Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

The Real Engagement Question

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Newsflash: “Student engagement” now seems to be rising as an indicator of school effectiveness, along with “hope” and “graduation rates.” It’s interesting that only one of those is easy to accurately measure; the other two are much more fluid, based on the opinions of students. That in and of itself is an interesting shift, and perhaps, an important one. (It’s also interesting to note that the percentage of kids who go to college really isn’t valued that much as an indicator.) 

But it depends on how you define “engagement,” right?  I wrote more about this at EML, but does it surprise anyone that “engagement” can be raised when learning is gamified? When getting the right answer becomes a race? When we throw technologies like iPads and clickers at kids? It shouldn’t. Kids, especially young kids, are easily moved by such tools and pedagogies.

But here’s the not so subtle question we need to ask: By doing these things, are we trying to get kids more engaged in school? Or are we trying to get them more engaged in learning? And yes, there is a big difference. 

Too often, the educators I work with have bought new technologies or implemented new practices in an attempt to make school more palatable to kids. That may bump the numbers up in the next Gallup survey, but in the long run, it won’t do much to move a child’s desire to want to learn more about whatever they’re clicking answers to in class. That requires a much bigger shift in agency to the learner in ways that we all know (but for some reason are loathe to implement) lead to more powerful learning experiences for kids.

Almost half of our kids and two thirds of our teachers say they’re not engaged in school. What they’re really saying, both the kids and the adults, is that they’re not able to engage in learning about things that matter to them. No technology alone is going to solve that. 

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.

Teachers “Showing Up” as Students

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Jesse Stommel:

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

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

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

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

“It Just Doesn’t Matter”

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David Perkins, author of Making Learning Whole:

To me, 90 percent of what we typically teach is a waste of time. 90 percent of what we teach probably constitutes particular skills and particular nuggets of knowledge that those kids will never encounter again in a significant way in their lives. It just doesn’t matter. Well, that is completely bizarre. We simply have to do better than that.

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 “Khanification” of Education

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Yesterday I Tweeted out a link to a video titled “Meet the YouTube Next EDU Gurus,” a video that I found disconcerting on a number of levels, (not the least of which the music.) I know that in one way, the subjects of the video exemplify the participation, transparency, and, at times, creativity that I actually hope my kids aspire to. But what bothered me is that we seem to have reached a “Khanification” of education moment where anyone with a passion can make a video and be given “teacher” status. A moment captured by this Michael Schnieder Tweet back to me:

Which begs the questions, a) what should an education degree or a teaching certificate  require when increasingly anyone with a connection can be a teacher of content, and, b) more importantly, what changes when the world begins to accept a definition of “teacher” as someone who knows “how to make and post a video”? (Read the comments below the vid.)

In many ways, I’ve been pushed by Sal Khan’s lack of teaching experience more than by his videos. But now this growing acceptance of non-teachers as teachers of content and skills  (and, in some cases, better teachers of content and skills) poses an ever greater challenge for us to redefine the profession. And it circles back around to that question that I pose in the book: what is our value as classroom teachers in a world suddenly filled with teachers?

Here’s a hint: our value lies in that which cannot be Khanified. We better figure out ways pretty quickly to articulate that value in spades to parents, boards, corporations, etc. 

UPDATE: Related

Another Stunningly Bad Vision for Learning

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From the somewhat ironically titled Getting Smart blog:

Harun envisions ShowMe playing a role in the future classroom. “Maybe we will shift to a new form of classrooms, leaving the traditional way of gathering 20-30 students in a room everyday,” said Harun. “Maybe students will have their own cubicles as we do now, and they will run apps and watch videos, etc. Or maybe they will not have the obligation to come to school everyday, they will study at home, with their parents working at home.”

Ok, so here we go again. This is what “learning” looks like to folks who think an education is simply mastering a set of concepts and skills that we deliver to kids. We know what they need to know, and all that we really need to change is the delivery method. Cubicles and apps. That’s reform. Cheaper. More efficient. Quantifiable.

Check. The. Box.

Anyone else have a problem with that? 

And on another note, I’ve been thinking lately that there’s a whole ‘nother level of problem with the “personalized learning” term. You can’t really personalize learning can you? You can personalize content with the aim that students will learn something. But the learning isn’t fait accompli.

Personal learning is just that. Personalized? #notsomuch

Thoughts?

Schools vs. Abundance

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I ran across this graphic in a Chris Anderson Wired article from a few years ago, and with a bit of editing, I think it speaks to the dissonance between school (scarcity) and not school (abundance) that I tried to capture in Why School? 

At the district, school, classroom, teacher, and student level, this is a hugely complex shift to navigate. 

Wondering which of those categories to the left you’re finding most difficult to come to terms with and what strategies you have for dealing with them.

What the Web Does and Does Not Scale

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George Siemens writing in a new blog that he’s sharing with Dave Cormier and Bonnie Stewart as they craft a new book about the future of higher education:

Our thesis with xEducation is that the internet is happening to higher education and that successful universities of the future will be those that find ways to generate value for its many stakeholders that go beyond content provision and teaching. What exactly that value proposition is remains unclear. On the one hand, content and (recorded) lectures can easily be shared with limited costs. The internet scales content exceptionally well. The human, social, processes of learning don’t scale. Research doesn’t scale (yet). Regional and national economic value generation doesn’t scale. In these spaces where scalability does not work well, universities will likely find their new roles in society. Over the next six months, we’ll explore and test this thesis and place the discussion of higher education reform on a firmer foundation than the latest tool and popular hype [Emphasis mine].

When we ask the question “Why School?” or “what is our value when content and teachers are everywhere?” the answer rests in that human, social process. And I think this is a function of K-12 as much if not more than higher ed. If our focus is not in developing learners through the face to face nudging, modeling, questioning, feedback that stems from our human selves, that stuff that technology, to date at least, has not been able to provide, then I think we run the risk of irrelevance. 

1st Century Skills

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I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying Roger Schank’s recent book Teaching Minds. (Thanks to Sylvia Martinez for the rec.) I will go so far as to say that it should be required reading for every preservice teacher (TFA folks included) if for no other reason than to fundamentally challenge the traditional thinking about the profession. If you’ve seen Roger speak (and I have twice,) you know that he never holds anything back, and this book is no exception. He had me laughing out loud on the plane this afternoon, and nodding my head in agreement more times than I can count. Here’s an excerpt that captures the message and tone pretty well:

Twenty-first century skills are no different from 1st-century skills. Interestingly, Petronius, a 1st-century Roman author, complained that Roman schools were teaching “young men to grow up to be idiots, because they neither see nor hear one single thing connected with the usual circumstances of everyday life.” In other words, schools have always been about educating the elite in things that don’t matter much to anyone. This is fine as long as the elite don’t have to work.

But today, the elite have extrapolated from what they learned at Harvard and decided that every single schoolchild needs to know the same stuff. So, they whine and complain about math scores going down without once asking why this could possibly matter. Math is not a 21st-century skill any more than it was a 1st-century skill. Algebra is nice for those who need it, and useless for those who don’t. Skill in mathematics is certainly not going to make an industrial nation more competitive with any other, no matter how many times our “experts” assert that it will. One wonders how politicians can even say this junk, but they all do. 

Why?

My own guess is that, apart from the fact that they took all these subjects in school (and were probably bad at them-you don’t become a politician or a newspaper person because you were great at calculus), there is another issue: They don’t know what else to suggest.

Thinking abut the 1st-century will help us figure out what the real issues are. People then and people now had to learn how to function in the world they inhabit. This means being able to communicate, get along with others, function economically and physically, and in general reason about issues that confront them. It didn’t mean then, and it doesn’t mean now, science and mathematics, at least not for 95% of the population (207).

Really good stuff. 

The “Immeasurable” Part 2

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I’ve been thinking about ways to represent the emphasis on the measurable that I wrote about a few weeks ago, and I’ve come up with this graph which, I think, comes close to capturing the problem right now. 

What I’m trying to get at is that our school assessment lives primarily in the bottom left part of that graph, and that we rarely if ever get to the “immeasurable” stuff that resides toward the top right. To put it another way, we focus in schools on that which is quantifiable when, I think, our real value as places of learning rests in that messy stuff that isn’t.

What do you think? Am I capturing something worth capturing here? Am I missing something? 

Invented Things

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Cathy Davidson:

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of some of the changes in U.S. education, from kindergarten to professional school, either invented or finalized in the Taylorist era (the same era that produced the assembly line, statistics, standard deviation, spreadsheets, blueprints, punch clocks): mandatory public secondary schooling, research universities, majors, minors, divisions, certification, graduate school, collegiate law school, nursing school, graduate school of education, collegiate business school, degree requirements, grades, required courses, electives, distribution requirements, IQ tests, multiple choice tests, item response college entrance exams (SAT), school rankings, class rankings. And learning disabilities.

There are some great things in that list. My point in this open-ended meditation, though, is that these are invented things. Like all inventions, they are historically situated, created for a specific time and place, to solve problems of an era and address the possibilities afforded by the society, institutions, wealth, ambitions, and technologies of that time and place. Like statistics and the assembly line, the system of education we have inherited is not “timeless.” It is an industrial age invention. So is the practice of ranking students from best to worst (“one best way”), using standardized forms of testing (extending Galton’s questionnaire form to the one-best-answer or item-response test).

We invented these standardized, regulatory, categorizing, statistical, practices for determining educational success or failure for the Fordist era of the assembly line. We can invent better ones for our own era.

So, I’m stealing this line: “The system of education we have inherited is not timeless.” I’ve been asking audiences lately what did we do before we had this thing called school? How did we learn? How were we graded? It’s not a great conversation starter. I think most have such little context for anything different that it’s almost impossible to see beyond the structures we’ve built. It echoes, once again, Tom Carroll’s astute question over a decade ago:

If we didn’t have the schools we have today, would we create the schools we have today?

Um…no.

(BTW, Clay Shirky instigated a similar discussion about higher ed a couple of years ago that makes for a pretty interesting read.)

I wish I were smart enough, creative enough, focused enough to see the edgy meme that we need to start around education to invent these new things, whatever they are. I keep thinking about how back in the 70s, Wisk basically branded a problem to sell it’s detergent. “Ring around the collar” for those of you too young to remember. We need to brand this assessment problem in a way that helps the masses see it as an embarrassing inadequacy of the system.

Thoughts on how to do that?

Personalizing Flipped Engagement

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My first post at SmartBlog on Education is up:

Three words seem to be dancing around in my head of late when it comes to current thinking about education: “personalization,” “engagement” and “flip.” All three were on display on the vendor floor and in session rooms at last week’s International Society for Technology in Education conference in San Diego, one of the largest ed tech conferences in the world attended by upward of 18,000 people. At first blush, they are words that seem to promote a vision of better learning for kids. But as is so often the case in education, I’m not sure we as a community are spending enough time digging to parse what those words really mean, especially in the context of what deep learning now requires in a connected world…

Read more here. 

Co-operation vs. Competition (vs. Collaboration)

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Finnish educator and author Pasi Sahlberg writing in yesterday’s Washington Post:

Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

One thing that fatigues me more than almost anything about the United States is our compulsion with competition. We have to be the best in the world at seemingly everything…cars, solar panels, education…and if we’re not, some committee will be created to study the “problem” and figure out how to remedy the situation and get us back on top. In education, we’ve totally gone off the rails in terms of assessing kids and teachers and schools by test scores and AP classes and all sorts of other meaningless stuff that no one thinks about or remembers three years after the fact. 

Look, I’m not against healthy competition. My kids play sports, and I think they can learn a great deal being on teams that are striving for a common goal and, in the end, experiencing wins as well as losses. And I know great ideas and products are many times borne out of the competitive spirit. There’s nothing inherently wrong with striving to be better than another in ways that promote and sustain goodness in the world.

But we need a different lens on a national level these days. At a moment where so much knowledge is at our fingertips, and when we’re facing so many seemingly insurmountable problems, we need to spend more of our time figuring out how to work together instead of work against each other. And this is especially true in education.

I think it’s interesting that Sahlberg eschews the word collaboration here. And I’ve been persuaded by Stephen Downes and Harold Jarche and others that really, we need to talk less about collaborating in networks and focus instead on cooperation. The difference is not subtle. Mike Caulfield summarizes:

The neat thing about cooperation is that if you can structure a solution to a problem as a cooperative one rather than a collaborative one you can solve very big problems in a very short amount of time — because at it’s best, cooperation requires simply that you do what you normally do, but in a way that allows cooperation.

And according to Jarche, at it’s most basic level, cooperation means sharing. For cooperation to happen, we need to be participating transparently with the idea that others can build upon what we share, reshare it, curate it, connect it or whatever else. In that vein, it’s why we need to promote a “network literacy” that supports our ability to find, analyze, synthesize and share information and knowledge in safe, effective and ethical ways. In my discussions and snap polling of education audiences, I can tell you we’re nowhere near a tipping point with that in schools. 

This competition to cooperation thing requires a huge culture shift here in the States. The longer we wait to begin to immerse our students to the principles and literacies of sharing and participation, the longer it will take for that shift to occur.

Too Much to “Teach”

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It’s early, and I’m trying to make some brain cells come together in a coherent thought. Help me out, ok?

Some truths/assumptions:

1. Schools have to act as if every child has easy access to the Web or will have it sooner rather than later. For now, we have to provide it to those that don’t, but more importantly, we have to provide to every student the skills, literacies and dispositions that will help them flourish in a content, knowledge, and teacher-rich networked world regardless their current level of access to it. 

2. Given the ever expanding scope of knowledge and information we have access to, suggesting that we know what to “teach” every student from a content perspective is highly problematic. Certainly, we need to “teach” the basics of reading and writing and math. Beyond that, however, our focus has to be on dealing with all of that information and knowledge rather than parsing out specific chunks of it to deliver.

3. Given that there is too much to teach, the traditional idea of the “teacher” is moving toward obsolescence. Instead of preparing the adults to be teaching “professionals” who are adept at a highly structured delivery of education, we need to prepare them to be “learning professionals” who have deep expertise in inquiry, literacy, information retrieval and vetting, collaboration, creation etc. 

I think I’m trying to make a case for unlearning and relearning teaching, or, even, pushing it more to the sidelines. Ideas?

Remember, it’s early. Be gentle.

Rebranding Teachers

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A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this post on “Rebranding Teachers” at Hyperakt, a design firm for “the Common Good.” Here’s the gist:

We began with a simple premise, that education is the key to human progress, therefore teaching is among the most important professions for humanity. Our new visual vocabulary should capture the excitement and magic of activating the potential that is innate in every student. It should celebrate the process of developing ideas, reflect the collaborative nature of teaching and pay homage to existing visual tools used in teaching.

Included are a host of images that aim to reach that goal. Here’s one:

Do check out the rest.

I continue to struggle with the whole “teacher” idea, at least in the traditional sense that we use it in schools. It goes back to my struggle with what learning really is and how we can best make that happen in schools. Do I really want “teachers” for my kids? As I’ve said many times before, I think the majority of those who teach find their value in their ability to “deliver” the curriculum in engaging, perhaps memorable ways, not in their ability to help students uncover or create their own curriculum for learning as they go. To put it another way, most teachers don’t place a greater value in their own ability to learn and model learning. In that way, the word “teacher” connotes someone with something to give, some piece of knowledge or skill or content that must be taught. But lost in that interaction too many times is the most important learning of all, a student’s ability to learn on his or her own, to ask his or her own questions, find the answers, and create new knowledge around those answers. 

So when I ran across this “rebranding” effort, my reaction was not like most of those leaving comments. I think the bigger rebranding effort is around just what the role of the adult in the room is in schools today. Ironically, as some of the graphics on the Hyperakt site suggest, it’s more about discovery than teaching. What if instead of seeing the adult in the room as the point through which the curriculum ebbs and flows and as the ultimate arbiter or what’s been learned we saw that person as the chief instigator of discovery, or the person that continually asks questions that he or she doesn’t have the answers to, or the learning expert that constantly models passionate and discerning practice around “learning more?” That would be a more relevant rebrand than things like “Teach Curiosity” which, at the end of the day, is something many would argue the system teaches out of kids who naturally bring it with them.

I find a lot of irony in that snip above. It’s a gaggle of competing verbs. Do we “teach?” Do we “activate” the innate potential of kids? Do we “develop” ideas? Are those things the same, really? Given the baggage of over a century of “teaching” defined by iconic symbols and roles, I don’t think they are. Maybe the real rebranding has to start with a different word altogether. 

***Added 2/27: Seth Godin gets to this in his new manifesto on schools (which I’ll probably be blogging about more in a bit.) He says:

If there’s information that can be written down, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number or sharpen an axe.  (Worth stopping for a second and reconsidering the revolutionary nature of that last sentence.)  What we do need is someone to persuade us that we want to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better. (Section #44)

Amen.

SOPA in the Classroom

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As Royan Lee points out, there’s every reason to have a conversation with students about SOPA and PIPA in almost any classroom right now. (If last Wednesday wasn’t a teachable moment, I don’t know what was.) For most older kids, the debate strikes at the heart of their practices online, and even for younger kids, the larger themes are well worth the mention in general terms. My guess, however, is that a very small percentage of students have had a chance to learn and think about those proposals in the presence of peers and teachers.

Why? For one, I wonder how many teachers could lead a cogent discussion about them. The whole world of online interactions and knowledge sharing is not something most teachers yet participate in. But as Royan points out, in order to have a really meaningful conversation about SOPA and PIPA, students need to have a larger context other than the pirating of copyrighted music and films. He writes: 

Do you know what made it a lot easier to have a discussion about SOPA and PIPA in my class? The fact that my students post regularly to the internet, comment on one another’s work, receive comments from the far reaches of the globe, remix work, share links, and honour CC licensed work.

I asked the students how they would feel if their ability to do all of things was restricted, or even taken away, without debate or a tribunal of some variety. The room went silent for a minute which felt like an hour, but we proceeded to have a rich discussion about democracy without ever mentioning the word itself.

I know they still care much more about whether the next Eminem song will get on their iPods, but at least we were speaking about something we really know, not just have heard of.

And Royan can do that because he really know this through his own practice as well. Those conversations in his class would have been far less relevant without that.

The Rise of State Schools

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So this pretty much sums it up as well it can be summed up right now:

U.S. schools under the jurisdiction of state and federal governments are now scripted processes that view knowledge as static capital, students as passive and empty vessels, and teachers as compliant conduits for state-approved content. The accountability paradigm is antithetical to human agency and autonomy and thus to democracy, but it serves the needs of the status quo and the ruling elite; in effect, accountability paradigms driving compulsory education are oppressive.

Amen.

Teachers – Thank Goodness!

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A couple of days ago, my friend Howard Blumenthal sent along this essay that his 86-year-old father wrote in response to a post here about online learning from a few weeks ago. I thought it might make for some uplifting Sunday reading, so I’m sharing it here. Enjoy!

By Norm Blumenthal

As the fourteen year old son of a widowed mother in 1939, I had to contribute to the lowly household income. As a teenager, any dreams I had for my own future had to be secondary. Supporting my mother was most important. After school and on weekends, I worked at the local hardware store, but I spent most of my spare time drawing pictures. Sure, I played lots of street games, but had more fun drawing pictures of my favorite baseball players. To me, drawing was like a hobby, or a game I seemed to enjoy.

To another person in my young life, it seemed to be more than a mere hobby. Mr. Solomon Schwartz, my elementary school art teacher, was a talented artist in his own right, but far more adept at guiding young hopefuls like me. With his encouragement, and his unrelenting perseverance, he made it possible for me to apply to New York City’s prestigious High School of Music and Art. Thanks to Mr. Schwartz, I passed the entrance exam and was on my way to join the Old Masters.

Surrounded by other talented Young Masters, I quickly realized I was in the wrong place. The High School of Music and Art prepared students for further education at the finest of art institutions. That was not something I could do, not with my responsibilities at home. I simply didn’t have time for that kind of education. I needed to support my mother. I needed to finish high school as soon as possible, and get a paying job. What’s more, I was failing French. In addition to that, keeping up with my classmates, while feeling guilty about being in this luxurious place, made me wonder about my own artistic abilities. Was I good enough? Was Mr. Schwartz wrong about me? With apologies to him, I decided to call it quits and change the type of school I should attend. With my family responsibilities, perhaps I should attend a high school that teaches students how to use things like typewriters and other vital instruments of the business world.

Abandoning the creative life of music and art was not as simple as I imagined. Radical changes to an educational agenda, by a fourteen year old, are rarely considered. Even a note from my mother was insufficient. It took the influence of my uncle, a member of the school board, to switch me over to a seemingly more practical existence.

Without much concern from anyone, especially a teacher, with the foresight I lacked, I transferred to Eastern District High School. This is where teenagers from my part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn went to get a diploma, if not a complete education. Fortunately, I didn’t have to take a test to get in, but I did have to face another fear-inducing French class. After a two terrifying weeks, my French teacher, Mrs. Cozzens, asked me to meet with her after class. I was doing very badly, and assumed she would either help me or suggest some dire alternative. I even thought I was going to be expelled. I was partially right. She definitely wanted me to leave that school, but not for my difficulty with the French language. Somehow, Mrs, Cozzens had seen my artwork, and decided to change my life. She told me it was “a crime to waste my talent at a school like this.” Like Mr. Schwartz, she was a very persistent guardian angel. She would not rest until this wrong was corrected, even though the school year had already begun. I explained why I had left Music and Art, but she would not give up. Within days she found the school she knew was right for me. The School of Industrial Art’s slogan was, “To Train Artists and Designers for Industry.” Even to a fourteen year old me, that made good sense – upon graduation I could become a commercial artist, and get a job to support my mother. I never really thought of myself as a potential Old Master, so Industrial Art seemed like a very good idea.

I’m sure that both Mr. Schwartz and Mrs, Cozzens are long gone, but I wanted to thank them anyway. Their confidence in me, and the determination they exhibited on my behalf, not only helped me, but countless others as well. First and foremost, I was able to support my mother at a time when she really needed me. Second, my life at the School of Industrial Art included a lot of working in live shows – which I produced, directed, wrote and performed in. As a Navy signalman, aboard a cruiser in the Pacific, during WWII, sharpened those skills, putting on shows for my 1,500 shipmates. Those war-weary sailors can thank those, and other teachers, who taught me how to make them laugh when it was so difficult. Third, I worked for several years as a commercial artist, working my way up to Art Director at Esquire magazine, and then I made the transition to television, as the producer of NBC‘s Concentration. Fourth, those teachers reached through several generations, as two of my (now grown) children have found careers in the media/entertainment business, and two of my grandchildren are heading in a similar direction (one, as a graphic designer, the modern-day equivalent of a commercial artist.).

Why did I write this? Because I’m hearing more and more about online courses that may take the place of teachers. And I can‘t help but wonder what would have happened in my life if my French class had been an online course..     

Personalized Learning: Help Wanted

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I’m working on a piece for the February issue of Educational Leadership and I’m hoping you’ll share your thoughts/ideas on the topic. Here is the issue theme:

For Each to Excel

High standards—personalization. Are these two education trends really in opposition? Because of today’s expectation that schools bring all students to high levels of achievement, many educators believe that it is more important than ever to get to know students as individuals, identify their needs, and target instruction to each student’s strengths and interests. This issue will explore how schools are personalizing learning to help all students reach common curriculum standards. We are looking for articles on new ways in which teachers are differentiating instruction and providing student choice and challenge at all grade levels. What does neuroscience tell us about the power of personalized learning? What are the benefits of the common core curriculum, and how can standards and personalization mesh? And what new possibilities for customized education are being created by technology, online courses, and virtual schools?

For my piece, I’m focusing on how technology can deliver more personalized, relevant, passion-based learning. To that end, I’m looking to include teacher stories of how you are making personalization work in your classrooms using technology. I’m not going to be focused on the Common Core standards as much as I am narratives that underscore the use of technology to enhance learning dispositions and create learners.

Please use the comment form below to share your stories, links, ideas etc. Or, you can e-mail me directly. Thanks!

My Kids Need Some Creative Disobedience

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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?

"Disposable Reform"

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Steve Hargadon held an interesting interview with Linda Darling-Hammond last week that covered, for the most part, the ideas in her new book “The Flat World and Education” as well as some of her earlier works like “The Right to Learn.” While I was hoping to hear her go a bit more into depth about the role of technology in the reform or transformation of schools, and to also be more specific as to how to get to reforms she says we need, she did articulate a number of compelling ideas around why change is so slow and why it’s so difficult to move the needle on schools here in the US. I’ve snipped three fairly short segments from the full interview that I want to touch on in three separate posts. (Full recording here.)

The first discusses the idea that reforms are hampered by the lack of teachers who can teach in progressive ways, and that replication of successful school models is extremely difficult due to diverse circumstances (some have leadership, money, infrastructure, others don’t) and a political reality that forces us to change course every few years while other countries are going through a steady process of “continual improvement.” She says it’s hard to build a “system of good schools” here. Take a listen:

Here is one quote that’s worth mulling over.

“Progressive educational philosophies, that is approaches that are child-centered, that are really focused on empowering forms of learning that allow people to inquire for themselves and pursue knowledge in self-initiated ways as well as in other ways, those kinds of reforms demand infinitely skilled teachers, and our system has never been organized to produce infinitely skilled teachers in sufficient qualities to fuel those reforms over the long haul.”

The other day I Tweeted the question “What % of teacher ed programs prepare teachers NOT to be the focal point of the classroom?” and the responses were telling. Most said 5-10%, and my sense is that’s pretty accurate. No question, we’re not producing “infinitely skilled teachers” who are also “infinitely skilled learners” as well, and that’s exactly what we need to make these progressive philosophies happen in the classroom. It’s not rocket science; if we want students who “pursue knowledge in self-directed ways” and flourish in an inquiry driven environment, we have to prepare teachers to do that for themselves. And we’re not. We prepare teachers to teach, not to learn.

But I also found it striking that she connected our difficulty in sustaining change with what she termed our “disposable culture” here in the US. We try one reform and dispose of it, then we try another and dispose of that one, and then we try yet another. And I can’t help ask, whose fault is that? Throughout our education, we’re give out disposable assignments, have kids work on disposable projects that lead to disposable tests. I mean really, how much of what we actually have our kids do in school is really worth hanging onto in a “change the world” sense? I don’t mean to saddle the current system with causing everything that ails our society, but you have to admit, we own some of that…we reap what we sow.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to put some thoughts together on two of the other topics she brings up, professional development and assessment. Regardless the lack of a discussion around technology and learning networks in much of her writing and discussions, there is no question that Darling-Hammond has one of the clearest voices in articulating the issues we’re facing in education today. Definitely worth listening to.

Unlearning Teaching

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Rather than teachers delivering an information product to be ‘consumed’ and fed back by the student, co-creating value would see the teacher and student mutually involved in assembling and dissembling cultural products. As co-creators, both would add value to the capacity building work being done through the invitation to ‘meddle’ and to make errors. The teacher is in there experimenting and learning from the instructive complications of her errors alongside her students, rather than moving from desk to desk or chat room to chat room, watching over her flock.

I love this vision of teaching from Erica McWilliam, articulated in her 2007 piece “Unlearning How to Teach” (via my Diigo network). I know the idea isn’t new in these parts, but the way she frames it really resonates. And it speaks to some important aspects of network literacy and the teacher’s role in the formation of and the participation in those student networks. At the end of the day, as she suggests in the quote above, we have to add value to the process, not simply facilitate it. Here’s another snip that gets to that:

A further point here – if we consider the student’s learning network as a type of value network, then, we must also accept that such a network allows quick disconnection from nodes where value is not added, and quick connections with new nodes that promise added value – networks allow individuals to ‘go round’ or elude a point of exchange where supply chains do not. In blunt terms, this means that the teacher who does not add value to a learning network can – and will – be by-passed.

I think that’s one of the hardest shifts in thinking for teachers to make, the idea that they are no longer central to student learning simply because they are in the room. When learning value can be found in a billion different places, the teacher has to see herself as one of many nodes of learning, and she has to be willing to help students find, vet, and interact with those other nodes in ways that place value at the center of the interaction, meaning both ways. It’s not just enough to add those who bring value; we must create value in our networks as well.

Another interesting point in the essay suggests that because of our emphasis on knowledge in the schooling process, we are actually creating a more ignorant society. I greatly admire Charles Leadbetter‘s work (If you haven’t read “Learning from the Extremes” (pdf) you need to), and this somewhat extended quote really got me thinking:

In a script-less and fluid social world, ‘being knowledgeable’ in some discipline or area of enterprise is much less useful than it was in times gone by. In The Weightless Society (2000), Charles Leadbeater explains the reason for this by exploding the myth that we are becoming a more and more knowledgeable society with each new generation. Leadbeater’s view is that we have never been more ignorant. He reminds us that we have a much less intimate knowledge of the technologies that we use every day than our forebears had, and will continue to experience a growing gap between what we know and what knowledge is embedded in our manufactured environment. In simple terms, we are much more ignorant in relative terms than our predecessors.

But Leadbeater makes a further point about our increasing relative ignorance that is highly significant for teaching and learning. It is that we can and must put this ignorance to work – to make it useful – to provide opportunities for ourselves and others to live innovative and creative lives. “What holds people back from taking risks”, he asserts, “is often as not …their knowledge, not their ignorance” (p.4). Useful ignorance, then, becomes a space of pedagogical possibility rather than a base that needs to be covered. ‘Not knowing’ needs to be put to work without shame or bluster… Our highest educational achievers may well be aligned with their teachers in knowing what to do if and when they have the script. But as indicated earlier, this sort of certain and tidy knowing is out of alignment with a script-less and fluid social world. Out best learners will be those who can make ‘not knowing’ useful, who do not need the blueprint, the template, the map, to make a new kind of sense. This is one new disposition that academics as teachers need to acquire fast – the disposition to be usefully ignorant.

As a parent, and I know I keep coming back to this lens more and more these days, I want my kids and their teachers to be “usefully ignorant.” It’s the basis of inquiry, and that type of learning can’t happen unless we give up this notion that we can “know” the answer and that it can be tested in a neat little short answer package. The world truly is “script-less”, and the more my kids are able to flourish with “not knowing” the more successful they will be. Just that concept will require a lot of “unlearning” when it comes to teaching and schools in general.

So how are you unlearning teaching?