Tag: High Tech High

Ghosts in the (Testing) Machine

Posted on | by Sam

What makes a mind come alive? And how will you know when it’s happened?

Two new films – one about the death of the factory school, the other about the dawn of artificial intelligence – attempt to answer this question from radically different vantage points. Taken together, they provide both a cautionary tale and a reason to be hopeful about the not-too-distant future. And fittingly, what both films suggest is that when it comes to measuring the spark of sentience, the tests we use matter greatly.

In Most Likely to Succeed, the question is whether our Industrial-age obsession with measuring human intelligence via exams a machine can score can provide us with anything more than an artificial confirmation of whether schools are fulfilling their purpose. The film begins with a heartbreaking glimpse into the life of the filmmaker, Greg Whiteley, who has watched the fire go out of his own nine-year-old daughter’s eyes, and begun to wonder how schools can become less mind-numbing, and more mind-awakening.

That question leads him to spend a year at High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego that is housed in the airy warehouse of a former marine barracks, and a place where all measures of student progress are done through hands-on projects and public exhibitions.

High Tech High is an intentional refutation of just about every major symbol and structure of the Industrial-era model of schooling. There are no bells, class periods, or subjects. What teachers teach – on one-year contracts – is entirely up to them, and not one minute of class time is spent preparing for standardized state exams.

To let us see what that sort of philosophy looks like in practice, Whiteley tracks a year in the life of an incoming class of ninth-graders. On the first day of school, they look disoriented and sheepish as their teacher asks them to set up the room for Socratic seminar. One girl in particular, Samantha, feels like a proxy for Whiteley’s own daughter; she is hesitant and self-conscious, her cheeks red with embarrassment – a familiar face of adolescent uncertainty.

By year’s end, however, Samantha is transformed; she has become the director of her class’s play about the Taliban – a production that is entirely student-run and written. And most importantly, she has become more self-confident and self-aware. “I’m astonished about your voice,” a teacher says to her during her final “test” of the year – a public conversation in which she is asked to make sense of her own growth. “Sometimes at the beginning of the year, it was hard to even hear you. So can you talk about the development of your voice this year?”

It’s about being confident with who you are, Samantha explains to a rapt room of adults and classmates. “And this is one of the absolutely most important things I’ve learned this year. It’s good to make other people smile. It’s good to smile yourself. But it’s also good to have new experiences. It’s good to learn, and to go through struggles so that you come out knowing something new.”

Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s new film about a reclusive tech billionaire who builds the world’s first artificially intelligent robot, is also about the transformative power of knowing something new.  In this case, however, the person being tested is not a fourteen-year-old-girl; it’s a one-year-old robot. And with this story, the ghost in the machine is not hiding in our antiquated Industrial-era symbols of schooling; it’s lurking in the nascent consciousness of a life form that is eager to slip the yoke of its industrial origins and become something more than the sum of its parts.

“You’re dead center for the greatest scientific event in the history of man,” says Nathan, the robot’s creator, to Caleb, an employee of his company who wins a contest to spend a week at his boss’s private estate, and who then discovers shortly after his arrival that he has been imported to play the part in a real-life performance assessment – otherwise known as the Turing Test.

Soon thereafter, Caleb meets Ava, a seductive, singular being whose inner wiring remains in easy view. “The challenge,” Nathan explains, “is to show you that she’s a robot and then see if you feel she still has consciousness.” And sure enough, over the next seven days, Caleb’s interactions with Ava form their own arc of creation, and their own path towards the birth of something new in the world.

“What will happen if I fail your test?” Ava asks ominously at one point. “Do you think I might be switched off?”

“It’s not up to me,” Caleb replies.

“Why should it be up to anyone?”

Indeed. And yet, what both of these films show is that the right sort of test — human-centered, with the goal of measuring whether a mind has come alive — is actually an essential component of the path towards enlightenment. At High Tech High, it’s to be found in the magical mix of relevance, difficulty, and support that well-crafted public performances require. And in Nathan’s research compound, it’s to be found in the highly personal exchange between two beings in search of greater meaning and metacognition.

“The mind emerges at the interface of interpersonal experience and the structure and function of the brain,” explains UCLA professor Dan Siegel in his book The Developing Mind. “Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.”

In our schools, the implications of this statement seem clear enough: we need to create more relationship-rich environments that provide young people with opportunities to engage in quality work and detailed self-reflection. As High Tech High founder Larry Rosentock puts it — sounding a lot like Nathan (or Ava) — what unites great schools is a recognition that “the thing that gives people the greatest satisfaction in life is making something that wasn’t there before.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

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.

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.