That said, I’ve been thinking for quite a while now that I need to change things up a bit in terms of the way I’m sharing with the world. It’s become a struggle to blog in long form here. Yet I’ve not found the short form of Twitter to be anywhere close to a substitute for the extended conversations that take place here. (And to be honest, Twitter is a totally crappy archive of reading and thinking.) While I’ve tried to like it, Facebook just is not a place that I find myself wanting to spend much if any of my time. (I have a theory as to why , but I’ll share that in another post.) More and more as I think about “curating” my learning world, I find myself wanting to stow all the good stuff in one place, all the blog posts, quotes, pictures, graphics, photos, bookmarks, videos and other snips that I find interesting. I know I could do that here. But here’s the other thing…I’m also in constant need of fresh voices an perspectives. I’ve been pretty much connected to the same fairly small group for a long time now. Not that there’s anything wrong with those folks, but I need, I want to branch out.

So, I’ve decided to pretty much bring my run here at Weblogg-ed to a close. I’m not taking the site down, but for all of those reasons and more, I’m moving my writing over to a new space on Tumblr that feels like, to me at least, a better space for the kinds of writing and curating and linking that I want to do. I’ve been playing there for the last month or so, connecting with some of the people in that community, and I’m looking forward to connecting even more. I’m feeling a sense of energy that really appeals to me, and while there are some drawbacks (lack of rss feeds for individual tags, for instance) it’s just seems like the space I want to be at the moment. I know there is some danger in the all eggs in one basket model…but I’ve got a post brewing about that as well. And I’m not ignorant of the effects the switch may have on my “findability” in the larger webspace. But I’m also not so worried about that. I sincerely hope you’ll follow me there and continue to engage in these conversations around change.

And finally, another new book.

Before you say it, I completely understand the irony of a book of collected blog posts, which is exactly what Corwin Press is publishing in August with about 40 or so of the most commented on pieces found here in this space over the last 10 years. The idea for doing the book was broached by my editor at ISTE last year, and at first, I blanched at the prospect. But I came around for three main reasons. First, while it may seem kind of strange to those who have read this blog in the past, there are still lots of people out there who have yet to entertain the notion of change that this collection argues for. It’s the kind of “meet them where they are” strategy, and if this book can help do that, great. Second, it will give me a chance to help some schools that might be in need of technology or infrastructure to make those changes happen. I’ve decided that all of the after tax profits that this book may generate will be used to fund learning initiatives at deserving schools or organizations. We’re not talking Bill Gates dollars here, obviously, but I’ll report out next April or May what the totals are and what the projects look like. (If you have any suggestions on how that giving might be structured, let me know.) And finally, on a personal note, as much as I talk and write about the future of the written form, I find great honor in being asked to put this book together. It may be an anachronism by the time my grandkids are around to see it, and I know there is little or no real reason to print it out, but there’s still a piece of me that finds a printed book inspiring. Maybe it will spark some conversations about grandpa down the road.

To all of you who have stopped by here over the last decade, I can’t thank you guys enough for reading and sharing with me. Here’s to new beginnings and even more powerful conversations ahead. Keep changing the world.

Lately, I can’t seem to get out from under the feeling that a) this country has pretty much lost its way and that b) at the end of the day, our education system carries much of the blame. No question, my parenting lens is coloring some of this; I’ve been reading Umair Haque and Climate Progress and the occasional Thomas Friedman essay, and I’m simply getting depressed at the picture of the future that’s being painted. And, I’m even more distressed at not being able to know how well my kids will be able to deal with the boatload of crap that is coming their way. Let’s just say things feel pretty dire right now, and to me at least, it seems like our society is offering up one part denial, one part lack of interest and one part ignorance in response. The first is a choice, but those second two? I blame our all consuming love affair with the test.

Not kidding.

It’s bad enough that we’re bleeding kids to the tune of 7,000 a day from the system, 2,500,000 1,200,000 a year. (See note below.) That’s not all due to the test, certainly, but much of it is due to being subjected to a curriculum that is driven by the one size fits all outcomes that we’ve set up for them. Read Seymour Papert’s list of 8 Big Ideas for Constructionist Learning and ask yourself seriously how much of that goes on in your school. My guess is not much, and the primary reason is we don’t value that stuff more than we value making sure kids pass the test. We don’t give kids time to go deep, we don’t honor failure, and we’re not about “learning to learn” as much as we are about “learning to know.” So many of our kids are disengaged or simply not interested in learning because they see no benefits past the exam. Are we really surprised that so many adults in our society aren’t learners? So many teachers, in fact? That’s not our emphasis in schools.

Similarly, is anyone surprised that a huge swath of our population can’t speak intelligently about the larger issues that face us? No doubt, the financial mess we’re in and climate change and the Middle East and the rest are complex, fast changing issues that can be difficult for anyone to keep up with. (I’m no exception.) But again, have our schools really been cultivating the learning dispositions needed to grapple with those topics as they evolve? We give a lot of lip service to problem solving and critical thinking and the like, but I’m not convinced that those and other really important skills and literacies are showing up meaningfully in more than 10% of classrooms in this country because in large measure, they’re not on the test. It’s about content and knowledge, not learning.

Here’s the deal: Right now, the test is forcing us to spend too much time on stuff that we don’t really need to be spending time on any more. I used to joke about open phone tests, but I’m not joking as much any more. I keep looking at my kids’ tests, especially Tucker’s state NJ ASK stuff and see way too much stuff on there that he could answer with his phone. Not getting it.

And it’s not getting better. I just spent a couple of days out in Seattle working with a group of pretty amazing educators helping to write problem based curriculum that aligns with the Common Core. Their main motivation is to engage kids in learning, and I got a chance to observe one of their modules being implemented in a local high school classroom. It was good stuff. But in general, what bothers me about the Common Core is what bothers me about the traditional curriculum as well, namely that there is still way too much emphasis on things that I just don’t see as all that important in the information and knowledge filled world in which we live. I totally get that there is not one part of most K-12 curricula that isn’t relevant to some kids in the system, but the idea that every child has to get every part of the standard curriculum is silly. And even more, there is still a decided lack of emphasis on the types of skills and dispositions and real world knowledge and thinking that my children are going to need to best exist in a world filled with what more and more appears to be some pretty dire problems.

So I’ve been building a list of my UnCommon Core, the things I think we can expect every child to understand regardless of interest and passion. I know some will read a liberal bias into this, but I find these hard to argue against, to be honest, regardless the political viewpoint you bring to them. So here’s a baker’s dozen:

1. Living softly on the Earth (Our global impacts.)

2. Gender equality equity (Note #2) (With a particular emphasis on the objectification and sexualization of young girls and women.)

3. Developing expertise (Understanding what it means to go deep intellectually)

4. Public participation (Both online and off)

5. Managing, analyzing, synthesizing and sharing multiple streams of simultaneous information (Thank you NCTE)

6. Physical fitness and health (Real fitness. Real health.)

7. Consumerism and finance (Understanding the systems of money)

8. Networked online learning (And all that goes with that)

9. Reputation management/becoming a trusted source/online safety

10. Participating in a democracy (Online and off)

11. Embracing and learning through change (Too much of schools is about stagnation.) (Added after original posting.)

12. Embracing diversity (Our changing cultural influences)

13. Problem solving and programming solutions

I’m sure there are others…feel free to extend the list.

And here’s the thing…we can teach math and science and even Shakespeare in those contexts, not as discrete, never the twain shall meet disciplines or units that are mostly aimed at checking the test prep box. If you don’t believe that, have you seen the vision for school that MaryAnn Reilly is working on?

Students do not take traditional courses tied to seat time or discrete disciplines and are encouraged to work virtually, as well as in person. Utilizing Option 2 (N.J.A.C. 6A:8-5.1(a)1ii), personalized learning plans are developed with students and their parents/guardians that fulfill the Morris School District graduation requirements while emphasizing students’ interests, emerging as well as established. These experiences can result in: project-based courses, virtual offerings, community-based internships, college courses, and capstone projects.

Like MaryAnn and her cohorts are doing, I think it’s time to start thinking uncommonly about education, for the sake of our kids and our futures. What do you think?

(Note: I miscalculated the number of dropouts in the initial version as 7,000 per day, not 7,000 per each school day. Apologies.)

(Note #2: As per the suggestion of Alec Couros.)

Dear Tess and Tucker,

For most of your young lives, you’ve heard your mom and I occasionally talk about your futures by saying that someday you’ll travel off to college and get this thing called a degree that will show everyone that you are an expert in something and that will lead you to getting a good job that will make you happy and make you able to raise a family of your own someday. At least, that’s what your mom and I have in our heads when we talk about it. But, and I haven’t told your mom this yet, I’ve changed my mind. I want you to know that you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree.

And today when I read this, I still think that old post is pretty relevant:

Of the 2 million graduates in the class of 2011, 85 percent will return home because they can’t secure jobs that might give them more choices and more control over their lives.

Ok, then.

The other day at Tucker’s basketball game, I overheard two moms talking about the “plan” for college. The one mom was very passionate about her son NOT going to a traditional college right  after high school. “My kid has no idea what he wants to do, and I’m not sending him to some $25,000 a year school to have him figure it out,” she said. “He can take all the standard requirement courses at a community college, transfer out when he’s ready, and in the meantime see where his interests are.”

The funny thing was that the other mom was shaking her head slightly in agreement but I could tell by her questions that wasn’t going to be an option for her child. “What if he can’t transfer the credits?” “Don’t you think he’ll miss a lot of the ‘college experience?’” “You mean he’s going to live at home?” The horror.

I have a theory, and I may be wrong, but I’m willing to bet that the 15% who do get a job out of college are not necessarily the smartest kids out there; they are the ones who are the most passionate and committed to the life’s work they know in their hearts they were meant to do. It’s not like every kid from an Ivy school is getting a job; plenty of kids from what Newsweek or U.S. News would consider third tier colleges will go on to find fulfilling work that will give them “more choices and more control over their lives.” Or, they will be the creative, self-motivated, problem solvers who will start their own businesses, carve out their own paths to success.

Look, I’m somewhat swayed by the statistics that show kids with college degrees are dealing with much less unemployment that those without, and that they make more money. And I know there can be amazing learning that happens in some university classrooms.  But I’m also swayed by the fact that neither I nor even one of my friends from college ended up doing what they got a degree from school to do. Way too many of us are going to college because we’re “supposed to” without any real clue what we want to do with our time there. Thirty years ago when I was in school, that wasn’t such a big hit in the pocketbook; there was always grad school, right? Today, I think that mom at the basketball got it right. Who can afford to waste a couple of years in college? And unless you really want to get saddled with debt, grad school’s not as much of an “hey-I-finally-figured-out-what-I-want-to-do” option.

I’ll say it again: Tess, Tucker, you don’t HAVE to go to college. Nor should your schools have to prepare you to go to college. What they and me and your mom need to help you with is finding your passion, going deep into learning about it, becoming an expert, and then using that expertise to change the world and make a living. We need to help you learn how to cobble together your own education, and you don’t have to wait until college to start down that road. And odds are pretty good that 10 years from now when you are looking to strike out on your own, your passion and your portfolio will take you as far if not farther than a degree that came at a great expense and in all likelihood with only a slice of relevance.

So, college? Maybe. But we’re keeping our options open.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

He was talking about beginning journalists, but I couldn’t help thinking about the many teachers who I have met over the years who haven’t waited. People like Shelley Blake-Plock and Dolores Gende and Anne Smith and Kathy Cassidy and Brian Crosby and Shannon Miller and Shelley Wright and Jabiz Raisdana and a whole slew of others who had some type of hunger overcome them, something that made them jump right in and really change the way the thought about teaching and learning and classrooms. For some, I know, what’s happened over the past decade or so has simply afforded a way for them to do more of what they always believed, to give kids the reins and let them learn about learning. But for others, and I would count myself in this second category, the last 10 years have brought to life a way of thinking about education that is decidedly different from the lens we originally carried into the classroom. For us, this has been a real transformation, not simply a shift in methods or pedagogy.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of teachers are still waiting…for something. What is it? Permission? Direction? Inspiration? Enlightenment?

I know this is a crappy time to be in education. Maybe as crappy as it’s ever been. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, their benefits. The profession is being dragged through the manure. The onslaught of tests and data collection and standardization is doing the same thing to teachers as it’s doing to kids, driving the creativity and the passion and the enjoyment of real learning right out of them. I am not unsympathetic to these realities…not at all.

But we can’t use this moment as an excuse to continue to wait. Technology aside, our educational systems are not creating the learners that we want our children to be. And it’s not about layering whiteboards or blogs onto a narrow, one-size fits all curriculum that has marched along undeterred for what seems like forever. It’s about fundamentally changing what we do in classrooms with kids.

The good news is that many have acted on their hunger. They’ve put kids ahead of the system, redefined themselves as learners first, teachers second, found the courage of their convictions and made learning, not test scores, the focus. The bad news is that far too many teachers still don’t even know that the traditional model of education is failing kids when it comes to learning. But somewhere in the middle, there are those that know there is a different path, yet they won’t make the leap.

What, I wonder, are they waiting for?

…we knew all along that atoms were never up to the job. We knew that the world doesn’t boil down to even the best of newspapers, that it doesn’t fit into 65,000 articles in a printed encyclopedia, that there was more disagreement than the old channels let through. (What they called noise, we called the the world.) We knew that the crap pushed through the radio wasn’t really all that we cared about, or that we all cared about the same things within three tv channels of difference. The old institutions were the best fictions we could come up with given that atoms are way too big.

And I’m wondering, deep down, have we known all along that this idea of an “education” was really a fiction, something we created out of necessity with the implicit understanding that in a world limited by atoms, it was never really the end all, be all, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances? And if we didn’t know that, can we admit that now?

The circumstances have changed. We’re no longer constrained by atoms. For 125 years we’ve been making the learning world small, and now the world is all of a sudden big…huge. All of a sudden, the walls have been obliterated. Learning is unbound, and “an education” is next.

The work now is in making the transition happen in ways that don’t hurt the kids or teachers currently in our schools. In ways that prepare our kids for a learning world where atoms still matter, but for very different reasons.  A peaceful revolution of sorts that starts…where?

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?

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.

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.

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?

I found it incredibly difficult to say everything that I wanted to say in 15 minutes or less, and as I reflect back on it now, I feel like a lot is missing. When I first started thinking about this talk, I wanted to speak more to parents than to educators, but I think I veered away from that a bit. And given the nature of TED Talks in general, I think at points I went too much into the moment as opposed to sticking to the bigger themes.

But overall, some rhetorical issues aside, I’ll take it. The best part? I learned a lot in the process. I definitely felt pushed by the experience, and it’s given me a great deal of valuable feedback into my own speaking and thinking. It made me consider deeply the ways in which we can now craft our messages and offer them up to the entire world for inspection. Scary on many levels, but motivating on many others.

Now, if I can just get this down to under three minutes to really appeal to the short-attention-span culture that we find ourselves in…

Case in point: recently I was working with a group of teachers trying to help them re-envision their curriculum in the light of all this “new” social technology that some of us have been swimming in for the last decade now. And I had one particularly interesting and, I think, compelling exchange with a teacher who was finding it especially difficult to see any value to changing what he was doing in his classroom. Briefly, he shared with the group that one of his most effective lessons was built around helping students understand the political drivers of redistricting by asking them to redraw maps of nearby cities in ways that would make it almost impossible for an incumbent to lose an election. The way he described it, it was a great lesson that challenged kids to research, think, and create in some important ways, ways that the teacher pointed out were necessary to do well on the state assessment.

I tried to move the conversation into what I think can be called “doing both mode,” as in finding a way to engage students in understanding the concepts for the test but doing so in a way that teaches them to think more expansively by using online tools to go beyond the paper and pencil and learn about connecting and creating and collaborating along the way. And some of the other teachers in the room provided some great suggestions, using Google Earth or Maps, and adding multimedia resources that could articulate the reasons for drawing the lines where they were drawn. And with a little prodding, others suggested using Skype to interview people involved in the real process, or maybe even connecting with schools within the districts they were redrawing to get some sense of what the effects of those revisions might be in real life.

Throughout, the teacher was nodding his head in assent, but when I asked him how all of that sounded, he paused, and then he said “Well, you know, sometimes I think technology just adds a lot of bells and whistles, makes stuff look good without really adding to the learning. I mean, they don’t need to do any of that to get the concept.” And he’s right, of course. Students don’t need technology to pass the test; they’ve been doing it for years without it.

But here’s the thing: that teacher didn’t yet see the value of having his students make those connections outside the classroom even though no one was asking or expecting him to do it. In fact, it took about another seven or eight minutes of back and forth before I think he finally came around to the idea that the connections might matter even though no one was testing for them or writing curriculum for them or demanding that kids understand them. That we may want to consider adding the “bells and whistles” because the world our kids need to be prepared for is opening up in ways that go beyond the long-standing goals and objectives we’ve set up for them. That it’s not just about map making any more.

My sense of it is that teacher is still in the majority, and as teachers get incentivized to do even more test prep and one-size-fits all instruction, he’ll remain in the majority for quite a while longer.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

(Note: I’m grumpy and tired after being sick for a week so I apologize for the somewhat random thoughts that follow. Hope you can make sense of it.)

I’ve been thinking about your post from the other day. This weekend, I ran across this 10th Grade Mathematics state assessment from Massachusetts. Forty-two questions that supposedly would identify whether or not a 15-year-old in Boston was “ready” for the world. I figured, what the heck, and I took the test.

Sad to say, based on the result, I should probably be heading back to middle school with Tucker (my 6th grade son) to get a refresher in Mr. Mead’s class.

But here is the thing: not only did I get the majority of the questions wrong, the vast majority of the questions asked me to do things I have never had to do in real life. I’ve never had to figure out the lateral surface area of a cone, nor been asked to give the mode of a series of numbers, nor had to figure out a square root. At least not that I can remember. If I ever did know how to do any of that stuff, and I probably did since I passed the test at some point long ago, it’s now long gone from my memory banks. Somehow, I’ve survived.

Yong Zhao recently linked to an article from a few years ago that indicates that kids in Wisconsin are spending somewhere around 3 million hours taking standardized tests, and that doesn’t include “time spent distributing and collecting materials, taking practice tests, giving instructions, and addressing other logistics of testing.” And I wonder, how much of that time is being spent on stuff that kids are going to forget? And then I wonder how much kids could really learn if they spent that time immersed in the stuff that they want to learn rather than what we want them to?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make sure every child can read and write and do basic math and have a fundamental understanding of history and science and the rest. We should provide every child with the skills and literacies he or she needs to understand the world and continue to learn. And I know that if we are to help kids find their own passions for learning that we need to expose them to many different things, especially when they are young.

But I have to ask, does every child have to pass the same test by the end of 10th grade? Really? Does every child have to read Voltaire and Turgenev and Amy Tan as the Common Core suggests? Our friend Karl Fisch admirably asked this same type of question last fall:

And therein lies the dilemma – is it possible to provide in a systemic way a customized educational experience for all students that both allows and encourages them to pursue their passions, but also exposes them to the wide range of human endeavors that they may have little or no knowledge about and therefore wouldn’t be able to even know if they were passionate about in the first place?

They key word there is obviously “systemic” because we do want every child to have the foundation to continue to learn about whatever he or she wants or needs to learn. But, like Karl, I’m not at all sure that’s even possible. For one thing, there is a real disconnect between what “learning” is and the all-purpose goal of “higher student achievement;” I would argue the two are almost totally unrelated in today’s heightened political rhetoric around schools. And for another, real learning for the most part requires real contexts, not the contrived experiences that schools in general can offer.

To that end, the Common Core doesn’t help. The real impetus for the Common Core has nothing to do with learning in the contexts that we talk about it. Nothing to do with exploration, experience, reflection, creation, sharing, collaboration, or changing the world. Instead, it has everything to do with creating a new “Easy Button” for education, one that will let us compare our kids even more. In a world where we can personalize and individualize in ways like never before, we’ll give students an even more “common” educational experience. That saddens me.

The crux of all of this is that it’s just too hard to do it any other way. It’s too hard to let kids make decisions around their own learning (even though they’re doing it all the time at home) because we won’t be able to track it easily. It’s too hard to let them read books that fuel their passions because we can’t read all those books to see if they are “appropriate” or “effective” or whatever else. And we can’t let kids go really deeply into the things they’re interested in because goodness knows we have too much stuff to cover in the curriculum that they need to pass the test to make that work.

And while I’m sure that there will be some great, inquiry-based, choice-based curriculum that will be developed around the Common Core that will make even me happy, I fear that in general, we just don’t want to work that hard. We’ll go running to those textbook publishers and “approved providers” (who are no doubt salivating at the prospect) who will help us get our students to meet the standards but, in the end, do nothing to expand the opportunities for kids to learn things in ways they will never, ever forget.

Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher has an interesting way of describing his classroom up in Snow Lake, Manitoba. As he tells it, it has “thin walls,” meaning that despite being eight hours north of the nearest metropolitan airport, his students are getting out into the world on a regular basis, using the Web to connect and collaborate with students in far flung places from around the globe. The name of Clarence’s blog, “Remote Access,” sums up nicely the opportunities that his students have in their networked classroom.

“Learning is only as powerful as the network it occurs in,” Clarence says. “No doubt, there is still value in the learning that occurs between teachers and students in classrooms. But the power of that learning is more solid and more relevant at the end of the day if the networks and the connections are larger.”

Without question, Clarence imbues the notion of the “connected learner.” Aside from reflecting on his life and his practice on his blog, he uses Twitter to grow his network, uses Delicious to capture and share bookmarks, and makes other tools like Skype and YouTube a regular part of his learning life. In other words, he’s deeply rooted in the learning networks he advocates for his students.

“It’s changed everything for me as a learner,” he says. “I teach in a small school of 145 kids, so I don’t know what it’s like to have a lot of colleagues. I can’t imagine closing my door and having to generate all of these ideas on my own.”

So Clarence helps his students create these networked interactions at every turn. A few years ago, his students collaborated with a classroom in Los Angeles to study S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, using Skype for live conversations and blogs to capture their reflections on both the story and the interactions. More recently, his students studied The Book Thief by Markus Zusak with a class of Ontario students, listening online as their teachers read the book aloud while conducting a chat in the background filled with questions, reflections, and predictions as to what would happen next. Over the years, his students have worked with kids in Australia, Brazil, Argentina, and China, just to name a few.

But here’s the thing. While Clarence may be the conductor of these connections at the outset, most of the networking quickly starts coming from his students. As he was beginning to explore the idea of the “thin walled” classroom back in 2006, he wrote on his blog:

The connections have had very little to do with me. I’ve provided access, direction, and time, but little else. I have not had to make elaborate plans with teachers, nor have I had to coordinate efforts, parceling out contacts and juggling numbers. It is all about the kids. The kids have made contacts. They have begun to find voices that are meaningful to them, and voices they are interested in hearing more from. They are becoming connectors and mavens, drawing together strings of a community. They are beginning to expect to work in this way. They want to know what the people in their network are saying, to hear about their lives and their learning. They want feedback on their own learning, and they want to know they are surrounded by a community who hears them. They make no distinction about class, about race, about proficiency in English, or about geography. They are only interested in the conversation and what it means to them.

That’s a very different picture from what happens in most traditional classrooms, but it captures the essence of what student (and teacher) learning can look like in schools these days. “Thin walls” expand the classroom, and in the process deepen our understanding and practice of all of those “21st Century Skills” that we examined earlier, the critical thinking, the problem solving skills, and the rest. And as students begin to experience the powerful pull of connection to other students and teachers outside of their physical spaces, they also begin to see the world writ large as a part of their daily learning lives. Just as Clarence says that these networks “changed everything for me as a learner” they also change just about everything about our interactions with the kids we teach, the way we think about classrooms, and the way we see the world. Those are big statements, but these shifts are being played out every day in profound ways. And more and more they reflect the real world of learning that our students will graduate into, whether we help them get there or not.

No doubt, all of this has huge implications for us as educators. In fact, even those of us living at the heart of these changes feel some discomfort trying to think through all the ways that the Web challenges the traditional structures of schools and classrooms and learning. But here’s the thing: given these opportunities for connection that the Web now brings us, schools will have to start leveraging the power of these networks. And here are the two game-changing conditions that make that statement hard to deny: right now, if we have access, we now have two billion potential teachers and, soon, the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips.

That, in no uncertain terms, is different.

Most schools were built upon the idea that knowledge and teachers are scarce. When you have limited access to information and you want to deliver what you do have to every citizen in an age with little communication technology, you build what schools are today: age-grouped, discipline-separated classrooms run by an expert adult who can manage the successful completion of the curriculum by a hundred or so students at a time. We mete out that knowledge in discrete parts, carefully monitoring students progress through one-size-fits all assessments, deeming them “educated” when they have proven their mastery at, more often than not, getting the right answer and, to a lesser degree, displaying certain skills that show a “literacy” in reading and writing. Most of us know these systems intimately, and for 120 years or so, they’ve pretty much delivered what we’ve asked them to.

But, what happens when knowledge and teachers aren’t scarce? What happens when it becomes exceedingly easy to people and content around the things you want to learn when you want to learn them? What happens when in the next decade or so, almost everyone gains access to these profoundly different learning spaces, filled with teachers and content outside the walls through the devices they carry in their pockets? What happens when we don’t need schools to manage the delivery of content any more, when we can get it on our own, anytime we need it, from anywhere we’re connected, from anyone who might be connected with us?

In a word, things change.

For each of us as learners in the world at large, the fundamental change is that we can be much more in control of the learning we do. It’s not about the next unit in the curriculum as much as it is what we need to know when we need to know it. And it’s not so much even what we carry around in our heads, all of that “just in case” knowledge that schools are so good at making sure students get these days. As Jay Cross, the author of Informal Learning, suggests, in a connected world, it’s more about how much knowledge you can access. “‘What can you do?’ has been replaced with, ‘What can you and your network connections do?’ Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts.” If we have access to our networks, we’re a lot smarter than we used to be. In fact, “connection with others in a network is of prime importance in having access to a wide repository of knowledge,” according to Vance Stevens of the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. In other words, if we want to make the most of our brains these days, we need to connect online.

What hasn’t changed is this: learning, online or off, is still social, and that’s good news for all of us. If you’re seeing a vision of students sitting in front of computers working through self-paced curricula and interacting with a teacher only on occasion, you’re way, way off. That’s not effective online learning. What is possible, however, is that because of the connections we can now make on the web, there is as much potential (if not more) for meaningful learning to occur in the interactions between people online than in their face to face places. Why? Primarily because online, we can connect to others who share our passions to learn in extended, deeper ways that in many ways can’t occur offline. That’s not to say that face-to-face learning isn’t important or valuable. It is. But so is the learning we can now do on the Web. And it’s the melding of the two that will shape our schools in the 21st century.

Excerpted with permission from R. Mancabelli & W. Richardson (in press), Personal Learning Networks, Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

MICHIGAN

NEW JERSEY

WISCONSIN

CONNECTICUT

I didn’t even get to look at Texas…

These are some crazy days, and I fear we haven’t even seen the half of it. And I wonder a couple of things. What will it take for people to figure out that the disruption here is far greater than budgets and unions which are right now the easy scapegoats in the reform message? And, if we keep going down this road to oblivion, what rises from the ashes?