Category Archives: 21st C Learning

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  • How To Prepare For The 4th Era of Innovation | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

    tags: innovation design #MustRead brainfood

  • The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown – Harvard Business Review

    tags: leadership clarity paradox #MustRead brain food UnbouBrainFood

    • “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

        

      Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
       Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
       Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
       Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

    • Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.
    • one of the key reasons for these failures was that companies fell into “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”
    • What can we do to avoid the clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:
    • First, use more extreme criteria.
    • Second, ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest.
    • Third, beware of the endowment effect.
    • If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less.

  • The Body and the Classroom: Phenomenology and Online Learning

    Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.

    tags: online learning online_education online education #MustRead universities

    • Massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as those offered by Coursera, are particularly intriguing in that they help democratize education.
    • Still, there is much to be said in defense of the real-world classroom
    • Is there any intrinsic value to being bodily present in the classroom?
    • Students learn not only from engaging with ideas, but also by engaging each other.
    • Online education raises exciting possibilities for universities. MOOCs democratize educational access. But democratic education is also about habituating ourselves to encounter our fellow citizens, to disagree passionately and to tolerate disagreement. Traditional liberal arts classrooms democratize education not in quantitative terms, but in quality of access to Others.

  • The Washington Monthly – The Magazine – The Siege of Academe

    According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.

    tags: education technology disruption university online education online_education #MustRead brainfood

    • According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.
    • The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online.
    • The recent surge of money into higher education startups reflects growing interest in the category.
    • Is the real money to be made, per Marc Andreessen, in eating the existing education industry? Or will it be in providing service to the industry, helping them do what they do better? In terms popularized by Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen, this is the difference between “disruptive” and “sustaining” innovation.
    • So the VC guys and the start-ups look at K-12 and higher education, which between them cost over $1 trillion per year in America, and much more around the world. They see businesses that are organized around communication between people and the exchange of information, two things that are increasingly happening over the Internet. Right now, nearly all of that communication and exchange happens on physical platforms—schools and colleges—that were built a long time ago. A huge amount of money is tied up in labor and business arrangements that depend on things staying that way. How likely are they to stay that way, in the long term? Sure, there are a ton of regulatory protections and political complications tied up in the fact that most education is funded by the taxpayer. As always, the timing would be difficult, and there is as much risk in being too early as too late.
    • To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions,
    • In less than a year, online higher education has gone from the province of downmarket for-profit colleges to being embraced by the most famous universities in the world.
    • We may not know who and we may not know when, but someone is going to write the software that eats higher education.
    • Older models often adapt and endure in significant if less important forms.

  • School Reform for Realists

    tags: school reform strategy business #MustRead Senge UnbouBrainFood brainfood

  • Climate Science as Culture War | Stanford Social Innovation Review

    tags: climate science culture social innovation #MustRead brainfood

    • Today, there is no doubt that a scientific consensus exists on the issue  of climate change
    • And yet a social consensus on climate change does not exist
    • answers to this question can be  found, not from the physical sciences, but from the social science  disciplines of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others.
    • people’s opinions  on this and other complex scientific issues are based on their  prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values—all  of which are heavily influenced by their referent groups and their  individual psychology.
    • We must acknowledge  that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental  issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews, and ideology
      • The debate over school change must also be over culture, world views, and ideology.
    • Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates  with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific  knowledge.
      • I wonder what the analogue is to education and the issue of school transformation? “Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific knowledge.”
    • “logic schism,”  a breakdown in debate in which opposing sides are talking about  completely different cultural issues.

  • No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated – The Answer Sheet – The Washington Post

    tags: algebra STEM #MustRead

    • We can teach people the skills they need if we allow them to choose what interests them and then teach them to predict, evaluate, diagnose, etc., within their area of interest.

  • A Conversation About Big Shifts | Democratizing Knowledge

    tags: School Change Big Shifts NAIS schools of the future #MustRead

  • From STEM to STEAM: Science and Art Go Hand-in-Hand | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

    tags: steam stem #MustRead

  • A List of the World According to the Class of 2016 | NewsFeed | TIME.com

    tags: culture #MustRead

  • 21st Century Schools or 21st Century Learning?

    tags: 21st 21C 21stcenturylearning brainfood #MustRead

  • It’s Time to Re-Think the U.S. Education System – Tammy Erickson – Harvard Business Review

    tags: education brainfood UnbouBrainFood #MustRead schools of the future Change

    • although there are some encouraging signs of change, several major challenges stand out from my ongoing discussions with today’s 11-13 year olds.
    • A disconnect between the way school works and how they function outside school.
    • We are not preparing these kids for the world as it operates today.
    • Boredom with the teacher-centered learning process.
    • Shifting sources of authority.
    • new role for teachers (and parents): that of a learning facilitator and coach, rather than of an authoritative source of information.
    • Growing interest in pragmatic, job-oriented skills.
    • Unease regarding global standing.
    • Thurow argued that the most significant invention in U.S. history was the public education system established in the early days of the industrial revolution.
    • Thurow argues that this unique educational system produced a workforce that was perfectly matched — in both skills and behavior — to the burgeoning needs of the new industrial economy.
    • Students emerging from this system had both the right knowledge (reading, math) to perform the industrial jobs and the right behaviors (punctuality, focus on specific linear tasks) to form an efficient industrial workforce.
    • modeled both on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it: specialization into separate subjects, standardized curricula, conformity, batch processing — by age group. The system was designed to leverage a “lock step” approach over set periods of time and using broadcast delivery methods to prepare students effectively for known jobs.
    • our current approach to education was designed for a different age
    • we all know, most of the jobs of tomorrow will not be industrial jobs.
    • gap between the output of our educational system and the job demands of the current century is enormous — and growing wider.
    • kids intuitively recognize the gap. They’re asking for a change.

  • Cutting the Digital Lifeline and Finding Serenity – NYTimes.com

    tags: nytimes com social media balance #MustRead

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#MustRead Shares (weekly)

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Why-What-How: Being Research-Practice Designers…I Dream a School

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As I venture into my new office each day at Unboundary, I am greeted by these words displayed on a wall:

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
– Eric Hoffer

And this admonition comes from a client workshop we hosted not long ago:

Look with no pre-conceived ideas – let go of wanting to be “the one who knows” which closes the possibility of discovering what you don’t know.

We face dramatic and profound changes in education and schooling, and we need to be working toward what we don’t yet know. In a recent blog post spurred by Diane Ravich’s question, “How would you welcome student teachers to the profession?,” Chris Thinnes responded:

I would say — to these students who have heard the ‘call’ and chosen to embrace the life of the ‘response’ — “Congratulations. You have entered the profession during a time that will be remembered as the most turbulent and transformative in the history of the institution. Once the tireless efforts of impassioned colleagues, educators and activists, have urged the national discourse on education to its apogee, you will help with your daily efforts to reframe a system’s return to its highest ideals: to prepare learners, rather than test takers; to foster citizenship, rather than competition; and to encourage dreamers, rather than drones.
– Chris Thinnes, How Would You Welcome Student Teachers to the Profession? by  on AUGUST 14, 2012

And, in my morning ritual of watching at least one TED talk a day, I viewed “A sense of humor about Afghanistan? Artist Aman Mojadidi shows how.”

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/1539

In the talk, as he briefly yet deeply explored the dynamics of identity, Mojadidi ended this way:

But I do them because I have to, because the geography of self mandates it. That is my burden. What’s yours?

Doesn’t the “geography of self” mandate that we school people – we educators (from the Latin educare, which means to draw out that which is already there) – re-examine our identity and re-commit to our purpose? Many, if not most, people agree that the world is changing at a rapid pace. And as Aran Levasseur stated in his provocative “Does Our Current Education System Support Innovation?,”

The best schools throughout history prepared their students for the social and economic realities of their time.

How are we doing at preparing our students for a future that we can only imagine? Many are discussing the changes that schools must at least be contemplating, if not implementing, should we want to remain relevant leaders for our learners in this changing world – preparing our “students for the social and economic realities of their time” – not our time.

Are we learning as fast as the world is changing?

We educators owe it to the world to be the catalysts and models of learning, not simply deliverers of information that can now be accessed by ways and means that did not exist when our school system was developed in the industrial age.

My burden is to help reform this picture – school as information delivery system:

“A Modern Classroom” by David Lentz, purchased at iStock Photo

Several factors contribute to my strong feelings about the stereotypical picture of “school classroom.”

  1. About 95% of what we know about the brain, we have learned in the last twenty years. Yet many schools have not adjusted significantly. We know that we are out of balance when we compare rows-and-columns-of-desks-learning to the ways in which the brain works best.
  2. Our industrial-age school design was created when information was challenging to obtain. Schools were the clearinghouses for transference of information and knowledge. Classrooms were designed for information 1.0. Essentially, the teachers were radio towers to the students radio receivers. But we are now in a 2.0 and 3.0 world. Information can be accessed easily and ubiquitously. What to DO with information and knowledge, however, is at an all-time premium. What we CREATE and ENHANCE with our knowledge is more critical now. Rows and columns of desks, in which to receive information passively, are not the best means of CREATING, DOING, and ENHANCING.
  3. We should be coaching students through more real-world contexts in order to “Make Learning Whole” (David Perkins). Rows and columns of desks are not the best way to learn to “play the whole game,” to “play out of town,” or to “learn from the team.” (Or for that matter, rows and columns of desks are not the best way to engage the other four out of seven principles that Perkins espouses.)
  4. The world faces a great many challenges, and students today want to contribute to addressing and solving those challenges, problems, and issues. Despite the short-selling that some commit when it comes to young people, the youth of today care far more deeply about the world and its conditions than my generation cared when we were in school. We should be spending less time in rows and columns of desks so that our students can engage with the world and contribute to its improvements…with our guidance as professional educators. School could be more about giving and less about receiving. School could be more real. School could be more authentic. School could enhance civic engagement by utilizing civic engagement.
  5. We are experiencing The Creativity Crisis. We will not solve this crisis by spending our time in schools seated in rows and columns of desks in the proportion of time in which we do so. We can – and should – teach for creativity…across the disciplines.
  6. Will our current proportion of time spent in desks help us reach the aspirations of…Howard Gardner, in 5 Minds for the Future; Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind; Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, in 21st Century Skills (and the list goes on)? They ALL implore us to concentrate more attention on…
    1. the Disciplined Mind, the Synthesizing Mind, the Creating Mind, the Respectful Mind, the Ethical Mind [Gardner];
    2. Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning [Pink];
    3. Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Communication and Collaboration (in addition to the 3 Rs of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic). [Trilling and Fadel]
  7. We should “design for outcomes” (see the TED talk below – “Timothy Prestero: Design for people, not awards“). Are the outcomes we want for our students and learners best achieved by the rows-and-columns-of-desks preponderance?

Are we learning as fast as the world is changing?

How might we re-design school so that we can learn as fast as the world is changing? How might we re-design school so that we can address the seven issues above (and there are more issues than just these seven to address)?

Many assume that the core purpose of a school is to teach the students. What if we have that “not quite right?” Perhaps the core purpose of a school is to be a learning community – a place where we deeply understand learning. If it were so, then I believe that we would continue to educate students well…even better.

So, how might we re-purpose a school to be a learning community?

A First Step to Making a School a Learning Community

Teachers might reconsider their identity – an identity formed from over a hundred years of the rows-and-columns-of-desks stereotype. We teachers should re-invent ourselves to be better blends of researchers and practitioners.

Jennifer de Forest said it better than I can in her “Bridging the Reasearch-Practice Divide: A Call for School-Centered Research,” which appeared in the Spring 2010 edition of Independent School magazine.

Education researchers constantly bemoan teachers as resistant to implementing their findings. At the same time, teachers complain that education research is either too esoteric to be of any use in a real classroom or an exercise in proving the obvious. This persistent research-practice chasm is maintained by both the prosaic details of how and where we work, and by a more profound epistemological schism that cleaves researchers and practitioners into two separate worlds that tend to dismiss the legitimacy of each other’s wisdom. In the former, knowing must at least appear to be systematically built on data; in the latter, authority comes from the practical trial-and-error experience of doing.

This knowing-versus-doing divide is exacerbated by the fact that researchers and practitioners belong to their own organizations, attend separate conferences, read different publications, and, often, speak a different jargon. As a result, despite the efforts of an occasional intrepid translator who traverses these worlds, many good ideas on how to improve schooling stall at the research-practice border where they languish, unshared or forgotten. In addition, the border is littered with missed opportunities for research-practice partnerships that promise to turn good schools into vehicles for the greater good by making lessons from their practice public. Indeed, every school has its own ripe research questions waiting to be plucked for investigation.

This morning, while listening to Dan Pink interview Tom Peters, Pink asked Peters to explain “You are your calendar.” Peters essentially said that there was no sexy explanation. Bottom line – time is what we have, and we become what we spend our time doing. What if we built more research and experimentation time into the school workday? Educators could be both researchers and practitioners. Micro experiments and macro investigations could be occurring all the time.

Of course, we would have to prepare for such a rearrangement of time and work…

  1. Faculties must be provided time and space to develop research questions and processes, and administrators should work tirelessly to provide this time embedded into the school day. Learning is social, and people must be provided the opportunities and possibilities for working in teams. If I did anything right in my nine years as principal, it was merely to tear down the walls that were separating the faculty so that they could meet and work together during the school day.
  2. Faculties must be allowed to fail, as failure is a part of the genuine experimental process. There are few, if any, lab manuals for the type of educational research that I am advocating for in this post. We have to observe-research-make hypotheses-craft experiments-prototype-interatively improve-communicate, communicate, communicate.
  3. Schools must communicate transparently with parents about this approach to schooling – that action research will be built into the workday. It does not mean that our students are guinea pigs. In fact, our students are NOT our products. Our programs, pedagogies, and methods are our products, as well as our processes, and we need to be innovating, improving, and enhancing these approaches – through research and practice. Can anyone prove that our existing methods are the best that we got? If we are to remain unchanged, then the burden of proof should be on the current practitioners. If we are to learn, and grow, and improve, then we must experiment…with clear and inclusive communication with families.
  4. The school organizational model should be re-designed to be more network oriented than hierarchically oriented. I have been writing quite a bit about this lately. I have been researching and considering the possibilities for flattening schools and orchestrating conflict and using practices such as “Mutual Fun” at Rite Solutions. In his decades of research, Jim Collins has encouraged us all to move from “good to great” by doing such things as hedge-hogging, fly-wheeling, and concentrating on who. What if our hedgehog concept in schools was to be the research-practice centers for better education? What if we got the flywheels moving by connecting our best resources – our faculties? What if we concentrated on the who – getting our teachers educators networked?
  5. Schools should bake in the design-thinking process. Here are just “4 Lessons the Classroom Can Learn from the Design Studio.” If we want to learn as fast as the world is changing, we must prototype faster and use iterative failure to improve and enhance our designs. When most school timelines are annually based, we will not see the rate of change that we need. Our cycle must be more adaptable, more flexible, more agile. Design-thinking can help create interior time frames that are faster and quicker so that a year can see much more innovation and advancement in the school setting.

Are we learning as fast as the world is changing?

We could be. We should be. We can. Will we?

What’s In It for The Kids?

Imagine the “trickle down” that could happen with students if our faculty culture were re-oriented in these ways? Our students could utilize similar models and structures in order to explore, research, and improve the world in which they live. Most importantly, the school community could be immersed in processes that provide the frameworks and structures for the world that is coming – we would all be learning to observe, empathize, collaborate, hypothesize, experiment, prototype, revise, re-purpose, re-mix, design, meta-cognate,…so that we could map-make our future. It’s about equipping learners with the tools – the content and the skills – to be creational thinkers and citizen doers.

We should start with ourselves.

It’s about learning.

 

A piece of “what”: Take 15 minutes to read an article and watch a TED talk – if you care anything about creativity, discoverers, and school.

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Questions may be the single most important thing about learning, about school, about nurturing curiosity. If we want creativity to flourish, then we must nurture curiosity in schools.

Is school nurturing questions? How might we experiment with “school” so that we develop the core of curiosity and questioning – of the students, teachers, parents, administrators alike?

Over the weekend, thanks to Zite, I read a fabulous article entitled The Creativity Crisis. It may be one of the most important articles I have ever read. I hesitate to write much on this blog post because I would rather readers spend the time reading the article. In the piece, Bronson and Merryman weave together educational psychology, neuroscience, project-based learning, human development…and hope. Hope bred from motivation which considers how we educate young people. What are we nurturing in young people by the way we are educating them? Do our hopes and needs match our means and habits?

Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day.Why, why, why—sometimes parents just wish it’d stop. Tragically, it does stop. By middle school they’ve pretty much stopped asking. It’s no coincidence that this same time is when student motivation and engagement plummet. They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.

– Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in “The Creativity Crisis,” Newsweek, July 10, 2012, as found on The Daily Beast. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

How might we keep them asking questions! How might we reflect back to them that we are all creatives…all discoverers! We began as such. School should nurture and develop such – for us all.

Are we facilitating the development of new discoverers? How are we balancing time spent in desks and textbooks with time spent exploring, hypothesizing, designing, and experimenting? Are we out of balance in the ways that many schools are operating? Adam Savage, of Mythbusters, sheds some light on the wonders of science and exploration and discovery in his TED talk: “How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries” (and embedded below). How might we re-imagine and re-purpose time in school so that we create the space and atmospheres of exploration and discovery? How might we make school more about getting in the field…couldn’t we flip the field trip? Through whatever means, we must help students understand that they are the discoverers…that they can change the world.

What happens when you look at what the discoverers were thinking about when they made their discoveries it that you understand – they are not so different from us. We are all bags of meat and water. We all start with the same tools.

I love the idea that different branches of science are called fields of study. Most people think of science as a closed black box. In fact, it is an open field. And we are all explorers. The people that made these discoveries just thought a little bit harder about what they were looking at. And they were a little bit more curious. And their curiosity changed the way people thought about the world, and thus it changed the world. They changed the world.

And so can you.

– Adam Savage…6 min, 30 sec mark of 7 min, 30 sec talk

How are you helping to nurture questions, curiosity, exploration, and discovery? If you are not doing so, you are more aligned with the problems than with the solutions.