Constructing Meaning

More than a tip o’ the hat

Greg Thompson — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:18:55 +0000

Steve Jobs saw ways to connect people and realized that that was the best thing he could do with his time and his intellect . . . find ways to connect us to the ones we love, we trust, we cherish. Sure, he may have also thought about the money to be made . . . but he saw that the human spirit is creative and desires to be connected.

We, the human race, desire to create expressions of our love, our despair, our anger, our joy, our ideas, and our dreams. We desire to be connected to those we love, those we create with, and to challenge those with disagree with. We desire to share our experiences, good, bad, and inane. Steve Jobs found ways to provide us with tools to do all of those things.

First, and foremost, I think his desire was to help us connect to each other, share in each others triumphs and struggles no matter where we are in the world . . . even when we don’t know each other. I am reminded of @acarvin’s (Andy Carvin from NPR) work during this year’s uprisings in the Middle East. He was able to funnel real time, real emotion, real experience information to the world via Twitter – I don’t know if he used an iPhone, MacBook, or other Apple tool – but even if he used an Android enabled tool, the influence of connecting the world of the Egyptian uprising to the Populist protests in Madison, Wisconsin happened because of Steve Job’s influence and foresight over many years of innovative exercise.

The detractors may point to the ways in which the technology he oversaw (and at times all technology) have been used to do things unethical, immoral, or just plain stupid . . . but the ways in which the technology he helped develop have connected us and changed the world in positive ways far surpass any negatives.

His vision is essential to anything that the technology community does from this point forward. His spirit, insight, innovative desire are the things dreams are made of. There will be many amazing innovations in the years ahead, but they really have their energy in the things Steve Jobs has done since he co-founded Apple. At once, it is a day to feel a sadness, that an American who truly exemplified the things this country should hold dear – innovation, creativity, integrity, humanity, and a desire to make the world a better place – has passed away and a day to look forward with optimism to the possibilities his spirit has come to emblemize.

Legacy defines your time on earth. It may be big, it may be small. But, the question is always . . . did you leave this world a better place for your time here or not. This time the answer is clear.

21st century (fill in your educational consideration)

Greg Thompson — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:57:40 +0000

This post is an omage to a friend and colleague, David Jakes, series: “Words Matter.” You can read his thoughts about the vocabulary of education at Strength of Weak Ties and djakes posterous (follow him on Twitter).

The current debate about education is primarily focused on a product – test scores. All the subsequent discourse focuses on how best to prepare students to take tests, how to use those scores to decide who is and isn’t a good student, who is and isn’t a good teacher, and which schools to keep open and which to close. It’s all about the wrong things.

It is amazing to see the speed with which education has moved to the top of the political debate agenda. Where were are these ne’er-do-wells five years ago, ten, twenty? The debate is being driven by a growing number of individuals who are exponentially further and further from the actual experience of school. What are we to do then, not having access to the same size bully pulpit, to force the conversational focus where it needs to be?

We have to define the focus, the thing that really matters, the thing that has been lost in the process.

I just finished reading Education and the Cult of Efficiency by Raymond E. Callahan. The movement to use business models as a way the organize and manage schools has been part of the educational landscape for over a century now. Currently it has taken its most conspiratorial step with a myopic focus on testing and privatization. The current dialog and debate are solely focused on these considerations. Educators have taken to the defensive (which isn’t surprising considering the L.A. Times McCarthy style writing about testing as a means to determine good teachers). The proponents of this focus are not reformers at all – they are merely drawing the efficiency movement to its most reasonable conclusion: Students are a product that comes off a teacher assembly line. You can control the assembly line by defining the way in which you evaluate the quality of the end product. They are successfully framing the conversation that way.

Educators need to change the focus of the debate. We need to simplify our language, stop trying to brand the work of education with catchy adjectives and adverbs and talk about what matters. It’s time we stopped using phrases like:

21st century learning
21st century learners
21st century skills
21st century schools
21st century thinking

We are nine years into this century, that is less than 10% of the century. How do we know what any of the above phrases mean? That obvious consideration aside, what do we hope to accomplish by using catch phrases like these in the first place. We have to simplify the discussion, talk about what really matters. We need to talk about: learning.

Learning is a process that transcends century. It is an act we all engage in daily in any number of situations as we go about our lives. Is the act of learning any different today than it was on October 11, 1910? Or October 11, 1810? 1710? No. The difference is, there is a lot more to learn. There are many more ways to find that information; many more people to learn with and from; many more ways to connect to those people, that information, and many more ways to take that learning and innovate/create with and from it. Learning is still learning and is the very core of school – or it should be! It isn’t part of the current debate about reform, however, and won’t be, unless educators around the globe step up and actively bring the debate back to the center: learning.

Not only do we need to stop filling our own dialog with needless adjectives and adverbs, we need to start taking active measures to design our classrooms to be places of learning. These places of learning must eliminate the focus on an end product (test scores) and must be founded on the idea that content driven curriculum is an industrial era concept foisted on schools by business as a means to insure that the end product of schooling was easily plugged into the assembly lines of the factory. Society has moved on, so must we. We can’t let business dictate what happens in schools. Their focus is on, “What we need now to plug into what we’ve replaced the assembly line with.” Business is not concerned about the future that students will create, only on what they need to meet the bottom line projections and demands of their investors. As educators we are not in the business of filling the human resources offices with pre-packaged (programmed?) workers ready to step in and “do the job.” We are in the business of equiping young people with the tools they will need to build their future . . . helping them develop the insight and understanding to be able to answer the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (its Epilogue)

Educators, especially classroom teachers, need to take the lead voice in the process of rethinking schools. Yes, that does mean more work, a deeper commitment, and a collaborative effort. But, if we believe in the act of learning, we are morally obligated – by our belief and the young faces that look to us each day – to do that extra work, deepen our commitment, and build a massive voice that will wrest away the megaphone from people like Oprah, Gates, Broad, Rhee, Duncan, et al. Rather been the implied object (apologies to Chris Lehmann: Blog, Twitter Read this post: Growing the Movement) of the reform movement, it’s time to become the reform movement.

Simplify the language, bring it back to the center, raise your voice locally and expand it globally. And please, stop using “21st century” to describe what we do in school.

Photo Credits:

Statistics: Elgin County Archives on Flickr

Out Stretched Hand: by Funky46 on Flickr

Contemplative Girl: by Funky46 on Flickr

“Well, why shouldn’t the classroom be the ‘real’ world?”

Greg Thompson — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:36:06 +0000

This morning I posted the following blog post, by Dr. Scott McLeod (Twitter) at Dangerously Irrelevant, on my FB wall:

Our students want better work, not less work

Chris Guillebeau says:

Many people believe that the key to an improved lifestyle is less work. I think it’s better work. I believe that most of us want to work hard, but we want to do the kind of work that energizes us and makes a positive impact on others. That kind of work is worth working for, and the other kind of work is worth letting go of, finished or not. (The Art of Non-Conformity, p. 10)

I think that pretty much sums it up for our students, doesn’t it? It’s not that they don’t want to work hard. It’s that they don’t want to expend too much energy on work that isn’t meaningful. When we see reports of rampant plagiarism or tales of students who want to do as little as possible in order to get a grade, isn’t that an indication that they’re doing work that’s not meaningful to them? When students are working on something that they’re passionate about, rather than apathetic, don’t most of these so-called generational ‘values’ or ‘character’ issues disappear?

Contrary to what many believe, our students don’t want to just get by. They just want better work.

This afternoon, I received a comment to that wall posting from a former student. Bethany was part of a nationwide online learning program that I helped develop and pioneer back in 1997 (she was in middle school then). She stepped into a technology rich (for the time) environment that was unlike any she had ever been part of during her schooling. I remember her tenaciousness and desire to master the technology and the learning. She is now in college studying Administrative Office Systems, so her commentary is extremely apropos. She knows what she’s talking about because, she switched majors after making the discovery she mentions in her comment.

“I completely agree with this. I think that the lack of real world experience in the class room is why a lot of college students find it so hard to find what they want to do because you are required to do all of the classwork (i.e. generals) that has little real world application to what your major is and by the time you get to the class where you shadow or work as a n intern you’ve already invested years towards a major that you’re no longer sure you want to do. There is all of this pressure in high school to know what we want to do as a career. How are we suppose to know, when all we know is the seemingly irrelevant classwork? And what annoyed me the most were that adults who would tell me, “Wait until you get into the ‘real’ world. Well, why shouldn’t the classroom be the ‘real’ world?”

Had Bethany been considered part of the equation when she entered college, things might have turned out differently. The prepackaged idea that everyone needs exactly “this amount” of exactly “these courses” seems a bit disingenuous today. Dave Cormier (Blog, Twitter) talks about this in terms of “disaggregating” the power in education, “The traditions of education are not so much about the student having choice but about the institution of education having choice [ ].” How many of you remember your World Civilizations course from freshman year? How about General Science? What was your commitment to those courses and what did you take away from them that has served you, even marginally, in the years since (answering questions while watching Cash Cab doesn’t count)?

What if Bethany had been able to design her degree? What if she had been able to work as an intern during her first year? Either one would certainly have allowed her to spend her years (and the resulting dollars) in college doing what would best lead her to achieve her goals. Instead, the reality of the career path she chose upon entering college, was kept a secret from her until she had invested significant time and money in her college experience. Should Bethany have been empowered to form a learning “guild” around her that was predicated on the social nature of learning. Yes! Educational institutions (at all levels) will continue to become more irrelevant as long as the refuse to, as Dave says, “disaggregate the power in education, [and] empower individual learners.”

Bethany’s question is pointed and she deserves an answer, “Why shouldn’t the classroom be the ‘real’ world?” Can anyone answer it?

Cross posted at Cumulative Knowledge

Students are a product that comes off of a teacher assembly line

Greg Thompson — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:19:09 +0000

Time to start a new school year and with it wading back into the conversations about rethinking school. I’ve spent the past two months reading and talking with students, teachers, and parents about what is going right in their schools and what are their greatest frustrations. As I was considering what my first post would address this school year I happened across a link (in my Twitter stream) to the transcript from the August 15 edition of, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” The interviewees included, Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, Michelle Rhee, chancellor of Washington, D.C.’s, public schools, and Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. Though there is much to comment about, the following really stuck out:

Rhee: “And I think that’s incredibly important, because one of the things that we have not done in public education in the past is differentiate between the types of performers that we had. And it’s incredibly important to recognize and reward the people who are doing heroic work in our classrooms every single day, just as important as it is to ensure that for those who are not performing, we’re swiftly moving them out of the classroom.”

Reading between the lines here, Rhee is making it clear that in her mind, her world, the only teachers that can be recognized as “heroic” in the classroom are those that reduce their practice to preparing students for standardized tests and do so in such a way that those test scores increase over the previous year. Additionally, rather than finding ways to help teachers improve their practice she just wants to fire them (euphemistically referred to as “moving them out of the classroom”).

Nothing in Rhee’s approach to educational reform address the issues underlying the swift march toward irrelevance that American schools are engaged in. Change has been reduced to student performance on standardized testing (which in Rhee’s world is weighted at 50% of a teacher’s value and worth to their school). Rhee’s approach is simplistic and arcane in its application. Students become nothing more than a product at the end of an assembly line that are checked for defects via standardized testing. Defects are directly attributed to teachers only. Take a look at Rhee’s algorithm for determining teacher success:

Rhee: [ ] in our new model, 50 percent of the teacher’s evaluation is based on how much they’re progressing their students, in terms of academic achievement levels, 40 percent is based on observations of classroom practice, another 5 percent based on how their school is doing overall, and then the final 5 percent based on their contributions to school community.

Let’s break that down:

First, compare student standardized test scores from one year to the next. Take no consideration of socio-economic concerns, family issues, physical and mental health consideration, and/or cultural barriers. Take no consideration of the learning culture’s health within the teacher’s school or district. Take no consideration of support or, lack-there-of from, from the school/district administration.
Second, classroom observations would not seek innovative/creative teaching approaches, rather, they would have to support the goal of the school/district which is evidenced in item #1: higher standardized test scores. Teachers who dared teach in ways that didn’t evidence that the learning in the classroom was directed toward guaranteeing higher test scores (even if those methods were grounded in solid research and WORK) would have to be “graded” as unsuccessful.
Third, teachers will be forced into adversarial relationships with their co-workers who dare to teach on principal and choose not to design their learning environment as a test preparation operation. This works well for Rhee (and “leaders” such as Arne Duncan) because it creates a toxic environment where teachers will either acquiesce or work in greater isolation in fear that their fellow teachers will “out” them for not insuring that the school is “succeeding” overall.
Fourth, the simple act of teaching is a contribution to the community. Will the “powers that be” grade the community on its involvement and support of the local school? Probably not, instead this evaluation over looks the personal financial sacrifice most teachers make as they make sure that their students have the basics they need to in order to learn. It is a well documented fact that most teachers spend significant sums of their personal income to supply their classrooms.

In the same interview segment, Arne Duncan added:

Duncan: [ ] this stuff is complicated. [ ] Rewarding excellence is important. [ ] There’s no simple answer here. [ ] We have to learn from excellence in education. The answers are all out there.

We know that there is a tight connection between Rhee and Duncan, they share the same philosophy of educational reform. Duncan claims the situation is complicated and yet his answer (evidenced in Rhee’s approach) is to reduce reform to a simplistic, ineffective approach by ranking teachers and keeping those that share your philosophy and getting rid of those who don’t, labeling them as ineffective using the above types of metrics. The irony here is that in June 2010 Duncan told the National PTA Convention, “We want to launch a national teacher improvement campaign.” Nothing in the Rhee equation touches on “improvement” or the facilitation of improving teacher practices. Duncan’s support of school boards firing entire district staffs isn’t about improving teacher practice, it’s about putting in place those teachers who share a philosophy that focuses (arguably) solely on standardized test scores. That type of philosophical approach to educational reform is anti-student, anti-intellectual, and if one considers Dewey’s original vision, anti-leaning.

Duncan got one thing right, “this stuff is complicated” and it’s time he broadened his search so he can really “learn from excellence.” Until Duncan spends a week at/in/with:

Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia where Chris Lehmann (Blog, Twitter) is the principal
The classrooms (including that of Anne Smith (Blog, Twitter) at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado where Karl Fisch (Blog, Twitter) is the Director of Technology
Brian C. Smith (Blog, Twitter) at Monroe #1 BOCES outside of Rochester, NY, where he is an Instructional Technology Specialist
Jason Kern (Blog, Twitter) at The Oakridge School where he is Director of Technology
Dan Meyer (Blog, Twitter) math teacher currently working on a doctoral fellowship at Stanford University

among a growing chorus of truly great educators who dare to rethink school, he will continue down his primrose path. There are many educators who are creating environments that revolve around the missing element in American education: Learning. I could create an entire post listing great educators from my Twitter stream and Google Reader who know how to create real learning environments that are not focused on student scores on standardized tests. Educators that Duncan will never seek out, the result being, he will never be able to “learn from excellence.” Instead, he, and those that share his pedagogical philosophy, will continue to perpetuate a status quo that fails students and treats teachers as a renewable resource – easy to replace when they no longer buy his snake oil.

Photo Credits:

Pencil in hand: by beX out loud on Flickr

Testing girl: by Bastien Vaucher on Flickr

Teacher: by ben100 on Flickr

Cross posted at Cumulative Knowledge

Ally Bank and Progressive’s Flo explain school.

Greg Thompson — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:23:19 +0000

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.

What school is

What school should be

Epilogue to: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Greg Thompson — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:09:36 +0000

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.

It all began with a question, not just any question, one randomly selected for him – it was a question that asked him where he was in his thoughts, interests, and desires. That is a big question. It is a question that gets left at the school house door in favor of the statement, “Here is what you will need to know.” This Ally Bank commercial brings to life the reality of the school experience for so many kids.

For years, from the time they can start to communicate, we ask children what they want: what they want to do, what they want to be, what they are interested in, and what they think. Then in school they learn that the adults in charge of their world don’t care what they want to do, don’t care what they want to be, ignore their interests, and most egregiously don’t care what they think.

The more I run this through my head, the more I believe the purpose of school has to be: To assist students in achieving their answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A fearful question for those who need to control what happens in school. Their expected reaction would, of course, be:

How dare we consider asking kids what they want to learn, after all, we have already defined everything students need to learn each and every year they are in the system. If they (the students) start deciding what they want to learn, our tests, textbooks, standards, and outcomes will be meaningless and worthless. Those “tools,” which we have invested large sums of money in and staked our professional reputation on, are designed to insure every students knows the same stuff, in the same context and that they can tell us they know on the same day, in the same way, in the same amount of time. How will we know if they are learning the “right stuff,” the stuff we know they need to learn?

Much lip-service gets paid to the idea that students need to be in charge of their own learning. Unfortunately the current pervasive culture in our educational systems is predicated on sameness. Can we really expect ever student to make the same choices at the same time? Can we expect all students to be interested in the same things at the same time? Do they all really need to know the same data set?

Learning is an act of rebellion or revolution, it seeks to discover the unknown, and is driven by the desire to do, create, and invent. Learning wants to know the thing, the past, and then build on it as a means to change the present and future, much like those during the Reformation who dared to print, read, and share the Bible. Learning seeks, not just to dip its toe in the deep end, but to dive in head first. Does that sound like what is currently happen in our schools?

School should look like the Payne’s living room -both actually and metaphorically. It should be a place were students are allowed to let their minds drift out the window and explore the possibilities inherent in being asked what they want to do or be when they grow up. I always feel compelled to add this caveat when getting up on this soap box: Yes, there are things that kids should learn. Basic things that make the exploration of the complex more fulfilling. That list, however, is a very short list and should be embedded in curriculum that is process – not content – driven. We need to let our students imaginations run wild and go along for the ride. Think about the these two cliché statements:

Color inside the lines.

Think outside of the box.

Which one best describes the school where you work or your children attend? Which process will insure that they can invent their future and learn the ways to live in that future they create? It’s time we get back to asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and then designing revolutionary learning environments where we, as parents, teachers, administrators, and communities, can assist students in achieving their answer to the question. That is the purpose of school.

Additional Reading:

“Standardized Testing is Dumbing Down Our Schools” by Joe Bower at For the Love of Learning

“The Textbook I Would Buy” by Dan Meyer at dy/dan

“Why ‘Standards-Based’ and ‘Accountability’ are dirty words” by Ira Socol at SpeEdChange

Photo Credits

Teen surfer by San Diego Shooter at Flickr

Young surfer by mikebaird at Flickr

Math test by Old Shoe Woman at Flickr

Learning Revolution by Wesley Fryer (Blog, Twitter) at Flickr: Note from Wesley: Winning design by Bill Moseley (Blog, Twitter) for the NECC 2008 button contest announced by Scott McLeod (Blog, Twitter) and I. My own ideas about “the learning revolution” are included in my blog posts about school reform.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Greg Thompson — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:32:16 +0000

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:


Unfortunately,  kids today are the victims of a "bait-and-switch" cultural paradigm  when it comes to school. They are told they will "love school" and that  they will get to "learn cool things" and "do fun stuff." And because  they trust us, they believe it. They enter school with all kinds of  questions and they are sure they will get to find the answers, curiosity  is their modus operendi. Then school kills that curiosity. Here is the  problem, the adults that run their world have lost a vision for the  purpose of school and its function in the world is growing more  irrelevant every day. A logical question is, "Why should we keep 'doing  school'?"
Over  the past few months, as I have reworked this post, I have been asking anyone who would listen, "What  the think the purpose of school is or should be?" I would like to have  had more takers, but this big lovely thing we call the Internet has  allowed me to track down some thinking on the question and broaden the  discussion in my head. This fundamental question is begging to be  answered, "What is the purpose of school?"
Is the purpose of  school to "prepare students" for a "technology-suffused,  globally-interconnected era," as suggested by Scott McLeod (Blog,  Twitter),  in his post, "Our mental models are the biggest barrier to moving  schools forward into a digital, global era"? Or is it to "prepare  students for what is and will be, not what was" as Scott asserts in his  post, "We ARE the system"? I love Scott's willingness to  address the question, but I am not sure we can prepare anyone for "what  will be" when we have a hard time keeping up with everything that has been with us for decades added to the things that were just created, invented, thought of, and discovered yesterday. For years, keynote speakers have lead with statements like, "We are  preparing our students for a future we can't imagine." If that is true,  how can we possibly suggest we can nail down what needs to be learned in  order to live in that future? Yet politicians, textbook publishers,  standards movement proponents, and business leaders all suggest they  know and then set about prescribing exactly what needs to be learned.
David Warlick (Blog, Twitter)  in his post, "What  is the Purpose of Education?" took a similar view:
I’ve  had a ready answer to the question.
“The purpose of education  is to appropriately prepare our children for their future.” 
There  are some implied, but essential questions in that answer:

What  will their future      hold?  What will they need to know?
What  are appropriate method,      materials, environment, activity?
Who  are these children?       What is their frame of reference?


However, his "answer" shifted after an interaction with students at  Karl Fisch's (Blog, Twitter)  school, where they were conversing with Daniel Pink (Blog, Twitter)  using UStream and CoverItLive. Upon reflection, David reworked his  response:

The purpose of education is to make  the world a  better place!“


[ ], when there is a  mission, where teachers and students are equal  partners in achieving  new learning — and they both realize that it is  not simply about new  knowledge, but more importantly it is about new  potentials, then we’re  not just producing cogs for an industrial and  societal machine.  We all  becoming better and more inventive builders of  the future.
Is that the answer? Is the purpose of school to "make the world a  better place?" Of course, but that isn't something that you can easily  wrap a framework around. A number of individuals who responded to my  question said something similar, "The purpose of school is to educate an  active citizenry" or "The purpose of school is to teach kids to be  informed citizens." This, too, is a laudable response, but what is an  "active citizen" or an "informed citizen" and who gets to write that  definition? It feels problematic. It also appears, to me, that it opens  the door to widely to the idea that there is one best way to educate  kids and that sounds just too much like standardization.
Back in  January of '09, Seth Godin (Blog, Twitter) in his post, "What  is school for?" gave the question consideration. He didn't try to  answer it, but rather tossed out a list that might include an answer to  the question (this is just part of the list):


Become  an informed citizen
Be trained in the rudimentary skills  necessary for employment
Do well on standardized tests
Homogenize  society, at least a bit
Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
Teach  future citizens how to conform
Teach future consumers how to  desire
 Build a social fabric
Create leaders who help us  compete on a world stage
Generate future scientists who will  advance medicine and technology
Learn for the sake of learning
Teach  future citizens to obey authority
Teach future employees to do  the same
Increase appreciation for art and culture
Teach  creativity and problem solving


The question was posed at Chris Lehmann's (Blog, Twitter) Educon 1.1 and Tom Kim (Blog, Twitter) provided a reflection of the panels response's in his post, "Panel Discussion: What is the Purpose of School?"
Kendall Croilus, the business consultant, began by saying that the corporate world would like lifelong learners, specifically those who had:

Creativity:      the ability to innovate
Collaboration,      especially the ability to appreciate — and not just tolerate — cultural      diversity, whether that diversity is expressed in race, class, geography,      silos of expertise, or personality
Courage, or      confidence — especially in embracing change and challenging the status quo

Dr. Stephen Squyres, the scientist, stressed the potential for school to open students’ eyes to what was possible (the old “broaden horizons” bit) and allow people to understand how things really work.
Dr. Molefi Asante, the academic, gave the most open/vague answer of all: that school is meant to provoke inquiry.
I left Prakash Nair, the architect, for last because I found him to be the most radical, passionate, and specific advocate for reform. He suggested that the school of the future ought to serve the following functions (and that these functions should be evident in everything from its building architecture to its curriculum):

Social anchor:      or the hub of community life, open 24/7, available not only to kids but to      adults
Technology showcase:      a place the purchases, tests, and introduces cutting-edge technology so      that the innovation and change from such tools would disseminate      throughout the community
Idea generator:      a place to invent, create, and engage in blue-sky thinking
Idea harvester:      a place to prototype, test, and develop those very ideas into reality
Player in the      community’s economic network: and then a place to make those      ideas marketable and valuable and available to the larger community
Builder of social      capital: a place to become socialized into  the shared culture of      the larger community


Tom reflected that the message he heard was bothersome and made the salient point, "I gradually realized what I thought needed to be acknowledged: that school has been required to become the Swiss-Army knife of institutional influence for American minors — that it has been made to be the surrogate parent, church, and workplace for most people under 18." In the process of being couched as the mitigator of everything, school has lost its relevance, because it has lost a purpose. The greatest hurdle in educational reform today is the fact that society doesn't have a clear vision of what school is for, it doesn't have a defined purpose that informs it's actions.
There are those who feel that school's purpose is to continue perpetuating a specific set of information under the premise that each generation needs to have experienced and cataloged in their mental filing cabinets the same set of "stuff". Anya Kamanetz (Blog, Twitter) provides the example of Julia Fierro in her book, DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, that is just a small example of this:
She graduated from the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop in 2000 and found herself teaching an honors creative writing class at Hofstra University, the private university on Long Island [ ]. One day, she mentioned in class that she wasn't a fan of James Joyce's Ulysses. "I was trying to open up their perspective and say there's more than just the literary canon. This one girl in class went and told the James Joyce scholar that I told her not to read James Joyce, and I got called into the chair's office."
Can we really define a data set of experience and information that "must" be learned by everyone who travels through the educational system? In his TEDxNYED presentation Dan Meyer (Blog, Twitter) hit the nail on the head when he talked about the reality of being a high school math teacher:
Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something; a movie, an album, a song, or a book and you recommended it whole-heartedly to someone you also really liked. You anticipate that reaction you waited for it and it came back and that person hated it. So by way of introduction that is the exact same state in which I spend every working day of the last six years. I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it.
The current form of our school environments don't teach kids the processes of learning as much as it teaches them to be taught. In school, students are typically positioned as receptors and not seekers of knowledge. They are allowed to be observers but not participators or doers. Students aren't thrust into uncharted waters with tools and allowed to explore, instead their floaties are blown up for them and they are placed in the kiddy pool where they longingly look to the deep end of the pool because they know that is where the freedom and the fun are.
As I sat in Barnes & Noble a week ago reading, I over hear a young girl, probably in the third grade, as you brought a book over to her father,
"Dad you know how I want to be a marine biologist? Look at this book"
She then went on to show him pictures from a big coffee table book about sea life. She explained how the ocean floor is just like the land surface with mountains and valleys while she pointed to pictures. She talked about sea spiders and cuttlefish fish as she paged through the book following her parents from table to table as they looked at books. Her love of sea life and the workings of the ocean were evident to everyone around as she excitedly shared about various aspects of the sea and creatures that inhabit our oceans. The parents paid only peripheral attention and feigned interest while she attempted to educate them,  everyone within ear shot who was listening. That little girls experience reminded me of the school experiences of so many students and brings me back to the beginning of this post, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
School should be about empowering young people to find answers for themselves, to present them with big questions that need unraveling and contain deep relevancy to their lives. How can we do this in an environment that; is focused on a predetermined set of fact points; an environment that is driven by insuring coverage over depth, memorization over investigation; an environment that is defined by prescriptive directions/directives from outside interests and top down control?
Geoff Sheehy(Blog) grappled with the question in his post, "What is the purpose of school? An informal and very unscientific survey." His thoughts come closest to the ones I have been having:
To equip students  		with the essential skills they will need to move on  to the next stage of  		their lives, whatever that stage may be.
Geoff, in the course of interview various people about their response to the question, made the following observation:
The only surprise to me was that more people did not answer like my  wife, who mentioned that a primary purpose of school is to learn how to  learn. I found this surprising because that element is the basic  foundation to what I do every day, so foundational that I would think  that more people would recognize it. I am grateful that if anyone did  recognize it, it was my wife.
I started asking the question a while ago, "What is the purpose of school?" and I think I have arrived at an answer - at least for me - that makes sense. It may be simplistic, but when you let it sit in your thoughts and you build a larger picture around it and dig down into the idea behind it, I think it makes beautiful sense.
The purpose of school is to assist students in achieving their answer to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" We have to stop trying to divert their attention, quashing their curiosity, shelving their creativity, and constraining their communication. If we focus on helping them navigate this great question and exploring its many answers, in the end we will have students who are:

Engaged and thoughtful citizens
Prepared for a "technology-suffused,  globally-interconnected" world
Ready to create their future (which we have resisted in defining for them)
Seek to make the world a better place
Who can create, innovate, and collaborate courageously
Who seek to discover the answers to the hard questions

In response to Karl Fisch's post, "What's the Purpose of School?" (a post I leaned heavily on for sources, as I worked on this post), Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach (Blog, Twitter) said it more concisely than I have:


[ ] I asked a similar question to Alabama kids across the state, I  asked what is the purpose of education? They all, with out exception, in every school, placed their definitions in the future. [ ]
However, I have to side with Dewey in  that I believe a good chunk of school should be about today. The purpose  of school should be to help kids find and develop their strengths,  talents, passions and interests right now. I want school to help my kids  learn what they want to know right now, things that will serve them  right now as well as what they need for the future. As Dave Mathews so  aptly states, "The future is no place for your better days."
Education,  says Dewey, should focus on the growth of the individual in the here  and now. Education should not be preparation for something: Children  proverbially live in the present; that is not only fact not to be  evaded, but it is an excellence. The future just as future lacks urgency  and body.
He goes on to explain what follows if educators  simply emphasize education as preparation for some aspect of the future: The  future having no stimulating and directing power when severed from the  possibilities of the present, something must be hitched on to it to make  it work. Promises of reward and threats of pain are employed. Healthy  work, done for present reasons and as a factor of living, is largely  unconscious. The stimulus resides in the situation with which one is  actually confronted. But when this situation is ignored, pupils have to  be told that if they do not follow the prescribed course penalties will  accrue; while if they do, they may expect, some time in the future,  rewards for their present sacrifices. Everybody knows how largely  systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems  which neglect present possibilities in behalf of preparation for the  future.
Kids live to a great degree in the here and now.
Whenever  I give students a choice in learning they always pick something that  interests them now. Very few will choose a book because they think it  will be useful to them in college or an assignment because it will help  them in their future careers. Their passions and interests drive what  they want to do, just like many of us.
Dewey says: If  education is growth, it must progressively realize present  possibilities, and thus make individuals better fitted to cope with  later requirements. Growing is not something which is completed in odd  moments; it is a continuous leading into the future. If the environment,  in school and out, supplies conditions which utilize adequately the  present capacities of the immature, the future which grows out of the  present is surely taken care of. The mistake is not in attaching  importance to preparation for future need, but in making it the  mainspring of present effort.
We should keep an eye on the  future, yes, but this does not mean that we make it our primary focus.  Our focus should be on the concerns of our students in the present- what  motivates them now. As they grow, so will their concerns and  step-by-step they will become prepared for their future.
The question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" is the future rooted in the here and now. Sheryl beautifully outlines the depth of this thought. Designing the learning opportunities in our schools around this question would help define a purpose that would drive the one thing that should be happening in our schools, but sadly isn't very often: learning. Yea, I like this: The purpose of school is to assist students in achieving their answer to  the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Photo Credits:
Lost in thought: CC from johnb2008 on Flickr
Girl on the beach: CC from mikebaird on Flickr
Old school house: CC from Jim Frazier on Flickr
Old classroom: CC from motionblur at Flickr



The world isn’t flat anymore, it fits entirely in your hand.
Greg Thompson — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:13:27 +0000
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.

I don’t know about you, but my mind races when I read Jarvis’ paragraph above. What if my high school or university classroom is mobile? Where can I go and still teach (be connected to) my students? At the elementary level (a place where a classroom would still constitute a “base of operations” for teacher and students) where can my students and I go to discover and learn? The idea of mobile learning lends itself perfectly to the process of learning by doing. School can finally become a verb.
The paragraph provides so many questions to play with:

What will school look like for the connected student if local does  come to refer to where ever you happen to be?


Will school become a year round reality as students are able to  access work, teacher/professor presentations anywhere, anytime?


What will this do to University enrollment models if mobile/local  shortens the distance between me and my school to nothing regardless of  where I am on the globe?


Will classroom options, like Second Life, be the way students and teachers come together?

Why would I not be able to “attend” any university I desire?  Currently I can complete whole courses from MIT, Yale, UC Berkley, Harvard, Duke, Emery, Columbia  all available at iTunes University, and others for  free and anywhere I have a connected device. How will Universities  design an accountability model so they can begin to defer degrees to  anyone who completes the work?
Rethinking school just received its communique from the future and the parameters are changing faster than ever. Time to take a leap.
The world isn’t flat anymore, it just shrunk, now it fits entirely in your hand . . . the world is local.
Additional Reading:
“Ani & the iPad or ‘Much Madness is the Father’s  Curse” by Bud Hunt (Blog, Twitter)  at Bud the  Teacher
“A Is for App: How Smartphones, Handheld Computers Sparked an Educational Revolution” by Anya Kamenetz (Twitter) at Fast Company
“The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash.” by Charlie Stross (Blog) at Charlie’s Diary
Photo Credits:
Businessmen with laptop: pragyahira on Flickr
Classroom outside: JPhilipson on Flickr

         


Yoda on learning, “You must unlearn what you have learned.”
Greg Thompson — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:31:08 +0000

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.

Too many students current reality
Many who are working diligently to rethink school and redefine the purpose and process of what happens in our classrooms often fancy themselves “early adopters” of new technologies and regularly lament the number of teachers who seem satisfied with perpetuating the status quo. Regularly on Twitter, I see conversations that include a form of the question, “What are we going to do with those who refuse to take the leap?” Those questions, asked by educators seen as leaders in developing new teaching approaches and making technology ubiquitous, carry with them an inherent assumption that the act of implementing technology in the classroom is the way to “bring schools into the 21st century.” I am going to argue that we, the early adopters and experimenters, are falling further behind at the very time we claim to be headed full steam ahead. Not that what is being done isn’t good, but often times it still lags far behind the ideas of those creating the technology we use. We need to leap forward and create learning environments in our classrooms that are predicated on where the “visionaries” see the reality of technology existing down the road.
If we want our schools to be places where students learn, we need to design them around the act of learning. We need to embrace the furthest edges of the ideas being imagined by those building the pathways to the future. But, how do we do that in a way that prepares students for this future we admit we can’t define? Should we be spending time deciding how to make Interactive White Boards actually become interactive or how to use software licensed and installed on each computer in the school? What about keyboarding or WebQuests? What about games and simulation programming?
While the new iPad has been praised and derided it has none-the-less generated much discussion about where things are going. In the latest issue of Wired that landed in my mailbox early last week, the cover story is about just this conversation. I contend that it has significant implications for education and if we listen now, letting this discussion lead in the process of rethinking schools, we just might make a major leap forward.
It’s often argued that the issue isn’t hardware and that is probably accurate most of the time. However, when hardware frames the view of the future it becomes a serious issue. Kevin Kelly (Blog, Twitter) refers to this new computer form not as tablets, but rather “windows that you carry.” These “portable portals” will “remake both book publishing and Hollywood” because they will “conflate books and video” resulting in “books you watch and movies you touch.” If our students are headed for a world of upside-down interactive data, what are we doing to provide them process knowledge to creatively integrate new tools of this sort into their learning lives?
How will Steve Johnson’s (Blog, Twitter) take on tablet computers change the way students arrive at our school house door? “For decades, futurists have dreamed of the ‘universal book’: a handheld device that would give you instant access to every book in the Library of Congress. In the tablet era it is no longer technology holding us back from  realizing that vision; it’s the copyright holders.”

Advances in technology will give us plenty of headroom with other kinds  of data: streaming real-time video, conjuring virtual spaces, exploring  real-world environments with geocoded data, modeling complex systems  like weather. But in the tablet world, contextual innovation will not  come from faster chips or wireless networks.

Students who live in a world like that BEFORE they enter school will find they have stepped back in time when the walk into a classroom. In  an article for Time.com Johnson explained his early take on the iPad:

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.

This vision is forming while we teach kids about folders and keeping their work organized. Are we really that far ahead in bringing schools forward? The argument about application or practicality of a tablet environment is moot. James Fallows (Blog, Twitter), national correspondent for The Atlantic explains in a sidebar of the Wired article, that pilots have been using a tablet device for some time. These Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs) include models that are similar to the Apple iPad. The idea of tablet computing is not new, it is just beginning to expand. Schools are a perfect incubator space to discover what can be done with hardware of this sort. An initial thought is that they would appear to automatically make the Interactive White Board obsolete before it has even been largely adopted.
Johnson speaks of a “universal book,” which in itself should send the mind spinning when, as educators, we contemplate the possibility of all school related materials being contained in one easy to carry device or even less constrained than that. Co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, Bob Stein (Blog), takes the idea even further:

The most important thing my colleagues and I learned from experiments with “networked books” is that as discourse moves from the page to the networked screen, the social aspect of reading and writing move to the fore. A book is becoming a “place” where people congregate and converse. [ ] Simply moving printed text to tablets (as with the Kindle) will be of limited value. To succeed, publishers will have to embrace multimedia and community-building. My guess is that the gaming industry will show us the way. Unlike publishing, the culture of video games is much less stifled by legacy products and thinking.

School has perfected the art of legacy thinking. The status quo is dressed up in new outfits occasionally, like a host at an awards show, but when the discussion turns to getting a new host, the brakes areinstantly applied. The entire system comes to a screeching halt until someone trots the host out in a new outfit and claims it’s “all new and improved.” The current political administration has done exactly this by taking No Child Left Behind and buying it a new wardrobe. It remains, at its core, the status quo.
Seymour Papert, addressing the House Committee Economic and Educational Opportunities Hearing on   Technology in Education in October of 1995, addressed what was being presented as the future of education saying, “We are putting [ ] technology in a school system that was designed for a totally different epoch [ ].” His words evidence the glacial pace at which the conversations about rethinking school develop. He also addressed what was then being presented as the classroom of the future, “I object strongly to what you saw being called a classroom of the  future. It’s a classroom of the very, very, very near future. I doubt if  there will be classrooms in the real future, there will be something  else. Obviously there will be places children learn, but they won’t  resemble what we see today.” I can’t embed the video here, but you can view it at Techno Constructivist by Carl Anderson, (Twitter) in his post “Stager, Papert & the War Path” which is where I was introduced to it.
Are the schools we teach in meeting any of this potential vision? Are they on their way to, not resembling what we see today? We implement Voicethread, Elluminate, UStream, wikis, blogs, Nings, Etherpad, and a variety of other Web 2.0 tools.
But that is what “IS,” not what will “BE.” I know, we can’t create learning environments with things that haven’t been invented or developed yet. However, are we taking those things that have been put in our hands (or at least could be) and designing spaces and opportunities to launch our students forward?
Chris Anderson (TED, Twitter) addresses some of the arguments that might arise when discussing the power of a new form of hardware, the tablet:

I think most of us are willing to carry two devices (one a phone) [ ]. So why would [users] dump a keyboard for a touchscreen? Look to three data points for the answer: the iPhone, the Kindle, and the cloud.

He goes on to tie these data points together as evidence for a new form of “portable portals,” as Johnson refereed to them, the most potentially powerful idea for education that Anderson addresses is “the cloud”:

Finally, the cloud shows that as more and more of our data and software lives in servers somewhere, the computers we  carry with us can be less and less powerful – thinner, lighter, longer battery life. Let Google buy the big iron; you can buy sexy aluminum and glass that’s a delight to hold. [ ] Modern smartphones have shown us what efficient mobile operating systems and specialized apps can do with hardware that wouldn’t fill a single drive bay on a desktop PC.

Steven Levy, author of the article, reinforces this idea:

While Apple wants to move computing to a curated environment where everything adheres to a carefully honed interface, Google believes that the operating system should be nearly invisible. Good-bye to files, client apps, and onboard storage – Chrome OS channels users directly into the cloud, with the confidence that the Web will soon provide everything from native-quality applications to printer drivers. Google hopes that a wave of Chrome-powered netbooks set for release this fall will hasten that day and its designers are already sketching out the next generation of Chrome OS devices, including touchscreen tablets.


Google vice president Sundar Pichai contends that having an iTunes-like app store is unnecessary, because desktop software is just about dead. ‘In the past 10 years, we’ve seen almost no new major native applications,’ he says, ticking off the few exceptions: Skype, iTunes, Google Desktop, and the Firefox and Chrome browsers. ‘We are betting on the fact that all the users will need are advanced Web apps.’

Unconstrained access. Google is looking for ways to facilitate the unchaining of our learning and the products of our actions. In a future where students arrive at the school house door having immersed themselves in the very latest technology tools and the tools have developed along the lines imagined by those most involved with their development, what should school be? What should it look like? What will we do when the open-source mindset hits the educational system full force? It will, it has already begun to. Students who have had the freedom to develop ideas and interests without constraints will challenge a system that wants to categorize and organize them and then define their learning for them. As parents take notice of what their children are doing, they will see the disparity of options and opportunities available in schools compared to those outside of school and may very well make the decision to forgo the formalized status quo of school. How many will opt for online learning or hybrid learning, or even a fully self-directed models using open educations sources like Harvard and MIT?
In her just release book, DYI U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Edcuation, Anya Kamenetz (Blog, Twitter) in Chapter 7 provides, “A four part guide for the student who wants to hack [their] own education.”

The so-called path – graduating from high school at eighteen, going straight to college and living on campus, graduating at twenty-two and going straight into the workforce with a college appropriate job – describes the experience of just 10 percent of people today. If you belong to the other 90 percent, whether you’re sixteen or sixty-one, here’s how to take the first steps down your own personal learning path.

In the introduction to the book, Kamenetz makes a point that, I think, is critical to rethinking school and discovering its purpose in our society today:
Technology upsets the traditional hierarchies and categories of education. It can put the learner at the center of the educational process. Increasingly this means students will decide what they want to learn; when, where, and with whom; and  they will learn by doing. Functions that have long hung together, like research and teaching, learning and assessment, or content, skills, accreditation, and socialization, can be delivered separately.
As much as some teachers have moved forward, experimenting with technology in the learning environment, have we really made strides that would allow school to propel students along the trajectory suggested above? How far have we really come? Kamentez’s suggestion indicates that Christensen, Johnson, and Horn didn’t go far enough with the idea of disruption; technology isn’t just disrupting the educational hierarchies in existence, it is upsetting them.
This isn’t an attempt to legitimize the iPad as “the next best thing for education,” rather it uses it as a catalyst for discussing the big questions that face us today:
1. What is the purpose of school and the systems that support it?
2. How do we design schools for unconstrained learning: physical design and learning design?
3. How do we design new organizational structures to support this new idea of school: teachers, administration, finances?
4. How do we keep the answers from 1 – 3 from becoming the entrenched status quo?
We have expended great efforts to experiment with the implementation of technology in learning environments. It just might be time for us to “unlearn what we have learned” and start learning a whole new way, by asking ourselves the questions above; by listening to those who work tirelessly to study, imagine, and move creativity and innovation forward; and to begin to aggressively challenge each other and become the type of “critical collaborative” we ask our students to become in the classroom.
Additional Reading:
“Is ‘The School of One’ the future of schooling?” by Scott McLeod (Twitter) at Dangerously Irrelevant
Open High School of Utah
“Colleges Dream of Paperless, iPad Centric Education” by Brian X. Chen (Blog, Twitter) at Wired
“Anya Kamenetz talks about her new book DIY U and the future of higher education” by Andy Santamaria (Twitter) at CMTY
“Ani & the iPad or ‘Much Madness is the Father’s Curse” by Bud Hunt (Blog, Twitter) at Bud the Teacher
“iRrational iPolarization” by Alan Levine (Twitter) at CogDogBlog
Artwork is linked to its source.

         


The Power of Conversation
Greg Thompson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:19:52 +0000
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”).

How many students in classrooms across the country have had the opportunities I have had today? Not just my short interaction with Tom Peters, but prior to that I was in an Elluminate session with amazing teachers from China, Germany, Spain, Qatar, Texas, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Alaska (Flat Earth Project 10-1). In the past month I have virtually “attended”  TEDx events in Austin, Texas (#TEDxATX and #TEDxAustin) and New York (#TEDxNYED), listened to Jon Becker (Blog, Twitter) from Virginia Commonwealth University, throw everyone under the bus discussing “The Logic of ‘Our’ Arguments” and listened to a conversation with Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the University of Regina (I watched/listened to the archived presentation the following day as it occurred at the same time as Jon Becker’s presentation). This is just a sampling from the past two months. How many students don’t even have the benefit of a field trip to their local museum? I went with my daughters classroom to the Milwaukee Public Museum yesterday to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit and will go with them to tour the Wisconsin state capital building later this month which will include twenty minutes of conversation with a justice from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Another great example of the power of reaching outside the existent walls is shared in a post by Karl Fisch (Blog, Twitter) in his post, “Sometimes This Stuff Mazes Me.“:
Just a quick post to note that I still find my own personal networked world to be pretty fascinating and amazing. Yesterday I was talking with my wife about a homework assignment Abby had in math where she needed to gather some data. So I threw together a quick Google Form, posted on my blog, and tweeted it out.
Very quickly the responses started coming in, mostly from Twitter I suspect because I doubt that many folks had seen the post at that point. (Next time I may add a question about where they found out about the survey just to confirm that.) About a day later we now have 299 responses (as of this writing) from 43 states and 18 countries (counting the U.S.). (You can see the results embedded in that post.)
Now this particular survey and this particular post are nothing earth-shattering, but it again reminds me of how different the world is from when I was growing up; how easy it is to connect with others around the world, and certainly how easy it is to gather data via Google Forms, a blog and Twitter. While I certainly still need to do a lot of thinking about how best to utilize this capability in meaningful ways, I think we all as educators need to be constantly asking ourselves the question, “What can we do now (that is relevant and meaningful for students) that we couldn’t do before?”
Teachers lament the learning curve (for them) of new technologies, curricula, pedagogy, etc. They spend countless hours in conversations about how they don’t have time to learn to use technology, or they can’t see the possible benefit to them or their students. Most of these artifices are constructed out of fear, but these, and other excuses, just don’t stand up. My own personal experience today is evidence that the equation isn’t complex like a theoretical physics concept, isn’t expensive like the top-shelf MacBook Pro, and isn’t constrained by time. The status quo no longer suffices. Here are a few simple, dare I say game-changing equations for our classrooms:
(Computer + Internet Connection) x Skype = Powerful Conversations
equally as powerful
(Computer + Internet Connection) x Elluminate = Powerful Collaborative Interactions
a little higher up the learning curve
(Computer + Internet Connection) x (Google Forms + Blog + Twitter) = Powerful and Meaningful Research
or the very barest of minimums
(Computer + Internet Connection) x TED.com = Sowing Powerful Idea Seeds
The only constraints placed on those equations would be the limits of the teachers creativity and desire to open their classroom to the world (Skype, Elluminate). An email or phone call to potential experts  is all it takes to begin the process . . . what’s the worst they could say? No. Then you move on. I would wager however, that teachers would receive far more enthusiastic “Yes” responses than “No” and would then have the opportunity to share their classroom with many wonderful individuals. The power of such opportunities for students is obvious. Equally as important, teachers would have the opportunity design a classroom environment that would escape the restrictive confines of the physical building.
David Jakes (Blog, Twitter) in a recent blog post, “Rethinking Conversation and Change,” took on the tension that exists between talking about change and actually doing it.

Continually talking about the need for change isn’t helping.  At some point you have to do it what you are advocating for.  How exactly does that get done?

He argued that we need to pull our larger conversations into our daily ecosystem and dig deep. Then act.
Let’s see if I can tie it all together, at least as it sounds in my head. Tom’s response, “The first step is a defacto leap” is the point. Teachers need to leap or get out of the way (or, as may be necessary, be asked nicely to get out of the way). One of the first leaps we can make is to turn in our “Guru Badge” and open our constrained classroom to the world. The act of teaching, by nature, is a learning experience for teachers as well as the students. The call to all teachers should be:

Stop generating artificial obstacles to rethinking your classroom. Give up the false constructs that money, time, fellow teachers, or administrators will keep you in check if you decide to take your first leap – and there will be many that need to be taken.

David said it best:

Simply stated, change begins at home.

If we care about our students, as discussed by Chris Lehman (Blog, Twitter) in his post “Educon 2.2 Reflections – What Do You Think?” we have a responsibility to,

[Ask our students the] question — “What do you think?” and then listening, fully and deeply, to their answer. That is the ethic of care made manifest in the inquiry process.

Providing opportunities for our students to interact and collaborate with experts, thinkers, innovators, artists, risk-takers, leaders, and arguably most important: their global peers, will be a brilliant first leap. Then, we ask them Chris’s question and allow the learning to grow exponentially. The equations above are cheap, easy, and already exist in our classrooms today. It’s not hard to move past the conversation to action . . . It’s harder to make the decision to leap.
What great leap will you take in the next week, quarter, semester, year . . . personally, professionally . . . for your students, because, it’s the right thing to do for them?
Additional Reading:
While I advocate the leap above, it is always wise to look while you are jumping. Brian C. Smith (Blog, Twitter) talks about a crucial part of the process in his post, Being Critical: Transformations on his blog.