Tag: Habits of Mind & Work

The Learning Revolution, Circa 2012

Posted on | by Sam

Six years ago, a funny Englishman gave a stirring speech about how schools were stifling the creativity of their students. Today, Sir Ken Robinson is a worldwide celebrity, and his TED talk has been seen by as many as 100 million people.

How did that happen, exactly? And what is the state of the learning revolution Robinson urged us to launch?

The first answer has a lot to do with TED, and the ways it has become an unparalleled global phenomenon and idea accelerator. But it has more to do with Robinson, and the ways he was able to – clearly and cleverly– articulate our education system as it is, and as it ought to be. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original,” he argued. “By the time we get to be adults, most of us have lost that capacity. We have become frightened of being wrong. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

The second answer has a lot to do with the impact of those words, and the ways in which our education systems have started to move – slowly but surely – in the direction of Robinson’s recommendations. In particular, I see three trends worth noting:

  1. Shifting Endgoals – In 2006, it would have been impossible to suggest that anything other than content knowledge was the desired endgoal of a quality education. The rest was fluff, and if you couldn’t measure it, it didn’t matter. Today, however, there is an increasing recognition that content knowledge is actually the means by which we acquire a quality education, while the endgoal is a set of life skills or habits we can rely on throughout our lives. This paradigm shift was foretold by Robinson, whose talk centered around one of those skills – creativity. It has since expanded to include a rotating cast of others, from critical thinking to collaboration. And it will continue to reshape how schools see their work, both strategically and morally, requiring a new wave of creative thinking about how we assess both student and teacher learning and growth.
  2. Growing Grassroots – Robinson was right to urge people to stop waiting for policies to change before they themselves change. The only way a learning revolution will begin is if we heed the advice of Myron Rogers, who advised us to “start anywhere, and follow it anywhere.” That means recognizing each individual school is, as Ken says, its own school system, and insisting that educators start being more proactive in how they reimagine the structure and purpose of school. Scores of networks and organizations are already doing just that – from Expeditionary Learning to the Institute for Democratic Education in America. More communities are joining every day. And eventually, the policies will have no choice but to catch up.
  3. Emerging Leaders – In schools and districts across the country, a new wave of leadership is emerging with the confidence to speak publicly against the dysfunctions of the current system and think strategically about how to transform education for the long haul. Montgomery County superintendent Josh Starr is one such example – the leader of a massive network of schools and educators, a passionate believer in working collaboratively with all stakeholders, and an astute communicator who relies on everything from podcasts to Twitter to community book clubs. “I see my work being as much about helping people understand how we learn as it is about balancing budgets or driving student growth. These are community-wide conversations we all need to be having, and my job is to help seed those – and to keep learning alongside everyone else.”

It’s instructive that the most watched TED talk in history is about public education – despite the mainstream media’s ongoing reluctance to provide anything more than cursory coverage. Sir Ken’s talk is a reminder that people everywhere recognize that there is no issue more important to our future than the education of our newest generations. And his message, fittingly, is that we are the people we’ve been waiting for all along.

(NOTE: This article also appeared on Huffington Post as part of its TED Weekend series.)

Vive La France?

Posted on | by Sam

Yesterday was one of those days every parent dreads.

My 2.5 year-old son, Leo, had decided to make dinner a histrionic struggle for power. My energy reserves were at historic lows. And my larger visions of effective parenting had lost out to my smaller need to merely give in to Leo’s irrational demands, make it to bedtime – and live to see a new day.

Regularly, as parents, we’re forced to make choices about how we respond to the words and actions of our kids. Ideally, those choices are always guided by a clear frame for determining what our children need to become healthy and happy human beings. But what if we don’t have a clear frame – or, worse still, what if our frame for parenting has us focusing on the wrong recipe for success?

That disturbing thought is the focus of Bringing Up Bébé, a new book by Pamela Druckerman, an American mother living in Paris who couldn’t help but notice the differences between the behavior of her American children and their French counterparts.  “Why was it,” Druckerman writes, “that in the hundreds of hours I’d clocked at French playgrounds, I’d never seen a child (except my own) throw a temper tantrum? Why didn’t my French friends ever need to rush off the phone because their kids were demanding something? Why hadn’t their living rooms been taken over by teepees and toy kitchens, the way ours had? Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life.”

According to Druckerman, the key was in the way French parents employed a “whole different framework for raising kids.” Unlike in America, most French children are encouraged to learn how to play by themselves. They are instructed to be respectful and to wait their turn; and they are not unfamiliar with a word that has become dreaded in American parenting: “No.”

The point is not that all Americans should raise their children as the French do – though I’m sure Druckerman and her publisher wouldn’t mind if we interpreted it that way. The point is that successful parenting, in any culture, requires a clear frame for understanding which habits of mind and being we want our children to develop, and how we’ll help them do so. And I fear that what we have in America is a familial case of mission creep – one in which our well-intended quest for ever-higher achievement has bred a nation of helicopter parents and a generation of children with plenty of love, and precious few limits.

So how can we cultivate a deeper national clarity around what our children need most to learn and grow? In short, what do we need to know to be better parents?

Ironically, a partial answer to that question may come from an unlikely source – the private sector. In fact, Harvard professor Chris Argyris has been studying human behavior in organizations for years, and his observations in the boardroom may be equally useful for better behavior in the nursery. “Most people define learning too narrowly as mere ‘problem solving,’” Argyris writes in a Harvard Business Review article titled, “Teaching Smart People How to Learn.” “But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act.”

Developing the reflective skills and the language to break out of dysfunctional frames takes time, but it’s also quite possible. “Despite the strength of defensive reasoning, people genuinely strive to produce what they intend,” Argyris explains. “They value acting competently. Their self-esteem is intimately tied up with behaving consistently and performing effectively.”

Each of us – whether we’re a parent or a professional – can rely on these universal human tendencies to learn how to think in a new way. “People can be taught how to recognize the reasoning they use when they design and implement their actions,” says Argyris. “They can begin to identify the inconsistencies between their espoused and actual theories of action. They can face up to the fact that they unconsciously design and implement actions that they do not intend. Finally, people can learn how to identify what individuals and groups do to create organizational defenses and how these defenses contribute to an organization’s problems.”

A personal story comes to mind. When I was still a teacher in Brooklyn, I was also the coach of my school’s basketball team. In retrospect, I can see I fell into a pattern of mimicking my own high school coach – a man who yelled and berated his players mercilessly. I hated this leadership style, and yet I unconsciously reenacted it when I became a coach. It was as if I had no other behavioral model to call on, so I repeated the only one I knew, despite my desire to do otherwise.

We do this in parenting as well – unconsciously summoning our own familial ghosts of the nursery and then wondering why we’ve fallen into the same old dysfunctional traps we were determined to escape. Argyris describes this as the difference between our espoused theory of action (“I am a loving, responsible parent”) and our actual theory-in-use (“I let my kids do whatever they want”). “Put simply,” he says, “people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use, between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.”

Parents reading this may have already identified some of the ways their theories of action get trumped by their theories-in-use. We may, for example, want our children to be empathetic and polite, and yet if we fail to help them imagine the world through the eyes of another, or if we give in too often to their demands for convenience’s sake, we should stop being surprised when they constantly interrupt us, or, worse still, start to see the world purely through me-colored glasses.

The good news is that once this sort of thinking is exposed and examined, all of us can develop the capacity to “see” our own thinking as it develops. We can stop believing there is a world ‘out there’ that exists apart from us, and start recognizing the ways our actions help bring forth the world we inhabit – a world we can always change and recalibrate.

So let’s start being more mindful of exactly what we think is most essential for our children to learn, know, feel and be able to do – even if some of our answers may run counter to the contemporary currents of American society. And let’s not be afraid, once again, to learn something valuable from our French counterparts:

Vive La Révolution!

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.