Education and the Presidential Debate 10.3.12 – my overly simplistic (and predictable) view

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Last night, I tuned into the first hour of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Debate with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. In the first few minutes, I heard education mentioned several times, but I never heard many specifics or actual plans of a concrete nature. (Perhaps I am naive and overly optimistic that I would hear such… one can dream… one should dream.)

This morning, I read a recap of the education-mentions in the debate – from EdWeek.
[After initial publish, I read this other EdWeek article – excellent!]

So, we want to enhance education so that, among other reasons, we can improve the economy. Maybe we should work to align education and the economy more purposefully. Perhaps business and education and non-profit could be considered three strands of the same chord. Perhaps they could play for the same team. Perhaps students and faculty should be considered the incredible resources they are for transforming school into more “real life.” Or for transforming more “real life” into school.

If you want to get better at the guitar, what do you do? Do you mostly sit and listen to others play the guitar? No. You PLAY THE GUITAR!

If you want to get better at soccer, what do you do? Do you mostly sit in desks and watch someone lecture on how to play soccer? No. You PLAY MORE SOCCER!

If you want to get better as an artist, what do you do? Do you mostly use your senses only to collect information in your head like a vessel to be filled? No. You MAKE ART! 

Maybe if we want learners to know how to create and contribute to the economy and the national citizenship as producers of value, we should work on an educational system that more systemically facilitates students PRACTICING such now!

[For the record – I think aspiring guitarists should listen to other musicians. I think soccer players should watch film and other games and listen to their coaches. I think artists should observe other art and visit museums. But, I think these aspiring creators should spend a huge balance of their time… creating. Creating things that matter for real audiences and learning by doing. Seems simple to me. School should be more like what we know works for the rest of our learning lives. Teachers and students are fully capable of this. I do realize the transformation is not “simple,” but we could do this together. I have no doubts.]

Some questions I continue to research about #PedagogicalMasterPlanning

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Schools and universities are making huge decisions about academics and instruction, partly to “keep up” with other decision-making institutions doing likewise.

The University of Virginia board’s decision to dismiss Teresa A. Sullivan as president in June illustrated the pressure on universities to strike MOOC deals quickly to keep up with peer institutions, said Martin D. Snyder, senior associate general secretary and director of the department of external relations for the American Association of University Professors.

– http://chronicle.com/article/In-Colleges-Rush-to-Try/134692/

Schools and universities spend millions and millions of dollars on planning and construction of physical spaces and buildings.

Phase One of the master plan (2008 through 2017) calls for more than $750 million in new facilities and infrastructure construction on the campus

– http://www.umb.edu/the_university/masterplan/

Schools and universities are investing enormous time into meeting with stakeholders and gathering input from various constituencies about campus master planning and physical buildings.

The core of the planning process focused on engaging the university community in crafting a plan for the future of Carnegie Mellon. Town meetings were widely advertised and dozens of meetings were held with students, faculty and staff as well as neighbors in Oakland and Squirrel Hill and the City of Pittsburgh.

–http://www.cmu.edu/cdfd/documents/masterplan2002.pdf

Are schools proactively thinking and planning about the big academic and instructional decisions they face…and master planning for the consequent issues that are symbiotically affected?

Are schools investing comparable dollars into the master planning for academics, pedagogy, and instruction – similar to the dollars spent on physical master planning?

Are schools devoting similar time to gathering stakeholders and constituents to discuss the academic, pedagogical, and instructional future of their organizations and the overall institution of education?

[Note: The above is not intended as commentary or criticism about University of Virginia, University of Massachusetts of Boston, or Carnegie Mellon University. Rather, in my investigations, these are quotes that spurred ideas of possibility for me around the future of pedagogical master planning. Shouldn’t schools make decisions from “academic-architecture plans?” Shouldn’t schools spend comparable money on the core of the organization – the academic architecture? Shouldn’t schools convene similar quantities and qualities of meetings for developing academic architecture? And, perhaps, some are doing so. But I’m not finding those articles or sharings online.]

PROCESS POST: Roused emotions of possibility – choreography as teaching and school leadership

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This morning, I realized that I aspire to be a choreographer. While watching “Wayne McGregor: A choreographer’s creative process in real time,” I was moved by the emotion of possibility. Not only was I moved by the literal art and science of McGregor’s work as a master choreographer of physical dance, but I was also moved by the metaphorical force of McGregor’s message – for the translation that this work can be for teaching, school leadership, and education.

As McGregor recounted:

So this is not the type of choreography where I already have in mind what I’m going to make, where I’ve fixed the routine in my head and I’m just going to teach it to them, and these so-called empty vessels are just going to learn it. That’s not the methodology at all that we work with. But what’s important about it is how it is that they’re grasping information, how they’re taking information, how they’re using it, and how they’re thinking with it.

 

I’m going to start really, really simply. Usually, dance has a stimulus or stimuli, and I thought I’d take something simple, TED logo, we can all see it, it’s quite easy to work with, and I’m going to do something very simply, where you take one idea from a body, and it happens to be my body, and translate that into somebody else’s body, so it’s a direct transfer, transformation of energy.

Likewise, our student-learners are not empty vessels to be filled. They are creative, thinking, energetic forces who can express their constructing understanding of the world…with a bit of support and guidance from a choreographer. [As I learned from Farnam Street’s “What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?,”this transfer could also be called engraving.] Student-learners can do so much more than receive, memorize, and recall for testing. They can connect, empathize, and interpret. What could be used as the stimuli? How about world issues? How about big ideas and grand challenges that we face in our schools, in our communities, in our cities, in our nations, and in our world?

School leaders could choreograph the orchestrated dance of a coordinated, collaborative faculty…working in harmonious partnership with business, government, and non-profits. We could dance together with a bit of guidance and support from our school choreographers (school in the BROAD sense).

Later in the talk, McGregor explained:

So they’re solving this problem for me, having a little — They’re constructing that phrase.They have something and they’re going to hold on to it, yeah? One way of making. That’s going to be my beginning in this world premiere.

 

Okay. From there I’m going to do a very different thing. So basically I’m going to make a duet. I want you to think about them as architectural objects, so what they are, are just pure lines. They’re no longer people, just pure lines, and I’m going to work with them almost as objects to think with, yeah? So what I’m thinking about is taking a few physical extensions from the body as I move, and I move them, and I do that by suggesting things to them: If, then; if, then. Okay, so here we go.

“So, they’re solving this problem for me.” Student-learners, in partnership with their teachers choreographers and collaborators from the “real-world,” could construct phrases to test and trial against a dialogue with the big ideas and grand challenges we face. Our learning architects could assist in designing “structures” that provide for such dancing with ideas and interdisciplinary problem solving. For the accompaniment – the assessment, the communications, the engineering – would have to be re-imagined to facilitate well-architected dancing and duet-ing.

And, nearer the conclusion and the unveiling of the completed dance premier, McGregor articulated:

That was the second way of working.The first one, body-to-body transfer, yeah,with an outside mental architecture that I work withthat they hold memory with for me.The second one, which is using them as objects to thinkwith their architectural objects, I do a series ofprovocations, I say, “If this happens, then that.If this, if that happens — ” I’ve got lots of methods like that,but it’s very, very quick, and this is a third method.They’re starting it already, and this is a task-based method,where they have the autonomy to makeall of the decisions for themselves.

Do I even need to translate this one? “This is a task-based method, where they have the autonomy to make all of the decisions for themselves.” Isn’t this what we all want for our student-learners? Don’t we want to choreograph in such a way that they are not vessels to be filled but the paradoxical wonders of simultaneously independent and interdependent thinkers and doers? That they have autonomy to go and make the dances themselves that will solve our school, community, city, nation, and world issues?

Yes, I aspire to be a choreographer. A choreographer of School 3.0. And I’m looking for dancers.

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Step 0: Preparation @GrantLichtman #EdJourney Episode 4, 9.28.12

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In “Step 0: Preparation,” the second chapter of Grant Lichtman’s book The Falconer: What We Wished We Had Learned In School, Grant offered a number of thoughts that keep me coming back to this chapter, and they seem to be relevant to this third week of Grant’s three-month, 60-school, cross-country tour exploring innovation in an interesting collection of our nation’s schools.

  • “Before we solve a problem or overcome a challenge or invent an invention or come to a personal point of realization, we have to be prepared to encounter a problem or challenge or a quest worthy of our assault. The excitement of learning, the compelling personal drive to take one more step on the path towards wisdom, comes when we try to solve a problem we want to solve, when we see a challenge and say, yes, I can meet it. Great teachers lead us just far enough down a path so we can see a challenge for ourselves. They provide us with just enough insight so we can work toward a solution that makes us, makes me want to jump up and shout out the solution to the world, makes me want to step up to the next higher level.” (pp. 19-20)
  • “If they don’t care about what I want to teach, I will teach what they care about. (p. 21)
  • “‘Here’s your homework. For next class, each one of you will write down something that you don’t understand, something that interests you that you’d like to know. Anything at all…as long as it’s somehow connected to the physical universe, and you care about the answers.'” (p. 21)
  • “In the end, we’d covered most of the major points of my original syllabus.” (p. 23)
  • “Great teachers create opportunities for students to ask questions that excite them to self-discovery.” (p. 23)
  • “The first task of preparation is to create or take advantage of, the opportunity to explore, learn, lead, or challenge.” (p. 24)
  • “Happiness and success depend, in many ways, on one’s ability to calmly overcome challenges, to successfully solve problems, and to creatively take advantage of opportunities.” (p. 26)
  • “Solutions are often found by testing many different assumptions and ideas to see what works, creating options that look at the problem in new ways.” (p. 28)

The schools that Grant is visiting are “testing many different assumptions and ideas to see what works, creating options that look at the problems in new ways.” Those of us immersed in and devoted to educational enhancement, during these times of learning and school transformation, owe a great deal to the schools opening themselves to Grant so that we can see some of what they are testing and creating. And, of course, we owe a great deal to Grant for taking this #EdJourney in order to explore and examine the approaches that schools are taking as they face this educational crossroads…and for sharing his reflections and keeping us all connected so that we can learn with and from each other.

Highlight quotes and links from Grant’s visits this week – Week 3 of #EdJourney:

“But there is another, very critical layer to innovation, and that is what this post is about.  That layer is what I call the time of heavy lifting, of building the solid foundation upon which a relatively higher frequency of change and innovation becomes comfortable and a good overall fit for the organization.”

“Here are my major takeaways from Hawken, and I think they are important for any school, but most importantly for those where leaders are being really cautious about making changes for fear of upsetting faculty or parents.  First, with clarity, inclusion, and adequate preparation, our organizations can withstand a lot more change than we think. As Scott left me with, “if you are going to make some changes, go big”.  Second, taking on an issue like time and taming it to your needs instead of the other way around will change mindsets at your school.  People will get comfortable with change where once they feared it; they will embrace evolution where once they were stuck in the familiar.  These are critical traits for surviving in a changing world.  It takes courage to do these, but examples like Hawken prove what is possible, and the possible is what we should be all about.”

“We walked across the street, left the block walls and tired halls and visited two classes that Eric has arranged with Community College.  One is a beginning robotics class, students bent over benches putting together their first remote-controlled cars, fiddling with pieces and asking questions.  Eric said it is just like turning a switch when the students leave that place they associate with tedious, normal school life and come over here.  The fights and harsh words disappear.  They focus on the teacher. They engage.  They are actively participating in learning, and much of it is because they have inadvertently discarded their image of what school is.”

“As the Center concept grew, Bill feels they recognized deeper layers, that discovery is the true key to learning, and discovery does not happen in a class where the students are always the recipients of knowledge….

Busting the rigid silos of department was not without a bit of pain, but Koyen feels it was a modest level of pain, and well worth it.  It sometimes is messy to know who must be included in what decisions as the interest of the Centers intersect with the interests of the academic departments, but the faculty works it out and have grown stronger in the process. Koyen says “It is pretty obvious that there is conflict between traditional teaching and the way the world works”.

“SLA is a public magnet school and a partnership with The Franklin Institute, a major museum and science center in Philadelphia.  They have a rigorous college prep program, though devoid of AP’s. All of their classes are taught in a project-based environment and as a community they embrace the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. ”