Watch this great video produced by the faculty and students of City Neighbors Hamilton, a fabulous public school in Baltimore, which chronicles their field trip to New Orleans as part of their study of water, and history, and the world, and themselves.
There is nothing preventing every school in America from giving young people opportunities just like this one.
As Congress prepares to reauthorize ESEA, how might this sort of learning opportunity be incentivized, so that experiences like this become the norm (in all schools) and not the exception?
(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.
On March 4, during an appearance in Miami with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, President Obama announced he will spend the month of March conducting a listening tour across the country, and “talking to parents and students and educators about what we need to do to achieve reform, promote responsibility, and deliver results when it comes to education.”
I think it’s a great idea – and the clock is ticking. So without further delay, I’d like to recommend three core questions Mr. Obama should ask at every stop:
1. What do we know about how people learn – and how can we apply that wisdom to education policies and practices?
2. What does the ideal learning environment actually look like – and how can we create more such places for kids, both in and out of school?
3. What other metrics of success can we use to gauge student learning – and how can we apply them in ways that will continually improve both our schools and our teaching?
If you don’t live and breathe this stuff, it may surprise you to find out that these questions are not the ones currently framing our national debates about public schooling. In fact, despite 2010 being the “year of education reform” – from Race to the Top to Michelle Rhee to Waiting for Superman – the last fifteen months have been, in effect, a national debate about labor law, not a national conversation about how we can best help children learn how to use their minds well.
We know, for example, that a revolution in the study of the mind has occurred in the last three or four decades, with important implications for education. In the 2000 report How People Learn, a diverse coalition of scholars report that “learners of all ages are more motivated when they see the usefulness of what they are learning and when they can use that information to do something that has an impact on others – especially their local community.”
This sort of insight requires a fundamental shift in how we think about the delivery of information, how we think about assessment, and how we think about structuring the school day. Yet in scores of states across the country, a rightful push to rethink teacher assessment and evaluations has led to policies that would tie as much as half of a teacher’s overall evaluation to their students’ performance on basic-skills standardized test scores. Further compounding the irony, this continued overreliance on a single metric coincides with a report the National Research Council released last week – one day after the President’s speech in Florida – saying that without sophisticated longitudinal analysis tracking individual students over time, test scores are of little value as evidence of actual learning and academic growth.
The thing is – we all knew this beforehand. In fact, we all know a lot more than we think we do about how people learn, and about what the ideal learning environment looks like. We just need to reflect on what we’ve already experienced, and then apply those personal insights in ways that enhance our professional learning environments.
Since September 2009, I’ve been doing just that – gathering hundreds of personal stories from people around the world, all in response to a simple question: What was your most powerful personal learning experience – regardless of how old you were, and regardless of whether it took place in or out of school? 50 of those stories – from students to social workers to the Secretary of Education himself – were collected into the recently released book called Faces of Learning. And thousands more people can now share their own stories, and read the stories of others, at www.facesoflearning.net.
What these stories reveal are core conditions of powerful learning – and, not surprisingly, the best learning experiences occur in environments that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential. Perhaps, then, as Mr. Obama listens to the stories of the people he meets with, he can start encouraging policymakers, practitioners and the general public to start asking a different question when it comes to school improvement: How can we give children learning opportunities that are more challenging, engaging, supportive, relevant, and experiential? And what metrics would we need in order to properly evaluate whether or not we were being successful?
Despite what you may think, that’s not what we’re doing in this country. In fact, the school Mr. Obama came to Florida to celebrate – a school that had just engineered its own cultural turnaround – was motivated singularly by its need to “pass the state test.” Yet the president spoke without irony about the appropriateness of this singular goal, even as he (rightly) urged us to create an education system that can “prepare students for a 21st century economy.”
Let me be clear: testing has a key role to play in our education system, and basic-skills proficiency in reading and math is essential. It’s also extremely overvalued. And we are on a path to overvalue it further.
The good news is there’s still time to turn this ship around. And so, as the president and the education secretary travel around the country this month asking questions, I hope our nation’s commander-in-chief will become its teacher-in-chief as well.
As any good teacher knows, the worst thing you can do is try to answer a question before you fully understand the problem. That’s why we need to have a deeper reflective conversation about what powerful learning and teaching actually look like so that we can start to realign our system – and stop celebrating success stories that spring from communities forced to focus all of their efforts on passing a single state test. We can do better – and now is a good time to start.
Those of you living in the NYC area have a cool opportunity worth taking advantage of this coming April.
IDEA, aka the Institute for Democratic Education in America, is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure that all young people can engaged meaningfully with their education and gain the tools to build a just, democratic, and sustainable world.
IDEA helps transform education by showcasing what works in education and equipping others to learn from it. And this April 3rd-5th, IDEA will shepherd a group of people through an “innovation tour,” during which participants will explore four exemplary NYC schools, with opportunities to see and experience classroom and school culture, discuss instruction, and meet with school leaders.
IDEA’s Innovation Tours offer an in-depth opportunity to really see and engage with the most innovative schools in the U.S. The NYC tour will take participants through the NYC iSchool, Urban Academy, Calhoun School, and The Green School.
Tours are designed to offer participants a chance to see dynamic schools in action, to learn from school leaders about the challenges and evolution of their culture and instructional program, and finally, to discuss ideas and applications with other teachers, students, parents, school board members, business leaders, and policy-makers involved in the tour.
Tour participants will also attend Columbia University’s Seminar on Innovation featuring IDEA leaders Kirsten Olson, Scott Nine, and Dana Bennis on Monday evening, April 4th. Tour costs average $300 per person or $150 without housing. Registration details, itinerary and further information can be found at www.democraticeducation.org/tours/newyork.
Check it out. And if you do, report back on what you discover!
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