The New Innovators

The crisis is still with us.  Grads look for jobs and don’t find them.  People call for a rescue to save them and others.  There’s despair and longing and a sense of hopelessness.  But not everywhere.  For some there’s a better way.  Necessity is the mother of invention.  The ones you will see rise up today are the ones who can tap into what made this country what it is: intrinsic motivation, perseverance, inventiveness, confidence, curiosity, boldness, independence and courage.

Watch  this music video and what do  you see?  I see two young people ” just doing what needs to be done”.  They put themselves out there.  They are making something of value because they can, and maybe they have to.  Hand-outs are not ever an answer.  Hand-outs train people to wait for help.  It trains them to “rely on” and become DEpendent.    That’s no future.  Maybe it’s just me but the passion and confidence I see in these two is what will carry them.  Never mind the particular song if you don’t care for it – see the souls of these two, their spirit.  I’m not worried about them.

The world is spinning out and we need young people to understand what will get them ahead.  The ones who are capable of rising themselves up will be the ones to make the future, to carry the world forward.  We need education to play a role in nurturing these young people, to show them that this is possible. We don’t need schools that  train them to sit and wait, to follow the rules, to be lead and to just  do what they are told.  Maybe too many generations of that is taking its toll today.

Education needs a reality check today.  It needs to be able to show all students  (i) that they have something inside themselves that they can contribute, (ii) that they can develop the skills to make that contribution.  But that skill development is not what’s on offer in most schools today.  There’s no path there for the innovators and creators.  Half of them are “tamed” with medication to help them “focus” and be calm and controlled.  That’s a shame because the taming also suppresses that which actually makes them tick, that which would unlock their contribution.

So, “cheers” to those who are striking out on their own, who have discovered their contribution.

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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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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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Parent Teachers

“Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”  (sing it with me.)  Yes, Pink was on to something.  Parents – leave them kids alone!

When did parenting become a vocation?  When did parents become artists whose children are the raw material from which to sculpt their masterpiece?  This is what too many parents do these days: from Baby Mozart (hopefully mostly debunked… right??) to prep-school for a prep-school for a prep-school…. getting into the “right” kindergarten, yes?  Otherwise it’s all downhill.  Helicopter parents who attend job interviews for their 18 and 22-year olds – then call up the employer when they don’t get the job to ask why.  I don’t make this stuff up.

When president emeritus of the American Public Media Group, Bill Kling, was asked what his parents were like, he said “They were wonderful.  They absolutely left me alone.”  What?! Come again.  Not in today’s world.  He talks about all the exploration he did and experiments he invented (and, yes, things he blew up!) – all in the pursuit of his own ideas, his own conceptions, his own thinking, innovation and curiosity.  That’s an education.  That’s a child given the space, the freedom to learn.  Not plugged-in, entertained and “activitied” (I made that up: it’s the parental over-scheduling act of having activities being thrown at you all too frequently).  No, this was a child left on his own to learn.

It really is that simple.  We are born to learn.  That’s the one huge gift we are given at birth: ready and powerful learners.  Naturally curious and explorative we will figure it out, whatever it is.  It’s what humanity has done all  along and will continue to do if we don’t short-circuit the system.  Leave them children alone, and all will be fine.

We need anxious parents to relax, take a step back and understand that this is how it works best.   There are too many parents motivated by good intentions but who are lacking some basic information.

A good new website provides some guidance: http://www.aidtolife.org

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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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Self-Organized Learning

A case has been made that universities need to shift from the present top-down and insular style to a more “learner”-based style.  It is argued that if we look at the end-users (students) and see how they already modify the system to met their needs, we can create a better system that relies on the self-organization of people: people taking ownership and control of their lives (learning) and making it fit.

While the point being argued for has merit, the premise that it relies on is weak: that college is getting too expensive and courses too often don’t relate to the problems faced in the real world. A stronger argument would be based on the premise that this style/model of learning simply makes more sense if you look at how people learn and are motivated.  Further, the model can and should be applied beyond the college level: younger students would also benefit from a more learner-centered approach, engaging them in problem-solving such that their learning will be the result of the efforts, mistakes and experimentation that they will themselves conceive of.

Actual learning occurs like the scientific method: conjecture and test -  try something and see what happens, repeat, learn.

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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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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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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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21st Century Education Paradigm

This is really hard to wrap one’s head around, or so I’m beginning to think.

When I talk about a “new education paradigm” people seem to think that I’m talking about something “different”.  Sure, its different, but there’s “different” and then there’s DIFFERENT.  Thinking of the necessary paradigm shift merely as “different” fails to capture its magnitude.  This is not a call to “make some changes” to how we go about the business of education, this is about upsetting the apple cart.

Think of it this way: when Thomas Jefferson wrote that a government gets its power from the will of the people, he was presenting a new paradigm for government.  Up until then governments were mostly monarchies- blood-line rulers who claimed the “divine right of kings”.  Jefferson through this aside and asserted that the only legitimate government is one that the people have put in place and that its job is to serve the people- see?  In this model the system has been turned the other way around (okay, that’s the theory, I get that we may have strayed a little but that’s besides the point for here).  This is common today, but 250 years ago this was unthinkable.  THAT’S a shift of paradigms.  Jefferson didn’t merely make some changes to how the system worked, he introduced a new system from the ground up.

This is where we find ourselves today with education: we need to start from the ground up. This takes courage.

One more point with Jefferson’s work: the success (and beauty) of the new model – democracy – was not so much that it worked better (though it did), but that it was a model that followed from nature, from the nature of humanity.  That people should govern themselves is “right” – it is aligned with universal/natural laws.  We need to follow this approach for education and ask: “what does nature want when it comes to human education?”

When we ask this question we find that we are taken down a new road, one that diverges “in a yellow wood”, and we are well advised to take that road less traveled.

Tune in and I’ll show you what you can find there.

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