I’m off this morning to spend two days with Sir Ken Robinson and the Kirkpatrick Foundation, which is planning to host a World Creativity Forum this November in Oklahoma City.
If you’re unaware of Sir Ken, here’s a video preview, courtesy of a recent TED talk — and his take on why we need to move away from standardized instruction, and more towards personalized learning.
I need your help in coming up with the title for the book of learning stories. Whoever submits the winning entry will get a $50 gift card to the bookstore of their choice.
Here are the three I have so far:
Yes? No? Maybe? Something else? Talk to me . . .
For anyone interested in learning a bit more about what the book will look like . . .
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This is a book of different people’s stories.
Some are about teachers who changed their students’ lives. Some describe the moment when a person first discovered how to ask the right questions, or found what they were most passionate about. Others are about making art, or going on a challenging hike, or studying everything from Morse code to Macbeth to Kung Fu. But all of the stories in this collection are about one central thing – learning, and what it feels like to discover one’s purpose, passion, and capacity for greatness.
The 50 stories gathered here, along with hundreds of others, were submitted as part of the Rethink Learning Now campaign, a national grassroots effort to change the tenor of our national conversation about schooling by shifting it from a culture of testing, in which we overvalue basic-skills reading and math scores and undervalue just about everything else, to a culture of learning, in which we restore our collective focus on the core conditions of a powerful learning environment, and work backwards from there to decide how best to evaluate and improve our schools, our educators, and the progress of our nation’s schoolchildren.
In sharing their stories, our authors – who range from students to social workers to the Secretary of Education himself – were responding to one of two simple prompts:
The purpose in asking these questions was twofold: First, to give people an opportunity to reflect on what they already know to be true about powerful learning and teaching – rather than tell them what some “expert” thinks it is; and second, to use the insights of these stories to help people see more clearly what a powerful learning environment actually looks like – and what it requires.
Based on those insights, the stories in this book are divided into five sections – challenging, engaging, supportive, relevant and experiential. As you read them, imagine how the insights they provide might be used to strengthen the learning cultures of the schools in your neighborhood. And rather than viewing each story as a “best practice” that should be replicated and scaled up, think instead of how these authors’ collective wisdom clarifies a “best question” we should ask whenever we want to improve our schools: “How can we best support educators in their work to create schools that are more challenging, engaging, supportive, relevant and experiential?”
Now, more than ever, our country needs these sorts of schools. Unlike any other pillar of our society, public education is the only institution that reaches 90% of every new generation, is governed by public authority, and was founded with the explicit mission of preparing young people to be thoughtful and active participants in a democratic society. And as these stories illuminate, the business of improving our schools doesn’t need to be a tiresome, desperate, and futile task; it can be a collaborative, risky, and deeply fulfilling journey that results in us better understanding ourselves – and each other.
So please, enjoy the stories that follow. Consider which of the recommendations we provide might be worth putting into action in your community. And take the time to share your own story, and read the stories of hundreds of other fellow citizens, at rethinklearningnow.com.
Nine months ago, the Rethink Learning Now campaign launched a national storytelling initiative by asking people to reflect on their most powerful learning experiences, and/or their most effective teachers.
Since then, the campaign has received hundreds of insightful and illustrative submissions from people across the country –from students to social workers to the Secretary of Education himself. And this past month, I’ve had the difficult challenge of selecting just 50 of those stories to be collected into a book that will be released next spring.
My work has been so difficult because the stories people have submitted are all so good, and so varied. Some are about teachers who changed their students’ lives. Some describe the moment when a person first discovered how to ask the right questions, or found what they were most passionate about. Others are about making art, or going on a challenging hike, or studying everything from Morse code to Macbeth to Kung Fu. But all of the stories in the campaign – and, ultimately, the book – are about one central thing – learning, and what it feels like to discover one’s purpose, passion, and capacity for greatness.
And so, I’m proud to officially announce the Final 50. I want to congratulate all of you who took the time to share your stories with the campaign. And I want to urge anyone that hasn’t yet done so to add your voice to our growing patchwork of learning memories. Do so today at rethinklearningnow.com.
I see that President Obama listed education as a core aspect of his overall National Security Strategy. It reminds me of a great piece my former boss and mentor Charles Haynes wrote less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks.
As Charles wrote: “Over the course of this long struggle, the most effective answer to training camps of hatred and terror will be schools of freedom and democracy. While Osama bin Laden and his ilk use tools of indoctrination and propaganda to teach blind obedience, our schools must use democratic principles to instill an abiding commitment to universal human rights.”
This is, of course, as true today as it was then. And yet I wonder — in what ways are our current policy prescriptions addressing this particular challenge, either implicitly or explicitly?
Today, the coalition of education and civil rights organizations that launched the Rethink Learning Now campaign, in conjunction with Time Out From Testing, is launching a postcard campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama asking that she encourage the President to put an end to the use of high stakes testing.
You may recall that when Mrs. Obama was on the campaign trail, she said the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Program “is strangling the life out of most schools … If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee that.”
Thousands of us agree with her criticism. We need her help to end the reliance on high stakes standardized tests — not because we want to see an accountability-free education climate, but because we know that in order for schools to help children learn to use their minds well, educators must be evaluated on more than a single measure of student achievement.
Here is what YOU can do:
On May 28th, send a postcard to Michelle Obama with this message:
Dear Mrs. Obama:
We know you share our belief that all children deserve the same high-quality education that you provide for Malia and Sasha.? But in this current national culture of testing, public schools are forced to spend too much time preparing children for basic-skills tests.
Help us create a national culture of learning instead. Our children are not their test scores. Encourage the President to end the use of high stakes standardized tests!
Sincerely,
Name/Address/Signature
Mail these cards to: First Lady Michelle Obama, White House,? 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest Washington, DC 20500
A flood of postcards at the White House is the effect that is needed for Mrs. Obama and her staff to take notice. This means that an actual physical postcard must be sent. Help end our country’s overreliance on the use of basic-skills standardized tests!
Yesterday, Congressional Quarterly reported that Senate Democrats have abandoned efforts to add $23 billion for saving teachers’ jobs to their chamber’s supplemental war spending bill, acknowledging they don’t have the 60 votes to block an expected Republican filibuster.
Republicans have criticized the White-House backed proposal as a “bailout” that shouldn’t be attached to an emergency war spending bill. Supporters of the education jobs measure say that it would stave off the loss of tens of thousands of education positions at a time when state budgets are stretched thin and funds from the 2009 economic stimulus law are running dry.
I’m sorry — I realize that teachers have become the face of our dysfunctional education system these days (which is another story), but could there be anything more essential to our national interests than ensuring that our schools remain well-staffed in the midst of numerous state budget crises?
In case you missed it, Steven Brill wrote a relatively balanced piece in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the national education reform landscape — and how teachers unions are truly facing a sink-or-swim moment of reinvention.
As someone who feels neither allegiance nor antipathy toward either of the increasingly polarized camps (I actually like and respect both Linda Darling-Hammond and Jon Schnur), I see the partial truths in each side’s argument. On one hand, for example, it’s clear that K-12 teachers should not be granted lifetime tenure so easily — tenure, after all, was originally designed to protect the free-expression rights of college professors, and since the First Amendment barely even applies to public employees anymore, that point is moot. So I say bring on this reform.
It’s also clear that teacher evaluation systems need to be dramatically retooled. When educators can only be scored ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory,’ that’s a huge problem. So again I say yes to any reform that results in a new system that creates a reciprocal flow of feedback and helps educators improve the quality of their professional practice.
However, I see one massive problem — and it’s a problem that no one, Brill included, seems interested in addressing: Everyone wants to tie these new teacher evaluations to student performance data, but no one wants to talk publicly about the fact that we lack sufficient metrics for truly evaluating the full extent of whether or not young people are learning and achieving at high levels.
As I’ve written many times before, basic-skills tests in reading and math provide a single, useful proof point that is, in the current climate, dramatically overvalued. To help students learn to use their minds well, schools — and teachers — need to focus on not just basic- but also higher-order skills; they need to engage children in not just reading and math but also the arts and sciences; and they need to focus less on just data per se, and more on how well we’re equipping our teachers to respond to data in ways that improve the overall learning conditions (and outcomes) for kids.
A system, therefore, that incentivizes compensation and job security by using a single measure to count for as much as 50% of an evaluation will incentivize — you guessed it! — a relentless focus on basic-skills reading and math scores. But that’s not enough if we want the achievement gap to mean more than test scores. And more people need to start calling it out.
The good news is that although we may not yet have these more sophisticated metrics in place, at least we know what we should be looking for. This month, I’m finalizing the manuscript of a book that brings together 50 powerful stories about teaching and learning — selected from the many hundred that have been submitted by people across the country as part of a national campaign. The stories recount a wide range of experiences — from third grade classrooms to Outward Bound courses to church missions to prison sentences — but what they combine to make visible are the core conditions of a powerful learning environment. (See for yourself at rethinklearningnow.com.) And although they do not reveal a simple, single answer to the deeply complex question of how to improve our schools, they do clarify the question we should be asking ourselves at every turn — How do we create more challenging, engaging, supportive, relevant and experiential learning opportunities for children?
Imagine if more people started asking that question. Imagine what a new statewide teacher evaluation system would need to look like in response. And ask yourself — would you want that sort of environment for your child?
In today’s New York Times, the Dalai Lama writes about his own spiritual journey and how he has come to believe in the primacy of helping people of different faiths find common ground. Although he doesn’t speak about education, I read it through that lens (surprise surprise), wondering how our current policy recipes might differ if we shared the Dalai Lama’s sense of urgency for helping all people cultivate this most fundamental of human skills. Take a few minutes to check it out yourself and see what you think.
I’m spending every minute this week finalizing the manuscript that will stitch together 50 people’s stories about powerful teaching and learning (Jossey-Bass, Spring 2011 release).
Already, there are powerful voices and insights in the mix — from everyday citizens to U.S. Senators to the Secretary of Education himself. And although we already have several hundred stories to work with — and far more than 50 that are worthy of being in the book — you still have one week to share your own experience and have it be considered for publication. Just visit rethinklearningnow.com/stories/submit and tell us about your experience, and what it is that made it so worthwhile.
USE YOUR VOICE!
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