learning Archives - Will Richardson

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

April 23, 2020 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

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.

A New Phase

February 3, 2020 By Will Richardson 1 Comment

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.

On Learning and Common Sense

October 11, 2017 By Will Richardson 4 Comments

As I continue my trek through some of the “classics” regarding learning and schools, I’m finding it interesting the belief systems that many authors take pains to articulate when it comes to answering my current favorite question “What do you mean by learning?” And while there are some similar overtones, to be sure, each comes at it a bit differently.

Carl Rogers, best known as a psychotherapist who championed “client-centered therapy,” was also a vocal advocate for one of today’s most prevalent edu phrases, “student-centered learning.” And this was 50+ years ago.

Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become is Rogers’ most focused work on education. It highlights the stories of three different teachers at the outset and their work to create conditions in their classrooms where students had a great deal of agency over the what and how of the learning they were doing. The stories are not unlike those you read from a number of schools who are currently reimagining what their practice in classrooms looks like. Later, Rogers goes into the practical aspects of facilitating classes like these, and dives into the types of relationships that teachers and students must have in order to develop kids as learners.

To that end, Rogers’ principles for learning interest me and resonate to a great degree:

Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning. They are curious about their world, until and unless this curiosity is blunted by their experience in our educational system.
Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
Learning which involves a change in self organization—in the perception of oneself—is threatening and tends to be resisted.
Those learnings which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
When threat to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
Much significant learning is acquired through doing. Placing the student in direct experiential confrontation with practical problems, social problems, ethical and philosophical problems, personal issues, and research problems, is one of the most effective modes of promoting learning
Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process. When he chooses his own directions, helps to discover his own learning resources, formulates his own problems, decides his own course of action, lives with the consequences of these choices, then significant learning is maximized
Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner—feelings as wells as intellect—is the most lasting and pervasive.
Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance. If a child is to grow up to be independent and self reliant he must be given opportunities at an early age not only to make his own judgments and his own mistakes but to evaluate the consequences of these judgments and choices
The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change. If our present culture survives it will be because we have been able to develop individuals for whom change is the central fact of life and who have been able to live comfortably with this central fact

Much to unpack in that, but as I said earlier, almost all of it resonates with my own thinking and that of others I’ve read. A couple of specific comments.

First, in my work with leadership, I see the resistance alluded to in #3 all the time. Robert Evans calls it the difference between “first-order changes” which deal try to improve the “efficiency or effectiveness of what we are already doing,” and “second-order changes,” which are “systemic in nature and aim to modify the very way an organization is put together, altering its assumptions, goals, structures, roles, and norms.” Substitute “individual” for “organization” in that last sentence as well. Very few leaders in my experience are willing to level up to take on with seriousness those second-order changes.

The whole “external threat” aspect of learning Rogers talks about in #4 and #5 is a huge barrier to learning, and change. Federal and state governments have placed explicit threats on schools and teachers, which in turn tempers their ability to learn. (And yes, we need schools that learn.) It also speaks to the way we currently assess our kids and the consequences of “failure” that we place on them. Deep learning can be uncomfortable, and absent a supportive, nurturing environment, it does not flourish.

In #7, I love how Rogers uses the word “responsibly” and the stark distinction between his use of the word and the way it’s most often applied in schools. There, being “responsible” means acceding to the demands and norms of the system, as in do your homework, be on time, don’t cause a ruckus, etc. To Rogers, however, it means using freedom and agency to pursue personal learning in depth. Shifting the way we think about the word in schools would be a “second-order change,” no?

Finally, the one that resonates the most is undoubtedly the last. But it’s not just the goal of we the adults developing “individuals for whom change is the central fact of life.” It’s that we adults, especially in education, have to become those individuals ourselves. As much as schools have changed over the past 100 years, and they have changed a lot, present day school cultures are still resistant to change. It only happens when it has to, as a reaction to external edicts or pressures. I see little evidence of school cultures that embrace change, and act proactively to learn through it.

As with most of these lists of principles or beliefs, there’s little here that belies common sense.

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

March 17, 2016 By Will Richardson 1 Comment

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.

“Social Media Are a Trap”

February 22, 2016 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

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 Ability to be Taught

January 23, 2016 By Will Richardson Leave a Comment

“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.

Simple, Complicated, Complex

December 15, 2015 By Will Richardson

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…

Where Are You Going?

November 25, 2015 By Will Richardson

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…

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?

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.)

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.

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?

“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.

Teachers “Showing Up” as Students

November 10, 2014 By Will Richardson

Jesse Stommel:

Learning is always a risk. It means, quite literally, opening ourselves to new ideas, new ways of thinking. It means challenging ourselves to engage the world differently. It means taking a leap, which is always done better from a sturdy foundation. This foundation depends on trust — trust that the ground will not give way beneath us, trust for teachers, and trust for our fellow learners in a learning community…

…Connected learning depends, then, not just on agency but also on generosity. In my classrooms (physical, virtual, or some mixture of both), I work extremely hard to keep my own expectations from being the fuel that makes everything go. My only real expectation as a teacher in a learning environment is that students don’t look to me for approval but take full ownership of their own learning. And I work to develop trust by showing up as a student myself.

Pedagogical generosity is about making gaps in our work, space for the burgeoning expertise of other scholars and students to fill. It’s about advocacy, guarding space for growing expertise, dialogue, discovery, and disobedience.

Read the whole thing. Some excellent thinking on the changing role of the teacher in a connected world.

“Completely Inadequate or Outright Mistaken”

September 20, 2014 By Will Richardson

Some Saturday morning musings, 50-year-old musings I might add, from John Holt in How Children Learn:

We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely understand ourselves…

Only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged. They use their minds not to learn but to get out of doing the things we tell them to do–to make them learn. In the short run, these strategies seem to work. They make it possible for many children to get through their schooling even though they learn very little. But in the long run, these strategies are self-limiting and self-defeating, and destroy both character and intelligence. The children who use such strategies are prevented by them from growing into more than limited versions of the human beings they might have become. This is the real failure that takes place in school; hardly any children escape.

When we better understand the ways, conditions, and spirit in which children do their best learning, and are able to make school into a place where they can use and improve the style of thinking and learning natural to them, we may be able to prevent much of this failure. School may then become a place in which all children grow, not just in size, not even in knowledge, but in curiosity, courage, confidence, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, patience, competence, and understanding. To find how to do this best will take us a long time. We may find, in fifty or a hundred years that all of what we think of as our most up-to-date notions about schools, teaching and learning are either completely inadequate or outright mistaken. But we will make a big step forward if, by understanding children better, we can undo some of the harm we are now doing. [Emphasis mine.]

Here we are, 50 years later, and we may just now be beginning to challenge the fundamental premise of the institution. More smart, passionate educators are acknowledging the uncomfortable realities of teaching and leading in systems that feel increasingly obsolete and irrelevant to the modern world.

So, what if we’ve got it wrong? What if the efficiencies we’ve built in to the current design of schools, the age-groupings, the disciplines, the standardized assessments, the best-guess curriculum…what if all those things are now “inadequate” or “mistaken?”

By the way, none of those efficiencies come up when I ask educators “What are the conditions necessary for children to learn most deeply and powerfully?” Yet the disconnect between the answers we give and the realities of the classroom is acute.

Expansion of Learning vs. Limits of Structures

September 17, 2014 By Will Richardson

Randy Bass:

Our understanding of learning has expanded at a rate that has far outpaced our conceptions of teaching. A growing appreciation for the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience, along with the power of social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts, has created not only promising changes in learning but also disruptive moments in teaching.

And

Now, fifteen-plus years into that shift, our understanding of learning is expanding in ways that are at least partially incompatible with the structures of higher education institutions. In addition, these developments are occurring at the same time that higher education is being asked to become more accountable for what students are learning. Ironically, these pressures for accountability are making us simultaneously more thoughtful and more limited in what we count as learning. The question that campus leaders need to address is how to reinvent a curriculum that lives in this new space.

Can the same be said for the structures of K-12?

19 Back to School Questions for Leaders

September 1, 2014 By Will Richardson

School starts on Wednesday, and here are some questions that I’d love my school’s leaders to answer. None of these were answered in the “Back to School” packets.

What is the mission and vision for teaching and learning that guides your work? In other words, what are your stated intents for my kids’ school experience, and what pedagogies, practices, and principles guide you to those outcomes?

How were your mission and vision formed?

What is the last book you read about learning?

Under what conditions do you feel children (or anyone, for that matter) learn most effectively?

What conversations are ongoing at a leadership level around how to best create those conditions?

What are the biggest challenges you face in educating my children? How are you trying to meet them?

What research around children and learning have you read recently that has impacted your thinking about our school?

How have you changed as a learner in the last five years?

How are you modeling your own personal learning practice for the school community?

Currently, who are your most influential teachers? Why?

How do you use technology to learn?

What was the last artifact of your own learning that you created with technology?

What expectations do you have for your teachers’ use of technology in their own learning?

What expectations do you have for your teachers’ use of technology in the classroom?

What are your thoughts on the relevance of the current system of schooling in the United States?

How do we best assess student learning?

As a parent, what do I need to know about the current realities of higher education?

As a parent, what do I need to know about the future of work?

As a parent, how is my kids’ school also my school?

Feel free to make this an even 20 in the comments.

A Great School

August 21, 2014 By Will Richardson

Angelo Patri, writing in A Schoolmaster of the Great City in 1917:

The great school is one that preserves its life, dignifies it, holds itself responsible for the neighborhood and compels the neighborhood to rise to its highest level.

Unless a school enters deeply into the lives of the people, that school will not enter deeply into the lives of the children or into the lives of the teachers. Unless the school is the great democratic socializing agency, it is nothing at all.

Gary Stager had referenced this book to me on a number of occasions, saying that Patri solved all the problems of current schooling almost 100 years ago. After reading it on the plane ride home from my trip to Australia, I have to agree. This is a quick, eloquent, relevant read on lots of levels. At it’s heart, it’s about loving kids, about putting their welfare above all else, about really understanding how kids learn and how schools can best help them learn.

If you’re an educator, this would be a great way to start thinking about the new school year.

The Best Time EVER to Begin

August 12, 2014 By Will Richardson

What if we said the following to all of our students on opening day of school, and them committed ourselves to helping them invent, innovate, iterate, and make a positive imapact on the world?

Kevin Kelly:

So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now. Right now, this minute. This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh to have been alive and well back then!”

The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. However the coolest stuff has not been invented yet — although this new greatness will not be more of the same-same that exists today. It will not be merely “better,” it will different, beyond, any other. But you knew that.

What you may not have realized is that today truly is a wide open frontier. It is the best time EVER in human history to begin.

Sure, we educators have to believe this version of the future for ourselves. But can we take a serious look at the amazing innovation of even the last 15 years and not think that it’s only just the start? That the opportunities for kids who are tinkerers and playful, continual learners are unprecendented in our history as a species?

More and more teachers and classrooms and, in some cases, schools are waking up to this reality. But our collective sense of the Internet filled world and it’s opportunities for learners is still painfully slow to evolve. The vast majority of educators and decision makers are still about “better.” But what’s coming is “different, beyond any other."

I believe that. You?

“Learning is What You Do to Yourself”

July 10, 2014 By Will Richardson

Joi Ito, head of the MIT Media Lab:

I’m a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself.

And it feels like, and I’m biased, it feels like they’re trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I’ve got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you’re going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you’re always going to be connected, you’re always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn…

…So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it’s about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.

How do we learn to learn what we need to learn when we need to learn it with the people who can best help us learn it?

Schools at the Crossroads

July 7, 2014 By Will Richardson

John Hagel, from his “A 21st Century Global Declaration of Independence:”

We find ourselves now at a crossroads in history. The institutions – commercial, educational, political and civic – that we created in an earlier era in an effort to expand our potential have now become increasingly significant barriers to progress. It is not surprising that our trust in these institutions is plummeting around the world. We see so much opportunity and yet the institutions that are supposed to be helping us are increasingly standing in our way.

It’s not schools themselves, obviously, that stand in the way of progress. It’s our nostalgia for what schools are supposed to be. It’s our lack of a modern context for developing a vision for what schools might become.

Saturday, I asked 500 or so school trustees from across Canada this question: “How can you make relevant decisions about curriculum, budget, technology, assessments, staffing, infrastructure, pedagogy, scheduling, support and all the other things you deal with on a daily basis if you yourselves are not powerful, connected learners with technology in a modern context?” I’m not saying that those folks weren’t trying their best to serve the kids in their boards. I’m also not saying that their current decisions are all terrible. But, to paraphrase Gary Stager, you can’t make relevant decisions about 21st Century learners if you haven’t learned in this century.

As I’ve noted before, the rhetoric coming out of Canada is pretty “enlightened” if you will. The British Columbia Ed Plan says

Our education system is based on a model of learning from a different century. To change that, we need to put students at the centre of their own education.

Ontario’s Vision for Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age states

The new role of education is to ensure all students have the opportunity to use their interests and passions to connect to all areas of knowledge.

And in “Inspiring Education,” the Ministry in Alberta writes

To achieve their full potential as expressed in the vision children must be the centre of all decisions related to learning and the overall education system.

As with anything the devil is in the details. I can’t help wonder, at the end, how much of the rhetoric actually translates into practice. I wonder, for instance, how much students will truly be allowed to organize their own learning and pursue their passions in ways that actually create a new narrative for schooling as opposed to simply tweak our nostalgia.

Reagrdless, the rhetoric of “progress” grows more interesting by the day…

Interest Powered Curriculum

June 30, 2014 By Will Richardson

From Howard Rheingold:

The PSII website illustrates for prospective students the differences between traditional and PSII curricula: where traditional schools cover subjects, PSII uncovers them. Curriculum is built on learners’ personal interests in close relationship with teachers who aim to nudge more than assign. Personal learning paths for each student are co-created between learners and teachers; “learning is based in valued human attributes, then competencies, then personal and universal learning goals.” Instead of grouping learners by age/grade levels, they are grouped in whatever configurations make sense — sometimes by similarity, sometimes by difference, sometimes by interest. “Learners are encouraged to develop real projects, based on their own inquiries.” Online networks and forums are employed when appropriate, in addition to face-to-face learning. “Personal health plans” replace traditional PE.