http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200808/children-educate-themselves-iii-the-wisdom-hunter-gatherers

What I find interesting is that the “play” of the children is structured, loosely at first and more cohesively as they age, around the tasks that they observe adults doing. Because they are not by and large separated from their parents or other adults in the community, they learn by observation and, as they age, from direct instruction in the skills they will need to be socially adept providers for their eventual families. And, when we boil it down even in 21st century modern America, aren’t we really striving to have socially adept, skillful providers of goods and services that are capable of raising their own offspring so as to perpetuate the cycle?

The “short, nasty, brutal life” hypothesis of stone-age man and modern hunter-gatherers has been debunked. They have legitimate cultures that, while very different in expression from our own, provide the same fundamental service to society as our own cultural products do.

I digress; apologies. To bring this back to what it means for education, I wonder if the potential for more parents to telecommute or bring their children with them to work, at least some of the time, would not begin to build the framework needed for teaching “21st Century Skills?”

And I agree that these “21st Century skills” are not really 21C-specific – they are the life skills we all need regardless of the temporal frame of our existence. But if children see their parents doing work in the context of what our modern workplace demands, as opposed to just what home chores demand, they may begin to take education more seriously and engage themselves, rather than forcing teachers and administrators to scramble to design innovative curricula and delivery to keep kids focused, attentive, and productive.

This would require taking project based learning to a whole new level. After the “parrot-stage” of grammar school where facts and language arts/math rules are drilled into memory, children would need to start seeing how those facts and skills are used in real-life settings. The need for creativity in a child’s educational products really can’t express itself until certain facts and figures are there to apply to a given situation. Assessing how much they’ve absorbed is one thing that is easy to do. Seeing how they apply that knowledge is where assessment needs to go – especially for older children.

Assessment is the problem in education as long as it crowds out feedback. The main difference between the two is that one promotes fear while the other defuses it. The anticipation of a powerlifting event or a sprint triathon is not the same as the anticipation of a grade in a class or at the end of the semester. The former aids us on the road to mastery while the latter is to be gotten over and forgotten.

Will, we are indeed doing both but I think that means we are doing neither very well. And worse the system cannot abide a parallel track. Education is broken, pulling along a trailer with flat tire behind it, sparking and weaving until it flips or grinds down to the axle. Well…that may be too goofy an image but my point is that as long as we are doing both we are doing neither very well. And that is built into any system that doesn’t play well with others.

Of course, the world is full of a parallel tracks, informal trains of learning. I think that the key to American success is “to organize a school just well enough to get teachers and students together and see that it gets no better organized.” This quote is from Myles Horton who is describing the experience of the Dutch Folk School movement in 1931! (Horton, 1997, p. 53)

Horton, M. (1997). The Long Haul: An Autobiography. Teachers College Press.

‘Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact lets nothing else be learned than—learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they—he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official’ (15, Being and Time).

The Willingham/Rotherham piece is excellent. It was first published in the September (?) 2009 issue of Educational Leadership which focused on 21st century learning. The entire issue was so accessible for teachers, we ordered magazine copies for everyone in our Dobbs 21st Century Learning Cohort–a cohort of public and private school teachers that was working together in a PLC model for a year. I encourage everyone to read the article, and go back to that issue if they have not read it.

You ask, “what are we doing”? For one, I think it is incumbent on those of us who are really passionate about this topic to initiate and persist the conversation. Internally, I have pushed our academic deans and school heads to make this a priority, and I’m asking teachers to share with me their planning documents and rubrics whenever possible. I really like the idea of having a common rubric (nod to Lehmann and the folks at SLA), and I’m pondering how to evolve that notion within our schools.

McLeod tweeted this weekend about alternative assessment models that measure this important stuff, and mentioned the College Work Readiness Assessment(CWRA). Tony Wagner has been involved with those folks, and we’ve sent two groups now up to St. Andrews (Delaware) to explore that assessment. Although the jury is out, I think we will consider offering it to our high school students-if nothing else to get a better idea of whether what we are teaching is indeed helping develop these core competencies.

As you and I have discussed before, as a large independent school community we are not “hung” by a battery of meaningless tests day in and day out; however, we are strangled by these high stakes “end of the line” tests that are the gatekeeper for our students in a college prep environment. Wish it were different, but it’s the current reality. I do sense, more than I have, that the tide is starting to turn a little. I’m spending a lot more time with parents in order to bring them into the conversation. The more people we have talking about it, the more likely shifts can be made.

Thanks for the post. Assessment is vital.

Occasioning complex learning (self direction, collaboration, creativity) is decidedly different from teaching the “basics”. I discuss this in a recent blog post (http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2010/08/slow-fuse-of-possibility-why-race-to.html). I also have a few articles recently published that explore complexity being occasioned inside public school classrooms (see list below). It is being done, but may not be reported in more main stream press as it cannot be packaged and sold.

Davis, B. & Simmt, E. (2003). Understanding learning systems: Mathematics teaching and complexity science. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 34(2), 137-167.
Moll, L. (2005). Reflections and possibilities. In N. González, L. Moll, & C. Amanti (Eds.). Funds of knowledge: theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms (pp. 2275-287). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff D., & González, N. (2005). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classroom. In N. González, L. Moll, & C. Amanti (Eds.). Funds of knowledge: theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms (pp. 71-87). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Reilly, M.A. (2009). Restoring points of potentiality: Sideshadowing in elementary classrooms. The Reading Teacher, 63 (4), pp. 298-306.
Reilly, M.A. (2009). Saying what you see in the dark: Engaging students through art. LEARNing Landscape, 3(1),69-89.
Reilly, M.A. (2009). Dressing the Corpse: Professional learning and the play of singularities. Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, 6(1), 79-99.
Reilly, M.A. (2009). Opening spaces of possibility: Teacher as bricoleur. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52 (5), 376-384.