Category: Organizational Change

The First Day

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The First Day

This morning, I witnessed the start of a new school year at two very different buildings – a neighborhood public school that first opened its doors in 1924, and a public charter school that was opening its doors for the very first time.

I still get back-to-school butterflies each time a new year begins.  There’s just something uniquely beautiful, and precarious, about the first day a group of children come together under one roof. The promise of what lies ahead feels like an almost unbearable ache – the weight of the work to be done being so great, and so unsteady.

By 7:00am this morning, there were still no children under the charter school’s roof  — the school day didn’t begin until 8:30am – but the mere presence of the roof itself was cause for celebration. Just two days earlier, the hallways of the school, which will be housed for its first year on the fourth floor of a new office building in downtown DC, were buzzing with last-minute preparations. Workmen installed new windows in every room – a task the school’s founding executive director had been begging the building’s owner to complete for weeks. One volunteer steadily made her way up and down the hallways, using a green marker and a stencil to affix room numbers. The father of the school’s board chair installed wire hanging rods on the walls. In one classroom, two women spoke Spanish as they finalized nametags, while another made colorful signs out of construction paper.

By the time the first student arrived – a five-year-old boy named Henry, clutching a batman action figure and bearing the eager grin of someone ready for a new adventure – any signs of the recent chaos were long gone. The classrooms – large, sunny and airy – were immaculate and inviting. Each adult wore colorful t-shirts bearing the name and logo of the school. As the school’s operations manager struggled to get the printer in working order before the inaugural group of 120 children arrived, she took a deep breath and said, to no one in particular, “It will all be OK.”

A short bike ride across town, a different set of children and families made their way along the long, sunny sidewalk that leads up to the neighborhood school’s front doors. Originally built to accommodate the children of European refugees from World War I, the school’s enrollment now tops 450, and reflects the modern diversity of the surrounding streets. This morning alone, I heard English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Amharic in the hallways. Children as young as three and as old as eleven filled the school’s gymnasium to meet their classroom teachers and get escorted to their homerooms. Parents received last-minute registration and information forms, and interpreters worked busily to make sure everyone understood what was required. During one such exchange, a teacher kinetically approached a particularly sullen young boy. “How you doing, Enrique?” she said, smiling and putting an arm around his shoulder. “Did you have a great summer?” Enrique shrugged, his head still down. Nearby, two girls playfully interacted with each other – new friends perhaps? – each clasping securely to the leg of her father, each performing her own unique pirouette.

This year, I hope to watch how the school calendar unfolds for these two communities – along with a private secondary school – and learn more about the particular obstacles and opportunities that give shape to the daily workings of a modern American school.

Although I live and work in DC, my interest in choosing three schools from the area went beyond mere convenience. Roughly 40% of the students in DC attend charter schools; less than 3% do nationwide. Similarly, less than 10% of the nation’s students attend private schools, yet many of the country’s finest are housed here, reflecting an uncomfortable – yet accurate – cultural divide that typifies the nation’s capital. And although the overwhelming majority of children in America still attend their neighborhood public school, fewer and fewer families in DC are doing so, opting instead to enter the growing, chaotic and nascent marketplace of school choice.

As this market grows and more families across the country are faced with similar decisions, what can the experiences of the educators, parents and students from these three school communities teach us about how to identify – and support – a great learning environment? Will our nation’s public, public charter and private schools openly and freely share their most valuable insights and observations with each other in order to benefit children and communities nationwide? Or will the high stakes of the marketplace lead a new generation of educators and innovators to guard their best practices, undermine their colleagues, and further privatize this most public of institutions?

Time will tell how these particular schools choose to answer those questions. But today was a good first day.

Just 179 to go.

What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on What We Talk About When We Talk About School Reform

With all due respect to Flannery O’Connor, my vote for greatest American short-story writer goes to Ray Carver.  And with all due respect to America’s current crop of leaders, my hope is that they convene a summer book club to read Carver’s stories – and heed his central message.

I’m thinking specifically of his collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As with all of Carver’s work, it’s a collection filled with a cast of characters best suited for the island of misfit toys – or the town in which you live. These are people who are down on their luck, who have fallen out of love, and who are struggling to find the right words to communicate their feelings, their thoughts, and their sense of how (and where) it all went wrong. Reflected in Carver’s spartan prose are the surface realities of life – the quotidian desperation of the things we sometimes say, see and do. But his genius comes from his ability to surface the submerged emotions of living – the weight of grief, the insufficiency of the words we live by, the slow acknowledgment of seeing what we don’t want to see. Carver’s stories are always about what we know, what we are perpetually struggling to know, and what we talk about while we linger in the chasm in between.

Which leads us to the present moment.

In the last week alone, we’ve seen a national prayer rally in Houston, the worst rioting in London in two decades, and – oh yeah – the first-ever downgrading of the U.S. government’s credit rating. More narrowly, fools like me who focus on school reform for a living are burdened by a national debate that still frames success or failure in terms of a single indicator of student performance. And everywhere, it seems, people are out of answers, in need of new narratives, and unsure of what to do next.

New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni captured the zeitgeist perfectly in his weekend column, “True Believers, All of Us.” “We all have our religions,” he wrote, “all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now . . . In government and so much else there are a multitude of options to weigh, a plenitude of roads to take and a tendency to puff up the one actually taken, because doing so squelches second-guessing and quells doubt. Magical thinking, all of it.”

Bruni’s advice in response?  Less of the thinking that got us into these messes, and more of a willingness to search for entirely new approaches to solving the world’s problems. “Faith and prayer just won’t cut it,” he concluded. “In fact, they’ll get in the way.”

As I read Bruni’s column, I thought of all the magical thinking that exists in my own field. On one side I see smart, well-intentioned people continuing to discuss school reform strategies via the illusory lens of achievement, and refusing to acknowledge the ways in which that word has come less and less to reflect any fully conceptualized reflection of the real thing we seek – learning. At the same time, other colleagues seem convinced that any outside influence is nefarious, that all charter schools are unwanted, and that Arne Duncan is the antichrist.

These are not just straw men – they are, as Carver suggested, the things we talk about when we are unsure of what to actually talk about. They are what we cling to when we are unsure of what to do next. And they are massive obstacles standing between us and a new way of seeing public education – and making it better, more accessible, and more equitable for succeeding generations of Americans.

What if we heeded the wisdom of Carver’s stories and acknowledged we’re struggling to talk about what we really need to talk about because no one wants to admit we’re not really sure how to get there from here? Would doing so help us start to address not just the concrete, visible aspects of school (academic growth, prescriptive policies, structural reforms), but also the intangible, invisible aspects of schooling (emotional growth, holistic practices, appreciative inquiry)? Would such a change even make a difference?

It’s only a hunch, but I think integrating these lines of thinking – the logical and the emotional, the visible and the invisible, etc. – is the only chance we have at true paradigmatic change, which Thomas Kuhn defined back in 1970 as “change in the way that problems are posed and solved; change in the unconscious beliefs what about is ‘real’; change in the basic priorities and choices about what to pursue and what social ends to serve; change in those approaches and solutions which display the whole world view as a coherent whole.”

Is the coherent whole what we really want to talk about when we talk about school reform? Is it something else? Or am I merely engaged in my own form of magical thinking?’

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

Posted on | by Sam | 14 Comments on How Many Sacred Cows Does It Take to Sustain A Movement?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

How do we transform the quality of teaching and learning in America?

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wrestling with that riddle for the bulk of my career. And this month, three separate events are making me wonder in a new way about how to bring about such a shift – and sustain such a movement.

The first two were meetings that represented parallel, powerful constituencies and ideas – an Imagination Summit hosted by the Lincoln Center Institute in New York City; and an Empathy in Action working group, hosted by Ashoka in Washington, DC. At each gathering, I heard stories and insights from some of the world’s most influential thinkers – from Sir Ken Robinson to Deepak Chopra to Kiran Bir Sethi. I heard compelling cases for helping our education system become more effective at ensuring that all children become empathetic, and develop the ability to think imaginatively, act creatively, and behave innovatively. And I left feeling impressed by the energy and the motivation that was driving each group to push its work forward.

In a few days, I’ll also be attending the Save Our Schools (SOS) March, a grassroots-led movement of teachers and parents from across the country that disagree with the Obama administration’s current reform path – and plan to peaceably assemble in DC to indicate their displeasure. Since I’ll also be covering the march for CNN, I’ve been reflecting on the goals of those private meetings, the goals of this public march, and the essential questions that must be answered for any movement to be successful: Who or what is the movement’s opponent? What is its core idea, and how can that idea be expressed as simply and compellingly as possible? And how can a complex network of individuals, organizations and alliances come together to forge a common agenda?

Our own history tells us just how possible, and difficult, it is to turn ideas and energy into transformational change. That’s because reforming a system requires not just the capacity to know your enemy and forge a compelling narrative, but also a systemic approach to the problem – an articulation of the whole. Too often, what happens instead is we lose sight of the whole out of our preference for a specific piece of the puzzle – I call it the sacred cow syndrome. Instead of a unified movement, we get a cacophony of parallel efforts. And instead of paradigm shifts, we get Groundhog Day.

If you’re a principal, you know this all too well. In addition to everything else you do, you have to regularly sort through the literature from a range of school-improvement approaches and programs that, to your eyes, seem to have similar objectives and research bases: is it a service-learning focus you want to adopt, or a character education program? Is civic education where you will choose to hang your hat, or will you double down on social and emotional learning?

To be certain, each of these field’s approaches to learning is distinct, and each field has its own unique advantages. Each would also clearly benefit from a larger movement that brings about a shift from our Industrial Age model of schooling to one that is suited for the Democratic Age. And yet for years the different leaders of these different fields have sought, genuinely, to unite their efforts – only to fall back, eventually, on their respective sacred cows.

Which returns us to the present. What will the future hold for these nascent Imagination and Empathy networks, and for this weekend’s DC protest? Since all three tribes talk of movement building, will one be able to craft a big-enough umbrella to unite the aspirations of the many? Will we develop the capacity to understand the whole? And is it possible to sustain a movement of sacred cows that, by definition, no one is willing to eat?

What DC Can Teach Us About Teacher Policies

Posted on | by Sam | 7 Comments on What DC Can Teach Us About Teacher Policies

This weekend, an article in my local paper crystallized three things we need to stop doing if we want to transform American public education for the long haul – and three things we should start doing instead.

1. STOP having a national debate about labor law; START having a national conversation about how people learn.

The article I’m referring to was written in response to the July 15, 2011 announcement that 206 teachers in the D.C. public school system had been fired for poor performance, “a rarity in a big city school system and an extension of former chancellor Michelle A. Rhee’s aggressive drive to upgrade classroom instruction in the nation’s capital.”

Indeed. For the past four years, ever since Ms. Rhee first took the helm of the D.C. public school system (DCPS), the tenor of our national conversation (and my local one) has been squarely fixed on teachers, on teacher evaluations, and on the role teachers unions have played in our ongoing efforts to guarantee each child an equal opportunity to a high-quality public education.

On one level, this makes sense: teachers are clearly the most significant in-school factor to a healthy learning environment for kids; teacher evaluations are clearly in need of an extreme makeover; and teacher unions have clearly been occasional obstacles to some of the larger efforts to remake our public schools. In that regard, any and all efforts to “upgrade classroom instruction” are exactly what the doctor ordered.

And yet, the reality is that the past four years have been more of a national debate about labor law – and less of a national investigation about how people learn. And the problem is not that labor law doesn’t need fixing; it does. But when things like “last in, first out” (LIFO) firing policies, collective bargaining rights, and teacher pensions crowd out our capacity to identify what highly effective teaching and learning really looks like – and requires – what we get are cover stories about personnel dismissals and litmus tests on national personalities, not evaluation tools that are designed to help the vast majority of teachers get better. Which leads to the second thing . . .

2. STOP spending so much time talking about the best and worst teachers; START focusing on everyone else.

Although mass firings of the sort DCPS reported last week are rare, the number of personnel affected was still quite small – just 5% of the total workforce. In fact, very few teachers were rated as either great or horrible; the vast majority – nearly 70% — were simply rated “effective.”

This underscores a rather obvious point: the only way to transform the teaching profession is by crafting policies that help the vast majority of educators improve the quality of their practice over time – not by lionizing the master teachers or demonizing the ones that should find a new line of work.

Is that what’s happening in DC? I believe our new schools chancellor, Kaya Henderson, when she says that IMPACT, the city’s new teacher evaluation system, is designed to build capacity, not just weed out the unwanted. Perhaps over time IMPACT will even become a useful national model for a different sort of evaluation tool that can provide feedback, reinforce high standards, and help ensure a high-quality teacher in every classroom. However, based on a recent in-depth review of IMPACT, we’re not there yet – and we’re still way too focused in our public rhetoric on the best and the worst teachers. It would be nice to see the rhetoric and the reality get more in line with each other. And it would be nice to imagine that some worthy educators won’t recklessly lose their jobs along the way.

3. STOP viewing poverty and education as an either/or; START viewing them as a both/and.

Anyone who lives and works in education knows that an ongoing argument has been occurring between some who feel you can’t fix education until you fix poverty, and others who feel you can’t fix poverty until you fix education.

The reality is that both sides – and neither side – are right. Poverty and education are inextricably linked, and the ecosystem each child inhabits – from his home and community to his health and his school – has a massive, complicated impact on that child’s capacity to learn and grow. Therefore, any new policies that fail to account for that complexity aren’t just poorly designed; they’re patently unfair.

This point was reinforced in the article about the DC firings and the IMPACT evaluation system. As Washington Post reporter Bill Turque wrote, “a breakdown by ward confirms, as it did last year, that the overwhelming majority of highly effective teachers work in schools with lower rates of poverty and other social problems.”

This news shouldn’t surprise anyone – how could it be otherwise? – and yet too many of us are still suggesting the path forward must be lit by signs saying either “It’s The Poverty, Stupid,” or “No Excuses Means No Excuses.”

We can do better. We have the capacity for greater nuance in our understanding of something as complex as teaching and learning. And as we spend the summer months preparing for a new school year, we would be wise to be more mindful of what we must stop, start and keep doing in the months and years ahead.

A Signature Shift?

Posted on | by Sam

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Last week, I was asked by CNN to comment on the news that most states will soon phase out cursive writing in order to give students more time to hone their digital skills. Initially, I wondered why the issue was receiving national coverage – there are bigger fish to fry, after all – so I posed a Facebook query to that effect.  A torrent of comments followed, and I received several long emails from viewers who saw the segment and felt compelled to share their thoughts. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion, and a strong one at that. Why were so many people so upset about this seemingly small development on the gigantic landscape of K-12 education reform?

This morning, as I watched my two-year old son make distinctive colorful swirls on his drawing paper, I realized what was going on: not only were we inching toward a new understanding about what each child must learn; we were also moving away from a deeply held belief about what makes each of us unique – the distinctive imprint of our handwritten signature.

The first issue is the one I tried to address last week – the powerful influence that memes have on our collective capacity to imagine new ways of addressing old problems or institutions. Ideas or memories that are shared among people in a given culture, memes are powerful obstacles to change – and they are ubiquitous in the American public school system. As Geoffrey and Renate Caine make clear in Natural Learning for a Connected World: “Traditional education is driven by a powerful meme that keeps replicating itself. One simply has to imagine several people gathering to talk about education to recognize how powerfully the meme is embedded. Individuals will visualize desks and books and a teacher in the front of the classroom. Grades, tests, discipline, and hard work will bind together the beliefs that everyone automatically subscribes to. These beliefs linger as foundational ideas that are rarely, if ever, questioned.”

Because we have such a strong shared sense of what schooling is (and isn’t), even small-scale changes to the way we think about elementary school — such as, say, phasing out cursive — will be likely to spark large-scale resistance.  And yet rarely, if ever, do you hear a discussion of memes make its way into the national debate about school reform. It’s the equivalent of trying to help a garden grow by removing all the visible weeds – and ignoring all the invisible root structures.

In other words, arguments for or against the educational benefits of cursive only represent one part of the picture. Far more influential are the social and emotional memories we bring to the idea of elementary school itself, or the level of individuality we ascribe to our own handwriting, or the extent to which we fear the prospect of replacing something so familiar with something so unknown.

What do you think?  How important, in the end, is handwriting to our own sense of individuality and self-expression? As we shift to a world where script is slowly giving way to e-signatures, and where the artfully crafted letter is crowded out by the cursorily crafted email, are we losing something irreplaceable? Or is the significance we attach to handwriting merely a reflection of our humanness that will, in time, easily migrate with us to new forms of communication and technology?

Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

This month, schools across the country are hard at work preparing auditoriums, printing programs, checking commencement speeches, and readying for the arrival of one of our society’s most cherished rites of passage – the high school graduation ceremony.

Perhaps by this time next year, we can do our students an even greater service and scrap the high school diploma altogether.

OK, maybe not next year, but soon. After all, almost every component of today’s traditional diploma reflects yesterday’s traditional thinking – if by yesterday we mean the 19th century.

It was 1893, to be precise. That’s when the first blue-ribbon commission was assembled to study the nation’s schools, which, at that point, were still largely decentralized. Among its findings, the ten-person committee recommended that “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil.” Not long thereafter, the College Entrance Examination Board was established in order to create a common assessment and set uniform standards for each academic subject. Couple those developments with the rise of the Industrial Era, the exponential growth of immigration, and the need to move an unprecedented number of students through the system, and you have the seeds that slowly gave shape to the public schools we have today.

Although these developments were clearly pivotal in fueling American growth in the 20th century, it’s equally clear that same system is ill-suited for the particular challenges and opportunities of the 21st. Which brings us back to the high school diploma – a document that still depends, in most places, on the same set of required courses, the same set amount of “seat time,” and the same set of curricular content that students have been studying since the end of the second World War.  No wonder that more than half our students have been classified as chronically disengaged – and that figure doesn’t even include absentees and dropouts!

We can do better. But first we need to shake free from the comforting familiarity of the pomp and circumstance of high school as we have come to know it.

The good news is that several schools across the country are already taking this courageous step. One such place is the Monadnock Community Connections School, or MC² for short (mc2school.org). A public school of choice in New Hampshire, MC² was founded to fulfill a distinctly 21st century mission: “Empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” As school founder Kim Carter explains, “Learning at MC² is personalized – so it can be tailored to each student’s learning needs; experiential – because students learn best by doing; negotiated – so that students can participate in decisions about what they will learn; and community-based – because learning takes place through a variety of community interactions.”

As you might expect, MC²’s goals and mission force it to look quite different from the typical high school. Instead of annually promoting kids from one grade to the next, students at MC² cannot progress until they have demonstrated mastery in a set of core competencies. Students spend as much time learning out of the school building as they do in it. Every student must write a 100-page autobiography in which they reflect on the people and events that have shaped the person they have become. And no one receives a diploma until they have successfully made a public presentation of their own personal growth and preparedness for adult life. (You can view a few of those presentations here).

In schools like this, the old adage is turned on its head: children are to be seen and heard. In schools like this, academic learning is balanced by an equal emphasis on emotional and vocational growth. And in schools like this, teachers and administrators have stopped relying on Industrial-Age benchmarks, and started identifying which Democratic-Age habits of mind and being will be most essential to their students’ future success as global citizens.

To create places like this for every child, we don’t need to sacrifice our desire for greater rigor, equity or accountability – but we do need to scrap many of our most time-tested symbols of schools, and of schooling. Redefining the requirements of a high school diploma is a great place to start.

Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Do Great Conferences Have a “Special Sauce”?

What makes for a transformational meeting?

I’m asking myself this question because I just attended the best conference of my life. I’m asking it because most conferences, well, suck. And I’m asking it because the people I just spent three days with were continually asking it of each other in order to identify the “special sauce” for themselves – and give us all a better chance of recreating it for more and more people.

The conference in question was WorldBlu live, an annual gathering that is “designed for individuals, for-profit and non-profit organizations who recognize the power of freedom and democracy as a tool for building thriving businesses, promoting innovation, attracting top talent and inspiring full engagement.”

I’ve already written about some of the specific highlights of the conference. Now I want to share the foundations of the WorldBlu “special sauce” that made it such a success – and that any conference planner can replicate, no matter what industry you represent.

1. The People (aka, Widen the Gene Pool) – WorldBlu Live is as heterogeneous a gathering of people as you’re likely to find.  It is, most broadly defined, a business conference, and, true to type, there were many CEOs in attendance, in industries ranging from telecommunications to healthcare to online retail. But there were also human resource professionals. And programmers. And higher education administrators. And musicians. And students. And the people themselves were coming from all across the United States. And Canada. And Denmark. And New Zealand.

This olio of professions, places and perspectives made for conference exchanges where no one could ever safely rely on their own linguistic industry shorthand, or even on an assumption about what one’s training did (or did not) include.  As a result, the conversations formed a powerful double helix of ideas and questions – quite the contrast from the more typical industry-specific meeting, in which the capacity to exchange new ideas – the genetic building blocks that lead to new ways of seeing both the world and our work – is so inward-focused it produces the equivalent of an inbreeding reproductive loop. In short, WorldBlu starts with the assumption that our capacity for innovation grows exponentially when we inquire into core questions with people inside and outside of our chosen fields. And any other conference would be wise to do the same.

2. The Purpose (aka, Start with the “Why”) – As Simon Sinek makes clear in his must-watch TED talk, successful businesses and individuals don’t get better solely by perfecting what they do and how they do it; they get better by understanding why they do what they do, and where that source of intrinsic motivation originates.

The same is true of WorldBlu live. Despite being such an eclectic group, each of us was clearly and powerfully united by the most unlikely of common denominators – a shared commitment to organizational democracy, and, by extension, to create spaces where people could bring their full selves to life and work. It was, put another way, a conference that was designed to reconnect the Me (individual capacity) with the We (collective capacity). And as a result, it was infused with great personal and professional relevance for every attendee.

By contrast, most conferences myopically focus not just on the professional, but also the “what” of what we do. This is what leaves us feeling half-filled, as, indeed, we are. It also prevents us from inquiring deeper into our own sources of passion, strength, and joy – a feeling anyone who attended WorldBlu live will tell you was at the heart of the experience.

3. The Pace (aka, Balance Passive & Active Learning) – Unlike many conferences, in which the majority of people have but one role to play – passive consumer of someone else’s learning experience – WorldBlu Live was designed to strike a dynamic balance between absorbing and co-creating solutions and ideas. Each morning, different people gave short, TED-talk style speeches to the entire conference – and each in response to one of WorldBlu’s ten design principles of an organizational democracy. Afterwards, someone else, from an entirely different organization or industry, spoke briefly about a tool they had used to apply that principle in their work. Then the group transitioned into long unstructured coffee breaks, then box lunches, and then short 45-minute breakout sessions.

I have never seen a shorter time for breakout sessions at a conference, and initially I assumed they would be too brief to yield anything meaningful. What I experienced was the opposite – the brevity encouraged folks to jump right in, and the design assumption was that breakouts were merely a way to help people identify affinity groups, and enable a more useful sorting of the participants so people could have the conversations they were most eager to have with the other people most eager to have them. Consequently, I witnessed something I rarely see in a conference: the complete absence of “drive-by speakers” – the folks who simply show up to dispense their wisdom and then leave as soon as they’re done. As one person put it, “At WorldBlu Live, the speakers were the conference, and the conference was the speakers.”

Imagine if more of our professional conference experiences were characterized by these design principles of people, purpose and pace? Imagine if we started to expect actual learning and fulfillment from these sorts of exchanges, instead of the reluctant knowledge that we will miss yet another opportunity to learn something valuable? And imagine if in the course of our own professional advancement, we made new connections that were equally valuable to our ongoing journeys of personal fulfillment?

It’s possible. I’ve seen it. So let’s stop accepting – and expecting – anything less.

Faces of Learning San Diego — High Tech High

Posted on | by Sam

A little over a month ago, I spent a few days on the campus of High Tech High (HTH), a remarkable network of schools in San Diego that are, simply, among the best examples of public education our country has to offer.

As you can see from the video, what distinguishes HTH is its ability to think differently about what a public education should look like — and accomplish. The schools are all housed in former Navy barracks, giving the school and its hallways an airy, open, almost half-finished sort of feel. Student artwork is EVERYWHERE, as are engineering and design projects, from robots to a whole wall of bicycle wheels, all connected via a long, single chain. It’s impossible not to feel creative — or at least to want to try something new.

Beyond the aesthetics, I asked Ben Daley, HTH’s Chief Operating Officer, to help me understand the keys to their special sauce. “We make sure our teachers have time to plan with each other,” he began. “Their day always starts earlier than the students, so there’s built-in time for teachers to coordinate what they’re doing and provide the kids a more integrated learning experience. We’re also doing a lot with videos of our own teaching, so we can study our own practices and find better ways to improve our teaching. And of course we have our own graduate school of education, so the overall learning culture for adults is of such a quality that it can’t help but be passed down to our kids.”

Indeed, HTH is the first school I’ve ever visited that literally houses its own graduate program on site. (Could anything be more logical?) As Ben and I talked, we ran into Stacy Caillier, who runs the program. Smiling as she spoke, Stacy explained what makes the program distinct. “For over 75 years, the average American High School has followed three critical assumptions that have become deeply ingrained in our understanding of what school needs to look like: segregate students by class, race, gender, or perceived academic ability; separate academic from technical learning; and separate adolescents from the adult world they are about to enter. Here, we try to overturn all of these tenets — we group students heterogeneously; we integrate our curriculum; and we embed students in the adult world of work and learning. By extension, our graduate program is designed to prepare educators to both design and assume leadership in this sort of learning environment, and to do so in a learning community that is collaborative, challenging, and very much grounded in the day-to-day world of the classroom.”

As part of its missionary spirit, HTH had spent the previous months building an impressive and eclectic local coalition of individuals and organizations, as the San Diego manifestation of the Faces of Learning campaign. I was in town to bear witness to its first public gathering, an impressive evening of storytelling and strategic planning.

Interested in learning more? Check out this short video of the event — and join us in imagining the possibilities of a movement of adults and young people — in search of better places to work and learn.

Don’t Believe the Hype (About College)

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Don’t Believe the Hype (About College)

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s not what you think.

I’m a proud graduate of the University of Wisconsin (and two graduate schools). I loved college. And it’s undeniable that the United States boasts some of the best universities in the world.

I’m also someone who flunked out my freshman year with a 0.6 GPA. In fact, I’d say it wasn’t until I flunked out that I had a chance of being successful. I simply wasn’t ready for what college was designed to give me (aside from the unsupervised social time).

Although my freshman-year GPA was surprisingly low, my freshman-year experience is unsurprisingly common. Too many young people simply aren’t ready for college, for a variety of reasons – meaning they either coast through four or five years and waste a ton of money along the way, or, if they’re lucky, they crash and burn so badly that they discover, for the first time, what it is they actually want to do with their lives – as opposed to what the adults in their lives have told them they should do.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently since reading Matthew Crawford’s bestselling book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Crawford, as you may know, got his doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago – and then left a cushy job at a DC think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia.

In this regard, Crawford is uniquely suited to comment on three inextricably linked aspects of modern society – our public education system, our modern economy, and our shared values. And, as Crawford puts it, the news ain’t good.

In some respects, the story starts in the 1990s, when shop class started to become a thing of the past, and educators started exclusively preparing students to be “knowledge workers” – and stopped valuing the ancient notion that our hands are what make us the most intelligent of animals. Yet the clearest starting point stretches back much farther, to the early 20th century, the rise of Industrialism, and the concerted effort to separate thinking from doing – and, in the process, to begin the degradation of “work” as we have come to know it.

Any historian is already familiar, for example, with Frederick Winslow Taylor and his 1911 book, Principles of Scientific Management. It was Taylor who wrote: “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning department.” It was Taylor who suggested that the modern workplace “will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.” And it was Taylor whose ideas led people like Ellwood Cubberly, a former head of Stanford University’s Department of Education, to recommend in 1920 “giv[ing] up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are created equal. . . . Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”

What has this legacy begotten? According to Crawford, it has given us a society where the production of credentials (e.g., knowing how to graduate) matters more than the cultivation of anything real (e.g., knowing how to think). It has led us to devalue the specific skills of the craftsman, and overvalue the general knowledge of the office worker. And it has engendered the gradual WALL-E-fication of our culture, in which the larger goal becomes the creation of passive consumers whose assembly-line work environments – be they the actual assembly line or the assembly-esque world of modern office work – can only be cured by the illusory freedom we exercise when we choose different products to purchase.

The bigger concern, and the one that relates to my own skepticism about whether everyone should go to college, has to do with the changing nature of the workforce. As Princeton economist Alan Blinder has written: “The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that do not.”

In other words, it’s easier to imagine outsourcing your need for legal advice than your need for an electrician. But the point is not that no one should go to law school and everyone should become an electrician – just that the goal of our schools, our economy, and our society should be to help people find work that engages their human capacities as fully as possible. And that’s not happening. And that’s a really big problem – and one that will never be solved if our knee-jerk reaction is to urge every young person to go to college.

“The best sort of democratic education,” says Crawford, “is neither snobbish nor egalitarian. Rather, it accords a place of honor in our common life to whatever is best [for each individual].” Amen, I say. So let’s stop pretending that college by itself is a cure-all for every person. Let’s start recalibrating our schools in ways that will help children discover their worth – and acquire the skills they’ll need to unleash their full potential on the world. And let’s keep searching for ways to help people understand, in the deepest, fullest sense, what it means to be free.

What’s Your Declaration of Education?

Posted on | by Sam

Those pesky EduCon folks are at it again.

Earlier this year, I wrote about a small, networked, eclectic tribe of educators who attended a conference at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, and who, with great energy and determination, pledged their shared commitment to bring about a different type of public school system by agreeing to the following core values:

  1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members.
  2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen.
  3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
  4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate.
  5. Learning can — and must — be networked.

For me, EduCon was a Come to Jesus moment – a time when I found adults who shared my fidelity to a language of possibility that was solution-oriented, relationship-driven, and future-focused. And now I see that they/we are at it again, this time via a drive “to remind ourselves and our students that citizenship means asking questions, finding answers and standing up for what you believe in . . . and that education must mean that too.”

The vehicle for this lofty goal is something known as The Great American Teach-In and, if it works, the result will be, on May 10, thousands of classrooms, students, and schools drafting their own Declarations of Education.

The Teach-In website has useful resources for anyone who wants to structure a conversation that results in an actionable set of aspirational goals toward the creation of healthier, higher-functioning learning environments. And the conversations will all be framed by a core set of essential questions:

1.     When and where do I learn best?

2.     What does an ideal learning environment look like?

3.     How closely do our current places of learning resemble our ideal learning environment?

4.     What barriers to learning/growth exist within our current learning environments?

5.     What will we do to make our current learning environments more perfect places to work and learn?

What I love about this idea is it assumes the best people to change the landscape of public education are those closest to the day-to-day workings of our nation’s schools – educators and students. After all, although there is much to dispirit us with the state of our school system, it does educators no good to assume these ills have merely been “imposed upon them”, and that they have no choice but to keep hoping, as passive victims, that better days lie ahead.

As the great quantum physicist David Bohm once said, “Thought creates the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’” So, too, is it with the current state of public education in America – and all of us have a choice: remain complicit, and passive, in the acceptance of a system that denies us the ability to create truly transformational learning environments; or become active agents in solving our own most intractable problems – and creating spaces for people to reflect on their ideal learning environments, and then think together about how to create those environments as soon as possible.

Sound like a good use of your time? Check out http://declarationofeducation.com/ to learn more and get involved. We can do better – and it is up to us to make sure that we do so.