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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.

ISTE 2010: Emerging Themes

Posted on June 28, 2010 by in Design, Learning, Networking, Technology

Two themes are emerg­ing in what I’m learn­ing here at ISTE 2010. These aren’t new ideas by any stretch, even to me. It’s just that they are being dri­ven home in very pow­er­ful and deep ways.

The world is small and flat. Not pre­cisely in the sense that Thomas Fried­man meant in his book, but in the sense of con­nec­tions and rela­tion­ships. As I said yes­ter­day, I can hardly turn around any­where with­out see­ing some­one I know, or meet­ing some­one I’ve con­versed with on Twit­ter. Today I met Jeff Aga­menoni and Sue Waters, from Mon­tana and Aus­tralia respec­tively, and with whom I have chat­ted many times over the last cou­ple of years. (Sue, of course, reminded me almost imme­di­ately that I for­got to bring her the choco­late I promised her. And then I took her seat in the Blogger’s Cafe. Great way to treat some­one I’ve just met.)

When our stu­dents leave our schools, they are going to land in a world where they need to relate not just with peo­ple who live and work near them, but with peo­ple around the world. It’s not optional any more. Every­one is your neigh­bor. Dis­tance is now mea­sured not in miles but by your abil­ity to con­nect with dif­fer­ent chan­nels. The more com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools you know, the closer you are. Kids are going to have to be able to find peo­ple and be found, to build their own dig­i­tal homes and tell their own dig­i­tal stories.

Which is the sec­ond theme I’m see­ing over and over:

Design is an essen­tial skill. Garr Reynolds in his book and blog, Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen, talks about how often peo­ple treat design as an after­thought, as though it’s dec­o­ra­tion to be painted on after mak­ing the con­tent. But design is much deeper. It is ulti­mately about effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion and facil­i­tat­ing con­nec­tion. If a valu­able mes­sage is obscured by poor design, the mes­sage will lose power, or the recip­i­ent will give up before it gets through.

Just as kids have to learn how to con­nect with the world and man­age those con­nec­tions, they have to learn how to effec­tively use the prin­ci­ples and tools of design to enhance their com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The only way we will ever be able to teach those skills is to use them ourselves.

So my first take­away from the day is that all edu­ca­tors, not just the ones who like that “tech­nol­ogy stuff,” have to become con­nected and become design­ers. It’s not optional any­more, because we will be putting our kids at a dis­ad­van­tage if we don’t get there.

ISTE 2010: Day 1

Posted on June 27, 2010 by in Learning, Technology

So here I am, sit­ting in the Blogger’s Cafe at the ISTE Con­fer­ence, a place that until now has existed only in myth and leg­end. This is, depend­ing on how you count it, either my first or my third ISTE. Two years ago, I attended NECC 2008, but only vir­tu­ally, through the activ­i­ties at ISTE Island in Sec­ond Life. I met many peo­ple there, and blogged about my expe­ri­ence. Last year, I did the same, again meet­ing new peo­ple, build­ing my net­work of col­leagues, and grow­ing my inter­est in attend­ing in person.

So this, year I’m at ISTE for the third year in a row, but this time in per­son. And as I tend to do, I didn’t do this halfway: not only am I attend­ing my first ISTE, but I orga­nized a Tweetup ear­lier this morn­ing, I’m vol­un­teer­ing at the Infor­ma­tion Booth in about an hour, and I’m pre­sent­ing a model les­son on Tues­day.

I have attended pro­fes­sional con­fer­ences before, some­times with other col­leagues from my dis­trict and some­times on my own. In some ways, this is much like the annual con­fer­ence of any other large, inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion: there are thou­sands of atten­dees (I over­heard one per­son esti­mate it at 20,000), a huge exhibitor floor of cor­po­ra­tions want­ing us to buy their prod­ucts, a book­store, keynotes, work­shops, and so on.

But I think what defines ISTE for me, and what sets it way apart from the other con­fer­ences I’ve been to, is that this is all about con­nec­tions. I walked into the Den­ver Con­ven­tion Cen­ter this morn­ing, and ran into Scott Mer­rick, some­one I’ve known for two years online, but never met in per­son until today. Although I am a lit­tle intim­i­dated by the enor­mity of the site and the num­ber of peo­ple here, it was imme­di­ately com­fort­able, because I knew that I already know dozens of peo­ple. I’ve run into many of them, and I’m very likely to run into more as the week goes on.

This con­fer­ence, then, isn’t a one-​​shot event where I will be immersed in indi­vid­ual learn­ing for a few days and then go back to “real­ity” where I can only hope to apply a few things that may have been absorbed while the rest evap­o­rate like the fad­ing shreds of an inter­rupted dream. This con­fer­ence feels to me much more like an intense con­cen­tra­tion of the rela­tion­ships and con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pen on a daily and weekly basis with the net­work of pro­fes­sional col­leagues that I’ve been build­ing over the last two years through Twit­ter, blog­ging, and Sec­ond Life.

Every moment of my time here so far has involved learn­ing. Even at din­ner last night, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to some deep philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions about the nature of learning.

On its sur­face, ISTE is a tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence. At its root, though, are not hard­ware and soft­ware and ven­dors and books. This con­fer­ence is really about pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tors who care deeply about learn­ing and stu­dents and max­i­miz­ing potential.

Tomor­row I begin attend­ing the for­mal ses­sions. I expect to learn more than I can process, and will be blog­ging about my expe­ri­ences. I also expect to learn just as much from the infor­mal gath­er­ings, the hall­way con­ver­sa­tions, the din­ner mee­tups, and the other amaz­ing peo­ple I will meet. What I hope to bring back to my dis­trict is a renewed enthu­si­asm for cre­at­ing an awe­some envi­ron­ment in our schools for stu­dents to learn and thrive, and ideas about how to intro­duce my work col­leagues to the power of this net­work I have discovered.

Lessons Learned from Pawn Stars

Posted on June 8, 2010 by in Gifted, Learning

Ear­lier today, Tony Bal­dasero posted this:

There are times when I think #pawn­stars on the His­tory Chan­nel is more rel­e­vant than many his­tory classes I have been inTue Jun 08 02:43:02 via Tweet­Deckbaldy7
baldy7

As his posts tend to do, it got me think­ing about what I’ve learned from the show, not about his­tory, but about teach­ing and learning.

For those read­ers who haven’t seen Pawn Stars, it’s a real­ity show about a pawn shop in Las Vegas. In each episode, cus­tomers bring in var­i­ous objects they want to pawn or sell. The shop own­ers have to appraise the value, nego­ti­ate, and some­times spot the fakes among the real items.

At first blush it seems like an odd fit for the His­tory Chan­nel. But the items that peo­ple bring in are such things as antique firearms, his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, sports mem­o­ra­bilia, even Jimmy Hoffa’s photo album (in the Back­room Brawl episode). As the series star and store owner Rick Har­ri­son says, “Every­thing has a story.”

The stars of the show are a col­lec­tion of not-​​so-​​sophisticated guys who are more likely to trade an item for a new tat­too than to appre­ci­ate the cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of a native artifact.

But there is no deny­ing that these guys know their stuff. Rick, his dad (the “Old Man”), and his son “Hoss” all have a depth of knowl­edge about his­tory and antique objects that never ceases to fas­ci­nate me. In one episode, a cus­tomer walked into the shop with what looked like a rusty hunk of metal, and Rick imme­di­ately iden­ti­fied it as a set of 19th cen­tury Frog­gatt Plug 8 handcuffs.

A few semi-​​random thoughts that came to mind as I con­sid­ered the show:

  1. Learn­ing is not the same as aca­d­e­mics. Rick Har­ri­son dropped out of high school in tenth grade, but he prob­a­bly knows more about his­tory than most col­lege grad­u­ates. Rick has obvi­ously learned an incred­i­ble amount in the years he has been in busi­ness. He works in a par­tic­u­larly unfor­giv­ing field, too—if he’s wrong about an object or its ori­gin and pays more than it’s worth, no one is going to buy it from him out of pity. He’s out of luck. The only way to be a suc­cess in his busi­ness in the long term is to know what you’re doing.
  2. You can’t know it all. Despite the exten­sive knowl­edge and exper­tise of the pawn shop staff, they don’t pre­tend to know every­thing. When an item comes in that Rick ques­tions, he calls in a spe­cial­ist. He has a col­lec­tion of experts who he asks to exam­ine items and ver­ify their authen­tic­ity. He’s not afraid to tell a cus­tomer, “I have no idea if this is real or what it might be worth.”
  3. There is no “proper” expres­sion of an intel­lec­tual gift. Some might say that the Har­ri­son family’s tal­ent is “wasted” in such a low class oper­a­tion as the pawn busi­ness. But who are we to judge the value that this shop and its own­ers con­tribute to the com­mu­nity or soci­ety? Who or what deter­mines if some­one is a suc­cess, or is achiev­ing at his or her poten­tial? Rick seems to love what he does, and he is good at his cho­sen pro­fes­sion. If we have a stu­dent who is a tal­ented writer, who’s to say that we have to guide that writer to pro­duc­ing “great lit­er­a­ture?” What if his or her pas­sion is to write slap­stick car­toons? Isn’t South Park just as valid an expres­sion of writ­ing tal­ent as Mans­field Park?

I believe we spend a lot of time in edu­ca­tion try­ing to cram stu­dents into the molds we have pre­de­ter­mined are best for them. While we do have an oblig­a­tion to take raw tal­ent and shape it, per­haps we need to look at it the way Michelan­gelo looked at sculp­ture:

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculp­tor to dis­cover it.


Our job is to dis­cover the poten­tial that is already inside the stu­dent and help them real­ize it, not to maneu­ver the stu­dent into becom­ing what we believe they should become.