Recently during a presentation a teacher raised his hand and asked what is a fairly common question.
“Look, I agree with most of what you’re saying, but I’ve got kids in my class who don’t have the devices, who don’t have the access,” he said. “What are we supposed to do when every student can’t do this?”
I could hear in the voice of the questioner that this lack of access was offered not as a problem to solve but as a reason for inaction, an excuse to maintain the status quo. Normally, the answer I give to that question includes the words “moral imperative” and “digital divide” or some other fairly typical phraseology that tries to honor the challenge, but this time, for some reason, I just looked at the person and said “Great question. How you going to fix that?”
Silence.
I think that’s going to be my new strategy, actually, for all of the “yeah buts.”
“My students’ parents don’t approve of these technologies.” I hear ya’. How you gonna fix that?
“I don’t have time to do all of this.” That is a problem. What are you going to do about that?
“My superintendent/principal/supervisor doesn’t have a vision for these types of changes.” Yeah, that stinks. So, how you gonna help her with that?
We say we want our kids to be problem solvers, but all too often, when faced with the challenges of a changing educational landscape, we don’t offer solutions. Instead, we offer excuses as to why we shouldn’t solve the problem, why it’s better to just keep on keepin’ on. And solving these problems is getting easier and easier, actually, as more and more schools have already done the heavy lifting to find and implement solutions. It’s not like anyone needs to reinvent the wheel any more. And it’s also not like you need a solution overnight, either. Frame the problem, create a timeline and a process, and have at it. If you had say, two years, is there really NO way to solve that access problem?
I know at some level you have to see all of this as a “problem” to solve. You have to REALLY want those kids to have access. You have to look at the world and the ways in which information and communication are changing, and the ways that online communities and networks are becoming powerful learning opportunities, and the move to digital texts and products and look at your school and classroom and have that “Houston, we have a problem moment.” But once you do that, it becomes your problem to solve, not someone else’s.
So yeah, you’ve got challenges. What are you gonna do about it?
It’s gotten to the point where I shudder every time I hear people with plans to “increase student achievement” or “improve schools” because whenever I dig more deeply into what those phrases mean it always comes down to one thing: improving standardized test scores. And the reasons are clear: they’re easy to give and to make sense of, they provide our competitive society with some way to rank what’s happening with schools and students, and because we’ve build a billion dollar industry on making sure every kid learns the same thing in the same way on the same day so he or she can pass the test.
Problem is, far too little of what those assessments “measure” is what I care about as a parent.
I read this fascinating article about a the recycling company TerraCycle yesterday. It called the company “The Google of Garbage,” and I couldn’t help but be taken by the creativity that the founder Tom Szaky brings to his business approach. The company is located just down the road from me in Trenton, NJ, and my environmentalist author/wife Wendy actually did some work with Tom a few years back when the company was just getting started. Here’s the article’s description of the way he got his start:
Szaky’s novel business plan was to ‘make a tremendous amount of money’ out of the leftovers from the Princeton canteen. The scheme involved shovelling the food slops on to a Heath-Robinson-like conveyer belt, where worms would gobble up the leftovers and turn it into worm casts, which were then liquefied to form a rich fertiliser for the gardening industry. Apart from the labour, mostly provided by the worms, and the cost of running the machine, it was a zero-cost operation. Szaky decided to sell this home-brewed plant food, Earth Plant Fuel, in re-purposed soft-drinks bottles with spray-gun tops bought from a remainder company. In the two years it took for orders from shops to start trickling in, he dropped out of college and TerraCycle was born.
Now I know that this isn’t the usual story, but you can’t help but love it when someone has an idea and has the guts to pursue it. It’s passion, and as you read the rest of the article, you can see that almost his entire business is about solving problems, most of them other people’s, like how can we reuse used tea bags and make them into something useful.
May just be me, but in 20 years, I want to be reading that story about my kids, about their passions being fulfilled in ways that can earn them a living solving problems and helping to make the world a better place. And I want my kids’ schools to help them do that, not teach them to know the dates of the Second Continental Congress (which is what Tucker was looking up on Wikipedia last night because he knows it’s going to be “on the test.” Sigh.)
Learn (What did you know? What are you able to do?)
Understand (What is the evidence that you can apply learning in one domain to another?)
Share (How did you use what you have learned to help a person, the class, the community or the planet?)
Explore (What did you learn beyond the limits of the lesson? What mistakes did you make, and how did you learn from them?)
Create (What new ideas, knowledge, or understanding can you offer?)
These are not sequential, but ongoing, and in all of these, Reeves moves the conversation not only away from the standardized framework to a more fluid one, but advocates doing all of it transparently, and, importantly, focuses on group assessments not just individual ones. This type of learning and assessment should be shared widely and should be built upon by others. It gives a whole different picture of learning as an ongoing process, not an event, not something that can be summed up in the reporting back of a few facts and figures on a short answer test.
A couple of snips from the essay that stood out:
Students are not merely consumers of education laboring for their next reward. Their success is measured not just in terms of tests passed, but by the ways in which they apply their earning to help others. They measure their significance not by how they have distinguished themselves, but by the impact that they had on their communities and the world.
And:
Educational leaders cannot talk about the need for collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking and creativity and at the same time leave teachers and school administrators fenced in by obsolete assessment mechanisms, policies and assumptions.
Two depressing facts about assessment keep weighing me down in all of this. First we teach what we assess, and second, we get the assessments we can afford (both in time and in money.) Neither of those two facts gets us very close to a much needed, systemic upgrade of assessing learning. And as Reeves notes, a third depressing fact is that this will require us to be able to step out of our own school experience, to be willing to define success in ways that are unfamiliar and more nuanced. That may be the biggest barrier of all.
Someone asked me earlier today “if you were a principal of a new school and you were hiring teachers, what would you look for?” Once I got past my “What would Chris Lehmann answer?” moment, I connected back to a post I read yesterday titled “Never Read Another Resume” by Jason Fried, whose book “Rework” is sitting in my Kindle waiting for me. Aside from paying much more attention to cover letters than resumes (as in “can this candidate write?”) I loved this snip about the questions that get asked in interviews.
During interviews, we love when potential hires ask questions. But all questions aren’t equal. A red flag goes up when someone asks how. “How do I do that?” “How can I find out this or that?” You want people who ask why, not how. Why is good — it’s a sign of deep interest in a subject. It signals a healthy dose of curiosity. How is a sign that someone isn’t used to figuring things out for him- or herself. How is a sign that this person is going to be a drain on others. Avoid hows.
I think that’s one of the first things I’d look for, people who are asking why. Why are we using blogs in the classroom? Why is this in the curriculum? Why are we making this decision? So much of the “how” stuff is figure-outable on our own that I wonder why we spend time on it.
Why don’t we take the millions of hours that teachers sit in workshops asking “how” and instead let them learn that stuff on their own and spend those hours asking “why”?
As part of an piece I’ve been asked to write for Ed Leadership’s upcoming “Screenagers” issue, I’m looking for some input. Basically, the thesis of the piece is that we need to help our students use the Web as a way of showing not just what they know but what they can do with what they know. That we need to help them, in essence, create a “g-portfolio” so they are “Googled well” when future employers or potential collaborators et. al. go searching for their footprints online.
I’ve felt for a long time that my own kids will need to be consciously thinking about the online portfolio that they are building, but as they are getting older (11 and 13 next month) I’ve lately been trying to make that process and product more concrete in my own mind. I’m hoping this piece will help clarify a lot of my own thinking about the idea (something writing and blogging always has a tendency to do.)
Anyway, I thought I would reach out to see what others might think about a) the need for this, b) our role in helping our students in the process, c) the general considerations for creating a “g-portfolio” and d) any good examples of students already being Googled well that I might point to. (I already have a few, but I would love more.)
Some framing questions that I’ve posed for myself that might get some conversation started:
What types of literacies should be displayed in this Web portfolio?
What role will this play in “reputation management” or the personal brand of the student?
What are the challenges and complexities of the process?
To what extent should educators have their own “g-portfolios”?
What are the best tools, sites, etc. to create and organize these portfolios?
What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts.
(Please make sure to leave your name and a real e-mail address if I can use your responses in my article.)
Nine years ago today I wrote my first blog post. I just want to thank all of you who have joined me on this journey for reading, commenting, pushing my thinking, sharing your thoughts, and keeping me motivated to continue writing here. I may not be blogging as much as I did in my heyday four or five years ago, before Twitter and a half a dozen other new tools started eating into my blogging time, but I still love this space and the things that happen here. I feel very, very humbled by how much you all have taught me in the process.
I have every intention of getting back to the blog more often this summer. Not just for the conversation but for the writing practice. As a lifelong writer, I continue to believe in the long form as a way of digging more deeply into what I’m thinking and seeing. In many ways, ideas and connections reveal themselves in the process, and the “other” powerful value of this site (aside from the interactions) is the exercise my brain gets, the “intellectual sweat” that’s required in synthesizing various ideas into a coherent whole. I know I don’t need this blog to practice that, but for me at least, that shift into the public sphere has been the most transformative piece. It raises the game in a good way, and I can’t imagine my life without continuing to write and without continuing to interact with my readers to think and learn more deeply.
My passion here is still in answering this question: “How do these new social online technologies change the nature of learning and, in turn, education?” Over the last nine years, some answers, at least have become clearer. But so much of this story is still evolving. In some ways, it’s moved a great deal since June 11, 2001. In other ways, it hasn’t moved much at all. Now that my own children, who were just 3 and 1 when I started this blog, who will be 13 and 11 later this summer, now that they are deep into their education experience, I’m more motivated than ever to keep pressing the question. I sincerely hope you’ll continue to keep engaging here in the search for those answers.
A few things have been pushing my thinking even more about reading and writing in digital environments, and I thought I’d throw some kind of random thoughts together here mostly to capture them but also to see where writing about them takes me. So apologies in advance for the thin threads and varied directions this may go in.
First, let me say I love my iPad…as a reading tool. I’ve been telling people that when the new OS comes out here in the next couple of weeks, my “grade” for it will go from a B- to a B+ just for the mere ability to multitask through many open programs, which is the major frustration I find with the device right now. I hate having to close one app down in order to open another up because it’s just so different from the usually six or eight programs and 30+ tabs I have running at any given moment on my MBP. But having said that, I absolutely love reading on the iPad. It’s light, it’s thin, it glows. Yeah…I’m having a moment…
To that end, I seriously don’t know if there’s a more useful app than Instapaper. Now, when I’m working on my laptop and my network floats up some interesting piece to read, I just “read-later” it in my browser and the article, stripped of all the ads and extraneous junk on the page, syncs right into my iPad for later, leisurely, comfortable consumption. And…for somewhat comfortable creation. (Btw, here is the RSS feed for my Instapaper saves if you want it.) With a little work, I can share out those pieces to Twitter, capture chunks on Evernote, save them to my Delicious account, all of which will get oh so much easier when the OS updates. But there is no question that reading no longer just means consuming. It’s all about pulling out the most salient, relevant pieces and doing something with them that potentially makes other people more knowledgeable as well.
Second, there has been a great series of posts on my new favorite blog at the Neiman Journalism Lab (Harvard) regarding the use of links:
Now I know most of these have a journalistic bent, but I think they have relevance for any of us who write in this linked world, whether it’s blogs or Twitter or whatever. In fact, I might argue that conversations such as these should be happening in fourth and fifth grade as we begin to help our students understand the value of public writing. I mean it might just be me, but I would love my kids to have an understanding of the value of links in writing in terms of how they can be used in storytelling, in keeping the audience informed, in enabling transparency and their value as a “currency of collaboration.” Isn’t that an inherent part of the online writing interaction that we should be teaching?
Third, back to the iPad for a sec. I love the fact that this morning, Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus landed in my Kindle app, ready for me to read. I just finished Switch (highly recommended) and now I have two abridged, annotated, digitally marked up versions of recent books in Evernote that are fully searchable and remixable and sharable (within limits, of course.) I’m becoming more convinced that I’ll never buy another paper book again if it has a Kindle version.
And finally, I bought the Wired Magazine app for the iPad on Monday ($4.99) and it’s, um, pretty darn cool. It’s also another small step in the way we read; embedded videos and audio, amazing graphics, interactive buttons to push. I found it much more engaging to read…that participation thing again. Not that it’s the reinvention of print, but I would have loved to been in some of the brainstorming and idea sessions when they created the interface. It is beautiful and functional. And soon, according to the developers, it’s going to get more social as well, more opportunities to do “connective reading.” Not saying I’m going to subscribe to Wired this way, but when textbooks are made for the iPad in this format…could be very interesting.
I know most people shudder when I say this, but I’m more than ok with letting go of the paper reading world at this point. I’m much more interested in exploring these digital spaces, their opportunities and their drawbacks (as Nicholas Carr has been espousing of late) than watching my paper books grow dust on the bookshelves.
It’s gotten to the point where I shudder every time I hear people with plans to “increase student achievement” or “improve schools” because whenever I dig more deeply into what those phrases mean it always comes down to one thing: improving standardized test scores. And the reasons are clear: they’re easy to give and to make sense of, they provide our competitive society with some way to rank what’s happening with schools and students, and because we’ve build a billion dollar industry on making sure every kid learns the same thing in the same way on the same day so he or she can pass the test.