Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

School as Fiction

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I’ve been expending a lot of bandwidth lately reading and thinking about the meta story of school, not just the history of the system and of pedagogy, but, more specifically, the motivations behind the story we’re currently living and how they effect the potential for deep and powerful learning that we all say we want for kids.  That means diving into some new (to me) edu-historians and thinkers and trying to connect what I’m learning to others who have been tweaking my thinking for a long time. Frankly, it’s a lot to make sense of, but I think it may be time to try. Feedback welcomed.

Let me start with Yuval Noah Harari, who has been stuck in my craw for the last few years after I read his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The other day, a lengthy, fascinating piece about Harari popped up in the New Yorker, and one idea in particular jumped out at me. The author of the article is talking here about Harari’s most famous book, Sapiens:

In the schema of “Sapiens,” money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations. Harari uses “fiction” where another might say “social construct.” Harari further proposes that fictions require believers, and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists.

If you recognize schools as “social constructs” which, of course, they are, that’s a provocative idea, no? Schools don’t exist in nature. We’ve constructed them to meet some type of societal need, primarily to collectively educate our young. We see them as a public good, aimed at perpetuating democracy (at least in the US) and creating a more just and livable world. (More on the purpose of schools later.)

The idea of schools as “fictions” is bracing at first. But if you flip the idea over a few times, less so. The narrative of schooling runs deep, but it is simply that: a narrative. A story. One that depends on our “communal belief” in it to wield the power it does. (And no one doubts the power of the school narrative, right?)

In-Between Stories

Importantly, Harari’s work highlights another idea that is relevant here, and that is that in this moment, almost everything is in-between stories. Think about media, business, politics and even the ways we meet and fall in love. Less and less seems to be abiding by old rules and norms. In 21 Lessons, he writes that we are particularly stressed because of this:

“We are still in the nihilist moment of disillusionment and anger, after people have lost faith in the old stories but before they have embraced a new one.”

I think it’s fair to say that many are losing faith in the traditional story of school, primarily because it doesn’t serve all kids equitably and it’s increasingly out of step with how the modern world operates. But while there are some indications as to what the new story might look like, (more child/learner centered, focused more on skills and dispositions than content, etc.,) we’re nowhere near any “communal belief” in it. It’s not clear enough, yet, that there is a new story to fully “embrace.”

Still, the new story that is emerging feels much more in tune with the natural, biological rhythms of learning, which, by the way, are not a “fiction.” This is the point that Carol Black has so eloquently made in her amazing essay A Thousand Rivers (which I’ve glossed many times.) If you want the punch in the gut quote from that, here it is:

“Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behavior in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behavior at Sea World.”

Our current fiction about schools attempts to take the very natural process of learning that is a part of all of us and make it happen in the very unnatural setting of the classroom where few of the conditions that all of us know are needed for learning to occur actually exist. It’s our greatest unpleasant truth that schools are not really built for learning. And if you read the rest of Black’s essay, you’ll get the gist of just how harmful that current fiction can be to the well-being of kids.

The Function of Schools

I think this whole idea of “fiction” resonates with me more deeply today due to my recent introduction to the work of David Labaree, a recently retired professor from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. I can’t remember how I found it, but a few months ago I came across his essay from the Journal of Curriculum Studies published in 2012 titled “School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage.” Let’s just say that it’s been rocking my thinking about schools ever since.

In a nutshell, Labaree’s thesis is this: we may say that we want great schools because they are a public good, because (as I said above) they serve the purpose of preparing children to live in a democracy and to hopefully improve society. But what we truly value in schools in the private good they offer in terms of promoting privilege and the current meritocracy, and in the assumed role of providing access to “a better life.” Here are his words from the top of the essay:

The US is suffering from a school syndrome, which arises from Americans’ insistence on having things both ways through the magical medium of education. Society wants schools to express the highest ideals as a society and the greatest aspirations as individuals, but only as long as they remain ineffective in actually realizing them, since one does not really want to acknowledge the way these two aims are at odds with each other. Schools are asked to promote equality while preserving privilege, so perpetuating a system that is too busy balancing opposites to promote student learning. The focus is on making the system inclusive at one level and exclusive at the next, in order to make sure that it meets demands for both access and advantage. As a result the system continues to lure one to pursue the dream of fixing society by reforming schools, while continually frustrating one’s ability to meet these goals. Also, a simple cure cannot be found for this syndrome because no remedy will be accepted that would mean giving up one of the aims for education in favour of another. [Emhasis mine.]

Yes. That.

Seriously, the whole piece is important because it paints with an historical eye to explain school reform movements and why almost all of them have failed. It makes a compelling case that the true reform of the original system was the one that was driven by the consumers of education, not the creators and purveyors of it. While we say that schools and education are the most effective way to attain our highest aspirations and ideals as a society, schools are also the primary way that we accomplish our greatest individual ambitions and “stave off our worst fears.” And that last part, in fact, has become the primary motivation behind the story in schools that we’re currently living.

In short, we choose to build our narrative of schooling around the “private good” of schools and education in order to maintain access to social standing and individual opportunity, rather than as a “public good” which emphasizes citizenship and civic mindedness at its core. And that is a challenging, “unpleasant truth” as well.

The Consequences of our Fiction

That narrative has many deleterious effects, as I was reminded last week in Johannesburg when I reconnected with David Gleason, the author of At What Cost? Defending Adolescent Development in Fiercely Competitive Schools. A school psychologist, David is researching why it is that our students are now reporting record levels of stress, anxiety, and depression and what schools can do to alleviate it. Educators at “prestigious” schools that David has interviewed are very forthcoming about how their schools contribute to those issues. They freely cite things like putting too much emphasis on college, assigning too much homework, rewarding “achievement” over all else, and not honoring the normal mental and physical development of adolescents, among other things. (In other words, they’re acting in service of the “private good” over the “public good.”) But when he asks those same educators what would happen if they stopped doing those things that they know contribute to the problem, they respond by saying they would then be seen as lacking rigor and excellence, that they would lose their reputations as elite schools and their enrollments along with it, and more.

This “bind” that David discusses so powerfully in his book is the same “bind” that Labaree sees as well, this idea that we are trying to balance two things that are in opposition to one another, and that right now, we are deferring to the consumer’s need for credentialing over students’ well being or society’s noblest aspirations. It’s the same tension that Black feels between the natural needs of children and the unnatural needs of schooling.

Which all ties into a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times titled This Is How Scandinavia Got Great: The power of educating the whole person. Brooks argues that the reason Scandinavia got it right is because they dedicated themselves in the late 19th Century to educating the whole child, that it was more about lifelong learning. That it was more about connection to community and home. It wasn’t about status. Money quote:

“If you have a thin educational system that does not help students see the webs of significance between people, does not even help students see how they see, you’re going to wind up with a society in which people can’t see through each other’s lenses.”

When we choose (or allow ourselves) to be motivated by pragmatism and individualism over idealism and collectivism, we run the risk of ignoring what’s best for our kids and for our society and world.

What We’ve Lost

I’d argue we’ve lost a great deal because of the system as it’s currently constructed and the motives that drive it. And this idea that schools are meant to serve the individual over the collective is at the root of many of our ills. This is what we get when we focus on grades. On being right. On knowledge and not learning. On delivery instead of discovery. We get kids who see others as competitors, not collaborators or cooperators. We don’t want to work with them as much as work to overcome them.

The fiction of schools says we can teach kids things that they don’t internally care about. That we can measure long term learning with numbers and letters. That following the rules is the way to success, at least at the game we call school. The fiction also says that we know what you need to know. It says that you as a child should just acquiesce to our choices. That acceptance of this fiction is the path to an education and, ultimately, personal success.

And yet, we all know this just isn’t true. The vast majority of what we measure in schools, those things that count, literally, are most often quickly forgotten, never again used, and a barrier to the conditions that great learning requires. Our emphasis on “outcomes” and grades creates real emotional stress that is absent when we are learning the things that matter to us. I mean, what kind of emotional stress and anxiety do you feel when you are learning something that you find deeply and powerfully important and useful?

Our greatest challenge as educators is to write a new story of “school” that more effectively serves our students and our society given the moment in which we live and whatever future we can glean. Acknowledging that that too will be a “fiction” may actually make the work easier. But more than anything, understanding and acknowledging the motives of the current story will make that work more urgent, more relevant, and hopefully, more powerful.

A New Phase

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

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

“Damaging Effects”

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

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

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

Transition Time

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

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

The 69%

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Doug Sosnik:

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

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

31%. 

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

From ACT to Acts

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

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

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

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

Wow. What a concept.

Where Are You Going?

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

What’s the difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US friends…

Make a Difference That Matters

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

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

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

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

The whole thing is worth it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we just have to act like we know it.

Towards a “New System of Education”

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Phillip Schlecty:

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

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

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

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

Go figure. 

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

How Schools are Stuck

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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?

“None of the Teachers Know What I Can Do”

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Yesterday, Irving, Texas police arrested 14-year-old Mohammed Ahmed when they and his teachers mistook a homemade clock he had constructed out of circuit boards and wires for a bomb. This despite his repeated denials and attempts to explain his project. Handcuffed. Suspended. Called a liar. All over a clock. 

Now it would be easy, and probably appropriate, to suspect at least a pinch of racisim in the mix here. But as was suggested in yesterday’s post, the bigger problem may be a lack of understanding and savvy on the part of the adults as to what’s possible these days with technology. 

And Mohammed agrees:

“Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do.”

That just speaks volumes.

And it begs the question, why are we ok with that? We spend boatloads of time and treasure on all sorts of stuff like differentiated instruction and assessment strategies and response to intervention and god knows what other stuff. But we refuse to spend time on making sure that everyone in the building at least has a clue of what’s possible with technology and what kids (and adults) are doing with it. I’m not even talking about getting people to actually make stuff in their classrooms with technology; I’m just suggesting that we understand what’s happening with tech in the real world. 

And finally, what does it say about a culture that chooses suspicion over trust when it comes to kids? I know, there are bad 14-year olds out there, but not enough to suggest that we don’t give kids every benefit of the doubt at the start. 

Sad. 

Update: The principal’s response.

Sadder still. 

Oh, The Irony

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Richard Elmore:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elmore takes no prisoners. Read the whole thing.

You Have Been Warned

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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.

We Need Discoverers

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David Edwards from American Schools are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist:

Over the next twenty years the earth is predicted to add another two billion people. Having nearly exhausted nature’s ability to feed the planet, we now need to discover a new food system. The global climate will continue to change. To save our coastlines, and maintain acceptable living conditions for more than a billion people, we need to discover new science, engineering, design, and architectural methods, and pioneer economic models that sustain their implementation and maintenance. Microbiological threats will increase as our traditional techniques of anti-microbial defense lead to greater and greater resistances, and to thwart these we must discover new approaches to medical treatment, which we can afford, and implement in ways that incite compliance and good health. The many rich and varied human cultures of the earth will continue to mix, more rapidly than they ever have, through mass population movements and unprecedented information exchange, and to preserve social harmony we need to discover new cultural referents, practices, and environments of cultural exchange. In such conditions the futures of law, medicine, philosophy, engineering, and agriculture – with just about every other field – are to be rediscovered. 

Americans need to learn how to discover. 

Being dumb in the existing educational system is bad enough. Failing to create a new way of learning adapted to contemporary circumstances might be a national disaster. The good news is, some people are working on it.

The essay goes on to talk about the growth of the maker movement and an increasing urgency to explore new ways of thinking about education for the new challenges we face. Some in the comments disagree.

I don’t.

According to the group of teachers I spent the day with yesterday in Southern NJ, despite some movement toward more discovery learning outside of school, inside of school is getting worse. More testing. Pre-K Common Core curriculum. Fewer and fewer opportunities to stretch outside the classroom and the traditional pedagogies that everyone seems to expect in the new evaluation regimes.

Why are we doing this?

If nothing else, essays with titles like this one in major magazines and websites can at least push the conversation in a new direction. But until the educators themselves are willing to seriously take up the call for re-envisioning schools, not much will happen.

“Completely Inadequate or Outright Mistaken”

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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.

The Best Time EVER to Begin

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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 to Box

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Yesterday, I took my incredibly spoiled daughter into New York City for her first boxing workout at a basement gym in midtown. It was in a sweat-filled, fairly grungy, Rocky-type place with old fight posters plastered on the walls. And, no lie, the first person I saw when we came off the stairs was Gerry Cooney, a heavyweight boxer who almost killed Ken Norton in a fight I remember watching live on television in 1981. Suffice to say he looked older than his years. 

Anyway, Tess wasn’t there to box as much as she was to work out. Without going into the details, she’s chasing a dream, and part of it revolves around getting really, really fit. We’d learned about a this trainer who worked with girls pursuing the same path, and yesterday was the “tryout.” Here’s a snip of what it was like. (I know, turn the phone sideways next time.) 

An hour of that, and fifteen minutes in, she was drenched in sweat. 

Both of my kids live in their bodies more than their brains. That’s not to say that they’re not smart; they both are. But let’s just say that at this point in their lives, academics and school are not what they are most interested in. They’re not chasing 4.0s; they’re not working to get into Princeton, if you get my drift. My son is focused on the AAU state basketball tournament games he has this weekend, and he’s been putting in hours shooting, dribbling, and working out. Tess is literally by far the healthiest eater I know right now. I’m totally impressed by the dedication both of them have shown to their current passions. 

But here’s the larger point to the story. When Tess finished up yesterday and we got in the car so we could spend the next hour trying to get out of the city at 5 pm on a Friday (doh!), I turned to her and said “So, how do you feel?” Her response was interesting.

“My brain hurts,” she said.

Now before anyone gets the wrong idea, there were no real punches thrown; she didn’t take any jabs to the head or anything. Instead, it was about learning. That was probably about the most in-the-moment hour my daughter has spent in quite some time, primarily because she was learning something new, something that interested her, something that challenged her. “Hard fun” as Seymour Papert might have called it. I’d expected her to say that she was physically exhausted. Instead, she’d been working even harder in her head.

Obviously, there’s a whole lot more tied up in this regarding teaching and persistence and failure and more. And I know that schools weren’t built for “hard fun." 

But man do I wish that my kids would come home from school much more often with the good "brain hurt” that my daughter got at that gym yesterday. 

Making Ourselves Vulnerable

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George Siemens:

Learning is vulnerability. When we learn, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we engage in learning, we communicate that we want to grow, to become better, to improve ourselves. When I first started blogging, I had a sense of fear with every post (“did that sound stupid?”), loss of sleep soul-searching when a critical comment was posted, and envy when peers posted something brilliant (“wow, why didn’t I think of that?”). When a student posts an opinion in a discussion forum or when someone offers a controversial opinion – these are vulnerability-inducing expressions. On a smaller scale, posting a tweet, sharing an image, or speaking into the void can be intimidating for a new user. (I’m less clear about how being vulnerable becomes craving attention for some people as they get immersed in media!). While the learning process can’t be short-circuited, and the ambiguity and messiness can’t be eliminated, it is helpful for educators to recognize the social, identity, and emotional factors that influence learners. Often, these factors matter more than content/knowledge elements in contributing to learner success.

Walk down the vendor floor of any big edu-conference and you’ll see our obsession with making learning less messy and less “vulnerable.” Struggle, patience, courage, persistence, failure, passion…none of these are quantifiable to the degree that reformers or most edupreneurs need them to be to “count.” Yet schools will spend time and money (lots of it) on stuff that organizes, compartmentalizes, personalizes, standardizes, and captures “learning” in order to be compared “successfully” to other districts down the road.

If we fail to recognize the inherent risk that goes with learning something new, we fail our kids. Yet we try to mitigate that risk in almost every decision we make. 

The Questions

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Audrey Watters, in her most excellent post deconstructing Sugata Mitra’s $1 million TED prize award from last week:

I have questions about this history of schooling as Mitra (and others) tell it, about colonialism and neo-colonialism. I have questions about the funding of the initial “Hole in the Wall” project (it came from NIIT, an India-based “enterprise learning solution” company that offers 2- and 4-year IT diplomas). I have questions about these commercial interests in “child-driven education” (As Ellen Seitler asks, “can the customer base be expanded to reach people without a computer, without literacy, and without any formal teaching whatsoever?”). I have questions about the research from the “Hole in the Wall” project — the research, not the 15 minute TED spiel about it. I have questions about girls’ lack of participation in the kiosks. I have questions about project’s usage of retired British schoolteachers — “grannies” — to interact with Indian children via Skype.

I have questions about community support. I have questions about what happens when we dismantle public institutions like schools — questions about social justice, questions about community, questions about care. I have questions about the promise of a liberation via a “child-driven education,” questions about this particular brand of neo-liberalism, techno-humanitarianism, and techno-individualism.

Here’s my question: What happens to these questions (and others) that we need to be asking about schools and classrooms and learning in general? How do we answer them? How do they enter the larger debate which, by and large, has and is ignoring them?

Whether you agree/believe/get tingly about Mitra’s work or not, and regardless how you feel about the whole TED approach, this award does, I think, serve a positive purpose in our little corner of the student-centered reform world here. There are now whole bunches of more people considering the role of schools, the value of technology in learning, and the new paths that are opening up to learning. In many cases, his vision is going to pull this conversation to a different place. There are lots more questions being asked. I think, on balance, that can be a good thing.

But only if we’re engaging in those conversations critically. Only if, like Audrey, we’re willing to read further, to engage in the debate, to articulate our own thinking around it not just to those we know in our local communities but in our online communities as well. Only if we’re brave enough to take the learner’s stance and say “I’ve got an opinion, but I want to know more.”

This is hard, especially in the online space. And it’s not just the idea that online spaces can bend toward an uncivil, almost bullying tone. It takes a confidence and boldness to engage. This is not easy even for someone like me who has been doing it for a dozen years or so. My brain explodes when I think of all the people (many of whom I know) who are just much smarter than I who might read this and might chuckle at my ignorance.

Yet I’ll read and I’ll write because I want to know more, and I want those who might read this to help me clarify my thinking, and I trust them to do so with civility and not disdain. But I also know full well that the vast majority of people who read this won’t engage either here or elsewhere. 

Which, as almost always, brings me back to my kids. How do I/we help them help them want to learn more, help them understand the value of engagement, and help them become able to navigate the rough spots in all of this? I’m not sure Mitra’s vision is the definitive answer, and as Audrey suggests, there is much more a potential public good in community schools that can be replaced by grannies in the cloud.

But it does beg that ongoing question that we still need to push: are our schools and systems helping our kids develop into the types of modern learners that will flourish in this  modern world? And if not, what do we do about that?

Good Luck With That

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Alex Reid on the National Council Teachers of English updated release of their literacy framework:

What NCTE recognizes is that English should be the means by which such literacy is acquired (at least in the US, which is the nation in “National Council”). To that I say, “good luck.” Good luck providing this professional development for existing teachers, who are not prepared to do this. Good luck finding university English departments with faculty to provide this literacy to the general population of college students, let alone educate preservice K-12 teachers or graduate students who will become university faculty. Good luck finding English departments who even remotely view digital literacy as a subject that even marginally concerns them, let alone one that would be central to their curriculum in the way that print literacy is now. As I suggested above, I think you’d have better luck selling the average college English department on becoming grammar-centric than you would on becoming digital-centric.

…The truth is that if this was 2003 and a department recognized that digital literacy was going to become the issue that might make or break their disciplinary future, then by now they might have four or five digital scholars hired and a couple tenured. Maybe they’d be in a position to deliver this content today. But few departments did that. This means the transition is likely to be rocky.

Rocky, indeed.

As Goes Journalism…?

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Ryan McCarthy:

The dirty secret about the web media business is that there’s a massive oversupply problem. Everyday, content creators are producing more journalism, more think-pieces, more interactive graphics, more photo galleries, more tweets, more slideshows, more videos, more GIFs, and more deviously socially-optimized Corgi listicles. All of that is being distributed via more channels on more devices. This creates more supply for display ads, web media’s favorite and still growing revenue generator. All that supply, however, drags down ad prices…

…a wide swath of media — journalism included — is becoming less and less valuable as the Internet gets bigger.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that if you want to get a sense of what’s in store for education, look at what’s happening to journalism. Reporters and writers are now everywhere. Content and news is everywhere. It’s changing the very nature of the business. 

Same for education, just that now it’s content and teachers that are increasingly everywhere you turn. The economics are the hard part…what happens when you need scale to make a living? What happens when teachers find themselves competing with other teachers for students? What happens when school is something your organize for yourself?

Pretty sure we’re about to find out…

The Birth of a Middle School

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Just a quick update on the Triangle Learning Community Middle School that I’ve blogged about here before. Founder Steve Goldberg reports that he’s just signed a lease, and that there will soon be some serious inquiry-based, student-directed learning going on in North Carolina this fall.

From the outset, Steve’s been building on fundamental ideas for progressive schooling enriched and immersed in connective technologies. Just a snip from his website:

It’s not time to reform existing schools (created in an industrial age where it sort of made sense to go from French to Biology to English every 50 minutes) — it’s time to re-think what’s possible for 21st century learners.

 TLC students will pursue real-world project-based learning. Unlike most middle schools, where students move from teacher to teacher and switch subjects every 45 minutes, we will build a strong sense of community with a team of two learning facilitators working in concert to create the best possible learning environment for the twenty students who will be a tight-knit learning community for three years. Students at TLC will spend their days together in thoughtful blocks of time.

It’s interesting to see how educators like Steve are forging their own path and finding ways to innovate around the idea of “school.” He’s articulating a valuable vision for what school might become.

I really urge you to check out what he’s been up to and to continue to think about ways to “rethink” our own systems and practices to move in the same direction. 

We’re Getting Rolled

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Tom Hoffman:

Ten years ago, “school reform” at least equally applied to Deborah Meier and Ted Sizer as it did to, say, Joel Klein.

In the intervening decade, I’ve become a social software curmudgeon – you’ll pull Blogger from my cold, dead hands – and yielded the “ed reformer” tag to people and practices I hate.

Basically, in both cases, the money men started to roll in and roll over the geeks and the teachers who were building tools and schools with an eye to something other than the market, or market-based logic. We’re only just now hitting the point where it is clear the grifters are rolling into schools like Visigoths, but even when the point hasn’t been to make money directly, it has been to apply the methods of business to education.

It has taken a while to sort out, but at this point many of the leading figures in screwing up the internet are also leaders in screwing up education (reform): Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs (RIP), etc. It isn’t hard to tease out the common thread. The earnest geeks who do things, understand how things work, and care about actual people get rolled by the big money guys. That’s it.

And, the other folks who are screwing up education are those who stand silent and watch it happen…

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…

Results That Matter

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Nicholas Carr in MIT’s Technology Review:

Looking toward the future, Kuntz says that computers will ultimately be able to tailor an entire “learning environment” to fit each student. Elements of the program’s interface, for example, will change as the computer senses the student’s optimum style of learning.

The advances in tutoring programs promise to help many college, high-school, and even elementary students master basic concepts. One-on-one instruction has long been known to provide substantial educational benefits, but its high cost has constrained its use, particularly in public schools. It’s likely that if computers are used in place of teachers, many more students will be able to enjoy the benefits of tutoring. According to one recent study of undergraduates taking statistics courses at public universities, the latest of the online tutoring systems seem to produce roughly the same results as face-to-
face instruction.

Adds to my post from yesterday, but don’t miss the point. The most important word to parse in this snip is “results.” And this is what drives me crazy when we talk about this stuff. We all know that Carr is talking about performance results as measured by competencies or tests or grades, but are those the only results that matter in face-to-face instruction?

Apparently so.

Let me be really, really clear. The teaching profession is absolutely important and worth fighting for. But I’m convinced, in the current climate especially here in the US, that simply pushing back against these types of innovations by attacking their lack of humanity will not work. At the end of the day, if technology continues to bring better scores and better economics to the equation, I’m not sure the separation between “tutoring” and “teaching” will be deemed worth saving.

I appreciate the stories of learning that many are telling now, stories of inquiry and creation and authentic work using technology to deepen and scale the experience.  Somehow, we’re going to have to make those stories scale.

Deep Learning for Students

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Ron Berger in Edutopia:

In all of my years sitting in classrooms as a student, in public schools that were highly regarded, I never once produced anything that resembled authentic work or had value beyond addressing a class requirement. My time was spent on an academic treadmill of turning in short assignments completed individually as final drafts – worksheets, papers, math problem sets, lab reports – none of which meant much to anyone and none of which resembled the work I have done in the real world. Although I received good grades, I have no work saved from my days in school, because nothing I created was particularly original, important or beautiful.

Yet when we finish school and enter the world of work, we are asked to create work of value – scientific reports, business plans, websites, books, architectural blueprints, graphic artwork, investment proposals, medical devices and software applications. This work is created over weeks or months with team consultation, collaboration and critique, and it goes through multiple revisions. The research, analysis, and production involve multiple disciplines, such as reading, writing, mathematics, science, engineering and design.

When will students develop the skills to do this kind of work if not in school? It’s not just the reading and math skills; it’s also the planning, problem solving and working collaboratively. When do we believe students will develop the dispositions to persevere over time with a challenging project and hold themselves to high standards of quality? These skills and mindsets – collectively known as Deeper Learning – can only be built through long-term practice in classrooms where students work together on significant projects.

The very few artifacts I have of my own learning in school are artifacts of “deep learning.”

I totally agree that if we’re not giving kids opportunities to go deep into subjects and ideas that they find interesting, we’re not giving them the experiences they need to flourish in an abundant world.