Tag Archives: A piece of why

PROCESS POST: Starting to put the pieces together…

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How might a school (and education, at large) become more agile, more adaptable on a larger scale and shorter time frame?

What if we explored recipes that combined ingredients of Collins’ Good to Great (the flywheel effect, “who” before “what,” and the hedgehog concept), Design Thinking and the Japanese concept of “kaizen” (continuous improvement through…Discovery, Interpretation, Ideation, Experimentation, Evolution), and Manuel Lima’s power of networks, which is closely related to Friedman’s flattened world?

Could we re-imagine and re-purpose so that school becomes more of a quickly evolving ecosystem that better integrates learners with real-time, real-life, contextual learning and a developing citizen skill-content set that readies learners for the present and future more than for a past that is rapidly fading?

To move from the industrial age to the information age to the creativity age, must we synergize processes that can better develop creational momentum?

[“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.]

A piece of “what:” map making, problem finding, messy searching

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Rebecca Chapman, literary editor of a new online journal called The New Inquiry, was quoted in the New York Times. “My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything.”

The only surprising thing about this statement is that some consider it surprising.

Rebecca trained to be competent, excelling at completing the tasks set in front of her. She spent more than sixteen years at the top of the system, at the best schools, with the best resources, doing what she was told to do. [emphasis added]

Unfortunately, no one is willing to pay her to do tasks. Without a defined agenda, it’s difficult for her to find the gig she was trained for.

[Then, later…] Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer from the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.

(from section 35, pages 53-54, of Seth Godin’s “Stop Stealing Dreams.” Read the entire section and manifesto here.)

In my jobs as teacher, school administrator, husband, father, educational innovator, etc., I am having to search and discover what needs to be addressed, celebrated, ceased and desisted, opened, studied, innovated, reiteratively prototyped, and enhanced. No one is digesting the messiness for me and handing me well-crafted assignments to complete. While I was in formal school, I think the tasks given to me and the work assigned to me taught me invaluable lessons that I would not trade for the world. I am eternally grateful to my school teachers. But my life has also been filled with the need to make maps, not just read them. I have found it essential that I find problems, not just solve the ones given me. I have needed to search through mess and muck to explore possibilities, connections, relationships, and opportunities. I don’t think I learned these things enough in my formal schooling. Why shouldn’t we incorporate more of this set of modalities into school? Why can’t we create and design more balance into the system of well-defined problems and ready-made assignments?

As the school year begins, are you…

  • Letting students wander in search of their own questions and curiosities, or just directing them to the ones you’ve already defined?
  • Designing space and time for map making, or just promoting and teaching map following?
  • Getting off to the side while students find problems that they think need solving, or just having them solve problems with answers that can be found in the back of a textbook?
  • Making room for students to explore what various real-life work feels like, smells like, tastes like, and sounds like…or just handing them the packages of industrial-age school?

[“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.]

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.]

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.]