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.
