(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?
“Education is a self organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.”
So what are we to make of this? (Take the 17 minutes to watch the video…you won’t be disappointed.)
I want to chime in here, obviously, but I am really interested at what questions, comments, etc. this provokes from educators. On one level, it’s inspiring to think that technology can change the educational playing field in this way. On another, it’s a huge challenge to the structure and systems we have in place. Seriously, what do you make of this?
It’s no secret that I lean toward seeing a future where self-organized learning rules, and that the role of school is to develop the passion, motivation and skills necessary to help kids become amazing learners as opposed to pretty good “knowers.” I love Mitra’s inspired vision of that future as it’s now made possible through access to Web. But if we value that, and if we want that for our kids, it means we’re going to have to start teaching ourselves out of our jobs (at least as they are currently defined.)
Not everyone is feeling it yet, but we’re entering a real big, huge hairy transition period for schools. I’m honestly not sure what comes out the other side of it.
Seriously, what swims in your head after watching this?
I’ve been sitting here for the last few minutes trying to come up with a number, a percentage that captures how much of what I read is read on a screen as opposed to a piece of paper these days. My first thought was 90%, but that sounded too high, so I’ve been sitting here trying to knock that number down. It’s really, really hard. Just about all of my books are on the iPad, all of my bills are online, all the newspapers and magazines that I read regularly are on the Web, all the RSS feeds, the Tweets, the videos… This may be TMI, but there aren’t even any magazines in the bathroom any more.
Maybe, in fact, it’s 95%.
Which, as is so often the case, leads me to think about my kids and the reading and writing they are going to do in the next school year. For my son who’s 11, I’m guessing about 90% will be given out and handed in on paper. For my daughter, who is 13 and has “adopted” my old MacBook as her own, it may be closer to 75% on paper coming in and going out as I’m sure she’ll be asked to print most of what she composes on the computer. In either case, I’m guessing not much instruction or discussion is going to be centered on the ways in which screen reading and writing are changing the very nature of the acts. They’re not creating links. They’re not deconstructing them.
They should be.
Two great pieces by Scott Rosenberg and Kevin Kelly have me thinking deeply about this. Scott’s piece, “In Defense of Links Part 3: In Links we Trust” neatly captures so much of the shift around reading that I think it should be required reading for every teacher (since every teacher is a writing teacher.) I’m serious. Here’s a fairly short snip that gets to the complexity of reading and writing in links.
The context that links provide comes in two flavors: explicit and implicit. Explicit context is the actual information you need to understand what you’re reading…you land on my page and you might well have no idea what I’m talking about, since this is part three of a series. Links make it easy for me to show you where to catch up. If you don’t have time for that, links let me orient you more quickly in my first paragraph with reference to Carr’s post. I can do all this without having to slow down those readers who’ve been following from the start with summaries and synopses. Again, even if the links that achieve this do demand a small fee from your working brain (which remains an unproven hypothesis), I’d say that’s a fair price.
By implicit context, I mean something a little more elusive: The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?
Links, in other words, transmit meaning, but they also communicate mindset and style.
Which isn’t to say that written texts don’t communicate mindset and style. But it is to suggest that interacting with links, both by simply reading them and by clicking on them, creates quite a different experience, one with more complexity and, I think, more potential. It’s not as simple as “links provide context.” The choice of what we link to speaks volumes about our interests, biases, agendas, and those cues are now a part of the reading interaction, a piece of what we as readers then use to make sense of the text.
Kevin Kelly’s piece in the Smithsonian Magazine, A Whole New Way of Reading, also gets to the complexity of these changes.
But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. It is screen reading. Screens are always on, and, unlike with books we never stop staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words zip around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch, or television we read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is a new art, and reading charts a new literacy. Screen culture demands fluency in all kinds of symbols, not just letters.
There is a lot going on in that paragraph, a lot about balance, about participation, multimedia, literacy and more. And a lot about the flows of knowledge vs. the stacks of knowledge that John Seely Brown and others write about in Pull.
So here are the questions I’m asking: Are reading and writing changing in these linkable, screen centered environments? If so, does the way we think about reading and writing literacy have to change to embrace these shifts? If so, what are we doing about that?
Right now, I think the answer in most schools is “not much.” In fact, I’m not sure many even realize the extent to which this shift is occurring. They have other things on their minds. (Case in point, see this snip from a local newspaper that Steve Ransom tweeted to me this morning.) Which is why I just sent these two links to the English Department supervisor and various others at my local high school and my kids’ two schools. As good as they are at what they do, my sense is that they need us as parents out here in this stew to send them this stuff to read.
So the latest edition of ISTE’s magazine Learning and Leading calls me out by name and wonders if I, in my attempt to “cajole, inspire, persuade and demand, sometimes with righteous indignation that readers bring forth radical change in education, might unwittingly discourage the very educators who are fighting the good fight, often unsuccessfully.”
Fair question, and one that I think about all the time, actually. I absolutely mean to provoke the conversation around change in schools and in ourselves; anyone who has read this blog for any stretch over the last nine years knows that’s the case. But I also try to do so in a way that doesn’t demean teachers, a way that challenges their thinking about the profession and their roles in the classroom while at the same times honors the realities of the classroom. The vast majority of the time, I think I strike that balance. And on the rare occasion that I might miss, the comments usually set me straight.
The ISTE article is worth the read, and since there’s no way to engage these ideas on the Leading and Learning site, I’ll offer it up here by proxy. Take a minute to read it, and feel free to let loose here. How hard is too hard to push for change?
A couple of points for the record first. Since the link to my blog post cited in the magazine is incorrect, you can read it here for context. As you’ll see, I’m not chastising “teachers who are also parents” in the post; I’m pretty much throwing all parents under the bus. And while it’s correct that I’m not currently in the classroom, I think it’s worth pointing out that for three years I actually did “Try That in My Classroom,” blogging and wiki-ing with my students, bringing authors and experts in virtually, asking my kids to problem-solve, collaborate, sift information and use technology to connect with others around the world around their passions. I also spent a number of the rest of my 21 years in a school struggling with technology integration in general, and I’ve also had the opportunity over the last four years to work with thousands of teachers close up through PLP. So it’s not like I have zero context for what teachers are dealing with in their own attempts to shift.
Finally, let me just point out that while I was in the classroom, my blogging was about the classroom. My book was written when I was still there as well. But as my work has evolved, so has my writing. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a “30 Ways to Use (insert your new tech tool here) in the Classroom” post here, not that those types of posts can’t have great value; they can. But that’s no longer my main interest. As I tell just about everyone one of the audiences I speak with, at the end of the day, this is less about technology and more about learning, less about schools and classrooms and more about individuals experiencing these shifts deeply for themselves so they can then bring them into their curricula and conversations with real context and meaning. That’s been the focus of our work in PLP, and it will continue to be my focus here; how are you changing as a learner and connecting with the world despite the barriers you may be up against in your classrooms, your schools and your districts? It all flows from that.
