Author: Sam

I write books and talk about stuff.

In defense of the Industrial-era model of education

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I spent yesterday attending the Blue School’s fabulous Teaching Innovation conference, where everyone is rightly concerned with how to reimagine education for a changing world.

At a few different points, people spoke about how sad it was that we are working within a system that can’t do the sorts of things we now see are in the best interests of children: personalizing instruction, creating physical spaces that feel less institutional and more welcoming and respectful, and designing learning programs that help young people acquire the skills and dispositions that will be most useful to them as they negotiate their way through a world in which content knowledge is no longer the key to the kingdom — adaptability, compassion, and creativity are.

As I listened, it occurred to me that we need to cut the Industrial-era model some slack. When it was designed, a different set of questions needed to be answered, chief among them how to process an unprecedented number of young people through a system and into a job market was was largely predictable and known. Consequently, it makes sense that such a system would be anchored in the ideas of the factory line and the tabula rassa.

What’s sad is not that our old system can’t do these new things; it wasn’t designed to. What would be sad is if we don’t find the collective courage, capacity, and will to build a new system that is aligned for these new questions, and this new world. That work is just beginning, and it will take time.

Onward march.

 

The Difference Between Hannah Graham and Relisha Rudd

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On March 1, eight-year-old D.C. resident Relisha Rudd disappeared. She was, according to news reports, homeless, hungry, and in the care of a man who likely killed her. The search for her body didn’t even begin until almost three weeks after she was last seen, and, after just one week and a dwindling number of tips, police effectively stopped looking.

On September 13, eighteen-year-old University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham disappeared. She was, according to Charlottesville police chief Timothy Longo, a “bright, intelligent, athletic, friendly, beautiful college student who’s been part of our community for the past two years.” Hours after she went missing, state emergency management officials launched a massive search effort that was fueled by more than 4,000 tips. A little more than a month later, her body was recovered.

What can possibly account for the dramatic differences in these two stories? Both girls were filled with promise and potential. Both girls’ disappearances attracted the helpful glare of media attention. And both girls’ families deserved the closure that only a retrieval of their bodies could provide. So while I am grateful that the Graham family can now give Hannah a proper burial, I am appalled that here in D.C. – in the midst of a mayoral election, no less – the disappearance of Relisha Rudd has faded from public conversation altogether. And while I would love to say that the different outcomes of these two searches have nothing to do with race, the reality is that these two stories underscore what has been true for the duration of our nation’s history: black girls like Relisha don’t matter as much as white girls like Hannah.

Consider, for example, that whereas Graham was a college sophomore on a campus designed by Thomas Jefferson to serve as a beacon for the value of public education, Relisha’s first elementary school, Ferebee-Hope, was closed in 2013. Consider that whereas Hannah’s parents regularly appeared together at press conferences to make emotional pleas for help in finding their daughter, Relisha’s mother, Shamika Young, was a single parent who never reported Relisha missing out of fear that authorities would take away her other three children and enter them into the foster care system – a system Young herself had been shuttled through as a child. And consider that whereas Hannah had been supported, nourished and challenged by her high school and college communities, Relisha hated the homeless shelter at which she lived so much so that she would sometimes fake asthma attacks at friend’s houses in the hope that she could stay, and adults from her old school recalled her often arriving with filthy clothes, dirty hair and an empty stomach.

These are not just the differences between two girls’ stories. They are the difference between the seeds our society has decided to tend, and the seeds it has decided to discard. As the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak has written, “what the nation’s capital has sanctioned — a miniature, shameful city of about 800 displaced and homeless residents who live in squalid, depressing conditions next to the morgue and among the clients at a methadone clinic — is fertile ground for evil.” And what the rest of us have sanctioned by our relative silence is just as malevolent – a tale of two cities, two worlds, two paths, and two girls – only one of whom matters.

We can’t begin to undo the systemic inequities that led to Hannah’s and Relisha’s starkly contrasting lives until that contrast becomes the central topic of D.C.’s upcoming mayoral election – not to mention the midterm congressional elections nationwide. And even if/when it becomes the central topic, it will require generations of effort to undo generations of injustice. We are not a post-racial society, and we have a lot of work to do.

We can, however, do something that won’t take generations, or elections, or policies to remedy.

We can find the collective will and focus to move mountains, as Charlottesville did, and we can find Relisha Rudd.

In memory of Ted Sizer

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Several years ago, as the director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, I was lucky enough to meet Ted Sizer. A lion in the field, Ted was warm, welcoming, and eager in both theory and practice to create space for a new person like me to join him in his life’s work.

Ted died five years ago today — too young, at 77. In 2011, I edited Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education, to try and honor his work and the impact it had on my thinking. It was a book that stitched together 50 people’s stories of their most powerful learning experiences, and the final one to share was Ted’s.

On this anniversary of his death, I want to share that story here — and urge everyone reading to consider reflecting on, and sharing their own story, at facesoflearning.net.

We miss you, Ted. And we haven’t forgotten what you taught us.

Ted Sizer’s Most Powerful Learning Memory

My first real teaching was in the army, where, as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the artillery, I needed to teach my charges—mostly Puerto Rican high school dropouts who were as old or older than I was—how to prepare howitzers to fire at objects that were miles away. It was an important and practical form of geometry, a subject at which I had not been very successful in school. By now I was good at it, but I feared that learning would be too difficult for them, and then we would all fail.

I learned then that most teachers need to learn before they can teach. They have to learn about their students—and especially about what is relevant to them. My students were determined not to hit the wrong target; they struggled with the guns’ sights’ calibrations until they got them right. They took care of the ammunition so that it wouldn’t grow too wet or too dry. They followed all the safety precautions as if they had written the manual themselves. Where they came from, the learning difficulties they had had in the past, the many differences between their childhoods and mine, even what language they spoke mattered less than the job we had to do together. They did their new work successfully and gave me something I have valued ever since: faith in the possibilities for learning if teachers and students align their incentives.

Ted Sizer

Has Oprah come to embody what’s wrong with modern American culture?

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I’ve decided that if I were to pick one person who embodies the ersatz character of contemporary American cultural life, that person would be Oprah Winfrey.

Let me explain.

Over the course of her long career, Oprah has stood for much of the best of American public life.  In her daytime talk-show heyday, Oprah created space for people to reflect on their inner selves, to connect to big ideas, and to find a point of entry into a shared community of people who were committed to living better, fuller, more community-centered and empathetic lives. It’s for this reason that she has become so beloved, justly, by millions of Americans – and the scale of her success has felt all the more resonant because of the way she rose from humble origins to become a truly global phenomenon. She is Horatio Alger incarnate, or as close as we’ve ever come.

When I see Oprah these days, however, I see someone whose work increasingly reflects a dangerous conflation of America’s equally revered, slightly oppositional founding principles: capitalistic consumption; spiritual self-fulfillment; and democratic community-building. And the yield of that vacuous mixture is best embodied by her current “The Life You Want Weekend” tour.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, the vibe at these events is akin to a Great Awakening of the modern era – except whereas the previous Great Awakenings were purely religious revivals, Oprah’s events are more like what happens when you combine a deeply felt spiritual yearning with a deeply embedded profit motive. At the event in Auburn Hills, Michigan, reporter Jennifer Conlin chronicles a steady line of opportunities for people to pay at the altar of self-improvement – from a tiered $199 magazine/fan club subscription, to a $999 VIP upgrade, to a smaller set of items like t-shirts, hoodies, books and phone covers. By the end of the weekend, after Oprah’s appearance on stage triggered the audience’s wristbands to glow orange (like the sun), and attendees wrote vision statements for the future and took notes during self-help seminars, Oprah’s parting words seemed unintentionally revealing. “Thank you for your money,” she told everyone. “I know how hard you all work.”

Now, don’t get me wrong – events like these must cover costs, and there’s nothing wrong with ending up in the black. For lack of a better way to put it, doing ‘good’ and doing ‘well’ are equally valued aspirations of the American identity, and since our dual allegiance to capitalism and democracy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, our ongoing challenge is to strike the happy medium between, in this case, profit motive and personal fulfillment.

The problem is when we assume that one’s conscience is heightened based on the products one consumes. That, in a word, is gibberish, and yet that is what Oprah has come to personify – whether it’s a giveaway of free cars, a magazine that highlights her favorite stuff (and only features her on the cover), or a highly monetized national tour of self-actualization. As one frustrated attendee put it, “I came here to be spiritual, not commercial.”

A capitalist economy depends on our insatiable desire for things. A spiritual life demands that we be free from the suffering of desire. And a democratic society demands that we unite in service to a shared society that allows our best selves to emerge.

How do we reconcile these three components of our aspirational civic order?

The first step is to start acknowledging the inherent tensions that exist between our democratic, our spiritual, and our capitalistic selves – and to stop trying to tend to them all at once. Oprah has become a larger-than-life guru because we asked her to be. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be at the nexus of the spiritual and the corporate worlds, as she is, and the ways in which that must distort one’s sense of reality. (Though this video paints a pretty vivid picture.) So to be clear, I’m not blaming her – I’m blaming us for what we’ve asked her to become, and what our neediness says about who we are, and who we think we aspire to be. It’s telling, for example, that the first words Oprah uttered at her Auburn Hills tour event were, “You came! You’re here! Why are you here?”

Why indeed. But here’s the thing – the path toward “turning up the volume in our lives” does not lead through a Toyota Prius dealership, a magazine subscription, or a suite of Oil of Olay bath products. The things Oprah once gave us – the sense of community, the relevant national conversations and lines of inquiry, and the iconic model of intelligent self-reflection – have been cheapened by her attempt to align them with things. We cheapen her legacy, and ourselves, by pretending that they can be. What we need is a room of one’s own, not merely something to OWN. And the reality is we can’t really have them both.

At some point, despite what Oprah is telling you, we all need to choose.

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Is it time for schools to rethink, well, time?

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On a recent weekday morning in Washington D.C., several hundred teenagers hurriedly made their way through their high school’s hallways in a frantic effort to get to class on time.

I know – nothing new there. Except that in this particular school, the hallways had ubiquitous electronic clocks that measured time in bright red numerals down to the second, and these particular students had just three minutes to move from one class to another. “They had five minutes last year,” principal Caroline Hill told me, in between passionate exhortations for her students to keep moving. “And it was a complete waste of time.”

Admittedly, Hill – the founding principal of the E.L. Haynes Charter High School – is a little time-obsessed. That’s because she’s also obsessed with making sure that the most timeless experience in American public life – the school day – jettison its anachronistic habits and enter the modern age. “We can’t transform school,” she continued, “until we transform the way we think about time and its relationship to learning.”

Ostensibly, Hill’s school is as good a place as any to try to bring about such a mindshift. One of D.C.’s most sought after public options, the Haynes high school building reflects a mixture of traditional and innovative roots. Formerly a neighborhood public school until it was closed in 2008, Haynes secured the right to the building a year later, in 2009, and launched an ambitious renovation plan soon after. The end result is a $25 million, space capsule-style addition to the original building – and more than 46,000 additional square feet. The main entrance opens onto a sun-filled atrium that feels more like a university student center than a high school. And although the pace of the day still feels a lot like the high school you and your parents (and your grandparents) probably attended – with classes in fifty-minute increments, spread across a seven-hour day – what happens during those classes feels a lot different. That’s because E.L. Haynes is determined to rethink the two most important parts of the high school experience: ninth grade, and the way students start; and twelfth grade, and the way they finish. “And what we’re learning,” Hill told me, “is that in order for those experiences to be meaningfully different, adults and young people first need to completely rethink what it means to be a teacher or a student.”

Hill’s interest in reimagining the entry and exit points for her students was piqued shortly after the school welcomed its first group of ninth graders. “We had assumed that all of our high school kids would come directly from our lower school,” she explained, “but three-fourths of them were coming from other schools across the city, which meant the skill-levels and expectations each student had about what school was about were all over the map. Meanwhile, our ninth grade was structured as this typical one-size-fits-all experience, regardless of where the kids were at individually.”

Hill and her faculty quickly decided that if they wanted to ensure that all students were ready for life after high school, they had to get serious about closing those gaps. “And it’s really hard to create a more personalized high school experience when you have constraints on time and talent, and all these pieces that say you have to do ‘school’ a certain way.”

In particular, Hill means a timeworn way of thinking about school in which, simply put, time is the constant, and learning is the variable. Typically, American schools are structured this way, such that if a student doesn’t master the material presented in the allocated time, he or she fails the unit, the class marches on, and whatever skills or information were supposed to be acquired simply get left behind. Sound familiar?

But Haynes and a growing number of other schools around the country are trying to flip the script by making learning the constant, and time the variable. “If we’re not willing to have a revolving door on our talent and our students, then something’s going to have to change in the way we do ‘school,’” she said. “Why not, on the first day, give students everything they need to succeed, as opposed to this lesson today, and that book tomorrow. Instead, say these are the books we’re going to read this year. Here. Have them. These are the lessons and models we’re going to do in math. Here. Have them. And then spend the rest of your time tending to individual needs and letting everyone proceed at their own pace.”

Of course, that sort of culture shift is easier said than done. American schools have conferred degrees based on Andrew Carnegie’s century-old notion of the “Carnegie Unit” – aka the credit hour – for generations. This is especially ironic since the Carnegie Unit was never supposed to be a measure of learning; instead, its original purpose was simply to measure how much teachers were working, as a way to differentiate high school from college – and as a method for determining teacher pensions. If learning is to replace time as the constant, however, our methods for evaluating each individual’s learning must become much more nuanced and precise. And yet once again, time looms large. As Lee Shulman, president emeritus of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, puts it: “The reason students fail . . . is not that they’re not smart. It’s that they need more time to succeed, and time is precisely what educators fail to give them.

“Learning should never result in a normal curve,” Shulman argues. “It should result in a kind of ‘J curve’ in which most students end up clustered at the successful end of the continuum. And the only way that can happen is if we permit time to vary.”

I saw firsthand what this looks like after entering Shane Donovan’s ninth grade physics class. An early adopter of this approach, Donovan received the Citybridge Foundation’s Education Innovation Fellowship, a yearlong program that introduces teachers to promising innovations in personalized learning, as well as the chance to pilot personalized learning models in their schools. While Donovan surfed the room, his students – all but two of who are either designated as special-needs learners, or English-language-learners, or both – worked in small clusters based on whichever standard in the curriculum they were working on.

Occasionally, Donovan would address the entire room, but it was only to remind them to monitor their own needs. “If you’re not done with Standard Seven by the end of the period,” he bellowed at one point, “you have homework. If it’s just a matter of time, finish it on your own. But if you’re stuck, come find me so you can get yourself unstuck.”

Donovan is bouncy and bound, with glasses, a lanyard around his neck, and rolled-up sleeves. After the period ends, I asked him what it takes to run a class this way. “I spent the summer making screencasts of all the traditional lectures I would have to give this year,” he said, “but the hardest part has been learning to let go so I can let the kids do, without the typical minute-to-minute feedback.

“For me,” he continued, “the important question was not how to make school self-paced; it was how to stop getting crappy projects that didn’t show depth of understanding. How can we shift what we do as adults so that if kids are doing assessments, they’re doing them well?”

Since making that shift, Donovan says something surprising emerged: a much clearer demonstration of high-impact life skills that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with physics – skills like learning how to organize your time, keep track of your own progress, and get help when you need it, but not before. “I’ve come to believe that the most important thing happening here isn’t the physics; it’s them understanding how to correct their own mistakes. We still have kids who are always pressing the ejector seat – ‘I need a teacher! I need a teacher!’ – but it’s much easier now to see who got it and who didn’t, and who knows how to organize their time, and who doesn’t.”

That transparency is key for the school’s plans to reimagine twelfth grade as well. “We need to teach our students how to work with independent time,” Hill explained.  “If they’re flailing with us, that’s a gift, because it means we still have some time to teach them how to manage their time before they leave us and have to do it on their own. It’s like peeling back an extra layer of the onion.”

Donovan agrees, and is surprised by how much it’s changed the way he thinks about teaching. “In a way, I don’t really care how much physics they learn,” he admitted. “I want them to learn how to correct their own mistakes. That can make it harder – to see kids struggle – but if our boys don’t graduate, we know what the statistics tell us will await them. So helping them learn how to struggle and become more self-aware matters much more than, say, Standard Twelve in the ninth grade Physics curriculum.

“To teach this way is definitely messy and weird,” Donovan said while welcoming his next group of students into class. “And I’m definitely never going back.”

(This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Singularity is Coming. What Should Schools Be Doing About It?

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Whenever I want to get a feel for the national mood, I look to Hollywood – and the films it thinks we’ll pay to see. In the post-911 malaise, there was the dystopian world of The Dark Knight. In the era of extended male adolescence, there’s just about anything from Judd Apatow. And now, in the shadow of the Technological Singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.

What’s the Singularity, you say? That’s the moment when the whole game board changes – the moment when artificial intelligence purportedly pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with) human intelligence. Hollywood’s best effort to portray it thus far is Spike Jonze’s Her, the unsettling story of a man who falls in love with his operating system, which also happens to be the first artificially intelligent OS (think Siri with a personality, and a conscience, and Scarlett Johansson’s voice). But there are others: Lucy, the film about a woman (curiously, also Scarlett Johansson) who begins to use 100% of her brain’s capacity; Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp plays a dying scientist who gives the Grim Reaper the slip by uploading his mind to the mainframe; and then, starting October 10, there’s Automata, a story about the moment man-made robots acquire a consciousness separate from their creators.

Not coincidentally, that film is set in 2044 – the year most tekkies predict the Singularity will occur. If this sounds too far-fetched for you to take seriously, consider that the person most associated with the theory, Ray Kurzweil, is not some crackpot scribbling manifestos from a cabin in Montana, but the Director of Engineering at Google – a company that has been buying up all of the most advanced robotics companies in the world over the past several months. And if that isn’t enough to get your attention, consider that the people who will be charged with making sense of this brave new world – young adults like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Her – are not some abstract future version of humanity: they’re today’s Kindergartners.

Knowing just how much the world of tomorrow will differ for the kids of today, it’s curious that so many of our most passionate contemporary debates about school reform – from high-stakes testing to the achievement gap to the growing controversy around the Common Core – are about content knowledge. This fixation is a remnant of our Industrial-era model of schooling, in which the undisputed objective was to cram as much information as possible into the minds of schoolchildren.

By 2044, however – actually, a lot sooner than that – people will have near-instant access to the totality of human wisdom. What, then, should the schools of the future be designed to do? And how will they help today’s five-year-old navigate a world of unprecedented technological, ecological and ontological promise and peril?

There are a lot of possible answers, but here’s one that seems simple enough: start focusing less on what we want kids to know, and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this – not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which we reach a new endgoal, which is a set of skills and dispositions that can guide young people through life, and equip them to solve problems we can’t even conceive of.

At the Mission Hill School in Boston, educators have decided four characteristics matter more than anything else: forethought, perseverance, production, and reflection. At the MC2 School in New Hampshire, there are eighteen habits to work towards, from critical thinking to self-direction. At the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, it’s just five – inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection; and at Indianapolis’s Spring Mill Elementary, it’s a set of twelve that includes traits like empathy, integrity, and cooperation. I could go on.

What these schools demonstrate is that every school doesn’t need to aspire to a single, universal set of skills and dispositions; just that that every school needs to decide for itself, of all the characteristics the ideal graduate of our school could embody, which ones must they embody – and how will we know if we’ve been successful?

The latest research about how people learn affirms the value of this priority shift. As Paul Tough writes in How Children Succeed, “what matters most in a child’s development is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” Cal State University’s Arthur Costa makes a similar point in Learning & Leading with Habits of Mind: “We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it,” he writes. “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.”

That’s right. And that’s the sort of mindset I’d like my five-year-old son to have at his disposal, whether he’s navigating his way through middle school, or making sense of a not-too-distant future we are only beginning to imagine – with Hollywood’s help.

(This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.)