Sacrifices in the name of U.S. History #DogGoneIt

Posted on December 30, 2012 by boadams1

Did you know that the U.S. military trained suicide bombers in World War II? The living instruments of warfare were dogs. That’s right – dogs. In fact, tens of thousands of people enlisted their family pets to serve in WWII in a program called Dogs for Defense – part of the Canine Corps. The dogs were trained for a number of tasks – to carry ammunition, to attack shooters’ trigger hands across battlefields, and to bust bunkers.

I had heard of Victory Gardens and scrap metal donations in the early 1940s, but I had never learned of the animal sacrifices made during WWII. Until this morning. While walking Lucy today, I listened to This American Life – Episode 480: Animal Sacrifice. In Act 1,

Susan Orlean tells us about the moment America asked untrained household canines to make the ultimate sacrifice: to serve in World War II. Susan talks to Gina Snyder, who remembers being a teenager when her dog Tommy joined the service. And Susan digs into the national archives to learn the fate of other dogs that fought on the front lines. A version of this story appears in Susan’s book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. (20 minutes)

After watching Hachi (briefing on Wikipedia) last night with the family, and because I was listening while walking my faithful companion Lucy, I’m sure the Dogs for Defense story resonated more poignantly with me. But despite my emotional priming, I found the WWII story compelling and interesting in its own right.

Of course, I wondered why I had never heard or learned of Dogs for Defense or the Canine Corps before now. I used to teach seventh graders the subject of U.S. History, and I had never even encountered a hint or a glimpse of this fascinating military effort and civilian sacrifice. I thought the story would make an ideal artifact for the typical middle school history course. I’m feeling a bit of regret that Dogs for Defense was never before in my teacher’s toolbox. From another perspective, though, I am thankful that I found the story in my learner’s toolbox.

It’s fascinating to me what we curate into the curriculum, and it’s equally fascinating to me – maybe more so – what we intentionally and unintentionally curate out of the curriculum. In a content area like history, time is our greatest enemy, I guess. In historical survey courses, many are driven to cover as much history as possible (at a particular altitude), so we skim a surface for as many years as possible. Therefore, a certain degree of depth and a luxury of search-and-discover is sacrificed. What if we let the student learners do more of the curating?

It would be interesting to me to see what middle schoolers would find – through search and discovery – if they were guided to more self-discovery in subjects like U.S. History. I may be admonishing only myself, but I regret not being a more creative facilitator of learning when I was a part of a formalized learning space for U.S. History. I now wish I had served fewer completed meals, and I wish I had allowed more for students finding their own ingredients and recipes. I don’t doubt that we would not have covered as many years of history, but I bet we would have all learned – and retained – so much more.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d make my own sacrifice – giving up my traditional march through the chronological years in order to catalyze more searching, discovering, story finding, and connecting. To do so might even be responding to a higher calling of service to my country … and to the future learners’ world.

School Innovation Teams – Start with Outrospection #WhatIfWeekly #StudentVoice

Posted on December 10, 2012 by boadams1

Education faces a design challenge. From what I know about design challenges, it seems that the best designs begin with intensive stages of immersion and discovery – putting the designers in the positions of chief empathizers.

One of the best examples I know of related to this commitment of being chief empathizers comes from Dan and Chip Heath’s book Switch. The story of Dr. Jerry Sternin harnessing the local wisdom of Vietnamese mothers who were rearing healthy children amidst a malnutrition epidemic stands out to me. Actually, the story inspires me. Dr. Sternin did not swoop in with pre-conceived notions and ready-made solutions. Instead he committed to a process of immersion and discovery to find sustainable, scalable solutions that came from within the community. He leveraged empathy to create a most-likely-to-succeed solution that honored the end users.

Countless other examples come to mind, but I’ll restrain myself and offer only a few here:

When I enrolled in a design-thinking course from IDEO and Design Thinking for Educators, we began with a mini design challenge, and step 1 was to interview someone about their morning commute. “Learn how they feel, what they wish for, what gets in their way. Your job is to ask great questions, listen, and learn. TIP: Don’t be afraid to ask ‘Why?'”
When I participated in Mount Vernon Presbyterian School’s Design Institute, before we began designing our ideal outdoor classroom, we interviewed students. We collected insights from them before we even thought about preparing solutions to our own notions of classroom design.
When Emily Pilloton asked her student designers to imagine a better chicken coop and design it, they started with observing how chickens behave. “In three days, students would get to know their feathered ‘clients’ by observing their behavior. How do they eat? ‘They like pecking out of the straw, not eating from the trough,’ noted Kerron. How do they sleep? ‘They huddle together up in the roosting box,’ said another student. After three days, our students knew far more about chicken behavior than they ever imagined or wanted.”
When Imagining Learning formed to help crowd source ideas for redesigning education, they began with Listening Sessions – for students.
When University of Missouri-Columbia freshman Ankur Singh thought to study standardized testing, he decided to take a semester off of school in order to ask those most affected – the students.

So, for all of the schools facing essential questions of innovation, I am wondering how you are factoring in “immersion and discovery.” How are you building empathy into the design challenges?

When I was a school principal, one of the most valuable things I ever did was to shadow a student every year. For a day, I would partner with a student – most often a sixth grader – and I would trail along beside them and pretend to be a student for a day. I was off limits as a principal because I wanted to be completely immersed in the experience. In the years that I was most committed, I would even do all of the homework assignments that night of the shadow. Often, on blogs like Connected Principals, I read of other administrators engaging in such empathy gathering. Now, I am wondering if schools should not build this process into their regular routines and habits.

Maybe schools need innovation teams. Among other jobs, these innovation teams could commit to shadowing students, interviewing students, observing school days and after-school activities, talking with parents about what family life is like at home after school, etc. I bet devoting just three days a year to such immersion and discovery would yield invaluable insights and empathies. [Why the arbitrary number of three days? Well, if it’s good enough for the chickens in Bertie County, NC, I figured it was a good starting place!]

Our school innovations might improve mightily if we designed with the students’ voices at the core – if we committed to “outrospection.”

Pop-Up Courses, like Pop-Up Restaurants… CHANGEd: What If…Weekly

Posted on December 5, 2012 by boadams1

Pop-up Restaurant

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my wife and I had a date to go see Lincoln. The movie was playing at Atlantic Station in Midtown, so we met up at Atlantic Station for a quick bite to eat before the show.

As we were walking, we noticed a “Pop-Up Restaurant.” I had no idea what a Pop-Up Restaurant was, but this one shared its definition right on the glass of the front door. I also looked it up on Wikipedia – Pop-up Restaurant. This particular Atlanta Pop-Up Restaurant also had it’s own entry online – “New Pop-Up Restaurant Opens In Atlantic Station.”

Well, if you know me, you understand that just about everything I see makes me think of project-based learning and educational innovation. I’ve somewhat trained myself to think, “How could that relate to school innovation?” It’s a sort of game that I play with myself.

So…what if we had Pop-Up Classes at school? What if we created time and space to invite students and teachers to offer quick-pitch courses that could be opened and operated for low cost, for a limited amount of time? A sort of mash-up between school as we know it and flash-mob learning. “Owners” and “chefs” could share their passions and their “offerings,” and others could partake in the mental nourishment. It could be a great way to try out ideas and methods, just like the Pop-Up Restaurants provide R&D experimentation for foodies. It sounds fun to me.

What do you think? Do you know any schools doing anything like this? I’d love to learn about connected examples.

Guns and butter, production possibilities frontiers, and students doing real-life work #WhatIfWeekly

Posted on October 30, 2012 by boadams1

I believe the most underutilized resource in our nation is our young people in schools. As an economics major in college, and as a long-time teacher of 8th graders enrolled in economics, I studied “production possibilities frontiers.” You may remember them as “guns and butter” graphs, if you’ve studied any introductory econ.

Perhaps the school application is “20th century learners” and “21st century learners,” instead of guns and butter. Regardless, to work below the frontier is to underutilize resources – to waste available capacity. I believe we are wasting a good bit of the capacity of our student learners.

I believe students are perfectly capable and willing and eager to work on real-world issues. I love finding examples of such work, partly because I think it’s like the Bannister 4-minute mile. Once we know it’s possible, more people will do it! If you read here regularly, you’ll likely remember previous examples that I have highlighted about students doing real-life work. Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School. Geoff Mulgan’s Studio Schools. Brittany Wenger. There are many examples.

Recently, I’ve discovered a few more examples of students doing work that goes beyond just handing it in to a teacher for grading and “recycling.” They’re doing work for a larger scope. For a bigger cause.

Adobe has created The Adobe Educators’ Choice Awards: Honoring the work of innovative educators. The finalists in the primary and secondary-school categories are fabulous. Tagature and the study of graffiti tags combined with classics literature…turned into a book that you can acquire. A partnership among students and Powerhouse Factories to create gig posters for the band Belle Histoire. The Digital Voices project for understanding cultures (see the actual class website here). The work does not stop with the teacher and the classroom walls. The work extends well into the real world.
Recently, TED released “Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole: Science is for everyone, kids included.” The story they share is about 10 year olds who become the youngest people ever to publish a peer-reviewded science paper. As the talk begins, Lotto shares that “perception is grounded in our experience… Now if perception is grounded in our history, it means we’re only ever responding according to what we’ve done before. But actually, it’s a tremendous problem, because how can we ever see differently?” We must see “students” differently. They CAN work on real-world challenges. They WANT to work on real-world challenges. They SHOULD be working on real-world challenges. We adults are too often the greatest limitations to helping them reach their production possibilities frontier…exceed it even! What if more of us inspired and enabled such work and play for our students?!

Monday morning ideation – imagining the future of schools and schools of the future #WhatIfWeekly

Posted on October 22, 2012 by boadams1

Three idea seeds from my weekend “studying”…

1. What if we developed “nutrition info” for our school courses? Looking at an egg crate this weekend, I wondered why we don’t have something like this for our courses in schools? How might we develop guides for the 7Cs that could accompany a course description and indicate to folks what’s actually in the content-and-skills meal that one’s about to partake in?

2. What if we understood capital-P PBL as futebol de salão? Reading Farnam Street, I learned about a game credited with developing the soft skills of young Brazilian soccer players.

This insanely fast, tightly compressed five-on-five version of the game— played on a field the size of a basketball court— creates 600 percent more touches, demands instant pattern recognition and, in the words of Emilio Miranda, a professor of soccer at the University of São Paulo, serves as Brazil’s “laboratory of improvisation.”

For students working on real-life problems in a curriculum more balanced toward challenges and contexts, instead of so content-centric, they could be developing such soft skills for problem finding and problem solving in comparable improvisation labs for applying their interrelated subjects of math, science, English, history, etc.

3. What if we devised ways for personal learning, like Susan Solomon describes medicine is developing personal drug treatments? Listening to the TED talk “Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells.” I was struck by this part of the transcript:

But it isn’t really enough just to look at the cells from a few people or a small group of people,because we have to step back.We’ve got to look at the big picture.Look around this room. We are all different,and a disease that I might have,if I had Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease,it probably would affect me differently than if one of you had that disease,and if we both had Parkinson’s disease,and we took the same medication,but we had different genetic makeup,we probably would have a different result,and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully for me was actually ineffective for you,and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for you is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious,but unfortunately it is not the way that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs because, until now, it hasn’t had the tools.

And so we need to move away from this one-size-fits-all model.The way we’ve been developing drugs is essentially like going into a shoe store,no one asks you what size you are, or if you’re going dancing or hiking.They just say, “Well, you have feet, here are your shoes.”It doesn’t work with shoes, and our bodies are many times more complicated than just our feet.So we really have to change this.

Too much of formalized education in schools seems targeted to the mean…or overly generalized, so that many experience something comparable to the shoe store that says, “Well, you have feet, here are your shoes.” With the advances in technology and brain research, how might we design personal learning, like Solomon describes designing personal drug treatment?