Category: Leadership

New Rules for New Schools

Posted on | by Sam

As more and more adults get vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus — and more and more students cautiously return to some form of in-person schooling — the desire to “get back to normal” feels like the irresistible lure of Spring after a long and lonely winter. 

Tempting as it may be, however, the barrage of warnings we have tried to wish away — spoken in the language of fires, floods, and invisible pathogens — make clear that the norms of the past are no longer tenable. 

There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.

This is the hindsight of 2020. 

To heed it, however, we must acknowledge the ways our common public world has shifted — and then we must shift the way we think about the structure and purpose of our common public schools.

Consider this: whereas in 1500, we produced goods and services worth about $250 billion in today’s dollars, today it’s $60 trillion — a 240-fold increase. 

As a direct result of that conspicuous consumption, one-third of the Earth’s land is now severely degraded. 

There are half as many animals in the world today as there were in 1970. 

And we’ve used more energy and resources in the past thirty-five years than in the previous 200,000 — the total amount of time that homo sapiens have been alive and kicking.

Against these odds, and in the wake of all we’ve been through, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And yet as environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it, “the great advantage of the twenty-first century should be that we can learn from having lived through the failures of the twentieth. We’re able, as people were not a hundred years ago, to scratch some ideas off the list.”

When it comes to our nation’s schools, then, what ideas should we scratch off the list? And what, ultimately, is the shape of the change we seek — in our schools, our civic structures, and ourselves?

To orient us for the long journey ahead, we need four new rules of the road — and four new metaphors to use in redesigning how we learn and live:

  1. SCHOOL AS ECOSYSTEM 

For generations, schools and universities have looked and felt the same because of the ways our “sacred cows” of education have kept us trapped in boxes of our own making.  

School is a place, not a mindset. 

Work must be graded to become meaningful. 

Students are best sorted by age. 

And so on (& on & on).

In the span of a year, however, COVID’s complete disruption of our traditional patterns has forced us to question these assumptions on almost every front. 

What if school was a mindset?

What if the work itself was meaningful?

And what if we thought about learning design less mechanically, and more emergently?

Of course, this is already happening in many schools and universities all over the country (and your neighborhood Montessori school has been acting this way for the better part of a century). But in order for more students and communities to have the same experience, we need to stop unconsciously designing schools as assembly lines, and start consciously designing them as ecosystems.

The good news is that nature has shown us what living systems require in order to thrive — we’ve even written an entire (free) book about it . And although it may seem counter-intuitive, a central lesson is that anything that disturbs a living system is also what helps it self-organize into a new form of order.

Growth, in other words, comes from disequilibrium, not stasis.

So while it’s unrealistic for most of us to just burn the whole thing to the ground, what we can do is take a critical look at our own school’s sacred cows and then decide strategically which ones are both the greatest hindrance to our work — and the easiest to get rid of. (Here’s a helpful way to do this together). 

Then, over time, this gradual approach to structural change can start to chip away at the foundations of the systems that have held us prisoner for too long. 

Speaking of which . . .

  1. SCHOOL AS ACORN SEED

While it has been true for some time that the pace of change in our modern world requires long-range thinking and planning (see, e.g. Blockbuster v. Netflix), the catastrophic impacts of COVID-19 are demanding that we make a radical shift in our relationship to time — away from the seductive lure of short-term, election-cycle solutions, and towards a less certain, more generational worldview and way of being.

In short, as Roman Krznaric argues in his vital new book, The Good Ancestor, “we have to think long” — something we humans can do, just not very well.

It’s hard to think long when the world around us is driven by short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops. Yet our ability to activate what Krznaric calls our “acorn brain” is what will determine whether we can meet the existential risks that surround us, from climate to coronavirus. “The challenge we face is to amplify our acorn brains and release their dormant power,” he says.

In which case, we need less five-year plans — and more fifty-year intentions. 

This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, a feature of indigenous cultures the world over.  The Iroquois, for example, held that any decision made today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. 

Imagine if the Seventh-Generation Principle were a part of our future decision-making in schools and universities?

It would probably result in less swimming pools, and more “living schools” (such as this one in Chicago, which is being designed and built for the same per-pupil expenditure as any other public school in the city). 

And it would definitely result in a radical shift in what we define as the end-goal — away from just being a good employee, and towards being a good ancestor.

  1. SCHOOL AS HORIZON LINE

As Kznaric reminds us, “we are the inheritors of gifts from the past.” 

Consider the gift of Jonas Salk, the scientist who, after a decade of experiments, created the first polio vaccine — and then refused to get his invention patented so more people could benefit from it. 

As Salk said, “The most important question we can ask ourselves is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?” 

For too long, we have ignored this question at our peril. As cultural anthropologist Wade Davis explains, our current patterns of human behavior expose the fallacy that it was ever possible to achieve infinite growth on a finite planet. It is, he warns, “a form of slow collective suicide, and the logic of delusion.”

Yet we see evidence of our delusion in every direction.

In smoke-clogged Chinese cities, giant LED screens show daily videos of the sun rising. 

In American schools and classrooms, it has become commonplace to have “active shooter” drills. 

And people touch, swipe and caress their phones almost 3,000 times a day.

Is this the future we wish to resign ourselves to — even after the first global pandemic in a century? 

What if, instead, by using our acorn brains and letting nature’s design principles be our guide, we committed to a course-correction in the service of a different story, and a different way of learning and living?

In our schools and universities, the central contribution to such an audacious goal would be to start crafting fifty-year strategic intentions with the primary goal of creating good ancestors.

With that as our goal, we would need to design everything differently — our spaces, our cultures, our structures and our pedagogies. But in the spirit of a true long view, we wouldn’t have to do it all at once.

  1. SCHOOL AS TROJAN HORSE(S)

Long before there was a global pandemic, other industries were already making proactive pivots away from their timeworn traditions. As Eric Ries explains in The Lean Startup, “planning and forecasting are only accurate when based on a long, stable operating history and a relatively static environment. Startups have neither.”

Neither do schools and universities. 

What our institutions of learning do have, however, is the chance to learn from other industries. 

We can, as Bill McKibben said, scratch certain ideas off the list. 

And when it comes to a task this massive — resisting the lure of our sacred cows, adopting a long view, and/or changing the central goal of schooling itself — we must stop making comprehensive plans, and start making constant adjustments through what Ries calls the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. 

It works something like this:

  • Try lots of things (A day with no passing bells! A weeklong course! A month with no letter grades!)
  • Test them out in short-cycle, low-stakes environments
  • Let people opt into being part of the experiment (or watching from a distance)
  • Pay attention to what works (and what doesn’t)
  • Abandon the things that don’t work
  • Double down on the things that do
  • Follow the energy
  • Rinse. Repeat.

As Ries puts it, the idea is to start building “minimally viable products, or MVPs”

as quickly and imperfectly as possible. “It should feel a little dangerous,” he adds, “but in a good way.”

This should be our post-COVID goal together: to build a thousand Trojan Horses – future seeds of potential creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about schooling, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.

Simply put, the days of letter grades, two-dimensional transcripts and “senior year” are numbered. We don’t need to get rid of them all right now – indeed, the time it will take for the larger systems and structures of K-12 and higher education to adjust to a new ecosystem almost require schools to cling to these trappings a while longer.

But make no mistake – much of what we have come to find most familiar about public education will, in due time, go the way of the 1960s-era department store  (and, one hopes, the coronavirus itself). 

So let’s change the story of the way we live and learn: by using nature as our guide, activating our acorn brains, making decisions for our great-great-grandchildren, and sowing the seeds of our own creative destruction — one slightly dangerous Trojan Horse at a time.

 

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows

Posted on | by Sam

Watch this video. What do you see?

Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute.

We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in Nepal they literally block traffic, in America they block our ability to think in new ways. And I can think of no aspect of our shared public life with more sacred cows than America’s schools:

Grades. Bells. Schedules. Credit Hours. Classrooms. Tests. Transcripts. Homework. 180 days. Age-based cohorts.

And the list could go on.

For this reason, we produced a short film series that looks at a few of these structures, and how and why they need to change. Here’s one of them:

But more importantly, what can each school do to better understand which sacred cows are blocking traffic, and which, if removed, would best improve the quality of learning flow for kids?

Try doing this exercise with your entire school community:

  1. Name as many “sacred cows of schooling” that exist in your school and/or district as you can
  2. Number these along a continuum of least imposing (1) to most imposing (10), in terms of which prevent you from doing your best work for kids.
  3. Now, rate the same list according to which would be easiest to remove, (10) and which would be hardest (1).
  4. Add the two numbers together.
  5. Take note of the sacred cows with the highest total. These are the habits and structures that are the biggest obstacles, and the easiest to remove.
  6. Start with those, by thinking about the ways in which you could either replace, revise, or remove them from your school’s overall learning culture.
  7. Rinse. Repeat.

Travelers Wanted for Yearlong Expedition to Change the Story of How We Learn & Live

Posted on | by Sam

There is so much wrong with our world, and it’s so easy to feel hopeless in its wake.

I was grateful, then, when earlier this week a friend suggested I read a piece Arundhati Roy had written several months back, in the pandemic’s earliest days. “Historically,” she wrote, “pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

I think that’s right. Which means we have (light) packing, and (heavy) planning, to do.

In response, in eight weeks — the day after Inauguration Day, to be precise: 1.21.21 — I’m joining a quixotic yearlong quest of people from all over the world who share a commitment to change the story of how we learn and live — by using nature as our guide.

In between now and then, our shared challenge is to design an expedition worthy of the moment, our time, and the needs of the world.

If you’re interested, you can see how the design is unfolding anytime, and offer your own ideas and advice, on our community whiteboard.

Better yet, you can join us. A new world is struggling to be born . . .

After the Election: HUMANS WANTED

Posted on | by Sam

Now the real work begins. 

As this historic year (and election season) draws to a close, the barrage of warnings we have tried to wish away — spoken in the language of fires, floods, and invisible pathogens — make clear to anyone paying attention that the norms of the past are no longer tenable. 

There can be no return to normal — because normal was the problem in the first place.

This is the hindsight of 2020. 

To heed it, however, we must acknowledge how we got here — and then we must change our ways.

Consider this: whereas in 1500, we produced goods and services worth about $250 billion in today’s dollars, today it’s $60 trillion — a 240-fold increase. As a direct result of that conspicuous consumption, one-third of the Earth’s land is now severely degraded. There are half as many animals in the world today as there were in 1970. And we’ve used more energy and resources in the past thirty-five years than in the previous 200,000 — the total amount of time that homo sapiens have been alive and kicking.

Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis says these patterns of human behavior expose the fallacy that it was ever possible to achieve infinite growth on a finite planet. It is, he warns, “a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.”

Yet we see evidence of our delusions in every direction.

In smoke-clogged Chinese cities, giant LED screens show daily videos of the sun rising. 

In American schools and classrooms, it has become commonplace to have “active shooter” drills. 

And people touch, swipe and caress their phones almost 3,000 times a day.

Against these odds, it’s easy to feel hopeless. And yet just as past behavior patterns have laid bare the extent of the damage we have done to the natural world (and ourselves), so, too, can our propensity as pattern recognizers lead us, in this first year of a Biden presidency and beyond, to course-correct in the service of a different story, and a different way of learning and living. As environmentalist Bill McKibben puts it, “the great advantage of the twenty-first century should be that we can learn from having lived through the failures of the twentieth. We’re able, as people were not a hundred years ago, to scratch some ideas off the list.”

What, then, are the ideas we should scratch off the list? 

What should we start, stop and keep doing during the remainder of this pandemic-fueled pause from our regular routines? 

And what, ultimately, is the shape of the change we seek — in our schools, our civic structures, and ourselves?

In a line worthy of a poet, Sir Ernest Shackleton remembered a similar moment of extreme shared trial: “Deep seemed the valleys,” he wrote, “when we lay between the reeling seas.” 

For Shackleton, the British explorer who, a century ago, placed an ad in which he sought 28 intrepid volunteers for a hazardous expedition to the Antarctic by promising “small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, and constant danger,” moving toward an uncertain future meant facing it with courage, belief, and imagination.

As 2020 (and this election season) draws to a close, we need a different expedition, and a different ad — not the exploration of a barren wilderness, but the effort to reclaim lost wisdom and ways of being, in the service of elevating a new story for the world. 

HUMANS WANTED 

For hazardous journey in search of what comes next. No wages, long months of purposeful wandering. Success doubtful. Food for thought and fellow travelers provided. In event of success, a new story for humanity.

The journey begins on 1.21.21. Will you be part of it? 

Inquire within.

Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Amidst the Trees, a School Grows in Chicago

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing one obsolete.

— Buckminster Fuller

Before these six acres were left to the trees, before the buildings were razed and the families displaced, before the $31 million promise or the thousands of visitors, and before there was ever a blueprint for a campus that might light a path towards the school of the future — there was the young woman on the bike with the 600-page plan under her arms, the one whose childhood teachers labeled her defiant, the one who set out alone to discover the world while still a teenager, who refused to take no for an answer, and who looked out at these abandoned lots and neglected tapestry and saw the culmination of everything those 600 pages had outlined.

For Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, it was an idea that had first taken hold of her as a child, and would not let go until she found a way to make it manifest in the world: Humans re-learning to live in harmony with nature — and schools as the vital containers in which that re-education could begin.

Before her twenty-fifth birthday, Ippel had already traveled to six continents to speak with educators, sit in classrooms, and look for patterns that might reveal the most irreducible elements of a transformative education — the design principles of a living, thriving school.

As a girl, she had always felt like she was hiding in plain sight. What she experienced as curiosity, her teachers saw as misbehavior. And what she felt as frustration, the adults in her life described as the price of the ticket.

You need to play the game, they instructed, to become a player in the game. Sit and get, so that one day you can stand and deliver.

But those rules never made sense to Ippel — or to the millions of others like her, whose natural iconoclasm, or wanderlust, or mischief, or undiagnosed trauma, or all of the above made it all but impossible to abide by The Game’s overarching rule: conformity.

In her travels, however, Ippel found a willing audience for her marked intensity and drive — and a more useful set of models for her musings about the best way to reimagine the timeworn thing we have always called “school.”

What she learned spilled across the pages of her ambitious proposal to the Chicago Board of Education. The Academy for Global Citizenship (AGC), she promised, would provide a new public educational model for the 21st century — one that prepared all students for an increasingly uncertain, interdependent, and ecologically fragile world. AGC’s curriculum would foster a schoolwide commitment to holistic wellness and sustainability that expanded from the inside out — developing healthier humans, communities, and ecosystems. And it would do all of this with the children whose well-being was usually the last to be addressed.

Twice, the city said no. The approach was “too sophisticated” for the community she wanted to serve. Topics like global citizenship and the environment would have to wait until basic literacy and numeracy improved. Recess was a luxury. Healthy food was a nice-to-have. Nature was a distraction.

Not true, Ippel insisted. Empowering students to make positive change would provide them with the motivation for academic growth. Before students could become stewards of the earth, they must first fall in love with nature.

In short, there were no shortcuts.

In 2008, on the third try, AGC’s application was finally approved, and Ippel and her colleagues got their chance. 

They spent their first year in the ground floor of a former dental tool factory that had been turned into a church. Founding teacher Meredith McNamara recalled needing to keep students quiet during funerals, and struggling to choreograph the daily, sometimes oppositional dance between theory and practice. “We discovered during that first year there are the ideas you have about how a learning experience should unfold,” she explained, “and then there are the realities and interests and needs of the kids in front of you, which, in the end, is all that matters. Whatever sparks their natural curiosity, that’s what you should do.”

In time, the school found its distinctive intellectual rhythm — six in-depth academic units a year, three curricular themes (responsibility for oneself, for one’s community and for the Earth) frequent field trips and speakers, and an integrated exploration of health and wellness. “As we evolved,” McNamara explained, “we realized we needed more structure for everything from community governance (i.e., becoming more democratic) to teacher collaboration (i.e., reserving two planning days at the start of each six-week cycle). We also realized just how confining the larger system of the city is, and how limiting it is to imagine our model, which depends on a certain type of physical space, in a place that’s not our own. It’s hard to teach kids to fall in love with nature if they’re never in it.”

Indeed, despite all its successes, AGC is still housed in two rented buildings, one of which is a former barrel factory, in the industrial landscape of the Garfield Ridge neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. The campuses are separated by Cicero Avenue — a frequent thoroughfare for long-distance truckers — so the businesses that surround the schools are a mixture of automotive shops, fast-food restaurants, and motels. It’s a gray, flat section of the city, with scores of undeveloped lots alongside nearby residential streets and rows of well-manicured, single-story houses. 

More than 90 percent of AGC’s student body come from these nearby streets and houses. Two-thirds of them are low income. Three out of ten are learning English for the first time. And one out of four have special learning requirements.

To support the needs of these children, Ippel and her colleagues have done everything they can to create a greener landscape. An asphalt parking lot now features raised garden beds, a greenhouse, and some schoolyard chickens. The students grow their own vegetables, and eat what they grow thanks to an on-site chef working in a zero-waste organic cafeteria. Classrooms are lit by on-site solar panels; a wind turbine anchors the outdoor playground; rainwater gets collected from the greenhouse gutters. 

And yet.

“When we started AGC,” Ippel told me, “we always knew we needed a future home of our own design — an environment that fully reflected the vision of what we are trying to achieve here. To build a thriving world, we must design the template of a living school, and create a prototype so that others can do the same.”

And so, while her colleagues went on with the critical daily work of teaching and learning, Ippel went on the hunt for funding, and for a team of visionary designers from across the globe.

The team came first, and their work has engendered what critic Alexandra Lange describes as “the most architecturally ambitious design I’ve seen in the U.S.” In a section of the city in which healthy food options are scarce, more than half of the six-acre site will be reserved for neighborhood gardens, orchards, food forests, hoop houses, greenhouses, teaching kitchens and a community farm café and store. Instead of traditional classrooms, the school will be organized into Neighborhoods that get shared by grade-level bands. Each building will have a sloped roof, tilted toward the sun and covered with photovoltaic panels. On the shady sides, a clerestory window will let in cool northern light. Gutters running along the low points in the roof will collect stormwater for toilets and gardens. Students will move throughout the day along a series of meandering outdoor paths. And the campus will abide by the world’s most robust sustainability performance standards.

“It’s a flipped relationship with circulation space,” Ippel says. “Rather than breaking learning spaces up with hallways and walls and asking each educator to stay in one space with one group of students, teachers will circulate around the entire shared learning space throughout the day. The campus itself will be a living system — with geothermal wells, animals, a learning barn, and ample green space. We’re adding trees to improve outdoor air and remove air pollutants. We’re giving preference to building products and materials that are recycled, salvaged, rapidly renewable, or sustainably harvested. And we’re doing all of this using the same cost per square foot as the district, so that the ideas and design principles are accessible to anyone who hopes to replicate this approach in their own communities.

“Why would we all not do this? Why would we not make this the new standard?”

Good question. And in 2019, Ippel finally got some answers when, after seeing the school’s sustainable design and its possibilities for replication, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker authorized $31 million of state funds to support the school’s construction. 

Making the decision easier for the Governor, Ippel had already found the land on which AGC’s vision could eventually become a reality — a site that runs alongside the Stevenson Expressway, a few blocks from AGC’s current campuses, and about a mile from Midway Airport. It’s a patchwork of large tracts of overgrown grass, comprising more than forty acres in total, broken up by a cross of empty roadways, and currently housing little more than a well-spaced community of sturdy Oak trees. 

Its barrenness, in the shadow of the Chicago skyline, makes one wonder why it is barren, and what or who was here before. And, as you might suspect, the story of this land is a reminder of just how many other forces are always at play in our cities and communities, and just how far we still have to travel as a people.

That’s because AGC’s future home was also once the home of LeClaire Courts, a public housing complex of 600 two-story row houses that stretched along Cicero Avenue. Built in 1950, Leclaire Courts was an early attempt at integrated, low-rise public housing. And over the years, it became the home of thousands of African-American children and families. 

That all changed in 1999, when Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced what he called “The Plan for Transformation.” It was a plan to demolish every remaining public housing complex in the city — more than 18,000 units. It would take ten years, the Mayor said, at a cost of $1.6 billion. It would ostensibly result in a slew of transformational public-private developments, and a bevy of new and improved public housing options. And it would guarantee most of the families that were going to be displaced a “right of return” once the old buildings were demolished and the new units were built.

In 2011, the Courts were torn down, and its families were displaced. The site has been barren ever since. And now, nearly ten years later, according to the Chicago Reader’s Lucia Anaya, “the list of LeClaire residents with a right to return has dwindled from 400 families to fewer than 40. Some no longer qualify for return or have died. Others have simply lost hope of ever returning and have made their temporary homes permanent.”

As a result, Garfield Ridge’s Black families, once the majority in the neighborhood, are now being joined in increasing numbers by Latino children and families. “Daley didn’t believe public housing developments could ever be assets to the neighborhoods around them,” writes Chicago native Ben Austen. His belief was that “the very landscape would be remade, the skyline altered, the street grid restored.” Anything less, the Mayor proclaimed, and “you wouldn’t have a city of the future. You’d have a city of the past.” 

But timing is everything, and the Plan was devised amid the real estate bubble of 2008. As money dried up overnight, Austen explained, “the poured foundation set exposed like a Roman ruin, harking back to an age that had yet to be.”

For residents like Tara Stamps, a CPS teacher who had grown up in one of the houses the city had destroyed, the feeling of displacement left a permanent scar. “Those were not just buildings,” she said. “Those were families. Those were communities.” The people who lived there “are rooted to the land. They have a blood memory there. Their grandparents and their aunts and their cousins and their favorite memories were there.”

So the story of this place does not begin with the young woman on the bike after all, just as our own stories do not begin with us. Instead, like all stories, they are a kaleidoscope of things and memories and people, equal parts beauty and tragedy, injustice and fairness — the dialectical legacy of homo sapiens, sunk into the soil of our shared landscapes.

Wherever we are, in other words, old bones are buried, stubborn legacies persist, and new life is bound to emerge. 

How willing are we to find the roots of the stories that shape us?

By her own admission, Berenice Salas wasn’t willing at all. She grew up in this neighborhood — the daughter of educators — and the only things she was certain of as a young woman were that she wanted to leave, and she didn’t want to teach.

Once she moved away, however, she felt the land of her family pulling her back. And when she heard what they were doing in a former barrel factory near her childhood home, she allowed herself to be pulled all the way in.

Now, as AGC’s elementary school principal, Salas sees her work as a part of something larger than herself. “This is the school I would have dreamt of growing up,” she told me. “We are creating our own little ecosystem — right next to the highway. The Southwest side has always been unfairly under-resourced. But we can be the anchor of something that is both very new and very old. My dad was a farmer in Mexico. This work makes me feel like I’m going back to my roots, and reestablishing what was lost. I’m continuing the work of my ancestors, but in a different way.”

For too long, this is the work that too many of us have tried to forget. 

For generations, we have practiced the logic of delusion, and the slow dance of collective suicide. 

And now we must remember — before it’s too late. 

“Our school lies at the crossroads of a great city,” Ippel says, “bounded by racial divisions and economic challenges. But our citizens are the seeds that will give birth to new gardens here, and new chapters of hope across the globe. Together, we can all be the seeds that inspire people everywhere to reimagine the structure and purpose of school.”

 

 

A Parent Guide to Home Learning During the Coronavirus

Posted on | by Sam | 10 Comments on A Parent Guide to Home Learning During the Coronavirus

My fellow grown-ups:

Now that the End Days are upon us (kidding/not kidding) and your kids are out of school for the foreseeable future, how should you structure their time?

This is both a helpful and an unhelpful question.

It’s helpful because we’re all about to huddle indefinitely in close quarters. Whereas just a week ago, we were still snarfing down breakfast in the car to get to school on time, we’re now about to drown in a sudden deluge of the most precious (and scarce) feature of modern life: time. 

It makes sense, then, that we would want to schedule the uncertainty of this time away. And amidst the fear and anxiety of the current moment, there are few things as universally familiar as our shared assumptions about what one is supposed to do at school:

45-minute class periods. Scripted lesson plans. The neat sequential order of a curricular march through time. 

Since school is highly structured, the thinking goes, one’s debut as a homeschooling parent should be the same. Worksheets. Assignments. Schedules. Tests!

On behalf of your children (and yourselves), I beg you — STOP.

In fact, over-structuring your children’s time at home will result in the worst possible outcome: a slapdash recreation of our most stereotypical assumptions about learning — which, not surprisingly, are not actually what kids need (or want) to learn.

As we now know from research (and our own lived experiences), learning is not passive, it’s not sequential, and it’s not neat or predictable. It’s emergent, and tactile, and contextual, and highly personalized.

So don’t think about recreating the images you have in your head of what school is supposed to look like, feel like, and do. Put away the worksheets, forget about the assignments, and let the perceived urgency of mastering the Three R’s slip gently from your white-knuckled grasp. Because the most important thing you can give your children during this period is not a crash course on their time tables; it’s your sustained attention and company.

Let me say that again.

The most important thing you can give your children is your sustained attention and company.

That being said, the wide open nature of these coming weeks need not feel like a daily process of reinventing the wheel. So try giving shape and intention to your days around these six endlessly-modifiable activities:

READ — Find a book that you’re interested in. Read it, preferably in front of your children. Help them find things to read that interest them. Don’t worry — and don’t be surprised — when the books they choose are not about fiscal policy or British history. Commit to reading together at some point each day, rather than scheduling the same daily reading time. And use your self-quarantine to, as a family, get hygge with it.

WATCH — Pick a wide range of movies, in a wide range of styles, that are both appropriate for your kids to watch but aren’t necessarily “kid movies” either (AFI’s list of the top 100 films of all time is a good place to start, or this list of 12 documentaries that will inspire kids to change the world). Watch them together, and then talk about them afterwards. Use your child’s natural fascination with all things screen-related to essentially set up an impromptu film course. 

Watch one a day. Make popcorn. Rinse. Repeat.

COOK — Make lots of meals together. Procrastibake. And when cooking, use these ten herbs, which help ward off viruses.

NOTICE — Use the slower, quieter pace of the coming weeks as a chance to deepen your level of attention to everything and everyone around you. As artist Jenny Odell writes in her must-read book, How to Do Nothing, “simple awareness is the seed of responsibility, and patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves.” 

The problem, as too many of us know all too well, is that the current way we pay attention is through the toxic filter of commercial social media, which has invaded our our lives so thoroughly that we use it to achieve the brief dopamine-fueled release of virtual likes, while the platforms themselves keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction.

So let’s use this disruption of “business as usual” to pay closer attention to the things and people that surround us. “When the pattern of your attention has changed,” Odell explains, “you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.”

The acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton agrees. “Silence is not the absence of something,” he said. “It is the presence of everything.”

WALK — Bearing the above in mind — and although big crowds are a no-no — fresh air remains the cheapest, most effective and natural form of mood calibration there is. 

Better yet, don’t just walk around the block — take a walk into nature.

This has become a lost art for many of us — but it is especially absent in our children’s lives. “Within the space of a few decades,” writes Richard Louv in his classic book, Last Child in the Woods, “the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment — but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading.”

So let’s use this expanse of time to take nature walks together as often as possible, and let’s try to pay close attention — to what we notice, hear, wonder, and see — as we do.

UNPLUG — Most importantly, do all of the above without your phone in your hand. Don‘t text in the midst of the movie. Don’t take selfies on your walk to let the rest of us know what you’re doing. Don’t live-tweet the juiciest quotes from the book you’re reading. 

Just stand back, pay attention, be together, and see what you notice that your previous pace had prevented you from ever seeing before. “Escaping laterally toward each other,” Odell promises, “we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.”

The (A)morality of Trump’s School Choice Plan

Posted on | by Sam

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Trump will renew a call for tax breaks in order to provide more scholarships for students to attend private schools.

The Education Freedom Scholarships would provide up to $5 billion in federal tax credits to individuals and businesses who donate to scholarships for families to use at private, faith-based schools or to fund homeschooling. “For decades,” Trump explained, “countless children have been trapped in failing government schools. We believe that every parent should have educational freedom for their children.”

To which I say, buyer: beware. 

And: it’s complicated.

As a resident of Washington, D.C., site of one of the country’s most ambitious school voucher plans to date, and a city in which half of the city’s students attend public charter schools, I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. And, for what it’s worth, I even support school choice. I helped launch a charter school here. My sons attend another one, and the city is beginning to see some real collaboration between its charter schools and the district. Good things are happening.

At the same time, I worry about what could happen if too many of us simply assume that the invisible hand of the modern school marketplace – or, worse still, the incentivizing hand of the federal official – is a sufficient strategy for ensuring that all children receive equal access to a high-quality public education.

One sees, for example, the horror stories from Michigan — aka Ms. DeVos’s former laboratory — where four out of five charter schools are run by for-profit entities (read that again). One sees the sizable discrepancy between the expulsion rates of charter and district schools in D.C. and elsewhere. And so one should take seriously the warnings of scholars like Harvard’s Michael Sandel, who urges us to think much more carefully about the role market-based thinking should have – scratch that, does have – in our lives.

“Markets don’t just allocate goods,” Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. “They also express and promote certain attitudes towards the goods being exchanged.” And what has occurred over the past thirty years is that without quite realizing it, we have shifted from having a market economy to being a market society. “The difference is this: A market economy is a tool – a valuable and effective tool – for organizing productive activity. A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor. It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”

Anyone who has closely followed the sturm und drang of American school reform over the past decade has seen evidence of what Sandel is describing. Our  growing reliance on — and resistance to — data-driven decision-making is a direct result of an ascendant technocratic faith in applying scientific rigor to the previously opaque art of teaching and learning. Economist Gary Becker sums up this thinking well when he asserts: “The economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior, be it behavior involving money prices or imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions, large or minor decisions, emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, brilliant or stupid persons, patients or therapists, businessmen or politicians, teachers or students.”

That’s a mouthful, and it captures the sea change Sandel wants us to see. Whereas in the not-too-distant past, economic thinking was restricted to economic topics — inflation, investment, trade — today it is being used to outline a new science of human behavior: one that assumes modern society will work best when human beings are allowed to weigh the costs and benefits of all things (including where to send their children to school), and then choose whatever they believe will yield the greatest personal benefit.

The part of me that agrees with that logic is the part that supports the basic idea of school choice. After all, we have tolerated a system of unequal opportunity in this country for too long, and there’s real merit in the argument that one’s zip code should not become one’s destiny. School choice in cities like mine gives everyone the same chance at a high-quality education, and empowers each family to set its own “shadow prices” – the imaginary values that are implicit in the alternatives we face and the choices we make – and then make their own decisions about where to send their children to school. As the rally cry goes, MY CHILD, MY CHOICE.

Who could argue with that?

Certainly not Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of the legislative sponsors for the new plan. “Competition improves,” he asserted. “And in this case, injecting new money to give that freedom, to give that competition, to give that power of choice, will enhance the quality of education to kids all across the country.”

But here’s where it gets complicated.

In the end, should we define public education as a public good, or a private commodity? Will our efforts to unleash self-interest (which is, after all, what the economist seeks to economize) strengthen or weaken the connective tissue of our civic life? And will the current trajectory of the school choice movement unleash a virtuous cycle of reforms that improves all schools, or merely add another layer in our historic apartheid system of schooling?

On these questions and others, I agree with former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who, when asked by reporters in 1971 to offer his assessment of the impact of the French Revolution of 1789, said: “It is still too soon to say.” But I also agree with British sociologist Richard Titmuss, who argued that “the ways in which society organizes and structures its social institutions can encourage or discourage the altruistic in man, foster integration or alienation,” and strengthen or “erode the sense of community.”

President Trump’s myriad other amoral tendencies notwithstanding, our changing notion of community should be the central concern of anyone who cares about school choice. How can greater choice bring us closer to each other, and to a revitalized notion of civic virtue and egalitarianism? How can we ensure that school choice does not contribute to an even wider divide between the haves and the have-nots, and an even wider discrepancy between those who know how to negotiate the increasingly commodified assets of modern life, and those who are merely left to take whatever comes their way? And how can school choice reflect this basic truth about democracy – that while it does not require perfect equality, it does require that citizens share in a common life, one that is grounded as much in the “we” as the “me”?

These are the questions we must explicitly ask – and answer – if we want school choice to become a force for good. And we can’t do that without explicitly debating the extent to which market-based thinking can get us there. As Michael Sandel reminds us, “when market reasoning is applied to [an issue like] education, it’s less plausible to assume that everyone’s preferences are equally worthwhile. 

“In morally charged arenas such as these, some ways of valuing goods may be higher, more appropriate than others.”

Diverse by Design: Episode 1 (The First Day of School)

Posted on | by Sam

How do you reimagine something that has looked the same for generations? And what does a diverse society require — and need — in order to support a shared commitment to the common good?

In a new four-part series from 180 Studio, we witness one community’s efforts to answer both questions.

In the city of Memphis, in a formerly abandoned Sears warehouse, a new school, Crosstown High, is aspiring to model something that hasn’t been seen before — a version of school that looks nothing like the schools most of us attended or experienced, and an explicit commitment to weave together a community of young people who embody the full range of Memphis’s social, economic, and ethnic diversity.

This is Diverse by Design. I hope you’ll watch, share, & comment . . .

Seeds for a Better World

Posted on | by Sam | 8 Comments on Seeds for a Better World

I’m writing a new book with some cool folks — a field guide for a better world. The goal is to translate the core design principles of the natural world, and show readers how to apply those principles in the service of creating better human systems (including, and not limited to, our schools).

To do it right, however, we need your help. So here’s the idea, and the challenge:

Imagine a small metal tin filled with colorful index cards — sort of like your Grandma’s old recipe box, but in this case, instead of each card showing you how to make peach cobbler or yummy meatloaf, they’re showing you how to build a better world.

Now, imagine that each seed/card outlines something tangible to do — the sort of thing that anyone, anywhere, can apply and “plant” in their own life and work immediately (since our own behavior is the only thing we can actually control).

Next, imagine that these seeds are scattered across the following six categories of individual action: TEACHING, LEARNING, PARENTING, LEADING, CREATING, and BEING. And imagine that every seed/card has a front and a back that outlines the what (do I do), the how (do I do it), the who (gave me this seed), and the why (should i make time to do this?

By way of example, here are three, properly titled and categorized, along with their authors and a way to go deeper.

But the real question is, what would be your seed(s) of contribution to the tin?

Maybe it’s an idea/recipe original to you, or maybe it’s an excerpt from some super useful thing you read by someone else. But if you could only provide a single seed/idea/recipe to be planted in the service of building a better world, what would it be?

Standing by for all clarifying questions and ideas, and thanks in advance for your thought and creativity!

EXAMPLE 1
FOCUS ON BETTER, NOT MORE (TEACHING)

One of the most important questions any school or teacher can ask is simple: “How can we be more thoughtful about what we do?”

Unfortunately, it’s not the question we ask most frequently. The question schools and teachers have fallen in love with — “What more should we be doing? — is much more dangerous. It also leads to the creation of unsustainable systems.

The better question, the sustainable question, the question that frees up resources for schools to do more is the question of reflection and refinement.

Schools are better when they create spaces and expectations for reflection.

Formalized protocols for the adoption of reflective practices abound — though a good place to start is schoolreforminitiative.org/protocols. What’s most important, however, is simply creating the space and support for reflecting on the work that is already being done. And while it would be ideal if this reflective practice started with the principal, it could start anywhere.

In fact, it should start everywhere. Department chairs, classroom teachers, sports coaches — we can all be models of reflection to those with whom we work. That’s why reflective practice means asking not, “What more can we be doing?” but “How can we do what we’re already doing. better?”

AUTHOR(S): CHRIS LEHMANN & ZAC CHASE

GO DEEPER — READ BUILDING SCHOOL 2.0: HOW TO CREATE THE SCHOOLS WE NEED

EXAMPLE 2
CONNECT AND REDIRECT (PARENTING)

All parents experience times when their children say things and get upset about issues that don’t seem to make sense. At moments like this, however, one of the least effective things we can do is jump in and argue with our child’s faulty logic. Instead, we need to recognize that our children are experiencing a right-brain, nonrational, emotional flood, which guarantees that any sort of logical, literal left-brain response will only make the situation worse.

Instead, try this: Connect with the right. Redirect with the left.

When a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs.By letting our children know that we hear what is upsetting them, we show that we are tuned into how they are feeling. Instead of fighting against the huge waves of emotion, we surf them.

After responding with the right, we can redirect with the left through logical explanation and planning. It won’t always do the trick, but Connecting and Redirecting will almost always work better than Commanding and Demanding. It’s as if you’re a lifeguard who swims out, puts your arms around your child, and helps him to shore before telling him not to swim out so far next time.

AUTHOR(S): DAN SIEGEL, M.D. & TINA PAYNE BRYSON, Ph.D

GO DEEPER: READ THE WHOLE-BRAIN CHILD: 12 REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGIES TO NURTURE YOUR CHILD’S DEVELOPING MIND

EXAMPLE 3

TAKE FIVE (BEING)

  1. Sit in a comfortable position.
  2. Take 3 slow, deep breaths.
  3. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
  4. Relax into your body.
  5. Clear your mind.
  6. Keep going.

Meditation is all about the practice. Don’t get too focused on whether or not you’re ‘doing it right’. The process of redirecting your focus to the present moment is where the benefit comes.

One of the most valuable aspects of it is that it builds resilience over time, not only during a meditative sit, but during stressful moments in your daily life as well. With regular practice, you’ll begin to notice more space between events and your reactions. You’ll find that you are more able to make choices in how you respond rather than acting on impulse.  

Breathing out slowly through your mouth stimulates the Vagus Nerve which connects with almost every organ in your body and immediately sends signals to your brain to relax. Your heart rate slows, as does the release of cortisol (the stress hormone) into your brain.

Though it can be intimidating to begin, even this short five-minute meditation, practiced frequently, can bring noticeable stress relief and peace into your life over time. For best results, try longer meditation sessions (20 minutes or more) a few times per week. Then, these five-minute sessions will have more of an immediate impact when you need them!

GARDENER: STEPHANIE BUNTON

EXAMPLE 4

(YOUR SEED HERE)

2019: The Year of Living Emergently?

Posted on | by Sam

We’re doing it again.

2019 is barely a week old, yet everyone seems to be searching for the singular person, policy or program that can restore order and usher in the better world we seek. From the excitement over the looming presidential race (and the promise of a return to normalcy) to the anticipation of the pending Mueller report (and the vision of a president in handcuffs), we are hardwired to hope for the sweeping solution, the quick fix, the reset button.

In reality, life works differently. What if we started to work in closer accordance with life?

What if we made 2019 the year of living “emergently?”

Emergence is not a word we hear or use often, yet it is the dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution, and we see evidence of its existence in everything from our cells to our cities. Indeed, the conditions for emergence flow from the reciprocal relationship that exists between any living form and its environment. A single ant, following the chemical trail of its neighbors to carve out a vital, completely decentralized role in a teeming colony. An adaptive software system, seeking patterns in individual behavior that shape which banner ad you see. A human stem cell, self-organizing into increasingly more complicated structures based on the behavior of its neighbors. Or even a solitary Tunisian fruit vendor, whose decision to set himself ablaze eventually sets the entire Arab world on fire.

As Steven Johnson writes in his book on the subject, the capacity for emergent systems to learn and grow “derives from their adherence to low-level rules. . . Emergent behaviors are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.”

In that sense, the central features of emergent systems outline a set of rules from the natural world that are both timeless and timely:

Give and receive feedback.

Pay attention to your closest neighbors.

Seek order, not control.

Start anywhere, and follow it everywhere.

It’s the songline of life itself — the deeply resonant story that flows through all living systems, including our own. And in a world that is becoming increasingly interwoven, and at a moment in history when the promise and peril of artificial intelligence are becoming more than just a sci-fi script, our ability to shift to a more emergent way of thinking may just be the difference between survival and extinction. As Johnson puts it, “our ability to capture the power of emergence will be closer to the revolution unleashed when we figured out how to distribute electricity a century ago. Almost every region of our cultural life was transformed by the power grid; the power of self-organization — coupled with the connective technology of the Internet — will usher in a revolution every bit as significant.”

Like the natural systems that surround us, the human systems we inhabit — from our schools to our cities to our political parties — are in a state of continuous dynamic balance. These systems are not done to us — we are the ones who create and perpetuate them, despite our protestations of innocence. (As the theoretical physicist David Bohm once put it, “Thinking makes the world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it.’”)

And so we cannot underestimate our individual and collective power to consciously create the conditions that make our system’s transformation in the direction we desire more likely.

It is literally that simple — and that complicated.

What, then, would it mean to make 2019 the year of living emergently?

For starters, it would mean resisting the urge to pin all of our hopes on any “singular solution.” Stop pretending that removing Donald Trump from office will restore a set of moral principles to American culture. Stop viewing ourselves as blameless pawns in someone else’s end game. Stop waiting for someone else’s policies to empower us to do our best work. And start working where you can, how you can, and with whom you can.

Although a better world depends on all of us, the work towards its creation begins with each of us. Transformation is first and foremost an inside job. And how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.

We see evidence of these principles in practice throughout the natural world — although perhaps in no more stirring form than a murmuration of starlings. What words can do justice to the magic of as many as a million birds, flying and weaving as one?

Improvisatory choreography? Elegant chaos? Symphonic cacophony?

There is no familiar way to make sense of this natural phenomenon — both what they do and how it makes us feel when we see one.  Yet this flocking behavior of the birds the ancient Romans believed foretold the will of the Gods — indeed, the word auspicious comes from the Latin auspicium, or “divination by observing the flight of birds” — is a natural manifestation of a set of principles for organizing complex behavior,  and an observable phenomenon that runs counter to the way we human beings have made sense of the world for as long as anyone can remember. And thanks to the work of researchers, we now know that individual starlings all obey the same few flight rules:

Watch your seven nearest neighbors.

Fly toward each other, but don’t crowd.

And if your neighbor turns, turn with them.

Why do they do this? According to one of the studies, “when uncertainty in sensing is present, interacting with six or seven neighbors optimizes the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort.” By following this rule of seven, the birds become part of a dynamic system in which each individual part combines to make a whole with emergent properties. This collective behavior allows the birds to gather information on their surroundings and self-organize toward an ideal density, one in which optimal patterns of light and dark are produced that can deliver information to the entire flock (and protect them from predators). The closer each bird pays attention, the safer — and more cohesive — the entire flock becomes.

Of course, this sort of swarming behavior is not unique to starlings. Many different animals, from birds and insects to fish and mammals, have been observed in their own form of a swarm. So what can this behavior teach us about ourselves, our organizations, and our ability to change the story of the way we work and learn?

According to Andreas Weber, author of The Biology of Wonder, “the spirit of poetic ecology is the spirit of swarms. To understand the individual, we need to understand its environment, and each through the other. We have to think of beings always as interbeings.

“We are a swarm ourselves,” Weber writes, “and we form swarms. A swarm does not have intelligence; it is intelligence. In this respect, a swarm (or a murmuration) is an intensified counterpart of ourselves. It is what we are and what we try to imagine with our conscious thinking. Swarms are solidified feeling. The swarm is — and in its being living dynamics and their expression are welded together in one single gesture.”

A murmuration, then, is more than just a metaphor for thinking differently about organizational behavior; it’s a reminder, in physical form, that our own bodies, cultures and classrooms are governed by the same rules.

As Weber puts it, “we see gestalts of the living that behave according to simple organic laws mirroring the great constellation that every living being has to cope with: to persist, to be close to the other, but not so close as to collide with him. These are the principles of poetic forms that are so thorough we can even teach them to a computer. They are the primary shapes of a poetics of living things.”

So let’s stop waiting for Godot. Let’s make 2019 the year in which we plant a thousand Trojan horses — future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about the systems we inhabit, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.

Applying these principles to the way we organize ourselves will change the way we feel and act. It may even change the way we dream. “My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration,” says author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown. “The way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, and dance collectively through the air. Each creature tuned in to its neighbors. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them — too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.”

We can imagine. And we can flock more strategically — but only when we recognize that the work begins with each of us, at the scale of the individual, now.