Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent
“The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, "How does this advance help our business [read: education system]?”
The correct question is, “how does this advance undermine our business [read: education] model and require us/enable us to build a new one?”
Yep. That’s the question alright.
This piece by Nilofer Merchant is more about business, but I think the translation to education is pretty obvious and relevant.
We must recognize that we are always a product of what we’ve done and who we aspire to be. It is not enough to lead our current businesses; we must also lead our future businesses. Over the past dozen or so years, I’ve learned that to do this, the best leaders do five key things well:
- Master unlearning. One of the most difficult tasks for corporate innovators is to learn how to unlearn the legacy business models they have perfected. Often, maybe even always, companies take the standards they have for their current business and use that to measure the new model. Start unlearning by explicitly recognizing that these metrics or assumptions are from the past and not necessarily useful for the future.
- Augment expertise. The knowledge you need for future growth may not exist inside your firm’s walls. You can augment — but not skip — the internal learning process. If you’re investing in a new project and the options look like this: (a) 10 months by doing it alone, or (b) six months with an additional $200K in outside expertise, or © outsource it entirely, choose (b). Knowledge can be conveyed, but wisdom is only earned by the experience of trying.
- Pilot, invest, experiment. Obviously you won’t get “the new thing” right the first time. Peter Sims talks of this as “little bets.” It’s okay to invest in something you know is going to fail. It’s the equivalent of letting kids explore. This is part of unlearning, saying, “Our goal is X, we tried Q, we learned K so our next pilot should be T.” The iterations take time, but it is a “go slow to go fast” play.
- Reward learning and cooperation. Peg people’s bonuses to the new projects. Here’s how one compensation model I worked on said it: “Base pay covers the core business; of course we need to do that right to keep the core engine working, but bonuses cover the new ideas and unlearning, which will require us to stretch our minds/hearts/abilities.” And regardless of anyone’s focus area, everyone gets bonuses on the shared new area of growth. This doesn’t eliminate but greatly reduces potential checkmate behavior within the company that can block change.
- Know your aspiration. You cannot find a second market without having a vision of who you serve and why. This doesn’t mean you can see into the future; it means you’ve committed to a process of discerning which unique abilities you have now, and which you’ll need to win a decade from now. Apple ended up not defining itself by its hardware or software expertise but by its design point of view.
I think Sarah Thorneycroft gets it right. In commenting about a student-led Minecraft workshop held online last week, she writes:
Perhaps the best aspect of the session today was that it was truly a ‘flipped classroom’ – not through swapping homework with classwork, but through reversing the roles of teacher and learner and turning learning heirarchy on its head. Learning led by kids is challenging and valuable – it’s learning by exploration and questioning, not rote process memorisation. Kids innovate and create first and think later.
Those who have been reading here for a while know my thinking on teachers needing to be learners first, needing to be the learning experts in our communities, not just the subject matter experts. In a world where knowledge and information are changing so fast, where there is so much to know, education has to be more about preparing kids to be learners rather than learned. Unfortunately, I still get the sense that most educators struggle with that shift. Sure, they continue to learn about what they teach, but few see themselves as master learners. In fact, for many, the idea of being a learning “expert” them uncomfortable.
That’s dangerous, especially right now when so many people outside of education are driving the conversation around reform. We’re ceding the debate to non-educators when we are the ones who should be driving it. We need to reframe the conversation, we need to redefine what education looks like, make it something where “success” isn’t measured by test scores or the number of AP courses we offer or the percentage of kids that go on to college but, instead, whether or not the kids that leave us are true learners, kids who have the skills and dispositions to edit their world, create complex work of quality and beauty and significance, work with one another to change the world for good, and tackle any problem that comes their way.
That is not a place we’ll arrive at if we let Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Arne Duncan continue to drive the reform bus. And as more moneyed interests become invested in maintaining the status quo, we’ll get farther and farther from that goal.
WE are the learning experts in our communities. (Right?) WE need to lead. And WE need to dive into learning right now, just like those kids in Sarah’s Minecraft class. Flipping that lens, I think, will have a lot to do with flipping the larger conversation around change.
I think Sarah Thorneycroft gets it right. In commenting about a student-led Minecraft workshop held online last week, she writes:
Perhaps the best aspect of the session today was that it was truly a ‘flipped classroom’ – not through swapping homework with classwork, but through reversing the roles of teacher and learner and turning learning heirarchy on its head. Learning led by kids is challenging and valuable – it’s learning by exploration and questioning, not rote process memorisation. Kids innovate and create first and think later.
Those who have been reading here for a while know my thinking on teachers needing to be learners first, needing to be the learning experts in our communities, not just the subject matter experts. In a world where knowledge and information are changing so fast, where there is so much to know, education has to be more about preparing kids to be learners rather than learned. Unfortunately, I still get the sense that most educators struggle with that shift. Sure, they continue to learn about what they teach, but few see themselves as master learners. In fact, for many, the idea of being a learning “expert” them uncomfortable.
That’s dangerous, especially right now when so many people outside of education are driving the conversation around reform. We’re ceding the debate to non-educators when we are the ones who should be driving it. We need to reframe the conversation, we need to redefine what education looks like, make it something where “success” isn’t measured by test scores or the number of AP courses we offer or the percentage of kids that go on to college but, instead, whether or not the kids that leave us are true learners, kids who have the skills and dispositions to edit their world, create complex work of quality and beauty and significance, work with one another to change the world for good, and tackle any problem that comes their way.
That is not a place we’ll arrive at if we let Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Arne Duncan continue to drive the reform bus. And as more moneyed interests become invested in maintaining the status quo, we’ll get farther and farther from that goal.
WE are the learning experts in our communities. (Right?) WE need to lead. And WE need to dive into learning right now, just like those kids in Sarah’s Minecraft class. Flipping that lens, I think, will have a lot to do with flipping the larger conversation around change.
Steve Goldberg is starting a school in the Fall of 2013 down in Durham, NC called the Triangle Learning Community Middle School. It’s an independent school, which gives him a bit more freedom to innovate. But I just love the concept nonetheless:
Mentor a socioeconomically and culturally diverse group of 20 middle school students for three years to pursue real-world project-based learning. The opposite of industrial model schools, we will build a strong sense of community and provide personalized attention as students discover and pursue their passions rather than a set curriculum. This does not mean students will sacrifice rigor in their academic development – they will work hard and dig deeply into subjects about which they are passionate. Students will become empathetic, self-directed, thoughtful, ethical, creative, engaged, curious and confident global citizens who will excel in high school and beyond.
Over the first two years in the program, students will gain confidence as active learners who take daily initiative to discover more about their world. Beyond this healthy curiosity, students will be encouraged and expected to work hard every day and follow through by completing quality inter-disciplinary projects that responsibly and thoughtfully contribute to society. Sixth graders will complete about 10 short projects over the course of the first year. Seventh graders will complete 3-4 more involved projects. Eighth graders will complete a six-month capstone project for an authentic audience. Graduates will leave confident that they can make a meaningful difference in the world.
Students who complete this three-year program will enter ninth grade ready to excel. Though they will take a non-traditional (but more meaningful) route to get there, graduates will be strong in English, math, science, history and conversant in at least one world language other than English. Most importantly, they will be self-directed learners who engage with the world on a regular basis and want to learn as much as possible. Work at Triangle Learning Community (TLC) will happen with equal intensity whether teachers are present or not, because students have an intrinsic desire to learn about topics they care passionately about.
Steve has also been keeping a blog detailing the methods that he and his teachers plan to use to make all of this happen. His recent posts on tackling the recent financial mess are a great starting point for thinking differently.
This is what I want for my kids. I know that their schools can’t necessarily replicate the structure of what Steve is doing, but I would hope they could see the merit in the approach and find ways to make inquiry happen in their classrooms at a much deeper level. Yes, they need some knowledge and some context to make sense of the world, all that stuff that’s going to be on the test. But they also need to know how to take that knowledge out into the world and deepen their understanding of it, put it to good use to solve meaningful problems. Our own “co-schooling” efforts revolve around that, but my fear is we’re raising a generation of kids won’t have the dispositions to deal with the world we’re handing them.
I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn, and I couldn’t put it down during my five-hour flight to Calgary yesterday. I want to cover it more completely when I finish the last 75 pages or so (more flights tomorrow) but I wanted to just pull a quick passage that I think frames the struggle that traditional schooling as well as we as individuals are starting to wake up to right now.
Keep in mind that we had over a hundred years to perfect our institutions of school and work for the industrial age. The chief purpose of those institutions was to make the divisions of labor central to industrialization seem natural to twentieth century workers. We had to be trained to inhabit the twentieth century comfortably and productively. Everything about school and work in the twentieth century was designed to create and reinforce separate subjects, separate cultures, separate grades, separate functions, separate spaces for personal life, work, private life, public life and all the other divisions.
Then the Internet came along. Now work increasingly means the desktop computer. Fifteen years into the digital revolution, one machine has reconnected the very things–personal life, social life, work life, and even sexual life–that we’d spent the last hundred years putting into neatly separated categories, cordoned off in their separate spaces, with as little overlap as possible except maybe the annual company picnic (13).
What I like about her approach to all of this in the book is that she makes it pretty clear that we don’t have a choice as to whether or not we try to make sense of these shifts. We’re not going back to those neatly separate containers of our lives, that if anything, all of this is going to be more intertwined as we move forward. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a different thing, hugely different in some ways, but there is also great opportunity in the change if (IF) we begin to work to understand it more deeply than just a Twitter hashtag and blog post. We literally have to change the way we interact with the world.
And as educators, our struggle is especially acute. We not only have to “train” our kids for the twenty first century, we have to train ourselves.
Rather here’s what I see: our institutions, far from evolving and improving, at the time we need to update them most, are actually moving backwards. We’re taking tiny steps–and sometimes giant leaps–backwards in time, deconstructing the basic building blocks of civilization.
Ring true, educators?
Here are three quotes that will hopefully lead you to read this really interesting interview with John Marsh, the author of Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality.
–What I learned — and what I wanted to convey in the book — is the unsettling truth that if people truly care about lessening poverty and economic inequality, they should forget about education.
–People who live in more equal countries live demonstrably better lives than those who live in less equal countries. In more equal countries, people — rich and poor alike — live longer, trust each other more, discriminate against women less, devote more resources to foreign aid, have fewer bouts of mental illness, use fewer drugs, murder each other less, have lower rates of infant mortality, suffer less from obesity, are more literate and numerate, complete more years of schooling, imprison fewer people, and enjoy greater social mobility.
–Although economists and scholars debate it, it is not clear that the United States needs or will need many more college graduates than it already generates.
And for once, there’s a fairly high level, balanced, respectful comment thread that parses the ideas even further. I love when the comments make me think as much as the article.
What do you think?
I mean really, can this be said any better than the way Alfie Kohn says it?
We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education – a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” – that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries. There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?”
As Kohn suggests later in the article, educators need to drive these conversations, not politicians and businessmen. And I get the sense from the comments on my last post that people are looking for ways to do just that but are frustrated with the lack of scale. We can only start so many wikis…
One of the benefits of the Web is that everyone can have his or her own voice. One of the drawbacks is that everyone can have his or her own voice. Used to be only a few people started movements. Today, anyone can. So the question is, how do we pull our individual movements together into something that gets some real push behind it? Or do we even need to do that? Is there another path?
In other words, how do we not let this happen to education?
<rant>
In over 10 years of using social media I can say with almost absolute certainty that I have never used the “F-word” in any public post, Tweet, bookmark, note or whatever else…until today. It took me a few minutes to push “publish” on that Tweet, but in the end, the anger I’m feeling about what’s being done to public education in this country coupled with our growing political dysfunction drove me to it. That and the fact that 40,000 other Tweets with that hashtag had been posted in the last day or so, not one of which I could find on a quick search that dealt with schools or learning or kids. The anger is building everywhere it seems, but around education.
I know, I know. As Wes suggests, on some level it probably wasn’t appropriate, and were I still in the classroom, I doubt I would have done it. And I know there are other people besides me who are angry about what has happened to the profession and to the system who are voicing it in more “productive” ways. There are lots of educators taking to the streets this week in Washington, DC, and there are others writing letters to the editor and op-ed pieces and more. I commend all of those folks for doing what they can do to articulate the many complex sides to the education debate.
But here’s the thing: If you’re a public school educator in the U.S. right now, how can you not be angry? How can you not be doing something, even if it is just a profanity laced Tweet? The profession is being trampled. Politicians and businessmen with no background in education are driving reform. And our students are stuck in a system that still thinks it’s the 19th Century. By any standard, including the tests, our kids are not being well served, especially those who live in poverty. As a community, we’re in a fight, whether we like it or not, yet we seem more inclined to figure out Google+ than to make our voices heard to the policy makers who seem to have no desire to figure out what’s best for our children and care more about their re-election campaigns.
I mean really…what’s it going to take?
</rant>
This danah boyd post is from a few years ago, but it still rings as true as ever.
Bright people push the edge, but what constitutes the edge is time dependent. It’s no longer about miniskirts or rock and roll; it’s about having a complex digital presence. Naturally, there’ll always be a handful of young people who manage to go through adolescence and early adulthood without any blemishes on their record. Employers need people who play by the rules, but they also need “creatives.”…
My generation isn’t as afraid of public opinion… We face it head-on and know how to manage it. We digitally document every love story and teen drama imaginable and then go on to put out content that creates a really nuanced public persona. If you read just one entry, you’re bound to get a distorted view…
Part of living in a networked society is learning how to accessorize our digital bodies, just as we learn to put on the appropriate clothes to go to the office.
I had an amazingly good time in Toronto last week with the Ontario Teachers Federation, but despite Ontario being a fair length ahead of the change conversation being held here in the states, I was struck by how many teachers struggled with the digital presence thing. Not that that fear is anything new; needing to be Googleable is such a different reality for most adults, much less teachers. But I just still find it interesting that in a room of about 200 teachers, only about 20 indicated they had even checked on their digital presence in the last couple of months.
That speaks volumes about how few are really understanding this shift and the implications for our students. We have a lot of work to do…
This is about as succinct an argument against standardized tests as I’ve come across yet. Written by William Wraga, a professor in the program in educational administration and policy at the College of Education, University of Georgia, it’s in response to the cheating scandal now rocking the Atlanta Public School System, and it clearly lays out the case that we are not doing much to assess our kids’ knowledge OR promote a learning disposition when we use them.
Research has found that when high-stakes tests are used:
1. Educators will teach to the tests.
2. Curriculum narrows to that which is on the test.
3. Instruction narrows to skill-drill test prep.
4. Academically disaffected students are more likely to drop out of school.
5. The pressure to raise scores in the face of severe sanctions increases the incidence of unethical behavior.
Research has not found sufficient evidence to support the notion that implementing high-stakes tests will improve student learning. In short, research suggests that high-stakes testing accountability measures not only will not improve education, but also may actually undermine education. Why would we enact a policy that would do that to educators and students?
Even without the research, this isn’t rocket science, is it? Very little of what we test is useful knowledge to any individual child, and we basically have no idea to what extent students can build on that knowledge nonetheless. It’d be nice if we trusted teachers a bit more to do that.
(Do take a moment to read this reply to get the gist of the dysfunction in our thinking about this. The system is just doing a horrible job of teaching critical thinking, obviously.)
Yong Zhao has an interesting series of posts on how cheating scandals around standardized tests are growing and becoming, for all intents, an important part of the why we should get rid of them argument.
The evidence is clear. Test-score cheating is not isolated to Atlanta, Baltimore, and a few other schools, as testing proponents tend to suggest. It is not a problem that can be fixed with technical measures such as tightened security. It may be human nature but it is the high and unreasonable pressure of high-stakes standardized testing that leads to corruption. Thus, we cannot minimize the problem, trivialize potential solutions, or blame a few educators who have been caught. The Atlanta scandal should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, especially to those who continue to promote testing as a necessary and effective way to improve education.
He goes on to summarize the other reasons why we should get rid of the test in terms of the other “costs” to both budgets and psyches.
A number of states are now moving their testing over onto computers in the next few years, and I’m already hearing that “it won’t be as easy to cheat” when that happens. Doubtful. The incentives to cheat have been made stronger, not reduced by the recent Race to the Top stupidity.
Anyway, all five parts of this series are well worth the read.
So during vacation it apparently came out that a new Obama edu-initiative appeared, called by some “Race to the Top for Tots.” You guessed it…we’re now going to be giving money to states who can show that it’s preschoolers are test ready for elementary school. Cooper Zale has a great reflection on this fact that ties in nicely to the research that I cited in my post here yesterday. The absurdity continues:
But my fear is that in our instructional obsession (including a focus on a drill and test approach to ensure that instruction “sticks” at least until after the test), state funded and regulated preschool programs will be pushed in the direction of teaching to the test, which I believe would do a great disservice to our kids’ healthy development. “Kindergarten readiness tests” are one thing if they are a low-stakes assessment for parents and other adults that work with the kid. They are quite another thing when they become a high-stakes assessment by the state of which preschool programs will receive or not receive funding.
If as I fear it becomes a high-stakes situation, adult preschool staff are highly likely to increase their efforts to direct children’s play more, while the study I cited above says that children’s development is generally facilitated by directing their play less. Even now, from my anecdotal experience, I’m concerned that many parents, childcare providers and teachers are way too directive when it comes to children’s skill development.
And it’s already happening. In this piece by Milwaukee kindergarten teacher Kelly McMahon in Rethinking Schools from a year ago (reg. req.), she recounts the number of tests that her 5-year-olds took in the 08-09 school year.
- Milwaukee Public Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kindergarten Assessment (completed three times a year)
- On the Mark Reading Verification Assessment (completed three times a year)
- A monthly writing prompt focused on different strands of the Six Traits of Writing
- 28 assessments measuring key early reading and spelling skills
- Chapter pre- and post-tests for all nine math chapters completed
- Three additional assessments for each math chapter completed
- A monthly math prompt
- Four Classroom Assessments Based on Standards (CABS) per social studies chapter (20 total)
- Four CABS assessments per science chapter (20 total)
- Four CABS assessments per health chapter (20 total)
It’s hard to come to any other conclusion that we have simply lost our collective minds when it comes to learning, and the worst part of it is, there is no leadership at the highest levels that a) has an understanding of the really powerful negative effects of standardization, and b) is willing to educate us and move us collectively in a different direction. In that vacuum, we have Bill Gates and Jeb Bush and other non-educators who can’t see learning as anything but a bunch of numbers and data that can be sold to vendors and, now, parents.
But here is the bigger problem, I think. An engaged citizenry would have picked up this fight by now. I’m constantly amazed at how few people I talk to outside of my network really don’t have any sense of what this system is doing to their kids, and, more importantly, the kids in inner cities who don’t have nearly the advantages and opportunities they do. The fact we haven’t mustered much of a collective fight speaks volumes about the negative effects of a system that now is going to dumb down our youngest learners even more.
Seems like I’m hitting a creativity theme here of late, but if you have 15 minutes to read this most excellent piece titled “The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience” by Andrea Kuszewski in Scientific American, you won’t regret it. It’s a research based look at why traditional teaching methods suck the creativity out of us and the hard work each of us needs to do to escape the effects as we grow into adulthood. The last paragraph captures the idea and the urgency:
What is supposed to be the most critical learning period for shaping children into the leaders of tomorrow has evolved over the years into a stifling of the creative instinct—wasting the age of imagination—which we then spend the rest of our lives trying to reconnect with. The time has never been more ready for systemic change than right now, and we’ve never had better tools to achieve this level of creative disobedience, to successfully prepare our children for the big challenges that lie ahead. It might be uncomfortable and take a bit of work, but our future depends on this radical change in order to survive.
Let me just add here the effects on creativity of the assessments we currently use are no less of a factor in this. They are what drive our teaching methods, and until we find a path to assessing something other than basic skills and content knowledge, we are assured of deepening the creativity crisis that is already here.
One more quick note of connection. I’m almost done with Eli Pariser’s great new book “The Filter Bubble,” and I hope to be blogging some thoughts on it shortly. But there is deep resonance between his thesis (watch his TED Talk to get the gist) that current search metrics are severely narrowing our access to the world of ideas and this quote from the Kuszewski article:
While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution…it seems that by directly instructing children—giving them the answers to problems, then testing them on memory—we are inhibiting creative problem solving, to quite a significant degree.
In a few words, we are killing creativity on all fronts. And we’re going to have to change the way we teach (as well as, to a large extent, what we teach) if we’re to resuscitate it in our kids.
And, in the end, it’s not just about our kids. We need creative, “problem-finding” teachers in our classrooms as well. How do we get there?
From a lengthy .pdf titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” by Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy, this snip jumped out at me as one that captures the challenges that our testing mindset is bringing us:
The new Common Core State Standards for mathematics and English and the work being done by the two assessment consortia will begin to address some of these issues, but, even when that work is done, the United States will still be at an enormous disadvantage relative to our competitors. We will have tests in these two subjects that are still not squarely based on clearly drawn curricula. The two consortia are betting heavily on the ability of computer-scored tests to measure the more complex skills and the creativity and capacity for innovation on which the future of our economy is likely to depend. No country that is currently out-performing the United States is doing that or is even considering doing that, because they are deeply skeptical that computer-scored tests or examinations can adequately measure the acquisition of the skills and knowledge they are most interested in. If the United States is right about this, we will wind up with a significant advantage over our competitors in the accuracy, timeliness and cost of scoring. If we are wrong, we will significantly hamper our capacity to measure the things we are most interested in measuring and will probably drive our curricula in directions we will ultimately regret.
What kills me is that we are even attempting to measure creativity and innovation by a “computer scored test” when we have this thing called a teacher already in the room and the potential of many other human assessors via the network who could do a much better job. Inherent in all of this is a deep distrust of the ability of humans to do the work of preparing our children for their worlds. On some level, I get that…we have a lot of work to do to bring the profession to a different, more effective place when it comes to developing the learning dispositions we want in both teachers and students. But surely, investing in that process, creating a new normal of teaching and learning will better serve our kids than attempting to standardize creativity.
Right?
Our policy makers have this deep love of the test for lots of reasons: money, power, politics. But at it’s root, it’s because they are not educators. They can’t define and communicate what real learning is and looks like to their constituents, people who have all formed their own views of learning in test centric schools (for the most part.) They crave the easy answer. They can’t lead on this, but neither are they willing to let others, the real experts on learning, the educators in our schools, take the reins. That, ultimately, is what we will come to regret most of all.
“We moved so that my kids could go to the best school system in the state.”
That’s what the woman sitting next to us poolside said as our kids, fast becoming friends, splashed around in the water at a hotel somewhere in Wyoming during our recent vacation. We’d been talking about schools for about 20 minutes, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking “And how exactly did you find the best school system in the state?” Big state. California. I was curious.
Now before I give away the answer, one which won’t surprise anyone, let me just add that this was a very articulate, well-educated woman whose husband owns a successful software distribution company in Silicon Valley. Even though we’d just met, it was obvious that she was well-read, progressive in her thinking, and concerned about the system. So I winced just a bit when she said it.
“I just looked at all the test scores.”
I mean, I wasn’t surprised, but I guess I was hoping that she might have taken a different path, might have dug around for something a bit less obvious. Might have a different vision for what “best” means.
In a word…nope.
And I wonder if it’s even fair to expect that she might have taken a different route. I mean what was I hoping for?
“Well, first I wanted to make sure that the school had a solid grasp on inquiry-based learning, that the teachers were innovative and curious and letting their students take the lead, and that there was an obvious commitment to building a community of learners. And, of course, that there was a real understanding of how to use technology to prepare my kids for a digital world, to create things of value and to try to make the world a better place.”
Um…yeah. Right. Instead, she pressed the easy button; can I blame her?
But there is a kicker.
“So, how’s it worked out? Do you like the school?” I asked.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “My kids hate it. The teachers are just concerned about the test, and they’re all competitive as all get out. And the reason it gets the highest test scores is that just about every child there has parents who are pushing them and tutoring them and making sure they get what they need to ‘succeed.’”
Go figure.
Today is turning out to be Scott McLeod day here on my Tumblr page. It’s hard to argue with this:
We know, simply from projecting current trends forward, that in the future our learning will be even more digital, more mobile, and more multimedia than it is now. It will be more networked and more interconnected and often will occur online, lessening dependence on local humans. It frequently will be more informal and definitely will be more self-directed, individualized, and personalized. It will be more computer-based and more software-mediated and thus less reliant on live humans. It will be more open and more accessible and may occur in simulation or video game-like environments. And so on. We’re not going to retrench or go backward on any of these paths. We thus need school leaders who can begin envisioning the implications of these environmental characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling. We need administrators who can design and operationalize our learning environments to reflect these new affordances. We need leaders who are brave enough to create the new paradigm instead of simply tweaking the status quo and who have the knowledge and ability to create schools that are relevant to the needs of students, families, and society…
None of us are exempt. We can’t firmly believe in ‘life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around us; we don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ or ‘excellent professor’ if we do this. We must change inertia into momentum. That’s what we owe our children and grandchildren.
Read the full essay to get what I think is a pretty compelling case for change. Then forward it to your administrators, school board members, and community leaders. Ask them what they think.
After 10 years of blogging, I’ve decided to move my efforts away from Weblogg-ed over to here, my new site on Tumblr. You can read some of my reasoning here, but safe to say more than anything else, I just felt like I needed a change, that the world has changed, and that what I want to do online has changed as well. I will forever be grateful to the many readers and commentors who have stopped by my blog over the last few years as they have pushed my thinking and learning immeasurably. I really hope that continues here as well.
This is a bit of new adventure, an experiment in blogging, in community, in portfolio-making and a whole bunch more. I’m still working out the kinks in my process here, but I hope to be sharing out on a regular basis not only the long form writing that my old blog was built upon but also shorter snips with more concise comment, that space between my blog and my Twitter account. Both have left me frustrated of late, so I’m hoping this will closer to that sweet spot that I’m looking for.
Please feel free to comment and link and expand the conversation around change in schools and the impact that technologies are having on learning. It’s a most interesting time to be in education, much to figure out, much to learn. Hopefully we can do much of that together.
Thanks for reading.
(Warning: Elitist, preachy, liberal, rantish stuff ahead.)
Lately, I can’t seem to get out from under the feeling that a) this country has pretty much lost its way and that b) at the end of the day, our education system carries much of the blame. No question, my parenting lens is coloring some of this; I’ve been reading Umair Haque and Climate Progress and the occasional Thomas Friedman essay, and I’m simply getting depressed at the picture of the future that’s being painted. And, I’m even more distressed at not being able to know how well my kids will be able to deal with the boatload of crap that is coming their way. Let’s just say things feel pretty dire right now, and to me at least, it seems like our society is offering up one part denial, one part lack of interest and one part ignorance in response. The first is a choice, but those second two? I blame our all consuming love affair with the test.
Not kidding.
It’s bad enough that we’re bleeding kids to the tune of 7,000 a day from the system, 2,500,000 1,200,000 a year. (See note below.) That’s not all due to the test, certainly, but much of it is due to being subjected to a curriculum that is driven by the one size fits all outcomes that we’ve set up for them. Read Seymour Papert’s list of 8 Big Ideas for Constructionist Learning and ask yourself seriously how much of that goes on in your school. My guess is not much, and the primary reason is we don’t value that stuff more than we value making sure kids pass the test. We don’t give kids time to go deep, we don’t honor failure, and we’re not about “learning to learn” as much as we are about “learning to know.” So many of our kids are disengaged or simply not interested in learning because they see no benefits past the exam. Are we really surprised that so many adults in our society aren’t learners? So many teachers, in fact? That’s not our emphasis in schools.
Similarly, is anyone surprised that a huge swath of our population can’t speak intelligently about the larger issues that face us? No doubt, the financial mess we’re in and climate change and the Middle East and the rest are complex, fast changing issues that can be difficult for anyone to keep up with. (I’m no exception.) But again, have our schools really been cultivating the learning dispositions needed to grapple with those topics as they evolve? We give a lot of lip service to problem solving and critical thinking and the like, but I’m not convinced that those and other really important skills and literacies are showing up meaningfully in more than 10% of classrooms in this country because in large measure, they’re not on the test. It’s about content and knowledge, not learning.
Here’s the deal: Right now, the test is forcing us to spend too much time on stuff that we don’t really need to be spending time on any more. I used to joke about open phone tests, but I’m not joking as much any more. I keep looking at my kids’ tests, especially Tucker’s state NJ ASK stuff and see way too much stuff on there that he could answer with his phone. Not getting it.
And it’s not getting better. I just spent a couple of days out in Seattle working with a group of pretty amazing educators helping to write problem based curriculum that aligns with the Common Core. Their main motivation is to engage kids in learning, and I got a chance to observe one of their modules being implemented in a local high school classroom. It was good stuff. But in general, what bothers me about the Common Core is what bothers me about the traditional curriculum as well, namely that there is still way too much emphasis on things that I just don’t see as all that important in the information and knowledge filled world in which we live. I totally get that there is not one part of most K-12 curricula that isn’t relevant to some kids in the system, but the idea that every child has to get every part of the standard curriculum is silly. And even more, there is still a decided lack of emphasis on the types of skills and dispositions and real world knowledge and thinking that my children are going to need to best exist in a world filled with what more and more appears to be some pretty dire problems.
So I’ve been building a list of my UnCommon Core, the things I think we can expect every child to understand regardless of interest and passion. I know some will read a liberal bias into this, but I find these hard to argue against, to be honest, regardless the political viewpoint you bring to them. So here’s a baker’s dozen:
1. Living softly on the Earth (Our global impacts.)
2. Gender equality equity (Note #2) (With a particular emphasis on the objectification and sexualization of young girls and women.)
3. Developing expertise (Understanding what it means to go deep intellectually)
4. Public participation (Both online and off)
5. Managing, analyzing, synthesizing and sharing multiple streams of simultaneous information (Thank you NCTE)
6. Physical fitness and health (Real fitness. Real health.)
7. Consumerism and finance (Understanding the systems of money)
8. Networked online learning (And all that goes with that)
9. Reputation management/becoming a trusted source/online safety
10. Participating in a democracy (Online and off)
11. Embracing and learning through change (Too much of schools is about stagnation.) (Added after original posting.)
12. Embracing diversity (Our changing cultural influences)
13. Problem solving and programming solutions
I’m sure there are others…feel free to extend the list.
And here’s the thing…we can teach math and science and even Shakespeare in those contexts, not as discrete, never the twain shall meet disciplines or units that are mostly aimed at checking the test prep box. If you don’t believe that, have you seen the vision for school that MaryAnn Reilly is working on?
Students do not take traditional courses tied to seat time or discrete disciplines and are encouraged to work virtually, as well as in person. Utilizing Option 2 (N.J.A.C. 6A:8-5.1(a)1ii), personalized learning plans are developed with students and their parents/guardians that fulfill the Morris School District graduation requirements while emphasizing students’ interests, emerging as well as established. These experiences can result in: project-based courses, virtual offerings, community-based internships, college courses, and capstone projects.
Like MaryAnn and her cohorts are doing, I think it’s time to start thinking uncommonly about education, for the sake of our kids and our futures. What do you think?
(Note: I miscalculated the number of dropouts in the initial version as 7,000 per day, not 7,000 per each school day. Apologies.)
(Note #2: As per the suggestion of Alec Couros.)
If there is one thing you can count on upon leaving Educon it’s that you want to change things, most likely in a pretty big way. It’s not just the vibe at SLA with the kids and the teachers who actually seem to want to be there every day (and even on snow days and weekends) to be learning and leading. And it’s not just the assembled masses who are sharing and prodding and asking great questions in the “conversation” sessions. It’s more the stolen moments in the hallways and the quiet back and forths that happen over lunch when you start to sense this shared feeling of “WTF are we doing to our kids by sticking them in a system that’s just not working anymore?” Or something like that. I can’t tell you how struck I was by how many parent-educators almost grieved at the experience their kids were having in schools. It’s like we know in our hearts there is a better way, but we just don’t know how to make it happen at scale in the next three months. (Years are out of the question.)
We’ve talked about starting a “movement” for a long time now. Chris spent his session this weekend on the subject, and I used mine to offer up an idea for a tangible start to a new conversation. (I’ll be reporting out more on that in the next few days, I hope.) What with Michelle Rhee and Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan dominating the ed change conversation, I think we’re all pining for a bigger voice. That will be tough. We’re underfunded (or should I say unfunded), and I’ll say again that 90% or more of educators in the US really have no context for change in the way that we talk about it in our networks. Sure, we’ve got more people at the party who think the system needs to be transformed instead of reformed, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re still dancing down at the Legion Hall with a Polka band as the headliner.
This weekend I kept thinking, when will we have our Egypt moment? When will we get to the point where enough people feel dissatisfied with the whole school thing and want change badly enough to rise up and say “That’s it! We’re not going to do this anymore!” I know there’s a slim chance that our collective sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo around education will ever match the passion of those people in the streets of Cairo today. But I’m beginning to wonder if there may not be an untapped feeling of frustration around schools that those bigger voices are just not getting. That’s it’s not about improving the current system but, instead, creating a different, better path for our kids. But I also sense that while many people may feel this discomfort, they don’t quite yet know what to do with it.
Those folks in Egypt don’t know exactly what they want either. They just know what they don’t want. They’ve become disaffected enough to rise up and take it on faith that something better will rise from the ashes. At the end of the day, I doubt most parents will take their children out of a system they may have serious reservations about if there’s not a safe and effective and convenient alternative. But if the headlines of the past year are any indication, this system is starting to crash, be it economics, “competition,” lack of equity or whatever else. I’m wondering what we’ll build that will rise up and take its place.
Just a quick observation in the midst of my blogging hiatus…
I think it’s official. We’ve got the rhetoric for change down. We’re telling the new story…self-directed, multi-skilled kids with devices accessing content and teachers from around the world using a new literacy, all being assessed through a potent mix of traditional and not so traditional tests. All digital, all the time. New learners for new times. New schools and classrooms and teachers for new times. It’s all in there. It’s Prego!
That’s at least the impression you get when you read this latest from THE Journal and host of other articles and blog posts and Tech Plans. For example:
The students will lead this revolution if we keep them engaged and give them hope that they can make use of these technologies that they love in their private lives and make use of them for learning. Teachers will come along with that because teachers’ role will change. In my 2020 vision, we’ll have teachers as facilitators and mentors, and the students will be directing, leading, and collaborating, even as early as elementary school. The relationship between students and teachers will be, on a whole, much different and more valuable.
Ah, to dream.
But here is the thing…read between the lines in most of these descriptions and you get the sense that we see it, we want it, but we ain’t gonna get it very soon. Budgets are being cut. The people in charge don’t really see this vision. We haven’t figured out that assessment thing very well. And so on.
Read all together, you get the sense the revolution is coming, just not anytime soon. And even worse, it’s doubtful that when it does come, that schools in general are going to lead it. I know we have pockets of real change, but while the words seem to be scaling (somewhat, at least), the deeds have yet to follow suit.
Sigh.
From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.” I just wanted to share this 40-minute or so “interview” that my local superintendent Lisa Brady did with me last month and is now airing on local access television here in Central NJ. Nothing too much new here from me, but I think it’s great opportunity to hear a school leader in the midst of shifting a traditional school to a inquiry-based curriculum grounded in technology and online social learning tools talk about some of her thinking around making those changes. Would love to hear what you think.
Probably about five years ago now, I remember David Warlick and others trying to frame the conversation around the shifts we’re seeing in learning under the umbrella of “Telling the New Story” of education. And I also remember being frustrated for a number of years after that at our inability to come up with that new definition of schools, that new story of learning at least in a school sense. I’ve come to realize that we’re not going to be able to write “a” new story for schools, that there will be many new stories in the coming years as the institution tries to adjust to the explosion of learning opportunities outside the school walls. Should be fun to watch (or not.)
But through reading the comment thread on the last post here, it looks as if there might be a desire for some type of site or listing of schools that are telling a “new story.” Schools that are doing things differently in terms of taking advantage of what the Web and other technologies afford around learning. Schools that have a more “progressive” approach to learning through inquiry or immersion using social technology or something other than standards based learning. I know there are many pockets of innovation in individual classrooms, and many of those are well documented. But what about entire schools and, perhaps, systems that are modeling a different path? A few come easily to mind: Science Leadership Academy, High Tech High, CIS 339 in New York City, VanMeter High School in Iowa, and Hunterdon Central High School, my old stomping grounds here in NJ. From what I’ve seen and heard, these schools are beginning to significantly rethink what’s happening in their classrooms, not just infusing technology and tools, but really delivering networked learning to their students at a schoolwide level. And I’m sure there are others.
So I guess I’m wondering if it might be time to create a resource of these types of schools. Maybe a wiki where if people were interested they could create a page of overview for what they are doing that’s different? Anyone have any thinking to share around whether or not that might be a useful idea and how it might be structured?
It’s been great fun to get to share a part of eight school opening days this year from Mississippi to Vermont. They’re always filled with a great deal of energy, and they’re also a good way of getting a sense of where things are in terms of schools’ evolution (or lack thereof) in thinking around technology in a teaching and learning context. I’d love to be able to say that it feels like we’re a lot farther down the road, but by and large, that’s not the what I’m seeing. There is still a real emphasis on the implementation of “stuff” without the hard conversations about pedagogy that deal with preparing kids for a connected world. There are pockets of that, but not much that is being discussed within the frame of a long-term plan or real vision as to what classroom learning is going to look like in say, ten or even five years. (I put out a Tweet last week asking what the timeframe was for the technology plans at the schools where people are teaching, and most said three years with an occasional five year plan or a “Technology plan? What’s that?” thrown in. I’m wondering, by the way, when we’ll stop calling them technology plans and just call them learning plans.)
What I am sensing, though, is that more schools and districts seem to “get” that the Web is affording some new opportunities for learning, and that they are willing to seriously consider what the impacts are for their schools. The problem is, and this is just my take on it, that most still see it as a conversation about technology as opposed to a conversation about change. As I’ve suggested here before, there is a lot of “tinkering around the edges” going on, but not much that I can see happening in terms of really rethinking the role of schools in learning. In large measure, the schools I visited assess their effectiveness by making AYP, the scores their kids get on AP tests, percentage of graduates going on to colleges, and the merit scholars they produce. In and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with those measures. But I’ve been struggling to see examples of what learning looks like in those schools, examples of engaged kids, asking and answering their own questions, creating, cooperating or maybe even collaborating with other learners young and old, and doing all of it in ways that the rest of the world can learn from it. I’ve heard very few stories of learning that sound any different from the stories we’ve been telling for a very long time now. There are some, like the teacher I met today outside of Buffalo who has been collaborating with another teacher in Scotland the last couple of years as their students study literature together through a wiki, or another teacher outside of Pittsburgh who has her students using Twitter to ask questions and connect around science. But these are still ripples; there are few waves.
I wonder if that’s an accurate portrayal…obviously, eight schools does not a trend make. But I’m betting these schools are not dissimilar from most others at this point. And I’m still left wondering what it will take for evidence of more widespread, systemic shifting to bubble up.