Our schools are not failing. They certainly don’t need reforming. The system is obsolete and needs reinventing.
Tony Wagner: TEDxNYED – April 28, 2012 #Purpose
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Monday morning ideation – imagining the future of schools and schools of the future #WhatIfWeekly
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 atthe 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 ifone 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 wonderfullyfor me was actually ineffective for you,and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for youis safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious,but unfortunately it is not the waythat the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugsbecause, until now, it hasn’t had the tools.
And so we need to move awayfrom this one-size-fits-all model.The way we’ve been developing drugs is essentiallylike going into a shoe store,no one asks you what size you are, orif 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 aremany 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?
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Perhaps the most radical characteristic of CEMUS is the degree to which students are given agency and treated as intellectual equals. Students are hired and made responsible for developing both the content and pedagogy of their education. In close collaboration with teachers, researchers, and practitioners, students plan and coordinate the wide range of courses offered by CEMUS.
Diverse academic and professional lecturers, as well as varied student backgrounds, help to both break down and, in course, rebuild bridges between disciplinary boundaries—boundaries so often cemented in educational institutions. A combination of innovative and recognized pedagogical approaches, such as problem-based and explorative learning, forms an environment that is truly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and inclusive.
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The World We Explore- Sir Ken Robinson Zeitgeist Americas 2012 – YouTube
The World We Explore– Sir Ken Robinson, Educator. Curiosity encourages us to push boundaries into uncharted territories. Where can our hunger for discovery take us – both outside and inside ourselves?
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The Great Collision – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
NB: If you want some simple life or biz advice, here’s a tiny attempt. Tomorrow’s great institutions will be built — as they always have been — not merely by answering today’s preferences with the lowest common denominator, but by seeking radical, transformative paths to resolve the contradictions between preference and expectation, past and future, value and values. Want to build one? Take a hard look at the Great Collision — and blaze a trail that doesn’t end in social, personal, economic wreckage. Don’t just make a difference.
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The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth « Creelman Research Library
At the heart of the battle was his approach to building. Most building projects are fairly mechanical and capitalistic. An architect designs something in great detail on paper and then they pass it to a construction firm that attempts to complete the design as accurately (and as cheaply) as possible. All the thinking is done in the design stage, the builder is just a ‘pair of hands’ to execute it. Alexander’s approach is to work from drawings to mock-ups to the building itself. His approach allows for constant tweaking of the design to create something wonderful that works as a whole. The thinking never stops since it is impossible to know the right answers until you are deep in construction and what is working and not working has become clear. He calls this adaptive approach System A, and the mechanistic one System B.
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The Missing Link in School Reform | Stanford Social Innovation Review
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50 Education Leaders Worth Following On Twitter | Edudemic
Step 5: Solving Problems @GrantLichtman #EdJourney, Week 6, Episode 7
How might we discern if we are facing a problem, and if we are, what the problem is? In Grant Lichtman’s book, The Falconer, the chapter entitled “Step 5: Solving Problems” finds Mr. Usher and his class on a camping trip – an outing. As the class hikes Clear Creek, the trail suddenly ends.
“Mr. Usher,” he called cupping his hands around his mouth, “the trail has stopped. There’s nowhere to go. What do we do now?”
Mr. Usher walked up to the end of the trail, and the Children gathered around him. He looked ahead at the rocks and the mountain.
“Well, you’re certainly right,” Mr. Usher said. “The trail has stopped. What do you suggest we do?”
“We don’t know what to do,” Andy answered. “You’re the teacher. Tell us where to go.”
“We’ve never been here before,” added Felisa. “How are we supposed to know which way to go?”
“I’m ready for your suggestions,” said Mr. Usher. “I’m not at all sure that there is any one best way to proceed here. Who has a good idea about what to do?”
Later in the chapter:
Aaron (who you will remember had never been camping before) hugged his knees and looked up at Mr. Usher, worried. “If you knew the trail would end, why did you bring us this way?” he asked.
“I didn’t know the trail would end here. In fact, I’ve never been up the trail this far. If I had been along the trail before, this would be a pretend adventure, not a real adventure, and you’re all old enough for a real adventure on your summer Outing. In real life we don’t always know what’s going to happen next. We’re already doing exactly what one should do when one first faces a new problem. We’re sitting down calmly and thinking things out clearly. We should never rush at a problem or shoot off in the first direction that presents itself. Usually, doing nothing for a little while is a pretty good first step.”
The Children look puzzled and a little doubtful, as if they weren’t sure how doing nothing could help them whatsoever.
“So now that we’re thinking clearly,” continued Mr. Usher, “we need to decide if we really have a problem, and if so, what is it?”
I’ve read and re-read The Falconer several times. If you frequent this blog or know me beyond this virtual thinking space, you know that this book is an important one to me. I return to this section of this chapter often. It “bothers” me – in a good way, I think, but it bothers me.
There is a balance to strike. The class has a day supply of food remaining. They can’t simply think and talk the problem without acting. Yet, they probably should not just charge off in a direction, or worse yet in several different directions without some team discernment.
Isn’t this where many of us education folks are living right now? Where does our known trail of school end? What paths and trails will we forge next? How are we working together as a school to decide what our problems are, what we will decide to do next, and how we might make the journey together – as a team, not just as many individuals independently searching? Is our trail issue in schools one that can be solved over 10 years, or is the issue more pressing and immediate?
What is your school doing to discuss the trail you are taking next? How are you gathering voices and deciding on action…not just talk or directive instruction from a formal leader?
In this week’s #EdJourney video cast episode, Grant and I explore this thinking a bit further…
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Follow Grant Lichtman’s #EdJourney on Twitter and on his blog, The Learning Pond.
Link to blog post that contains resources mentioned in this week’s #EdJourney video cast episode: HBR article “Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?” and Eddie Obeng’s TED talk.
How intelligent are you? vs. How are you intelligent?
Jenn G. at Unboundary sent me this video of Sir Ken Robinson’s 20-minute talk at Zeitgeist 2012.
A few of the highlights for me occur as Robinson detailed:
- conformity vs. diversity
- compliance vs. creativity
- organized vs. organic
- how creative are you? vs. how are you creative?
- how intelligent are you? vs. how are you intelligent?
We must all work together to ensure that education – and “education” is much more all-encompassing than just formalized school – is consistently moving further to the right column.
Robinson concluded with this quote from H.G. Wells:
Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.
it's about learning 