(Cross posted to Huffington Post)

The last couple of days I’ve been soaking in a new white paper “Right to Learn: Identifying Precedents for Sustainable Change,” a document that I think nudges the serious conversation about real change in learning down the road a few steps if not more. The paper, written by Bruce Dixon and Susan Einhorn of the Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation, is the result of the discussions held at the Big Ideas Global Summit in June of 2010 (which was attended by the likes of Christopher Dede, Sugata Mitra, Karen Cator, Milton Chen, Angus King and many others,) and it poses one compelling question to frame the debate as we think about the future of learning:

Have we reached the limits of our traditional school system’s capacity to deal with the diversity of learners that come into our schools today?

I’m really intrigued by fundamental shift articulated in the paper, a move away from a “right to an education” towards a “right to learn,” a shift that is only made possible by the advent of new technologies to connect us to the resources and people who can help us learn.

To do this we need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something—a primary education—to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right—whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others—rather than supplying or rearranging resources. The shift is extremely powerful…

I agree. It’s huge. And it challenges the very basic assumptions that we have about this thing we call school.

On many levels, this is scary territory to enter. But it articulates an important choice that has been niggling at me for quite some time in terms of where we should be spending our time and effort at this moment of huge disruption and challenge:

We can see an emerging crisis in our schools, while, on the other hand, we see a renaissance for learning. The question then simply becomes: would a completely different perspective that builds on the latter, be a more productive focus for us than the continued, largely unproductive, public debate around the former?…

Instead of thinking about buildings and budgets, we think about what learning might be possible. Instead of thinking about student teacher ratios, and high stakes tests, we think about the impact that a child taking more responsibility for his or her learning might have on a child’s life choices. It simply shifts our emphasis, and most importantly, our perspective.

As a parent and a former classroom teacher, I for one hope all of the current ideas for “reform” fail, because few if any of them put our kids’ learning lives first. It’s about more standardization in our classrooms, more competition between our schools, and whatever is easiest and cheapest to implement. In many ways, it’s embarrassing the depth to which the conversation has sunk. And I agree with the premise of the report; if we continue to place our energy toward “fixing the system” literally millions of kids will be underserved at best in the process. Instead, what if we put a laser like focus on improving real student learning, not test scores? (And yes, the two are decidedly different.) Let’s start talking about how we can begin to deliver more personalized, relevant learning to kids right now, by rethinking our definitions of teacher and classroom and school in some profound albeit radical ways, and by starting to deeply consider the affordances that technologies bring to the learning equation, despite being made decidedly uncomfortable by those potentials in some big ways.

Instead of seeing the non-face-to-face learning space as one of a compromised experience, we surely need to recognize and explore without fear the new and, in many ways, more profound pedagogical opportunities the virtual space opens; opportunities that will challenge and possibly even undermine our traditional perspectives around effective teaching and learning.

The pedagogical opportunities are much more than just taking “online courses” the way we currently define them, more than just moving content online and trying to create communities around it. It speaks to the vast potential of individualization and personalization within the learning process that are possible now but that we haven’t even begun to explore as fully as we need to. I don’t read this as an end to physical space, but as a switch around what supports what. It’s not virtual that supports physical, as we think of it now. It’s where we use the physical spaces to help young learners make deeper sense of the interactions they pursue to a growing extent online. Again, that’s a profound switch, but it’s inevitable, I think.

There’s more, much more about learning and literacy and the like, and I urge you to read the entire paper. But I would love to hear your thoughts on those two “big” questions: Have schools as we know them reached their limits in terms of real student learning? And should we be shifting our focus away from how best to “deliver an education” to our students to, instead, building a new framework around each child’s inherent “right to learn” from cradle to grave?

Tim Stahmer’s post “There’s No Normal to Return To” has me thinking this morning. He writes:

At the same time we in education are also doubling down on the “back to basics” and on teaching kids how to follow someone else’s instructions. Our leaders, both political and business, want us to think that if we just combine greater effort with more standardization that we can recreate the glorious old days where every kid was above average and US test scores topped every other country.

The former, of course, is statistically impossible (only in Lake Wobegon) and the later a myth, but we spend large chunks of money, instructional time, and public discourse trying to make it happen.

So when do we acknowledge that our current education system, built to support that industrial society, also needs to change?

Good question. And even more, past acknowledging the need, when do we make it happen?

Most of the edusocialmediaverse sees a compelling need to change…but to what? What is the “new normal” in 20, 30 or 40 years?

I have little doubt any longer that it will be a “roll your own” type of education, one in which traditional institutions and systems play a vastly decreased role in the process. That the emphasis will be on learning and what you can do with it, not on degrees or diplomas or even test scores. As I Tweeted out yesterday, my new favorite quote comes from Cathy Davidson:

“‘Learning’ is the free and open source version of ‘education.’”

I do believe that the emphasis will turn back to the learning process, not the knowing process. And while I don’t think schools go away in the interaction, the “new normal” will be a focus on personalization not standardization, where we focus more on developing learners, not knowers, and where students will create works of beauty that change the world for the better. At some point, we’ll value that more than the SAT.

That’s my hope at least. As Gary Stager points out, it’s a pretty dismal moment:

The problem with the rehab or resurrection myth was that I never anticipated the chance that American public policy regarding public education was that there IS NO BOTTOM to rise up from. It now appears that schooling and the way in which some Americans treat other people’s children has no bottom. Things can and will get worse, perhaps indefinitely.

And that is the scary part, that for most kids, there is no bottom. Over the next decade, we’ll see lots of kids opting out of schools as we know them, many because they feel disenfranchised or disinterested and would rather just complete the same old curriculum online, but some because there will be a growing number of “education providers” who will offer a much more personalized, passion-alized learning experience for those who can afford it. And I’m not talking here about the Amazonification of education where we’re delivered content based on our interests (though that’s coming too.) I’m talking about places both online and off where highly motivated kids will gather to learn under the aegis of any number of different school-type entities that look little like the current brick and mortar spaces most of us send our kids. What concerns me is what happens to those that aren’t well off enough or highly motivated enough to create their own new, better paths to learning.

Tim’s post references a Seth Godin post where he writes:

It takes a long time for a generation to come around to significant revolutionary change. The newspaper business, the steel business, law firms, the car business, the record business, even computers… one by one, our industries are being turned upside down, and so quickly that it requires us to change faster than we’d like.

It’s unpleasant, it’s not fair, but it’s all we’ve got. The sooner we realize that the world has changed, the sooner we can accept it and make something of what we’ve got. Whining isn’t a scalable solution.

In other words, this is going to take a while, and it’s not going to be without pain. What does eventually rise from the ashes will be dependent on each of us seeing the world differently for ourselves, our willingness to lead and participate in the change, and at the end, fighting hard for what we believe is best for our kids.

So, the biggest learning news coming from the Richardson household last week has, as is more often the case than not, little to do with the classroom and everything to do with doing. Two quick stories, both involving my 13-year old daughter Tess:

Story 1

Three weeks ago, Tess decided (on her own) to go out for the track team, something she had never done before. As soon as the coach saw her walk into practice, saw her thin, 5′ 11″ frame, he pointed her over to the high jump pit and said “have at it.” And Tess started learning how to jump. Two things have “jumped” out at me in the interim. First, her high jump learning life has been made up of 98% failure, something my daughter does not deal with especially well when it comes to athletics. I’ve been trying to point out to her that failure, in some cases lots of failure, is a necessary step to success, especially in getting over the high bar. She’s trying to make her body do things it’s never had to do before (just ask her heretofore non-existent ab muscles), and it’s going to take some time to find the rhythm of the run, the jump, the flip and the landing in ways that make her sail over, not into the bar. But here’s the thing: success will not come just on the strength and the muscle memory she gains during the practice on or off the track. (Read: lots of sit ups.) It will also be dependent on her ability to reflect and learn from her failure. She can’t jump 4′ 8″ until she learns to jump 4′ 6″. And while she gets feedback from her coach, she also gets feedback on every jump from the bar, whether it stays or falls as she tries to go over it. How she makes sense of that in her mind and adjusts her efforts will determine her success. The good news is that I think she’s starting to understand this and, even better, she’s beginning to see those connections to other parts of her life as well.

And I love this part: it’s just her. She’s played basketball and field hockey for the last two years, but high jump is all about her. There’s really no team involved. That’s the other thing she’s learning…to push herself for herself. Sure, she wants to do well as a part of the track “team,” but at the end of it, she’s the only one who can make that success happen. No one is holding or adjusting the bar for her.

(Side note: Turns out, she’s pretty good. Keeping in mind she’s only in 8th grade, in her first meet last week she cleared 5′ 0″, qualifying her for the district meet, leaving her two inches short of qualifying for states, and tying her for the school record. Think she’s going to work harder?)

Story 2

Here’s the second part: Her class took a trip to Washington DC over the weekend and, as luck would have it, they were in the House chambers when the very contested vote was taking place on the budget resolution last Friday. She heard Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner speak, saw a bunch of protesters get arrested and thrown out of the gallery, and got a real slice of what democracy (at least what’s left of it) looks like. On the ride home from picking her up at her school last night, she was talking about all of the monuments, the museums and landmarks they visited, and all of the accompanying stories that she heard around those places. Despite the weather, it seemed to have been a pretty excellent adventure. At one point she said, “You know, I really learned a lot on that trip.” No doubt.

The Point

A couple of weeks ago, on the recommendation of Gary Stager, I picked up Seymour Sarason’s 2004 book And What Do YOU Mean by Learning? and I’ve been slowly working my way through it. It’s not the easiest read, for me at least, but what keeps me diving in is the push he makes about what we define as learning, something that has been making me increasingly frustrated of late in terms of  the national conversation around schools. Here are Sarason’s two main points for the book

• First, we’ll never get true “reform” in schools until we come to some consensus on a more accurate definition of learning.
• Second, that “productive learning” as he defines it doesn’t happen much at all in schools.

Here is a snip from the introduction that gives the flavor of both the style and the thesis:

Learning is not a thing, it is a process…I try on these pages to distinguish between contexts of productive and unproductive learning. And by productive, I mean that the learning process is one that engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more. Absent wanting to learn, the learning context is unproductive or counterproductive. Is it not noteworthy that the word or concept of learning probably has the highest of all word counts in the diverse literature in education and yet when people are asked what they mean by learnng they are taken aback, stammer or stutter, and come up with a sentence or two which they admit is vague and unsatisfactory? (Boldface mine.)

He’s right. I’ve been pressing this question of “What is learning?” in my presentations lately, and the answers have been intriguing to say the least. Some say it’s the acquisition of knowledge, others say it’s the application of knowledge, and yet others say it’s the creation of knowledge with a whole bunch of other stuff thrown in between.  And when the descriptions move more closely to the type of learning I hope happens in my kids’ classrooms, it’s difficult for many to describe what that looks like in practice.

In the “real” world conversation about schools, how learning is defined is pretty clear. Just do a search for the phrase “student learning” in Google News and you’ll get the gist right away. Just now, here are two of the three most recent results:

“Core courses taken during the school year give students an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of course content as well as prepare students to be successful on the state standardized Prairie State Assessment Exam and the ACT,” said Rosemary Gonzalez Pinnick, associate superintendent for educational services. “Our schools are not only improving processes for monitoring student learning but also are implementing timely and appropriate interventions. Consequently, the summer program has changed accordingly.” (Here)

And:

“Brickhouse said, ‘This bill not only provides financial support for districts to hire teachers during a timeframe that facilitates their hiring the best teachers, it also sends the message that hiring well-prepared teachers is of critical significance to the goal of dramatically improving student learning in Delaware schools. New standards, longitudinal data systems, data coaches, new assessments — all of these initiatives rely on strong implementation by capable and wise teachers.’” (Here)

My sense, and please correct me if you think I’m missing it, is that neither of the people quoted in these snips are seeing the world as Sarason sees it. I read that stuff and just let out a heavy sigh. In fact, I would guess the vast majority of those invested in the conversation around schools right now don’t see it that way either.

But here’s what I see with my daughter…Tess wants to learn more. She wants to learn more about how to high jump and about some of the events she experienced in DC, events that couldn’t be replicated by a text book or a YouTube video or anything else. She’s learning, productively learning by doing, not by studying up and taking a test and moving to the next chapter or passing the test. I’m wanting for more of it to be happening in the classroom. And not just hers.

(Cross-posted at Huffington Post)

First, let me say that I’m not specifically picking on the teachers and kids at Emerson Elementary in Pennsylvania, who put together this 12-plus minute video of their Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) pep rally for the state standardized tests, and posted it to TeacherTube a couple of weeks ago. Do a search on YouTube and you can find dozens of similar efforts. I am, however, picking on a culture of schooling that feels the need to pump up students for test-taking with chanting and dancing that, on some level, makes me actually shudder as a parent. Take a look. (Skip to 3:07 if you want to get the gist of event.)

You have to wonder, is this really what we’ve come to in schools? That we have to remind kids that they are “bigger than the test” and show pictures of kids with captions like “6th Grade: Not Afraid” in an effort to steel their nerves? That showing what they’ve “learned” in schools is something they have to mentally prepare themselves for instead of just naturally exhibit? Really?

As I said, Emerson is not alone in this pep rally effort. But I wonder what the parents of those kids at Emerson think of this. Sad to say, most of them probably are just going along with the flow, missing the whole point of what their kids are really learning by going through this exercise — that the test is what we do school for, and that it’s something to be conquered.

It’s not the test that parents and kids should fear. It’s the loss of real learning that these kinds of assessments cost them. To summarize my ranting TEDxNYEd talk from last month: If all we want for our kids is to pass the test, we really don’t need schools any longer. Just load ‘em up with a computer, an Internet connection and some test prep guides, and send them to Khan Academy or any number of other similar sites, and let them go crazy.

But here is why we don’t want to do that. In that type of interaction, we lose all the beauty of learning, the passion behind it, the motivation for it, the engagement that comes with the process of thinking deeply about things we care about, asking big questions and finding big answers together. And, most importantly, putting those answers to good use by applying them in ways that add to our collective knowledge, not just end up as filled-in bubbles on the test.

I know what those teachers at Emerson and other places are trying to do. They’re trying to help their kids be successful because this is how the politicians and businessmen and 100 years of tradition have defined success. But don’t miss the point: the tests have little to do with learning. The tests we give our kids aren’t assessing their learning; they are assessing their knowledge. At the end of the day, the PSSA won’t show one thing about what kids can actually do with any of the stuff they’ve spent countless hours of test prep getting ready for.

Ironically (or maybe not so ironically), some parents in Pennsylvania are saying “ENOUGH!” They’re going to their legislators and educating them on the reality of the current testing culture that is harming kids and leaving them worse off as learners. They’re pulling their kids out of the test to make a statement, one that is a personal statement for now but, if more people join in, could send a powerful message to the education “leaders” in this country that we have to think differently.

What’s most disconcerting, however, is the message all of this sends to our kids about learning — that it’s all about mastering content and skills that other people think are important, that all of the rewards are extrinsic, and that success is more about what we know than what we can do with what we know. None of this tells us anything about the qualities we most want from our children: a love of learning, a willingness and the patience to grapple with important, real problems, and the ability to make sense of the world as they experience it. And there’s no doubt that those things are getting lost in the process of prepping for the test.

And besides, we don’t need pep rallies for kids who love learning, do we?