Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Redefining Our Value

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Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking more and more that the biggest challenge we face as educators is redefining our value as schools and classrooms and teachers, not just to the taxpaying public but to ourselves as well. It’s becoming more and more apparent to me that unless we are able to articulate and manifest that shift, we really do risk losing much of what is meaningful and important about the school experience for our kids. 

And there is an urgency to this now that I’m not sure many are feeling. Recently, I heard a well respected author say during a presentation “We all know that kids don’t learn anything that we don’t teach them.” And I heard another wildly successful author about school practice comment that what we need to do to improve schools is to focus more on the techniques of direct instruction, using technology sparingly and on the edges. 

Here’s the point: if we see direct instruction as our value, if what we care about is “higher student achievement” in the context of passing the test, we are, in a word, screwed.

The reality? Technology will soon provide a better “learning” experience to kids needing to pass the test than a classroom teacher with 30 (or 50) kids. Self-paced, formatively assessed, personalized to each student’s needs. I wrote about Knewton a couple of weeks ago, and just a couple of days ago came news that they’ve joined forces with Pearson to create an individualized data-driven learning platform that will no doubt spawn a host of other startups in the education space. Read it, and most likely, weep:

Students in these courses use the computer during class time to work through material at their own speed. Through diagnostics taken along the way, the program creates a “personalized learning path” that targets exactly what lessons they need to work on and then delivers the appropriate material. Points, badges and other game mechanics theoretically keep students chugging through courses with more motivation. In the meantime, teachers learn which students are struggling with exactly which concepts.

If this is what we value, teachers will be reduced to folks who fill in the blanks that the software can’t…yet. Or to put it another way (again), if this is what we value, we don’t need teachers any more, nor do we need schools. And to be honest, it’s not hard to see a whole bunch of policy makers and businessmen who are just salivating at that prospect. I know that schools aren’t going away any time soon, (what would we do with our kids?) but our current concept of schools (or at least our greatest wish for schools) as places of inspiration and inquiry and joy in learning will die a quick death. 

I think Peggy Orenstein captures this pretty well in her column in the Times this week which described the tension between test scores and learning at a New Hampshire middle school that was featured in the paper earlier:

In the end, I guess, I believe in the quality, competence and creativity of her teachers. And perhaps that’s a type of faith worth having, one that in public education is being permanently (and sometimes understandably) eroded. Linda Rief, one of the Oyster River teachers, told Mr. Winerip that she feared “public schools where teachers are trusted to make learning fun are on the way out.”

“Ms. Rief understands that packaged curriculums and standardized assessments offer schools an economy of scale that she and her kind cannot compete with,” Mr. Winerip writes.

There is an urgency now to redefine our value. We cannot be about passing the test. We cannot be about content to the extent we are today because content is everywhere. We cannot be about a curriculum that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Something else can do that now, and in some ways, that’s a good thing. We have to be about the thing that technology cannot and will not be able to do, and that’s care deeply for our kids as humans, help them develop passions to learn, solve problems that are uniquely important to them, understand beauty and meaning in the world, help them play and create and apply knowledge in ways that add to the richness of life, and develop empathy and deep contextual understanding of the world. And more. 

To me, at least, our profession is in trouble not because of the technology, but because of the current expectations we have of schools. We need to start these conversations around redefinition today, shift this thinking now, not tomorrow. We need to make the case to parents and board members and policy makers and each other that while technology may now serve as a better option for kids needing to learn discrete skills or facts to pass the test, our great value is to cultivate and help develop those uniquely human dispositions and abilities that in the end will allow our kids to use what they know in ways that can make this world a better place and hopefully, save us from ourselves. And that that is an opportunity for change that we cannot waste.

There is an urgency now, for if what we as a society continue to value is the test, we’re lost.

Easier vs. Better

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Look, I can get to why schools look and act the way they do. They were built to do a certain thing…“educate” every child…at a certain time when folks didn’t have a lot of easy access to “quality” content or instruction. It was a monumental undertaking, and regardless of the fact that the founders of the system wanted to create factory workers instead of problem solving, creative, collaborative, lifelong learners, I have no doubt that a lot of people (excluding John Dewey) thought “yep, this is the best thing for the kids in our society. They’ll all get an education if we line ‘em up and nudge them through, and we’ll all be better for it.”

Or something like that.

But now the premise has changed. We’re getting more and more easy access to “quality” content and instruction (if we’re literate enough to know it when we see it), and that means that some of those once fine ideas for “getting an education” just don’t fit any more. Many of those old answers are feeling less and less useful when it comes to actually developing learners out of our kids instead of workers.

Yet we stick to them. And I know the reasons are many and complex (it’s what we know and what we expect schools to be,) but I think at the end of the day, we’re loathe to change because it’s just easier this way. It’s not what best for our kids, but it’s what’s easiest for us. (I know…a lot of you are thinking “there ain’t nothing easy about this,” and you’re right. Caring for kids and doing right by them educationally in whatever system we have is hard, hard work.)

But I’m thinking it’s time to call some of these old school habits out and ask, “are we really doing what’s best for kids, or are we doing what’s easiest for us?”

Like:

  • Is it better for our kids to be grouped by chronological age, or is it just easier for us?
  • Is it better for our kids to separate out the disciplines, or is it just easier for us?
  • Is it better for our kids to give every one of them pretty much the same curriculum, or is it just easier for us?
  • Is it better for our kids to turn off all of their technology in school, or is it just easier for us? 
  • Is it better for our kids that we assess everyone the same way, or is it just easier for us?
  • Is it better for our kids for us to decide what they should learn and how they should learn it, or is it just easier for us? 

You get the idea. Add yours below.

So, are we in the business of easy? Or do we want to find ways to do this education thing in ways that best serve our kids given the realities of this moment?

Just askin’.

Make it Stop. Please.

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I came across a 9th grade unit test on ancient history and Islam recently. One hundred point test. Forty-five multiple choice worth two points each, then choose one of five essay questions for the last 10 points.

Of the 45 multiple choice, 17 dealt with the names of capitals, countries and land masses. The rest looked pretty much like this:

This Roman emperor changed the official religion of the Roman Empire and moved its capital to Constantinople (today Istanbul):

A. Ptolemy
B. Cyrus the Great
C. Constantine
D. Jesus

 You get the idea. 

So, 90 points of this test was basically a Jeopardy game, asking isolated, disconnected (and therefore fairly useless) facts that the student could have answered in about 15 minutes using her computer or phone for that matter. Facts that, no doubt, that student spent much longer trying to memorize. Facts that, in all likelihood, that student will have little or no recollection of a year from now. Facts that, without some contextual understanding, are irrelevant.

The remaining 10 points came picking out one of the short answer questions. Here’s one:

What are the positive and negative aspects of Uthman’s caliphate? Why do you believe these aspects to be positive and why do you believe them to be negative. [Sic] Explain your reasoning. 

And the student needs to know this why?

To be fair, a couple of the questions were more interesting:

Is Islam a religion of violence? Why do you believe this to be the case?

Or

Explain the differences between Sunni and Shi’a. How have these differences led to the tensions that exist today between these two groups. [Sic]

Ten points for being able to discuss something relevant to today’s Middle East world if, and only if, the student chooses that question. So ninety, and maybe 100 points for facts that hold little value or relevance to anything important to know about the Middle East today.

This from a reputable, college prep school that parents choose to send their kids to. Spend money to send their kids to. 

I have to ask, why? Why are we asking kids to do this? Or if we are asking them to do this, why aren’t we dealing with reality and letting them use their connections and networks to get the answers? (I know, not every child has networks and connections, but the kids at this school do.) What value is there in this type of assessment? What is it preparing them for?

We have to stop this. Ok?

Headmasters, teachers, parents, Arne Duncan, Pearson, Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, union members, principals, college admissions officers, President Obama, board members, superintendents…make it stop.

Please.

It’s Not an Either/Or Question

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All sorts of silliness in this New York Times article which attempts (once again) to paint the technology in education discussion as either/or rather than right time/right place. We considered Waldorf schools for our own kids at one point, and there was much to like in terms of their focus on the environment, social justice and more. But we knew from the outset that their no-tech approach probably would not win the day for us. (There is much to learn and do with the environment and social justice with technology, you know.)

But to have well-heeled Silicon Valley executives tell it, these kids can just pick up technology and work it’s wonders any time. They don’t need it in school.

“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

“Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

“At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

And so on.

 I love Diana Laufenberg’s response to the either/or nonsense, captured in a couple of Tweets:

Yep. 

It’s Not an Either/Or Question

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All sorts of silliness in this New York Times article which attempts (once again) to paint the technology in education discussion as either/or rather than right time/right place. We considered Waldorf schools for our own kids at one point, and there was much to like in terms of their focus on the environment, social justice and more. But we knew from the outset that their no-tech approach probably would not win the day for us. (There is much to learn and do with the environment and social justice with technology, you know.)

But to have well-heeled Silicon Valley executives tell it, these kids can just pick up technology and work it’s wonders any time. They don’t need it in school.

“The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.”

“Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking.”

“At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

And so on.

 I love Diana Laufenberg’s response to the either/or nonsense, captured in a couple of Tweets:

Yep. 

Learners not Knowers

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I’m not saying that my kids don’t need teachers. But I am saying my kids don’t (won’t) need teachers any more to get them to pass the test.

Knewton’s software analyzes students’ performance on practice questions and recommends tutorials based on the student’s answers. Knewton optimizes learning by focusing only on the areas that students need to improve. The software determines subject areas at a granular level. it doesn’t just know whether you need improvement in algebra. It knows specifically whether you’re having trouble with, for example, quadratic equations.

According to COO David Liu, an afternoon of studying can give Knewton 100,000 – 150,000 data points about the student – such as how long it takes them to answer questions or what time of day they learn best.

And it’s not just math, by the way. If nothing else, the new iPhone’s integration of Siri is a clear indicator of how far technology has come in terms of understanding semantic cues and interactions. No tested subject area is “safe." 

In case it’s not obvious, this is the real danger to public education right now should we choose to continue down the path we’re currently on. If it’s all about test scores and "student acheivement” measured by test scores, immersing kids into Knewton-type environments is by far the easiest, cheapest, path of least resistance for the system’s current definition of “learning.” And it’s not just Knewton; there is big business in creating and providing these types of “learning” experiences to kids. Many others are salivating at the prospect, and education policy, just like all others, is driven by those with the deepest pockets. 

This is why we should all be feeling an acute urgency right now to take back the definition of what “learning” really is in a world filled with content and teachers and personalization. It’s not an easy task, especially when test scores and grades take such precedence in the conversation. Don’t get me wrong; there is some opportunity in the use of technology to prepare kids at a content level for the bigger learning conversations to come, the conversations that we need real teachers for, the ones which develop the dispositions of learning that are uniquely human.

Can Knewton prepare our kids to work with others around the world to solve problems? Can it show our kids how to create and share works of meaning and beauty that can change the world? Can it help them think critically about developing issues and events that impact their lives? Can it teach them to care deeply and act in ways that benefit the species?

Knewton doesn’t develop learners. It develops knowers. We’re in serious trouble if that’s all we value.

(Thanks to George Siemens’ riff on Knewton for getting me thinking…)

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Just yesterday I was struggling with a PC during a presentation…struggling…keys in the wrong place…touchpad sluggish…struggling…deathly embarassing silence…flailing… tension broken finally when I said “Look, I’m a Mac guy. These PCs drive me nuts.”

A large segment of the audience started applauding.

Brothers.

RIP Steve Jobs. Your inspiration has become a huge part of my life. I thank you sincerely.

https://willrichardson.com/just-yesterday-i-was-struggling-with-a-pc-during-a/

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If you have 30 minutes to spare, this presentation by Lawrence Lessig is a great overview of the state of American government and the importance of the Web with implications, I think, for the change conversation around schools. Some of this is standard fare for Lessig, but the plea he makes at the end is compelling. 

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)

https://willrichardson.com/if-you-have-30-minutes-to-spare-this-presentation/

Creating “Centers for Continual Learning”

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Deborah Meier gets right to the point in her essay “Reinventing Schools That Keep Teachers in Teaching”:

If we want teachers who are smart, caring, alive to students’ needs, and are in it for the long haul, we need to consider how to create schools that are themselves centers for the continual learning of everyone connected to them. We’ve learned most of what we know about teaching K-12 from our own schooling experience. Unlearning powerful past history in the absence of equally powerful settings for relearning won’t work.

Amen. How do any of us expect change to occur in schools if we don’t create a culture around unlearning the old and relearning the art of teaching? And I’m not just talking here about change as it relates to technology; Meier, in fact, does not even mention the role that technology plays in that process. On a basic level, we have a lot to unlearn around the way we’ve dumbed down the whole process of schools in our rush to raise test scores and promote “high student achievement” that’s measured by numbers and not actual performance.

But on another level, we need to create places where technology is simply an invisible part of the unlearning and relearning process, where we are continually learning with our connected networks and communities outside our physical spaces as well as inside. This isn’t just about moving to a more child-centered, progressive model of education; it’s about doing that through a global, digital lens that frames those ideas for this moment.

Easy to say, I know. So how do we do this? How do we provide the time and the support for teachers to “unlearn powerful past history” and move themselves and their colleagues to this new and different place? 

I actually had a conversation around that recently with Joel Backon, the Director of IT at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. And while there’s nothing inherently new about this idea, the way Joel framed it made a lot of sense. And it centers around this basic question: In a world where we have access to so much information and knowledge, where technology is providing more and more personalized learning environments for our students that are of quality and high engagement, do we really need to meet with our students five days a week, face to face, in physical space? In other words, could we work toward a model that allows students to work independently for let’s say one day a week, thus freeing teachers up to do the important work of unlearning and relearning either on their own or with their colleagues? Can a blended learning solution that takes advantage of all the Web affords perhaps make the Google “20% time” idea a possibility in schools?

I know this would require that every child have access. I also know that it would require some added time to plan those independent learning experiences for students. And I know some would struggle with the idea that their kids could actually learn on their own without them. There are hurdles.

But if we’re serious about giving teachers much needed time to learn, if we value it and Meier urges us to do, it’s “doable,” I think. Maybe not next week or next year, but as a part of a three-year plan? IF we value it. I love how Meier makes that case, too.

It’s doable. The details will vary from school to school, and some will fit one person and not another. But we cannot dare continue to keep kids in schools for so many, many years—incarcerated if you will—without doing a better job of making our schools places we all love. Places that we can’t wait to come to every morning and that we leave, exhausted and pleased with ourselves, every afternoon. Places where long-term experience and wisdom are not dismissed as the bad products of “seniority” rules, but what good societies take seriously. Schools are for the children, but they are also where the young build their images of adulthood. Our schools need to serve the students and the teachers.

So, how are your schools serving you as a learner? What other ideas do you have to make that happen?

“Is The Revolution Justified?”

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That’s the title of a chapter in a new free e-book my Martin Weller titled The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice. And the answer to that question is, in a word, “maybe.” It’s a pretty interesting look at the research on digital technologies in a learning context (or lack thereof) and the tensions of the moment when trying to figure out exactly what all of this means for higher ed with, I think, some useful applications to the K-12 world.

One conclusion that I totally agree with concerns the knowledge that kids have around these technologies from a learning perspective:

Overall, as Bennett et al. (2008) suggest, there is little strong evidence for the main claims of the net generation literature, which they summarise as follows:

  • Young people of the digital native generation possess sophisticated knowledge of and skills with information technologies.

  • As a result of their upbringing and experiences with technology, digital natives have particular learning preferences or styles that differ from earlier generations of students.

Weller makes the point that 

There seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes.

However, he also suggests that the influence of the Web on society is a large part of the reason schools need to consider changing:

But it is possible to at least conclude that there is significant activity online across a range of society, and the intersection of these activities (socialising, sharing, content creation, information seeking) has a direct relevance to education.

And one other interesting note. While dissatisfaction with schools is nothing new, Weller points out one big difference of this moment as compared to the past:

There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point.

Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors, such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community-based learning means that the competition is now more complex. [Emphasis mine.]

I’m really interested to see how those “viable alternatives for learners” play out. At some point, are we going to have move away from “college prep” and just make it “learning prep?”

Some interesting ideas to consider as we think about the scope and scale of change that we are considering.

“I Love Social Studies Class!”

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So, I know I spend a lot of time here (and elsewhere) lamenting the state of education in general and, specifically, wishing my kids were in systems where they were allowed to follow their passions more, systems where they were more engaged in the learning process overall. So I’m happy to report that yesterday Tucker came home from school totally psyched about his Social Studies class because they are studying Greek mythology. Tuck is a HUGE fan of the Percy Jackson series, and the fact that he will be reading The Lightning Thief in his classroom has him totally stoked. (He’s read it “four or five times” already…)

I know it’s kind of luck of the draw in this case, that the teacher’s choice just happened to be Tucker’s, that he’s really not being given the option to do it this way, and that I’m sure there are kids in the class who aren’t all that thrilled with studying or reading any of it. But it’s great to see him this pumped, and it speaks plainly to the fact that kids will be more motivated to learn if we can connect our content to their passions. I’ve written before how I wish he could learn English and science and math in the context of basketball, another subject that he loves.

I know, I know. It’s hard from a classroom of 30 kids standpoint to personalize for every student like that. And there are things that we want kids to know that don’t lend themselves to this type of learning. But I wonder if we valued it more, if we tested for “learning dispositions” and what kids can learn through their passions if we wouldn’t make it happen in some form in our classrooms. I remember when I was teaching, I had kids learning to be journalists by becoming beat reporters for the World Wrestling Federation and Metallica. They loved it, and the writing process became a way that they could express that love.

Here’s hoping both my kids (and yours) experience more of that “I Love…” feeling this school year. 

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!

The Question

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In about 15 minutes I’ll be waking Tucker up to get ready for the first day of public school seventh grade. Tess starts at her freshman year of high school at her independent school on Friday. And while I’m happy for them and the opportunities they have to go to places where they are cared for, places that are safe and where teachers take their jobs seriously, I wish I was more excited about their prospects for learning this year. Once again I’m weighed down by this question that Seth Godin asked yesterday on his blog:

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

That pretty much nails it, but I would doubt that more than 10 percent of the parents or taxpayers in the US are “wrestling” with that question in any meaningful way. They…we all should:

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

We are in trouble. And as Mary Ann Reilly commented on my blog, “We need to disrupt this. Soon. Now. Together.”

So how will you, how can we do that this year?

“We Prepare Children to Learn How to Learn”

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Fascinating piece in Smithsonian this month on the “success” of Finnish schools. And I put “success” in quotes because for most American observers, Finland’s school system works because they score near the top on PISA tests. When you read the article, however, you see that test scores have little to do with it from a Finnish perspective. 

There’s a lot to learn from what the Finns do, but more than anything, it’s an attitude toward learning that makes the difference. They’ll do “whatever it takes” to help a child be successful, whether that’s extra time, providing nourishing food and health care, or making play a focal point of the school day. School isn’t high stakes; as one principal said, “We are interested in what will become of them in life,” which is why 43 percent of Finnish kids go to vocational high schools and why there’s only one test in their senior years that they have to take.

But here are the three snips that really jumped out at me. First, the goal of the system:

“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,” said Pasi Sahlberg, a former math and physics teacher who is now in Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture.

What a concept, right? What they seem to understand that we here in the States can’t seem to get is that high test scores do not equal learning. That you can’t create a learning disposition if the focus is on content, Common Core or otherwise. That it’s about being a learner rather than being learned.

And this:

Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,” Louhivuori teased, as he rummaged through his closet looking for past years’ results. “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”

We’ve become so dependent on the test to tell us about our students that we know less and less about who they really are. And without really knowing them, how can we help them reach their individual potentials?

And finally:

In the United States, which has muddled along in the middle for the past decade, government officials have attempted to introduce marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private-sector ideas, such as vouchers, data-driven curriculum and charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, has apparently bet on competition. His Race to the Top initiative invites states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not fly in Finland. “I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,” said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”

Why is it we have such a hard time in this country seeing this “human aspect” of education? Is that something only understood by socialist cultures who see government as a way of lifting everyone up, of providing an equal starting point for all kids, as opposed to countries like ours that are so hell bent on competition that we’ll let millions of kids suffer a mediocre education just so we can have winners and losers?

I don’t buy the argument that we can’t learn from Finland because it’s smaller and doesn’t have such a big system or that it’s different from our culture. At the core, it’s about caring for kids, doing what’s right by them not what’s easy for us. That’s the piece we seem to be missing, and that’s the piece that should be motivating all of us start screaming about a meaningful overhaul of the system. 

Digital Outcasts

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This resonates:

The digital outcast is not somebody who doesn’t have access to the technologies; s/he is somebody who, after the access has been granted, fails to actualise the transformative potentials of technologies for the self or for others.

That’s Nishant Shah, Research Director of the Centre for Internet and Society in India, and while I’m not a fan of another label, I am intrigued by the definition and the implications it presents for schools.

It’s one thing to grant or provide access. It’s totally another to help students understand what to do with that access…not just for themselves but also in the service of others. I think one thing that we don’t talk enough about is changing the world for the better using the connections that we now have available to us. If we don’t begin to explore the opportunities for that type of change with our students, are we really making the most of the access we give them?

It Will Change Education

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George Siemens was nice enough to share a presentation he gave in South Africa yesterday, and while it’s always better to hear the context that any speaker brings to the ideas on the screen, a couple of the points in his slide deck got me thinking. Even though it’s articulating his thoughts around higher ed, I think there is a lot of relevance for K-12 as well.

In the accompanying blog post, George says:

I’m concerned about the narrowness of thought in higher education reform today…If you have one solution to the problem of education, you have missed the true nature of the problem. Many, many stakeholders have a vested interest in what goes on with our universities. Doing a better job of giving learners control and better tools for creating and accessing content is not enough. Most of reform suggestions are at best additive to the current model. None that I’ve seen have the prospect of replacing it.

Same can be said of the reform conversation in public schools; we’re tinkering on the edges, not understanding the true transformative nature of what technology is bringing. I’m reminded of this great Neil Postman quote:

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates.

Amen.

But here is the deal, and this is one of the clearest points in George’s presentation: this technology thing and specifically the web is going to change us whether we want it to or not. He writes:

If it changes how information is created…
If it changes how information is shared…
If it changes how information is evaluated…
If it changes how people connect…
If it changes how people communicate…
If it changes what people can do for themselves…

Then it will change education, teaching and learning.  

It already is.

So here is our challenge, I think. We can go along kicking or screaming, or we can LEAD. As I said the other day, we are the learning experts (or at least we should be) in our communities. We need to become the learning with technology experts in our communities, the ones who understand deeply and personally the really powerful opportunities we have right now and who also understand the difficulties and hazards that technology presents us as well.

You have a choice. Which will it be?

A Vision for Who Our Students Need to *Be*

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As my own two kids get ready for the start of school, it’s hard not to reflect on what I most want for them this year. It’s not about the grades they get (I wish they weren’t getting any grades at all, actually), whether or not they “pass the test,” or even so much about what they “know” at the end of the year (i.e. physics in Tess’s case and basic European history in Tucker’s.) More, I’m wondering whether they will love learning more next spring, be more patient problem solvers, understand more fully their place in the world, and embrace failure as opportunity, not defeat. 

None of that, however, will be reflected in their report cards. 

I wonder to what extent my kids’ schools have a vision of what they need to be, rather than what they need to know, as Michael Wesch suggests. 

I am not interested in what “information” or “skill sets” we need to learn… Skills and information fade into obsolescence . They are the metaphorical fish handed to you by the guy who should have taught you how to fish. More importantly, skills and information alone do not help us lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical and more meaningful lives.

Exactly right. And while I know that’s not what we as a society ask of our schools, that is exactly what I want my kids schools to be doing right now, especially now. As Wesch suggests, the moment demands it:

As a society, we continue trending toward individualism and superficiality even as we value connection, community, and authenticity. We disengage from community, social action, and politics. We amuse ourselves to death. And the most amazing collaboration and creativity machine ever created celebrates its 20th anniversary as a distraction device.

It shouldn’t be that way. We should be engaged in understanding for ourselves and for our students the ways in which we can make the most of this moment, by eschewing our focus on content and, instead, asking big, hairy, meaningful questions about our own learning and about the world. Wesch has a great riff on that topic in another post in the IDC forum:

Since all good thinking begins with a good question, it strikes me that if we are ultimately trying to create active lifelong learners with critical thinking skills and an ability to think outside the box it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions. Unfortunately, we can find a great deal of advice on how to ask good questions of students non-rhetorical, open-ended, etc. but we rarely share ideas on how to get students to ask good questions.

When I talk about good questions, I mean the kind of questions that force students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases. Oftentimes the answer to a good question is irrelevant; the question is an insight in itself. The only answer to the best questions is another good question. And so the best questions send students on rich and meaningful lifelong quests, question after question after question.

A great question is at the heart of Maxine Greene’s Social Imagination: “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society.” Really great questions are a step beyond what normally passes for “critical thinking” and become the generative source for finding solutions (and of course, new questions.)

Yeah…that’s what I want for my own kids. That’s what I want to see them doing this year, entering into “rich and meaningful lifelong quests” in the context of physics or history or whatever it is the school compels them to study. Forming and pursuing questions that they find compelling, not just answering ones that the teacher asks. I want them to be in classrooms where:

…students engage in real and relevant problems that excite them, work together to approach these problems as a learning community, and harness and leverage digital technologies while also critically reflecting on how those technologies mediate and change their lives.

I hope that will happen, but I’d by lying if I said I didn’t have my doubts. The system is loathe to embrace that kind of learning. But I also know that kind of learning is happening in classrooms around the country.

So tell me, how will you make that happen in your classrooms this year?

The Truly Flipped Classroom…and Conversation

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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. 

The Truly Flipped Classroom…and Conversation

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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. 

Then the Internet Came Along

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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. 

How Can You Not Be Angry?

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<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>

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?

Standardizing Creativity and Innovation. Really?

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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.

“The Shut Door is About to be Wrenched Open”

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Bryan Alexander has been thinking and writing about these trends for a long time now, and I think this analysis of why classrooms are going to change whether we like it or not is pretty much spot on. As always, the whole essay is worth the read, but I was particularly struck by this thought:

“Class begins when the classroom door closes.” This image is enshrined in many practices, much popular memory, and even campus policies. But the concept may well be turned inside out in the near future as several trends coincide, altering the ways we teach and learn. That shut door is about to be wrenched open and our closed classes drawn into a global, visible college (compared to the invisible college described by David Staley and Dennis Trinkle1).

The question is how much of that “visible” education will trickle down to K-12. As more and more mobile devices and more and more connectivity become the norm, that’s a question that we’re going to have to answer. 

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

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

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

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

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

Ugh.

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

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)