Almost ten years into this, I still find it hard to articulate the appreciation I feel for the people I’ve connected to through this blog, their friendship, their generosity and energy, and most of all their passion for making the world a better place for the two fast-growing knuckleheads below and the millions of kids out there like them. Thank you. You inspire me on a regular basis.
I’m closing up shop here and on Twitter and elsewhere for a few weeks. Sincere best wishes for a great season and an amazing New Year. See you in 2011.
Google just opened up it’s e-bookstore today. And while the required app doesn’t seem to be available in the US yet (even though it says it is), I already know what book will be my first download: Eight Days Out by my great-grandfather Merrick Abner Richardson. It’s an absolutely scintillating read (not), one of three “novels” that, so the story goes, he paid a vanity press to publish a few hundred copies way back at the turn of the 20th Century. Imagine what he coulda done with Lulu.
The cool part about this is not that his great-great grandkids (and beyond) will in some way be changed by his words. They won’t. The cool part is simply that another very small part of their personal history has been captured. It’s a thin slice of who they are, a piece of their DNA that will be preserved. And in some way, even though this isn’t a monumental work of fiction or a classic by any stretch, that makes me feel good.
It’s not lost on me that when I blog (or, in recent terms, don’t blog) or save a picture or put up a Tweet that I’m adding in some way to my own legacy, one that I can write and share in more amazing ways simply because I have the privilege of living at this moment. I don’t know if my kids or grandkids will ever take the time and effort to read or look at some of this stuff. I’m not much expecting them to. But they could. Whatever the technology they’re playing with in their adulthood, I’m guessing most of this will be pretty much a mouse click away. I’ve written about this before, but I know at some point I want to spend more time creating content specifically for them. Historical narratives, advice videos, favorite jokes. I share all that stuff with them now, in real life, but as someone who has been without a mother for almost 30 years now, I know how amazing it would be to see her and listen to her and keep learning from her, even though she may not be around. Not every day, but once in a while
When silly stuff like finding my great-grandfather’s fairly insipid prose preserved in a Google e-book happens, I’m reminded how amazing this moment is. In a world of serious struggle and argument and change, it’s nice to be reminded.
Just a quick observation in the midst of my blogging hiatus…
I think it’s official. We’ve got the rhetoric for change down. We’re telling the new story…self-directed, multi-skilled kids with devices accessing content and teachers from around the world using a new literacy, all being assessed through a potent mix of traditional and not so traditional tests. All digital, all the time. New learners for new times. New schools and classrooms and teachers for new times. It’s all in there. It’s Prego!
That’s at least the impression you get when you read this latest from THE Journal and host of other articles and blog posts and Tech Plans. For example:
The students will lead this revolution if we keep them engaged and give them hope that they can make use of these technologies that they love in their private lives and make use of them for learning. Teachers will come along with that because teachers’ role will change. In my 2020 vision, we’ll have teachers as facilitators and mentors, and the students will be directing, leading, and collaborating, even as early as elementary school. The relationship between students and teachers will be, on a whole, much different and more valuable.
Ah, to dream.
But here is the thing…read between the lines in most of these descriptions and you get the sense that we see it, we want it, but we ain’t gonna get it very soon. Budgets are being cut. The people in charge don’t really see this vision. We haven’t figured out that assessment thing very well. And so on.
Read all together, you get the sense the revolution is coming, just not anytime soon. And even worse, it’s doubtful that when it does come, that schools in general are going to lead it. I know we have pockets of real change, but while the words seem to be scaling (somewhat, at least), the deeds have yet to follow suit.
I’m hoping I can get some ideas from math teacher types (and others) around an idea I’ve been kicking around for my son Tucker, who, as you might guess by the title of this post, loves basketball. (He loves math, too.) Not that he needs it or has asked for it, but I keep wondering what a “Basketball Math” curriculum might look like for Tucker, one that would combine his serious interest in the sport with his growing interest in math, and one that would also give him opportunities to connect with other basketball and math lovers outside of the classroom. A few basic things seem obvious, even to my English teacher brain, in terms of learning percentages, ordering numbers, reading some blogs on using statistics in basketball, etc. But I’m thinking there’s a lot of other stuff about geometry, physics and more that he might find hidden in the game as well.
So if you have a second, I’m hoping you might post your ideas here. Assuming we could (and would want to) build a K-? math curriculum around the game of basketball that, if possible, takes advantage of these social learning spaces online, what might that look like?
From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.” I just wanted to share this 40-minute or so “interview” that my local superintendent Lisa Brady did with me last month and is now airing on local access television here in Central NJ. Nothing too much new here from me, but I think it’s great opportunity to hear a school leader in the midst of shifting a traditional school to a inquiry-based curriculum grounded in technology and online social learning tools talk about some of her thinking around making those changes. Would love to hear what you think.
I really enjoyed Stephen Downes’ first offering at the Huffington Post this week. I think it captures the friction between the growing availability of options for a more “open” education and the much more “closed” construction of schools. But while the whole thing is worth the read, one line in particular really jumped out at me:
We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.
Absolutely right. Schools are in the business of providing an education, and you can hear it in the language. School is the place you go to get a good education. The idea that we deliver an education is the foundation for the entire structure of the system, the way we age group kids, the way our classrooms look, the assessments we give. We’ve got something that we’ll give to our students, assuming, of course, that they are willing to receive it in appropriate ways.
What we’re not doing is focusing our efforts on how to best prepare students to educate themselves. It’s really not as much about content any more as it is about learning skills, and about the different ways that technology enhances our ability to drive our own learning. That’s the shift we must make, away from one-size-fits-all curriculum that we deliver to our kids to a model that embraces and promotes learning in whatever form works best for individual students. Stephen finds another way to articulate the difference between the learner and the learned.
To that end, I was reminded of another turn of a phrase that Ira Socol offered a while back (though I can’t seem to find the link, unfortunately.) It went something like “It’s not about how technology can support education; it’s about how education can support the technology.” It was one of those “just wait for the blowback” statements that felt a little too shifty at first even for me. But it really speaks to this same idea. If these tools open up all sorts of possibilities for learning and creating our own path, shouldn’t a large part of what we do be to support the creation of that path in individual learners?
“In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. ” –Eric Hoffer
I’ve always found that quote to be one that I think about most when it comes to education. I want so badly for my kids to be learners, not knowers first. Not that there aren’t things they need to know, but I would much rather they have a yen for learning, for the “patient problem solving” that Dan Meyer talks about, a comfort with ambiguity and failure that is the hallmark of so much deep learning. Broken record, I know, but we’re “right answering” our kids (and our teachers, to some extent) to death in this country. Hard to watch.
I thought of this recently when I came across a post by George Couros who was discussing the shift in professional development at his school. He’s been doing some great stuff up in Edmonton, and his blog posts and Tweets have added a lot to the conversation in the past year. As I read it, this one line stopped me:
“As we move forward, it is essential that our goals focus directly on how they impact and improve student learning.”
I commented on the blog, and there has been some interesting back and forth there. And while I don’t want to hijack the thread, I did want to dive into my reaction a bit more here and see where it might lead
What stopped me is this: should our focus be on how to “impact and improve student learning” or on how to “impact and improve student learners“? It’s a not so subtle shift, but one that I think takes the conversation in a different direction. Our zeal for “higher student achievement” and “improved student learning” is leading us to even more emphasis on standardized tests, because that’s the easiest, cheapest way to assess “achievement” and “learning.” If you want proof, check out this article about the discussion in Massachusetts to replace the state test with the new Common Core assessment. Here’s the “money” quote:
And there have been some suggestions that assessment may include other things that some educators have long been clamoring for, such as portfolios of school work and research papers. Celli, who is a specialist in individual student learning styles, said that a holistic assessment of students would dramatically increase grades and scores. But Latham pointed out the problem with that approach is time and resources and schools don’t have enough of either.
Thereyago.
But what if the emphasis was on learners, not learning? As Jaclyn Calder noted in the original comment thread on George’s post, the “learning skills” piece, the self-direction, critical thinking, “patient problem solving” piece are deemed “unimportant” in comparison to the grade on any given assignment. And as George himself points out, is that measuring creativity, passion, and innovation are difficult to do, much less teach. Andrew Rotherham and Daniel Willingham agree in this Ed Leadership piece from this summer:
Another curricular challenge is that we don’t yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division.
Somehow, we’ve got to get there. How do we begin to value these learning skills as much as we value the outcomes?
“We’re not really motivated to learn to gain knowledge,” Ranganathan said. “We just want to memorize it and get a good grade and get into a good school.” In a sense, she said, the educational process has been corrupted. “Especially after the final exam, you just forget it afterward.”
That’s a quote from a student in an interesting article from the Washington Post that covers the “other” education movie making the rounds these days, “Race to Nowhere.” And while the rest of the story is worth the read, that one quote speaks truth more than any other. We’re testing and standardizing ourselves to death in the name of a whole bunch of “corrupted” ideals (“higher student achievement”, “international competition”, etc.) that have little or no relation to real learning. We all know it: teachers, administrators, parents. If we’re completely honest with ourselves, it’s hard to escape that this is what we do.
But here is the other majorly compelling quote from that article. At one point during a discussion after a local screening of the film, the parent who put together the movie, Vicki Abeles, noted that while some schools are beginning to take steps to reduce the testing pressure on kids, “I think it feels scary to make these changes alone” for both parents and schools. She’s right on both accounts. On the school side, beneath the “yeah buts” as to why we can’t make changes (budgets, lack of technology, lack of time, etc.) is this nagging sense of fear, fear that parents will push back, fear that students won’t do as well on the tests, fear simply of being different. I hear it in just about every conversation I have with school leaders when we get to the “well, what are you going to do?” part of the conversation.
And on the parent side, that fear is there, too. I know lots of parents who aren’t all that thrilled with the system but who are assuaged by the idea that the schools their kids are in will at least push them along to success on the traditional path. Opting for something else is just too hard, and to be honest, too “untested.” (No pun intended.) It reminds me of the story I read somewhere this summer about a father being all for his daughter’s desire to pursue her own learning path after high school, as long as she understood that if she got into Harvard, she was going.
I’ve written here before that my kids know that we don’t care that much about the test, that we constantly try to turn the “what did you get?” question into the “what are you learning?” question. Too much of the time, I get the feeling my kids are learning to take the test. They do the homework for the sake of doing the homework, not for the sake of going deeper into something they have an interest in or a desire to learn. Both my kids know that they are not necessarily on the college track, that we’re not going do Grade 13 if they don’t have a real sense of what they want to become. No doubt, college can be a very valuable learning experience, but it’s just one of many, and at this point, despite the statistics that say otherwise, we’re open to the idea that there may be a better path to “success.” (All depends on how you define it, right?)
But this all takes on more relevance in the context of the “What to do About Schools?” conversations that we’ve been enduring the past couple of months. The “problems” we face with schools are right now are less about the schools themselves and more about a lack of vision and a fear of change. Put simply, the age-grouped, subject-delineated, 8 am-2 pm, September-June, one-size-fits-all system that we have makes the process of education easy. The realities of personal, self-directed, real problem-solving learning in a connected world are anything but.
Still, the hardest reality right now is that there is no groundswell to do school differently, not just “better.” Seems it’s easy to see a path to “better.” “Different” is just too scary.
(This is gonna be a tough post to write. Not that blogging shouldn’t be tough to begin with. But this one feels like it might be harder than most.)
By all accounts, it’s been a crappy week for education. To be honest, I haven’t participated in much of it, but reading the accounts from Chris and Bud and others, and some of the Tweets from Sunday’s Education Nation sessions, it’s hard not to sense the anger, frustration, sadness and even paranoia that has infected our little part of the education world. While I know it was all heartfelt and sincere, I think I turned it all off on Sunday when a Twitter thread started to assume that certain books about the mess we’re in had been somehow pulled from Amazon by NBC so as not to interfere with its one-sided reality about what fixes we all need to make education better. It goes without saying that it was much more fun watching Tucker win his soccer game and the Jets beat up on the Dolphins than watch the attempted dismemberment of the profession live and in Tweeting color.
But the last few days have me wondering a few things, among them, how many people are really tuned into this “conversation”, how many of those will still be tuned in a month from now, and, the toughest one, are we just asking the wrong questions to begin with?
NBC understands as well as anyone the short attention span theater that is most effective to deliver a message to an increasingly dumbed down populace in this country. Crank up the machine for a few days of flooding, intensive marketing under the guise of “conversation” in sound bites and then run to the next crisis. And the irony is that education really is failing if the vast majority of people go no further than to tune into Brian Williams or Oprah for an hour, receive the intended message, and then return to their lives thinking schools are broken and that billionaire-funded charters are the answer. Mission accomplished. (Of course the greater irony is that “student achievement” really has nothing to do with the critical thinking necessary to even attempt to navigate this morass of pseudo research and rock star opinion.) My sense is that very, very few people are “engaged” in these ideas, and most of them that are are angry. And rightfully so. NBC has the money and the bandwidth and the agenda in their pockets. “We” have a lot of passionate, kid-loving change agents who see the world a bit differently and are growing increasingly frustrated at our lack of a seat at the table.
But I guess I’m just wondering, do we even want a seat at that table? Are NBC and Oprah, and to a certain extent even the growing heroes in the movement like Diane Ravitch engaged in a debate that, at the end of the day, is going to be worth the time and energy we’re spending on it?
And this is where it gets really hard for me, because while in my heart I know that to not fight these battles in the short term to preserve the very best of what schools and classrooms are and can be would dishonor the teachers and students currently in the system, I’m continually persuaded that at the end of the day, the focus on “fixing” schools occurs at the expense of a focus on expanding the learning opportunities we give our students. I wish the two were the same, that better learning was seen as the impetus for better schools. But right now, to the mainstream at least, better “knowing” means better schools. Say what you will about online social learning tools, the networks and communities that so many of us are engaging in do afford deep, rich learning in ways that physical space cannot match. (And yes, we can say the same about physical space.) The mainstream is not yet open to the opportunities for learning our students now have, due in large measure to these technologies, and it’s nowhere near open to the idea that because of these innovations, the best outcome for our kids may be “schools” that look very little like what they look like today.
We need to be open to those ideas and more.
This post, “We’re Not Waiting for Superman, We Are Empowering Superheroes” by Diana Rhoten of Startl is the latest of many to push me in this direction. In it, she suggests that we are faced with a “massive, radical, design challenge,” that “we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning.” So much of what she says in this post makes sense to me. Here’s one snip especially:
Our vision of technologically enabled learning is not one of the lone child sitting at her desktop (or laptop) passively consuming PDFs or browsing Web pages. We believe the potential of technology for learning is much greater. We believe its power resides in its ability to deliver active and interactive experiences where a learner participates in the very construction of knowledge by crafting and curating, mixing and re-mixing information with digital tools, a process which can be and should be greatly augmented by online and offline social interactions between friends, in a community of peers, or an extended network of people (both professional and amateur) who share her interests.
Technology is just a tool. Its effects ultimately depend on the people who use them, how and where. Thus, technology does not negate the role of people or place in learning, but it does change their definitions and their dynamics. And, so just as we design new technologies for learning, we must also consider the contexts for learning that will facilitate their best use … whether that is at school, at home, at the library, on the job, or a place we have not yet imagined.
And she frames what I think is a coherent (for these times, at least) vision for innovation on the edges (echoing Christensen) when she says:
We believe the edge is place in the system where the risk of failure and the opportunity for success are most allowable, and we want to be the people who to take the risk to demonstrate the opportunity. We’re not Pollyannaish about the challenges of working on the edge. We know much of what we try will fail; that’s what innovation is about. We also know that it will take time for the work we support to travel from the early adopters to the mainstream, but we don’t see an alternative. Better to demonstrate what could be than to wait for what might be.
Exactly. We should all be innovating, testing new models, failing, reflecting, trying anew, sharing the learning with others who are working on the edges in their own classrooms and projects. It’s one of the great pieces of what we do at PLP, because we are innovating and succeding and failing and rethinking on the edge. And I know that’s hard because it’s not valued and supported in most places, and I know most teachers simply can’t or won’t. It’s too hard. There’s no time. Too many barriers. But those that can, must right now. Because the reality is we simply don’t have the media, the money or the muscle to compete with the current narrative about schools, and to fret over that fact I think cuts deeply into what energy we do have to think clearly about what’s best for our kids. And because in the long run, this conversation can’t be about schools first. It has to be about learning. And through that lens, we need to be advocates for whatever is best for our kids, whether at times that might be a technology over a teacher, an online community over a school, a passion based project over a one-size fits all curriculum, a chance to create with strangers of all ages over a classroom of same-age kids working hard to game the system. Those types of innovations will at some point get the notice of the mainstream.
Let NBC and Bill Gates and Oprah have at the “fixing schools” conversation. Let’s keep our energies and our laser like focus on the learning, in whatever form that takes.
Here’s an idea for your next PD day around technology (assuming you’ve already started a conversation around social learning tools and curricular change…no small assumption, I know.)
Step 1: Put up a wiki page with a list of interesting tools that teachers might use in the classroom, fairly complete descriptions of what the tool can do, and a few links to great examples of use in the classrooms. Ask teachers to read through the descriptions and sign up for the sessions that interest them. Schedule sessions in rooms with computers and internet access. Only run those sessions that have at least four people signed up for it.
Step 2: When people arrive in the rooms where the sessions are scheduled, write this on the board, whiteboard, smartboard, etc: “YOU HAVE 90 MINUTES. FIGURE IT OUT.”
The best thing about “Learning by Playing,” the most excellent feature in this week’s New York Times magazine, is not that it gives a fairly fair and balanced look at the potentials of learning games in the classroom. No, instead, it’s the willingness to ask big questions in a big, hairy mainstream publication that lots of people read:
What if teachers gave up the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?
Contrast that with the somewhat tired thinking that Time magazine offers around “What Makes Schools Great” and there’s no doubt we’re nowhere near a tipping point here or anything. (As someone who was thinking we were there like seven years ago, I’ve learned my lesson.) But I will say that it feels, at least, like more people are open to thinking about transforming schools, not reforming them, of seriously looking at “entirely different learning environments,” not just tweaks with tech. The National Ed Tech Plan, love it or not, at least pushes the thinking. The NCTE literacy standards are tough to meet in a traditional classroom. Some good stuff moving in the right direction.
The Times article, (assuming you haven’t read it yet) is about Quest to Learn, Katie Salen’s new school in New York City, funded by the Gates Foundation, flooded with technology, subject of all sorts of study, and for a host of reasons, difficult to replicate. But it’s also about a new language for classrooms, like
There are elements of the school’s curriculum that look familiar — nightly independent reading assignments, weekly reading-comprehension packets and plenty of work with pencils and paper — and others that don’t. Quest to Learn students record podcasts, film and edit videos, play video games, blog avidly and occasionally receive video messages from aliens.
And
The traditional school structure strikes Salen as “weird.” “You go to a math class, and that is the only place math is happening, and you are supposed to learn math just in that one space…There’s been this assumption that school is the only place that learning is happening, that everything a kid is supposed to know is delivered between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and it happens in the confines of a building,” she said. “But the fact is that kids are doing a lot of interesting learning outside of school. We acknowledge that, and we are trying to bring that into their learning here.”
We need more of this type of conversation getting “out there” into the mainstream as conversation starters. I know that to most, the idea of a “gaming school” is just off the charts, and I’m waiting to see if the Times opens comments on the article. But if we get more and more of this, all the better.
One last point. There’s a video with the piece that is worth the watch. About 1:20 in, pay close attention to the scan of the classroom as the teacher is talking. I couldn’t help thinking about Sugata Mitra’s comment that 1-1 classroom computing isn’t the best scenario; 1-4 requires kids to work together and collaborate in more meaningful ways. That’s writ large, I think, in that scene.
Take three minutes to watch this intro to MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by Dave Cormier, who with some of his Canadian friends are running “Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010,” a free course that starts today. Then, consider the questions below:
Questions:
How important is it that we make our students ready for these types of self-directed learning opportunities?
How can we begin to weave some of these types of experiences into our current curriculum?
How do we assess the learning that takes place here? Or, even, do we?
Add others as you see fit, but this type of learning has me thinking really deeply about how to help Tess and Tucker flourish in these environments.
It is the thesis of this book that change—constant, accelerating, ubiquitous—is the most striking characteristic of the world we live in and that our educational system has not yet recognized this fact. We maintain, further, that the abilities and attitudes required to deal adequately with change are those of the highest priority and that it is not beyond our ingenuity to design school environments which can help young people to master concepts necessary to survival in a rapidly changing world. The institution we call “school” is what it is because we made it that way. If it is irrelevant…if it shields children from reality…if it educates for obsolescence…if it does not develop intelligence…if it is based on fear…if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings…if it induces alienation…if it punishes creativity and independence…if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.
Neil Postman
Teaching as a Subversive Activity 1968
Forty two years ago. It really, really begs the question…can it?
Yesterday, Alec Couros went “Back to School” to “Meet the Teacher” of his first grade daughter. Here is what he saw:
Here is what he Tweeted:
It reminded me of the night I met Tucker’s first grade teacher, and the first words out of her mouth were something to the effect of “First grade is where we learn the rules.”
Ugh.
If I’d had Twitter back then, I’m sure I would have Tweeted something similar to this:
Alec’s Tweets registered a slew of responses which, to be honest, I found to be a fascinating read, so fascinating that I decided to capture the bulk of them here. (Start at the bottom and read up if you want to get the flow of the conversation.) They really are worth the read as they capture not just the emotion of a whole bunch of teacher parents who are met with the same reality when they go to their “Meet the Teacher” nights but also the complexity of what to do about it. It creates a dilemma; do we corner the teacher and give her a new view of the world, look for another class or school, march down to the principal’s office, or lay back, do what we can to help that teacher and fill in the blanks at home. We’ve tried them all, and none of them seem to work very well.
I want my kids’ schools to prepare them for the world that I and many of us see them growing toward. I want it desperately. (Emphasis mine.) But it’s not happening. For Tucker, it means handing in all of his sixth grade assignments in cursive (emphasis not mine), and it means another year of 50 lb backpacks filled with less that real world text books and a slew of worksheets that he’ll work through and forget. (Tess starts school on Friday so we’ll see what her realities are.)
So, while Alec struggles with his realities, I’m once again struggling with mine. And for what it’s worth, here’s what we’ll do to make the best of it once again this year.
1. We write an e-mail (or a letter) to each teacher introducing our kids and ourselves, letting them know what our hopes are, what we’d love to see our kids doing, and what we’ll do to support the classroom. We also introduce ourselves, and talk a little bit about what our worldview of education looks like. Finally, we offer to continue that conversation and help make it a reality in the classroom in whatever way we can. And we cc the principal and headmaster (since Tess is in private school.)
2. We co-school as much as we can. I found the Tweet by @dschink to capture it pretty well:
“We’ve always considered public school ed our kids receive as supplemental to the ed we provide at home so we don’t go crazy about it.”
Problem is, at least in our case, co-schooling is pretty scattershot, not as deep as I’d like it to be, and frustrating at times for our kids. In other words, I feel like we do our best to engage our kids in the bigger conversations, but it’s the reality of both parents being self-employed that it doesn’t always work that well.
3. We opt out when we can. I’ve written notes to teachers in the past when my kids get the first 10 problems of the homework right excusing them from the next 20 same old same old problems on the worksheet. Gets interesting responses sometimes. Also, this year, we’re 90% sure we’re going to have Tucker opt out of the 6th Grade NJ ASK assessment. Enough is enough.
4. We occasionally send links with resources to specific teachers and cc the principal.
I’m sure we could do more, but my radar to meddling parents may be a bit too sensitive having been in the classroom for 20 years previous. I know how difficult it is. I don’t want to make it more difficult, but I do want to try to strike that balance. Hard sometimes.
Wondering what other strategies might be working for you?
