A Fundamental Flaw

From the May 21st issue of Fortune Magazine (article not online yet), comes this quote from Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx:

We put so much emphasis on "college degrees." Well, in Germany students at some point come to a fork in the road, and they either go on to university or they go on to a trade school. Say you're a FedEx airplane mechanic working on one of our Boeing Triple Sevens. That's a $100,000-plus job. You don't have to have a college degree to get that job. You don't have to know Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. You can go right to West Memphis, Ark., where we have a relationship with the community college, and be trained to be a licensed mechanic. Then you can come to work at FedEx. (p. 206, emphasis mine.)

Now, I have mixed feelings about this quote. I've never believed that going to college, or getting an education in general, is solely about job preparation. We don't read The Canterbury Tales in order to directly prepare for having a particular career. Having said that, however, this quote resonated to me because once again it seems to be flying the face of most current education-reform movements, which all seem to promote academic skills and college admission as precursors to employment as the ultimate goals of K-12 education.

There are a lot of skills an airplane mechanic for FedEx needs - and some of them will be learned in school - but my guess is that knowing "there is a complex number i such that i² = -1, and every complex number has the form a + bi with a and b real?" (CCSS, N-CN 1), or how to "prove the Pythagorean identity sin²(x) + cos²(x) = 1 and use it to find sin(x), cos (x), or tan(x) and the quadrant of the angle" (CCSS, F-TF 8) isn't quite necessary.

So, once again, I'm struggling with this idea that all students need to learn the exact same things at the exact same time. That doesn't mean that some students shouldn't read The Canterbury Tales, and that some (possibly other) students shouldn't learn trigonometric identities. But I worry that locking our students into a fixed, required, standardized curriculum that is supposed to meet the needs of all of them will end up meeting the needs of few of them. I worry that our "assumption that it does indeed provide a comprehensive, well-rounded education" is a fundamental flaw in our thinking.

TED-ED Launches

I wanted to point to a new resource that some of you might find valuable: TED-ED. (Full Disclosure: While I did not play a major role, I was part of the planning process for this.)

To get a good overview, watch the three minute TED-ED Tour video linked from the main TED-ED page.





In a nutshell, here's what this resource provides.

• There is a growing collection of lessons on a variety of topics submitted by educators and then animated by professional animators. While currently small in number, this is likely to increase quickly. You can use the videos just as they are and there are suggested lesson plans and resources associated with each one. You can even create your own lesson plan around these videos (more on that in a minute).
  
• You can apply to submit your own lessons. If you have a particularly interesting lesson that you think is worth sharing, you can record your own audio of the lesson and then collaborate with the TED-ED professional animators who will illustrate your talk (example).
  
• In addition to the videos created by educators specifically for TED-ED, you can use the TED-ED resources for any video on YouTube. That means you can create customized lesson plans (including tracking student responses to multiple choice and free response questions) in the "flip this lesson" section for any YouTube video (you currently can't create your own multiple-choice questions for YouTube videos, but that's coming). You can, of course, also choose to upload your own videos to YouTube and then "flip them" if you have lessons that don't lend themselves to the TED-ED animation technique.

Again, I'd recommend watching the three minute tour video to get a better picture of this. This just launched today and is very much in beta, but I think it's another potentially good resources for folks to possibly utilize. If you do investigate it further and have feedback or feature requests for the site, please let me know and I'll pass it along to the TED-ED team. They are a great group of people and very much want your feedback to make the site even better.

For more background on the thinking behind TED-ED, read this post by Chris Anderson.

Ideas I’d Like My Future Principal to Consider: Starting a Bold Conversation with Parents

So I haven’t written one of these for a while for a few reasons, but one of the major reasons is I now know who my future principal is going to be (Hi Natalie!) and it feels somewhat awkward to write these in the same fashion as it feels like I’m telling her specifically something she should do which is, well, a bit awkward. But I decided to write this anyway because all along I’ve been trying to write these as just ideas to consider, to contribute to the conversation of how to move our school (and schools in general) forward. So I’m hopeful that my new principal will read this within that context (if not, then please stop reading now, Natalie).

Once again, Will Richardson has an article that I think my future principal should read, Getting Bold with Parents:

One of Lisa’s [the superintendent] mantras is that schools have little choice when it comes to thinking differently about education. And she also believes that parents are the key to making that different thinking happen.

“Parents are the piece where we’re not doing enough legwork,” she says. “Marginalizing parents, not letting them be an important voice in the larger conversation is a huge mistake.”

One of the problems I see in schools is that we’re just so darn busy. While we can argue about whether much of what we are doing is necessary or not, the reality is that – at the moment at least – we are doing them, and it doesn’t leave much time for these bigger conversations. (As a side note, I think that was one of the keys to the success of my own staff development efforts I led a few years ago, it gave the teachers involved time to actually have those “big picture” conversations.) But I think if we are actually going to move our schools forward, if we are truly going to meet the needs of our students, then the only way we are going to get there is to have these big conversations, and parents need to be part of that.

In Superintendent Brady’s case, that involved asking parents to read and then discuss Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap.

“When you ask parents what they want their kids to be able to do, none of them ever says ‘pass the test’,” Lisa says. “They start with the types of skills that Wagner talks about, problem solving, agility, initiative. What parent is going to say ‘no’ to that? And that’s the frame that we have to keep coming back to when parents start talking about test scores. We have to keep asking them ‘is that really what’s important to you?’”

So I’d like to suggest to my future principal that we figure out a way to engage our community in a meaningful way in an extended conversation around what we want for our students. Perhaps it could be a book study – Wagner’s book is not a bad place to start, but there are many others – or perhaps it can be a series of articles (perhaps even including Rigor Redefined from Wagner) that would allow us as a community to really take charge of what we want – and are doing - for our students, instead of simply reacting to policies and expectations imposed from afar.

As Will says,

We can’t wait for policy or politics to change. We have to be the impetus for change.

Or, as Seth Godin says,

Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.

Warriors take care of one another. Isn’t it about time that our community collaboratively draws the map for our students, instead of following someone else's map?

Don't Fear Failure

(Posted this to my class blog, but thought I'd share it here as well.)

One of the problems I think we have in schools is that we train students to fear failure, to avoid it at all costs. Now, to be clear, I'm not suggesting you go out and fail all your classes. But I am suggesting that you should take some risks in your learning. That instead of avoiding things that are hard (because you might fail), you challenge yourself to step up and take on things that are difficult.

I think sometimes students would rather not try (and fail) than try and fail. In the first option it's easy to say, "Oh, I just didn't try." But in the second option it's much harder, because you have to admit that you did try and still weren't successful. But here's the key - almost anyone who has done anything worthwhile has failed. Not just once, but multiple times. We often learn more from trying something and not succeeding than we do from trying something and succeeding, especially if we limit ourselves to only trying "easy" things that we know we'll be successful at.

Here are a couple of videos that illustrate this point that I think are worth your time. The first is from the TED Conference I attended, which speaker Brene Brown (who also has an excellent TED Talk) described this way:

You know what the big secret about TED is? . . . This is like the failure conference. No, it is. You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times.

The key is still to try hard things, even knowing that you might fail, but then learning from it. So the first video is from TED Fellow Myshkin Ingawale. It's a little over 6 minutes, so please take the time to watch it. The important point to realize is that he built this device - and it failed. So then he built it 32 more times until it worked. After watching this video, think how important his invention is and how many times he had to "fail" to get a working version.

The second video is designed to be motivational, but I still think it has a good message about "failure."

So, what are you willing to try (and perhaps fail) at?

Update 3-22-12: From @kaherbert comes this relevant post from Neil Gaiman

Doing Your Best to Build the World Anew

I came across this passage in John Bogle's Don't Count On It! and it resonated as I thought about our students, so I thought I'd share it here.

Bright futures lie before you. There's the world's work to be done, and there are never enough citizens with determined hearts, courageous character, intelligent minds, and idealistic souls to do it. Yes, our world already has quite enough guns, political platitudes, arrogance, disingenuousness, self-interest, snobbishness, superficiality, war and the certainty that God is on our side. But it never has enough conscience, nor enough tolerance, idealism, justice, compassion, wisdom, humility, self-sacrifice for the greater good, integrity, courtesy, poetry, laughter, and generosity of substance and spirit. It is these elements that I urge you to carry into your careers, and remember that the great game of life is not about money; it is about doing your best to build the world anew. (p. 534)

Points I'd Like My Future Principal to Remember: Students Are Not Customers

I'll admit I've used the "students as customers" phrase myself a few times. And, in the sense that meeting the needs of students is the teaching profession's primary reason for being, I still buy that. But I was reminded of the limitations of that analogy as I'm currently reading on a very different topic, John Bogle's Don't Count On It!

Bogle first defines professions and professionals using these characteristics from Gardner and Shulman:

1. A commitment to the interest of clients in particular, and the welfare of society in general.
2. A body of theory or special knowledge.
3. A specialized set of professional skills, practices, and performances unique to the profession.
4. The developed capacity to render judgments with integrity under conditions of ethical uncertainty.
5. An organized approach to learning from experience, both individually and collectively, and thus of growing new knowledge from the context of practice.
6. The development of a professional community  responsible for the oversight and monitoring of quality in both practice and professional educators. (p. 140 of Bogle, p. 13-18 of original article)

Clearly teachers strive for most of these, even as we sometimes fall short (particularly on #6). Bogle then goes on say this about business relationships with customers:

[P]rofessional relationships with clients have been increasingly recast as business relationships with customers. In a world where every user of services is seen as a customer, every provider of services becomes a seller, Put another way, when the provider become a hammer, the customer is seen as a nail . . . But as so many of our nation's proudest professions - including accounting, journalism, medicine, law, architecture, and trusteeship - gradually shift their traditional balance away from that of trusted profession serving the interests of the community and toward that of commercial enterprises seeking competitive advantage, the human beings who rely on those services are the losers. (p. 142, emphasis mine).

I would add the profession of teaching to his list (and Bogle does include that in his list on the previous page). My concern is that when we take the analogy of "student as customer" too far, when we talk about running "schools as a business" and "efficiencies" and "bottom-lines," we run this risk:

And yet, profession by profession, the old values are clearly being undermined. The driving force is our old friend (or enemy), the bottom-line society. Unchecked market forces not only constitute a strong challenge to our professions; in some cases, these forces have totally overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries. (p. 141)

So, while I think we as educators can learn vast amounts from other professions and from business in general, I'd like my future principal to remember that the "bottom line" of learning can't be directly equated with the bottom line of businesses. As education professionals we need to continue to "serv[e] the interests of the community" - our students - and not shift our goals "toward that of commercial enterprises seeking competitive advantage." I want them to remember that students are not nails to our hammers.

Trends I'd Like My Future Principal to Consider: Jobs Are Disappearing, But Work Isn't

I touched on employment in a previous post in this series, but wanted to revisit it briefly after reading this article:

This is all a part of the transition toward a postindustrial economy.

Jeff Dachis, Internet consulting legend and founder of Razorfish, coined the phrase “everything that can be digital, will be.” To the extent that the world becomes more digital, it will also become more global. To the extent that the economy remains physical, business may become more local.

The question is, what is the future of work, and what can we do about it? 

This article touches on a subject that appears to be surprisingly absent in our discussions of school reform. Much of the current rhetoric around reform talks about preparing students for a globally competitive world of work, but seems to completely ignore the nature of what that work will look like.

Work will always be about finding what other people want and need, and then creating practical solutions to fulfill those desires. Our basic assumptions about how work gets done are what’s changing. It’s less about having a fixed location and schedule and more about thoughtful and engaged activity. Increasingly, this inspiration can happen anytime, anyplace.

There is a blurring of distinctions among work, play, and professional development. The ways that we measure productivity will be less focused on time spent and more about the value of the ideas and the quality of the output. People are also going to have a much better awareness of when good work is being done.

The old model of work provided an enormous level of predictability. In previous eras, people had a sense of job security and knew how much they would earn on a monthly basis. This gave people a certain sense of confidence in their ability to maintain large amounts of debt. The consumer economy thrived on this system for more than half a century. Location-based and formal jobs will continue to exist, of course, but these will become smaller slices of the overall economy.

The new trends for the workplace have significantly less built-in certainty. We will all need to rethink, redefine, and broaden our sources of economic security. To the extent that people are developing a broader range of skills, we will also become more resilient and capable of adapting to change. (emphasis mine)

I worry that much of what we currently do in schools is prepare students for the old model of work, for a world of work that is predictable, educating them for the routine instead of the novel:

It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. . .

And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn't end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

I think many folks are looking at our current world and thinking we are in a time of massive upheaval, but then things will return to “normal.” But what if this is the new normal?

The new norm is for people to maintain and develop skill sets in multiple simultaneous careers. In this environment, the ability to learn is something of a survival skill. Education never stops, and the line between working and learning becomes increasingly blurred.

 . . . Fixed hours, fixed location, and fixed jobs are quickly becoming a thing of the past for many industries, as opportunities become more fluid and transient. The 40-hour workweek is becoming less relevant as we see more subcontractors, temps, freelancers, and self-employed. The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimates that these “contingent workers” now make up a third of the workforce.

I'd like to see my future principal lead our school community in a discussion of what this means in terms of how we're preparing our students for the world of work. I'd also like to see a discussion that might be even more important – is the basic structure of how we are educating our students compatible with the emerging structure of the world of work? Are 59-minute classes, with bells that ring and fixed curricula, with grades and class ranks, with high-stakes tests (that are most certainly not “open book” much less “open Internet”) and rigidly set schedules really the best way to go about this?

Imagine an office [school] where meetings [classes] are optional. Nobody talks about how many hours [credits] they worked last week. People have an unlimited amount of vacation and paid time off. Work [learning] is done anytime and anywhere, based entirely on individual [student] needs and preferences. Finally, employees [students and staff] at all levels are encouraged to stop doing anything that is a waste of their time, their customers’ time, or the company’s time. [bracketed comments mine]

 I'd like my future principal to help us imagine.

We Are Not Just Studying Human History, We Are Shaping It

Warning: Contains mature content and a few brief graphic images.

Update: There are some questions about the credibility of these folks. (And this.) Before my original post I did some brief checking and it seemed legit, and it still appears as though this is a real issue that we should take on, but perhaps the Invisible Children organization is not quite as straightforward as it first appeared.






Update 3-12-12: Invisible Children responds to critics with this video.

Update 3-14-12: And another critique. And more response.

We Need To Talk About An Injustice

If you only watch one presentation from TED 2012, watch this one from Bryan Stevenson. 

 

"Our humanity depends on everyone's humanity."

Equal Justice Initiative

Quotes Worth Spreading

I had the opportunity to attend TEDActive last week. (Full Disclosure: TED - with the generous support of the Kohl's Foundation - kindly paid my way so that I could give them feedback on their soon-to-launch TED-Ed initiative. All expense paid trip to Palm Springs at the end of February. It's rough, but I took one for the team.)

I'm sure this year's TED Talks will begin appearing shortly, but I thought I'd share some of the quotes I wrote down from some of the talks. Please note that while I'm attempting to quote directly, I'm sure some of these are paraphrased a bit. Please also note that there were many good quotes from many talks, but sometimes I just listened and didn't write anything down. Not all of these quotes are profound, but they made me think for one reason or another and I wanted to record them somewhere to refer to later when the talks are posted.

John Bates (TEDYou Talk)

Be generous by graciously accepting compliments. It's a gift you give the complimenter.

Brian Greene

Some details really matter.

Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts (talk posted)

The key to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in a zone of stimulation that is right for us.

Paul Gilding: The Earth is Full (talk posted)

It takes a good crisis to get us going.

Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our Future (talk posted)

The news media preferentially feeds us negative stories, because that's what our minds pay attention to.

It's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet, it's about creating a life of possibility.

Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story (talk posted, contains graphic language)

Make me care.

The audience wants to work for their meal, they just don't want to know they're doing it.

The unifying theory of 2 + 2. Don't give them 4. (Me: Shoutout to Dan Meyer)

Billy Collins

If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.

It took a long time to put the wheel and the suitcase together.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Technology is changing music itself.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Steven Pinker

Our circle of empathy expanded.

We are susceptible to reason.

Jonathan Haidt

Don't change the rider, or the elephant, change the path.

Atul Gawande

Making systems work is the challenge of our generation.

Complexity requires groups success. We all need to be pit crews.

Regina Dugan

If you refuse to fear failure then impossible things become possible.

Why did we do it? In part we wondered if it was possible to do it.

Donald Sadoway

If you want to make something dirt cheap, use dirt.

Julie Burstein

Passionate optimism.

Lior Zoref

They are all thinking with their friends.

Upgrade your brain.

Jennifer Pahlka: Coding a Better Government (talk posted)

Government is what we do together that we can't do alone.

Jim Stengel

What if I thought about him every day when I went to work?

Pick one attribute related to curiosity and make progress on that this year.

Articulate your ideal often.

Sherry Turkle

We sacrifice conversation for mere connection.

I share therefore I am. (Me: Shoutout to Dean Shareski, although she was disagreeing with this.)

Tali Sharot

People with high expectations always feel better about things.

Optimism changes both subjective and objective reality.

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice (talk posted)

Our humanity depends on everyone's humanity.

The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.

One of the keys is proximity: we're too far from poverty and suffering.

Note: Bryan moved the audience. The next day Chris Anderson asked for contributions from the stage - the audience contributed $1.1 million to Bryan's attempt to reform juvenile justice.

Chip Kidd

What do stories look like? (Me: He designs book jackets.)

Tom Campbell

We tend to use jargon to classify things, instead of really looking at them.

Ainissa Ramirez

It takes 64 elements to make a smart phone.

You fail your way to success.

Scientists brand failure differently. We call it data.

Kate Messner

The power of what if . . .?

We need more kid-sourcing.

Angie Miller

Are you content to let someone else represent you? That's what you do when you don't represent yourself.

Awele Makeba

It is my hope to find my best personal self in service to others.

Sebastian Wernicke

In a new medium you can break the rules.

Cesar Kuriyama

The power of time off.

Brene Brown

Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.

TED is like the failure conference. Everyone here has failed. Often. And learned from it.

You hear one of two voices. Either "you're never good enough" or "who do you think you are?"

Empathy is the antidote to shame.

Steven Addis

Get in the shot. (Me: Referencing taking photographs in your life.)