~synthesis~

who is more afraid?

...the student, the parent, the teacher, the principal, the university admissions officer, the employer?

I guarantee that of these six, the one least afraid of anything is the student.

As we mature, two things become very important - change and control. We hate the first and love the second. This is true as individuals and as organizations. Take our education system - it began with apprenticeship, and the master’s need to create a successor. This is the most successful teaching model ever.

Over time, education has “evolved” into a hideous creature that cares not at all about children, creating successors, or even the idea of learning. Instead, it is about building a standardized machine whose mission is put bums in seats, and impose tests on those poor bums that measure nothing meaningful.

The public education system in America is the last place you should look to find evolved thinking or a genuine commitment to give our children the means to be successful as adults. Of course there are (rare) exceptions, some teachers and school leaders do try to give their kids more than our feckless system prescribes; they are heroes, and they are a small minority.

My very good friend Larry Rosenstock (CEO of High Tech High) and Rob Riordan (President of the HTH Graduate School of Education) just published a brilliant and inspired essay entitled Changing the Subject. It, much more eloquently than I could ever, sets out a vision for what learning should be, and what a school ought to look like if we adults genuinely cared about our children.

Less than a quarter of a millennium old, America has accomplished amazing things. But much of the credit for this country’s greatness comes from those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The late 20th and early 21st century is a nadir - from the Baby Boomers to the Gen Xs, and now the Gen Ys, we have vilified change and embraced control. We have normalized and standardized and homogenized our way into insipidity.

There is a way to climb back up the mountain. Larry and Rob’s essay shows us how to build what our children deserve. It is time.

If we can learn from our children how not to fear fear, we just might have a hope of turning them into the adults we wish we could be.

child abuse

Have you ever seen a therapist or a counselor? Does your employer have workplace policies that protect you from isms (ageism, sexism, racism, etc.) or undue physical hardship (excessive hours, moving heavy objects, etc.)? Are you able to take a day (or a few days) off if some thing personal comes up? Are there advocacy groups to support you if you feel in some way wronged by your employer, or if your life is in some kind of stress or distress?

Despite all this "help," many of us will come home after a tough day at the office and feel horrible, exhausted, drained, and just ...done. How often have you heard (or said) the words, “I need a drink”??

Adults have advantages: we are mature, we have freedoms, we can speak for ourselves, we have advocates and advocacy groups, there are laws that protect us, and perpetrators of “bad” behavior are prosecuted or sued everyday. Lawyers who specialize in these issues are prolific, and work on a pure contingency basis - caring for adults is a thriving business.

While it’s disappointing that all this is needed, at least we have access to support, friendly ears, and recourse.

What about our children?

They have access to a fraction of the resources or recourses that we do; they even have fewer legal rights! Worse, they’re going through one of the most difficult things in the world - transitioning from child to adult - puberty, growing pains, emotional transformation and upheaval, sexual awakening, first loves, responsibility...

Add to this, middle and high school are pivotal to their one (really only) ticket to happiness, good health, and independence in life. Without a great education, their destinies are ...uncertain at best.

Stress, complication, emotional overload, difficulty, rule changes, a persistent feeling of powerlessness. This is what confronts children in our society.

Talk about pressure.

Who is their advocate?

• Parents? Nope - most parents delegate their children's upbringing to school as soon as they're in full-time school. More often than not, they side with the “system,” telling the child it was much tougher when they were growing up.
• Teachers? Nope - they are similarly victimized by a system that mandates ridiculous measures of performance, absurd outcomes, embarrassing working conditions for relatively little pay, and lately, a ton of social vilification.
• Government? Nope - kids don’t vote.
• The legal system? Nope - it’s almost impossible to sue the government or a school. They are happy to sue teachers (who are the vogue target these days), but nothing else gets any traction, and teachers are broke anyway.
• The media? Nope - they love to hype stories of bullying, suicides, other abuse, but they don’t do anything about it or cause others to change.
• Who?

No one.

Humans are designed to forget the worst experiences we have - otherwise no woman would give birth to a second child. Teenagehood is not a happy time, but once past it, our memories become very selective. As proof, think of how many times you said, “I’ll NEVER be like them [parents/adults] when I grow up.” And then...

Adults (even parents) may not remember or even understand what it is like to be a teen/student; BUT they are CONVINCED they know what’s right for kids, what they need, and how best to help them become adults.

So here’s what we (adults) have decided is the optimal approach to “educating” children:

1. At the beginning of each year, they are notified of the school rules [you *must* click this link (note: this is for middle school)!], which presume every child is a cheating, lazy, misanthropic vandal. Animals are held in higher regard and given more love and understanding. [If you treat impressionable kids like criminals, how do you expect them to behave? Is it any wonder bullying, delinquency, etc. are on the rise?]
2. Each student in a grade is assumed to come in with same knowledge, context, motivation and home life, and expected to learn the same thing at the same time and in the same way. There is no room for individuality; there is no tolerance for “deviants.” [If they had their way, I think Education America would prefer every student to enter the factory as powdered potatoes and exit as identical, extruded McDonald’s fries/graduates.]
3. They must wake up at 6:30AM and be sitting in class by 7:30AM. Most walk through metal detectors, into buildings that more closely resemble factories or prisons; all are assessed for attendance and dress code. [Do you need a jolt of caffeine so you can face the morning? Do you feed your 6-year old a shot of Red Bull before school? "Of course not - that would be horrible and cruel! How dare you!" And yet you expect them to learn things at 7:30AM.]
4. Sit with 29 others in a room designed for fewer, where they are required to be attentive (silent), docile, take copious notes, and speak only when spoken to. [Schools, like prisons are designed to control and monitor the population, not to enable learning.]
5. Change rooms every 50 minutes, "enjoying" a steady stream of lectures covering new and altogether unrelated topics, and of course, be assigned copious quantities of homework. [Are you able to learn so many new and disconnected things everyday, with just a break for lunch (crappy food) and then pass the tests??]
6. “Learning” is measured by completion of homework assignments and of course lots and lots of tests. In all cases, students are judged individually - teachers are required to be vigilant in preventing plagiarism, cheating, and other bad acts. [When’s the last time you took a test that judged your whole year as a success or failure?]
7. The children are required to carry 15-20lb packs containing expensive and outdated textbooks to and from school. [Workforce rules protect most adults from carrying this much weight every day. But not so for our children and their growing bodies.]
8. Adults in "higher" institutions have deemed that grades alone wont get a student into their university - they need a gazillion extra curricular activities, to be a volunteer, have interned somewhere, and written an essay begging to be considered for admission. And if the gods smile and they are accepted, they have the privilege of graduating just slightly more educated, saddled with at least $75k in debt because of the exorbitant tuition.

So this is the best way to prepare our children for adulthood during their already difficult growing years. Who knew?

But wait, there’s more! Shrinking federal, state, and local budgets have resulted in teacher layoffs, equipment reductions (no more labs), increased class sizes, school closures, elimination of most “non-core” classes (arts, phys-ed, clubs, etc.), the killing of recess (yes, recess!), and even guidance counselor layoffs in middle schools.

Rest assured though, our Defense budget remains largely untouched. Whew!

Adult feelings, wants, needs, and satisfaction are routinely surveyed by our bosses, who at least try to be responsive. When is the last time a school district asked its students how they like to learn, or what environment is most conducive to learning? And if they did deign to ask, did they actually listen, much less change??

Abuse is defined as "any action that intentionally harms or injures another person."

It is time that America admitted that her 50 million public school students are victims of wide-spread, systemic child abuse.

Do you recognize these words?

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

I bet the younger amongst us will. When, I wonder will they heed them and declare their independence from us despots??

As for me, all this typing has really stressed me out, and I’m feeling a tad overwhelmed. I'm going to visit my therapist, get a massage, have a martini or three, and then take a few days off...

mastering apprenticeship

I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo in Canada. It is a fantastic school (I might be biased), and it contributed greatly to preparing me for what awaited me in the years that followed.

In addition to the academics and the social, thanks to their Co-op Program, I graduated with excellent work experience, zero debt, and a firm job offer. Combining the practical with the learning is a critical success factor for any educational system.

I can’t count the number of candidates I’ve interviewed over the years with a solid academic pedigree, but no sense of the working world, how to navigate it, get things done, add value in a team setting, and even to be self-motivated and driven. We’d take a chance on some, but there’s no substitute for someone who can hit the ground running with both school and street smarts.

Many colleges and universities are embracing co-op or similar approaches to better prepare their graduates for employment (I’d like to think Waterloo is a pioneer!), as now are some forward-thinking high schools.

I was invited to speak to the faculty of such a high school a couple of weeks ago - Saint Martin de Porres in Cleveland. It was an eye-opening experience.

Saint Martin teaches low-income students and is noteworthy for many reasons, the greatest of which is that EVERY student graduates (vs. ~50% for the rest of Cleveland); and every graduate in the school’s history has been accepted to at least one college or university, all with a >30% higher college persistence rate than the national average. ...Wow!

From the founder to the school head to the faculty, everyone is committed to (in my words) the ideal that every child matters; that they must embrace and nurture each student; imbue drive, resourcefulness and perseverance; and teach them to embody integrity, respect, and grace.

Powerful stuff.

But there’s more - every student is required to work for a local company in a four-student job-sharing team, where together they cover a full work-week throughout the school year (1.25 days/week/student).

Over 100 companies in the Cleveland area are Corporate Work-Study Program partners, and this year alone, will invest more than $2.5 million towards funding the school! ...Wow!

Saint Martin takes this program very seriously - in fact, a teacher told me that they have a (very real world) zero-tolerance policy if students fail to take their job seriously; they are a bit more tolerant of in-school lapses, but work is work.

So... not only does every student receive an excellent education, they also graduate with work experience; are savvy about the workplace and how to thrive there; and they benefit from their very generous employers who provide mentorship and career guidance.

Blending theory and practice (master/apprentice) is at the heart of true learning and life-preparation, and has never been more critical than in this day and time, when students (and especially minorities) are disproportionately unemployed.

This alone is noteworthy, but there's also this:

The students’ academic proficiency is undisputed (100% acceptance of graduates to college/university), but they accomplish that with 25% less class time than other schools! Recall that each student spends five (5) school days every four weeks (ave 1.25 days/week) at work.

That’s “lost” teaching time -- or is it?? When you personally experience the application of learning outside school, your desire and capacity to learn in school grows, as does your engagement in class. In other words, they have improved the efficiency of teaching and learning by removing the kids from the classroom and putting them to work! How cool is that!

While almost every teacher I’ve ever met is worried about the volume of content that must be taught in a very limited time window, the faculty at Saint Martin has been able to literally teach more in less time ‘cause their students are steeped in context.

An important lesson for all school leaders and teachers.

Inner city students are the most disadvantaged among us, and it is important to learn from schools like Saint Martin de Porres, who are changing this by caring for their students, being innovative and creative in how they prepare their students to be kick-butt graduates, and by ensuring the sustainability of the school.

Bravo

essence

I’ve been pondering the role of technology in teaching, and what surveys say is the teacher's biggest challenge - student engagement.

Unpacking it:

What is engagement? Starting with an easy one :). It is when students crave learning, when they run to school, and dread leaving.

What is teaching? I see it as an unwrapping and a wrapping. The unwrapping is the job of the teacher, enabled by the student, and the wrapping is the job of the student, enabled by the teacher.

Unwrapping, according to sculptor Fredrik K.B.: “There is life inside the stone. Just as with people, you have to lure it out with love. To force upon it a form you self [sic] have made up is to me the worst form of violence.”

Except for some indigenous societies, this concept is anathema to most Western parents and school systems. Our “evolved” goal: “an effective education leads to gainful employment and economic independence.”

To create employees, education identified common denominator skills across “all” jobs and requires all students to learn them in the same way. To be common, these skills (fractions, algebra, grammar, essay-writing, etc.) are abstracted, and thus difficult to connect to any “real” job, and for most students, impossible to visualize as something fun or interesting or even employment-like.

Skipping the unwrapping process altogether, our system aims to shellack every child with a veneer of “common” skills so that they are generically palatable to the greatest number of employers. In doing this, we admit that education’s “customer” is the employer, not the child; and that success is not fulfilling the child’s destiny, but rather creating faceless drones.

...Truly honorable work.

Ironically, employers are not looking for automatons, they are looking for inquisitive, motivated, creative, team-oriented, and energetic people who are compelled to achieve greatness.

Maybe a bit of a disconnect here...

What is technology? In this context, technology is any “tool” that comes into the classroom and disrupts the status quo. Much of the education community perceives it as a threat because it disrupts “control and order.”

I wrote about the 21st century imperative in 2008, talking about how technology has enhanced communication, and bypassed the teacher as a bottleneck to information; you will also see some awesome quotes on how the establishment decries these intruders in their midst.

But I missed something in my post - technology can be more than this. It, with the help of a teacher, can be the path to engagement, and through that, the unwrapping and wrapping of a student.

“Why?” is probably the most frequently-spoken word by young people everywhere. Instead of dismissing this “insolence,” why(!) not have the child figure out the answer themselves? Most children in the West already have the second most powerful research tool ever (the first being the brain) in their smartphone, let them use it!

Teachers will tell you that a smartphone is a distraction, with Facebook and YouTube and games, they need to ban it so that kids can focus on “learning.”

I don’t agree. If you are given a thing and not shown how “best” to use it, you will use it “randomly.” To compel a student, you must take what interests them already (be it baking or playing music or humor or how-things-work or fashion), and help them “get good at it.” Teachers can help them use the tools at hand to observe, reflect, document, and exhibit what compels them. This is learning!

Michelangelo said, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.” This is true of cooking, DJing, being funny, building a car, or creating amazing clothes. In fact, there is hard work and mathematics, grammar, communications, science, and much more in every one of these endeavors.

Education is not wrong to define subjects like mathematics, language arts, and science as “core” to almost everything that follows. Its failure is in being “well-intentioned, wise, experienced, and successful” adults who have forgotten the moments in their lives oh so long ago when they swore they’d never be the unfeeling jerks their parents were.

Education has the opportunity to help students use the tools they have and like in ways that lead to learning. It can help them unwrap the perfect statue(s) that exists within every child, and through that, make each one a unique and valued and shape changing contributor to our ever-stodgy adult world.

It just has to want to.

inhumanity

What do the June riots in Vancouver have in common with this week's events in London? This Independent article posted by a good friend made me see things in a whole new light.

Each riot was sparked by an event - the Canucks losing the Stanley Cup, and a black man killed by the police in a way that raised the community's suspicions. The rioters in both cases are young (teens and early 20s) people. The police are not designed for, and ill-equipped to quell riots and prevent innocent people and local buildings/stores from being harmed.

[ASIDE: Domestic police forces ought not be militias, armed to the teeth, and bent on suppressing the citizenry; this assume-the-worst-of-our-people attitude is a self-fulfilling prophecy.]

There's one other thing the countries have in common: while both invest heavily in, and are reputed to have excellent public education systems, their schools are becoming increasingly mechanistic and factory-like. Success is measured by test scores; effectiveness is based on numeric data; and students are viewed as numbers (vs. humans), and assumed to be cheaters and prone to bad behavior, read: mistrusted.

In good times, economic success can overcome these failings, but with increased unemployment and more people falling below the poverty line, no-one is present to model a "peaceful national character and an accepted moral outlook" or the idea of civility for young people. Parents are too busy making ends meet, and there are few "good" influences in the media, or in our increasingly aloof neighborhoods.

Their most formative experiences happen whilst in school, and if the "texture" of that experience is "you'll be held back if you don't do well on the tests"; "we know you're a truant or are cheating and we will catch you"; and being treated as a data point and not a person, how do we expect them to grow into anything but disenfranchised young adults, who when presented with an opportunity to rebel against "the man" will gleefully take it?? This BBC interview of two young British rioters is a classic example of the result.

Why doesn't this happen as much in America (which has an even more mistrustful public education system)? I think it's because the local police forces are more violent and better armed.

[ASIDE: Domestic militia can discourage violence, but at what cost? Prime Minister Cameron just said, "There are pockets of our society that are not only broken, but frankly sick...It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel that the world owes them something." His remarks are political peacocking, and by weaponizing his police forces, he creates an even greater rift with the citizenry. Being 'tough on crime' is a failed strategy, as evidenced in America, which boasts the highest percentage of incarcerations on the planet, but no corresponding reduction in crime.]

It is regrettable that politicians can't focus on root causes. In all three (and many other) countries, our children are victims of an increasingly dehumanized education system. The powers that manage (districts, departments/ministries of education, etc.) and influence (Gates, etc. Foundations) public schools are filled with too few real educators, and too many MBAs, whose training in micro-thinking leads to disastrous macro-outcomes.

"Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves" is a practice in most MBA programs (in their parlance: what gets measured gets done, just focus on optimizing your piece of the business), and is one of the worst things to happen to schools (and corporations) over the last generation. "Penny-wise and pound-foolish," or "missing the forest for the trees" are much more apt, but frequently ignored.

When you manage teachers based on their students' test scores, you demand that the teacher ignore the person in front of them, and focus ONLY on their preparation to answer a set of questions on a piece of paper. Learning is not a requirement; correct responses are.

More and more parents choose a school for their children based on test scores, in the mistaken belief that that's a "good education."

Is it at all surprising that young adults aggressively rebel when given the opportunity? Is it at all surprising that they have a diminished sense of civility and respect? Which adults treated them with civility and respect? What behaviors did their "models" exhibit towards them when they were most impressionable?

Learning is an inherently human act - the more you separate the person from their education, the less educated and "human" our younger generations will be.

The people to blame for the riots in Vancouver and London are not the kids (they are merely accountable), but rather the adults (parents and educators and policy makers) who created the education system in which they were dehumanized.

leap of faith

Education's goal is to prepare students to succeed in life. What skills will help kids be healthy, independent and even happy?

Most schools choose English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and "World" Languages as core skills. Missing is anything that helps students bridge concepts across subjects, or become independent thinkers and learners. Also missing is anything that looks at the whole student, their hopes and emotions (as they go through puberty), how they will live and work within our society, and how they become ...a person.

Research shows that employers are looking for broad, creative thinkers who can work in varied settings and in teams to solve complex, multi-disciplinary problems. In other words, people who know how to learn and have the confidence and wherewithal to get things done in ambiguous and unpredictable settings.

There are schools whose mission is to graduate students like this. Two that I know are Seattle Girls' School and High Tech High. They are amazing.

Both schools incorporate an integrated curriculum in which students actually become entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, activists, writers and artists. They also focus on the person before them, treating them not like a widget in a factory but a human being with feelings, fears, interests and lives outside school.

Tangentially, the US Department of Education is investing $4 Billion to fix the 1,000 poorest-performing schools in America. The primary approach is a complete reboot, including a complete staff overhaul. Cynics predict a 1% success rate, or 10 good schools, and $3.96 billion wasted. I think they'll do better, and I'm willing to bet that the successful schools will have principals who are focused on the whole student, who aren't pitting teachers against each other, and who recognize that an integrated and experiential curriculum is not only what the kids need, but how best to engage them in the magic of learning.

Leaders like this are what made Seattle Girls' and High Tech High successful, and what's needed not just in the worst of our schools, but all of our schools. These aren't easy people to find, so we need better resources to help the less-brilliant leaders.

I recently suggested an approach that leads to integrated learning by inverting the classroom, turning lectures into homework, and what was homework into teacher-facilitated classwork. This ought to be a part of the academic solution, but it doesn't address a problem most poor schools face - that the students have a tough, tough life (poverty, violence, drugs, etc.) outside school; and with that occupying their minds, can hardly be expected to care about math or grammar.

Of course a school can't fix problems at home, but is it possible for them to help children cope with these issues, and in doing that enable them focus on school? Yes. Are there examples of this in action? Also yes.

John Gilmour founded four LEAP Science and Maths Schools, in townships (where the black people were forced to live during Apartheid and continue to live now) in Cape Town and Johannesburg. I had the opportunity to visit one school last year and was amazed. Each class spends one hour/day in Life Orientation, where an Occupational Therapist helps students listen, feel, understand and express what is inside them, and learn how to interact with each other.

The result is a remarkable awakening of children who might otherwise have lived lives of crime, poverty and disaffection, but instead are successful, empowered contributors to society. Gilmour has made this work with students who are immersed in the worst circumstances, and created graduates whose brightness and brilliance easily matches that of any American private school student.

Are inverted classrooms and Life Orientation a panacea? No. Are they worth exploring? Absolutely. What holds us back? They're different and not invented by the "establishment."

There is a fear of trying anything new or "radical" even though America is only graduating 70% of its students, of which most are unprepared for college (1/3 drop out after their first year, and 1/2 never graduate). Shouldn't some of the $4 Billion from the Dept of Ed go towards proving these approaches in American schools?

The traditional approaches are failing; radical is our only choice.

tech in ed - epic failure

Education today is designed to meet the needs of 19th century Industrial Revolution employer - “We need millions of assembly line workers, who are all similarly-skilled, and able to work for a simple wage.”

But children today want more, they have broader needs and expectations from their school - not the least of which is to be treated as individuals and to be engaged based on their unique aspirations and abilities. This is not possible if the least interactive and differentiated part of learning in today’s schools is the lecture, and the most interactive part is the homework. We are not only wasting the most valuable asset in the room - the teacher - but also flaunting the idea that you can create creative, critical thinkers in a one-way, generic teaching system. Real learning is a curated experience; humans - teachers - must be involved, but in an interactive and personalized way.

Technology’s role is NOT to mechanize, but to humanize. The most humane technology interventions in history are characterized by a simple truth - the target audience naturally consumed them. The telephone, television and browser are examples of this.

Sadly, a generation of school leaders, administrators, teachers and parents are now conditioned to view technology in the blandest way; from the slate to the blackboard to the whiteboard to PowerPoint to the SmartBoard, the ONLY improvement is mechanization. Teaching and learning NEVER changed. To-date the use of technology in learning has been a waste.

Successful teaching can’t be an act of oppression, it can’t be “pushed,” it needs to be “pulled” - the student must want. Talk to any teacher and they will say that student engagement is fundamental to success. Combine the best teacher with the smartest but disengaged student, and learning will NOT occur. But if the students are engaged, and if the teacher can meet them where they each are and work with them, any student can be successful.

This is our challenge, but in a system this complex (USA: 50 million students, 3 million teachers, 15,000 school districts, $600B/year), it must be done correctly.

The answer is not rocket-science. In fact, it's right in front of our noses. Look at children at play - watch them engage and interact in mediums of their own choosing - they have already know how they see, learn, play, and enjoy. My favorite example is Pokemon. Excerpt from student teaching?:

Most Pokemon aficionados that I know mastered the game in about six months. Mastery implies a full understanding of the Pokemon vocabulary, ecosystem, evolutionary paths, strengths and weaknesses of each character and appropriate strategies with which to select the right Pokemon and win battles, etc.

Moreover, each child also learns to interact with their peers, learn tricks and techniques from each other, and of course battling to achieve supremacy in the game.

Finally, for particularly tough battles, students need to also do research online to uncover cheats that they can use to achieve status.

How often do you see average students achieve this level of skill this quickly in Algebra, Grammar or even simple Fractions, forget Organic Chemistry, Biology, or a foreign language? Animated cartoons, simple re-playable simulations, pervasive, easy-to-use, child-friendly, long-battery-life devices are the basis for Pokemon's success.

This can be translated into mainstream learning. Technology can inspire children to want to learn.

We can't ignore the role of the teacher - they are essential to connecting with students based on their specific interests, abilities, and learning needs; and to being the human connection that all Brain Science tells us is crucial to effective learning.

Technology should liberate teachers from the burden of generic lectures and enable them do what they're best at, what they came to do in the first place - engage students. But we have to do this practically, knowing that they have 30 students and 50 minutes per class.

What if we took the current education standards in a given school system and created short (< 10 mins), animated lectures of each concept(s) with a simple assignment to test comprehension? The teacher could assign these lectures to students as homework, have them "play" their homework and complete their assignments, and automatically receive "reports" on how each student did, and what they understood before class started. In class, the teacher would group the students based on their comprehension, and work directly to inspire, and bridge their learning gaps.

Of course there is much more to this approach; but in the end, it helps accomplish three things:

1. Recognizing and accommodating the way children naturally think, learn and play.
2. Empowering the teacher to directly engage students and help them learn.
3. Eliminating the child abuse of forcing young children to shoulder 20lb (10kg) backpacks filled with dated textbooks.

It can be done at a substantially lower cost - American public schools spend more than $5 billion/year on text books - this approach would cost much less, if for no other reason than most kids already have the devices (smartphones, MP3 and game players), and that all learning content should be open-source.

He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger. ~Confucius. Bold school districts and teachers unions need to step up and lead our children into safety.

pro child-labor

What's the return on investment of education? Why bother? Why especially in poor communities? Just because I/you/we believe education is a silver bullet doesn't mean it is. As a skeptic, I can find many examples of education shooting blanks or even causing harm.

If I'm a parent of a family living in one room in a shanty town or village, why should I bother wasting my kids on education? How is grammar going to feed us? How are fractions going to heal my sick baby? How is history going to clothe us? I need none of this; it's a waste of my children's time and life. Go away.

Today UNESCO released The Hidden Crisis: Armed Conflict and Education, which states that: "Armed conflict is robbing 28 million children of an education by exposing them to widespread rape and other sexual violence, targeted attacks on schools and other human rights abuses."

Their agenda for change includes: "tougher action against human rights violations, an overhaul of global aid priorities, strengthened rights for displaced people and more attention to the ways education failures can increase the risk of conflict."

UNESCO is asking for US$2 billion to cover current budgetary shortfalls, and changing the proportion of humanitarian aid that goes to education (currently only 2%). All worthwhile goals, aimed at giving "them" what we have. But as Einstein famously said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, and expecting a different result.

Yes - 28 million children aged 5-12 are not in school, yes this is a crime, and yes it will result in bad things (disease, starvation, rape, war...). BUT - building more schools isn't the complete answer, nor is training more teachers or distributing textbooks or laptops.

Philanthropy is the least effective way to affect change. The best way is for the community itself to change because it values that change over existing subsistence priorities. This is the crux of sustainable transformation.

To get kids into schools, the parents need to be convinced that it is the right thing to do. Not "right" based on some abstract morality, but right based on what they care about, they need, and they value. This is what matters most; what we believe is irrelevant.

Parents will compel their kids to go to school if it enables survival of the family. If you can't directly and immediately connect to that, parents will choose other subsistence (food, shelter...) needs over education - you would, I would. Moreover, the "ROI" of education happens after graduation - that's at least a decade out! If you're starving now, that kind of future is meaningless.

We in the wealthy world delude ourselves into believing "if you build schools, they will come," or "it's so obvious - why don't they understand it?"

Ironically, we're clothing our ignorance in empathy, and believing that empathy will save the wretched from their ignorance!

We must give parents something they need now in exchange for their children's attendance:

1. School as a farm. The students will learn innovative farming techniques; they will plant and harvest crops; they will be required to work the farms in exchange for being fed and bringing food home for their families.
2. School as a factory. The students will learn innovative production techniques; they will create and produce goods that we will sell; they will be required to learn factory-work, in exchange for being fed and bringing goods home for their families.
3. School as a clinic. The students will learn about health care; they will assist in providing services to the injured and sick; they will be required to clean and cook and feed patients; in exchange for being fed and bringing food and medicines home for their families.

Yep - this is putting 5-year old kids to work. CHILD LABOR - get used to the term; learn to like it.

Children are not in school because their parents value subsistence over education. "In exchange" for being fed and bringing food home every day, these children will also happen to learn literacy and numeracy + skills that can help improve their family's health and standard of living. BUT if they don't get fed and bring food home, they will not have reduced the family burden sufficiently to warrant their parents' commitment.

We suffer from the desire to assuage our own guilt and feed our intellectual egos by over-engineering things. The issue is not education, it is survival. Education is nowhere near the top of Maslow's hierarchy for a reason. It's not important enough when you and your kids live on 500 calories/day, with dysentery and AIDS.

This feels dastardly - railing against child abuse/sweatshops/etc. is ingrained in us - but we're wrong.

If UNESCO is serious about getting 28 million kids in school, they need to first employ them, and then educate them. Let's spend money on that.

why?

How often do you ask this? More importantly, how often did you ask this? Wondering and asking "why" is a powerful determinant of creativity. Ironically, it's something we "breed" out of our children when they're young. I think it's mostly because adults get tired of being asked it at home, and when they're in school, it's because teachers (also adults I suppose) are also tired of being asked.

Sir Ken Robinson (if you haven't seen him speak, click on the image to the right; if you have seen it, click anyway - I've watched it at least 4-5 times) defines creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value." He argues that creativity should be as important in schools as literacy.

Sir Ken further argues (I couldn't agree more) that our schools in their ever-mechanical approach actually extract creativity from our children because of the way they measure "achievement," how they "enforce" discipline and adherence to structure, and worst how the "wrong" answer or approach is so actively discouraged as to impede the emergence of anything but a bland, conformist child. "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

Newsweek published The Creativity Crisis this month, where among other things, they talk about the correlation between a student's score on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and their "success" in life (entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers).

I've written here and here about how the values and needs of the industrial revolution have polluted the idea of a public education being about helping every child achieve their greatest self. As I stated during a recent interview on edReformer: "It feels like Education America has become an end unto itself – i.e. the system is less about whether children graduate prepared for the world vs. whether they went through the process of going to the school. The former is righteous, the latter smacks of too many administrators and mid-level bureaucrats getting in the way of people with a legitimate desire to help our children be the best they can be."

Voices like that of Sir Ken, and Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (authors of the Newsweek article) are important, but not enough if the goal is to reshape Education America or any other country's system.

The most critical voices are parents and employers. The former because they are (or are supposed to be) their children's advocates, and because they are voters and hence valuable to elected officials. The latter because they are the "reason" that education exists in the mind of most people/parents (to prepare kids to earn money). In effect, the employer has the real power, and the parent is one of the strongest advocates of their needs.

If employers don't want creativity, parents won't demand it in the classroom. If employers stopped hiring graduates of school factories, parents would take action. I had dinner this weekend with two very cool people who work for an education foundation, and we were talking about how difficult it is to affect real change.

What if instead of trying to change teachers or drive common standards or curriculum, etc., these foundations went straight to employers to "help" them become stronger advocates for better job candidates? What if they were able to get these employers eliminate the requirement for an accreditation to get a job? What if they were willing to put a bit more energy into the recruitment and filtering process, but focus on the person and their ability vs. what some piece of paper said they could do?

What if the foundation in question invested in a service that helped candidates better represent their true capabilities and not just what the transcript said? Imagine how by building a whole new way of marrying candidates to employers, a foundation with a relatively small investment could create fundamental change in the education system without ever touching it. Now imagine how parents would glom on to this and push their children, and their children's schools to make sure they were prepared for this new world.

Creativity requires that you be prepared to be wrong; if we're not willing to try new approaches, we will forever live up to Einstein's definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

intellectual divides

Have you encountered the phrase "digital divide"? I imagine more than once. What does it mean to you? Is it expanding, contracting or the same as it was? What's on either side, and how do you know where you are? If you do only do email on a PC, are you on one side (which side?); if you only use SMS where are you? It's not clear cut anymore, and it also depends on your point of view.

eSchool News published A look at the technology culture divide recently, the author made a bizarre assumption - that the "have" side of the digital divide is static. According to this, the "digital divide" came into the mainstream in the mid-1990s via speeches by then President Bill Clinton and Vice President (and self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet) Al Gore.

Do you think someone who was on the "digital" side of the divide in 1996 is still on that side today? At that time, being "digital" would have meant owning a computer with access to the Internet (via a modem connected to a land line). Say that was me, and that I'm still using the same or similar equipment today; how do I compare (my PC + internet access, living in Seattle) to three 15 year old brothers I met recently in Angola who have smart phones with data plans but don't really use PCs? Is it clear who has the advantage?

Now take a look at this article also in eSchool News about the excessive proliferation of hardware in learning. This author suggests it's not about more hardware (I agree), but that we need the right software packages (he enumerates four requirements); once we have these, no more change is needed, and our now "futurized" school system can happily live in this new steady state.

Education is not about social networks, mastery of existing assessments, or basic reading; it is about preparing every child to discover and become their greatest selves, and to prepare every child to survive (and hopefully thrive) in whatever future lies ahead. All we know about the future is that it will come; to create a static system that is based on today's state of the art (just because we can't grasp a more advanced or changed future) is naive at best, and assured to NOT prepare children for their future.

These authors are like Al Gore when he proclaimed Internet paternity - they're trying to lay claim to ideas that they don't fully grasp, and making absolute that which is always changing. As Seth points out, it's very easy to be manipulated - all you need to do is string together the right kitsch phrases, and prey on people's fears or avarice. It's a sure-fire way to win followers and influence people, but it is devoid of integrity.

Rather than railing about the digital divide, we need to bemoan the intellectual divide that has made adults in our society gullible enough to believe this kind of propaganda.

For those who wish we could go back a generation to the time when our education system was wonderful, and when we graduated the best and the brightest on this planet, I would point out the following: more adults in America are illiterate vs. the top 20 economies on Earth. More than half of Americans adults are unable to identify the precise location of Washington DC or New York or Los Angeles on a blank map (forget naming the capital of Canada or pointing to its location). More Americans bought mortgages beyond their means, believe they can healthily lose weight via diet pills, and believe the Earth is flat than any other nation in the OECD top 20.

I'm exaggerating to make a point, but it's important to realize that many of the people making decisions about our children's education are both victims of their own (potentially weak) education, and susceptible to the random and ill-informed rhetoric of others. Rather than trusting education to people whose only qualification is electability (by these same ill-informed crowds), shouldn't we put it in the hands of the best and brightest and most successful among us?

It's time to get our collective heads in the game...

open accreditation services

Is learning is undergoing a transformation? From this article in the NY Times on the profusion of lectures available online, its implications on learning, and how that's changing the way students learn; to 21st Century Learning proponents, who claim that learning in this century is like no other, that students are actually different, and that institutions need to evolve their curriculum to match, you might think so.

I don't think the turn of a calendar's page changes the way the brain works, but what (if anything) is really different about education in this century?

It's not enough to say we have new technology today vs. yesterday, because yesterday they had new technology vs. the day before. It's not enough to say that we expect more from our students today than ever before (ibid).

What about this - could this be the century in which the business model of education changes? Is this the point where accreditation as we know it goes away? This isn't new in the history of learning, but it's something that hasn't happened in perhaps the last 150 years.

The mainstream public education system on this planet is authoritarian, discriminatory, built to make life easier for adults and regulators, and seemingly not even designed to make children great. The rules in most schools are all about what you CAN'T do. Oppression doesn't seem to be a good way to engage students and improve learning outcomes - does it?

How does the system become so authoritarian? Simple - they own the ticket to employment. I wrote recently about the tertiary education is becoming commoditized; I think things are getting even worse now. The most tangible benefit of staying in school and graduating is the piece of paper you get that says you attended, graduated, and are now employment-worthy.

If you have something hammer-like (the ticket), then it is easy to be lazy and use that hammer to assert power vs. truly engaging students - think of most country's border guards; they should be tourism advocates, but instead let their power get in the way. This is not universal, but it is pervasive.

Change in this case won't come from within. These days, more and more employers look beyond the accreditation to the person to assess whether they'd be a good hire. Ask any recruiter, hiring manager, employment consultant or counselor and they will confirm that where you went to school only helps if it's one of the top ten (or where the hiring manager went); otherwise it's more about the rest of you - who you are, what you've done, and how you did it that counts - take a look at your own resume - is education at the top or near the bottom?

Admittedly, most employers (today) won't let you in the door without the proper accreditation - that's still the first filter. But I believe this is changing. The number of "accreditation-free" people that get hired is growing rapidly, and the approach these hiring managers take and the quality of these hires will be the biggest determinant of the "value" of a formal education.

As these "alternate" candidates prove their worth in the market (likely at lower starting salaries as well), I think there will be a groundswell at both ends - hiring managers/recruiters becoming more open-minded, and students becoming more savvy.

Students are already skeptical about school; when the approach that these hiring managers use to select candidates becomes better known, it could begin to shape students' process for building a resume, the way they demonstrate knowledge, ability and experience, and the criticality of a diploma.

Imagine if you could describe your job-worthiness not in terms of a certificate, but as say a balanced scorecard, or as Seth put it, as your own quilt. It would not only be a huge help to hiring managers, but also allow much more of the candidate's broader value to be demonstrated.

Just as Open Education Resources (OER) is altering the nature of curriculum and teaching materials, I think we're about 10 years away from an Open Accreditation Service that enables students to score or quilt all of their achievements across the board.

The next revolution in learning then, is the outmoding of the existing business model. And as with the music, video, and print/TV advertising industries, education will try and hold on to the past, but at some point face reality, and focus on earning the opportunity to teach your child. I can't wait.

head games

There are about 3 million teachers and about 65 million students in America, or roughly 22 students per teacher. Since we know that only 75% of students graduate, there are probably more younger students than older students - so instead of an even distribution of 5 million students per grade (65/13, 13=#of grades from K-12), it's more likely that there are 3.5-4 million students in upper grades and 5.5-6m students in lower grades

So what?

Well, I attended a fascinating presentation as a follow-on to a conversation I had with Bob Watt almost a year and a half ago at I-LABS - the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. If you're ever in the area, and interested at all in early childhood learning and brain development - you need to know Pat Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff the co-directors. These guys are something else - the work they're doing is world-renowned, and kicks butt.

I was there with a small group, and they were gracious enough to give us two hours, and patiently respond to all our questions. What I learned from I-LABS is how much proven science flies in the face of education convention in America.

For example - there is pretty much universal agreement backed by data that conclusively states that the brain is most receptive to learning new languages in its first two or three years of life. As the brain ages this ability diminishes rapidly - by the time you hit puberty it's really difficult, and by the time you've left your teens, it's just about over.

And yet, our schools start teaching a second language around grade 8 (age 14)!! Why bother? Why not make it easier and teach a second language when the child's brain can do it without any effort?

As you will read from my conversation with Bob, one of the most critical I-LABS insights is the extent to which personal interaction matters in early childhood learning. In a discussion with Pat and Andrew, there was conceptual agreement with the idea that the ratio of teachers to students should be much, much higher for younger students, and can be much lower for older students.

Going back to the data in the first paragraph, the incumbents and nay-sayers will argue that this is impractical, we can't afford the teachers we have, much less lowering the student-to-teacher ratio further!

What if we implemented something like the table to the right? By dramatically shifting the bias towards younger grades, we can keep the number of teachers constant, and explore "inhuman" (computer-based learning, games - 1:1 and massively multi-player games, etc.) approaches to learning support for older students.

If brain science tells us that this is a sensible approach, just as brain science tells us that we should learn languages sooner than later, then we should listen and change our approach to education to reflect the reality of how children learn.

I suppose the more productive question Pat and Andrew need to answer is how the brains of the adults in charge of education work, and what we need to do to make them see straight.

euphemasia

I haven't been blogging very much lately; I just haven't been in a mood to write. I wonder at times if this is it? Have I said all I have to say, and no more is left? I hope not. I have begun with a title and written this much - let's see what comes.

As a child, I wondered why it was wrong to call a fat person "fat" or call a short person "short." I wondered why we said "passed away" instead of "died," why it was better to say "enhanced coercive interrogation technique" than "torture," or a bunch of other such examples.

At that age it felt like lying. Now it seems to me that all of these words represent an act of dehumanization instead of the intended act of compassion. I am who I am - whether that's brown, white, thin, fat, dumb, smart, ugly or whatever. I am who I am.

When someone euphemizes me, they take something away from my self. An obvious and defining characteristic or aspect of me is suddenly made generic.

Is a fat person also heavy? Yes. But "heavy" is intended not to offend, though the meaning is the same. But if the meaning is the same, then how is it less-offensive to be considered heavy instead of fat? Haven't we just insulted this person by assuming they're too dumb to notice that "heavy" is equally as pejorative? Shouldn't we rather be truthful?

When we euphemize, we generalize, we profile, we stereotype, and we assume that all of "them" are one. Every member of this "xxx" group is now the same. We've erased their individuality, voice and power.

Euphemisms convert people into demographic variables. The individual is killed.

But we don't confine our euphemistic ways to individuals - politics and business are equally "blessed."

President Truman called Korean War a "Police Action" - he did this for political reasons - to make it seem smaller and less than it was. The soldiers and civilians that died couldn't tell the difference, they were just as dead irrespective of the President's spin. In this case, the goal was to dupe a nation and even other countries into thinking a thing was more benign that it was. There are many others: "revenue enhancements" instead of raising taxes, "collateral damage" instead of military screw-ups, etc. The political world is rife with them, and in the end, they all serve to perpetuate lies.

This happens in business too, examples include "right-sizing" or "volume-based involuntary reductions" instead of layoffs and firings, "market corrections" instead of stock market collapses, "earnings restatements" instead of accounting failures, etc. Here's one a hospital network used recently: "negative patient care outcome" instead of deaths - imagine being told that your parent or sibling or child were unfortunately a negative outcome.

When you read these in a document or hear them in a presentation, you don't really realize what's being said; it's not clear even whether it's a bad thing (I suppose that's the goal), and what ends up happening? Middle management will euphemize poor results, failures, screw-ups when talking to upper management so that they don't look bad, but then the leaders have incomplete (bad) information and the company can't make good decisions.

In every case - personal, political, or business, we euphemize to take the edge off, and in doing so, we sacrifice clarity, we sacrifice truth, and worst of all, we avoid facing reality.

Try stopping yourself from using euphemisms - they are so entrenched in our vocabulary, our behavior, our very thought processes that it's almost impossible to be truly truthful - whether to yourself or those around you.

We say that children can be really cruel because they are unfiltered - I prefer cruelty and facing reality to killing with kindness.

barriers

Barriers keep things away from other things - they might be levees that keep dangerous waters away from communities; they sometimes separate nations at border crossings; they might even be erected around buildings (as happened often after 9-11) to prevent wrongdoers from entering.

There are other kinds of barriers too - ones that aren't so physically tangible, but every bit as real. Consider barriers to entry for a company trying to get into a market or reach a demographic; consider also barriers to entry for a person trying to gain employment.

In this last case, there are a few ways that would-be employees can break through these barriers - I think it boils down to:

• Accreditation - a diploma or certification attesting to something you've learned that is of value to the employer
• Connection - someone you know either in the company or that the company wants to know
• Reputation - being proven or having a following that you bring to the table that improves the employers' ability to do something (attract new customers, build credibility, etc.)
• Experience - jobs you might have had, or work you may have done that is meaningful to the employer

Of these, the first two are most cited as likely to get you in the door, and the last two are the ones most likely to have them seek you out.

For most people starting out, having a piece of paper from the right institution accrediting their education is the only thing they have. In the past, you may have been hired solely for having a diploma, but today with the scarcities we face and the glut of prospective candidates, employers can be much more selective. It's not enough to have a piece of paper; what that paper represents is actually more important.

I wrote a while back about universities being at risk because of their steadfast commitment to keeping things as they were a century ago, but now we know that institutions do this at their assured peril.

I have written a ton about K-12 education and how it's being impaled into the ground, but a couple of thoughts stand out. I'm the first to agree that we are what we measure - but we should also know that if you lower the barrier to entry, people won't try as hard!! If you protect management from failure, they won't feel as accountable!! 

Seth Godin wrote this great post today about how career fairs are (my words) the aspiration to be average. He didn't need to prove it, but here's more proof of this - the NY Times reported that several states are lowering their high school graduation test standards!!

How often have you seen a person say - well if I only need to produce 10 widgets a day, and no matter what I do, I only get paid to produce 10 widgets, I'll produce 20 (or even 11) anyway, just because I can and I care?

What gets measured gets done - if you lower the standard, guess what, you've guaranteed that the students will learn less! These legislative charlatans are trying to put a better spin on things - Dr. Gerald Zahorchak, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Education in one breadth said that 20,000 2007/8 graduates required remediation at a cost of $26 million before they were ready for their next step - a pretty damning condemnation of current graduation standards. BUT in the next breadth, of their plan to lower the standards for testing, he said: I want more than anything to be able to say with confidence that every Pennsylvania student who receives a diploma is ready for the real world.

I am speechless.

I think Dr. Zahorchak and all of his peers must be required to face the tens of thousands of unemployed high school graduates in their state every day, and hear from each of them about how their 13-year investment in public school has failed them.

The school system in this country is in peril - there should be a sense of urgency that eclipses the post 9-11 fervor on national security for approaches that improve the potential of every child in the school, not lower the standards so some imbecile with a big office can look good.

The barrier we are missing is the one that requires politicians to have an IQ above that of a grape.

differentiation

Today is one of those days - the whole year is ahead of us and sadly, the prospect of imminent holidays is not. So what do you do? You get up, face your truth, and you get it done.

When an organization faces the prospect of a long struggle, it's different - there is no guaranteed holiday in five months, there is no fixed cadence that assures it of two fun weeks 50 weeks hence, etc. The organization faces a much more dire truth - survive or die. Seth Godin laid out an interesting corporate evolution process today:

1. Technicians who invented it, run it
2. Technicians with taste, leverage it
3. Artists take over from the technicians
4. MBAs take over from the artists
5. Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality

Organizations facing dire straits are generally well past stage 2 and usually in 4 or 5. When that happens, where do they turn to find their truth? The 4s and 5s will commission analysis, fabricate a plan to turn things around within a quarter or two to demonstrate to Wall Street that they've righted the ship. The strategy will be filled with data from quantitative and qualitative research, it will have lots of graphs and graphics, and it will answer the question - how do we turn our sow's ear into a silk purse?

But it will not have been authored by any of the 1s & 2s that found a truth, began from nothing and created a differentiated good or service that thrived. It will rather declare that the fruits of 1 & 2 were the sow's ear, and must now be re-thunk. "Our survival comes from giving them what the research and our consultants told us they want." Well... that's hard to argue, but it's also hard to show why customers will leave those that are already doing this (after all, if the market already knows what it wants, it's because it's already getting it somewhere else). It's also hard so show how your new extruded silk purse will be better than the competitions', and spark the turnaround.

The question of Making College 'Relevant' was discussed in the NY Times today. In it, liberal arts school students (and prospective students) are worried that this education won't translate into meaningful work. The schools are responding: University of Texas, Austin for example has a class called "The English Major in the Workplace," which includes reading Death of a Salesman, résumé writing and how to network. The provost at University of Michigan claims that they are too keeping up with changing times, after all - they have recently stopped offering majors in elocution and animal husbandry...

I don't know about you, but that doesn't feel like a liberal arts education anymore. It feels like schools run by, and designed to prep students to become #5s.

In five minutes of searching, I found this report that surveyed 25 Canadian employers (500k employees collectively) about the traits they seek in new hires; you can find hundreds of similar surveys - they all want the same thing:

1. Ability to communicate, think, and continue to learn throughout life
2. Ability to demonstrate positive attitudes and behaviors, responsibility, and adaptability
3. Ability to work with others.

I also found this essay On the Purpose of a Liberal Arts Education, after extracting the religious overtones, it is about exactly the skills that employers want, as is this Michael Roth Huffington Post post, which talks about Wesleyan University's value proposition.

The Liberal Arts folk from the NY Times article are missing a rather vital point - their truth, the thing that differentiates them from others is not whether they create jobs, or whether they are able to graduate students with pretty CVs, it is that they create thinkers with broad, open minds that are able to collaborate, learn, create and communicate. Turning their schools into résumé-writing factories is moronic and beneath everything their 1s and 2s stood for.

Why not instead demonstrate how liberal arts graduates added more sustained value to an organization than others? Why not demonstrate how their students were more innovative and created more shape-changing opportunities for their employers because they had ability combined with breadth?

The truth that sparked their being oughtn't be rendered meaningless so easily. Instead they must demonstrate with conviction that there is value from such an education, that the skills they create are sought by employers, and that their students bring even more to the table. <-- This last might be where they add to their truth - helping their students develop experiences more relevant to the anticipated needs of the workplace, and using their innate abilities to document them with maximum effect.

I'm not saying that a liberal arts degree is the panacea for graduates in the next decade, what I am saying is liberal arts schools were born because their truth was clear and differentiated; by becoming yet another #4 or #5 factory, not only do they (or any other company that succumbs) become mundane, but they also concede that their very reason for being (in this case to educate) is a commodity, and they must now follow the downward spiral to low-margin, high-volume genericness.

There is no truth in that, worse, there is no good in that.

the calling

If you were on a train about to cross a bridge, would you expect the engineers that designed the trestle to know how trains work? If you were about to go into surgery, would you expect that the doctors and nurses knew how the human body worked?

When you go into a school, do you trust that the teachers know how students learn?

Greg Noack a well-regarded educator tweeted: Why is it that, the more I learn and meditate on HOW kids learn, not what they learn. The less I have in common with other teachers. This prompted David Warlick to write a post that I read, and now here I go :-):

Greg's words scare me because they suggest a classic industrial age "I just work here" mentality that I didn't think was in teachers. I have to believe that no primary/secondary teacher went into this profession for the money or the work-life balance. They went because they were called. If teaching is/was a calling for me, I think I'd want/need to be as insightful as possible on the question Greg asked. I'd expect every teacher to be that way.

David and his commenters' takes are slightly different: when most teachers were students, there was a dearth of information, today there is overload; the world (comparatively) is moving much more quickly; teachers are preparing their students for a vastly different reality from the one they know and understand.

David (and team)'s words scare me - if they really believe this then they are not the great teachers I believe them to be.

Can you think of a generation that was less complicated than the one that preceded it? Think of each successive decade from say the 1950s (I presume most practicing teachers were born in or after 1950) - can you name three things that made each decade complicated, difficult and more fraught? How about (in no particular order) the Cold, Vietnam and Gulf Wars, the Swinging 60s, the Kennedy assassinations, women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, telephones, television to name but ten? Each of these was pretty socially cataclysmic, each foretold a future dramatically different from that present. Yet we survived, and thrived.

Every dissenter is going to use the "ya-but" defense, in most cases saying that this time it's different, but let's face it - life is change, life requires change, and life relishes change. If it were not so, we'd still be living in caves. 

David used these words: "We are recognizing that our students will be moving from their formal education into a world that we can hardly imagine." The future today is just as uncertain as it was yesterday; the only difference is that we know how yesterday turned out.

Sure we're all susceptible to bouts of doubt, but really, there has never been a time when teaching was not about learning, nor has there been a time when teachers knew exactly what the future held for their students.

This is the reason that we send our children to schools - to prepare them in the best way possible for whatever tomorrow comes their way. Our teachers have always done this and will need to always keep doing this. In every time there will be uncertainty - we have to prepare every child for their destinies in the best way we know how.

I think it's important to worry about whether we're up to the task for anything; but we don't make excuses, we don't just aspire to do it better, we actually work on doing it better. That's why it's a calling.

the time is now

This week, I had the great pleasure of meeting Prof. Deborah Ball (math teacher and Dean of UMichigan's School of Education) as she spoke to a group of math teachers (I crashed the party). She was there to talk about teaching math, but really, her presentation was about two issues that I think we ignore at our own peril - a national education approach vs. state/district, and that teaching is a professional discipline and not a just a job.

With respect to federalizing - IMO it is utterly moronic to have more than one school district in America. According to the 2002 census there are:

• 13,506 school district governments
• 178 state-dependent school systems
• 1,330 local-dependent school systems
• 1,196 education service agencies (agencies providing support services to public school systems)

That's 16,210 separate entities that govern this country's public school system! There's just no way a rational person can say that's a good thing. It turns out, neither the Constitution or any of the 27 Amendments ever mentions the word "education" - that's a mistake.

My thanks to Larry for the African proverb below - it is brilliant, has many messages, not the least of which is "sure if you had had a brain you would have done this ages ago, but since you didn't then, it's time to grow some and get it done now." President Obama and Secretary Duncan need to grow some (the Republicans will likely endorse this before the Democrats), argue that eliminating 16,210 agencies is a good thing, and that we need a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to mandate that public education be nationally funded and administered.

As Deborah pointed out, every country that does education well, does it as one - we can learn from that. Moreover it is morally abhorrent for the government to discriminate against a child's right to a great education just because of their zip code. <-- Where are our student-rights advocates?

The second (and best) part of Deborah's speech was about teaching as a profession, with specific skills, discipline and capabilities. Lay teachers (i.e. parents, etc.) do create learning experiences for their child, but they have nowhere near a professional approach, worse, they often do the wrong thing if their goal is to grasp the child's current understanding and help them learn more. (If the goal is to make the "teacher" feel good, then they're successful.)

Read at least the first 2-3 presentations on Deborah's website, and you will see that she talks at length about how a professional teacher is distinguished from a lay-teacher. She also answers the question "what persistently impedes progress?" by identifying five contributors:

1. Persisting with extinct arguments about skills versus conceptual understanding
2. Lack of a central or common curriculum
3. Persisting with outdated and refuted ideas about "teacher quality," especially with respect to content knowledge
4. Persisting with pendulum shifts from teacher-proofing to teachers, but rarely focusing on teachING
5. Persisting with approaches to teacher education that emphasize things other than practice (e.g. reflection, believes, propositional knowledge, experience)

We've talked about #2 already, the other four are all aspects of respecting teachers as professionals, treating them as such, measuring their ability to teach separately from domain knowledge, and providing them with the tools and mentorship and support to become more skilled teachers. During her lecture, she gave us all a bunch of tests that show how different it is to be a professional teacher vs. a lay-teacher. It was fantastic.

But do teachers really want to be professionals? Do they really want that obligation and expectation? I think they do, I think the bulk of teachers go into it because they are called to it. BUT - as Deborah points out, that doesn't mean they're going to be good at it. It's also not the case that teaching is more art than science. There are specific tools and techniques that effective teachers use that lay-teachers or ineffective teachers don't. This needs to change.

But achieving professionalism isn't just about the teacher, it's a systemic commitment. It must start with the school leaders and administrators providing an environment where teachING is valued and developed; it goes to teachers colleges who must focus on developing these skills from the outset and for accreditation; it goes to the unions who must support these initiatives to measure and compensate their members in terms of their professional ability vs. tenure. It goes to teachers who have to sign up to evolve their technique in order to improve their performance.

Note that I didn't say teachers should be accountable for student outcomes. I think that's the job of schools vs. individual teachers. BUT - teachers do need to be accountable for developing their craft. They need to be paid based on their ability (vs. tenure) in this regard.

If we are able to go from 16,210 to 1 and treat teachers as professionals and measure their proficiency accordingly, change will happen. Not planting the tree 20 years ago shouldn't stop us from planting it today.

inversions

 

There was an article in the NY Times recently about a research study that found that students who study online outperform those that study in the classroom. But according to an email Prof. Kathy Gill at U Washington sent to a listserv, the causative factor was not on/off line, but time on task

So it wasn't the medium, it wasn't the message, it was the participation level that made the difference. It makes sense doesn't it? You could be in the most beautiful place with the most beautiful people looking at the most beautiful things, but if you weren't engaged, it was all for naught.

One thing this study does show is that listening to lectures online does work - students can and do pay attention; insight is conveyed, and gained.

Have you heard of Professor Glenn Platt at Miami University? He along with Prof. Maureen Lage invented the concept of "The Inverted Classroom." This is Einstein-like (so simple and yet no-one's ever thought of it before) brilliance.

From the students' point of view (and let's face it, they're the customers!), the lecture is the least interactive part of a learning experience; the assignments/homework are the most interactive.

So why not flip things around and make the lectures homework, and the assignments class work? The teachers should actively facilitate the interactive experience, and expect the students to "attend" the static part out of class.

The lecture is information with some insight (students sit, listen, take notes). The homework and assignments are where you're meant to internalize the concepts, be able to extend them to related areas, and demonstrate your knowledge by submitting solutions to problems you've been assigned (student reviews, infers, works, and documents understanding).

Think back to when you were doing homework - did you collaborate with your peers to solve a particularly difficult problem? If so, you had to arrange for an "out of class" meeting, to connect and then brainstorm, argue, share, and hopefully solve. There are many studies that show that the best way to know is to teach - getting together with your mates was the first step in teaching (or co-teaching), and understanding.

Platt/Lage published this idea nine years ago (in 2000) - shocking that this hasn't been more broadly explored.

Why hasn't it taken hold? IMO - there are three reasons for this:

1. Ability to record and disseminate lectures - requires video recording tools, a portal with video streaming services, the disk space and bandwidth to assure a good experience. This is being done in many places today - my traditional favorite is MIT Open Courseware, but Curtis Wong at Microsoft Research has created a rather ground-breaking project called Tuva - well worth a visit, especially if you share my appreciation for Richard Feynman. I don't think this is as expensive as everyone makes it out to be. Plus there are many organizations that would happily lend assistance to school systems that wished to implement this.
2. Capacity for all students to receive and consume lectures at home - this is more contentious. Throwing out the trust issue (kids won't do the work), which I believe is spurious and can be overcome, this is also the expensive part. Every student will require their own device to access lectures (could be as simple as a mobile phone), and the bandwidth to download them. Again - this is not a complex problem, but merely a costly one. I've talked about an adult equivalent of this here, I think the opportunity and impact is even greater for children.
3. Incumbents' willingness to change - there are four players involved (besides the students) and each is a big hairy issue. Are teachers and administrators willing to change? Are their unions open to encouraging this type of approach? Will parents (voters) agree to this idea? Does anyone have the cojones to pilot this for a whole school system?

Does it affect pedagogy? Yes. Does it require a new set of teaching skills? Hopefully not - my presumption is that teachers sought this scenario when they chose the profession. Does curriculum need to change? It could - for example, rather than streaming full 50-minute lectures, try ~10 minute "lecturelets" that are aggregated into lessons. One advantage of the inverted model is that the teacher and the lecturer don't have to be the same person. If your state had a standard curriculum, you could record the 4-5 best lecturers in your state, and then have that "best of the best" set of lectures be your streaming library; this library could be updated every two or three years to keep it fresh. The in-class teachers' role becomes more guide on the side.

The other advantage of this lecture/lecturelet model is that students can replay them to clarify understanding and review prior to exams. It allows them to learn in a much more self-directed way.

The issue with this model - will all students actually watch the lectures? No. But how is this different from today? I have observed a number of primary and secondary school classes, and can say with certainty that despite physically being in the room, not every student was really in the room. Moreover, not every student actually did their homework. Bet you're surprised to read that!

One other thing - when surveyed most teachers say that keeping students engaged while in the class is difficult. That doesn't surprise me given that most of the time is spent lecturing. This approach changes that - it puts the teacher in the role of actually working with the students to together internalize, understand and demonstrate the material. And I bet engaged students are more likely to watch lectures at home too.

I would change the approach to assignments - it's not about kids being head's down, answering questions, but rather about a discussion with problem solving, team exercises, lab work, etc. I'm not sure if assessments would need to change (they might), but I think the grading breakdown should - class participation and activity must now be at least 50% of the student's grade.

The data shows that time-on-task helps performance, that it is possible to learn from steaming lectures, and that keeping students engaged is a challenge for teachers. Inverted classrooms could be an answer.

I would really like to see a sizable school district or maybe a whole State give inverted classrooms a try. I think it has incredible potential, and might actually transform learning in a way we've never seen before. Perhaps this is what President Obama and Secretary Duncan should provoke with their Race to the Top program.

 

commodity U

In the words of Wayne Gretzky the best hockey player ever, "a good player skates to where the puck is, a great player skates to where the puck will be."

Reading Seth Godin's recent post about abundance and scarcity, there is no doubt that winning is about altering the model, redefining the game so that it favors your "home-field advantage" vs. anyone else's. History is littered with examples of things that were once special, expensive and sought after, but are now commodity. From air travel to televisions to mobile phones to personal computers, value diminishes as innovation takes over or as Seth put it, we move from scarcity to abundance.

The mark of a great organization is its ability to anticipate the next disruption (where the puck will be) and either be the authors of it, or redesign to obviate a competitive threat altogether. Organizations that sustain preeminence do so because they understand that being entrenched in their past successes is the surest path to future failure. It's not easy; they face phrases like "old school" or "back in the old days" or "we've done it that way forever" and have to overcome that tendency to stay in the past where it's comfortable.

The communication revolution has felled many seemingly iconic "incumbent" organizations and even entire industries. Perhaps they failed to grasp the implications of the democratization of publish, access, and more critically, connect. Sadly, some also fail to realize that the "hold" they might have on a market is wavering as the demand for their unique "thing" dissipates.

There is one industry that for the longest time has managed to subvert the forces of change, and stay true to the old ways - higher education. They've historically prioritized faculty over the students or rarely paid attention to teaching quality (how many professors did you have that had any training or any skill as teachers?). As long as they were the accreditation gatekeeper, and were able to attract funding from public and private sources, the students were secondary, if not tertiary (sorry). The recent economic times have changed things - most universities are now realizing that student "satisfaction" is critical, but only because their cash flow is now so significantly dependent on undergrad tuition - most of the other sources are diminishing.

But this isn't all, conventional universities are facing competition from three other sources:

1. Just like universities complain that high school students aren't prepared when they graduate, employers must also train graduates before they're ready to contribute - they don't all hit the ground running. Sure they want a trained candidate, but one who has proven skills delivering business value (not academic value). Candidates' other experiences (work, creative, community, teaming, etc.) are sometimes better indicators of work effectiveness. This puts less pressure on student to have to go to a branded school, and more focus on demonstrating their ability to be a valued employee.
2. Online players like  University of Phoenix or Kaplan University are really traditional educators in a new medium, but they're growing by leaps and bounds. They have a more streamlined economic model than traditional schools (less buildings, more bandwidth). Their professors also have to be better teachers given the online medium. Their diplomas are also respected by employers.
3. Have you ever heard of StraighterLine or P2PU? The former is a $99/month all-you-can-eat lectures to earn college credits, and the latter a community/peer learning facility by subject/class. These two organizations may not succeed right away, but IMO there's a "there" there. Sure it'll take another decade to gain a foothold, but I think StraighterLine or Peer2PeerU or similar entities will be the University of Phoenix of the 2010s.

Adding this up, universities are facing funding shortfalls, skeptical students (customers), disruptive business models, and a product that's been devalued in the marketplace. That sounds very much like they're being commoditized. Nobody believed the University of Phoenix would survive, but it has thrived - so much so that others (Kaplan) are copying its model. You even have institutions like Florida Virtual School, which is a very successful Kindergarten-Gr12 school. Once again we see scarcity shifting to abundance; those that try and hold on to the old ways may well be doomed, and those that adapt will survive.

I think this is a good thing; competitive spirits will surface, academia will raise it's head to try and figure out where the puck is going, and everyone (especially the students) will benefit.

dropstop

Eli Broad has put a ton of philanthropic energy and money into education; his foundation's site has some interesting statistics:

1. 1.2 million students drop out of high school every year, 44% of dropouts under 24 are jobless
2. Dropouts pay less taxes (costing the Feds potential revenue), and 65% of US convicts are dropouts
3. It costs $12,956 more per year to house an inmate ($22,600) than educate a student ($9,644)

Assuming dropouts only spend two years in jail over their adult lives, then each dropout costs the government $45,200 + $? in arrest/court costs + $? in lost tax revenue = $100k (guessing $5,000 in arrest/court + $50k in lost taxes). I think the actual costs are much higher, but let's be conservative and say it's just $100,000 per dropout over their lifetime.

This means every year, the American government (American taxpayer actually) takes on an increased burden of $78 billion dollars just from the 65% of dropouts who will become convicts. Just for the dropouts since the year 2000, this burden over their lives is over $700 billion. To put that in context, the annual operating budget for education is $450 billion, which serves almost 50 million students. [See update below.] I couldn't find the data I wanted, but still believe that the burden on society is significant enough to warrant the investment below. 

Why do students drop out of high school? The three most frequently-cited reasons are: family issues ~25% (pregnancy or becoming a parent), employment ~32% (couldn't combine school and work, or needed to get a job), and motivation ~69% (didn't care, no-one pushed them). How about this: two thirds said that they would have tried harder if more was expected from them (i.e. someone cared).

The National Dropout Prevention Center proposes fifteen strategies for improving graduation rates (about twelve too many); if I were to pick three, besides the obvious ones (centralization and teacher improvement), my third pick would be mentorship, or as I proposed, "minternships."

I recall hearing about a Big Brothers Big Sisters study that said effective mentorship requires a minimum 18 month commitment; less can actually do more harm than good. The quality of the mentor is of course also a critical factor. But if you're good and you stick around, the results are strong and positive - the mentee is more likely to complete and graduate school, etc.

Is there a common thread among the three main reasons kids drop out? They're not being counseled well about family planning, birth control, safe sex, etc.; there are no clear options for financial support for children in high school; there's no-one who believes in them, encourages them, and provides them with a model of how to achieve gainful employment. There doesn't seem to be one, but I think we can create it :-).

Let's build a formalized mentorship program (using the Teach for America concept, we could call it "Reach for Americans") where students are able to receive not just counseling and support, but also a stipend (for community service or internships that pays enough to prevent the need to get a job). The mentorship must focus on both family planning/sex ed and of course motivation, support and inspiration to stay in school, graduate and succeed. Let's not make Reach for Americans (or whatever it'd be called) a .org - let's instead make it a .gov, that way it's not beholden to fund-raising, and students can count on the counselors being there always.

The program should begin early - say at age 8, and continue through high school graduation - this would get expensive (but I bet we'd not only improve graduation rates, but also student performance, and hopefully in a generation be able to claim that families were elevating themselves out of poverty because their children were graduating high school (potentially going on to community college or university), and earning a family wage. This organization might also become a student advocacy group, and argue for student rights across the board, but particularly in low-income communities.

The business case is clear, the outcomes could be significant - I think we should pick a state and give it a try.

UPDATE - I realize (thank you everyone for your emails and comments!) that I made a false assumption above - 65% of criminals are dropouts, not 65% of dropouts are criminals. I will correct this this evening.

Resourceful, Fearless, Passionate

Education in America is one of the most maligned institutions around. Everyone believes they have the silver bullet that will fix education once and for all. Off the top of my head and in no particular order, here are ten panaceas (by the way - how can "panacea" have a plural form??):

1. Class size
2. 21st century skills
3. STEM
4. Constructivism
5. Desegregation
6. Standards
7. Instructivism
8. Integrated curriculum
9. 1:1 laptops
10. Increased budgets

The thing Edu-America has done most consistently in the last century is wholeheartedly embrace fads - but like diet cures, with a dismal success rate. I couldn't come up with one example of when any of these has worked over time (sustained success) and at scale. Can you? As with diets, there is no miracle pill that takes no effort, has no side effects and maintains ideal and guilt-free health and fitness.

Ideas like "21st Century learning" freak me out. The nature of life is that things change - today's internet is yesterday's library or bookstore; today's cell phone is yesterday's letter (the kind you mail); today's podcast is yesterday's correspondence course... The only truth is that tomorrow will not be like yesterday. What "21st century" skill would not have been useful in the 18th century when this country was formed?

Mainstream schools today seem like the worst kind of sweatshops. If anyone in the education system needed a union, it's the students. When you find a school whose leadership is the strongest advocate for the students, you find a pretty good place to learn. They don't come at it with isms - that's not the path to greatness.

So what should a student be? How can school contribute to the graduate being more than the freshman?

If I had a child there are three things I'd want them to be - resourceful (find things, learn things, get things done), fearless (never let someone else's lack of imagination or inhibition stop you), and passionate (care about things, and share your ideas). Above these three, I'd want them to be filled with joy.

Shouldn't a school be able to contribute to this, be the place where creativity and exploration happen? Don't you want to be these three things as well?

Deciding what change a school system needs doesn't IMHO begin with standards or curricula or tests (and certainly not isms) - it begins by first describing what we want ourselves to be - making that our mission statement and building something that manifests that destiny. If you start with, say "we need more nerds," you're destined to fail as we've proven time and time again.

forests and trees

If you're in a position of power, chances are you want to hang on to it. If you're in a position of power and you don't have to do a lot stay there, you like it even more; and if you've had it this way for years, complacency has set in as well. What's your natural reaction if someone or something challenges that power? Do you welcome change or do you hunker down, decry it, and marshal your resources to defend because you believe the status quo is righteous and "they" are just plain wrong? 

Despite all resistance, there are things beyond your control - some examples that come to mind include Open Source to Microsoft; bad carbs and saturated fats to fast food restaurants; cell phones in children's hands to teachers, etc. In the first case, the company still rails against their competition but now demonstrates interoperability and even distributes open source software of its own. In the second case, most fast food companies have seen the future and shifted to healthier options.

In the third case, most schools, teachers and unions continue to passionately resist change; they are adamant about the "right" way to learn, closing the door to Google, Wikipedia, the Internet, cell phones, etc.

Dean Shareski wrote a great blog calling out schools that on the one hand ask for technology in the classroom, but then prevent students from bringing their own tech to school because it would erode "the traditional education model." David Warlick wrote teacher shock about students who aren't being taught about the world around them.  Chris Lehmann also wrote a great post about a presentation to the FCC on the role of teachers in the new world of teaching.

A couple of months ago, I wrote that teachers and schools are the gatekeepers to information and accreditation, but it is changing rapidly - their hold on information is all but gone, and the value of their accreditation is diminishing as quality and relevance wane. Despite this, the incumbents remain vigilant in their fight to "control" the classroom in the name of true learning and status quo.

Dean, David and Chris are heroically pushing their fellow educators to shirk the past and embrace technology as an opportunity to transform education from the inside vs. resist and be done unto by external forces. In the business world, an apt metaphor is: "if someone's going to eat your lunch, it may as well be you, even if you have to cannibalize an existing revenue stream to do it."

The "Resistance" has powerful weapons - tenure, the political power of unions, a massive and highly distributed bureaucracy, and low self-esteem resulting from being at siege for so long. Aikido masters teach their students to blend with their opponents' motion and redirect the force to a more advantageous outcome. I think the Education community can do the same.

Blend

I'd argue for consistency and consolidation of administration across the country. Imagine how much money and energy it would save if there was one education standard mapped to one set of curriculum? The lesson plans should be at the discretion of schools and teachers, but should incorporate the use of advanced concepts like computers, calculators and cell phones - this is their biggest compromise, but look what they get in return (one standard, one curriculum).

Redirect

Take all the savings from the rationalization and invest it in increased pay and benefits for teachers.

Gain Advantageous Outcome

Improve and equalize the education service provided to every student in the country, grow teacher pay, hopefully improve student outcomes, do it without increasing the budget for education in the country, look like heroes, and get paid.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? I doubt it - this is a classic case where the Resistance is stuck in the trees and can't see the forest.

nerd-up!

There's a conversation happening between luminaries in American industry, major players in the American philanthropic scene, leaders in the American education system, and some very senior and "in-the-know" people in the state and federal governments to figure out ways to grow the number of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)-skilled graduates in the United States. Specifically, there aren't enough students in elementary and high school with an interest in STEM and there aren't enough university graduates in STEM to fill current and future open positions.

Let me start by saying that I don't believe in isolating any one (or one set of) disciplines - good learning must be holistic and serve the complete child. I can't learn science well and sacrifice communications skills (reading, writing, speaking, etc.); I can't learn engineering well and sacrifice creativity (music, sculpting, painting, etc.); I can't learn any STEM discipline without a good (really good) sense of art and crafts (carpentry, etc.).

Making this about one and not the other creates a bifurcation of the education system that is wrong and unfair. My good friend Larry has decided he'll focus his schools on STEAM for this very reason (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) - I could agree more + I love the idea of steAm:-)!!!

How about this:

Overarching goal: every student must achieve their greatest academic potential.

STEM-focused goal: America will double the number of American-educated, successful STEM employees by 2020.

Situation:

• The forecast for STEM jobs in ten years is almost double the current population of STEM employees (i.e. at least 80% growth in jobs in 10 years)
• American junior and high school students drop out of STEM disciplines at alarming rates
• Graduates in general are weak in STEM basics irrespective of major
• Students are daunted by the sciences, and aren't captivated by how interesting (and well-paid) jobs in the sciences can be; it's also noteworthy that students normally decide (explicitly or implicitly) an interest in STEM before they reach grade 7
• Employers have done an abysmal job of engaging students and compelling them with opportunities in their organizations
• Philanthropy alone cannot sustain any major social (or other) change (it's incredible at sparking things, but it's not forever)
• In the rest of the world, families and institutions value STEM graduates tremendously; students are encouraged by their peers, families, employers, etc. to get in that game, and get some of that coin; and the results in these countries (like Korea for example) are outstanding, and at a lower cost-per-student than America

Truths:

• Employers are motivated by the following: making money, hiring the best talent, looking good (image) - let's not waste time on any other incentives - help them with these three and you win, everything else is crap
• Students are motivated by the following: getting laid, making money, looking good - let's not waste time on any other incentives - help them with these three and you win - everything else is crap
• Parents are motivated by the following: getting the kids gainfully-employed, becoming burden-free empty-nesters, being financially solvent - ibid
• Teachers & Administrators are motivated by the following: being employed, teaching students, preserving status quo - ibid
• Governments are motivated by the following: getting elected, being perceived as doing good, getting re-elected - ibid

If we want all schools to improve their curriculum and performance, the most sustainable way to do this, is to get the parents (voters) to demand it and expect it. If you want scale and sustainability, this is the ONLY way to do it. If you can achieve this, the governing bodies who seek reelection will find a way to make it happen, and I argue, make it happen without additional funds.

This is a marketing problem - if the demand is created, and elected stakeholders start feeling it from their constituents, outcomes will occur.

Some might think this trivializes the problem, but I've never heard of organized ingenuity (seems like an oxymoron), or broad, sustained, grassroots change (outside of declarations of war or the like) happening just because one person (irrespective of how charismatic, powerful or visible they are) said it should.

The real goal is to make STEM sexy (dare I say: "STEAMy" = Science + Technology + Engineering + Art + Math = yeah baby!).

Sustained, societal change requires a broad from the bottom-up movement that changes culture and expectations.

Solution:

I think we need to create a whole new concept and movement in America - I'm calling it "MInternship" - a combination of mentoring and internships.

Today, most American STEM firms get R&D tax credits for doing all that nerd stuff. I want to change the rule for getting the tax credits. From now on (beginning with the 2010 tax year), in order to qualify for any R&D tax credits, 100% of your R&D staff must mentor a student in grades 6-12. Each mentee must also intern in your organization for at least one week during the school year (not in one go, plus it counts as community service for the student), and optionally for an additional two weeks during the summer break - paid experience.

But please let's not make this exclusive to STEM - why not open this up to all industries - if you want your R&D or operating tax credits, this is the new cost of doing business - involve the future in the present.

It is an amazing opportunity for employers to reach out, identify and nurture stars, eventually hire them, and of course get those tax credits. It's huge for students because they get to be engaged in reality, identify with people who are doing great work, learn, and realize that this could be their vocation.

We marry this with a marketing campaign where we showcase and applaud nerds (Iron Man and Hulk are two pretty cool nerds, and both got laid (well Hulk almost did)!), with creative uses of media - targeting both parents and students. This campaign is a myth-busters campaign - we want everyone to know that nerd-smarts are absolutely attainable irrespective of gender, demographics, whatever; and we especially want everyone to know that nerds get paid really well, and better on average than other professions.

This marketing campaign has to show parents how important it is for them to focus on their children's academic time as an investment in independence, and how a great education is the key to being a successful empty-nester.

Result:

It will take some time - say 5-6 years, but if done right, this is a sustained and totally scalable approach to growing the American nerd (and otherwise) population - by creating a desire in the American ethos for a better education that is more closely connected to employment. We are also addressing the needs of each of the audiences identified above.

The problem with it is that it doesn't fit well with bureaucrats and politicians because it doesn't demonstrate direct and substantive results in the first year. (Though I'd challenge you to name five government programs that have.) But the key is to find answers that will be pervasive and live for a long time.

It will also be daunting because it's whacky, there were no committees formed, we didn't hire expensive consultants, and there were no 500-page PowerPoint presentations developed that demonstrated blah, blah, blah.

Let's hope that that group of people above will come to a dramatic and divergent conclusion, rather than live up to a most primo nerd (Einstein)'s definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

tinkering

My good friend Larry pointed me to a fantastic presentation by John Seely Brown on tinkering. The ten minutes you invest in listening to John is well worth it.

Where to begin. First - I think back to times I'd spend with my father, fixing his car, or an appliance, or building something (he is a tinkerer:-)), and how I osmotically learned about machinery or design, and most importantly, how I learned to decompose a problem and then solve it bit by bit until it was complete.

This approach also taught me to be bold. I can't overstate this - when you are working on a problem beside someone whom you trust and who knows more, you are more likely to try things because you know s/he is there to help/rescue/fix you if something goes wrong. When you're learning alone or in a typical classroom setting this type of "support" might not be available for two reasons - creativity and exploration is generally discouraged (a crime IMO), and often the teacher or tutor is dealing with too many students to actually be there at the precise time the one child is at the point of trying something.

As I've gotten older, I'm emboldened (because I learned how to "fix on the fly") to the point where I can now explore, experiment and create, and actually enjoy it! This is how we will build the leaders of tomorrow, by giving them the ability and confidence to do things, to try things, and to seek the joy of learning, and sharing.

"Playing with Knowledge"

I love this phrase. The idea of create, reflect and share is very familiar. About a month ago, this same "Larry" and I had breakfast together and talked about many things, including the failure of standards in learning. During that conversation, he described his view of learning - observation, reflection, documentation, exhibition. I know that Larry and John are two peas in a pod on this:)! The share/exhibition aspect can't be overlooked, whether it is in a gallery, a school hallway, or teaching another student (as John suggests), learning is cemented during this process - yet, the education system today rarely offers students this opportunity, favoring regurgitation instead (another crime IMO).

This process of continuous learning and teaching is crucial. When Einstein (thanks Larry:)) spoke these words, he was talking about discovery, which I see as implicit and tied into the learning process above, and brought to life through exhibition.

Exhibition has another aspect - it requires creation - often physical and tangible creation. The creation process enables us to evolve to not just a way of learning and teaching, but also a way of improving. When work in progress is shared (as my father did with me), we were both able to improve it, I as the observer might have had an idea that my father as constructor didn't and after some discussion and experimentation, who knows, maybe together, we created something better, just because we shared.

But we did more than share, we critiqued each others efforts as well, not maliciously or judgmentally, but productively. Building the skill to do that and having the strength to accept it is so fundamental in school, because let's face it, it's certainly there (positive and negative) in real life.

I wish our public school system were bold enough to embrace this approach. The possibilities for its graduates would be limitless.

This blog is one way in which I tinker - it results from my observations of the world; how I reflect (and synthesize) what I see; an articulation; and then my favorite part - the exhibition, where when shared, I have the pleasure of learning from others (you) through their (your) willingness to share.

Thank you.

co-creating futures

Like David Warlick, I had not read this wonderful Chinese quote before:

If you are thinking a year ahead - plant seeds;
If you are thinking 10 years ahead - plant a tree;
If you are thinking 100 years ahead - educate the people

In the next breath I read Dean Sharesky's latest posting about how the book destroyed the community. Then I remembered Scott McLeod's recent post on what students want in an e-textbook - see the graphic on the right.

Together, these three are a most powerful argument. The first sets the context - it speaks of the power of education and its impact on the destiny of a people. The second refers to a predisposition (perhaps a desire to live in the past) that the way they learned something or did something is superior to what's available now or what happens now. The third speaks to what the current student generation wants in order to successfully shape its destiny and create the best tomorrow (and today) possible.

Dean has built a persuasive "business case" to rethink the nature and role of traditional paper books, and their real implications. I must admit I had never thought of books as an anti-community catalyst, though it's hard to argue the point given Dean's post. Moreover it also opens up the question of whether a traditional book is even the best way to read.

I love books and read as much as I can, but surely there are better ways to enrich the conversation? There is an argument that a book sparks the imagination and helps create a more vivid experience and impression of the author's story. I would normally agree, but then I look at how my good friend Clyde Ford has incorporated an enriched geo-spatial dimension in the e-experience of his latest book Precious Cargo; and now believe that this is actually a much better, more vivid, and imagination-sparking approach to reading.

There is a tendency to view technology as an anti-social medium. But in talking with Clyde, I know his vision is for adults and children alike to interact with his book. To learn virtually first-hand about the places his characters traveled, visualize, annotate, share their impressions and experiences, and ideally be inspired to show off their own world (both real and imagined) using similar (or what the heck, altogether different!) tools and techniques. He believes that this is a way to spark a broader embracing of literariness, literature and self-expression. I agree.

I also think it's a way to evolve the mainstream definition of literature and expression, and maybe even learning. If mashups were one starting point for this journey, why not expand the idea and open books up to the same capability? Might that inspire more people to read and express? Might it inspire deeper learning and understanding? If greater learning occurs through the process of teaching, then I think so.

Talking of self-expression, Scott has pointed us to a fantastic analysis that shows what students want in order to become better learners.

Participation creates vestedness - if students participate in the design and potentially creation of their texts, then don't we get better results? If people in general are able to participate in the consumption (and creation) of content, don't we get improved appreciation of that content?

Isn't that the ideal outcome?

fallacious panacea

The world of education is complex, nuanced, fraught with incumbency, and a worst-case scenario for its stakeholders because unlike say astrophysics, everyone feels justified in claiming domain expertise because they went to school or have kids who are now in school.

So when new ideas are proffered, it's very easy to jump on the bandwagon with conviction; be dismissive with conviction; or find effective ways to impede change with conviction. Sadly the last has the most "authority" and most resonant effect - the first two are just words.

I came across three readables this morning. First - Andrew Rotherham's pointer to the Moskowitz-Weingarten debate on Harlem charter schools vs. the AFT. Second, David Warlick's post on a response to this May 2007 article in the New York Times on the failure of 1:1 school laptop initiatives. Third - Mike Hourahine's post on how IT leaders can be an inhibitor to technology usage in education.

The debate was interesting, at issue is how a top-down union negotiating approach can lead to slow-downs at the school or class level, and provide a shield for teachers to be less accountable and have room to "just say no" to change. The union prefers the status quo, but did offer the olive branch of creating a special contract for charter schools, which I think might be really interesting, and a potential camel's nose under the tent opportunity.

The NY Times article damns 1:1 laptop initiatives in schools because they're seen to be ineffective (no differentiated learning outcomes), too expensive (initial and ongoing costs), and result only in bandwidth availability problems (excessive porn surfing). Jeff Utecht's response to this is a great read and enumerates some of the things that also occurred to me as I read the NY Times article.

Mike Hourahine (presently the CIO for Appleby College in Oakville, Ontario) advocates that trust and freedom don't result in widespread anarchy and prolific porn surfing in schools, and that CIOs should instead be much more open to change, know what their schools really need, and what teachers and students are really doing, vs. being the perpetual naysayer.

When something new is proposed for education, everyone has an opinion, most have a visceral reaction, and everyone feels compelled express themselves. But to Jeff's point, few if any take a strategic view, and in my view, apply discipline to the questions of what, why and how:

• What is our overarching mission? Achieve quantum improvement in learning outcomes for all students.
• Why will this help us get there sooner? It can allow broader access, and deeper and richer understanding and application of the concepts.
• How will we ensure success? By integrating this within learning, adapting the pedagogy, curriculum and assessments to account for this change, ensuring adequate teacher professional development and preparation time to make the change worthwhile, and adjusting our benchmarks accordingly.

The what/why/how is not specific to laptops, it is about any change (it could be new text books, a new cafeteria menu, new crossing guard uniforms, whatever). But if the system and its people are bent on preserving the status quo (which is why "why" is so critical), then no matter how great the potential is, any success is purely accidental.

Out of the gate, 1:1 laptops were burdened with high expectations and very little preparation. Given this, the best case outcome was simple mechanization (from slate to blackboard to whiteboard to PowerPoint), no change to learning, just a slight improvement in process. There was no alteration of curriculum, teaching or assessments to account for the laptops, it was just thrown into the schools.

Technology has the potential to cost-effectively allow more people access to compelling content in a form that is best suited to their learning style. I think those who push it away are doing it for the wrong reasons, just as those that advocate it without a plan are doing it for the wrong reasons.

But the big failure was even more critical - the addition of computers came with no specific expectation of improved performance for the school, teachers or students. We all know that we are what we measure, if you don't expect improvement and raise the bar, you will not see better results. If instead they said - "we are investing $X in equipment and process change, which is Y% of our school budget, and we expect Z% improvement in learning outcomes." Even if Z was a small number, people would have rallied around it and tried to achieve or exceed expectations.

We must involve students (the customer), learn how they interact with their world today, understand how they learn, what they like, and incorporate that in the teaching process. We should recognize that no tool is a panacea, that open-minded, passionate and creative teachers will trump any technology, and that no technology will overcome a closed, uncaring, and tired teacher. Finally, we should be prepared to adapt to new tools as students evolve, 'cause they will, and we should be prepared.

ability, trust and chemistry

Dean Shareski wrote a fantastic open letter to his students - I'm convinced the majority of teachers would wholeheartedly agree with him - it, plus the comments are worth a quick read.

I bet that most teachers would LOVE to embrace the ideas that Dean espoused, flaunt the arbitrary grading requirement, and bemoan the fact that graduating today proves only that you were able to successfully navigate the school system during your twelve year journey.

I also had this recent conversation with Tony Wagner where we talked about his book and the survival skills students should be developing through school. Again, there was violent agreement about the rightness of this, and like Dean's post, there was virtual unanimity that this is precisely the stuff our children should be learning in school - grades be damned - we want our children to be equipped for the real world!

Finally, David Warlick reacted to US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's view that to compete with India & China, we should teach school six days/week, eleven months/year by suggesting that we just put them all in jail. Judging from the flurry of comments on David's blog, there's even more violent agreement here:)!

So - what's really harshing on our collective mellow??? I think it has nothing to do with what happens in school, but everything to do with the the world outside school.

Here are some hurdles students must overcome to call their learning a success:

• Parents - who at the end of the day still focus on the grade/GPA and relative performance of their child(ren) - parents it seems are more competitive than students
• Universities/colleges - who still filter students largely based on grades or SAT
• Employers - who still prefer students that went to the "right" schools, ranked higher or achieved better grades

Until these three alter their behavior, there is really no way for the public primary/secondary school system to move away from what Dean, Tony and David railed against. The measure of a child's performance during school should be much more about their best outcome and less about arbitrary standardized assessments or grades.

It is rare that academic achievement is the only determinant of workplace success - there are so many other factors that go into it. I wonder whether the hiring managers of tomorrow will get sucked into the same morass that prevails today, or whether they will be able to rise above it and realize that looking at the whole person (attitude, team spirit, integrity, ability, passion, tenacity, intellect, academic proficiency) and their complete portfolio of "work" is so much more critical to the hiring process.

During informational interviews for prospective employees who might be working for me, I review the three things I look for - ability (can you get the job done?), trust (will you trust us, can we trust you?), and chemistry (will you be a part of our family and make us better?). Of these the first is how you get through the door and into the interview process in the first place - it is the easiest to judge. The second and third are what our team will evaluate when we meet with you, these are incredibly difficult to discern, but I trust our team's judgment and instincts.

It is really critical for us to get it right, and when we do, the team/family is better, and our ability to achieve greatness is strengthened. I've never cared whether a candidate went to a "good" school, and have never checked their grades.

But if it's the right person for our team, we are destined for success.

the target audience

Most rapid successes in the commercial world come from people who built something that they themselves would use, knowing (or hoping) that there were many others out there like them who would be similarly compelled. Their second advantage came from knowing themselves, and knowing where they'd go to shop for something like this, and how much they'd be willing to spend on it - thus was formed their marketing strategy.

But then the plague of success hits - they get bigger, hire more people, get an MBA intern. and fall into the trap of PowerPoint, market evaluation, quantitative and qualitative analyses, projections, focus groups, etc., and all of a sudden ideation and marketing become a process-laden mechanism that has its own definition of success and failure, which may or may not correlate to actual business success.

At this point, it's hard to identify that original company, its original passion and commitment to the audience, etc. At this point, things like Seth Godin's sugar-coated corporate speak emerge. Why? Because MBAs and lawyers and HR people get involved, and marketing becomes data-driven, lawsuit-proof, politically-correct "customer engagement tool" vs. the process of authentically and creatively driving demand to capacity.

This organization must get out of its strategic entrenchment and sense, respond and adapt. It must focus on what matters most, their knowledge and intimate understanding of their audience, its needs, its passions, and what the customer will pay for. They can do this by recapturing that which started them off on a path to success in the first place.

What if you didn't have that first-hand knowledge? Pete Reilly spoke of the need for new paradigms this week, specifically about why "shared pencil" and "many watching one" models for learning are not very effective, and proposes a new paradigm of "ubiquitous access" based on cloud computing and virtualization. Just two days before this, Scott McLeod wrote about the efficacy of netbooks in schools.

I admire both these gentlemen immensely - they are passionate, proven and respected educators (I am not); and while I wholeheartedly agree with their premise (that a paradigm shift is needed, as is better technology for learning), I worry that they might be missing a critical element.

The target audience.

Students are not adults. They have (as both Pete and Scott have spoken about many times) an absolute affinity with technology. The adult frame of reference is different, and the adult's filter is different, adults are not children.

The customer of a school system is the student. Like Google's advertising model, the students don't pay for the service, but if they aren't achieving the right outcomes, the funding/ads will dry up. Proof that the education system hasn't internalized this - "no child left behind," "education reform," abysmal graduation rates, etc.

What do students want? A friend was telling me recently that he bought his 14-year-old son an iPod Touch and an Acer Ferrari 1100 laptop. The former costs roughly a tenth of the latter. One day he walked in on his son doing homework with his Touch while the Ferrari sat, closed and untouched. Dad asked Son why he wasn't using the laptop (bigger screen, keyboard, faster, etc.), and Son said he was fine as-is. Dad then asked Son if he'd be good without the laptop altogether, and after a pause to think about it, Son said "yes." Dad took the laptop away Son hasn't yet asked for it.

I think Pete and Scott ought to reflect on the real needs of the customer. "Ubiquitous access" today is about mobile devices that the students already have or can get easily and cheaply. It's about schools and educators opening their minds to the idea that the customer and hence the target audience is not people like them. Students' use of technology is dramatically different from adults. Tomorrow it will change again.

The paradigm of teaching will need to adapt to the requirements and expectations of its customers, and engage them in their context. Most project-based learning schools already do this. What's more, in this new world, schools may have to re-think certain concepts - preventing text messaging (and the use of mobile phones) because it looks like "cheating" might be replaced with encouraging the use of text/mobile because it is teamwork. But as an adult, I'm sure this is already so last year...

elemental learning

I received an email from Steven Volk a few days ago - he's a professor of education at Northeastern Illinois University who wrote an article entitled Why Go To School? In it, he speaks first on how today's schools treat students like widgets in a factory and are totally devoid of joy. Steven goes on to enumerate and describe the eleven elements that he believes are necessary for schools to do justice to their students:

1. Self; caring and empathy; peace and nonviolence; money, family, food, and happiness
2. Social responsibility; global awareness; environmental literacy; multicultural community; media literacy
3. A love for learning; creativity and imagination

This (with my ordering of his elements) makes for an interesting framing of what schools should teach. Makes a lot of sense.

School must provide a child with the ability to develop and build the atoms they will need to shape the molecules that will comprise their life. There are two kinds of atoms - basic and nuanced. The basics I've talked about before: the capacity to find information and sift through it; the ability to distill it into insight (which requires an understanding of the basics); and the skill to persuasively communicate new ideas. And the nuanced: we must help students know and embrace who they are; know and embrace the people and world around them as their own; and seek and desire the joy of learning and the pleasure of creating.

Let's say we make progress, and our high schools are able to graduate students with anything remotely resembling these atoms, what do we think will happen next? I ask because I also read this amazing article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a nutshell, it says that the advent of the Internet led (albeit with a longer fuse than anticipated) directly to the demise of newspapers. It goes on to say that universities may well suffer the same fate, quoting one of my heroes:

Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. ... Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Peter Drucker, 1997

I totally agree. Tuition fees have risen dramatically, there is little oversight or cost control in the system (compared to a typical corporation), many professors are reluctant teachers, and in a model that celebrates anarchy (aka academic freedom), the concept of customer-centricity is largely foreign (exceptions include University of Phoenix, and it's peers). But this isn't their real problem.

Their real problem is that students entering high schools today are completely comfortable learning via iTunes U, or listening to Professor Walter Lewin's brilliant lectures at MIT Open Courseware. They may not all need formal university lectures to learn. Already university students increasingly attend electronic lectures. And when these students graduate, they will not look askance at students whose lecture bias was more electronic than personal. So the real problem will be compounded by the fact that employers a decade from now may be less interested in the academic accreditation when presented with a prospective candidate's e-portfolio, which so eloquently and persuasively demonstrates her work to-date.

It is then that the elements of learning will have reconstituted themselves. If the K-12 school system does its job well, and its graduates have been prepared with the atoms they need to create the molecules they will be, universities may end up holding a very different role in our society than they do now.

Perhaps this won't take a mere decade, and of course many universities will remain strong, but I believe the premise that is their undergrad cash cow will change dramatically. The elements of learning tomorrow will be very different from today. It's time to start preparing for this. University leaders should begin the retooling process now, or some may follow in the path of many of today's newspapers.

It's time to begin (re)creating the elements of higher learning.

Drawing the line

I subscribe to eSchool News, and find most of their issues have something of interest, but I never expected to see this subject line: eSN Today: Porn charges for 'sexting' stir debate in my inbox!

Sexting is where teenagers use their cell phones to take and distribute nude pictures of themselves. And because there are laws governing the distribution of obscene materials, prosecutors are charging teenagers for both sending and receiving these materials. The charges can include felony obscenity or child pornography, and might result adding "sex offender" to the person's hopefully confidential juvenile record.

First, based on this search, I had no idea this was such a big thing (375k results). Second, it never occurred to me that a minor distributing pictures of themselves could constitute child pornography, though it does make sense (separating the two acts - taking the picture, and distributing it). Third, how does a kid get arrested for receiving a text message?  Finally, it got me thinking about the approach that officials have taken to discourage it, and how well similar approaches have worked for other "bad acts."

It has generally been difficult for the adults to effectively police the kids, or find the right deterrent. More often than not, the attention given to the act (and the adults' negative views) results in more frequent occurrences that are more effectively hidden from older eyes. The risk only adds to the allure.

Where to draw the line? It is illegal for minors to drink, smoke, drive, and I'm sure many other things. It is also illegal for minors to have consensual sex.

How effective have these laws been? Do you think that the laws have resulted in deterring these behaviors? Did they stop you?

What's next? Will the police start arresting minors who masturbate and charge them with statutory rape? Will there be a harsher penalty for repeat "offenders"?? Will there be any minors left to roam the malls? What will they do to while away the days in their jail cells? What will all those poor child-molesting priests do? [OK - that last one was in bad taste - apologies.]

Is there a better way? What if we erased the line altogether?

I'm thinking about countries I've visited where there isn't a child drinking problem. In France and Italy for example, adults don't seem to share America's angst. Their minors drink wine at the dining table with the family, and have for generations. Their open-mindedness towards this has not only resulted in this not being an issue, but because children are taught "how to drink" at a young age, and don't view it as a novelty or illicit in any way, there are dramatically less incidents of alcohol abuse in children in these countries vs. the USA.

Let's look at Finland, where most friends and families routinely sauna together. In their culture, it is a faux pas to wear clothing in a sauna. So the naked body has no novelty value for children in Finland - they see it all the time. I'm guessing that sexting is not a problem in Finland.

Now let's look at the potentially horrific societal effects of having a glass of wine with dinner in Italy or France, or sitting naked in a sauna with people of either gender in Finland - wait a minute, there aren't any! The French and Italians do not have higher alcoholism or liver problem rates than Americans. And the Finns don't have higher child pornography or child abuse rates than America!

Maybe it's time for America to erase the lines, before all our teenagers are arrested for felony masturbation.