful snip from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Schooling by Design (2007). It articulates perfectly what I think may be the biggest barrier to real change in schools and classrooms.

We have seen this phenomenon repeatedly over the past 25 years. More tellingly, even when educators acknowledge inadequacies in student performance, too many express lack of confidence that they have the power or capacity to make a difference. Experience abets the fatalism that many teachers feel: given the way schools are run, few people do actually change much. So the very fear of embarrassment or failure is often too strong for us to publicly acknowledge. But such fatalism is the antithesis of habit change.

In short, most schools have, ironically, been poor examples of learning organizations, afraid as they typically are of taking that first crucial step of admitting ignorance about how to cause more and deeper learning, and stuck as they typically are in unexamined and self-perpetuating routines in which defensiveness about any critique of comfortable practice is the norm. And the typical job conditions abet the problem: individual teachers are often weak models of learners in action because they are asked only to “teach” instead of continually being asked by job requirements and norms to show a commitment to continual questioning and openness to change.

So it won’t do for school leaders and professional development programs to demand something of individuals that schools do not model. Professional development must be based on truly essential questions and puzzles about learning: what would it take to get more learners to learn well? When is the problem their’s and when is it ours? Which practices work and which don’t? Who is having the most success and why? Professional development can then emerge around the action research and training that follow from such inquiries.

It is therefore incumbent on change agents to be the kind of questioners – that is, habit challengers and habit breakers – we are describing, and to work with staff to develop structures and situations in which exploring our most important questions and needs is safe and supported. That will require leaders to charge not only the professional developers but also every staff member to make a commitment to root out institutional inconsistency between mission and practice at central job responsibility. [Emphasis mine.]

Amen. I can count on two hands the number of schools that I have visited where a) the beliefs around how kids learn best are clearly articulated and aligned to practice, and b) where there is a laser like commitment to “rooting out institutional inconsistency” in that regard. The places that are doing it are amazing places of learning.

The scary part? We all know that most schools are “poor examples of learning organizations,” yet we lack the capacity, the courage, and the commitment to change that. Why?

The Crappy Moment of Shift

September 15, 2015 By Will Richardson

There is much to absorb in this piece by the OECD’s education director Andreas Schleicher, but here’s the part that we need to all think about:

The impact of technology on education delivery remains sub-optimal, because we may over-estimate the digital skills of both teachers and students, because of naive policy design and implementation strategies, because of a poor understanding of pedagogy, or because of the generally poor quality of educational software and courseware.

The results suggest that the connections among students, computers and learning are neither simple nor hard-wired; and the real contributions ICT can make to teaching and learning have yet to be fully realised and exploited.

But the findings must not lead to despair. School systems need to get the digital agenda right in order to provide educators with learning environments that support 21st Century pedagogies and provide children with the 21st Century skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world.

Welcome to the crappy moment of shift that we’re in as we try to shake the grip of a pre-connected education and figure out what the new version looks like. Not to say we cut loose everything old, but it’s hard as hell to figure out what to keep when we know that things need to be different yet so few of us really understand what that means on a personal level. We cannot keep it all, but we cannot change it all.

And I wonder this: could we be at “peak learning” when it comes to using technology to master the traditional curriculum and outcomes? I mean, might the most powerful learning that connected, creative technologies afford have little to do with the stuff that we deem important enough to “teach” and test? Is it possible that technology and tradition are wholly incompatible when it comes to learning?

On “Rigor”

August 12, 2015 By Will Richardson

I’m back in Australia, my 13th trip “Down Under,” and it’s interesting how things seem to be tracking backwards here on a national level. As in “back(wards) to basics” a la this piece in The Australian: National Primary Curriculum Shifts Focus to Core Skills (paywall). Here’s a quote from Aussie Education Minister Christopher Pyne:

Mr Pyne said a “strong, robust and rigorous curriculum” was one of the most important factors in lifting student outcomes and promoting a quality education. He said the Abbott government was decluttering the curriculum in primary schools to give young students a “laser-like focus’’ on the core skills of literacy and numeracy.

Can’t help but wonder what will be lost to the “decluttering” process.

Contrast that to this description from Rob Riordan titled “Rigor Reconsidered” in the Spring edition of “Unboxed,” the High Tech High magazine:

This is where rigor resides—not in complexity of prescribed content, or persistence in meaningless tasks, but rather in the moment-to-moment decisions students and teachers make, and the dispositions and relationships they develop, as they pursue their interests and passions in the world. Luis and others like him challenge us to develop a new set of rules for rigor:

No rigor without engagement
No rigor without ownership
No rigor without exemplars
No rigor without audiences
No rigor without purpose
No rigor without dreams
No rigor without courage AND
No rigor without fun

I doubt that most policy makers like Australia’s Pyne would think about rigor in these terms, yet to me this aligns almost perfectly to what Seymour Papert used to call “hard fun.” I especially love this sentiment:

These rapidly changing times challenge educators to find areas of work that are hard in the right way: they must connect with the kids and also with the areas of knowledge, skills and (don’t let us forget) ethic adults will need for the future world.

When the task at hand has meaning for us, when we are interested in it, when it challenges us, that’s when “rigor” is useful. That’s when it becomes “hard fun” instead of just hard. For some reason, we seem loathe to accept a rigor of purpose to be the equal (or better) of the rigor of persistence. Not that both aren’t useful, but the former is where real, sticky learning lives.

On Teachers as Learners…

July 21, 2015 By Will Richardson

Seymour Papert on project based learning in 1991:

Again, one of my favorite little analogies: If I wanted to become a
better carpenter, I’d go find a good carpenter, and I’ll work with this
carpenter on doing carpentry or making things. And that’s how I’ll get
to be a better carpenter. So if I want to be a better learner, I’ll go
find somebody who’s a good learner and with this person do some
learning. But this is the opposite of what we do in our schools. We
don’t allow the teacher to do any learning. We don’t allow the kids to
have the experience of learning with the teacher because that’s
incompatible with the concept of the curriculum where what is being
taught is what’s already known.

First, this is just common sense, right? If we value kids becoming learners, then we should surround them with learners to apprentice with. But being a learner requires grappling with things that aren’t “already known.” (Whenever we talk about learning in my workshops someone always defines it as gaining new knowledge.) But teachers live 95% of the time in the “already known” because that’s the whole point of curriculum delivery. We know it, and now we’ve got to get them to know it.

Second, if kids becoming learners and teachers acting as learners isn’t what we value most in schools, we’ve got bigger problems than we think. Yet, how many put that at the forefront of their vision statements?

“Gone is the Era of the Lifetime Career”

July 13, 2015 By Will Richardson

Nick Hanauer & David Rolf:

The American middle class is facing an existential crisis. For more than three decades, declining wages, fraying benefits, and the rising costs of education, housing, and other essentials have stressed and squeezed middle-class Americans. But by far the biggest threat to middle-class workers—and to our economy as a whole—comes from the changing nature of employment itself.

Gone is the era of the lifetime career, let alone the lifelong job and the economic security that came with it, having been replaced by a new economy intent on recasting full-time employees into contractors, vendors, and temporary workers. It is an economic transformation that promises new efficiencies and greater flexibility for “employers” and “employees” alike, but which threatens to undermine the very foundation upon which middle-class America was built. And if the American middle class crumbles, so will an American economy that relies on consumer spending for 70 percent of its activity, and on a diverse and inclusive workforce for 100 percent of the innovation that drives all future prosperity.

I keep asking this question, but how many school boards or leadership teams are talking about this new reality when it comes to adding context to discussions regarding curriculum, technology, outcomes, assessments, etc.? No doubt, it’s very, very few.

Facebook is Not Ours. It’s Theirs.

June 23, 2015 By Will Richardson

David Weinberger:

For example, when blogging first blossomed, it was seen by its early enthusiasts not merely as a form of publishing but as a type of community-building. Our blog sites were our personal presence on the web, and we viewed ourselves as social. That’s why the “blogroll” was standard equipment on the early blogs; it was a list of blogs that constituted your bloggy neighborhood. You read those blogs, you commented on them, and they did the same to you. We supported one another emotionally, intellectually, and sometimes in the physical world.

The blogosphere did not scale. I believe that problem could have been solved. But then Facebook happened. In many ways, Facebook fulfilled the dream of blogging. It was fully social, came with sophisticated social-network maintenance tools, and was inviting even to those who didn’t like writing, didn’t have the free time to devote to it, and didn’t enjoy the self-assertion a daily blog requires. But my delight about Facebook is at best mixed for one crucial reason. We built the blogosphere ourselves. We wrote the posts, we linked to others, and what emerged was ours. At the time it stood in contrast to the content coming from the professional media. That content was written by them for us to consume. Blogs were ours.

Facebook is not ours. It’s theirs for us to use. Facebook is now a far better Roschian prototype of the Internet than old-fashioned blogs are. The fact that I resist that fact makes me a prototype of a sad old man…

If the new prototype of the Internet is not the Blogosphere but Facebook, then the argument that’s maintained me for 20 years has fallen apart. If users don’t come into contact with the Internet’s architecture, that architecture can’t shape them. If they instead deal almost exclusively with Facebook, then the conclusion of the Argument from Architecture ought to be that Facebook is shaping the values of its users. And Facebook’s values are not much like the Net’s.

I can’t tell you how much that first paragraph resonates. Things have changed.

Read the whole thing.

From PBL to PBW

June 11, 2015 By Will Richardson

Adam Davidson on the “Hollywood model” of business:

A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands. This short-term, project-based business structure is an alternative to the corporate model, in which capital is spent up front to build a business, which then hires workers for long-term, open-ended jobs that can last for years, even a lifetime…Our economy is in the midst of a grand shift toward the Hollywood model. More of us will see our working lives structured around short-term, project-based teams rather than long-term, open-ended jobs.

If you want a justification for Problem/Project Based Learning, there probably isn’t any better than this: increasingly our students are going to be doing problem/project based work in their professional lives. According to a new report from Accenture, one-third of US workers are already primarily temping or freelancing, and that number is expected to rise steeply in the next decade. More and more, permanent jobs that feature pensions and insurance and other traditional perks are falling away. The future of work is going to be characterized by constant change, constant inquiry, and constant learning self-organized by the “worker.”

You getting your students ready for that?

But it’s not enough to initiate PBL. Students have to work in flexible, fluid teams, collaborating and adapting as they find solutions and then tackle new problems. They need to be working on projects they care about, projects that have a real purpose in the world. Projects like the kids in the NuVu School are tackling in a “studio” (think “Hollywood”) process. (See this great overview from Susie Boss as well.) Problems and projects that are pursued within larger school cultures of inquiry and design.

More and more schools and classrooms and kids are doing PBL which is no doubt a good thing. But as always seems to be the case in schools, too much of it is still driven by curricular outcomes instead of student passions and real world relevance. If, as Dewey said, school should be real life, this modern definition of what work will look like for our kids better be a driving force behind our change discussions in schools.

14 Trends We Should Be Thinking About

May 28, 2015 By Will Richardson

Though not explicitly meant for education and educators, I always find Mary Meeker’s annual research on Internet trends to be an eye opener that has important information and implications for those of us thinking about the K-12 world of learning. While I urge you to click through all 197 slides, let me just note a couple of things that jumped out at me. Random, I know…

1. The percentage of time we spend on “vertical viewing” (primarily on our phones) is up to 29% as opposed to just 5% five years ago. We’re definitely moving to mobile, and our content is going to have to adjust.

2. User generated live streaming and gaming is growing 122% year to year. In other words, YouTube is moving to “NowTube.” (Oh joy!)

3. Four years worth of new reading material is posted by Wattpad authors every single day. And lots of those writers and readers are kids.

4. User-generated reviews and feedback are growing by 140% year over year. Future reputations will be built (or lost) by users, perhaps more than credentials or other traditional indicators of expertise.

5. Youth are driving the explosion of multimedia content shared on the Internet. That’s why among 12-24 year olds, Facebook is tanking while Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) and Snapchat are growing.

6. 87% of millennials say “My smartphone never leaves my side, day or night.” Now read that again.

7. 76% of millennials use their smartphones to post content to the Web.

8. Commercial drones are being used more widely than most people realize.

9. “Globalization/Structural Changes + Mobile Connectivity + Generational Shifts = Changing Ways Many People Work”

10. The percentage of employers offering retirement and health care programs is declining steadily.

11. 44% of millennials (21-32) are classified as “on demand” workers or freelancers, and that number is expected to increase moving forward. Now read that again.

12. Millennials are perceived to be (much) more narcissistic, open to change, creative, money driven, adaptable, and entrepreneurial but also less confident and team-oriented.

13. The most important thing to millennials is meaningful work, followed by money.

14. In total, 34% of the US workforce is now classified as “freelancers.” That number is growing quickly.

So, yeah…some of this probably suggests that our curriculum and practice is just a bit out of date, no?

Required: Living on the Edge

May 28, 2015 By Will Richardson

Harold Jarche:

Innovation comes from the edge, almost never from the centre. It is time to start creating the edge of the organization now. As organizations become more technologically networked, they also face skilled, motivated and intelligent workers who can now see systemic dysfunctions. But those who talk about these problems are often branded as rebels. Pitting rebels against the incumbent power-holders is detrimental to organizational learning. Instead, rebels should be allowed to move to the edge. With some additional help from native pathfinders, organizations can then learn to solve their own problems.

Change management then has to be seen as a way of working, not a separate process, and not an event. On the edges the answers will not be clear, but they will be less obscured than in the centre. A new partnership is needed, between current management on the inside, workers on the edges, and others living beyond the organizational edges. This can start by creating a trusted space away from the centre, funding it, and letting people start to work and learn anew. It’s like giving birth to a child, and will take time and a lot of nurturing. It’s also a bit of a leap of faith.

This speaks to school cultures as much as any other, but the problem is that innovation in classrooms is many times seen as experimenting on the kids. It’s a complex shift to make, requiring trust at its base that failures (which will inevitably occur) will be instructive, not catastrophic. But even more, it requires that everyone in the organization have a clear understanding and context as to why innovation is required and necessary. Part of the “rebels” job (and those that support them) is to constantly answer the “why” question.

My sense is that the answers to the why are becoming more and more compelling at the meta level. Making those answers relevant and effective at the local level is as much a part of the change as the innovation itself.

Thoughts?

From Master Teacher to Master Learner (Excerpt)

May 20, 2015 By Will Richardson

(The following is an excerpt from my new book From Master Teacher to Master Learner, which is just off the press!)

When we talk about transformation in schools, we too often forget what we know about good learning. Transformation is not about more technology, personalized learning, or flipped classrooms. It’s instead about rethinking our roles as teachers and the purposes of our classrooms. It’s first and foremost about creating the conditions under which our students can learn powerfully, productively, and freely, especially since so few of those conditions currently exist. And remember, we don’t need research to tell us this. We know this from our own experience as learners.

There is no question that in many cases, the very nature of schools works against these conditions. Schools in general are highly structured, committed to the curriculum, and are rooted in long-held narratives about what classrooms, teaching, and learning are supposed to look and feel like. We put kids in rows with the teacher at the front for the reason that, in the story of schools, teachers deliver the curriculum. We hand out As, Bs, Cs, and Fs because, well, the job of the teacher is to assess, to be the ultimate arbiter (aside from the state tests) of what a student has learned. And for those of you reading this who may want to argue that the narrative of teachers in classrooms is changing, answer these questions: Are you writing lesson plans? Are you marking papers and turning in grades? For the vast majority of teachers, the answer to both is still “yes.”

We had limited options in the old, scarce world in which we conceived the ideas of schools and school teachers. Due to time constraints (which we’re still under, by the way) we had to decide what should and shouldn’t be in the curriculum. (Remember, curriculum is just a guess, nothing more, at what we think every single child needs to know and be able to do to be successful in his or her life.) We opted for breadth over depth when it came to curriculum decisions. (How many of you have ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of material that you had to cover in your courses?) And because we chose breadth, we created the most efficient method to make sure we got through it all: age groupings, standardized assignments and assessments, clear scope and sequence, and more, most of which the teacher orchestrates.

Now, however, we find ourselves in a world of near ubiquitous, 24/7 access, with knowledge, information, experts, and tools at our fingertips. The limitations of scarcity that existed when schools were created are rapidly disappearing. This shift drives the need for transformation in schools and the need to rethink our roles in classrooms.

As mentioned before, transformation has little to do with giving every student a mobile Internet device. It has everything to do with changing the narrative of classrooms in response to these new affordances. In the abundant world in which we now find ourselves, transformation in schools must be about empowering learners to organize their own learning and about delving deeply into the subjects that interest them, to live on a “perpetual learning curve.” Those are the skills they need to be successful learners in their adult lives. The emphasis shifts from knowing to learning.

This is easier to write about than it is to enact. School structures and traditions almost exclusively aim at supporting the knowledge acquisition aspect of schooling. State and federal policies support it as well, not to mention standardized assessments. We must rethink almost every part of the architecture to effect systemwide change, from assessments to curriculum to aspirations for higher education and more.

And it would take a bit of courage. You see, achieving the traditional outcomes of schooling and preparing students for the modern world of learning are not mutually exclusive. Teachers who choose to let students pursue their own interests and go deeply into the things they care about within the context of the school-mandated curriculum report a shocking result: the kids are OK. In fact, they’re better than OK. They still pass the test, they still get into college, and importantly, they sustain high levels of engagement for learning. It’s just messier and, in many cases, uncomfortable at the outset.

If I’ve made a compelling enough argument that only students who are self-organized, persistent, patient learners can fully take advantage of the abundance at their fingertips, then it isn’t a stretch to suggest that teacher roles must change dramatically. Teachers must move their own practice in transformative ways toward a focus on learning, not knowing. That’s not to say that the need for knowing isn’t still important. (Though there’s a strong argument that there’s way too much curriculum to know.) But it does suggest that to best help our students become powerful learners in the modern world, they need teachers who are master learners as well.

(Used with permission. From From Master Teacher to Master Learner by Will Richardson. Copyright 2015 by Solution Tree Press, 555 North Morton Street, Bloomington, IN 47404, 800.733.6786, solution-tree.com. All rights reserved.)

What Making Across the Curriculum Means

May 17, 2015 By Will Richardson

Gary Stager:

When school leaders tell me “our school is building a $25 million Makerspace,” I am concerned that Makerspaces may exacerbate educational iniquity. While there are expensive pieces of hardware that may need to be secured, I want the bulk of making to permeate every corner of a school building and every minute of the school day. Teachers whose Makerspace is in a few cardboard boxes are doing brilliant work. Making across the curriculum means students as novelists, mathematicians, historians, composers, artists, engineers–rather than being the recipient of instruction.

Much in the way that schools have spent tons of money on iPads and Chromebooks that have changed little in terms of the culture of learning or in the agency and autonomy kids in classrooms have to learn in classrooms, the same danger exists for Makerspaces. As Gary says, making is a “stance.” It’s a way of thinking about learning and schooling, not something that suddenly happens because of new technologies.

Why it’s so difficult for schools to put vision and philosophy ahead of tools and tech escapes me.

What We Really Need

May 15, 2015 By Will Richardson

Jordan Shapiro:

We need a cultural shift in how we think about what it means to learn because we’re shifting what you need to learn. Our society is changing in crazy, enormous ways now and in ways we don’t fully understand. This is one of the things that drives me crazy about the whole ed conversation: Instead of us having a conversation about what kind of society do we want to see for the next generation and how do we educate kids for that outcome, we’re assuming that we all agree on what they need to learn and then finding these utilitarian solutions to try to execute that.

Amen.

Learning with #Rhizo15

April 28, 2015 By Will Richardson

I’ve been a fan of Dave Cormier’s work for a long time (eons, in fact, in blog years), and I’ve been following his thinking around Rhizomatic Learning with a great deal of interest. The idea that learning follows different, unpredictable pathways just like the roots of a plant, and that those pathways oftentimes intersect with the learning roots of others is an apt and workable metaphor for the way I’ve come to think about what’s possible for learning in the access rich world many of us now inhabit. Even without the Web, the metaphor works. But no question, the internet amplifies the opportunities to learn with others in personally meaningful, unplanned, self-organized ways.

Dave’s cMOOC “Rhizo15” kicked off last week, and I’ve spent the better part of the day reading and trying to catch up with the conversations so far. As you can guess, it’s less a “course” than it is a quickly expanding pool of conversations and resources that center, for now, on the topic of how learning happens and on how we as learners make sense of an ever expanding pool of conversations and resources that are there for the picking. And it’s hard.

It’s hard because no one’s telling me what to read or when to read it.
It’s hard because there’s no one text, no central collection place for ALL the associated thinking with the course.
It’s hard because I worry about what I’m missing.
It’s hard because there are no due dates.
It’s hard because I don’t know if I’m doing it “right.”
It’s hard because despite the fact that I’ve been learning online informally for almost 15 years, I still have a lot of “old school” baggage built in when I hear the “course.” (By the way, if you want a lesson in how long it takes to unlearn old habits, watch this.)

In other words, “rhizomatic learning” is all about me, what I choose to read, when I choose to read it, whether I choose to respond, how I choose to respond, what I choose to create and share, who I choose to connect with, and so on. I have complete autonomy and agency in the process. I can “quit” any time I like.

This week’s challenge from Dave is to see learning as a “non counting noun.” He says learning “is not something we should think about counting, it’s not something we should worry about counting” and that trying to measure learning “doesn’t make any sense any more.” Yet, he asks, “What are we going to measure? What can we measure?”

I can’t help (again) to harken back to Seymour Sarason and his definition of “productive learning.” Simply put, productive learning is when “the learning process is one which and engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more. Absent wanting to learn, the learning context is unproductive or counterproductive.” (See page X.)

So for me, that’s what I’ll be measuring. Do the interactions in #rhizo15 make me want to learn more? I know that’s going to be driven in large part by my own investment initially, to find those conversations and resources that keep me engaged, keep me coming back. And those are all based on my own “learning subjectives,” as Dave calls them. (“Objectives” are too concrete for this work.) Those questions that I want to answer as I dig around the roots. Questions like:

What changes do learners experience as they move from straight line learning to roots and shoots learning?
What new literacies are required to, as NCTE suggests, “manage, analyze, and synthesize [the] multiple streams of simultaneous information” that the “course” will no doubt supply?
And, maybe most pressing, how can we down here in the K-12 world embrace some of these new learning contexts in our work to prepare our students for their own “Rhizo15” like journeys?

Much to learn, no doubt. Up to me to learn it.

Imagining a World Without…

April 22, 2015 By Will Richardson

Tom Hawking:

What happens when machines start squeezing out the middle class, though? It’s already happening; I can easily book an airline ticket without a travel agent, for instance, something that would have been a massive pain in the ass 25 years ago. If I had the cash to buy stock, I could happily do so without a stockbroker. What happens when the job you went to college for ends up being done by a piece of software that can do it faster than you can? What happens when the surgery you need can be performed more reliably by a machine than a doctor who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a college education? What happens when I can walk into a shop off the street, get cheap laser eye surgery from a machine and dispense with the need for optometrists forever? What happens when someone creates software that can read and synthesize more thought about the nature of capitalism than I ever could, and suddenly it’s that machine writing this essay instead of me?

And, of course, what happens when adaptive software or a game can teach enough content and skills to pass the test? Does the role of the teacher go away, or does it change?

Education and an “Informed Democracy”

April 19, 2015 By Will Richardson

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

The issue here is not what politicians do because the electorate votes them into office. So what does it mean to complain about what politicians do? We should complain about what the electorate does. I’m an educator, so I see it as one of my duties, especially as a science educator, to alert people of what science is and how it works. About what it means for there to be an objective truth that we would then act upon.

You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t. If you want to lean in a political way because that’s your politics, you should do that based on an objective truth rather than cherry-picking science before you even land at an objective truth. You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t.

So I’m not blaming the electorate in that sense. I’m blaming an educational system that is not positioned to educate an electorate such that they can make informed decisions in this, the 21st century, where informed decisions based on objective scientific truths will play a fundamental role in what kind of society we create for ourselves. [Emphasis mine]

In another part of the interview, deGrasse Tyson says that politicians denying science is the “beginning of the end of an informed democracy.” Ted Cruz saying that he’s not worried about climate change because he saw a lot of snow and ice on a recent visit to New Hampshire suggests we’re well on our way down tht road.

Sure, the CCSS wants to promote and measure critical thinking skills. But the CCSS wants that to happen in the context of contrived situations within an increasingly irrelevant curriculum that most kids don’t care about and will forget as soon as the test is over. Applying those “skills” to the complexities of real life situations doesn’t much transfer if you don’t care about what you’re thinking critically about in the first place.

Give kids the freedom to make “informed decisions” about things they care about, real things in the real world, things that probably aren’t in the standards or on the test, and we’ll get a lot farther down the road to preserving what’s left of this experiment in democracy.

“Eroding our Foundation”

April 11, 2015 By Will Richardson

Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron:

Waves of technology are eroding our foundation. They threaten our traditional journalistic home. Survival dictates we move. And we have to move quickly.

This is what I’ll call the Big Move. As we make this move, the first casualty is sentiment. The forces at work don’t care about how we prefer to do our jobs, how easily we adjust to change, how much we have to learn. They don’t care about any extra workload.

This transformation is going to happen no matter what. And there is only one realistic choice available: We can do what we must to adapt and – ideally – thrive. Or not — in which case we are choosing to fail…And for those who resist the change rather than embrace it, there will be no forbearance or forgiveness. Their destiny is to be pushed aside and forgotten. That is the brutal truth.

Replace “journalistic” with “education” and…

Those of you who have stopped by here over the years know that I’m drawn to quotes like these. I think it’s interesting when one of the top dogs at one of the top newspapers in the world basically says “change or die.”

I’ve got degrees in both journalism and education, and I can’t help but see the parallels in how each is or will be affected by these “waves of technology.” The only difference is the timing. Journalism’s foundations are eroding more quickly and at a larger scale because of its vulnerability to market forces more than anything else. In education, while the market forces are certainly growing, we’re more captive and bound by long-standing narratives (and structures and policies and nostalgia) that are harder to push apart. Our customers, by and large, can’t easily move to a new provider.

Yet.

As Jeb Bush and his business driven posse finish up another “summit” on education in Arizona, it’s clear the options are expanding, and those options are being fueled by “waves of technology.” And those forces don’t care how teachers prefer to do their jobs, or how easy it will be for them to change. They’ll just be collateral damage.

Importantly, however, the market forces in education are still mostly aimed at delivering the same product in a “better” way as defined by legacy assessments. They’re not focused on developing the learner over developing the knower because the latter is easier to quantify. That, to me, is an opportunity.

We can choose to believe that this transformation isn’t coming for us. I believe otherwise. Put simply, if we don’t start writing and articulating and advocating for a more relevant vision for learning, and if we don’t start creating a more relevant classroom experience for kids, we are choosing to fail.

On Secret-Keeping and Forgetting

April 9, 2015 By Will Richardson

Leon Bottstein, the president of Bard College:

But in the context of today’s disenchantment with the public sphere, what can a school-trained citizen do? Merely compete in the marketplace? Work for Google? What actually defines the public sphere today is not the government and Congress, but Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Conspiracy theorists when I was young pointed to the presence of socialists and communists who were said to undermine our system of values. Fear seemed reasonable in the Cold War and under the threat of nuclear war. The line between fear and paranoia was thin indeed. Fear was plausible.

But the people who frighten me and undermine the public sphere today are not terrorists and ideologues interested in overthrowing the government; they are not even those who work for the U.S. government within the NSA or the CIA. Rather, I’m afraid of the very large corporate giants that control our access to information, regulate our private lives by providing social networks—a platform for deceptive intimacy—and monitor every move we make in life and preserve a record of every message, thereby rendering secret-keeping and forgetting—two essential human experiences—impossible.

Two points. I’m guessing maybe 1.8% of our students are engaging in conversations around issues like these in school with people who can help them understand and contextualize the realities of the new world. And second, you are hereby required to read the whole essay. Bottstein is one of my favorite thinkers and writers who stretches me always.

Can We Talk About Change Without Hurting Feelings?

March 24, 2015 By Will Richardson

“Last night, George Couros Tweeted this:

“I think when we say things like ‘school is broken’ it really demeans the hard work of so many educators who make school awesome everyday.”

As I would have expected, it was retweeted and favorited widely. The sentiment is, of course, that the failures of schools, perceived or real, shouldn’t be ascribed to the teachers who work with our kids every day. As George suggests, there are a great number of caring, smart, hard working adults in schools around the world who are trying to make school “the best seven-hours of a kids day” as my friend Gary Stager puts it.

What I can’t read in that Tweet is to what extent George feels schools are in fact “broken,” if he feels that way at all. And if they are failing in some aspects, is it possible to say that without “demeaning” the people that work in them?

As someone who finds the experience of traditional schooling to be increasingly out of step with the real world, and as someone who has come to believe that schools actually are “broken” in many ways, how do I write and speak about those viewpoints without being heard or read as hurtful or demeaning to educators in schools? Is that possible?

And if schools are in fact “broken” in either large or small ways, are we to hold all teachers blameless for that? Really?

Responses to George’s Tweet ran from sentiments like it’s easier to say it’s broken than to be a part of the solution, to the system is flawed and teachers struggle within it, to moving the rhetoric away from schools altogther and to put the blame squarely on the system.

I feel a tension underneath all of this that makes this conversation difficult. First, the definitions of “broken” and the concomitant “solutions” are so all over the place that it’s hard to even know what we’re talking about here. I think the fact that only 44% of our kids reporting engagement in high school strongly suggests “broken.” I think the difference of educational opportunities for the kids in Camden vs. the kids at Lawrenceville Prep is “broken.” I think spending an inordinate amount of time on curriculum that will soon be forgotten, curriculum that most kids don’t care about despite our best efforts to make them care, curriculum that then gets assessed in ways that really don’t show if kids can actually apply it and is used to evaluate teachers in a blatantly unfair way…all of that is “broken.” Among the solutions, I think we need to get rid of most of the stuff we currently teach and, instead, create classrooms where kids have more freedom and agency to pursue the things they are most interested or passionate to learn. And I think we have to fundamentally redefine the roles of the adults who share space with kids in school.

Others will disagree. Their versions of “broken” may be much less extreme than mine. Their solutions less radical or progressive. And that’s absolutely fine. Let’s talk and debate and listen.

But what might be most “broken” is the idea that we can’t have these conversations around change, conversations that push a re-examination and re-evaluation of the fundamental functions of schools and classrooms and teachers, that we can’t talk about that openly and honestly because we might offend some of those caring, smart, hard working adults in schools who may take those conversations personally. That any negative descriptor for the school experience can’t be used because it might be found demeaning.

If the two are inseparable, then we better be fully ok with the status quo.

Josh Stumpenhort, one of those responding to George, Tweeted the “System is not broken. Just in need of a revolution. :)”

Last time I checked, revolutions aren’t painless.

The Corruption of Learning

February 4, 2015 By Will Richardson

Frank Smith in The Book of Learning and Forgetting:

The widespread propagation of the “official theory of learning” [that learning is hard work] is not so much a conspiracy as a massive manifestation of self-interest by special-interest groups outside schools. The belief has been fostered by academic psychology, uncritically adopted in education, and vigorously promoted by people who would like to control what students and teachers do in schools–often to make a profit in the bargain. The idea has been around long enough–just more than 100 years–to have become widely accepted as common sense, natural, the way things have to be. And the official theory is wrong. It creates frustration and wasted effort in our personal lives and futility and discrimination in schools. It is a crippling belief that fosters some of the worst social attitudes that afflict our society.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on my own learning, thinking about what I’ve learned, what I’ve forgotten, and why. It’s reflecting that I wish I had been doing 30 years ago when I first came to teaching, and on one level I’m ashamed that it’s taken me so long to understand the natural dissonance between traditional schooling and learning. It’s not that I didn’t know it in my gut…I am, after all, a product of school…it’s that I let the narrative of school learning dominate my own experience and practice. And in my last few workshops as I’ve prodded people about their own experiences as learners, I’ve come to realize that most others in education feel the same disconnect but feel powerless to act to change it in their classrooms.

All of which resonates with a great Seymour Papert quote from The Children’s Machine:

“When it comes to thinking about learning, nearly all of us have a School side of the brain, which thinks that school is the only natural way to learn, and a personal side that knows perfectly well that it’s not.“

The unfortunate reality is that natural learning, what Smith calls the "classic theory of learning” that suggests, rightly, that “we learn effortlessly, every waking moment of our lives” has been rendered irrelevant by the dominant narrative that learning is onerous and requires sustained, conscious effort. (It certainly does if you don’t care about what you are being asked to learn.) And it is about control, as I recently was reminded by an experience with my own kids. Without going into detail, one of my darlings made a poor yet basically harmless decision which met with harsh consequences from the school. But, as is often the case, my child learned more from the actions of the punisher than she did from the punishment. Effortlessly, I might add.

The biggest challenge facing schools is that the modern world amplifies our ability to learn in the classic sense, and increasingly renders the official, school based theory of learning pointless and oppressive. While our kids’ love of learning can flourish outside of school, it’s extinguished inside of school as we take away agency, passion, connection, audience, authenticity, and more.

How long can that stand?

Oh, The Irony

January 9, 2015 By Will Richardson

Richard Elmore:

While learning has largely escaped the boundaries of institutionalized schooling, educational reformers have for the past thirty years or so deliberately and systematically engaged in public policy choices that make schools less and less capable of responding to the movement of learning into society at large.

Standards and expectations have become more and more literal and highly prescriptive in an age where human beings will be exercising more and more choice over what and how they will learn.

Testing and assessment practices have become more and more conventional and narrow as the range of competencies required to negotiate digital culture has become more complex and highly variegated.

Teacher preparation, hiring, induction, and evaluation practices have become more and more rigid and hierarchical in an age where the teaching function is migrating out into a more individualized and tailored set of learning environments.

We are continuing to invest massively in hard-boundary physical structures in an age where learning is moving into mobile, flexible, and networked relationships.

In other words, it would be hard to imagine an institutional structure for learning that is less suited for the future than the heavily institutionalized, hierarchical world that education reformers have constructed. [Emphasis mine]

Elmore takes no prisoners. Read the whole thing.

“Schooling is Not a Natural Act”

December 4, 2014 By Will Richardson

Seymour Papert writing in The Children’s Machine in 1993:

Schooling is not a natural act. Quite the contrary: The institution of School, with its daily lesson plans, fixed curriculum, standardized tests, and other such paraphernalia tends constantly to reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of technician. Of course, it never fully succeeds, for teachers resist the role of technician and bring warm, natural human relationships into classrooms. But what is important for thinking about the potential for megachange is that this situation places the teacher in a sense of tension between two poles: School tries to make the teacher into a technician; in most cases, a sense of self resists, though in many the teacher will have internalized the School’s concept of teaching. Each teacher is therefore somewhere along the continuum between technician and what I dare call a true teacher.

The central issue of change in education is the tension between technicalizing and not technicalizing, and here the teacher occupies the fulcrum position.

Not since the printing press has there been so great a surge in the potential to boost technicalized learning. But there is also another side: Paradoxically, the same technology has the potential to detechnicalize learning. Were this to happen, I would count it as a far larger change than the appearance on every desk of a computer programmed to lead the student through the paces of the same old curriculum. But it is not necessary to quibble about which change is more far-reaching. What is necessary is to recognize that the great issue in the future of education is whether technology will strengthen or undermine the technicalness of what has become the theoretical model, and to a large extent the reality of School. My paradoxical argument is that technology can support megachange in education as far-reaching as what we have seen in medicine, but it will do this through a process directly opposite to what has driven change in modern medicine. Medicine has changed by becoming more and more technical in its nature; in education, change will come by using technical means to shuck off the technical nature of School learning.”

If we’re not there yet, I think we’re very close to the inflection point on whether or not schools will become more or less “technical” due to technology. Unfortunately for kids, there’s more money to be made in “personalizing,” in leading the student through the paces of the curriculum rather than seeing technology as a way to enhance all kids’ freedom to learn. There are dozens of layers to all of this, obviously, but Papert’s articulation of the choice in front of us resonates deeply.

You Have Been Warned

December 1, 2014 By Will Richardson

From Audrey Watters ebook “The Monsters of Education Technology,” now on sale in various forms for $4.99 and worth every penny:

As Cassandra, I must warn you that education technology’s monstrosity will bring about our doom. Education technology is the Trojan Horse poised to dismantle public education, to outsource and unbundle and disrupt and destroy. Those who will tell you that education technology promises personalization don’t actually care about student autonomy or agency. They want surveillance, standardization, and control. You have been warned.

This collection of 14 lectures/keynotes that Audrey gave in 2014 is required reading for anyone interested in being more fully informed and aware of the histories of ed tech and the current motivations of those building the latest tools and services for “learning” in schools. I don’t agree with everything Audrey says in these essays, but I have come around to the view that we in the education space are now in real danger of losing what is best about public schools and schools in general. The danger comes not just from those who seek to co-opt the language and story of education and learning and schooling for their own profits, something they are doing very well, btw. Sadly, it also comes from our own ignorance about learning, what it means to learn, what it takes to learn, and what we believe our roles in kids’ learning lives to be.

Recently, I asked a roomful of about 150 administrators how many of them regularly set aside time to talk about and reflect on and articulate their beliefs of how kids learn, and how that is changing in the context of technology and the Web. About 10 hands went up. Yet when I asked them how many were having regular, ongoing discussions around technologies and services plans for their classrooms, over 100 hands went up.

The two are not separate. We cannot think critically and make great decisions about ed tech for our students if we don’t make learning the starting point. And we can’t make learning the starting point in a relevant way if we have no evolving, articulated belief around what learning looks like in a modern context.

Ed tech is not all evil. Ed tech can be a powerful amplifier for productive learning. But ed tech in a vacuum pushes hard against much of what progressive educators believe schools should and can be. It’s about increasing dependence rather than increasing freedom. With billions of dollars on the table, those desiring the former are highly motivated.

The question for us now is, how highly motivated are we to fight back?

The fight begins with knowledge and context. Read Audrey’s keynotes. Read The Children’s Machine by Seymour Papert. Read And What Do You Mean by Learning? by Seymour Sarason. Read How Children Learn by John Holt. Read and discuss and figure out what you believe about learning and the role school now plays in that. And state that belief aloud.

And then talk about ed tech.