Education for doing and failing

The business world, the world where people work once they move  out of schooling, knows the value of “doing”- it’s called “experience”, and there’s no substitute for it.  Employers regularly complain about new hires out of school who can’t do anything. They can’t think, they can’t apply a principle if they “didn’t have a case study about that” — in short, they aren’t good at DOING.

In rethinking about what education needs to be about and how we can then go about achieving this two things always come to the surface.  One is that education needs to be conceived as more than the transmission of data/facts and second is that the means by which you go about doing it conveys as much as what you are conveying.  In other words, how you go about the  business of education says a lot about what you are teaching. In fact, the two are inseparable.

Want to teach engagement and creativity/innovation?  You have to give students the opportunity to ask their own questions, explore and discover.  Stop “telling”.  Figuring out what the good questions are will always be more important than finding  out the answers to any questions.  Yet, schools today still provide the question and send students off to find the answers.  “Innovators” in education today think they are making significant strides when they  provide iPads as a tool to find the answers.  This is what passes for thoughtful and “forward thinking” solutions to the education crisis.  Myopic indeed.  This is what happens when people who have not truly been “educated” are old enough to be in charge.

Of  course, “doing”, if we’re lucky, often leads to failing.  More about  that in the next post.

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Reforming a curriculum or moving a cemetery?

Well, that’s the comment that a former Harvard president, Derek Bok, once made: that the two were about as easy to do. His replacement, Larry Summers, wrote in the NY Times recently that in 21st century universities “students (still) take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of which bear the same names they did when the grandparents of today’s students were undergraduates. A vast majority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department”.

And so the cemetery of education sits. In a recent Huffington Post article, Laura Shaw suggested that there are entrenched interests that keep the system as it is.  One thing simply screams as intuitively true: in a world that is remaking itself on so many fronts, surely the approach to what education is and how it should be achieved needs to be rethought.  Innovation guru Seth Godin just published an online manifesto arguing that “School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.”

So what are the new goals?  Well, I’ve written about that in this space for two years now.  The question is, why is there so little demand out there?  Why are parents willing to put up with a system that is so clearly out-of touch, out-of-synch, and utterly broken?  Stories abound about the decay of the education system.  Creativity experts  decry the destructive style of  conventional schools which strip all the inventiveness and engagement that is natural to people. Yet, the system persists.

Larry Summers identified six elements of an appropriate education, if we were to make a change.  Some of his focus is on:  processing information over retaining facts, collaboration over “keep your eyes on your own work”, and active learning.  Not a bad start.

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Cautious Collaboration

You hear about it everywhere today.  It’s in all the latest talk around offices, job interviews, and articles about keys to success in today’s world: collaboration is very much de rigueur.

And that’s a good thing.  Yet, like most things, there’s a context in which is is good/valuable, as opposed to just being good/valuable by itself.  This idea was taken up recently by Susan Cain in the N.Y. Times.  She wrote  about “The New Groupthink”, urging us to consider the important difference between coming together to  share ideas and learn from one another versus engaging only in a group setting.

Collaboration, to be effective, should mean “individuals who  engage in creative/productive thought on their own, generating ideas, then engage with others who have taken up similar or related questions in order to make connections and spurn one-another on”.  It should not mean “a group of people sitting around a table trying to ‘think collectively’ one the spot”.

The research supports this (see the NY Times article).

Schools talk a lot about collaboration, both as a mechanism for learning and as a tool that should be acquired in order to function well in today’s workplace.

As we transform education, let’s be sure to promote the appropriate understanding of collaboration.

Why is the distinction important?  It has everything to do with how the human brain functions and with intrinsic motivation.

The process of creativity involves careful thought, which cannot  be undertaken in  a room of people talking and sending ideas flying around.  It requires that you be able to  have a thought, turn it around in your mind, consider implications, integrate it with other things you know, and so on.  This  process is an internal one requiring calm, time and concentration.  A room of people bantering ideas about is not this.

Extreme forms of “forced collaboration” look like the  example Cain describes: a fourth grade classroom where the only questions that can be asked in a group session are ones that everybody has- you can’t ask your own question in the group if only you are curious about it.  If this is what collaboration  in schools turned out to be we’d be preparing children for  a dictatorship, not a constructive democracy.

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Intelligence, Ingenuity, Genius

Do schools make us smart? smarter? What is more important: intelligence or ingenuity?  If you had to choose, which would you?

Steve Jobs biographer, Walter Isaacson, recently wrote that Jobs was more ingenious than he was conventionally intelligent.   He argues that Bill Gates – that other guy – had more raw intelligence but that Jobs, like Einstein and others before him, stood at the intersection of the humanities and science.  Ingenuity here means “practical creativity”, it means seeing the relationship between disparate things that others don’t see, the connections.

It’s not that ingenuity is better than intelligence, they are just different.  The world needs all kinds.

What is an educational experience to do with these?  How can the experience in schools support both styles?  There’s no secret today that there are many kinds of learners.  Jobs’ insight is said to come from “experiential wisdom” – that’s learning which comes from doing, from acting in the world, learning from errors, trial and error- like all the great inventors did.

Of course, Jobs dropped out of college.  School was a limitation for him.  It didn’t allow for him to function, dare we say “excel”, the way he he was born to.  The reality is that we are all “born this way” – the way we are.  We need schools that recognize this, that allow each student to be themself, to learn as they need to, to think, create, invent, explore and solve problems.  Some may not even need school the way it is typically conceived of today.

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Stress, Emotion and Learning

The relatively new field of neuroeducation has made it clear that emotion plays a role in learning. Getting more specific, the field has shown that stress plays a role, a destructive role.

It turns out that stress prevents the human brain from developing optimally.  It does this by preventing neurogenesis from taking place.  Neurogenesis is our brain’s ability to create new neurons- brain cells.  If you grow up in a healthy and stable environment your brain is able to generate new neurons, which help you to learn.  Provide an enriched environment and you’re off to the races.  Stress takes you in the opposite direction of an enriched environment.

How does this inform the education paradigm-shift position?

Conventional environments create stress in students.  Whether it’s from the fear of failure and mistake making or the upcoming quiz, there are daily stressors for most students in a conventional environment.

The New Education Paradigm removes these stressors.  By placing the learner in greater control of her activities, by encouraging mistakes (in the spirit of risk-taking that is necessary to look for new questions and answers), by shifting to alternate modes of assessment, amongst other things, the new paradigm creates a rich environment that minimizes stress in the student/learner.  The result is a student who is not only motivated to participate and apply themselves fully, but a brain that is there to support them by creating the new neurons that they can then use to learn.

Now, if only we can get the prime movers in “industrial education” (new term) to catch up to  the science of the day, maybe we can begin to help more students sooner.  In the meantime, check out Montessori schools – they’ve understood this implicitly for decades.

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real education change, please

Recently it was brought to my attention that a new charter high  school in Chicago was being shaped by an innovative idea: allowing students to engage in meaning-making activities, based largely on game-theory.  This is intended to produce students who can think critically.

Meaning-making is indeed one of the necessary core outcomes of a true education, one which has generally failed to exist in the conventional model.  But, the  people behind this new charter program fail to grasp a key point: to direct students in their meaning-making cancels out the very thing you desire to achieve.

The subtle issue here is that of “idea generation”.  The person generating the idea is the one reaping the benefit.  Having others act upon the idea may have some value, if the idea is worthy, but what will not be developed is the ability to generate ideas- to be a critical  thinker, or a thinker at all.  It’s the genesis point that matters.

This new school calls what they’re doing “digital learning” and they explicitly talk about “getting kids hooked on learning” by making learning feel like a video game.  They talk about exploring things actively, with large video screens and tools that are wii-like, to demonstrate principles of physics, for example.

But, if you step back from all the tech jargon you see that it’s simply the latest smoke and mirrors attempt to deliver “content”, much the way conventional education always has.  It’s just the latest “use of technology”, after a long line of technological saviors of education (radio, television, computes, the internet).

In the end, the program description here contains all the misguided principles of old: it’s adult-directed, geared towards covering the curriculum and while the idea that students aren’t sitting in their seats all day long is good (let’s see in practice how it actually works out….) it’s not enough to make a fundamental difference.

Understanding what fundamental change in education looks like just seems to be so challenging, I’m coming to believe.  I guess that’s why paradigm changes are just that.

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What is Edn FOR?

There’s been a lot written in this space about the role, purpose and goal of education, especially in the 21st century – today!

In a guest lecturer spot at Oregon State University last month I addressed this issue again.

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Talent Development Centers

This is what needs to replace “schools”.

Think about it.  What we need is to develop the talent of each person: those skills, interests and abilities that define each individual person.  That’s what we should be offering each child, each student.  Imagine a world of people who are motivated about their lives, motivated by what they do all day long… so that it will be the very, unfortunate, few who still think that it’s the thing of dreams, or the fortunate few, who can say in the last years of their life “I never worked a day in my life” (because they PLAYED all day long, doing work that they loved).  That’s a world I want a part of.

Think about the perspective-shift that “talent development centers” connotes, as opposed to “school”.  The latter is laden with a lack of interest, a place and experience that we longed to escape and which generated little actual learning.  The former would be environments where you were free to excel at what you excel at and are passionate about; where you develop the very thing that will be your “gift” or contribution to the world.

There are programs out there today that use the language of “talent development centers”, but they end up being “talented and gifted” programs which require “acceptance” into or craft-type programs that are conventional in style- that is, they are not paradigm or perspective shifting.

Breaking down the idea of “school” is the challenge.  Change is difficult enough, changing something that is part of a cultural landscape is much more difficult.  Yet, nothing less will suffice.

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US Education Policy is Confused

And now, a re-post from a brilliant education scholar who understands what matters in education and what needs to be changed.  Yong Zhao recently moved to Oregon to become the Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

You can read his recent post here.

His recent book Catching Up is also a gem.

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China – education to emulate?

If we’d like a culture of poorly motivated and critically-thinking impaired people then- sure, let’s emulate China’s education system.

Wait!  Don’t they “perform” really well by international standards?  Aren’t they the ones we’re chasing on math and science tests?  Don’t they win most of the competitions in US schools and always “do well”.. why wouldn’t we want to emulate the system that gave rise to this?  Because our world will fail if we do.

To begin, regular readers of this blog do not need a reminder of why “doing well on tests” doesn’t matter (you can search for that content on this blog).  “Performing” is not living, and no indicator that you’re ready to live or succeed in the world.  But the biggest reason why Chinese education should be shunned is because it kills creativity and stifles innovation – the motors of development and growth.  That’s why even the Chinese are making serious efforts to  change their education system.  Chinese author Yong Zhao has written about this very subject in his book Catching Up.  He describes China’s desire to undo the damages of testing and standardization; and he accurately notes that “Innovative people cannot come from schools that force students to memorize correct answers on standardized tests or reward students  who excel at regurgitating dictated spoon-fed knowledge”.

American “reformers” who think that the ANSWERS to our current “testing” crisis lie within the model of Chinese/Asian education are just plain mistaken.  Well, let’s correct  that.  The answer to our testing crisis may very well be in that model – the problem is that our crisis in NOT one of testing – it’s much worse, much more fundamental.

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