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Edcamp: A Professional Development Amuse Bouche

Posted on May 23, 2011 by in Learning, Networking

I spent this past Sat­ur­day at edcamp Philly. Edcamp is an uncon­fer­ence: a gath­er­ing of pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tors that is delib­er­ately struc­tured dif­fer­ently than your typ­i­cal pro­fes­sional con­fer­ence. Instead of a set sched­ule of pre­sen­ters and ven­dors, pre­de­fined and pre­s­e­lected by a com­mit­tee, the atten­dees cre­ate the sched­ule on the fly by propos­ing their own sessions.

The top­ics at this year’s edcamp Philly ranged from “Mod­els of 1:1 Com­put­ing in the Age of Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics” to what was billed as the last-​​ever “Things That Suck” by Dan Calla­han (sorry, Dan, you may never get away from the con­nec­tion). The tone of the con­fer­ence and the ses­sions is almost self-​​consciously casual and irrev­er­ent, cul­mi­nat­ing in a “Smack­down” where par­tic­i­pants came to the podium and shared in rapid-​​fire suc­ces­sion a web site or app they thought was par­tic­u­larly use­ful, pow­er­ful, or sim­ply cool.

This is my third uncon­fer­ence (fifth if you count Educon, which has a sim­i­lar feel, but is more struc­tured). The first time I attended one, I left feel­ing like my head was going to explode from the sheer vol­ume of ideas that had been gen­er­ated over the week­end. Since then, I have had sim­i­larly pow­er­ful responses and believe there is some­thing to this that could be trans­lated into more tra­di­tional pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment are­nas. That was, in fact, one of the ses­sions I attended on Sat­ur­day, and there was some pow­er­ful con­ver­sa­tion around the idea of dis­tricts adopt­ing an edcamp-​​like model for some of their inter­nal training.

But I can’t help but think that there ought to be more to this, also. I’m won­der­ing of some of the energy is sim­ply from the new-​​ness of doing PD dif­fer­ently. There was a con­ver­sa­tion on Twit­ter last night (in which I did not par­tic­i­pate) prompted by a very fair ques­tion by Bud Hunt:

“Have been check­ing in on #edcamp tweets off & on today. Still wait­ing for the use­ful bits. What’d I miss? Worth your time to go to #edcamp? I see plenty of state­ments regard­ing the awe­some­ness of #edcamp, and plenty of smart peo­ple involved, but no steak to match the sizzle.”

I have to agree with him: I seem to be miss­ing the steak, and I’ve been won­der­ing why. It got me think­ing about why edcamp still feels pow­er­ful and impor­tant to me, even though I walk away from many ses­sions feel­ing as though noth­ing of sub­stance actu­ally took place. On reflec­tion (which isn’t done yet, by the way), I’ve come up with some rea­sons that edcamp is still worth the time:

  1. It’s about the rela­tion­ships. The great­est thing I have received from each of the uncon­fer­ences I’ve attended is con­nec­tions with other edu­ca­tors. I have made some very good friends through the con­ver­sa­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion that has devel­oped from each edcamp I have attended. I have found peo­ple who have sim­i­lar beliefs and inter­ests, and in many cases we have extended our work beyond that day.
  2. My bat­ter­ies get recharged. Each and every time I attend one of these, I am sud­denly immersed in a deep pool of peo­ple who care deeply about edu­ca­tion. In my every­day work envi­ron­ment, I am extremely for­tu­nate to work with sev­eral oth­ers who are as pas­sion­ate about edu­ca­tion as I am, but even so, it is a pow­er­ful thing to walk into a room where there are over a hun­dred peo­ple who have vol­un­tar­ily cho­sen to use their week­end talk­ing about work. It is next to impos­si­ble to walk away from that envi­ron­ment with­out feel­ing ener­gized and renewed.
  3. My map gets big­ger. It never fails that in every ses­sion I attend at an edcamp, I am exposed to a thought, idea, tool, resource, or con­nec­tion that I wasn’t aware of or hadn’t con­sid­ered before. I find out that some­one has already been doing some­thing that I was con­sid­er­ing, and now I have a place to go for advice. I learn about a tool that will solve a prob­lem I’ve been hav­ing, or I add a resource to my col­lec­tion and now have more ways to approach something.

Edcamp ses­sions never bring me to the point of mas­tery of a topic, and often we are no closer to a solu­tion to the prob­lems fac­ing edu­ca­tion than we were at the begin­ning. There are no deliv­er­ables at the end, there isn’t often a great deal of mea­sur­able growth or action.

I’m begin­ning to real­ize, though, that edcamp and sim­i­lar gath­er­ings can’t and won’t be the entire meal. It is more like an amuse-​​bouche: a tan­ta­liz­ing, bite-​​sized taste, designed to pre­pare the mouth for the later courses, to excite the taste buds and waken the senses to embrace the entire expe­ri­ence of the meal to come.

Should more sub­stance, more meat, be brought into the mix? Should the orga­niz­ers of edcamps think about how to begin grow­ing the model out of its infancy into a more sophis­ti­cated thing? Should there be out­comes and evi­dence of real learn­ing at the end of the day?

Per­haps. I leave it for another day to pon­der how that might hap­pen. But for now, I’m con­tent know­ing that edcamp has a very valu­able and worth­while place in inspir­ing me to keep work­ing hard at mak­ing things bet­ter for kids, not only in my own dis­trict, but as part of the larger edu­ca­tion community.

How about you? What other rea­sons is this kind of uncon­fer­ence still worth­while, even if the meat isn’t there yet?

The Solution to Climate Change: When In Doubt, Choose C.

Posted on May 2, 2011 by in Learning, Policy, Uncategorized

Imag­ine pick­ing up the news­pa­per and see­ing this story:

A 9.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake and sub­se­quent tsunami struck Japan today, caus­ing wide­spread destruc­tion. Dur­ing a news con­fer­ence, the Prime Min­is­ter said, “We have con­sid­ered all of the pos­si­ble solu­tions to this prob­lem, elim­i­nated the dis­trac­tor and one other obvi­ous wrong answer, and then guessed between the two that remained. We chose C.”


Obvi­ously ridicu­lous (and not because news­pa­pers are myth­i­cal crea­tures). Yet this is what we are set­ting our chil­dren up to expect. Because the entire world of school now revolves around the prepa­ra­tion for, and the after­math of, high-​​stakes annual tests, stu­dents now believe that all prob­lems worth solv­ing have pre-​​defined “right” answers. Even worse, they believe that “prob­lem solv­ing” means being able to suc­cess­fully choose (or if all else fails, guess) what that right answer might be.

Let’s stay in this alter­nate uni­verse for a lit­tle while and see how our future cit­i­zens might tackle some typ­i­cal real world problems:

1. You are the senior man­ager of a nuclear power plant that has been dam­aged in an earth­quake. Radi­a­tion is leak­ing, and the core tem­per­a­ture is ris­ing, rapidly approach­ing melt down. Do you:

a) Draft a press release min­i­miz­ing the threat to the com­mu­nity?
b) File a law suit against the engi­neer­ing firm that built the plant?
c) Turn the air con­di­tion­ers on high?
d) Panic and cry?

2. You are the Chair­man of the Fed­eral Reserve and you just dis­cov­ered that sev­eral of the country’s largest banks are in dan­ger of fail­ing cat­a­stroph­i­cally because of poor invest­ments and ques­tion­able account­ing prac­tices. Do you:

a) Blame it on the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion?
b) Tell the Trea­sury Depart­ment to print up a whole bunch of new money to help the banks catch up?
c) Lower inter­est rates?
d) Panic and cry?

You get the idea. Real world prob­lems don’t have a finite set of solu­tions from which we sim­ply have to pick the best. Nat­ural dis­as­ters, the econ­omy, cli­mate change, even our per­sonal rela­tion­ships are com­pli­cated and messy. Yet I already see in my own chil­dren a mind­set where if they don’t know the obvi­ous “right” answer to a prob­lem, they wait for some­one to give it to them—or at least to give them the pos­si­ble options they can choose from.

You are likely famil­iar with the Chi­nese proverb about fish­ing. My wife and two of my sons went fish­ing last week while on vaca­tion in Florida. In the course of about three hours, I caught one trout (on my first cast, no less), and my son caught a small cat­fish we had to throw back. There were sev­eral times that all of us were get­ting tired and frus­trated and I just wanted to be able to jump into the water and hook some­thing onto their lines for them.

Many of our class­rooms can look like this. Teach­ing some­one how to fish, or how to solve math prob­lems, or how to read, can be com­pli­cated, frus­trat­ing, and tire­some. It is tempt­ing to just show them short­cuts, and often we do.

The prep-​​and-​​test cycle can lead this way as well. As Diana Laufen­berg said to me yes­ter­day on Twitter,

@geraldaungst we’ve got to get over this obses­sion that there is a bucket of info our stu­dents should be car­ry­ing around.Sun May 01 18:34:08 via webDiana Laufen­berg
dlaufenberg

(Thanks to Diana for also sug­gest­ing the idea that led to the title of this post.)

There is an expec­ta­tion, rein­forced by years of NCLB, that in edu­ca­tion we can see steady, con­tin­u­ous improve­ment, and that the sim­ple path to this improve­ment is bet­ter teach­ing by bet­ter teach­ers. It’s like dri­ving a school bus: if we get a dri­ver who is more effec­tive, the bus will get to its des­ti­na­tion more effi­ciently and the pas­sen­gers on that bus will get fur­ther along the route.

The real­ity is much more com­plex and much more sub­tle. Teach­ers aren’t the bus dri­vers. Stu­dents are. And not only are they not in the same place on the route, they’re not all even on the route. In fact, they’re not all dri­ving buses. Some have cars, some are on bikes, some are walk­ing or even sit­ting in canoes. When a teacher gets involved in the process, it’s not a sim­ple mat­ter of turn­ing the steer­ing wheel, giv­ing it gas, or apply­ing the brake. We are more like guides who are explain­ing the map. We don’t have the lux­ury of see­ing imme­di­ate results of our instruc­tion, and in fact by the time results start to appear, we have likely given a great deal of addi­tional instruc­tion in the meantime.

I’ve used this school bus metaphor before, and will likely expand on it more in the future. The point here is that the real­ity of teach­ing doesn’t align with the expec­ta­tion of imme­di­ate and pos­i­tive improve­ment. Just like I got frus­trated wait­ing to see results of our attempt at fish­ing last week and wanted to take short­cuts, teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors look for faster, more straight­for­ward ways of get­ting the results that are demanded. So we also take short­cuts, train­ing kids to take tests more effec­tively and more effi­ciently, fill­ing their non-​​existent buck­ets with globs of infor­ma­tion just wait­ing to be spewed out onto their test book­lets like graphite measles. We sac­ri­fice learn­ing for per­for­mance, under­stand­ing for achieve­ment, and inno­va­tion for indoctrination.

Short­cuts can only get short term results, and only by the tightly lim­ited def­i­n­i­tion of “results” that is in vogue today: a test-​​score graph with a pos­i­tive slope. Real world results mean solv­ing real prob­lems; messy, com­pli­cated, con­fus­ing prob­lems where there might very well be no real solu­tion. It doesn’t mean going by the book, it means writ­ing an entirely new one. Results are about cre­at­ing new things that never existed before, not about select­ing the least inad­e­quate of some­one else’s mediocre options.

When I was in school, one of the tricks of the multiple-​​choice game that I was taught was, “When in doubt, choose C.” I sug­gest that we need a new answer:

E. None of the above.

Post­script: This post was writ­ten and sched­uled before the events of last evening. Just one more exam­ple of an immensely com­plex prob­lem with no easy or obvi­ous solu­tions. I’m glad we have problem-​​solvers work­ing on this and not answer-​​selecters.

Nonlinear Learning: Family Vacation

Posted on March 4, 2011 by in Differentiation, Learning

A cou­ple of days ago, I wrote about how schools often take the “camp bus” approach to learn­ing: load all the kids on the bus at the start of the year, take them all for the same ride, and arrive at the same destination.

Imag­ine a fam­ily trip planned this way. Grandpa calls the house one day and says, “We’re all going on vaca­tion to Dis­ney World this sum­mer. The whole fam­ily, kids, grand­kids, every­one.” Sounds won­der­ful, espe­cially when he adds that he’s paying.

“I already booked the hotel and the flight. We’re all meet­ing at the Philadel­phia air­port and fly­ing to Orlando.”

Prob­lem is Grandpa didn’t con­sider that these plans might not work for every­one in the fam­ily. Mom just found out she was preg­nant, due a month after the trip. She won’t be able to do much of any­thing in Dis­ney World, not to men­tion what Florida weather is like in August. Mom’s brother lives in Atlanta, so it makes lit­tle sense to have him come to Philadel­phia to fly to Orlando. Then there’s Mom’s sis­ter, who is a cast mem­ber at Dis­ney, so she’ll be work­ing through this “vacation.”

We could imag­ine a num­ber of other sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios that would affect the wis­dom of plan­ning a trip this way: Cousin Eddie won’t fly. The nephew gets vio­lently ill on any mov­ing vehi­cle (even the tram from the park­ing lot would be iffy). The new grand­daugh­ter is ter­ri­fied of mice. You get the idea.

How often in school do we make our kids get on the plane where we pre­de­ter­mined they need to get on? Instead, what if we were to show them the des­ti­na­tion and help them make their own way there?

Or bet­ter yet, let them choose their own des­ti­na­tion. Take it back to the vaca­tion: what’s the pur­pose? Is it fam­ily togeth­er­ness? Is it to have the Dis­ney Expe­ri­ence? Is it to be some­where warm? Let the fam­ily talk about all the pos­si­bil­i­ties and plan it together.

How could this play out in your school or class­room? How do we deal with the real­ity of com­mon stan­dards and imposed expec­ta­tions? We usu­ally respond to these with the con­ve­nience of the camp bus or the pre­arranged flight, but could there be other ways? How can we marry the non­lin­ear nature of learn­ing with the neatly scripted cur­ricu­lum that we are increas­ingly given?

Nonlinear Learning: The Camp Bus

Posted on March 2, 2011 by in Differentiation, Learning

When I was about 9, I went to Cub Scout day camp at Camp Del­mont for the first time. Every day, a group of us got on a bus and we rode for an hour or so. I had a great time, and at the end of the week, for rea­sons that I can’t now recall, my dad and I decided to take a ride up to the camp. So we hopped in the car, and Dad said, “Tell me which way to go.”

Now I had sat in the mid­dle of the bus and knew vaguely (at best) which way the bus had gone, but I did remem­ber one of the other kids com­ment­ing at one point that we were get­ting on the Turn­pike. Or was it the Express­way? No, Turn­pike, def­i­nitely. “Go to the Turn­pike.” We hadn’t gone more than a minute or two, when Dad took a left at an inter­sec­tion through which I was absolutely cer­tain the bus had gone straight. “No, Dad, go straight!” So he calmly got turned around and back onto the route I remembered.

Wasn’t long before I was com­pletely lost. But I wasn’t about to let Dad know that, after my absolute cer­tainty about the first turn. So he kept dri­ving, and I kept direct­ing him as best I could. “Are you sure you drove through Nor­ris­town?” he asked. “Yep, Dad, I’m sure. Right through here. Yep.”

Mirac­u­lously, or so it seemed at the time, we man­aged to end up at the camp, and I showed him all the places I had done stuff that week, and we had a great time. In ret­ro­spect, Dad, being the map king he is, prob­a­bly had already fig­ured out where the camp was and knew how to get us where we needed to go.

School has a ten­dency to work like the camp bus. At the start of the year (or a unit, or a chap­ter, or a les­son), we pile all the stu­dents on the bus, the teacher dri­ves us to camp, and the kids all get off. The teacher knows where we’re start­ing, where we want to end up, and the best way to get there. All the stu­dents have to do is go along for the ride.

The prob­lem comes when later the stu­dents have to make the jour­ney on their own. With­out the bus or the dri­ver, they get lost, miss turns, and lose track of where they’re going.

Learn­ing isn’t lin­ear, though, and the kids aren’t all at the same start­ing point. The process is much more com­plex and takes place in three (or more) dimen­sions. As a teacher it is far more effi­cient to plan the camp bus kind of les­son than to work in three dimen­sions, but it’s not about our con­ve­nience. In my next post, I will elab­o­rate more on the impli­ca­tions of non­lin­ear learn­ing as I con­sider what a fam­ily vaca­tion would look like if it were orga­nized accord­ing to school struc­tures. I will also be co-​​presenting a ses­sion with Mary Beth Hertz on this topic this Sat­ur­day at Teach­Meet NJ. If you’re in the area, come join us to con­tinue the conversation.

First Thoughts From Educon

Posted on January 30, 2011 by in Collaboration, Leadership, Learning

Conversation 3, by Andrea Christman

I’m part­way through my sec­ond Educon, and as I found the first time around, my brain is hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with the inten­sity of learn­ing that is going on. I con­tinue to be amazed at the num­ber of edu­ca­tors will­ing to spend an entire week­end, almost around the clock, think­ing deeply and richly about edu­ca­tion and how we can make it bet­ter for our stu­dents. And I’m not just talk­ing about how to improve com­pu­ta­tion or com­pre­hen­sion or pro­fi­ciency scores. I’m talk­ing about peo­ple who are con­stantly pok­ing at the whole idea of what edu­ca­tion is for and how it should work at a fun­da­men­tal level and what it needs to look like today, next year, and in the next few decades.

If you want an exam­ple of what’s good and great in edu­ca­tion today, if you want to meet the best of the best edu­ca­tors, come to Educon.

Also as I dis­cov­ered last year, there are a few big themes that seem to be emerg­ing from the con­ver­sa­tions, both for­mal and infor­ma­tion, that I have par­tic­i­pated in so far. I imag­ine that some of this is a result of my own bias and self-selection–I do tend to end up with peo­ple and in ses­sions that already lean the same way I do, after all–but these seem to be pretty con­sis­tent no mat­ter which par­tic­u­lar clus­ter of peo­ple I land in. I’m not going to attempt here to ana­lyze these themes in any great depth (I’ll save that for future posts), but sim­ply to put out some of the raw thoughts for your con­sid­er­a­tion. Push back, pick at the parts I am not con­sid­er­ing or grasp­ing prop­erly, and con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion that is going on in Philadel­phia this weekend.

Voice, Choice and Passion

We talk a lot about student-​​centered learn­ing in edu­ca­tion today, but much of it revolves around dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and keep­ing stu­dent abil­i­ties and needs in mind as we deliver our pre­scribed cur­ricu­lum. But what about student-​​DRIVEN learn­ing? Give stu­dents more free­dom to express them­selves, to explore and dis­cover what they are pas­sion­ate about.

We are wrestling with the very nature of what school and edu­ca­tion are for here. What is our role? What are the lim­its of that role? Or are there any? Part of me believes that more than sim­ply train­ing kids to be com­pe­tent adults (which I do think is part of our mis­sion), we have a big­ger ques­tion to help stu­dents answer: Who am I, and what is my place in the world? On the other hand, I’m not sure I want schools to shoul­der all of that respon­si­bil­ity. That’s what fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties and faith are for, too.

I believe part (or per­haps most) of our job is prepar­ing kids to make a con­tri­bu­tion to the world (I could well be wrong about that, of course). Dif­fer­ent kids will make dif­fer­ent con­tri­bu­tions. Dif­fer­ent kids SHOULD make dif­fer­ent con­tri­bu­tions. So should we be work­ing harder to mold stu­dents into our box, or should we be refit­ting the box to accom­mo­date the stu­dents? The Educon con­ver­sa­tions seem to be push­ing that even fur­ther: we need to let the stu­dents design and build their own boxes.

Challenging Assumptions

Another fre­quent theme that is aris­ing this week­end is the idea that we can’t be con­tent with our assump­tions. More times than I can count, I have been involved in a con­ver­sa­tion where the com­ments set­tle into a com­fort­able place where we mostly agree on the prin­ci­ples, then some­one (some­times me) says, “Wait a minute,” and points out that the assump­tions behind the prin­ci­ple aren’t nec­es­sar­ily givens.

There are dual dan­gers, I think. If we get too com­pla­cent in what we “know” is true about stu­dents, or schools, or edu­ca­tion as a whole, we can’t inno­vate and adapt to the world. But if we are too skep­ti­cal, if we only ever act as if all our assump­tions are poten­tially wrong, we may never actu­ally act on anything.

But I think we prob­a­bly ought to lean much harder towards reg­u­larly step­ping back and ana­lyz­ing what our assump­tions are. Stu­dents change and the world changes quickly enough now that things that really were true last year may not be true this year.

A ques­tion I am start­ing to ask myself in every con­ver­sa­tion and with every book I read is “What are the biases and pre­con­cep­tions that are fram­ing my point of view, and what hap­pens to the argu­ment if I turn them upside down?”

Now I need to fig­ure out how to bring these ideas back to my dis­trict and what to do with them in the con­text of every day school life. What are the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions of these ideas about stu­dent pas­sion and assump­tions? What do they look like in a class­room? How does pro­duc­tive change hap­pen? Maybe today’s ses­sions will move me towards some answers.

Which Side of the Fence Is In?

Posted on October 10, 2010 by in Leadership, Learning, Policy

Waiting at the fenceFences exist to sep­a­rate the things inside from the things out­side. They pro­vide a bound­ary to define and sep­a­rate space, and safety for those inside.

Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors put up both lit­eral and metaphor­i­cal fences in schools. Rules, fire­walls, expec­ta­tions, codes of con­duct. “They are for the pro­tec­tion of the stu­dents,” we say, and we believe it. We feel that schools should be safe places for our chil­dren, and we want to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment in which they can learn.

But what do our lan­guage, atti­tude, and focus say about these fences? Why are they there, and which side of the fence is in? These things mat­ter, and they reveal a great deal about our schools.

Stu­dent hand­books, pol­icy man­u­als, and our daily inter­ac­tions with stu­dents are filled with words like these: don’t, can’t, con­trol, con­fine, restric­tion, infrac­tion, esca­late, inter­ven­tion, penalty, enforce, and impose. The chat­ter in the fac­ulty room revolves around the “good kids” and the “bad kids”.

Think about the frame of ref­er­ence where you are. Which term below rep­re­sents the atti­tude and focus of the adults? What is the cen­tral prin­ci­ple around which the sys­tem is set up?

  • Com­pli­ance or Cit­i­zen­ship?
  • Con­for­mity or Cour­tesy?
  • Enforce or Encour­age?
  • Obe­di­ence or Respect?
  • Restric­tions or Bound­aries?
  • Don’t or Ought?
  • Penalty or Result?

What are we really try­ing to pro­tect? The stu­dents? Or the school?

There are con­se­quences to our choice of vocab­u­lary, our atti­tude towards kids, and the things we choose to focus on every day. Stu­dents pick up on these things, and their own behav­ior, atti­tude, and lan­guage reflect the envi­ron­ment they experience.

What are you and your school say­ing to your stu­dents? Does the envi­ron­ment com­mu­ni­cate safety? The oppo­site is not, “You aren’t safe here.” It’s worse. It actu­ally says, “You are dan­ger­ous.” Which puts them on the out­side of the fence look­ing in. And that’s no place to learn.

Why Blog? It's About History

Posted on July 19, 2010 by in Learning

I got think­ing about his­tory the other day.

How do we know what we know about the peo­ple around us? Our lives over­lap in var­i­ous ways. We expe­ri­ence things together, we talk, we share, we col­lab­o­rate. If I want to know more about some­one, I can give them a call or get together with them for a cup of cof­fee, and we can talk. We ask ques­tions, we share thoughts and dreams, and a con­nec­tion is made. His­tory is about the rela­tion­ships between our sto­ries. It is a grow­ing, chang­ing thing. My story is dif­fer­ent today than it was yes­ter­day, and I’ve added a small bit to the web of his­tory by the things I did today.

The day some­one dies, their story, and what­ever his­tory they were con­nected to, is com­plete. The cement has set. Any­thing new we may have to find out about them is already there in the things they’ve left behind. This is the real job of the his­to­rian: to assem­ble the clues and frag­ments left behind by the peo­ple who can’t tell us their own sto­ries any more.

So the ones who really write the his­tory are the ones who leave things behind. And this is pre­cisely why I think it is impor­tant for teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors to blog. What will future his­to­ri­ans have to work with when they are try­ing to piece together the story of teach­ing in the twenty-​​first cen­tury? Do we want our story to be told by politi­cians and the press? Do we want to be defined by the view from outside?

Teach­ers have always been in a posi­tion to cre­ate his­tory and define a legacy through the stu­dents whose lives we change, and that is still true today. But we have a unique oppor­tu­nity to tell our own story daily. If oth­ers lis­ten to that story and cre­ate a con­ver­sa­tion with us, the his­tory is that much richer. Only while we are liv­ing that story can we add to the con­ver­sa­tion and build an intri­cate, inti­mate pic­ture of our lives and the lives around us.

Everyone’s story is inter­est­ing to some­one, and everyone’s story is impor­tant to his­tory. What his­tory will you cre­ate today?

What Does it Mean to be Gifted Now?

Posted on July 16, 2010 by in Gifted, Learning

For the sec­ond in our sum­mer series, Tony Bal­dasaro (@baldy7 on Twit­ter) brings us this reflec­tion on his views about gifted edu­ca­tion. Tony is the Chief Human Resources Offi­cer and the Per­son­al­ized Path­ways Admin­is­tra­tor for the Vir­tual Learn­ing Acad­emy Char­ter School. This arti­cle was also cross-​​posted at Tony’s blog, TransLead­er­ship.

What excites me about the shift in edu­ca­tion away from the classroom-​​centric model we have all been a part of over the last cen­tury, is the fact that stu­dents are less depen­dent upon the teacher and/​or the sys­tem for all knowl­edge.  Stu­dents no longer have to attend school to attain their knowl­edge, they are as Nagel describes, “free agent learn­ers”.

Because of that, stu­dents have the oppor­tu­nity to break from the long-​​standing cat­e­gories we so often use in edu­ca­tion.  Terms such as “slow learner”, “hands on learner”, “trou­bled stu­dent”, “active stu­dent”, “solid stu­dent”, “middle-​​of-​​the-​​road stu­dent”, “tal­ented stu­dent”, “straight A stu­dent” and yes “gifted stu­dent” are sim­ply con­structs of our edu­ca­tional sys­tem and they most often only pro­vide clues as to how the stu­dent learns within the nar­row con­fines of that sys­tem. The “straight A” stu­dent may be intel­li­gent, but I’ll bet they are also also very com­pli­ant and dili­gent in get­ting their home­work done and being atten­tive in class.  They are very good at play­ing the part of the indus­trial model school stu­dent that the “con­spir­acy” of school was intended to cre­ate but are they good at solv­ing prob­lems, being cre­ative, unlearn­ing that which they have pre­vi­ously learned so they can be rel­e­vant?  Do we really chal­lenge these stu­dents to use their gifts to their fullest poten­tial or do we sim­ply moved them along the con­veyor belt, send­ing them off to col­lege with the tools to con­tinue to be “good” students?

The “active” stu­dent is one that doesn’t fit our sys­tem well, yet fits in the world’s chaotic and unpre­dictable sys­tem very nicely.   To make that stu­dent fit within our edu­ca­tional model, we drug, pun­ish, and belit­tle the stu­dent until they either com­ply to a degree in which they can be tol­er­ated, or are pushed out of our sys­tem all together.  The real shame here is that many times there is an assump­tion that these stu­dents are not gifted, when in fact they are, they sim­ply don’t play the game by the indus­trial model rules that were estab­lished a cen­tury ago.  Our choice has been to change the stu­dent to fit the model instead of chang­ing the model to fit the stu­dent and by doing so, we have missed an oppor­tu­nity with a whole bunch of gifted students.

How often do we work to con­trol our stu­dents?  Think of that stu­dent who chal­lenges our sys­tems.  Think about your reac­tion to that stu­dent.  Now think about your reac­tion to that stu­dent when you know they are right and our sys­tem in wrong.  Unfor­tu­nately, most of us squelch that stu­dent and often with­out a true expla­na­tion as to why.  We say that it is, “com­pli­cated” or “for their own good” or “they will under­stand when they are older”, instead of embrac­ing those stu­dents, their ideas and their input.  Instead of acknowl­edg­ing that they are right­fully chal­leng­ing the way we edu­cat­ing them because our sys­tem is not work­ing for them and they want it to.  Their “chal­lenges” are pleas for help, not the acts of betrayal we so often por­tray them to be.

My point here is that we have so nar­rowly defined what it means to be “gifted” in our sys­tem of edu­ca­tion, that we fail to either see the gifts within each stu­dent, or we fail to push stu­dents beyond the model we have been a part of for so long.  I fear that as long as we define “school” and “learn­ing” so nar­rowly, we will con­tinue to miss the the oppor­tu­nity to cul­ti­vate the gifted stu­dent found in all stu­dents.  As long as we con­tinue to define what it means to be “gifted” by the sys­tem which so nar­rowly defines how we learn, we will not truly find each of our stu­dents’ gifts.  It is why this shift toward free agent learn­ing, with the cat­e­gor­i­cal free­doms and the power to self-​​define our gifts, is so intriguing.

Who Are the Learners?

Posted on June 30, 2010 by in Leadership, Learning

I just fin­ished a ses­sion at ISTE 2010 by Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann on Twit­ter) on Thought­ful School Reform. Besides turn­ing a lot of my assump­tions upside down (which hap­pens every time I hear any­thing he says) and hav­ing far more to process than I could pos­si­ble fit into one blog post (so I won’t try), I walked away with an inter­est­ing ques­tion. It was not some­thing he addressed directly, but it was embed­ded in many of the points we dis­cussed in the session:

“Who are the learn­ers in your school?”

What answers would you get if you asked this ques­tion tomor­row? I sus­pect that in many cases, if the askee didn’t just look at you like you’d lost your mind, they’d say, “Uh, duh, the students?”

If that’s the only answer you get, though, there’s a lot of work to do. Every­one in a school needs to be a learner, needs to think like a learner, and needs to be treated like a learner. Teach­ers, vol­un­teers, par­ents, aides, facil­i­ties staff, bus dri­vers, and admin­is­tra­tors all need to under­stand that they are part of a learn­ing com­mu­nity. Every­one still has some­thing to learn, every­one has some­thing to teach.

We make an effort in our fam­ily to eat din­ner together as often as we can. Even if it’s only a brief time, we are delib­er­ate about mak­ing it hap­pen. Din­ner often inter­rupts stuff the kids are more inter­ested in, like play­ing out­side, surf­ing the Web, read­ing, and so on. Our youngest son typ­i­cally will pick at his food, eat a few bites, and say, “I’m full.” While, we’re not look­ing to get our kids in the habit of eat­ing when they’re not hun­gry, we’re also respon­si­ble for mak­ing sure he’s not mal­nour­ished. So we’d tell him, “You can’t pos­si­bly be full yet. You need to eat a lit­tle more before you can leave the table.”

What was funny, and now a fam­ily joke, is that it didn’t take long for him to catch on, and instead of telling us when he was done, he started ask­ing, “Can I be full yet?”

I don’t believe there is a sin­gle per­son involved in any school who has the right to ask “Can I be full yet?” The answer should always be no.

I’m think­ing that this would be a great inter­view ques­tion. The answer would tell you a lot not only about the per­spec­tive of the appli­cant, but also how they are likely to work with their col­leagues and parents.

I’m curi­ous too about your thoughts: What are the impli­ca­tions and con­se­quences of ask­ing (and answer­ing) this ques­tion? I’d also be inter­ested in find­ing out about peo­ple that actu­ally do ask this, and what kinds of answers you get. What are you going to do tomor­row to start chang­ing what answer peo­ple give?

Developing Knowledge Farmers

Posted on June 29, 2010 by in Content and Methods, Learning

While work­ing on my model class­room pre­sen­ta­tion for this after­noon, I dis­cov­ered a metaphor that helped me crys­tal­lize one of the things that makes learn­ing today rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent than it was when I was in ele­men­tary school, and gave me a bet­ter grasp on how and why teach­ing and schools need to be different.

In the 1970s, writ­ing a report was like buy­ing fast food. I remem­ber writ­ing reports on many top­ics in ele­men­tary school: Morse code and Iraq are two that specif­i­cally leap to mind. (When we were select­ing our coun­tries to report on, I picked Iraq because I thought it was cool that the name ended with a Q. Yeah, I know.) I selected my topic, went to the library, found a book, read it (or more likely, skimmed it), then sat down to write my own ver­sion. Report writ­ing really wasn’t research then, it was more like retelling. Like fast food value meals, some­one else had really done all the work of tak­ing the infor­ma­tion ingre­di­ents, pro­cess­ing them, and putting them together into sty­ro­foam con­tain­ers and paper car­tons. All I had to do was pick meal #2 and con­sume it.

School today is still set up for our kids to be fast food knowl­edge con­sumers. State and fed­eral gov­ern­ments have already done the work of select­ing what kinds of things are on the menu. School dis­tricts and text­book pub­lish­ers have already cho­sen the ingre­di­ents, devel­oped the recipes, and pre­pared the food, ready to deliver to the stu­dents. And just like fast food, it all looks and tastes pretty much the same every­where. A Whop­per in Den­ver is iden­ti­cal to one in Philadelphia.

Sim­ply being a con­sumer is no longer suf­fi­cient. In the sev­en­ties, kids (and most adults for that mat­ter) couldn’t access infor­ma­tion directly. We only had lim­ited sources, and all of them had been pre­processed for us by oth­ers. Today, on the Inter­net, we can tap directly into the raw data. The prob­lem is, many of us still just con­sume it the same way we used to. We’re get­ting fresh pro­duce and meat, but we are eat­ing it raw.

We must teach kids not how to pick a good value meal, but what do do with the ingre­di­ents they have. We have to teach them how to cre­ate their own meals. We’ll begin by fol­low­ing recipes, but we have to also teach them the prin­ci­ples behind the recipes, the think­ing that went into cre­at­ing them, and even­tu­ally how to develop their own recipes. They need to know how to select qual­ity ingre­di­ents, and which ones go together well. They need to develop their palates so they can expe­ri­ence the enor­mous vari­ety of ideas and rela­tion­ships that exist in the world. This will involve skills like crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem solving.

Even this isn’t enough, though. I believe we need to get kids out of the gro­cery stores and into the fields. Teach them not just to select the right foods, but to grow them. We need to give kids the seeds, the tools, and the tech­niques for becom­ing their own knowl­edge farm­ers, to cre­ate knowl­edge and share it with the world.

And of course, all of this means that teach­ers have to get out of their own value meals and learn how to shop, how to cook, and how to farm. I sus­pect that at least for a while we’ll all be learn­ing these things just half a step ahead of the kids, but that’s okay. What mat­ters is that we rec­og­nize that there’s a world of cui­sine out­side of the food court and that we’re will­ing to live there.