Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

“Constancy of Purpose”

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

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

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

The Best Possible Guarantee of Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we just have to act like we know it.

“Schooling is Not a Natural Act”

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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.

School’s Dying Monopoly on Children’s Time

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Gary Stager on the future of schools from a soon to be released conference video:

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I will make one prediction about the future of education and that is that schools will no longer enjoy the monopoly on children’s time that they currently hold. Simply put, that means kids won’t spend as much time in schools as they do today. And one of the reasons I know that I’m 110% accurate in that prediction is that every politician on earth says the exact opposite.

When we were an agrarian society kids stayed home with their parents. When parents went off to factory jobs kids went off to factory schools. There are enough changes in the work pattern and dissatisfaction with school and opportunities to learn in a variety of places that if for no other reason that you’re tired of getting your kid up before sunrise to go somewhere every day, I think kids won’t spend as much time in schools as they do today.

And then the challenge for schools becomes, if we think of school as a technology, how do we gain the greatest affordances of being co-located in the same physical space at the same time? And ironically, many of the things that we as a society devalue the most, the first, are the actual things that will keep school viable in the future. I don’t have an orchestra at home, or pottery kilns, or science labs, or field trips, or enough people and stuff to build some wondrous project that requires us to be in the same space at the same time. Much of what’s actually tested and valued by the current system doesn’t need to take place through some set schedule in one place at the same time.

A more dystopian view of what schools will look like in the future is they’ll be exactly the same way they are today but there won’t be any kids there.

The irony of what we’re currently focused on in school is painful, yet we don’t understand that unless we change our value proposition, that dystopian view of Gary’s may come to fruition.

Schools Don’t Equal an Education

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Anya Kamenetz:

Among educators and families, there’s a level of resistance to and understanding that the tests we have are not really serving our kids, but what there isn’t, maybe, is an awareness of the alternatives. It’s Industrial Age thinking to believe our school system is identical to our education system. We have a universe of educational opportunities that did not exist ten years ago and they consist of small pieces loosely joined. At this moment, school-age children spend an equal amount of time with screens as they do in the classroom, if not more. And so the opportunities lie in digital media, in out-of-school learning, in maker spaces, in summer camps, in sports, in community groups—places at the margins where so much of the important work in imagining what schools and learning are going to look like.

“Learning is What You Do to Yourself”

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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? 

It’s the Delivery, Silly

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Winter weather may have kept Bishop Donahue High School students home from school Monday, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have to go class.

So starts a story in a West Virginia paper yesterday titled “Snow Days Become ‘Cyber Days’ at BDHS.” It’s as if school is now taking on the postal service’s famous creed: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these teachers from the swift completion of their appointed deliveries of education…thanks to the internet.”

Yay!

Words matter here, right? So, it’s interesting that the “cyber day” has nothing to do with learning. (The word itself is mentioned just once when talking about “distance learning"being offered by colleges.) Instead, it’s ”the school’s answer to lost instruction time.“ Because all that instruction time is just way more important than playing in the snow or reading a good book or going on Minecraft or watching a few hours of tv and just chillin’.

Words matter:

The principal says "This way, we can keep students engaged and continue with lessons with school is canceled." Really? This is engagement?

"Teachers sent online assignments in the morning through email and students were expected to get the work done by early evening. Students could ask questions by email in the early afternoon and the assignments were graded at the end of the day.”

And why can they do this? Because every student has an…wait for it…iPad “they can take with them to complete schoolwork.”

Wow.

And here is the absolute worst part.

“It’s a benefit if a child is sick or hospitalized or if they are on vacation, they still have access to school. It’s a real benefit. You’ll never replace a teacher in a classroom, but this is an awful good way to still have education continue on days that would have been lost.”

Now, read that again.

It still shocks me, the extent to which we continue to dumb down the affordances of the Web and technology for authentic learning in the service of keeping the system grinding no matter what the obstacle. It still shocks me that even before we get to the tech discussion, we can’t seem to even get to the learning discussion. It’s all about schooling. This is the narrative we need to push back hard against.

I’m sure most read this article and think “Progress!” Instead, we should be thinking “Why?”

(See also.)

Announcing: Educating Modern Learners

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Today, I’m happy to announce that my friend and colleague Bruce Dixon and I are starting a new membership website, Educating Modern Learners (EML). It’s a site and an accompanying newsletter that’s aimed specifically at helping school leaders and policy makers from around the globe be better informed about the huge technological changes that are impacting education, and to help them make better, more pertinent decisions for the students they serve. And I’m equally excited to announce that we’ve hired one of the best education bloggers / thinkers we know, Audrey Watters, to be the editorial director / lead writer for the site. Our official launch is scheduled for mid-February.

Our hope is that EML will offer a reader-supported, independent voice to help articulate what is as yet a struggling but growing new narrative in the school reform discussion, one that provokes serious conversation at the leadership level around a more learner-centered, inquiry-based, technology and access-rich school experience that more powerfully and relevantly serves children in this fast-changing modern world. We’ll be commissioning some of the best writers and thought-leaders in the world to produce analysis and commentary on all aspects of modern learning, from local, state and ministry level policy issues, new literacies and pedagogies for 21st Century learners, effective change-centered leadership, new technologies, and best school practices, among others. Also in the mix are regular whitepapers, live events, podcasts, and more. More details to come.

Here’s some of where we’re starting from in our thinking about this:

  • We believe that we live and learn at a moment of rapid and radical change across institutions and cultures, and that technologies are in large part driving those changes.
  • We believe that today’s students will be immersed in creative and connected technologies throughout their adult learning lives, and that they require new skills, literacies, and dispositions to succeed in the modern world.
  • We believe that the web and other technologies can be a powerful source for good in the world.
  • We believe that schools must move away from “delivering” an education to, instead, empowering students to organize their own education.
  • We believe technology implemented with vision can be a powerful part of effective teaching and learning in schools.
  • We believe that relevant reforms are occurring too slowly because not enough of our efforts are aimed at those who make decisions regarding technology’s role in learning in schools.
  • We believe that top level decision makers often act without a relevant, global, modern lens for how technologies can best serve progressive teaching and learning. This is through no fault of their own as much as it is the consequence of leading at a moment of rapid and radical change.
  • We believe there is a real need for a diverse set of expert voices to use a global lens to intelligently curate and contextualize the changes, new technologies, future trends, best practices and more on a regular basis.
  • We believe this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. A time for boldness, and a time for well-informed leadership to shape new thinking around what schools could and should be; about where, when, and how learning takes place.  A time for us to truly rethink the possibilities that technology offers education, and a time for creative and courageous leadership to show the way.

EML is hopefully just the first step in what we hope will be a collection of resources and events that will help expand the contexts for learning and leading in the education leadership space. If you’d like to be notified when we officially launch, just sign up on our “Coming Soon!” page. 

From PLNs to PGSDWOPNs

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Kakul Srivastava:

One of the insights that we’ve come to is that the premise of how work is done fundamentally needs to change. We imagine these corporate environments (often very large companies) and we try to visualize how they might improve their infrastructure and communication patterns. The real revolution isn’t inside the company — it’s that the company itself is increasingly irrelevant.

The atomization of the corporation is very real and has been discussed at length. What’s discussed less is how increasingly critical our out[side] of work networks are to our ability to get work done. Millennials are more likely than any other previous generations to daily access their outside-of-work networks to get work done. The forces of micro-entrepreneurship are increasing making each of us our own “corporation”, reliant on our outside networks to make things happen. Finally, as our previous work experience becomes increasingly irrelevant to our future work problems, our real asset to bring to any endeavor becomes our network. FB and even Linked In are not capable of meeting these demands. We’ll see the rise of modern, personal networks for work, to allow these worker tribes to thrive and flourish.

I think for most of us, our PLNs are “sharing networks” in that the main currency in our connections are links and or ideas that, in theory at least, amplify our own learning about whatever it is we’re interested in. But seeing our networks as “critical to getting our work done” is a step up for most (not all.) That requires a willingness and a literacy in collaboration and transparency that I’m thinking most eductors (and others) still aren’t comfortable with.

The point here, however, is once again about our kids. If Srivastava is correct that “the company itself is increasingly irrelevant,” that’s a huge shift in the way we think about preparing our students. It’s not now just a personal learning network. It’s a “personal get stuff done with other people network.” We have a hard enough time with students getting real, important stuff done with other kids in the classroom much less online. All of which is why making and inquiry and PBL leading to authentic, shared knowledge creation and done in the context of outside-of-classroom networks should be a central focus of classrooms and schooling in general. 

How we doin’ with that?

What is the Purpose of Schooling?

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

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

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

Cory Doctorow on John Holt on Kid-Centered Learning

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I’ve become a real Cory Doctorow fan ever since reading Little Brother (and yes, I did double check that.) It’s a great novel for geeks and non geeks alike, and I wish I could remember who I loaned my copy to.

Anyway, Cory has a post at Boing Boing today that talks about his recent reading of John Holt’s classic How Children Learn which I remember reading parts of quite a while ago. (It’s obviously something I need to revisit, along with many others.) He pulls out some really great quotes that just make me yearn for that type of learning environment for my own children. I loved this one snip:

Most resonant for me was his description of kids’ learning unfolding from the natural passionate obsessions that overtake them.

Me too. I remember when I was in sixth grade and Mrs. Tharp let me go outside of the regular essay assignment to write another chapter in my exceedingly exciting novel about a camping trip gone bad. (I wish fan fiction was around back then.) Same with Ms. Riley when I was a sophomore in high school who let me write the bulk of my journalism stories around sports related topics, and Dr. DeCavalcante when I was a senior who instead of doing the standard report about John Updike let me instead try my own hand at a short story a la A&P (one of my all-time favorites) written in Updike’s voice. It wasn’t the story that he assessed, it was my attention to style and diction, and I loved trying to replicate the cadences and dialogue. And even though I knew the story wasn’t great, I got an A. (I’m an English geek, I know.)

So I’m wondering what memories along these lines others have. And I’m wondering how much we feel we’re able to let kids do along these line in our classrooms.

Btw, Doctorow’s post is worth it for the comments as well…