(Cross posted to the Powerful Learning Practice blog.)

So what does the following list suggest to you about the value of “online learning”:

1. I can work ahead if I’m able to
2. I get nearly instant responses from my teachers
3. I get personalized support when I need it
4. My teachers are just as excited about online learning as I am
5. I can do all my math for the week on one day if I want to
6. I know how I’m doing, my grades are right on the screen
7. My parents can see my work and grades
8. My courses are more challenging
9. I can keep up with my work when my family travels
10. I can work around a busy schedule

Those are the “benefits” touted by a group of Utah sophomores in this Huffington Post piece by Tom Vander Ark, ones that apparently impressed senators, representatives and school board members. I’m not as impressed.

Sure, taking a course online may offer more individuation and student choice in how to manage the process, but at the end of the day, I wonder what those online students have learned more or better than the ones who took the course in a classroom. And if we’re touting the online experience has superior because kids can take trips and still do the work or because their teachers are excited, that speaks to bigger, more fundamental issues that aren’t being addressed. This is still all about content delivery,  old wine in a new bottle that’s being motivated more by economics and convenience than good or better design. And it’s about, as I mentioned yesterday, a growing business interest that sees an opportunity to make inroads into education as “approved providers.” Hmmmm.

Learning online is not about finishing the course requirements a few days early or answering the questions that the text or the teacher dictate. It’s about finding our own path through the material.  As I asked in a comment on the post, do students practice inquiry in these settings? Are they able to ask their own questions? Are they assessed any differently? Do they create any new knowledge in the process and, if so, is that knowledge shared anywhere? Does their experience in the course replicate real life in any new way? Does it teach them how to learn on their own? To go deep? Not that any of that shouldn’t be taking place in face to face classrooms as well, but if you’re going to suggest something as different…

My point is that if this vision of online learning is being touted as reform, why? What’s really different here? Obviously, I’m a big believer in the value of online networks and communities to support lifelong and lifewide learning. The work that Sheryl and I and our amazing colleagues have been doing with PLP attests to fact that there is another way to learn online aside from digitizing a curriculum. We have goals and outcomes for our participants, but we don’t say to them “here is the path, work ahead if you like, and your grades will be posted online.” We let them find their own way, supporting and prodding as needed, trying to keep them moving in the general direction of shift. With any luck, they experience the change in their own way, on their own terms.

Not saying there isn’t any value to offering classes online. But if we do, let’s make sure they take advantage of the online piece to let participants develop the connections that will sustain them far beyond the class. Or, if not, let’s call it what it is…online coursework, not learning.

I feel like I should do some fun tool blogging or great classroom blogging or something before heading down the depressing road of writing more about change in schools, but I guess I can’t help myself. Especially after taking pictures like the one at right at a school I visited a couple of weeks ago and after reading quotes like this one:

“Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.”

That’s Stan Karp of the New Jersey Education Law Center lamenting the cuts and “reforms” here in my great state and elsewhere in a blog post in the Washington Post. (If you want to see a video of Karp giving basically the same riff on the topic, check out his YouTube video and there is a transcript here.) It’s a really powerful exploration of the current conversation around change and the many problems surrounding it.

The critical point to me, however, is this: all of this orchestrated bashing of teachers and schools is opening the door for folks outside of education to come in and “save the day” Superman style, a fact that, as Karp suggests, could undermine the whole democratic ideal that we built schools upon. You can catch whiffs of it everywhere, when people say that “competition” is what will save education, to the “approved providers” the Jeb Bush and his Excellence for Education crew are promoting in their reforms to the growing number of personalized and customized tutoring programs that are cropping up all over the place. It may not be on a lot of folks’ radar at the moment, but rest assured, we’re going to see more and more corporate attempts to not just provide content (as they’ve done forever with textbooks) but, increasingly, to provide instruction as well. And, as Karp suggests in the quote above, that reality will surely make worse the already growing educational divide for our kids.

There is no question that businesses will play a part in the “reforms” or “transforms” that we so often talk about in this community. And there is also no question that we need to promote a different vision for what teaching and learning look like. But there is a big difference between the vision we have for students having equitable, thoughtful access to technology and teachers as opposed to the vision where only a few do. I’ll once again quote Allan Collins and Richard Halverson:

For education to embrace both equity and economic development, we believe that our leaders will have to stretch the traditional practices to embrace the capacity of new information technologies. This will require schools to forfeit some control over the learning processes, but will once again put the latest tools for improving learning in the hands of public institutions (as opposed to the hands of families and learners who can afford access.) (145)

As schools, we are going to have to “forfeit some control,” as we well should as the learning opportunities outside the classroom become more ubiquitous and effective. But we have to make sure that those opportunities are equitable and open as much as we can. That’s the real urgency of the debate right now, how do we use these new (and old) technologies to lift everyone up instead of just a few.

So first I just want to thank all of you who stuck around during the last session at Educon last week to extend this conversation, and to those of you who have signed on to see if we can make this happen. I thought for the most part, the conversation was valuable, and it’s left me thinking a lot this week about what we can and, perhaps, cannot do.

But I wanted to start this post with some context from a Jon Becker blog post that Chris alluded to in his session as well. It’s a quote by former NYC education head Joel Klein commenting on the “Political Education of Michelle Rhee.” He says:

This is a game about power, and I think you have a vacuum on one side…She’s concluded — and I think with some wisdom — that there’s really no countervailing force that is well-funded, is well-organized. What I think she wants to build is an organization that can really step up and amass political support and play hardball.

As Jon notes, Klein is right. There is no alternative narrative to the “do what we’re currently doing only better” “reform” that Rhee and her cohorts are espousing. And as much as I’d like to agree with Jon that the Educon axioms suggest an alternative narrative, I still don’t see an “elevator pitch” that articulates those ideas in sound-bitey ways that people will take a chance on. And I do mean take a chance. As natural and as logical as those axioms may seem to the attendees at Educon, I’m not sure the general public is able or willing to accept them for their own schools. I know the parents at SLA have done so, and I’m totally hoping to be convinced otherwise, but for now, it’s easier to put “Students First,” the name Rhee has wrapped her “reform” around.

That new message is the hard part, and we grappled with that during our session. In fact we tried to plan around it, and I actually think we got a decent start on it. But try as we might to trust that we’d eventually coalesce around that “new story,” it was obviously on our minds. Take a look at the ideas we added to the brain dump doc:

It needs some organization, no doubt (and if anyone wants to take a shot at that, have at it), but there are definitely some great thoughts that we’ve already amassed. We’ve also got 38 people who have committed to getting about 2,000 parents organized, and John Pederson was nice enough to put together a Facebook group that we can use, all of which leaves me hopeful that we can actually make this idea come to fruition.

In a nutshell, here are the logistical themes that we can glean already:

• There should be a consistent, formal presentation piece followed by facilitated discussion
• Part of the presentation should involve students, perhaps in helping to create a video
• Create a way for these conversations to be captured and continued…make a movement
• We want to think about a name and a brand and a marketing plan.
• We want to plan the facilitation of these events carefully and provide opportunities for organizers to connect and plan together.
• And, let me add, we’re going to need some folks to take on an organizing role around some of these specific tasks. (Don’t be shy.)

But it’s gonna come down to the message. I think what we’re going to be suggesting is a conversation around transform, not reform, a conversation that necessarily will move parents out of their comfort zones a bit to really look at how schools simply have to change to better serve our kids. But even that last statement is loaded with all sorts of assumptions that I’m not sure are fair to make. Thus, the problem.

So, time for some ideas on next steps. What’s our next move?

If there is one thing you can count on upon leaving Educon it’s that you want to change things, most likely in a pretty big way. It’s not just the vibe at SLA with the kids and the teachers who actually seem to want to be there every day (and even on snow days and weekends) to be learning and leading. And it’s not just the assembled masses who are sharing and prodding and asking great questions in the “conversation” sessions. It’s more the stolen moments in the hallways and the quiet back and forths that happen over lunch when you start to sense this shared feeling of “WTF are we doing to our kids by sticking them in a system that’s just not working anymore?” Or something like that. I can’t tell you how struck I was by how many parent-educators almost grieved at the experience their kids were having in schools. It’s like we know in our hearts there is a better way, but we just don’t know how to make it happen at scale in the next three months. (Years are out of the question.)

We’ve talked about starting a “movement” for a long time now. Chris spent his session this weekend on the subject, and I used mine to offer up an idea for a tangible start to a new conversation. (I’ll be reporting out more on that in the next few days, I hope.) What with Michelle Rhee and Jeb Bush and Arne Duncan dominating the ed change conversation, I think we’re all pining for a bigger voice. That will be tough. We’re underfunded (or should I say unfunded), and I’ll say again that 90% or more of educators in the US really have no context for change in the way that we talk about it in our networks. Sure, we’ve got more people at the party who think the system needs to be transformed instead of reformed, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re still dancing down at the Legion Hall with a Polka band as the headliner.

This weekend I kept thinking, when will we have our Egypt moment? When will we get to the point where enough people feel dissatisfied with the whole school thing and want change badly enough to rise up and say “That’s it! We’re not going to do this anymore!” I know there’s a slim chance that our collective sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo around education will ever match the passion of those people in the streets of Cairo today. But I’m beginning to wonder if there may not be an untapped feeling of frustration around schools that those bigger voices are just not getting. That’s it’s not about improving the current system but, instead, creating a different, better path for our kids. But I also sense that while many people may feel this discomfort, they don’t quite yet know what to do with it.

Those folks in Egypt don’t know exactly what they want either. They just know what they don’t want. They’ve become disaffected enough to rise up and take it on faith that something better will rise from the ashes. At the end of the day, I doubt most parents will take their children out of a system they may have serious reservations about if there’s not a safe and effective and convenient alternative. But if the headlines of the past year are any indication, this system is starting to crash, be it economics, “competition,” lack of equity or whatever else. I’m wondering what we’ll build that will rise up and take its place.

So, yesterday I tried to articulate what I think might be a new story to tell around education, one that acknowledges that schools will soon no longer be seen as the only path to learning though they can and should still play a crucial role in our children’s learning lives despite the “unbundling” of what schools have pretty much held a monopoly on for 125 years. Obviously, it’s a story that has yet to gain any traction in terms of the national or local conversations going on about schools. Everyone is yelling and screaming about doing what we currently do better, not fundamentally changing what we do. Current “reformists” don’t want real change because it would upset the business of schools in some fundamental ways. And those like Jeb Bush who are now engaging in reform talk around access to technology no doubt are driven by the $$$ that many businesses are seeing right now in the “personalized learning” space. (If you haven’t guessed, it’s going to be huge.)

But for me, the question comes back to how do we expand the conversation about the new roles that schools will play in this interaction. And it seems to me that one place to start is with parents. If we can get parents to advocate for change, then maybe we can move the needle a bit, so to speak. And if we can get lots of parents and give them a different story from the one that most are telling, then, who knows?

That’s what my Educon conversation is about on Sunday. Actually it’s a question:

Can we leverage the networks that we currently have to bring 10,000 (or more) parents together across the country next fall to hold a real conversation about education and change?

Obviously, that’s a lofty goal:

• Are there 500 people/schools out there in the network who could get 20 people to a “meet up”? (Or some other combination?)
• Can we agree on a coherent message?
• Can we market that message?
• Can we create a compelling presentation that will spark this conversation?
• Can we build a movement around it?
• Can we create a core group of organizers to take this idea and run with it?

I may be nuts, but I’d like to find out. I’m thinking it’s time we see whether or not all of these “weak ties” can coalesce into something that actually can make some noise. In some ways, I offer this as a challenge or a test to see if all of this Web and network and community goodness can lead to something tangible at scale. What do you think?

Anyway, since my session is the last block of the conference and I’m thinking there may only be a few interested souls that will stick around for it, maybe we can get the conversation going online first. I’ve started a sort of “Brain Dump” Google Doc for anyone who wants to put some thinking to this idea. Also, I’ve created a form for those who might like to tentatively sign up to host such an event.

If you’re at all into this idea, spread the word. Use #pbtsn11 as the tag for Tweets and posts.

On many levels, I think this could be a pretty interesting effort for our communities to create some collective action around change. Or not. Fun to dream at any rate…

(Offered for discussion, not as complete thinking…)

A few months from now, I’ll be marking my 10 year anniversary as a blogger. It’s been an amazing ride, and it’s been a surprising one in more than a couple of ways. Obviously, it’s changed my life, changed who I am, and changed my view of the world. For all of that I’m thankful. But it’s also been surprising in that so little has really changed in that time when it comes to schools and education. Sure, we have many more voices, and the community of connected teachers and learners is growing every day. There are lots more computers in classrooms, and we’re carrying around a heck of lot more in our pockets that can lead us to learning. But our collective ability to articulate a different vision for what to do with all of that stuff has still not manifested itself in anything cohesive, anything that we can point to that’s moved the needle on the conversation very much. Case in point, I gave a keynote to an audience of about 900 educators recently and only a handful (as in count ‘em on my fingers and toes) raised their hands when I asked if they’d participated in social spaces online aside from Facebook. Learning in networks was not in their frame. And at most of my presentations, I still get this “I never knew” reaction from most of the people who sit in. Seriously, I’m thinking 90% of educators still don’t know that the Web is turning into a profoundly important place for learning and creating together, and even fewer students in this country are doing anything that resembles networked learning in their schools. Push back if you like, but I’m not sensing anywhere near 600,000 educators (10%) participating in these spaces. Not even close.

In these 10 years at least, the basic “story” of education hasn’t changed. Schools are where we go to get educated. With a very few well documented exceptions, it’s a planned, linear, for the most part standardized process, one that allows everyone to recognize what being “educated” means at the end of the day. We all learn basically the same stuff on the same day in the same way, take the same tests, get the same diploma. It’s that narrative most of us share, at least those of us who didn’t drop out or choose homeschooling as our option. It’s one that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and most everyone else who is trying to “reform” school still buys into. It is the best and easiest, most familiar story to tell, and it’s a deep part of our culture as Americans.

But it is a story that is slowly but surely going to go away. I really believe that. We’re seeing the outlines of a compelling “new” story to tell about learning and education, and it’s this: there no longer is one story, one narrative around how to become educated. Not to say there haven’t always been options to schools. But now there are a growing number of  stories, many unbundled paths to getting an education, and the future will be filled with many others as learning opportunities become more ubiquitous, more personalized, more varied, and more accessible through the Web. For now at least, this new story doesn’t exclude schools as an important part of the path,  but it demands different things from them. They will be nodes in a network of many different learning environments, and their charge will be to help students be, as Charles Leadbetter says, “investors in their own learning,” able to flourish by pulling in information and teachers instead of having those things pushed upon them as is currently the case. Teachers in schools will be master learners first, content experts second, connecting students to knowledge and mentors outside of the physical space, helping students acquire the skills and literacies to learn deeply on their own. Their focus will be to help students become great at creating and sharing and connecting around new knowledge as opposed to being great at consuming the old. As Stephen Downes suggests, schools will build the capacity in all students to create an education for themselves, not wait for it to be delivered to them. And all of this will, in the words of Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, “make us rethink the dominant role of K-12 schools in education.”

My sense of it is that not many people at the head of the “reform” movement really understand this yet. And it will take a whole heap of humility for schools to get this right. We can see this as a threat or as an opportunity. In essence, we need to be teaching ourselves out of our current jobs, empowering and enabling our students to do the difficult and joyful work of learning on their own, supporting and nurturing their individual and collective efforts as we learn with them. On many levels, it’s more important, more difficult work than what we currently do. But if we are to keep schools relevant in our kids’ lives as places where they are cared for and appreciated and loved, something I desperately want to be the case, we’ll need to get comfortable with this new role. And we’ll need to advocate for these shifts in even more compelling ways.

So, assuming this comes close to the “new” narrative of education, how do we do that? Tomorrow, I’ll share one idea that we as a community might work together on.

So what did I glean in my almost month-long hiatus from my social online world? Not much that I didn’t already know. The world didn’t end. My family will always be more important than Twitter. I can learn without being online. There are bigger fish to fry. Etc. It gave me some time to rest and reflect and recharge, something I don’t often give myself enough time to do. And it gave me the opportunity to rethink some of my approach to the networks and communities I’m a part of online. Nothing earth shattering, and nothing I’m suggesting for anyone else either. But helpful to me, I hope, if I’m actually going to still be here on this blog and in these conversations as I hit the 10-year marker later this spring.

I thought a lot about Twitter, actually, and realized (again) that for me at least, it’s become as much of a bane as it has a boon. (This really isn’t news.) Much of the reason I don’t blog any longer, I think, is the Twitter effect. It’s easier just to Tweet out an interesting idea than to examine it more deeply here. I envy the many people who can do both, but I just don’t have the attention span or the time these days. So, I’m going to try to be much more structured about my Twitter time. I’m using Proxlet to sift out only Tweets with links. I’ve started using the scheduled Tweets feature in TweetDeck. I’ve cut down and really tried to diversify the hashtags I follow. I’m not going to check Twitter 20 or more times a day any longer, which was a habit that I was finding myself getting into late last year.

That all led me to consider even more deeply my time spent online in general. Robin Dunbar’s essay in the Times right after Christmas, “You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends” really stoked my thinking as well.

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.

That’s not to say that I feel like I have more than a couple of handfulls of “close relationships” online…I don’t. But it is a reminder that even the more superficial interactions we have online are not just intellectual ones. Learning in these spaces requires some of that limited “emotional capital,” and frankly, I think I was getting to the point where I was expending too much of it at the box and not enough of it in my f2f life. I’ve been doing a great deal of offline writing of late, and I’ve found the “flow” that comes from that work to be blissful in a way that my online practice had lost. I still love the feel of getting lost in the links, don’t get me wrong. But at the end of the day, it’s really, really nice to have my hours of work reflected in a substantive piece of work, whether it’s text or anything else, instead of an assortment of Tweets, bookmarks and Evernotes. That’s not to say I’m giving up Tweeting or bookmarking or Evernoting. I’m just trying to make sure that all of that effort turns into something more useful…for me. To each his own.

This morning I found this amazing blog post by Dan Perez, “The Klout Myth and Living Above the Influence.” (Yes, I Tweeted it out.) In it, he makes a highly compelling case, to me at least, to take a hard look at how we spend our time online. It does a much better job than I in articulating the challenge. The message, in a nutshell, is “Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.” It’s definitely worth about 50 Tweets of your time.

I’ve pretty much stopped making resolutions, but I’m hoping that balance for me this year means more blogging, more reflecting, and more creating in general in the time I do give to these important albeit secondary pursuits. As always, we’ll see.

So what are your struggles this New Year as you reflect on your practice? Or am I the only one in reconfiguration mode?

Almost ten years into this, I still find it hard to articulate the appreciation I feel for the people I’ve connected to through this blog, their friendship, their generosity and energy, and most of all their passion for making the world a better place for the two fast-growing knuckleheads below and the millions of kids out there like them. Thank you. You inspire me on a regular basis.

I’m closing up shop here and on Twitter and elsewhere for a few weeks. Sincere best wishes for a great season and an amazing New Year. See you in 2011.

Google just opened up it’s e-bookstore today. And while the required app doesn’t seem to be available in the US yet (even though it says it is), I already know what book will be my first download: Eight Days Out by my great-grandfather Merrick Abner Richardson. It’s an absolutely scintillating read (not), one of three “novels” that, so the story goes, he paid a vanity press to publish a few hundred copies way back at the turn of the 20th Century. Imagine what he coulda done with Lulu.

The cool part about this is not that his great-great grandkids (and beyond) will in some way be changed by his words. They won’t. The cool part is simply that another very small part of their personal history has been captured. It’s a thin slice of who they are, a piece of their DNA that will be preserved. And in some way, even though this isn’t a monumental work of fiction or a classic by any stretch, that makes me feel good.

It’s not lost on me that when I blog (or, in recent terms, don’t blog) or save a picture or put up a Tweet that I’m adding in some way to my own legacy, one that I can write and share in more amazing ways simply because I have the privilege of living at this moment. I don’t know if my kids or grandkids will ever take the time and effort to read or look at some of this stuff. I’m not much expecting them to. But they could. Whatever the technology they’re playing with in their adulthood, I’m guessing most of this will be pretty much a mouse click away. I’ve written about this before, but I know at some point I want to spend more time creating content specifically for them. Historical narratives, advice videos, favorite jokes. I share all that stuff with them now, in real life, but as someone who has been without a mother for almost 30 years now, I know how amazing it would be to see her and listen to her and keep learning from her, even though she may not be around. Not every day, but once in a while

When silly stuff like finding my great-grandfather’s fairly insipid prose preserved in a Google e-book happens, I’m reminded how amazing this moment is. In a world of serious struggle and argument and change, it’s nice to be reminded.

Just a quick observation in the midst of my blogging hiatus…

I think it’s official. We’ve got the rhetoric for change down. We’re telling the new story…self-directed, multi-skilled kids with devices accessing content and teachers from around the world using a new literacy, all being assessed through a potent mix of traditional and not so traditional tests. All digital, all the time.  New learners for new times. New schools and classrooms and teachers for new times. It’s all in there. It’s Prego!

That’s at least the impression you get when you read this latest from THE Journal and host of other articles and blog posts and Tech Plans. For example:

The students will lead this revolution if we keep them engaged and give them hope that they can make use of these technologies that they love in their private lives and make use of them for learning. Teachers will come along with that because teachers’ role will change. In my 2020 vision, we’ll have teachers as facilitators and mentors, and the students will be directing, leading, and collaborating, even as early as elementary school. The relationship between students and teachers will be, on a whole, much different and more valuable.

Ah, to dream.

But here is the thing…read between the lines in most of these descriptions and you get the sense that we see it, we want it, but we ain’t gonna get it very soon. Budgets are being cut. The people in charge don’t really see this vision. We haven’t figured out that assessment thing very well. And so on.

Read all together, you get the sense the revolution is coming, just not anytime soon. And even worse, it’s doubtful that when it does come, that schools in general are going to lead it. I know we have pockets of real change, but while the words seem to be scaling (somewhat, at least), the deeds have yet to follow suit.

Sigh.

I’m hoping I can get some ideas from math teacher types (and others) around an idea I’ve been kicking around for my son Tucker, who, as you might guess by the title of this post, loves basketball. (He loves math, too.) Not that he needs it or has asked for it, but I keep wondering what a “Basketball Math” curriculum might look like for Tucker, one that would combine his serious interest in the sport with his growing interest in math, and one that would also give him opportunities to connect with other basketball and math lovers outside of the classroom. A few basic things seem obvious, even to my English teacher brain, in terms of learning percentages, ordering numbers, reading some blogs on using statistics in basketball, etc. But I’m thinking there’s a lot of other stuff about geometry, physics and more that he might find hidden in the game as well.

So if you have a second, I’m hoping you might post your ideas here. Assuming we could (and would want to) build a K-? math curriculum around the game of basketball that, if possible, takes advantage of these social learning spaces online, what might that look like?

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?

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“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.