A simple post today with what I think is a deep message. I hope this metaphor works for you as well as it does for me. In one minute and three seconds we see what school currently is too often like and then how it should be. I’d love to know if you see the same message I do.
I received my copy of The Power of Pull by John Hagel III (Blog, Twitter), John Seely Brown (Web, Twitter), and Lang Davison (Blog, Twitter) yesterday and sat down with a cup of tea this morning and started to read. I made it to page four and had one of those serendipitous moments when I discovered the epilogue to my last post, “What do you want to be when you grow up?“
To begin to understand how pull helps and enables individuals, groups, and institutions to thrive, we visited the living room of Wendell and Lisa Payne’s Lahaina home in Maui. Not just any living room turns out to develop world-class athletes, of course. So what made this one different? On the
surface, the Payne’s living room looks much like any other: There’s a sofa, an easy char, a scrapbook on the side table (with a one-word title: “Dusty”), a television, and a book shelf. But this living room also became a place where Dusty and his friends, without realizing it, were tapping into deep processes that have lessons for all of us.
More often than not, these processes start with a simple question: What interests us? What are we passionate about? As eight-year-old Dusty squinted into the sun in the backyard of the small family house in Haiku, Hawaii, his father asked him, “What do you want to do?” Dusty, who had already gotten tired of stick and ball games, such as baseball and soccer, thought for a few moments and said, “I want to surf.”
From that moment on. Wendell and Lisa immersed their young son – and themselves – in the world of amateur surfing, becoming heavily involved
with the Hawaii Amateur Surfing Association, where they met the Larsens, the Marzos, and the Bargers – the parents of other promising groms [a term for young surfers] who were as hooked on surfing as Dusty was.
In the midst of all this activity the Payne’s living room became a focal point, a clubhouse, a place of retreat and reflection following the day’s experiences out in the surf – the calm center in the middle of a growing intermingling of influences, contests, people, and interactions that together launched five of the most promising young surfers of their generation.
Have you ever watched or been part of this scenario:
A Thanksgiving dinner with all the family. Great grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, newly weds, nieces and nephews. Uncle Dan is sitting with the youngest kids and asks Johnny what he wants to be when he grows up. Johnny answers, “A dinosaur!” His father looks over and laughs, “He really means that.” Uncle Dan decides to ask Jimmy, who is entering kindergarten in the fall, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Jimmy, not hesitating, says, “A fireman!” and a dialog begins as Uncle Dan explores all the “whys” behind the decision. He then turns to little Sally and repeats the process and she ponders a moment, then thoughtfully says, “I want to be a doctor.” After exploring her reasons he asks them both, “Are you looking forward to starting school?” Both are. He asks them why and the respond, “Because we get to learn things and do stuff.”
The sad reality is that those kids will enter school in the fall and realize they were sold a bill of goods. I imagine their faces will not be too different from that of the young boy in this commercial:
I dropped into my reader this morning and started to read Jeff Jarvis’ (Blog, Twitter) latest post, Mobile=Local and the second paragraph really caught my attention:
The biggest battlefield is local and mobile (I combine them because soon, local will mean simply wherever you are now). That’s why Google is in the phone business and the
mapping business and why it is working hard to let us search by speaking or even by taking pictures so we don’t have to type while walking or driving.
I don’t know about you, but it occurs to me that this idea should have a major impact on rethinking school. I say “should” because not only is the whole of education meandering into the 21st century to see how it works, even the pockets that are attempting to race forward are realistically moving at a mere jog (Check out: Yoda on learning, “You must on learn what you have learned.“). This is more evidence that what we call school is not a place that will prepare students to create their future. This future will be a place where their learning can be carried around in their pockets.
Most Star War’s geeks know and love this scene, arguably one of the most memorable in the first trilogy. The segment of dialog that is usually referenced is:
“No! Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.”
I like that, to me it pushes the point that you must have conviction when you take the leap. If you don’t, the experience may look like the first time Morpheus ran Neo through the “Jump Program”:
Okay, I know, the geek quotient is rather high at this point. I want to focus on a different line from Yoda in the scene with Luke and tie that message together with an article from the most recent issue of Wired magazine (yes, I do have a non-digital subscription, so sue me). The line I want to draw out is this:
“You must unlearn, what you have learned.”
There are numerous applications for this line that can be applied to various areas in the field of education and the process of school. I am going to apply it to those seen as leaders in the act of rethinking school. I know, some would argue that it more aptly applies to those that are dragging their feet or maintaining the status quo. That would work too, but here is why I think it applies more accurately to those who are at the front edge of changing school.
I have been reading Tom Peters (Blog, Twitter) work for almost 25 years now. I find it insightful, inspiring, and occasionally infuriating. I always wanted to have a chance to meet Tom and have a conversation over coffee. He does not address the topic much, but his thoughts about education, and what it means to learn, are filled with great potential for rethinking school. I have found that many of his best ideas are not business specific, though he presents them in that context. These ideas are foundational to the process of learning by doing – a critical idea long ago removed from our schools. On numerous occasions I have used a video clip of or quoted Tom in my posts here.
I have also have been following Tom on Twitter since he jumped into that pool about a year ago. I enjoy what he shares in 140 or fewer. This morning one really struck me and I decided to respond. I have responded to other “top shelf gurus” not expecting a response, and they have never let me down. Tom responded. Now, it was not an hour over coffee, but I appreciate his attention to “customer service” (the man practices what he preaches!) and count myself lucky to have had the brief interaction.
Reflecting on the momentary experience I find myself asking, “What power can be brought into classrooms around the world by ensuring interactions between our students and experts in the fields of architecture, art, medicine, sciences, business, engineering, technology, and especially authors, artists, thinkers and inventors?”
There is tremendous power in establishing, within our classrooms, the reality that we as teachers don’t have all the answers. At the start of every year in the classroom I began with a statement of my manifesto (of sorts) for the learning that would occur over the next nine months. My first line was an unapologetic announcement that they better be prepared for the fact that, “Your teacher doesn’t have all the answers.” Following on the heels of that announcement was a promise to always work with students to discover the answer to any question when none of us in the room knew the answer. I remember that every year at least one student would comment on how shocking it was for a teacher to admit the truth. They would also remark that teachers they had had previously allowed the “sage” aura to be perpetuated and they admitted they would often remark (usually under their breath or in their heads), “But you’re suppose to know, you’re the teacher” (my own kids have a version of that statement using “dad” in place of “the teacher”).
This is the third in a series of posts on assessment. I imagine that it won’t be the last, but I think this is the most important of the three thus far. The first post was inspired by a post by Henrick Oprea (Blog, Twitter) and developed as I read posts by Steven Anderson’s (Blog, Twitter) and Jan Webb (Blog, Twitter). If you are just checking in at this point, here are the links to the first to posts (Note: I had started this post prior to attending Educon 2.2 at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, January 29 – 31, and worked on it while I was there, thus there is an Educon influence):
I have been researching and toying with this post for a few weeks and recently saw a link, in my Twitter stream, to a post by Jim Blecher (Blog, Twitter), entitled, “SocialMedia CreativityCommunity.” It really clicked for me and brought the pieces of this post together. I am a firm believer that even the most jaded students enjoy learning, what they hate, is school. There can be any number of reasons this is true, but one that is arguably universal across the student spectrum is the fact that far too much of school is organized around testing and not around learning. School is focused on the process of knowledge inoculation as opposed to knowledge appropriation. Teachers need to vaccinate themselves against the evils of high stakes testing and in order to do that, they design learning that focuses on the fractured knowledge that is required to successfully produce on those tests. Students, on the other hand, want to know “stuff” and want to see what can be created out of it, they want to appropriate the knowledge to themselves, shall we say, Construct Meaning. The missing element in the equation is relevance and it is missing because it has been tested out of the school process. I am not referencing just the high-stakes standardized tests, those are merely the most egregious example. What I want to focus on in this post is, hopefully writing an obituary for the idea of summative testing, or at least declare it in critical condition.
I am not going to do more in this post than hopefully connect you with powerful thinking that I feel is essential for framing the conversation about rethinking school and discovering what its purpose is – why do we bother perpetuating school – which I fear has evaporated over time. I will cite what I think are key ideas – but you watch them and see what you can discover and then share your reactions/responses.
Larry Lessig
Key Idea: “We can’t stop our kids from using it [technology]; we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again; we can only make them, quote, “pirates.” And is that good? We live in this weird time, it’s kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life,we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that’s what I — we — are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy we ought to be able to do better. Do better, at least for them, if not for opening for business.”
I am regularly amazed at the effect that Twitter can have on my thinking. Actually, not so much Twitter itself, but rather the links, shared by others, that I click through on. Today I came across an article by Maria Lorena Lehman at the web site SensingArchitecture.com titled 7 Ways to Keep You Inspired for 2010. Right away the title caught my attention. Isn’t there a constant lament heard from teachers, “How do I inspire my students to learn?” The initial thought is what can teachers do “to” students that will cause them to be inspired. Instead, what if the thinking were turned in the other direction, “What can I, as a teacher, do “to” myself that will cause my students to be inspired?”
The idea of professional development is, in my opinion, predicated on reflective activity. Without asking ones self questions, there can be no growth. What most caught my attention, after the title, was the list of seven items that Lehman identified:
I started this as a response to Clay Burell’s (Blog, Twitter) post, “Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?” and half way through decided to move it to my blog due to its length. The spark for this train of thought was the statement by Nathan Lowell (Blog, Twitter):
Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.
And Clay’s response:
I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.
I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.
And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”1
Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).
And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.
The responses were also intriguing, but I kept coming back to a singular point, resparked by the above exchange, that I find fundamental to the discussion. I have worked with students in Grade 5 (US) through grad school, both online and in a physical classroom. Caveat: I have worked in self-contained classrooms, teaching almost all subject matter and settings were I worked only with specific disciplines.
