Can you spare 27 minutes for learning and world peace?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by boadams1

Do you have 27 minutes to devote to both educational reform and world peace? Do you? Just 27 minutes of your life. Twenty minutes is for watching the TED talk below – John Hunter on the World Peace Game. Two minutes is for reading my words here, which I try to make brief and get out of the way. Five minutes is to share the talk with another person or other people via whatever means you want. I would be willing to guarantee you that you will find value in the 27 minutes you spend doing so. Make it in the video to…

7:20 and you will see a teacher show an artifact of a simple game board that he designed so that he could avoid lecture, avoid dry textbook methods, and engage students in something we all love to do – play games.

8:00 and you will be wanting to build the enhanced prototype yourself…I do!

16:30 and you will see profound learning from a child that cannot be easily tested, but demonstrates self-evident assessment.

18:45 and you will contemplate the power of “spontaneous compassion” and a realistic hope for when these students earn the leadership positions of the world.

John Hunter shows the power of story, the power of dealing in questions rather than answers, the power of project- and problem-based learning, the power of 21st century skills leading the efforts of a classroom, and the power of a teacher who innovates and keeps learning. These are ideas worth spreading.

Many thanks to the colleague who shared this talk with me and our Junior High History PLC.

This post is cross-listed at Connected Principals

Be like bamboo

Posted on June 1, 2011 by boadams1

I learn so much from Garr Reynolds. There are countless lessons in his recent TEDxTokyo talk. Before I write too much about the myriad things I am learning and re-learning from his talk, I hope you will watch and find that still water in which to reflect yourself. Domo arigato, Garr.

A Hiccup of IMAGINATION

Posted on May 11, 2011 by boadams1

“Anyway,” said Old Wrinkly, “it might be just what this Tribe needs, a change in leadership style. Because the thing is, times are changing. We can’t get away with being bigger and more violent than everybody else any more. IMAGINATION. That’s what they need and what you’ve got. A Hero of the Future is going to have to be clever and cunning, not just a big lump with overdeveloped muscles. He’s going to have to stop everyone quarreling among themselves and get them to face the enemy together.”

As a minister-friend of mine is fond of saying, “That’ll preach.” The paragraph above comes from Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. My family fell in love with the movie this year, and my six-year old son is now reading the books. He reads to himself mostly, but he asks me to read a few pages each night. That paragraph on pages 63 and 64 really hit me. When I read it, I stopped for too long, and PJ had to spur me out of thinking to keep reading aloud. The movie and the children’s literature possess that amazing, rare quality of transcending the age of the viewers and readers – if you are paying attention, there is something profound for you…no matter what your age.

What a metaphor system exists in the story…in just that short paragraph about a Viking grandfather giving his grandson some advice about his different approach to an issue. For me, I am in the mindset to think of the dragon as school or education. We teachers and school leaders need to examine the 150 year old paradigm of school and re-think if the Prussian military model – the “overdeveloped muscles” – is the correct method for guiding the formalized learning of this iGeneration. Perhaps we need more IMAGINATION.

I certainly mean to point no fingers at anyone. When I point a finger, three point back at me. Maybe we could quit all the quarreling among ourselves and face the enemy together.

Last night, I attended the CFT Talks. The Center for Teaching hosted its Learning and the Brain Cohort for a TED-talk-style evening so that this team of teachers from Westminster and Drew Charter could share their action research projects. The event was superb and inspirational. On Twitter, you can trace the stream with the hashtag #CFTtalks. I learned so much from these “pracademics” who were meshing research and practice in their own learning-lab classrooms. At one point, two of the speakers shared two quotes:

“If students don’t learn the way we teach, why don’t we teach the way they learn?”

“If your job is to develop the mind, shouldn’t you know how the brain works?”

They spoke of “green light” and “red light” teachers. I hope you can see the summary of these terms by clicking on the image below (captured at event). In my mind, I saw the red light teachers as big, muscle bound Vikings who were trying to strong arm learning through something akin to force. I saw the green light teachers as Hiccup, the protagonist of How to Train Your Dragon – full of imagination and willingness to meet the learning dragon as a learner himself…mutually growing as a team that could synergistically thrive together. Maybe we all need a “hiccup” to cause us to draw up an unexpected breath and free the thing that defines us most as children…as the original-learner prototype – IMAGINATION. May we use it to address these changing times. May we inspire it and motivate it in our colleagues and students. May we learn together, as Old Wrinkly say, “the HARD WAY!” Together we can do this. Together we should do this. It’s about our children’s present and future. It’s about learning!

Powerful Communication

Posted on March 5, 2011 by boadams1

Dan Pink continuously talks about the power of story. The Heath brothers articulate that “sticky” messages have certain attributes. In Tribes, Seth Godin emphasizes the critical, fundamental importance of communication.

For the last 18 months, one of my tracks of personal learning has been focused in the area of communication, presentation, and idea story telling. Dan Pink, Dan and Chip Heath, Edward Tufte, Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte have been a few of my virtual teachers.

Recently, Nancy Duarte delivered a TEDxEast talk (below) and several blog posts about presentation and communication.

Our 7th graders are currently studying the god-teacher archetype. Do you see the connections? Here’s to the kaizen of our presentations and communications.

Thinking Out Loud: Tribes

Posted on February 27, 2011 by boadams1

In the old paradigm of writing and publishing, a writer essentially worked to have all of his or her ideas formed and packaged before publishing. Such was required – all of the thinking on paper had to be relatively complete before it went to press, experienced the magic of publication, and landed on a shelf.

With blogging, as well as with other social media, the power of the printing press has been democratized to the masses. For some, that is frightening. I often hear choruses of “Anybody can get something on the Internet now. Used to be only experts could express their ideas onpaper. Now any yokel can press publish.”

For me, getting to think out loud is exciting and empowering. Sure, sometimes thinking out loud means that a blog post possesses that feeling of “unfinished-ness.” However, it is this unfinished-ness that excites me. By thinking out loud, I can amplify my current thinking and incorporate others’ thinking – if they will just take the risk to think out loud, too, and share. WE are smarter than me. Steve Johnson’s “coffee house” has a better chance of materializing if we are congregating and sharing our thinking. With a growth mindset, I worry not about what people will think of my unfinished, unrefined, unpolished post. I want to grow. Growing requires sticking your neck out. It’s not about looking silly. It’s about learning.

Of course, I am not telling you readers anything you don’t already know. Rather, I am simply finishing a preface to what I really want to write about this morning – but, gloriously, my thinking is not finished on this next topic. By sharing some initial thoughts, those thoughts stand the chance of being read and amplified by a Jonathan Martin, a Lyn Hilt, a Bill Ferriter, a John Burk, a Jill Gough, an Anna Moore, or a colleague that I have yet to meet – either in reality or in virtual space. I can leverage my PLN if I will just risk letting them in to my thinking.

So…

This morning I am re-reading Seth Godin’s Tribe. Many of you may know that I am a stack reader – I will digress if I explain that strategy of my reading. I could just highlight some passages and take some notes, but then those highlights and notes would only benefit me. Additionally, those highlights and notes could not be amplified by others whose thinking could magnify my own. So…I am recording some ideas here – unfinished, unpolished ideas. Here’s to the potential of amplification. If nothing happens to these ideas, I am no worse off. However, if even one reader chooses to comment, question, argue, or postulate, then my thinking can be improved.

On page 83 of the hard-copy of Tribes, Godin writes, “When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.” Many people probably think that I love PLCs. They would be wrong. I love learning. I think schools and education should be ALL about learning. Over the last century or two, I worry a bit that schools may have fallen in love with the system of efficient operations and teaching. I have faith in people as learners, but I do believe that learning is a social activity. If teachers do not have time together – job-embedded time, not just their own time – then it is too easy to get in a repititious rut of teaching the same things, the same ways. To explore, experiment, wrestle with ideas…we need fellowship, time to think out loud, a tribe with whom to work. I am not in love with the system of PLCs. I am in love with learning. Show me a system that promotes learning better, and I will follow.
Folks who are not really studying PLCs seem to fall into the trap that PLCs ARE the meetings, the structures, the frameworks. PLCs are about the principles of learning. Call them whatever you want, structure them however you want…as long as the focus is on deep, mearningful learning. In our PLCs at Westminster (at least most of the current, formalized PLCs), we put things through four filters: 1) what should be learned?, 2) how will we know if learning is happening?, 3) what will we do if learning is not happening?, 4) what will we do if the learner already knows this? These questions guide all learning – student, adult, teacher, admin. ALL LEARNERS.
Godin uses pp. 79-85 to explore an extended metaphor comparing and contrasting faith and religion. Godin remarks, “Faith is critical to all innovation. WIthout faith, it’s suicidal to be a leader, to act like a heretic.” We MUST believe in the work and the change we are bringing about. Preserving the pre-existing structures, the worked-in-the-past frameworks, is not leadership. It’s management. Leadership revolves around learning. Learning is, by definition, about change. Leading and learning cannot love the status quo – to do so would admit that we have achieved all that we can achieve. We are as good as we can get.

More later. My thoughts are unfinished…

Godin, Seth. Tribes. New York: Penguin Group, 2008.