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?

Imagine picking up the newspaper and seeing this story:

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,

(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:

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?

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.

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.

Fences 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.

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 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 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?

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.