Some of the not-so-subtle Ericcson pitches may throw you off, but don’t let them. This video is worth twenty minutes of your time, as a way to see what’s coming — and why we should not be afraid. You may also want to check out this weekend’s story in the New York Times about MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses). And here’s a short blog post that captures the reactions of some Alabama high school students moments after watching it.
Author: Sam
I write books and talk about stuff.
This Revolution Is Not Being Televised
There’s an important new consensus developing around how people learn – and a missed opportunity about how to start applying that knowledge in schools. We’d be wise to pay closer attention to both trends.
The consensus is that man cannot live by intellect alone – that our physical, social and emotional selves matter equally when it comes to human development and growth. You’ll see evidence of this consensus across a wide range of mediums and public voices: from opinion pieces in the New York Times to bestselling books about both the brain and school reform. As David Brooks writes in a recent column, “It’s become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress.” And as a veteran educator points out in Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed, “This push on tests is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”
Although the amount of attention being paid to these sorts of observations is new, the insights being chronicled are not. Indeed, decades of strong social science research, sparked by Dan Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, have helped bring a more integrated view of learning into focus.
The good news is that our historically myopic view of schools as knowledge factories is starting to fade away, and public voices like Brooks and Tough are helping to promote a more holistic view of education to a wider audience of Americans. The bad news is that too many public voices are continuing to overlook a body of research and evidence-based practices that schools can rely on right now to transform their learning environments. Across the entirety of his new book, for example, Tough cites copious research studies and school-based programs – yet not once does he reference the expansive field – social and emotional learning, or SEL – that has, for twenty years, been at the forefront of researching how schools can apply the science of learning in ways that will deepen, not diminish, the art of teaching.
SEL’s flagship institution is the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning – or CASEL. And the programs it evaluates have been thoroughly researched, revised, and well received. The RULER Approach helps schools support the development of five essential life-skills: Recognizing emoti
Recently, CASEL extended its work even further by partnering with eight school districts around the country in an effort to demonstrate, across a variety of settings, what it looks like when a system of schools is organized to value both what children know and who they are. Yet most of the leading public voices on school reform act as though SEL doesn’t exist.
What organizations like CASEL demonstrate is something we would all be wise to remember: that we know more than we think we do about what great learning environments actually look like – and require. And what contemporary commentators like Brooks and Tough overlook is something we would all be wise to acknowledge: that when it comes to reimagining education, we do not need to start from scratch.
Great schools already recognize the multiple pathways through which young people must grow and develop. Great programs already exist to support schools in this work. And while it’s true that we are still waiting for the great policies, that doesn’t mean the learning revolution isn’t already well underway.
The Adult-Free School?
No doubt you’ve seen the intriguing story making its way around the Internet today about the Ethiopian kids who hacked the free laptops they were given in less than six months – and without any adult instruction.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great story, and it’s illustrative of the extent to which we underestimate the abilities of young people. But we’re missing the point if we think the moral is that adults just need to disappear in order for young people to optimally learn and grow.
Some of what adults do needs to disappear — overly structuring what and how we learn, worrying more about what gets poured in instead of what gets pulled out, and thinking that content knowledge is the ultimate end goal. But the adults themselves need to stay — and they need to stay so they can mentor, and prompt, and challenge, and guide, and nurture, and support.
As Paulo Freire said, there’s a big difference between being authoritarian, which shuts down the learning process, and being authoritative, which allows the learning process to thrive. As in all things, the art lies in the balance of it all. So it’s great that these kids figured it out on their own — and it would have been a helluva lot cooler, and progressed a helluva lot faster, if they’d had some caring, skilled guidance along the way.
The New Ninth Ward
If you’re one of the folks that stopped watching Treme after its first season (“Too boring! Too slow!”), or if you just never bothered to check it out, you might want to check back in. Now in its third season, Treme is proving itself adept at mirroring what creator David Simon’s more celebrated predecessor, The Wire, did better than any show before or since: depict characters struggling and surviving amidst the dysfunctional, intractable, and dialectical systems holding them – and us – prisoner.
In The Wire, the city was Baltimore, and the systems were the drug trade, the public schools, the municipal government, the press, and the police. In Treme, the city is New Orleans, and several of the systems – the schools, the police and the elected officials – make a return appearance. This time, however, Simon adds some new storylines and characters, all of which ride in on the destructive current of Hurricane Katrina, and all of who exist to tell a different story. Indeed, if The Wire was about the older, less visible systems that are holding us prisoner, Treme is about the newer, more visible ones that are being created in the name of progress. The genius of both shows is they refuse to craft a story about something so complicated by oversimplifying the myriad forces at play. As in life, systems and people are more nuanced than mere two-dimensional caricatures – even the ones that hold us prisoner, and even the ones who are up to no good.
I say this because lately I feel like the conversations about school reform in New Orleans are taking on an unhelpful and increasingly entrenched two-dimensional tone: you’re either for the locals, who are being preyed upon by profit-seeking charter schools and carpet-bagging businessmen who see in the chaos of Katrina their last, best chance to remake the city into something new; or you’re for the engines of progress, which recognize that the city’s schools were an embarrassment, its housing projects a blight, and its local traditions best preserved via tangible, lasting monuments, not intangible, romanticized dysfunction.
I say this as someone who knows well-meaning people that have gone to New Orleans as “engines of progress” and who see in its schools the greatest chance to reimagine urban public education for the better. And I say this as someone who feels that much of what they have created is, in effect, perfecting our ability to succeed in an old (Industrial-era) system that no longer serves our interests.
We do ourselves a disservice when we describe school reform in New Orleans in the overly simplistic “privatization of public education” storyline (which is so appealing precisely because it has such clearly defined good people and bad people – and which, like all storylines, is at least partially grounded in the truth). And we are kidding ourselves if we continue to believe that what poor communities need most are outsiders coming in and helping their children raise test scores via a grab bag of teaching methods that not a single “outsider” I know has actually chosen for their own children.
What we have at play in modern New Orleans, in other words, are a few bad people, a lot of bad decisions, and a lot of good (or at least decent) people struggling to succeed amidst larger systemic ways of seeing and thinking that are still holding them – and us – prisoner.
The most recent episode of Treme captures this spirit perfectly in the lyrics of a new song one of the characters has penned in an effort to tell the story of what has happened there since Katrina. Sung by the legendary Irma Thomas, its opening stanza tells you what’s coming:
I’ll meet you on the corner of Dick Cheney Street
And Rumsfeld Boulevard,
Right next to the statue of Michael Brown,
In the new Ninth Ward.
As the song progresses, it’s clear its author is not a fan of the changes underway (nor should he be).
Folks are living so easy there,
Times used to be so hard,
A chicken in every pot,
Oh they dance a lot,
In the new Ninth Ward.
The song’s final stanza sums up the unique tragedy of modern New Orleans – a city with as much cultural heritage as any place in the United States, and a city with as much need of civic improvement.
We kicked out all the criminals,
Got rid of the blight,
Put a little camera on the traffic light,
The kids that come to school
They come to learn and not fight,
This time around we’re making it right,
In the new Ninth Ward.
What makes Treme so redeeming is its refusal to give the chief architects of the post-Katrina clusterfuck a free pass, and its insistence that we not delude ourselves into seeing those architects as being separate from the rest of us. We have met the enemy, and it is us. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we may actually figure out a way to be free. Until that happens, get ready – a new Ninth Ward is coming your way soon.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
How to Balance the Art & Science of Teaching
Recently, I gave a TED talk outlining why I think we’re in the midst of the most exciting and difficult time to be a teacher in American history. These sorts of talks are always imperfect (and timed) efforts to inject new ideas into the stratosphere, but I received lots of nice comments and feedback, including some observations that only a mom – my mom, actually – would share (“Your posture was very relaxed, and you never even said ‘um’!”).
It was another thing my mother said that struck me, though. “Do you feel sure that your audience knows what to do with all you’ve said?” she wrote.
Great point, and I’m not sure. So here, as simply as I can say it, are three specific things – some big, some small – we need to do to help teachers get better at helping children learn and grow.
1. Follow the Med School Model – As any M.D. knows, different medical schools have different strengths and weaknesses. But one thing every medical school shares is the belief that a strong medical training is built on a dual foundation of two courses: anatomy and physiology.
In education, no similar consensus exists. Worse still, most programs – whether they’re traditional schools of education or alternative certification programs – give short shrift to one of the most important things a teacher needs to know: child and adolescent development.
Think about that for a second. Our country’s teacher training programs, by and large, pay little attention to how well prospective teachers understand the emotional and developmental needs of the children they propose to teach.
So let’s start there by urging all teacher-training programs to adapt the Med School model and establish a similar two-course foundation for all prospective educators: Learning Sciences and Developmental Sciences.
I realize that won’t happen anytime soon (if at all). But the good news is we don’t need to wait; we can just start establishing online and/or in-person courses anywhere and everywhere, for anyone that’s interested in acquiring a deeper understanding of this new knowledge base. These courses would provide recommended reading, a forum for people to communicate with some guided facilitation, and a space for learners to self-organize with each other based on their areas of interest. And while it would be great if some accrediting body offered participants credit toward a degree or certification, we don’t need to wait for that to happen, either. What matters is identifying what we need to learn to be more effective at what we do, and then learning it. Period.
2. Study the Brain – In the same way educators need a solid foundation in how people develop, we should be equally aware of how people learn. That’s why schools and districts should incentivize any efforts on the part of their teachers to better understand the brain – regardless of whether it’s a book club or an accredited course. And once again, we can start right away in any community, alone or in groups. There are scores of recently written books that translate the latest insights in neuroscience for a lay audience. So we don’t need to wait for the schools of education to catch up. But we do need to do our homework and make sure we’re creating classroom environments that are highly tuned to our students’ strengths and weaknesses and how they see the world.
3. Craft Evaluation Programs That Honor Art & Science – One thing all sides seem to agree on is that teacher evaluation systems are in need of an extreme makeover; for too long, they’ve been little more than pro forma stamps of approval, and they’ve done little to nothing to help teachers get better.
In too many places, however, efforts are already underway to craft systems that disregard the art of teaching in favor of the (misunderstood) science of measurement. These sorts of systems are more about pushing people out than lifting them up. That’s why we should blow them all up and start over.
A prerequisite of any new evaluation system should be its effort to help teachers improve the quality of their practice via shared inquiry into what is and isn’t working in their classrooms. These new systems shouldn’t be afraid of quantitative measures, just as they shouldn’t devalue qualitative measures. And we should be sure to pay attention to the illustrative efforts already underway. If you’re a policymaker, for example, take a close look at what they’re doing in Montgomery County. And if you’re a teacher, consider getting certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
It will always be true, in teaching and in the natural world, that not everything can be measured, just as it’s true that there are ways to measure aspects of teaching and learning that go a lot deeper than test scores. The challenge is to find the balance between the elusive but evergreen art of teaching, and the emerging but illustrative science of the brain.
We can do both. And we can start today.
The World is . . . a Sisyphean Hill of Policy Smackdowns?
As a former teacher with a MBA, I read a lot of “business books.” And of the titles I’ve read over the past few years, none have characterized the future of public education more presciently than Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read an Op-Ed in this weekend’s New York Times in which Friedman abandons the nascent non-hierarchical plains of the twenty-first century for the familiar twentieth-century terrain of command-and-control. Yet there it is – and there he is – writing about the future of school reform, and praising the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.
First, let’s recall what Friedman described in The World is Flat – the dawn of collaboration and the demise of top-down politics. As he wrote, “We are now just at the beginning of a massive, worldwide change in habits. . . from command and control to connect and collaborate.” In that world, “the most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn,’” and the only way that sort of shift will come about is by “having an abundance of trust.” Friedman quotes a wide range of experts to strengthen his claims, including foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, who, though speaking of geopolitics, might as well have been talking about school reform. “People change as a result of what they notice,” Mandelbaum said, “not just what they are told.”
Which leads us to this weekend’s column, and Friedman’s praise for the Obama administration’s support of a vision of “educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals,” and for an education secretary who trumpets reforms that “have already showed double-digit increases in reading or math in their first year” without realizing the only thing those sorts of numerical gains accurately reflect are the funhouse-mirror state of our modern discourse.
What Friedman seems to have forgotten, and what the Obama administration has repeatedly failed to heed, is that systems as dysfunctional as those in American public education require more than a new set of end goals: they require deep and sustained investments in our collective capacity to imagine and sustain something new – and that sort of change requires two main ingredients: technical expertise and emotional commitment.
Unfortunately, Race to the Top (RTTT) lacks both ingredients: its formulas for technical expertise, such as new teacher evaluation systems (good idea) based significantly on student test scores (bad idea), move the goalposts but ignore the skill levels of the players. As international change expert Michael Fullan points out, RTTT “pays little or no attention to developing the capacity of leaders to improve together or as a system: it is based on a failed theory that teacher quality can be increased by a system of competitive rewards, and it rests on a badly flawed model of management where everyone manages their own unit, is accountable for results, and competes with their peers – creating fiefdoms, silos, and lack of capacity or incentives for professionals to help each other” – in short, the sorts of habits Friedman defines as the key to becoming successful in the flat world of the twenty-first century.
Worse still, programs like RTTT reflect a technocratic insensitivity to the actual rhythms of human beings, and a complete disregard for the necessity of building a shared emotional commitment for the changes we seek (Chicago, anyone?). So whereas attaching a dollar sign to the “recommended” reforms of RTTT was an effective strategy, as was tying each state’s conditional funding under ARRA to its agreement to adopt the common core learning standards, it’s equally true that there are short games and there are long games. And what I loved about The World is Flat was its recognition that to win the long game of the current century, compulsion was fool’s gold; commitment was the gold standard.
In fairness to Mr. Friedman, this point was made long before him. As Plato said, a loooong time ago, “Knowledge, which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind.”
The sooner we heed that advice, the better.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
The Art (& Science) of Great Teaching
Here’s my new TEDx talk, or, as I like to call it, the video that makes you wonder when Sam will take his hand out of his pants.
What if the city became the school?
I think it’s time to start thinking differently. Watch this and you’ll see what I mean.
Is It Time to Stop Making the Grade?
I got two very different emails this morning that underscore just how far our thinking has to move if we’re ever going to truly reimagine American public education in ways that are aligned with the individual needs of each child.
The first was framed around a provocative question — “Imagine if rather than waiting to scale [innovative] ideas [about schools], we focused on scaling each individual?” — and an even more provocative idea: building an app that allowed people to self-direct their own learning experiences and reimagine the city as the school. The point is not that THIS IDEA is the answer — read the piece and decide for yourselves how much merit it deserves. The point is that this IS the sort of outside-the-box thinking we need more of if we are serious about making the modern educational landscape more personalized and customized (and we should be).
Which leads to the second email, a link to a New York Times article in which five different people react to the latest progress reports for New York City’s elementary and middle schools — progress reports that continue to rate schools via the same A-F letter system we’ve used since your grandmother was dancing to Big Band Swing. As the Times editors frame it, “Proponents say the “A” to “F” grading system is one of the best ways to get parents to pay attention, but critics say that the city’s over emphasis on test performance skews the grades, making them unreliable for judging the quality of a school.”
I’m sorry — but is this really the best we can do? On one hand, I get it — the best way to communicate is to speak in symbols and languages people already readily understand, and there is no more widely-understood set of shared symbols than the ones we already associate with American public education. On the other hand, I repeat — if we are serious about making the modern educational landscape more personalized and customized, at some point we have to start creating new symbols that reflect our commitment to personalization and customization. And letter grades ain’t it.
To be sure, massive urban districts like New York City’s have a particularly heavy burden when it comes to reimagining the shape and structure of school, but that doesn’t mean they need to be helpless in the face of our most intractable societal memes. And as long as leading voices in education keep making decisions based on the easiest way to “get parents to pay attention,” you don’t need me to tell you what the rest of us will keep getting as a result.
This is Why Education Matters So Much
And young people like Malala are what’s at stake — in Pakistan and everywhere else.
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