Angry Parents Storm State Capitol Buildings

Now that’s a headline I’d like to read, if the next line was “over the chaos that is public education, read government schools“.

With the unrest and demand for democracy in the Middle East it seems to me that parents in the US should be clamoring for their own “say” – a say in how their children are being educated.  Parents pay the tax dollars that fun the schools they send their children to.  Parents who send their children to independent/private schools are paying twice for their children’s education.  Why is it that no one is storming the capitol buildings?!  Why are we so passive, so accepting?

Conventional education has made so many promises about reform and “now we’ve got it figured out” and they fail to deliver over and over again.  Einstein was right, wasn’t he, when he said that the definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” – isn’t that us?  Isn’t that the legacy of public/conventional education?

It’s time to walk up those stairs and DEMAND something better for our children.  Demand that the schools stop being “schools” in any conventional sense.  Demand that education set as its goal the preparation of people to go off and live their lives, that it be set up to follow natural patterns of development, that it take children on a powerful journey of self-discovery.  Why can’t we have this?  Why aren’t we demanding it?  Since when are Americans willing to put up with something mediocre or worse, and not take matters into their own hands with a little ingenuity and simply come up with a better way? Since when?  What’s happened that the revolution is happening elsewhere and we sit back placidly watching it?

Has freedom lulled us into complacency?

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Learning, not Teaching (for 21st Century education)

The next element, as we begin to define what the 21st-century-education-paradigm could look like, is to understand the difference between teaching and learning.  This is critical because the conventional education paradigm wants to think as one as the means to the other: that teaching leads to learning.  That’s the whole paradigm.  The 21st century education paradigm understands that learning is not a function of teaching.

That’s right.  Learning occurs independent of teaching.

Learning happens all the time.  Long before there was any “teaching” there was plenty of learning.  Even today, we learn at such an astronomical rate in the first three years of life, that if we continued at that rate for the rest of our lives we’d put Einstein on an IEP!  Learning is nature’s way of creating a path for humans to find success.  We come to this world possibly the most fragile and dependent creatures.  We NEED to be able to do a lot of learning in a short amount of time.  So we are equipped (thank you “nature”) with a powerful computer/brain that has more brain cells than it could possibly use, and their nature is truly “use me or lose me”.  If there’s sufficient work for them to do, they get busy, and synapses are the result, then neural networks… there’s your “brain building”.

This is how learning occurs – it’s natural, it’s  nature’s way of making success possible for us.

What does this have to do with kids  in schools?  How do we take this knowledge and apply it to the new education paradigm?  What this tells us is that people learn by doing.  I was making this point today with someone at school.  We’d had a parent info night with childcare and the staff supervising the children were subs from the classrooms, subs who really acted as “aides” in those classrooms.  On this night they were required to play the lead role, not the supporting act.  They didn’t do a stellar job.  In thinking through this today I remarked that their experience as aides had not prepared them to take the lead role, so they’ve not really learned how to do it.  Merely watching others play that role is not an effective way of learning- you need to do the  doing yourself (and failing of course, because we know failures/mistakes lead to learning, that’s why mistakes are so valuable).

What the new paradigm requires is opportunities for students to “do”.  Not to sit and listen and watch in the hopes of remembering.  There’s a model for this already.  There exist alternatives to conventional education today that are seeing tremendous success, and which are based on following \”what nature wants\” and allowing for learning by doing, and it’s incredible what happens when you allow for that.

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50% Excellence?

Really?  Is it truly possible that 50% of Harvard undergrads are “excellent”.  That’s what the grades say.  Today half or more of Harvard undergrads receive a grade of “A”, while fifty years ago that figure was closer to 30%.

Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield spoke about this not long ago.  He describes grade inflation within Ivy League schools a a real problem.  Some are beginning to attempt to address it, but it’s not gone away and not going away any time soon.

So we graduate “excellent” students from “excellent” schools who we routinely hear cannot get the job done, can’t think or write thoroughly or succinctly.

Whether it’s due to post-modernist ideas of “well who are you to judge me?” attitudes, or lingering 1960s era notions of it being “oppressive” for “powerful” college profs to evaluate students, or entitled students of this modern day feeling like the world “owes” them (what, just for existing?)… whatever the explanation, it’s simply another symptom of a system that is broken and beyond mere “fixing” or “reform”.

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What education should be

So I have posted to the online magazine Slate.  They have a crowdsourcing project up around the question of what “schools should look like in the 21st Century”.  Below is what I posted.  It’s partly a distillation of what gets posted here.

 

If we look at what we’ve learned from developmental psychology, neuroscience research and leadership training we’ll see that this is what a school should be like:

1. mixed-age group environments: it is not chronological age that determines what a student can learns and we all take the time we need to learn. Living things develop in a non-linear process. How long does it take to learn to ride a bike?  The answer is: it takes the time that it takes you and that’s all there is to it.
2. self-directed, lengthy periods of work to accommodate the fact that intrinsic motivation leads to engagement and meaningful learning. When we work based on interest we invest far more time than anyone could require us to. When a child can choose what to work on based on her interest at the time she is far more likely to find herself productively engaged in the work.
3. allow for results-oriented assessment and student participation in assessment rather than raw test scores.
4. allow for exploration and open-ended questioning in order to foster real learning through meaning-making activity rather than focus on “content delivery” from a teacher. Students truly learn when they explore and arrive at conclusions rather than being fed “answers”. In this manner the resulting knowledge will be “owned” by them because they figured it out: that’s called learning.
5. deliver outcomes that truly prepare students for living their lives effectively and successfully: collaboration, leadership, creativity, adaptability, communication, empathy and resourcefulness. We need a culture of adaptability and creative innovation that will allow students to develop into people who can solve the problems when they do emerge.

 

 

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beyond grading

It still goes on.  In most traditional schools, it goes on.  We still feel the need to measure human development, progress in the development of a person, by putting a number to it.  What are we really measuring?  What does it tell us?

As I’ve said to some, “testing only reveals (i) weather you know the answer to the questions being asked and (ii) doesn’t measure understanding (only retention)”.  If you are given a geography test it won’t tell us what you know about geography, only if you know the answers we’re looking for on certain questions, and then we won’t know whether any of it means anything to you: just that you recall a data points.

We know that this approach is of little value for all kinds of reasons: students promptly forget what they “learned”, they can’t apply the “knowledge” to unique problems or situations, and plenty of people who succeed either didn’t do well in school or didn’t stay in it very long.

We need to move beyond grading and testing.  What is so difficult about just following a student’s progress?  You look at their work and see how they’re doing, you talk with them.  It helps if the approach engages the learner more than just making them a passive recipient of “information”.  This will ensure actual learning – what I call meaning making (if you’re not making meaning for yourself, you’re not learning).

Take away the pressure and stress.  Take away the “wrong answer” syndrome.  Let’s focus on constructing meaning and knowledge and the exploration and inquiry that is essential in this process, and forget about measuring it every inch of the way.  I’m convinced that relentless measuring of people in the process of learning is harmful.  Feedback is critical, yes, but that’s different from measuring and grading.  Feedback is natural: either you’re being successful at the endeavor or you’re not.  When I’m hammering nails I don’t need a final: “oh, 82%, not bad”.  I know two nails were bent in the process, etc.  What good does it do to put a grade on my work?

Yet, this is just what goes on. Still.  And to make matters worse, all of the calls for reform of  education center around making better test-takers!  We’ve no idea!  Higher grades?  Really, that’s the goal?  A long way to go still… we need every one of you to pitch in here… to change the conversation in education today.

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standards, yes!

Lest anyone interpret all my recent pradling on about “student interest” and “learning at one’s own pace” as suggesting that these “soft” and perhaps even “new age-inspired” educational values should replace the need for “academic excellence”, let me spill a few words about that.

Academic understanding simply means that a student grasps what is being presented.  Nothing wrong with that, it’s desirable even.  The point I’ve tried to make here is that our schools have focused exclusively on academics, on test scores, and two things have been made victim in this pursuit.  The first is that test scores – the only measure of “excellence” used – focus on right answers and not on understanding or meaning-making (more here).  Answers that one knows but which are not understood fully are empty- devoid of value for the “knower”.  We need an approach that builds meaning and understanding for  students, that’s a real measure of academic excellence.  Remembering data, answers, is not a measure of much, surely not of excellence.  The present belief that academic learning can be measured by tests and their scores is the first victim of this narrow concern.

The second victim is “all the rest”.  Ask an adult what makes people successful.  Ask them to describe people who “generally get along well in life” and what you’ll find is a lovely list of characteristics that actually make a difference in one;s life: perseverance, critical thinking, responsibility, compassion, leadership, self-discipline, and the like.  With the narrow pursuit of “excellent test scores” we’ve left behind all that really makes a difference.  As all the dislexic entrepreneurs how they got to where they are.  Similarly, it turns out that SAT scores are a terrible predictor (The SAT is a flawed predictor) of how someone will perform in college (yet it’s still a huge factor in who gets in and where).

Standards are huge, but let’s have standards for things that matter.  If an education is a process that helps you to be prepared to live your life fully and successfully, then much more will be required than the ability to take a test- and indeed, THAT will not prepare you for anything other than “test taking” which bears little resemblance to life.

Time to change the education conversation?  Let’s talk about standards for what?

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an emerging model

Slowly, as we look at how learning takes place – what the nature of learning is, we see a new model emerging.  As we follow the principles that are becoming clear – allowing student interest to determine work, allowing students to move forward when they are ready to – we see that the traditional classroom of yesterday and today does not allow for these things.  We see that what makes sense based on how learning happens is not what our schools weer modeled on.  This is why we’re changing the education conversation.

Recently I presented a small glimpse into how some of this might work (see post here) .  There’s much to be said to make clear how a classroom would work and the retraining that will be required in order for teachers to learn how to facilitate this new arrangement.  Fortunately much of this is already being done at some schools around the world. Following a different model of education, these environments have been emerging in rich and poor countries and have been shown to be successful across cultures.  They allow for student-lead interest (and still get all the work done!), they follow each student’s pace of learning so as to maximize the “fit” of learning and they reveal high student satisfaction.  I’m speaking of the Montessori schools.

These, it turns out, are not just “pre-schools” but extend into and through the elementary years, all the way to high school in some areas.  There’s much to be said here, but suffice it to say that a model already exists that incorporates the “how” of human learning.

With the rage that’s only growing about traditional schools, as depicted in a number of recent and soon-to-be released documentaries (Race to Nowhere, Waiting for Superman, The Cartel ) it is abundantly clear to a growing number of people that the “system” is broken and flawed.  We owe our children something better, something real, something based on the nature of learning and the nature of humanity.  Let’s put aside our special interests and pet projects and pursue what is actually, demonstrably, best for children (NOT for test scores, but for children).

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one’s pace in learning

As we continue to explore and define what a school should look like (\”education needs to be…\”) let’s look at how the pace of learning is determined: how fast or slow one moves through the material in question.  After “interest” this is a pretty significant topic.

Again, the intuitive approach is to start at the beginning and to move along as you are able to, right?  Once I grasp the first things I’m ready for the following steps or whatever comes next.  To not take this approach would mean either lingering with something that I’ve already taken in, mastered or grasped (and then to risk having interest drop) or to move along before I’m actually ready to, to take on the next step before I’ve really taken in the present one.

This is quite basic- when you teach a child how to ride a bike you don’t move them on to turning and riding in circles when they are barely able to manage “balance” by riding ten feet.

But what is the model of a traditional school?  Once again, we find that the design here has little to do with how people actually learn.  This model attaches a set of content, the curriculum, to a time line.  It has been determined in advance how long it takes to master the material.  One size fits all.  Sounds incredible doesn’t it?  Does it really take every student the same amount of time to learn how to read, to grasp the first principles of geometry or how to play a scale on the recorder?  Of course not.

We need  a model that allows for the unique learning pace of every student.  If we want to maximize interest we need to make sure that we’re not losing students due to being left behind or being asked to languish with material they are ready to move beyond… stalled in the middle ground.

So next let’s look at how we can accommodate this very basic and obvious necessary component of learning environments.

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failing to self-direct

Is it really such a nuanced concept?

I fail to see why it remains so difficult for educated people to grasp not only the value of students, indeed people, being self-directed, but also of simply grasping what it even is.  A New York Times story from about a week or so ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/business/11digi.html?src=busln) reported on middle school students and their ability to waste time on a computer.  The story focused on research revealing that with the great push to put computers into homes of those who cannot afford them, and an internet connection, the academic performance of these students actually declined after the introduction of the computer.  The premise was to “level the paying field” by giving the “advantage” of a computer and the internet to children who otherwise would be missing out.  The experiment failed.

What was also noted, however, was that “when devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning. Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.”  This comment inadvertently reveals just what self-directed learning is all about: the interest and motivation of the learner.  The students act with self-direction when trying to subvert the school’s internet “protections” because they want to get around them with great interest.  Why don’t these students show the same ability with their academic work?  Really?  You have to ask that question?  The way the academic work is presented (disconnected and abstract) it has no hope of gaining the students’ interest.

Why is this so difficult to understand?

Yes, self-direction is the much sought after remedy for much of what is failing in traditional schools.  But you can’t get there without understanding that it rests on personal interest and motivation.

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what is equal education?

If education’s role is to allow each person to become the best version of themselves possible, then surely all will not  follow the same educational path.  There are those in today’s world who contribute in all ways, at a variety of levels, and there is no common path that any has taken.  Successful people have spent years earning college degrees and successful people haven’t stepped foot in a college classroom.  Clearly a college degree is not essential.

Thomas Jefferson argued that we should have  an approach to education that allows each person to find their right place and that for different people and different professions the time of schooling and length of it will  vary.

As we consider how today’s traditional schools need to be reformed, let’s take this under consideration. Let’s do away with the bland idea that the same amount of education should be completed by everyone.  There are successful people in the world who would tell you that they were largely self-educated, or that what they learned that was truly important and helpful was not learned in a classroom.

We need to come  to an understanding that “it’s okay” if it’s not the same for all.  Equality in education can’t be equated with spending the same amount of time in school.  Some people are in school who really don’t need to be.  They are learning more harmful things that good: learning to dislike learning,  learning to not know who they are, learning that because they don’t feel right in school there’s something wrong with them, and so on.  Surely these people would be better off learning how to sustain their life in a meaningful and responsible way now.

As we change the conversation, let’s keep this idea in mind.  One size does not fit all in a world of unique and lovely human individuals.

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