Tag Archives: future of schools

Learner-preneurship and Innovation – PLEASE share your thinking! #NOV8 #NAIS #NAIS2012

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What are the conditions necessary for “learner-preneurship” in schools? How can we establish, maintain, sustain, and promote entrepreneurial-type innovation in the strategic designs, daily operations and purposeful activities that define “school?”

On December 28, I was blessed to receive a Twitter DM from Jamie Baker (@JamieReverb). Jamie has invited me to co-present at the NAIS 2012 Annual Conference, along with her other teammates Grant Lichtman (@GrantLichtman of The Falconer) and Lee Burns (@PDSHeadmaster). I am thrilled to join such a team of inspired educators and dynamic, innovative thinkers and doers.

W8. Move from “Why Innovate?” to “How?” — Become an Entrepreneurial School
Entrepreneurs know how to innovate. Discuss how to innovate at your school by developing the entrepreneur’s mindset in the board, head of school, administrators, teachers, and students. Cultivate understanding in the entrepreneur’s innovation process, building capacity by moving through resistance, and developing organizational habits of innovation.
PRESENTERS: Jamie Baker, Reverb Consulting (TN); A. Lee Burns, Presbyterian Day School (TN); Grant Lichtman, Francis Parker School (CA); Bo Adams, The Westminster Schools (GA)

For the next several weeks, I imagine that I will be writing and thinking even more deliberately and intentionally about innovation in schools. To write is to think, and I look forward to developing my thinking here in this blog and elsewhere.

Given that “WE are smarter than ME,” I am curious what you think about the opening questions in this blog post. Do you have ideas about what makes some schools more “learner-preneurial” and innovative than other schools? Do you have hypotheses, research, thoughts, and opinions about how innovation can become more nurtured in the ways that we work in schools? I hope you will take some time to share your thinking in the comments below – your resources, your ideas, your questions, your own blog posts and writings about the topic of innovation in schools. Here’s to our ideas colliding in a Steve Johnson coffee house of sorts.

Thanks for sharing. WE are smarter than ME!

PLEASE JOIN THE IDEATION HERE (and elsewhere)! On New Year’s Day, here’s to a 2012 full of innovative ideation and implementation!

Happy New Year! It’s About Learning!

[Note: An interesting story about the power of PLNs – I will meet Jamie Baker and Lee Burns for the first time face-to-face at our February 29 NAIS session. While we “know” each other online and while we will certainly video-conference in the weeks ahead, it is the power of “the world’s best faculty lounge” that has brought us together for this work!]

Schools promote drivers ed – learning by driving with guidance. Schools should do same with social media.

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When students reach a certain age and responsibility level, I believe that school should permit – promote even – the use of various social media tools. I think we should “Be safe and teach them to drive.” If we truly  are preparing students to lead and serve in a changing world, then we should teach students to utilize respectfully and responsibly the methods and processes that can be used in an engaged and purposeful citizenry. Literacy in today’s terms essentially demands that schools take an active role in educating our learners about how to connect with others from whom we can learn and with whom we can contribute to causes of import and worth.

I regularly think and engage with others about the reasons why students should or should not be allowed to use social media as part of school. These sessions, of course, include the opportunities, as well as the potential consequences. Perhaps soon, I will try to write a post that summarizes more of these ledger items, arranged as assets and liabilities. For now, though, I am focusing on two aspects of social media that I crave for my students: 1) encouragement and interaction from a wider, more authentic audience, and 2) opportunities to engage in civil discourse to develop one’s thinking and understanding.

1. Encouragement and Interaction from a Wider, More Authentic Audience

On Friday, December 23, 2011, I published a blog post entitled “Homework – Conforming to School Norms, Opps for Exploration, Unnecessary, Essential?” Moments after pressing the publish button, the following response came via Twitter (see image).

I know @occam98 personally; we work together at the same school. As a colleague and as an educator, I admire and respect @occam98, and I value his feedback and encouragement. To my knowledge, though, I have never met @bauerphysics. Because @occam98 tweeted about my blog, I now have encouragement and support from another educational thinker and teacher. Such feedback is wonderful. And, thanks to these two immediate responses, I may garner more comments on the actual blog post that will help me further to develop my thinking and understanding about homework as a school practice.

What if my exploration about the practice of homework were more confined, as if I could only talk to my immediate classmates and my teacher about my developing thinking and research about homework? I would have fewer potential network nodes on which to connect my thinking and learning. For students, I wish that they could engage in such connected communication through appropriate use of social media in schools. Some schools permit such use. Some schools promote it. Other schools forbid such use. Yet many students use social media independent of school. Duh! I prefer that students have the opportunity to benefit from the co-pilots, navigators, and coaches who are their school teachers (in addition to their parents). With such over-the-shoulder Yoda-dom for the emerging Luke Skywalkers, I believe students can safely interact and receive encouragement from the “teachers” whom they’ve never met in person…without turning to the Dark Side.

2. Opportunities to engage in civil discourse to develop one’s thinking and understanding

On the same day that Twitter brought the responses detailed above, I also engaged in another Twitter discussion with an acquaintance and a never-before-met-face-to-face person. If I am remembering correctly, I believe I met @SarahebKaiser at a Solution Tree event. But I have never met @Paul_Mugan. As in the above example, Sarah tweeted a blog post that I had written (“Pracademics”). I deeply appreciated the tweet and the encouragement, like I appreciated the support from @occam98 and @bauerphysics. In this second example, though, my learning advanced as a result of a different kind of online interaction than I had had in the first case. During this second case, I enjoyed participating in a fairly vigorous civil discourse, from which I grew immensely.

@Paul_Mugan, a follower of @SarahebKaiser, disagreed with an idea that Sarah tweeted – an idea specifically drawn from my “Pracademics” blog post. What then transpired was a fabulous learning opportunity for me…with a “stranger.” In the Scribd document below, I provide a taste of the dialogue and discussion. I did not capture the entire conversation on Scribd, but one could find the full exchange on Twitter. In total, I think over 30 exchanges occurred. We discussed and debated the nature of learning – acquiring versus applying knowledge. My views and opinions on the topic were both reinforced and altered. I grew tremendously in my understanding of learning – a topic that I think about quite actively. And thanks to an acquaintance and a “stranger,” I was able to think even more actively through the course of a civil disagreement and interchange. The back-and-forth provided a great opportunity for me to develop even more perspective consciousness about the complex domain of learning.

I would love for students to experience more opportunities for such civil discourse. Potential debates and discussions and teachers and learning opportunities are everywhere. With open minds and open media, we can immerse ourselves in invaluable conversations.

Also, as students engage in more project-based learning, I believe that their school activities increasingly  will tend to address various issues that confront our communities. Through such connected-communication tools as WordPress and Twitter, our students could write about their growing understanding of the issues (like our Writing Workshop: Environmental Studies eighth graders do on WordPress). Blog posts could be tweeted and readers from around the globe could engage in great discussion and civil discourse about the issues. With coaching from trusted teachers, our students could both solidify and expand their understanding. Students could connect with other thinkers and advocates on such issues as obesity, the importance of sleep, computer-assisted language translation, mass-scale window gardening, and developing better prosthetic limbs for amputees (all topics that have recently benefited from open-source problem solving). I would love for more students to contribute to such problem finding and problem solving.

#itsaboutlearning

Because of the connected learning in which I am involved, I believe my knowledge and understanding has accelerated exponentially in the last two years – yesterday alone provided a hyper-speed movement of my thinking on homework and learning. “School” is anytime and anywhere for me now. What’s more, on a sociological level, I tend to believe that people are good and want to help – I experience such examples from “strangers” on a daily basis now. And as a teacher, I want these lessons and perspectives for my students, too.

Homework – Conforming to School Norms, Opps for Exploration, Unnecessary, Essential?

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A Quick Story

“Dad, I’m gonna sit right here and write a story,” said PJ as he slung his five-section, lined-paper, spiral notebook on the kitchen table where dad was sitting.

“PJ, you have to do your math homework,” came mom’s voice from the office. Mom peeked around the door-less opening that joins the kitchen and the office. She and dad exchanged glances, and they both deemed that they were thinking the same thing.

PJ looked to dad as if for confirmation of the homework directive, but a depth in his gaze seemed to hold out hope for a possible contradiction to mom’s decree.

“PJ, you better do your ‘have-to-dos’ before your ‘wanna-dos,'” said dad, more than a bit disappointed that they couldn’t be one and the same thing.

PJ hung his head a bit – speechless. He slunk into the office and exchanged his story notebook for the math worksheet, “Math Link 12.5.” The toss of the notebook on the desk that PJ and his brother share made a rather booming smack, yet the noise seemed strangely muffled, too.

“Do you find it ironic that PJ wants to write a story, but we told him no because of math homework? I mean, he loves math, too, but he simply wants to write a story before we eat dinner.” Dad tried to keep his educationally philosophical outbursts to a minimum at home, but his reaction to the story-desire versus math-requirement leaped from his mouth before he could trap them in his bearded lips.

“I do find it a bit ironic, but his teacher assigned the math homework, and it has to get done. Dinner will be in thirty minutes, and then it will be time for a bath, a story, and bed. I love that he wants to write, but the math homework is waiting. He wanted to play outside after school, and I thought that was important, too.” Mom made perfect sense as she explained her guidance and contribution to PJ becoming a diligent student of the routines of school and home.

Dad agreed, but he remained pensive. He could see that mom was struggling a bit with the moment, as well. He could see her mind working overtime on the issue – seeming to project into what the next eleven years of this would be like.

A Longer Contemplation (not the writing below…the amount of time I have spent thinking about this stuff for the past 10-12 years)

PJ never returned to write that story. He completed his math homework though (a red “12/12” now resides on the top of that paper, which PJ studied for all of two seconds, if that). He’s written other stories since that moment three weeks ago, but I asked him each time, “So, is that the story that you were gonna write before dinner that night you had to do your math?” Every time, PJ responded, “No, that story’s gone. I cannot seem to remember what I was gonna write about then.”

PJ is a first grader. He loves stories and he loves math. He loves science and he loves art. He loves to explore and discover. He loves to be accompanied on his journeys and uncoverings. If I had kept tally of all of the time that he spends asking me math questions – and asking me to ask him math questions – I’d have a tally sheet at least a mile long. Maybe that makes him like most seven-year-olds…at least many seven-year-olds in the U.S. I’m not really sure, but he seems “normal” to me. [Note: YES! I think my boys are the most amazing children in the world! Far beyond “normal!” However, in this contemplation, I merely mean that PJ seems typical to me in his seven-year-old love of self-directed, yet occasionally-guided, learning.]

I have remained puzzled about what mom and dad decided to do in the above quick story. I am surprised, yet not so surprised, about how much I relive that moment in my mind. Did we help PJ? In the short run? In the long run? Both? Neither? What seed did we plant in that moment about the “rules of doing school?” What seeds did we plant in that moment about pursuing one’s current passion for writing and telling stories? Why hasn’t PJ returned to that story to write it down? What would that story have been like if he had written it? What if I had encouraged PJ to write just a concept line for that story? Would he have been able to return and remember?

I don’t mean to overplay this specific issue. In it’s own right, it is not keeping me up at night. However, in a more general sense, this issue of homework/family-time/pursuit-of-self-directed-passions is causing me to “lose a little sleep.” I think about this story as a microcosm of our next eleven to thirteen years as parents. How much quality family time will we use to wrestle and wrangle about homework? How much of a “second shift” will our boys have to work after they complete their first work shift during the typical school day? Will there be enough “white space” and “room to breathe” among all of the activities, extra-curriculars, homework, family time, etc.?

As a an educator and school principal, I have contemplated this homework dilemma for a long time. I try to sympathize and empathize with our students and their families. Certainly having my own children has helped me understand at a different level and to a greater degree.

Last January also helped me understand better. In Atlanta, in January 2011, we missed a week of school because of ice and snow. I will not tell you the actual number of parent emails that I received by midweek asking for the teachers to assign some distance learning and homework. Almost all of the emails indicated that “my kids are driving me crazy…can you assign something for them to do?!”

Is this where are are as a school-based society? Do we really want such school-directed work for home? Are we losing the capacity to rear and educate self-directed children because we strictly structure and directly distribute specific assignments that possess relatively simple, discreet answers?

A Set of What If’s for Making a Homework Transition…Assuming HW Will Survive

If homework must remain (which I question, but not here)…

  1. What if homework were more general in nature? What if PJ’s first grade homework expectations were more like:
    • Write at least one story each week. Length and topic are far less important than you feeling like you can  write for the joy of telling a story. Format is relatively unimportant, too, at this point. Some weeks, though, consider posting a story to a family blog, if you have one.
    • Engage in some numeracy-based thinking each week. You might do some counting of objects around the house and build some different tables and graphs. You might be in charge of measuring stuff that needs measuring around the house. Help your mom and dad cook and be in change of the ingredients…what would happen to the recipe if your family contained twice as many people? [Perhaps at first, parents would need a menu of suggested activities. Hopefully, this menu could be consulted less and less as students and parents simply engaged in the natural math that happens around the house everyday. This same idea may need to exist in the weekly story, too.]
    • Make art.
    • Eat most of your meals, as a family, more slowly – try to hang out for an hour as dinner is prepared, eaten, and cleaned up. Enjoy family conversation.
    • Read.
    • Play.
    • Explore and experiment. [Maybe use all of the above as inspirations for your stories…or don’t and just use your imagination.]
  2. What if homework was to record a brief podcast of the child telling the parent of something really fun and interesting that happened at school that day/week? A question asked? A curiosity aroused? What if these brief podcasts were archived and cross-posted at a class Pod-o-Matic site with tags and categories for sorting and studying during the school day? [While this activity perhaps would have a learning curve for some, I bet by the fifth or sixth time, the kids and parents would have the hang of doing this in 10 minutes or less. Think of the good communication habits it could form. Think of the feedback it could provide about what exactly is interesting to young students about school.]
  3. What if homework in older grades was developmentally progressed from the above? What if the same bullet-points were used, but the level of “content expectation” were simply more advanced for the age of the child?
  4. What if there were no homework, per se? What if students were expected to be in school for 7-8 hours…sleep for 8-9 hours…and pursue the other parts of themselves and be with family for 7-9 hours? Of course, travel time, shower time, etc. would come out of the total. Would this really be so bad for learning? At age 7? At age 12? At age 17?
  5. What if schools developed more of an “adventure game” approach to homework? I am thinking of some of the video games that my sons and I play on the Wii…like “Dawn of Discovery.” What if there were a web site that had some sort of interactive board with general suggestions for explorations and perusals that could be “homework” in a general sense (rather than worksheet #15.8)? Imagine a tic-tac-toe board online, or a Jeopardy-like board, or a board game like screen. Perhaps there are nine, thirty-five, or some other number of spaces/areas. If students were having trouble coming up with an exploration of a self-determined nature, then they could go to this online resource for suggestions. (This would have helped during “Snowcation 2011!”) Or, perhaps students would be expected to complete three or four of the nine spaces/areas a week. Or they could traverse the online game board at a determined pace and rhythm. Such a system might have real promise for more integrated-studies homework – homework that combines different disciplines instead of having traditional, siloed homework in several subjects.
  6. What if more classrooms were flipped? [Doesn’t necessarily address opportunity costs of lost family time or time to explore one’s own passions.]

A Few Pieces About Homework

  1. “The Truth About Homework.” Alfie Kohn. Education Week. September 6, 2006.
  2. “But I Need to Assign Homework! Look at All I Have to Cover!” Alfie Kohn. Huffington Post. March 3, 2011. [Comments, 64 of them, are interesting.]
  3. “Duke Study: Homework Helps Students Succeed in School, As Long as There Isn’t Too Much.” Harris Cooper. Duke Today. March 7, 2006.
  4. “Five Hallmarks of Good Homework.” Cathy Vatterott. Educational Leadership. September 2010.
  5. “Homework.” David Truss. Pair-a-dimes for Your Thoughts. April 26, 2011.

Oh well. I’ll continue contemplating. After all, it’s about learning.

What are your thoughts on homework? What resources, research, and practices would you add?

New creation: culinary, jazz-fusion luminescence in teaching – PLCs as surgical-musical-chefs

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Working to understand better the functions and processes of PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) – this is a constant pursuit and area of deep investigation and learning for me. I am coming to believe, more and more, that high-functioning PLCs are like some hybrid-cross consisting of the following parts: chefs, surgical teams, and jazz musicians.

The three TED talks below are interesting and intriguing in their own, content-specific right. However, I think all three offer metaphorical meta-lessons about the nature of PLCs – teams of teachers working to learn with each other for the ultimate purpose of enhanced student learning. All three TED talks, when woven together into a common braid, speak to the power of CREATING SOMETHING NEW AS A TEAM. Great PLCs are like the innovative team of chefs at Moto – stretching concept and experimenting for fulfilling and engaging one’s appetite and taste buds (analogous to quenching the thirst for knowledge and wisdom). Great PLCs are like the collaborating surgeons who have discovered that luminescent dyes can be employed to light-up that which needs to be preserved and that which needs to be cut out (analogous to curriculum re-design and systemic formative assessment practices). Great PLCs are like the improvisational harmony of a jazz quartet that measures their successes by their level of responsiveness rather than by any sort of fixed-mindset worrying about mistakes (analogous to the thoughtful development of teamwork and use of RTI – response to intervention). Collectively, the three talks also point to the balance of art and science that seems essential to crafting the alloy which is a team of people working together to CREATE.

The Creation Project

This past semester, the English 7 team of the Junior High PLC developed a student-learning challenge about the nature of creation and creativity. This team of teachers acted in that careful blend of artists and scientists, and they utilized the professional practices of lesson study and instructional rounds to develop a common lesson and common assessment for their classes of English. Instead of simply sitting and being consumers of creation-archetype understanding, the students would become world creators themselves. [This reminds me of a recent post from Jonathan Martin: “Fab Labs and Makerbots: ‘Turning Consumers into Creators’ at our School.” Who knows…this may even partially inspire the next iteration of the world creations described below!]

Below you can find a Scribd document that provides more details about the learning challenge created by this team of teacher-learners. To me, they behaved something like that team of innovative chefs at Moto…that team of integrated-thinking surgeons pioneering the use of luminescent surgery…that team of improvisationally-responsive jazz musicians. This team of teachers is creating together in harmony – they are prototyping a product, as well as a process for using lesson study and instructional rounds to derive a better dish, a more successful surgery, a more beautiful harmony. They are innovating and creating. This stretch will provide potential for a further stretch next time. Their muscles are learning to work this way – a way that has been foreign to egg-crate culture schools for far too long.

“I’m passing along the “nuts and bolts” of our “What in the World?” Creativity Project, which is the product of our collaborative work in the 7th PLT…what a gift!”

What In the World – Creation Project (used with permission)

Peer Visit – Mackey visit from Snyder 11-16-11 (used with permission)

I am working on a blog post about this Creation Project – from the principal’s point of view. I plan to include the actual assignment document, and I am hoping to have a few more artifacts that point to ways that we (teachers, educators, etc.) can work on “teachers working in teams” and “integrated studies.” I think your peer visit serves as a superb artifact of how ideas and lessons can “seep” and “ooze” across disciplinary borders when teachers visit each other’s classrooms. [Brief backstory (from email to teacher requesting permission to use this peer visit)]

Now, we have a teacher of the subject of history interacting with a teacher of the subject of English. What interconnected learning and integrated studies might emerge from this seed? In other areas, we have World Cultures teachers teaming with Science 6 teachers to create a semester learning-challenge on global climate change in various world regions. We have PE and biology teachers crafting ideas of courses devoted to the understanding of the human body from an integrated approach through anatomy and exercise physiology.

We have distributed R&DIY “culinary, jazz-fusion luminescence” developing among our learners – teachers and students. Those are ideas worth spreading. Additionally, those teachers are inspiring me to think about the worlds that I would contribute to making. Hmmm….

What about “Interdependent Schools?” #schoolsofthefuture

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We have public schools. We have “private” schools – more accurately termed independent schools. We have homeschool. We have charter schools.

What if we had INTERDEPENDENT SCHOOLS?! I wonder…What if we had a declaration of interdependence in addition to a Declaration of Independence?

Aren’t WE smarter than ME? Couldn’t we scale that to entire school communities? Couldn’t we leverage technology more deliberately to achieve such interdependent schooling?