Category Archives: 21st C Learning

BRAVO Stephen Ritz and Green Bronx Machine! A vivid example of “tis better to give than to receive”

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Need a(nother) vivid, visual, inspiring example of what school could be? Do you have 14 minutes to see that “Tis better to give than to receive?”

BRAVO Stephen Ritz and Green Bronx Machine! (Hat tip to Nikhil Goyal @TalkPolitical for resource suggestion.)

Another piece of “why:” Tis more blessed to give than to receive…and school change

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At bedtime, my two boys, my wife, and I often return to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

For me, the story has always been aspirational. Throughout my life, I hope to grow closer to the end of the spectrum where giving is more valued than receiving. In the book, of course, the boy takes and takes from the tree and his happiness is only temporary and fleeting – it lasts until he needs the next thing…maybe shorter. But the tree finds its happiness and joy from giving, and the tree’s joy seems to be more permanent and long-lasting.

This weekend, as we read The Giving Tree, I was struck by the lessons that this story could teach school. I am constantly amazed by the latest generations’ generosity. As a school principal, I had countless students come to me seeking permission to have a fund raiser for a special cause to help others. I had numerous others want to stage events to make a positive difference in the world. In fact, my school had to create a policy to deal with the number of requests for coordination and organization reasons.

Interestingly, most, if not all, of these special requests existed outside the curriculum. Shouldn’t such giving, and work, and lessoning BE the curriculum? Or at least more of the curriculum?

Schools seems so geared to getting. So much of the fundamental set-up is about what each student gets, as they enroll in math, English, science, history, etc. We send them from class to class to be filled like vessels with departmental knowledge so that they can “get” into a good college and so that they can “get” a good job.

What if school were re-imagined and re-purposed to be about what students can give? What they can contribute to the world now.

This is why I feel so passionately about PBL – project-based learning, problem-based learning, passion-based learning, place-based learning, etc. This is why I love examples like Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School. This is why I feel so strongly about school curricula being more integrated and participatory in design-thinking and problem solving.

This is another piece of why people talk of 21st C education.

Twentieth-century education was modeled on the widget-creating, assembly-line system. Send the product down the line to have parts added and reservoirs filled. It was about 1.0. It was about receiving, like radios taking the signals from the towers.

Twenty-first-century education can be about giving. It is 2.0 and 3.0. Students can be co-creators of systemic improvement in the world – from better design, to water solutions, to energy enhancements, to health improvements, to more powerful robotics, to improved communications tools, to…, to…, to….

Tis better to give than to receive. Let’s facilitate kids “giving an education” instead of just “getting an education.”

Does any of this make any sense?

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Young people today think in terms of fixing the world,…

Young people today think in terms of fixing the world, by making things, and selling them. Selling them is just the necessary end point of the process.

William Deresiewicz, Writer and Critic speaking at CreativeMornings/Portland (*watch the talk)

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Related Posts:

[“A piece of ‘why,'” A piece of ‘what,'” and A piece of ‘how'” are strands of a series on why school needs to change, what about school needs to change, and how schools might navigate the change.]

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A piece of “why:” weaving together three strands of a strong rope for engaging school change

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Strand #1: Tony Wagner as cited in the National Association of Independent School’s 21st Century Imperative…

Tony Wagner from the Harvard Graduate School of Education interviewed over 600 CEOs, asking them the same essential question: “Which qualities will our graduates need in the 21st century for success in college, careers, and citizenship?”

Wagner’s list of Seven Survival Skills is a distillation of the outcomes of these hundreds of interviews and adds validity to the case we are making. They are:

  • Critical Thinking and Problem-solving
  • Collaboration Across Networks and Leading By Influence
  • Agility and Adaptability
  • Initiative and Entrepreneurship
  • Effective Oral and Written Communication
  • Accessing and Analyzing Information
  • Curiosity and Imagination

 The World Has Changed

In The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach The New Survival Skills Our Children Need – and What We Can Do About It, Tony Wagner argues that “in today’s competitive global ‘knowledge economy,’ all students need new skills for college, careers, and citizenship. The failure to give all students these new skills leaves today’s youth – and our country – at an alarming competitive disadvantage. Schools haven’t changed; the world has. And so our schools are not failing. Rather, they are obsolete – even the ones that score best on standardized tests. This is a very different problem requiring an altogether different solution.”

[from NAIS COA “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future”]

Strand #2: Seth Godin – “Stop Stealing Dreams”

6. Changing what we get, because we’ve changed what we need

If school’s function is to create the workers we need to fuel our economy, we need to change school, because the workers we need have changed as well.

The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers.

No longer.

Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.

[from Seth Godin “Stop Stealing Dreams”]

Strand #3: Sir Ken Robinson – “RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms“

NOTE: I highly recommend studying all three of these resources in great depth. Of course, there are countless related resources, as well. ANd there are more pieces to the “why,” such as brain research, technology advancements, world conditions, etc. But if a faculty would commit to studying these three resources as a think tank of sorts, I believe that a group of committed thinkers and doers could reveal and experiment with many of the “whats” and “hows” to make this transformation in education.

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Works Cited:

Godin, Seth. “Stop Stealing Dreams: (what is school for?).” http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/StopStealingDreamsSCREEN.pdf.

Robinson, Ken. “RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.

Witt, Robert and Jean Orvis. “A Guide to Becoming a School of the Future.” National Association of Independent Schools. 2010. http://www.nais.org/files/PDFs/NAISCOASchools.pdf.

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[“A piece of ‘why,'” A piece of ‘what,'” and A piece of ‘how'” are strands of a series on why school needs to change, what about school needs to change, and how schools might navigate the change.]

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  • Nobody’s as Smart as Everybody—Unleashing Individual Brilliance and Aligning Collective Genius | Management Innovation eXchange

    “Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.”

    tags: management innovation exchange Mutual Fun UnbouBrainFood #MustRead

    • Rite-Solutions created a state-of-the-art “innovation engine” designed to provoke and align individual brilliance toward collective genius. The goal was to connect on an emotional level where all employees are entrusted with the future direction of the company, asked for their opinions, listened to, and rewarded for successful ideas. Our quest is for each employee to feel “more relevant” and turn that relevance into forward motion toward a future state that we all create.

    • You start to get the message Day One. At 9am on your first day of work we throw you a birthday party—with wrapped presents, cake and all kinds of fun. That morning, your family gets the “welcome wagon”—flowers, gifts and a personal note from me and Joe, delivered at home.

      Why do we give people a party when they’re leaving a company?  That’s not the time to make them feel important! How do we make people feel important the moment they join a company? The idea behind the birthday party is that you’ve arrived at a new place where you belong, you were expected, and you are important.

      Even better, when  you go to your birthday party, everyone in the room has a lot of different reasons to relate to you. New recruits fill out a “birth certificate,” which details their hobbies, travel experiences, family, schooling, pets, military service, and surprising facts—like a hobby of growing giant pumpkins or playing a particular instrument..

      • Love this idea of throwing people a party when they START at a school, not when they leave!

  • Innovation Excellence | DNA of a 21st Century Educator

    tags: innovation dna 21st century educator educator Brainfood #MustRead

  • A Crash Course in Innovation | Edutopia

    tags: innovation design design thinking edutopia Boss #MustRead schools of the future

    • At capacity, SCS will serve 900 students in grades 6-12. Teens learn alongside college role models who are preparing for careers in creative professions.
      • Great synergy possible among 6-12 teens and college students studying for careers in creative professions. Interesting model of Ken Robinson’s “not grouping by date of manufacture.”
    • HFLI model emphasizes readiness for college and careers, “but we also want students to become active agents in community redevelopment,”

  • Can Innovation Skills Be Learned? | Edutopia

    tags: Innovation edutopia Wagner #MustRead Mindset

      • Curiosity, which is a habit of asking good questions and a desire to understand more deeply
      • Collaboration, which begins with listening to and learning from others who have perspectives and expertise that are very different from your own
      • Associative or integrative thinking
      • A bias toward action and experimentation
    • But as an educator and a parent, what I find most significant in this list is that it represents a set of skills and habits of mind that can be nurtured, taught and mentored!
    • “Innovative entrepreneurship is not a genetic predisposition, it is an active endeavor.
    • what you have learned to do is more essential
    • But by the time they are 6½ years old, they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.
    • “Creativity is a habit. The problem is that schools sometimes treat it as a bad habit . . . Like any habit, creativity can either be encouraged or discouraged.”

  • The Creative Personality

    tags: creativity #MustRead Psychology Csikszentmihalyi

    • Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
    • Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
    • the convergent and the divergent
      • I wonder…are schools pretty good at the convergent, but relatively negligent of the divergent? If so, could this mean we are scoring a “50” in terms of educating “whole people?”
    • People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying
      • Educational transformation in ways that enhance and amplify the blurring of lines between “school” and “life” seems to be an idea worth pursuing for a lifetime!
    • Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility
    • Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”
      • This paragraph about sculpting and hard work reminds me of “Grit” from Jonah Lehrer’s talk on 99%. Great connection to Drive, Mindset, Talent Code, Element, etc.
    • Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality
    • Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted
    • Creative people are humble and proud at the same time
    • Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping
    • Creative people are both rebellious and conservative
    • In innovation, you have to play a less safe game
    • Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well
    • Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
    • Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable

  • How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity – Harvard Business Review

    tags: pixar creativity leadership Collective creativity #MustRead

    • If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find.

  • The 11 Leadership Secrets You’ve Never Heard About – Forbes

    tags: leadership followers leading following Burk #MustRead

  • Cultural Change That Sticks – Harvard Business Review

    tags: change culture #MustRead

  • Experts & NewBIEs | Bloggers on Project Based Learning: The Common Core is the “what.” PBL is the “how.”

    tags: PBL commoncore CCSS #MustRead

  • Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums | Video on TED.com

    tags: innovation schools of the future TED&TEDx #MustRead

  • Between the By-Road and the Main Road: The Wide Space Between Personalized Learning and Personal Learning is Choice of Action

    tags: personalized personal learning choice action PBL schools of the future #MustRead

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In Mathematics

    tags: CCSS mathematics math PBL projects context #MustRead

    • standards stress not only procedural skill but also conceptual understanding, to make sure students are learning and absorbing the critical information they need to succeed at higher levels – rather than the current practices by which many students learn enough to get by on the next test, but forget it shortly thereafter, only to review again the following year.
    • high school standards call on students to practice applying mathematical ways of thinking to real world issues and challenges
    • develop a depth of understanding and ability to apply mathematics to novel situations
    • high school standards emphasize mathematical modeling, the use of mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, understand them better, and improve decisions
    • “Modeling links classroom mathematics and statistics to everyday life, work, and decision-making. It is the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions. Quantities and their relationships in physical, economic, public policy, social and everyday situations can be modeled using mathematical and statistical methods. When making mathematical models, technology is valuable for varying assumptions, exploring consequences, and comparing predictions with data.”

  • Common Core State Standards Initiative | Key Points In English Language Arts

    tags: CCSS PBL Writing Projects English Language Arts #MustRead

    • range of subjects
    • Research—both short, focused projects (such as those commonly required in the workplace) and longer term in depth research —is emphasized throughout the standards but most prominently in the writing strand since a written analysis and presentation of findings is so often critical.
    • students gain, evaluate, and present increasingly complex information, ideas, and evidence through listening and speaking as well as through media.
    • Formal presentations are one important way such talk occurs, but so is the more informal discussion that takes place as students collaborate to answer questions, build understanding, and solve problems.
    • standards help prepare students for real life experience at college and in 21st century careers

  • What does it mean to be learned? | SmartBlogs SmartBlogs

    tags: learning DavidWarlick #MustRead schools of the future responsive assessment gaming

  • Colleges Awakening to the Opportunities of Data Mining – NYTimes.com

    tags: data data mining assessment predictive colleges #MustRead

  • Social and Emotional Curriculum: Sharing Your Gift | Edutopia

    tags: gift strengths brightspots happiness PBL #MustRead

    • “Happiness comes from giving, not getting . . . to get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy we must scatter it.”
      • This article on sharing your gift seems intimately connected to PBL and the future of schools to me. If classroom work was done more to share gifts, innovation, enhancements and less as just-a-completion-of-an-assignment-only-the-teacher-will-see, then the level of engagement would seem to rise dramatically. The possibility for solutions-oriented education would rise dramatically, too.
    • moving from “me” to “we.”
    • signposts that can mark the way
      • Could these also be some of the signposts for school transformation to a more 21C model?

  • 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020 | MindShift

    tags: future mindshift schools of the future obsolete #MustRead

  • 10 Things in School That Should Be Obsolete | MindShift

    tags: school design learningspaces schools of the future #MustRead

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