Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

The Anti-Education Era

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James Paul Gee from the introduction of The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students Through Digital Learning:

This book is about what it means to be smart and to be a fully awake participant in our high-risk global world in the twenty-first century. It is about what parents ought to do to forestall their children becoming victims in that high-risk world. The book is about how to think about the future before we humans don’t have one. We need to save our children and ourselves from the sorts of human stupidity to which we are all prone, but that are now way too dangerous to indulge in. To have a future we need to start exercising our smart side more, a side that today’s schools, colleges, and media have too often put to sleep.

Reading…

Testing Kindergartners

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So during vacation it apparently came out that a new Obama edu-initiative appeared, called by some “Race to the Top for Tots.” You guessed it…we’re now going to be giving money to states who can show that it’s preschoolers are test ready for elementary school. Cooper Zale has a great reflection on this fact that ties in nicely to the research that I cited in my post here yesterday. The absurdity continues:

But my fear is that in our instructional obsession (including a focus on a drill and test approach to ensure that instruction “sticks” at least until after the test), state funded and regulated preschool programs will be pushed in the direction of teaching to the test, which I believe would do a great disservice to our kids’ healthy development.  “Kindergarten readiness tests” are one thing if they are a low-stakes assessment for parents and other adults that work with the kid.  They are quite another thing when they become a high-stakes assessment by the state of which preschool programs will receive or not receive funding.

If as I fear it becomes a high-stakes situation, adult preschool staff are highly likely to increase their efforts to direct children’s play more, while the study I cited above says that children’s development is generally facilitated by directing their play less.  Even now, from my anecdotal experience, I’m concerned that many parents, childcare providers and teachers are way too directive when it comes to children’s skill development.

And it’s already happening. In this piece by Milwaukee kindergarten teacher Kelly McMahon in Rethinking Schools from a year ago (reg. req.), she recounts the number of tests that her 5-year-olds took in the 08-09 school year. 

  • Milwaukee Public Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kindergarten Assessment (completed three times a year)
  • On the Mark Reading Verification Assessment (completed three times a year)
  • A monthly writing prompt focused on different strands of the Six Traits of Writing
  • 28 assessments measuring key early reading and spelling skills
  • Chapter pre- and post-tests for all nine math chapters completed
  • Three additional assessments for each math chapter completed
  • A monthly math prompt
  • Four Classroom Assessments Based on Standards (CABS) per social studies chapter (20 total)
  • Four CABS assessments per science chapter (20 total)
  • Four CABS assessments per health chapter (20 total)

It’s hard to come to any other conclusion that we have simply lost our collective minds when it comes to learning, and the worst part of it is, there is no leadership at the highest levels that a) has an understanding of the really powerful negative effects of standardization, and b) is willing to educate us and move us collectively in a different direction. In that vacuum, we have Bill Gates and Jeb Bush and other non-educators who can’t see learning as anything but a bunch of numbers and data that can be sold to vendors and, now, parents.

But here is the bigger problem, I think. An engaged citizenry would have picked up this fight by now. I’m constantly amazed at how few people I talk to outside of my network really don’t have any sense of what this system is doing to their kids, and, more importantly, the kids in inner cities who don’t have nearly the advantages and opportunities they do. The fact we haven’t mustered much of a collective fight speaks volumes about the negative effects of a system that now is going to dumb down our youngest learners even more. 

Schooling is a Choice (?)

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So, the first thing I read this first-morning-back from vacation was this amazing post by Bonnie Stewart, a post that echoes much of my own struggle as a parent but articulated in a much more powerful, thoughtful, beautiful way. Here is a snip:

We send them into the school system, most of us, with great hopes. Learning. Education. Talisman words. They promise development of our children’s potential, inculcation into the mysteries of consciousness. The lure of the Tree of Knowledge.

What they get – what we all get – is something…other…than that. We get people who learn their place in our culture. In the – however much I flinch at the word – patriarchy, with its implicit hierarchy of gendered behaviours and classed behaviours and racialized behaviours, even as we in our schools and culture pay lip service to inclusion and acceptance and celebration of difference.

More times than I can count now, in the Q & A follow ups after my presentations, I’ve been asked some variation of “So, what about you, Will? If the system is in such disarray, why don’t you pull your own kids out?” I never give a great answer, I don’t think. And I wonder if it’s because I don’t have one. As I commented to Bonnie, I just feel worse when I consider it deeply. I wrote:

I keep wondering if 10-15 years down the road I’ll look at my kids and wish I’d done it differently. Wish I’d had the guts (?), the sense (?), the love (?) to have put them on a different path, one that as much as I hope for the system to embrace, I fully realize it can’t.

I know deep in my heart that a “better” education lies elsewhere, right now, outside of the school walls. Yet, I keep sending them back. And Bonnie’s description of that dissonance resonates very, very deeply.

In the end, I suspect that I will deliver my children over to some version of a 1950s classroom. Anything else would shock me. And I assume there will be good in it, and bad, just as there was for most of us.

Yet, sitting here thinking about tiny diplomas and the patriarchy and the world I’d like to live in, I recognize that schooling is a choice.

And I marvel and cringe at the power of a system that makes it so difficult for even those of us most deeply embedded in and privileged by its operations to see other options. Patriarchy for the win, indeed.

Schooling is a choice. Why is it so hard for us to see it as such?

For Parents: How Much Do We Really Need (Want?) to Know?

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When I was in middle school, I remember trotting out my bike just about every summer afternoon and riding to the local park to meet Tom and Ken and my other best friends for a few hours of play and horsing around. We lived in a small, country town, and as long as I promised to be home by 8 o’clock, my mom was fine with it. Not that she didn’t care; I guess she trusted me and my friends and to some small extent maybe kept her fingers crossed. Looking back, we were good kids, good friends, and my mom didn’t really have much to worry about. But there were discussions and stories and secrets that my buds and I passed back and forth on those afternoons, the stuff of adolescence that mothers didn’t really need to know about. And she never found out (at least not that I know.)

Not that I’m getting all nostalgic or anything, but fast forward a few decades and now I’m the parent with the adolescent kids (11 and 13). And it’s feeling like life has changed quite a bit, especially in the knowing what’s going on in my kids’ lives department. Both of them have Facebook pages; both of them know that my wife and I have the logins and passwords to their accounts. And I’m not saying that we are constantly checking what they’re up to over there, but every now and then, our view is that it’s appropriate and important for us to take a peek. 

So here’s the deal: I know at some point, my kids, despite knowing that “nothing is private” online, are going to start sharing private stuff online. There have already been some forays into that territory, and I’ve seen enough on other FB pages to know that there will come a time when I find out something that I probably didn’t need or want to know if the first place. Something that I’d probably sleep better at night not having read. 

And I can imagine other parents in my shoes. It must be akin to the people who were breaking codes created by Germany’s Enigma Machine back in World War 2, wondering what, if any, action they should take when they did start getting actionable information in the communications they were intercepting, not wanting to let the Germans know they had broken the code, waiting for the really big secret to come through.

Ugh.

I know I’m not the only one struggling with this stuff. And I haven’t found much about this in the parenting manual. But I am wondering, how does this change things? My sense is it’s not quite the same as the journals many of us kept as kids. And I know bazillions of us made it through just fine without our parents knowing even a fraction of the thoughts and actions of our lives growing up. But still…

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

A Parent 2.0's Back to School Dilemma

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Yesterday, Alec Couros went “Back to School” to “Meet the Teacher” of his first grade daughter. Here is what he saw:

Here is what he Tweeted:

twitter-_-your-favorites

It reminded me of the night I met Tucker’s first grade teacher, and the first words out of her mouth were something to the effect of “First grade is where we learn the rules.”

Ugh.

If I’d had Twitter back then, I’m sure I would have Tweeted something similar to this:

twitter-_-your-favorites-1

Alec’s Tweets registered a slew of responses which, to be honest, I found to be a fascinating read, so fascinating that I decided to capture the bulk of them here. (Start at the bottom and read up if you want to get the flow of the conversation.) They really are worth the read as they capture not just the emotion of a whole bunch of teacher parents who are met with the same reality when they go to their “Meet the Teacher” nights but also the complexity of what to do about it. It creates a dilemma; do we corner the teacher and give her a new view of the world, look for another class or school, march down to the principal’s office, or lay back, do what we can to help that teacher and fill in the blanks at home. We’ve tried them all, and none of them seem to work very well.

I want my kids’ schools to prepare them for the world that I and many of us see them growing toward. I want it desperately. (Emphasis mine.) But it’s not happening. For Tucker, it means handing in all of his sixth grade assignments in cursive (emphasis not mine), and it means another year of 50 lb backpacks filled with less that real world text books and a slew of worksheets that he’ll work through and forget. (Tess starts school on Friday so we’ll see what her realities are.)

So, while Alec struggles with his realities, I’m once again struggling with mine. And for what it’s worth, here’s what we’ll do to make the best of it once again this year.

1. We write an e-mail (or a letter) to each teacher introducing our kids and ourselves, letting them know what our hopes are, what we’d love to see our kids doing, and what we’ll do to support the classroom. We also introduce ourselves, and talk a little bit about what our worldview of education looks like. Finally, we offer to continue that conversation and help make it a reality in the classroom in whatever way we can. And we cc the principal and headmaster (since Tess is in private school.)

2. We co-school as much as we can. I found the Tweet by @dschink to capture it pretty well:

“We’ve always considered public school ed our kids receive as supplemental to the ed we provide at home so we don’t go crazy about it.”

Problem is, at least in our case, co-schooling is pretty scattershot, not as deep as I’d like it to be, and frustrating at times for our kids. In other words, I feel like we do our best to engage our kids in the bigger conversations, but it’s the reality of both parents being self-employed that it doesn’t always work that well.

3. We opt out when we can. I’ve written notes to teachers in the past when my kids get the first 10 problems of the homework right excusing them from the next 20 same old same old problems on the worksheet. Gets interesting responses sometimes. Also, this year, we’re 90% sure we’re going to have Tucker opt out of the 6th Grade NJ ASK assessment. Enough is enough.

4. We occasionally send links with resources to specific teachers and cc the principal.

I’m sure we could do more, but my radar to meddling parents may be a bit too sensitive having been in the classroom for 20 years previous. I know how difficult it is. I don’t want to make it more difficult, but I do want to try to strike that balance. Hard sometimes.

Wondering what other strategies might be working for you?

Public Education as Conspiracy

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I’ve always been a fan of Seth Godin who is one of those people who pushes my thinking on a regular basis and who can articulate the issues in an unusually clear way. And, I love his passion for what he believes. That in and of itself makes him great reading/listening.

In this video linked by Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Godin neatly sums up in about 4 1/2 minutes a message I think every parent should hear (building on the post here a couple of days ago.) Take a listen:

My kids turn 13 and 11 next month. Homeschooling is not an option for us, for a variety of reasons. (I know, I know…we could make it happen if we REALLY wanted to.) One of my kids is in public school, the other goes to an independent school. While I love their teachers, I don’t love either system. I don’t love the “we’re going to do what you need to do to get yourself to college” path they’re both on (whether it’s articulated that way or not). I don’t love what’s lost in that equation.

What really resonates is when he says that we’re not going to test ourselves out of this problematic moment. “We need to essay ourselves out of it, sketch ourselves out of it, or we need to debate our way out of it” instead. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Thinking about all of this makes me more convinced that unless my kids develop serious passions for doing whatever good work they want to do, sending them off to college as Grade 13 is just a horrible idea, and that I will continue to advocate that their schools become less focused on the one-size fits all education and allow them instead to see their school time as an exploration of what the world can hold for them. To nurture their willingness and ability to seek their own topics, question everything, and participate with others from anywhere in meaningful ways that change the world.

We’ll try to do more of that at home as well, obviously. But I really want my kids to have meaningful choices about their “education” when they get to the point where they can make those decisions. What I wrote here four years ago now still holds…

Digital Inclusion

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I’ve got a mental stack of blog posts piling up on a bunch of seemingly random though thinly connected topics on NECC, the environment, note taking with Evernote, my kids’ schooling, the death of RSS and other stuff which I’ll hopefully get to at some point here, but this morning I read a couple of things that seem more interesting, to me at least.

Dean’s reflection post on NECC drew a whole bunch of great comments, but the one that made me really think hard was by Ira Socol who wrote:

So, it is not a question of whether these technologies add value somehow to education, but the reverse, can education add value to the communications and information technologies of our present day world, and its future?

That’s one of those really concise shift statements that makes me bend my own frame a bit. I think too often I fall into looking at these tools and wonder what they can add to our classrooms and our teaching when the real question is how can our classrooms and teaching add capacity to the tools. As he points out, we reframed education with the advent of the book; we need to reframe it once again with the advent of a networked, inter-connected medium that creates incredible new affordances for learning. He writes:

It is the job of education to alter itself to prove itself of value to the world which now exists.

Amen. Arguably, there is a great deal about the current system which has lost its value as compared to what is possible for those who are passionate learners with a connection. (More about that connection piece in a bit.) I mean grouping by geography and age are becoming less and less relevant, and while I’m not suggesting there isn’t a body of core knowledge all students should learn, the emphasis on what we know rather than how we learn it is becoming more and more frustrating to those who are already networked learners. As Ira Tweeted later:

Educators often think that school is the point, when it needs to be the path.

Part of being that path, however, is providing the access to our students that’s necessary for them to participate. Along those lines, I came across an interesting post from Renee Blodgett (via a Tweet from Howard Rheingold) who is writing about “Redefining Digital Inclusion.” The seminal question was “do those that enjoy the benefits of technology have a moral right over those who do not?” As Renee suggests, this isn’t a new thread, but the shift here is that the attitude of parents and teachers around this are just as important as the financial and logistical issues. Inclusion can no longer just be seen as having a device and a connection.

We need to redefine Digital Inclusion. The definition of digital inclusion today is basic access. It doesn’t include basic skills such as understanding some of the technology and social media schools to network and make friends not just locally for globally. It increases their job and life opportunities significantly. It’s time to move that definition beyond simple access. We need a new definition that policy makers, technology creators, parents, and educators can rally around. There will be a revolution when more and more students get their hands on some of these devices and start using them in the classroom.

While this is not a post on where the lever is, I’ve been arguing for a while now that not much of this is going to change until the stakeholders, in this case parents, take it upon themselves to demand something new. Something more relevant. But the only way that parents are going to DEMAND access is if they see that not simply as a way for kids to get a computer but to see connections online as a way to a better future, a way to help thier kids become more educated, better learners than by books and paper alone. Unfortunately, we’re losing the media war on this one right now. Feeling like a broken record, but we need to do a better job of making this case beyond our own still small, nascent network.

"So Why Do You Only Give Your Kids 45-Minutes a Day on the Computer?"

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I’ve blogged before about how Wendy and I limit the amount of media time that Tess and Tucker get, that we struggle with knowing how much time is too much or too little to be on the computer, watch television, play the Wii or poke around on the iTouch. Most people think that since both of us spend so much time of the computer that we’d naturally let them play all they want. But we don’t. In fact, I get the feeling we’re more restrictive than many parents, ironically. (Tess swears there’s only one other kid in her grade at school that doesn’t have a phone yet.)

When I mentioned in passing our 45-minutes-a-day on the computer policy during a recent presentation, I was seriously amazed at how many people came up afterwards (and even e-mailed me later) and asked about that. There was like a whole ‘lotta angst going on in terms of people wondering if their kids were getting too much screen time and how we came to the decision to limit our own kids. I had no answer for the first part, and I felt like I stumbled through the second part because to be honest, it’s a really complex equation that is going to be different for every kid, every set of parents. For us, I think it’s a combination of having two very energetic kids who love to physically play, a reaction to the struggle for balance in my own life, and an expectation that when we’re together as a family, we’re together as a family that interacts more often than not without media. Frankly, I don’t even like it when Tess plays the apps or listens to her iTouch for long periods in the car. But she (and Tucker) can read as much as they want, and they do. We always bring their books with them and we encourage that at every turn. (For some reason, my kids don’t get car sick when reading.) Is there a huge distinction? I don’t know. Books give us something to talk about. Mario on the iTouch? Notsomuch. And there are exceptions. Tess happens to really like Google SketchUp, and she can almost always get more time if she’s making something or exhibiting some creativity. All I know is that we, and I mean we, tend to push back against technology for our kids as much as we embrace it for ourselves. And that is ironic, I know, but that’s what we’re comfortable with right now when they are 9 and 11. As they get older, they’ll get more time, but I know that we’ll monitor what their doing and have lots of conversations about it. When they get ready to start creating and publishing in earnest, we’ll certainly help them if that’s what they want to do.

Now does that mean that isn’t perfectly ok for some other parents to make other, perhaps more liberal choices about their own kids media time? Absolutely not. To each his own, and I’m not suggesting to anyone how they parent their kids. I’m also not holding myself up as the poster child for fantastic parenting. (I could tell you stories.) All I know is that’s what we’re comfortable with right now, that the real cuts and scrapes they get in their physical worlds are more important than the virtual ones at this point, that we are always struggling with it, and that for today at least, I really like who my kids are shaping up to be. They’re creative, social, articulate, thoughtful and fun to be around. Most of the time. And I hope some of that, at least, comes from our parenting around technology and media in their lives.

"Get Off the Computer!"

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One question I get asked a lot during and after my presentations is “how much time to do you let your own kids have on the computer?” and the answer, in a couple of words, is “not much.” Both Tess and Tucker have their own accounts on our iMac which is conveniently placed in our living room, and they have access to a limited number of programs for 45 minutes a day. (The television is almost never on in our house, btw.) They can request more time if they like, and I often give it when Tess is in the midst of something on Google Sketch-up (me hoping she’ll follow in the footsteps of her mother the engineer) or when Tucker is deep into the latest batting statistics for his beloved Phillies. (I know, I know. Cubs are his second favorite team.) If it’s Webkinz or Line Rider, when time is up it’s up. But by and large, especially in the summer, Wendy and I want them off the computer and outside shooting hoops, jumping on the trampoline, or climbing up the mountain making forts and looking for snakes. Or reading books on rainy days. Or just being bored.

Wendy said that to me early on in our parenting lives when the kids were like 3 and 5. “Sometimes it’s good to let them be bored.” I’d never thought of it that way, but I’ve come to believe it wholeheartedly. They need to learn how to entertain themselves, to fill up their days.

Last weekend, they got really bored. After two months of weekend basketball stuff (which we are re-evaluating), Wen and I just wanted a couple of days to veg. The kids couldn’t believe it. They kept begging us to do stuff. We kept saying no. Computer? No. TV? No. It went on like that for a good two hours. But finally, it got quiet. We heard them rummaging around in the kitchen and in their rooms, running in and out of the house, and then a measured commotion down by the basketball goal. “I think they’re doing suicides,” Wendy whispered when she looked out the window.

Yes, they were. And not only that, they had devised a daily practice schedule (click on the pic above), which they proceeded to work through for the next two hours, coaching each other, supporting and praising each other, until the very end when Tucker threw the ball at Tess, she hit him in the head with a stick, and they both came stomping up to the house locked in mortal sibling combat. Oy.

Anyway, on par, boredom is good. They’re 8 and 10. They’ll have plenty of time for the computer…