Tag: collaboration

Across the Country, a New Type of Partnership Between Charters and Districts Emerges  

Posted on | by Sam

Increasingly, I’m hearing a question that drives me crazy: “Are you for or against charter schools?”

There can only be one legitimate answer to that question: It depends.

Are you speaking of the situation in Michigan, in which four out of five charter school operators are for-profit entities? Or the overall tendency for charters to be even more segregated than their public school neighbors? Or the reluctance by some charter leaders to hold themselves to the same standards of transparency and openness as traditional public schools?

If so, thumbs down.

But if you’re talking about places like Baltimore, where all charter school teachers are unionized (and the charters themselves are almost all locally conceived and teacher-led), or if you’re pointing to the growing movement among some charters to intentionally enroll and serve integrated student bodies – by way of the National Coalition of Diverse Charter Schools – the picture takes a very different shape.

And then there’s what’s happening with Summit Basecamp – a new sort of partnership between charters and traditional public schools that may very well offer the best evidence so far of what Al Shanker first called for back in 1988, when he imagined a new kind of school in which teachers could experiment with different ways of reaching students, and then inject that wisdom back throughout the public school system.

That’s what Diane Tavenner has done at Summit Public Schools, a successful network of charter schools in California and Washington that represent the bleeding edge of innovative approaches to personalized learning.

Unlike other models – I’m looking at you, Rocketship – whose efforts to leverage technology seem to be more concerned with creating magic in the balance sheet than in the classroom – Summit Schools have created scores of “playlists” that let students navigate their own pace and path through content knowledge, in order to free up more time for project-based learning, mentoring, and community-based work.

As a result, Summit Schools are besieged with visitors from around the world, all of them eager to see how technology can be used in ways that augment, not replace, the foundational social and emotional bonds between teachers and students.

And yet, as exciting as the attention has been, Tavenner felt it wasn’t going to allow her to fulfill her school’s overarching mission, so she sought out a transformative partnership with Facebook, whose engineers have helped her perfect the digital learning platform that allows Summit’s personalized learning system to function. And then she made that platform available for free, open source, to anyone who thought it would be useful to them.

You read that right. She perfected a product that could be worth millions – perhaps even billions – of dollars. And then she gave it away.

Still, Tavenner and her team realized that merely making the tool open source wasn’t optimal educationally. Surely, there must be schools and communities out there who would benefit from integrating the platform into their schools as a cohort, and continually learning from one another about how to get better at shifting to a different way of thinking about school – one that requires the kids, not their teachers, to be the hardest workers in the room.

From that idea, the Summit Basecamp project was born – a nascent, growing network of nineteen schools (across ten states) who are working to adapt Summit’s Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, to their own needs and norms.

Two of those schools are located near where I live in Washington, D.C., so I set out to visit both of them – Truesdell Education Campus and Columbia Heights Educational Campus, or CHEC – and see what all the fuss was about.

What I wondered was this: Is it possible that a charter school 3,000 miles away can exert a positive influence on the growth of a neighborhood school just a short walk from my home? Or is the reality of this transcontinental game of Telephone such that most of what makes a school special will get lost in translation somewhere along the way?

***

Truesdell and CHEC offer good test cases for the Basecamp idea, albeit for different reasons.

CHEC is located on a busy corner of one of D.C’s most racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods. Its students, who are overwhelmingly poor, Black and Brown, mulled about in their school uniforms the morning I visited, awaiting the start of the school day, while white-collar professionals passed hurriedly by on their way to the nearby subway.

When you enter the building, you must first pass through metal detectors that are staffed by a uniformed school resource officer. The halls of the school are wide and deep, evoking memories of an archetypal American public school. And while the 6th and 7th graders can still expect a rather traditional school day here – 65-minute classes, one after the other, divided by subject – for the 8th graders, Basecamp has meant the beginning of a very different school experience.

The day begins with individual goal setting – each student must establish daily and weekly learning goals, as well as a long-term aspirational goal (i.e., “to be the first in my family to go to college”) to which their daily decisions are pegged. It includes consistent time with an adult mentor. And it is anchored by personal learning time during which students must self-direct themselves through a series of content-specific playlists; and by group project time, during which kids and teachers can directly engage in more hands-on work together.

“The key,” Tukeva explained to me as we wandered CHEC’s cavernous halls, “is to target the kids who are not ‘buying what we’re selling’ in the old model. We have a lot of kids who are already thriving, but we also have a lot of kids who need different ways to get them engaged.

“Overall, this project represents a pretty intense jump for us. Before we signed up for Basecamp, we weren’t a 1-to-1 school; now, every student has his or her own computer. That’s a big jump. Before Basecamp, we didn’t have an integrated digital platform, so that’s a really big jump, too. We’d also never allocated time before for a mentor to work with each student intensively. So all of these steps are making our approach to personalized teaching and learning more comprehensive – it’s taking the different pieces we’d been working on and making them all more integrated.”

It’s true – it’s a big jump – and yet CHEC has also been piloting new approaches to teaching and learning for years. Consequently, it had already established an internal culture of experimentation. “We’ve been piloting different things for a while now,” she added, “so this doesn’t feel as foreign as it might in a different school. Our entire 8th grade team went out to Summit together this summer, where they worked as a team for two weeks. And so far, our kids are really liking both the technology and the increased levels of freedom.”

In that sense, early returns suggest that for a school like CHEC, which was already well on its way to becoming more student-centered and tech-savvy, a project like Basecamp is an effective accelerator. “We’ve had some small technological glitches,” she added, “and we have a much more bilingual population than Summit, so we have dual language needs they don’t which has forced us to do a lot of translating. But mostly it’s enabled us to go farther faster, because we can take everything that Summit has already done – from their playlists to their insights about how best to use the PLP – and modify it to our own purposes.”

By contrast, at Truesdell, Basecamp provided the impetus to start from scratch. “We’ve had crazy turnover here,” said Adam Zimmerman, a former classroom teacher at Truesdell and the school’s first-ever Director of Operations, Culture & Innovation. “But there’s a group of us that all arrived together about four years ago and feel some real continuity with one another and a desire to build something together. We’re all trying to find ways to keep growing as professionals. We also knew that if we just kept doing what we’d been doing, we weren’t ever going to effectively reach every kid. So we said, let’s bring in something that’s exciting that we can all get behind as a team. Basecamp is a retention tool for our teachers as much as a new learning strategy for our kids.”

I saw evidence of Truesdell’s upstart energy everywhere. One class I visited had been looking at injustice in the U.S. After spending a few weeks exploring topics together – police brutality, wealth inequality, etc. – they were able to choose their own for a culminating project. And as their teacher, Leah Myers, explained to me, “They’re allowed to decide if they want to work alone or in groups. The project is a public awareness campaign – either on social media, or in the local community – which they’re going to have to track the success of and then present a civic action project based on their findings.”

I asked Adam what was most exciting and most challenging about this new way of thinking about school – whereas, for example, organizing student projects had happened at Truesdell before, providing intense mentoring and unleashing kids to be the lead drivers of their own content acquisition had not. “It’s a new set of muscles we’re all trying to develop,” he explained. “Many of the teachers you’re seeing here were rated ‘Highly Effective’ before we ever brought Basecamp into the picture. That’s an important title to have in D.C. So how do you get teachers working towards something totally new and not merely reverting to what has worked best in the past whenever it gets challenging? We’re still figuring that part out.”

To be sure, both campuses still have plenty to figure out. Giving kids more freedom and authority over their own learning sounds great; but if what you’re giving them authority over is still not that interesting to them, there are limits. In one class, for example, I spoke to a group of students who were working on a project around percentages and figuring out how much a product might have been marked up.

“So you guys are using these rubrics all the time now to evaluate yourselves, huh?” I asked them.

“Yeah.”

“Is it better than what you did before, or worse, or do you not really care?”

“We don’t care,” they replied flatly.

Fair enough.

Yet for every exchange like that, there were ones like the kind I had with Diana, Leslie and Dania, three eighth graders who had decided to work together on a campaign about xenophobia.

I asked them what they thought about the new approach to learning. “It’s our choice now if we want to work together or alone,” Diana offered, a slight smile of embarrassment breaking across her face as she spoke. “It doesn’t really feel the same because last year we were used to having the teacher stand up and teach us but now we have this new program so we’re using the computer a lot. It’s hard, but I get to do it at my own pace so I can learn it more better and if I don’t understand it I can go over it again and I don’t get frustrated if other people are ahead of or behind me.”

Leslie nodded her head in agreement. “It just changes the way we interact with the teacher,” she explained in halting English. “Now she don’t stands up there teaching the whole class about migration. Now everybody’s doing different things and so she walks around answering questions. It’s given us more freedom. When a teacher stands up there she sometimes moves too fast and we’re behind. But now we can go at our own pace.”

Before I left, I spoke to another student – a young man named Kyree – who Zimmerman said embodied the potential of what schools like Summit, CHEC and Truesdell were trying to bring about. Kyree had been a Truesdell student, and then left – the result of instability at home – only to return after a rocky, violent tenure at another school. He spoke with a slow deliberateness, his eyes focused both squarely on me and on a distant horizon in which he was actively imagining the possibilities of his own future.

“I have a strain to be perfect at everything I do,” he began, “but sometimes it doesn’t actually come out to be what I want it to be. So I just strive to do more than usual, and do better the next time.

“I like this school better than my last one. At my old school, there wasn’t much learning or motivation to learn. But this school helps me learn faster than usual – I can go beyond the class or if I need to catch up I can catch up. I like that. You can find your own pace. But mostly I like hand work and there’s a lot more of that now.”

I love the way Kyree described what he liked – that there was more “hand work.” And we wonder why so many kids are so bored in school!

Because I get to visit schools all the time, I know how many Kyrees there are out there – young people with heavy burdens, great potential and a set of needs that have not been well met by the traditional classroom approach. I also know how many schools there are that are taking positive steps to support and inspire them more. So while it’s early, and the future is still a little murky, projects like Basecamp suggest to me what’s possible in the future of public education – and what type of standard we should establish for the charter sector.

As Summit founder Diane Tavenner has said, schools like hers – and projects like these – are “fueled by a deep dissatisfaction with the status of even our best schools, but also an extraordinary optimism that we can and will change them. We know that students are capable of so much, and so are our schools.

“Despite our hard work, we are far from realizing our full aspirations: classrooms, schools and systems where every student is joyfully realizing his or her potential. But we are optimistic that there has never been a better moment to harness this potential. We know more than we ever have about how people learn, what motivates them, and what drives success and satisfaction in life and work. We have access to technology that can help students and educators create and pursue knowledge more effectively than ever before, technology that can even bring communities together. And we are beginning to see glimpses of what’s possible when schools embrace the challenge of entirely redesigning the way they meet students’ needs and interests.”

(This article also appeared in Medium.)

The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Wisdom of Crowds, Untapped

The decision by DC Council Education Committee Chairman David Catania to hire an outside law firm to craft school reform legislation is an awful one, worthy of serious public rebuke – and for two interrelated reasons.

The first is that hiring a small team of lawyers is the least likely path towards achieving imaginative and effective policy. Despite public stereotypes of the profession, K-12 education is a complex web of cognitive, social, emotional, language, ethical and physical challenges and opportunities. Its systemic barriers to change are as myriad as our complicated shared memories of what schooling is (and is not). And it’s a field in the midst of a major paradigmatic shift – away from the traditional notion that a student’s job is to adjust to the school, and towards the radical notion that a school’s job is to adjust to the student.

So while it’s true that the final stages of policymaking involve a certain amount of legalese, Mr. Catania’s belief that this process should start with a team of lawyers – and not end with one – speaks to a fundamental missed opportunity, and the second reason it’s a bad idea: We are ignoring the wisdom of our own community, and the chance to imagine DC’s future education policy as a city-wide, regenerative civic event.

Of course, surfacing and applying the insights of our own community is not something we do often – perhaps because so many of us secretly agree with Thomas Carlyle, who famously said: “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

The thing is, Carlyle was wrong. As New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki writes in his 2004 bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds, “If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest, that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual.”

In other words, when our imperfect individual judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often extremely helpful. That’s why Surowiecki suggests, “we should stop hunting and ask the crowd. Chances are, it knows.”

In fact, that’s exactly what Mr. Catania is doing – hunting. It’s an impulse so common sociologists have given it its own name: “Chasing the Expert,” which references our tendency when facing difficult decisions to search for that one person (or small group of people) who will have the answer.

What Surowiecki discovered was that the opposite was true, but only if the core conditions of making a good large-group decision were present: diversity, independence, and a particular form of decentralization. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”

Imagine if instead of seeking outside funds to hire a small team of lawyers, Catania had announced a citywide initiative in which the best wisdom around crowdsourcing would be utilized in order to help the entire community arrive at a thoughtful, informed collective decision around the future of education policy? After all, politics is about the impact of government on the everyday lives of citizens. Why do we think the way to do it well is by distancing ourselves from the voices of the citizens themselves?

Indeed, the most damning implication of Mr. Catania’s decision is his inattention to the mechanisms of democracy, to the wisdom of the community, and to the regenerative power of combining both in an effort to improve public education. As Surowiecki writes, democracy “is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental questions of cooperation and coordination: How do we live together? How can living together work to our mutual benefit?”

“The decisions that democracies make may not always demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd,” Surowiecki concedes. “But the decision to make them democratically does.”

(This article also appeared in the Washington Post.)

Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on Should Schools be More or Less Democratic?

Like most parents of a young child, I’m trying to decide which environment will be the best for my son when he enters a public school for the first time next fall. At nearly every open house my wife and I attend, cheerful administrators and educators tout the advantage of being a “participatory” school, and of “giving children the opportunity to learn and work in groups.” Send your child here, they tell us, and he’ll acquire a core set of democratic skills – from working collaboratively to acting empathetically – that will help him successfully negotiate our increasingly interconnected global community.

Sounds great, I say – until I open my Sunday New York Times and read a cover story warning against the rise of a new type of groupthink. “Most of us now work in teams,” writes author Susan Cain, “in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”

Whom should we trust? Have we overvalued democratic skills like collaboration and shared decision-making to our own detriment? And, in the end, should our schools be more or less democratic?

The answer, of course, depends on which values and behaviors we associate with that word – democratic. And the reality is that too often, too many of us – from local educators to federal policymakers – define it in a way that limits our collective capacity to understand what a healthy, high-functioning learning community really looks like, and requires.

In many schools, “democracy” is a subject students study in social studies, or via a special add-on program, or, if your school still has such a thing, in civics class. It’s something schools and districts seek separate grant money to support. And it’s something that, in the end, you learn about – whether it’s the three branches of government or the legislative process or the twenty-seven Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Call it “Democracy via Content.”

In other schools, the word stands for something very different – a philosophy of human interaction that guides how adult decisions are made and how students interact with each other. In these places, what matters most is how the classroom itself is structured (or unstructured), and the messiness of the approach becomes the central message about what it all means. Call it “Democracy via Process.”

Problems arise whenever we overvalue either approach. In an environment where democracy is seen solely as a subject, children memorize their rights but never practice them. And in a classroom where democracy is seen primarily as a process, children sit in circles or work in teams – regardless of whether or not those methods are helping them learn more effectively.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan underscored this point at a recent White House forum. “The goals of traditional civic education – to increase civic knowledge, voter participation, and volunteerism– are all still fundamental,” he asserted. “But the new generation of civic learning puts students at the center. It includes both learning and practice — not just rote memorization of names, dates, and processes.” Harvard’s Tony Wagner agrees, noting that there is a “happy convergence between the skills most needed in the global knowledge economy and those most needed to keep our democracy safe and vibrant.”

In a healthy school, educators know which skills – from collaboration to self-direction – their students must develop to be successful as adults, and which combination of content and processes will get them there. Some days, that might mean working in groups; other days, it might mean listening to an old-fashioned lecture. And every day, it means school leaders are aware of the paradoxical human impulse at the center of any democratic society – a point Ms. Cain makes in her Times article. “Most humans have two contradictory impulses,” she writes. “We love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.”

A democratic learning environment honors both needs. That’s why from now on, the first thing I’ll ask at the open house is if the school understands which specific skills it wants to cultivate in its students, and why. I’ll ask which processes the teachers will use to engage kids in their own learning, and why. And when I find a school with clear answers and a clear plan for developing both “choice and voice,” I’ll know where to send my son.

The Three Most Important Questions in Education

Posted on | by Sam | 3 Comments on The Three Most Important Questions in Education

(This column also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

It’s graduation season again – yet nobody seems to be celebrating.

On college campuses, graduates are entering an economy in which the stable career paths of yesteryear are disappearing – and the specialized job opportunities of tomorrow have yet to appear. And in communities across the country, parents and young people are left wondering what exactly those past four years of high school were in service of – and how much, if any, truly transformational learning occurred.

Something’s gotta give. The Industrial-Age model of schooling, which benefited 20th-century generations by serving as a legitimate ticket to the middle class, has clearly run its course. In its place, we need a model for a new age – the Democratic Age. And we need strategies for ensuring that young people learn how to be successful in the 21st-century world of work, life, and our democratic society.

We can get there, but to do so we need to start asking – and answering – the three most essential questions in education reform:

1. How do people learn best?

Over the past several years, a slew of research from a range of fields has helped illuminate a much deeper understanding of what powerful learning actually looks like – and requires. We know the ideal learning environment is challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential. And we know that learners of all ages are more motivated when they can apply what they are learning to do something that has an impact on others – especially their local community.

The bad news is that too many schools are still crafting environments in which learning – if you can even call it that – depends less on these attributes than on obedience, memorization, conformity, and a set of requirements first deemed important a century ago.

The good news is that we already have schools across the country lighting a different path. At High Tech High in San Diego, for example, all learning opportunities are hands-on, supportive, and personalized. As school founder Larry Rosenstock explains, “Students pursue personal interests through projects. Students with special needs receive all the individual attention they need. And facilities are tailored to individual and small-group learning, including project rooms for hands-on activities and exhibition spaces for individual work.”

Best of all, the High Tech High model isn’t so precious or rare that our only hope is to remake every other school in its image. Instead, the rest of us can create our own success stories by doing what Larry Rosenstock did – heeding what we now know about how people learn, and operationalizing those insights into an actual school.

It’s environmental standards for learning we need – not a standardization of content or teaching practices.

2. What are the essential skills of a free people?

Whether we intend them to or not, every school is structured to value a different type of citizen. In China, for example – the site of my first teaching experience – the needs of the community are valued more than the needs of any individual. As a result, in the school in which I taught, free expression was discouraged, conformity was encouraged – and China got the citizens it sought.

In the America of the Industrial Age, one could argue we experienced similar alignment. After all, the early 20th century was characterized by exponential growth in its general and school populations, and a stable set of jobs for young people to fill. Today, however, the forces of globalization and democratization have elevated a different set of challenges and opportunities – and, by design, a different set of skills. Yet schools have not caught up to the shift, which is why so many of our graduates are emerging unprepared for the challenges and opportunities of the modern world.

What would happen if every school in America scrapped its current set of graduation requirements, and started over by identifying what it believes to be the essential skills of a free people – in work and in life?

One school in New Hampshire, the Monadnock Community Connections School (or MC2 for short), is already doing this. At MC2, students must demonstrate mastery in seventeen habits of mind and work in order to fulfill the school’s mission statement – “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.” These habits – which apply to every imaginable learning experience, from internships to classes to personal learning that occurs outside school – all have concrete indicators that are delineated in levels ranging from Novice to Expert. And not surprisingly, the habits reflect the skills most essential for the challenges of the Democratic Age – from self-direction and creativity to critical thinking and collaboration. As school founder Kim Carter explains it, “In preparing a student for their chosen post-secondary path, be it college or work, it’s critical to know what skills and knowledge will help to shape the decisions that impact their life.”

Makes sense, right? So what are the rest of us waiting for?

3.     What does it mean to be free?

In the end, our ability to answer the first two questions is in the ultimate service of the third. And yet the reality is that too many of us still understand what it means to be free in terms of the style of jeans we choose to wear, not the quality of ideas we choose to express.

The Founders certainly understood it differently, and so must we if wish to recalibrate our schools for the modern era.  In such a world, what it means to be free would mean having the space to discover one’s full worth – and developing the capacity to unleash one’s full potential.  Our schools and colleges would be places where we proactively created healthy, high-functioning learning environments. And our graduates would know, embody, and be able to apply the essential skills of a free people.

The answers we seek for creating such a system of schools are all around us. We just need to start asking the right questions.