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?

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.

Manifesto I’d Like My Future Principal To Read: Stop Stealing Dreams

I often find Seth Godin provocative, and this education manifesto is no exception. I don’t think he’s right about everything, but the direction he’s suggesting appears to me to be a better one than the direction our schools are currently headed. In a series of short posts, I’m going to excerpt and briefly comment on different sections of the manifesto that I’d like my future principal to consider when thinking about the direction that Arapahoe High School needs to move as we go forward.

First up is Section Three: Back to (the wrong) school. In this section Godin appears to pull heavily from Gatto as he describes the impetus for compulsory education. While that’s interesting and useful, here’s the quote I’d most like my future principal to ponder:

As we get ready for the ninety-third year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership, and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

We’re preparing students for a whole that no longer exists. A factory model of education isn’t what our kids need, yet it’s difficult to picture what the alternative is (at least it is for many of us to picture what that might look like at any kind of scale). So I’d like my future principal to lead our staff, students and community in a discussion of how we get to there (wherever “there” is) from here

Clearly if you designed a school from scratch today it would look very different than what our current schools look like. So that begs the question, why do we accept the current design just because it's already been created?

Ideas I'd Like My Future Principal To Consider: Putting the 'L' Back in PLC

My district went to the Professional Learning Community (PLC) model several years ago. I really like the concept of scheduled, on-going, sustained staff development with time carved out of the regular school day. (We have ten two-hour late start days a year. Not enough, but a beginning.)

My concern, however, is I feel like our PLC's have become too narrowly focused. To be clear, we've done lots of good stuff in our PLC's, so I'm not saying they've been all bad. They haven't, but I worry that instead of a PLC we too often look at them as a PAC - Professional Assessment Communities. We spend a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out how to measure how our students are doing, and not enough time talking about learning.

Folks with more experience than I have with PLC's might argue that based on what I've described we've failed to effectively define our essential learnings. There is probably something to that, but I think - for the most part - our PLC's have done a decent job of defining those essential learnings as they are described in the PLC model. The problem, I fear, is that more and more I find myself disagreeing with the basic tenet of essential learnings, namely that there's a fixed curriculum that all students should master, and therefore there are essential learnings within that curriculum that our PLC's can define, focus on, and successfully teach.

I wish we could spend more time as learners ourselves, more time talking about what that's like in 2012. I would like our PLC's to look more like a PLN (Personal Learning Network) and less like a PAC. Now, to be sure, they must be somewhat different from a PLN, as by definition there's a group instead of it being personal, and it probably needs to be somewhat more focused than a PLN has to be, but I believe that we need to radically rethink how we are structuring schools, and we can't do that if we're more focused on assessment than we are on learning. We need to experience the world of 2012 as learners ourselves, and discuss that with other teacher-learners in our PLC's, before we can figure out how best to help our students.

So I'd like my future principal to ask us to put the 'L' back in PLC, to be learners first, and assessors . . . well, I'm not sure where, but not first. I'd like my future principal to be the Lead Learner, and model that for our staff, our students and our community. Perhaps then we can not only put the 'L' back in PLC, maybe we can put it front and center in everything we do in schools.

Videos I'd Like My Future Principal to Watch: PBL at HTH

Let me start by freely admitting I don't know how to do this. Let me also admit that at the high school I think I'd like to create I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't hire myself as a teacher. Nevertheless, I'd like my future principal to watch the following video (yes, it's 15 minutes, but it's important to watch all of it).

I'd like my future principal to consider the ideas contained in this video and compare them to the more traditional view of what high school looks like that many of us have. I'd like them to lead a discussion around these two quotes from the video:

12:14 - We need to be evocative, we need to be midwives with teachers and find out how they learned in high school, what was their most memorable learning experiences. Draw that out of them and ask them to write it down on a piece of paper. It was a project, it had a mentor, it involved community, there was risk of failure, there was recognition of success, there was a public exhibition.

13:25 - I would argue that rigor is being in the company of a passionate adult who is rigorously pursuing inquiry in the area of their subject matter and is inviting students along as peers in that adult discourse. That's rigor.

Ideas I'd Like My Future Principal to Consider: The Schedule

We have a problem with time. Specifically, the way we allocate it in schools. As Chris Lehmann points out:

Our schools are structurally dysfunctional places which, therefore, makes teaching and learning much harder than it needs to be, so that teachers -- and students -- have to succeed despite the system, rather than because of it.

As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each others' shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. (emphasis mine)

At Arapahoe we have a fairly unique schedule for a high school, we call it the Variable Schedule. It's very similar to a college schedule. Some classes do meet five days a week, but most meet less than that; some MWF, some TR, some four days a week, etc. Let me be clear, there are many, many, many good things about this schedule, not the least of which is that it allows students to explore more areas than a traditional schedule, and it allows students to work one-on-one with teachers during unscheduled hours (or use the media center, or work in groups, or do whatever they need to get done).

Over the years we've become pretty protective of the Variable, as periodically there is pressure to abandon it.

(If you're interested, the two most frequently cited reasons: 1) High school students can't handle the 2-8 unscheduled hours a week we give them, especially with an open campus; 2) Teachers typically teach "only" 20-23 hours a week, which is less than in a traditional schedule.) 

We feel it allows students the flexibility to explore lots of different areas they might not normally get to, it gives them experience dealing with unscheduled time which is invaluable later in college, work and life, and it allows for the opportunity for teachers and students to develop deeper relationships.

I think over the years of defending the Variable we may have lost track of something important: there may be a better way to do things. For most of us, the only types of schedules we really have to compare to are the traditional 6 (or 7 or 8) by 5 schedule, or the block schedule (or minor variations on those two, like rotating days). The traditional 6 by 5 schedule holds very little appeal to us and, while the block schedule is appealing to some folks in some ways, it doesn't appear to be better than what we have.

But here's the thing - those aren't our only options. While the Variable may have been innovative when it was implemented at AHS in 1967, and while it may have served us well for most of the 45 years since, that doesn't mean it's the best option today. The world is significantly different now than it was in 1967, and learning opportunities are significantly different, so shouldn't schools be as well?

So am I proposing a specific schedule? No. I'm proposing that it's time for us to reexamine our purpose and goals in our school and that everything should be on the table, including the schedule. But, for the sake of discussion, here's a schedule that perhaps would break us out of our mindset of Variable, traditional or block scheduling.

What if students went to "regular" classes only in the morning (say 9 am - 12 pm, because certainly we wouldn't have teenagers start at 7:21 am in any logical universe). Then after lunch (I'd suggest more than 30 minutes, think about all the great discussions you have at conferences outside of the sessions), what if students were able to explore something they were passionate about more in-depth? Maybe that's a small class of students interested in the same thing working with a teacher or teachers. Or maybe that's an independent study. Or maybe an internship at a local business or place of learning. Or maybe something online. I don't know what exactly it looks like, but I think it's one (very rough) example of how we need to change our thinking about the possibilities of what school could look like.

Don't you learn the best and the most when you are engaged in something you are passionate about? Why wouldn't we want that for our students?

And, to be sure, even this proposed schedule is still pretty traditional, as it's hard for me to think creatively enough given my lifelong immersion in the traditional idea of what school should look like. Which is why I think we need to do it together, as a school community.

I think our current notions of what school - and school schedules - should look like are hopelessly outdated. As Ira Socol says:

Assignments need to stop having dates on them. Assignments - such as they may be - need to have goals instead. What are you hoping to accomplish? to learn? to create? to build? to know? to demonstrate? to provoke? How do you think you'll get from "here" to "there." What in the world does a date or a time have to do with that? Why would you even begin to interfere with the learning process by limiting the time? I'll explain, because in the industrial process of schooling 70% of a subject "learned" by a specific moment trumps mastery at some other time. Do I really need to explain how ridiculous that is?

Which is why I'd like my future principal to lead us through an examination of what exactly we want for our students, how we would best go about doing that, and what kind of school schedule would best support that. Maybe it turns out that the Variable is the best option (I obviously don't think so, but that doesn't mean it isn't). Or perhaps just tweaking the Variable. But perhaps something radically different, something that makes much more sense for learning in 2012 and beyond, as opposed to schedules created in the 1920's (traditional) or 1967 (our version of the Variable).

Here's what it comes down to to me. If you were designing a school today, would you design anything even remotely similar to what we have? Would you have 58 minute classes, where we think about Algebra for 58 minutes then, bing, now we go think about grammar then, bing, now we go to Band?

With all the affordances that technology allows us, with our ability to connect with information, ideas, and people inexpensively and easily around the world 24/7/365, with our ability to pursue our passions in way unthinkable for most humans even ten years ago, would you really limit learning in this way?

I would not, which is why I'm hopeful that, as great as the Variable has been, we don't cling blindly to it. I'm hopeful that my future principal will lead our community in a discussion of how to design the best school/learning experience possible for our students in 2012, and then help us get there.

Tools I'd Like My Future Principal To Consider: Twitter

From the article Meet Your New PD Tool in Scholastic Administrator magazine:

"I really think anybody who doesn't spend a little time building a personal network is doing themselves and their school a disservice. If we're not modeling this stuff for our teachers and students, then I don't think we're doing our jobs."
                                                             (p. 31, quoting Patrick Larkin, @bhsprincipal)

I'd like my future principal to consider that statement and ask themselves if they are modeling what it's like to be a lifelong learner, a connected learner, for our students if they aren't actively using and harnessing the power of social media. I'd like my future principal to not only have an active presence on Twitter, but I'd like them to engage their administrative team and the entire faculty in a discussion of how best to leverage these new tools (as well as the possible negative aspects that are indeed present). I'd like them to lead a discussion about how the staff could use tools like Twitter for their own personalized professional development:

For Sheninger, tweeting is like directed Googling. "Instead of doing a Google search, you're harnessing human power, a human-generated search engine driven by education professionals who are passionate and have determined that having an online presence will have a dramatic, positive impact on their professional practice."
                                                              (p. 31, quoting Eric Sheninger, @nmhs_principal).

I'd like them to lead a discussion not only about how to leverage tools such as Twitter to broadcast information to our community, but how to also use those tools to engage our community as learners. I'd like that discussion to extend to ways to have our students engage with other passionate learners around the globe - safely, meaningfully, and effectively.

I'd like my future principal - and their entire administrative team - to know what #cpchat is, and what folks are referring to when they talk about the Connected Principal's blog, or CASTLE. I'd like them to know not only Patrick and Eric, but Chris and Lyn and George and Josie and . . . the list goes on and on (including lots and lots of folks that I don't know . . . yet, or perhaps ever, it doesn't matter as their network will be personal to them.)

I'd like them not to be surprised by some of the things Eric says in this video:



Video credit: http://www.scholastic.com/administrator/

"24/7. When I need it. From anywhere in the world. To me that's power. It's helping my students see a new world. It give me goosebumps every time I think about it." - Eric Sheninger in the video

I want my future principal to help our students see - and participate - in this new world.

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: Participatory Media Education and Civic Education Are Inextricable

From the article titled "Head of State" in the print edition (subscription required, although if you are in a school you most likely have access to it through one of your library subscription services) in the November 7th, 2011 issue of Time magazine:

Whereas US Envoys once filed secret cables to Washington late at night, Clinton has pushed her ambassadors to expand the use of Twitter and Facebook - State now has 192 Twitter feeds and 288 Facebook accounts - and her daughter Chelsea calls her TechnoMom. "We are in the age of participation," Clinton said at her husband's charity even in New York City in September, "and the challenge . . . is to figure out how to be responsive, to help catalyze, unleash, channel the kind of participatory eagerness that is there."

Clinton is trying to ensure these changes are permanent: she requires every diplomat who rotates through the foreign-service institute to get training in social media. (p. 31, emphasis mine).

The United States Secretary of State is requiring every diplomat to get training in social media - sure seems like perhaps we should be doing the same with and for our students. Yet typically social media participation is looked down upon in schools and, in fact, banned outright and blocked by our Internet filters. I'd like my future principal to reflect on the above quote and then lead our faculty in a discussion of whether we are truly preparing our students for their future when we block most if not all social media, much less work with our students to help them unleash the potential power of it.

That reminds me of another quote, this one from the National Council for the Social Studies Position Statement on Media Literacy:

The 21st century world is media saturated, technologically dependent, and globally connected. We live in a multimedia age where the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources and more typically from highly constructed visual images, complex sound arrangements, and multiple media formats. The multimedia age requires new skills for accessing, analyzing, evaluating, creating, and distributing messages within a digital, global, and democratic society. The acquisition and application of critical analysis and media production skills are part of what constitutes media literacy. The Internet and the everyday use of social networking technologies, together with the expansive growth of corporate entertainment media and the integration of popular culture, also require us as social studies educators to link participatory media literacy with civic education. (Emphasis mine.)

If the majority of information people receive comes less often from print sources, then I'd like to see my future principal engage our faculty in a conversation around whether that is also true of our classrooms. If not, should it be, and what might that look like?

And the money quote cited in that same article, from Howard Rheingold:

“In the twenty-first century, participatory media education and civic education are inextricable” (Rheingold, 2008, p. 103)

So, in other words, if we aren't teaching participatory media, then we aren't teaching civics. Since we're required to teach civics, I'm hopeful that my future principal would help us as a faculty figure out how best to incorporate that into our classes.

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: 1472 and 2012

One more post that was at least initially generated from my reading of Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts. This time it was a passage on p. 205 that resonated that I wanted my future principal to read and consider, but it also sounded a bit familiar. Turns out I had already Diigo-ed it when John Naughton's article in the Guardian he references was first published:

So let's conduct what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment — a thought experiment. Imagine that the net represents a similar kind of transformation in our communications environment to that wrought by printing. What would we learn from such an experiment?

The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 — i.e. 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will:

(a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church?

(b) Power the Reformation?

(c) Enable the rise of modern science?

(d) Create entirely new social classes and professions?

(e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life?

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know.

Now it's certainly debatable whether the Internet is going to have a similarly large effect as the printing press, but that's a debate I'd like to see my future principal lead and participate in. (After all, part of the debate will surely be whether the Internet is going to have a much larger effect than the printing press.)

I then somewhat serendipitously came across this complementary post by Mark Pesce and Robert Tercek,

Yet there was a humanity before, a Homo sapiens before sapience.  We can reach back through prehistory, but our reach extends only as far as language.  Before language, our species was like a small child, remembering nothing.  After language we have continuous memory – indigenous Australians claim a cultural continuity going back some 60,000 years.  Language empowers us to express ourselves and know one another’s minds, but also imprisons us within an unbreakable cage that limits our ability to know anything about our pre-linguistic ancestors.  We are so different from them they are incomprehensible to us.  Language has so changed us that we understand nothing of those who do not share language.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Language was among the first human tools – along with stone axes and fire – and definitively the first tool that lived entirely within us, a bit of innovation as much cultural as technological.  In the moment language arrived on the scene, it became indispensable, and once indispensable, we adopted it as innate, favoring those with the greatest linguistic capability, and thereby subtly affecting the evolution of our species.  People who ‘talk pretty’ have broader prospects for success in the world.  They and their children will thrive.

Every claim made for the power of language – as an amplifier of human capability – can also be made for the sudden arrival of hyperconnectivity.  Connected people are more successful, and those most successful at mastering the techniques of connectivity have the greatest successes.  Connection is becoming indispensable, and we have already begun to think of it as an innate capability.  The billion seconds from 1995 – 2026 is witness to a transition from a world in which no one is connected, to a world where being connected and being human is seen as synonymous.

Just as we now see being verbal and being human as synonymous, hyperconnectivity is adding another layer of richness and depth to our experience.  Where we can observe the sudden explosion of depth in the human record, eighty thousand years ago, so our children’s children’s children’s children will look upon this billion seconds as a second explosion, another sudden quickening, before which the ‘dumb’ and disconnected generations of humanity will seem incomprehensible and inhuman.

I definitely want my future principal - and really all principals current and future - to be discussing hyperconnectivity. Do they agree, or disagree? (Or, more likely, how much of it do they agree with and which parts don't they buy into.) If connected people are more successful, what does that imply for our schools? Is hyperconnectivity really indispensable, an amplifier like no other; is it really changing what it means to be human similar to the way language did?

My next principal will (hopefully) be at my school for the next half billion seconds until 2026. (I know statistically it's unlikely for a principal to stay that long, but since our current one has been here for 27 years I'm hopeful the next one will last for at least half that long.) Isn't this going to be one of the two or three critical questions they (we) are going to have to address during their tenure?

 Flickr cc: Dean Shareski 

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: This new economy tilts toward publicness.

Again from Jeff Jarvis's Public Parts, a quote I'd like my future principal to ponder (p. 137):

"Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive," says entrepreneur Sam Lessin. "Now the opposite is true: You have to pay a mix of cash, time, social capital, etc. if you want privacy." You pay for privacy in the effort and hassle it takes to manage privacy settings. You also pay in the opportunity lost if you choose not to be public and social. On the other side of the ledger, you can be rewarded - with attention, influence, information, deals - if you reveal yourself. This new economy tilts toward publicness. (Emphasis mine.)

What opportunities might schools (students, teachers, administrators, communities) be losing by choosing not to be public and social? How are our fears possibly getting in the way of preparing our students to be successful in an "economy [that] tilts toward publicness?" As my future principal, how are you going to help our staff - and our students - understand the new privacy and the new publicness?

Quotes I'd Like My Future Principal to Ponder: Isolation Costs Too Much

I'm currently reading Jeff Jarvis's book Public Parts. I'm not that far into it, so I don't know yet if I'd recommend my future principal read the book, but this quote from p. 45 is one that I'd like that person to ponder:

"Businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products." Now "they are changing into networks of business units whose assets are called relationships and capabilities." Turning that perspective into an investment strategy, I'd bet money on start-ups that put relationships at their center so they can disrupt old, closed industries (later we'll look at what social car companies and airlines look like; imagine, too, the social store, restaurant and school). I'd buy the stocks of companies that know me well and play well with others. I'd short the companies that build walls around themselves. In a linked world and a relationship economy, isolation costs too much. (emphasis mine)

I'd like my future principal to ponder, and lead the staff in discussion around, the idea that an isolated school, a non-social school, a "closed" school that isn't actively reaching out to others and building those relationships (including letting students build those relationships as an integral part of their learning), is a school that is ripe for disruption. I think they should also lead a discussion about how well such a school would be preparing their students to live, learn and work in a networked world.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: What To Tell Your Twelve-Year-Old

(This is part two in a possible series. See this post for an explanation of the future principal part of the title of this post.)

I found these two recent articles from the Economic Revolution column in The Denver Post pretty interesting. They're written by Dave Maney who, in his own words, attempts to "connect the dots to our economic future." This sums up the thrust of the two articles:

The prescription for the last few generations has been: Work hard in school, get into a good college, pick a career field with lots of demand, and success will follow. I'm pretty sure that's what my parents told me, and it served me well. But I'm afraid it's largely misguided advice now.

While I don't believe that education is solely about preparing you for future employment, I do believe that's part of our mission. I also believe that many of the current batch of reforms are being made in the name of economic success and competitiveness, yet they seem to fly in the face of what I see happening. (Which, of course, is probably why these two articles caught my eye, since I agree with much of what he says. It's always dangerous to read too much into something that confirms your own bias, but here goes.)

I particularly like how he attempts to state his "ten big ideas," but then also tries to frame them in terms of how he would begin a conversation with a twelve-year-old. For example, one of his points is:

In this tumultuous time, I wouldn't trust anyone's traditional prescriptions for success. (Nor mine for that matter.) It's incumbent on everyone to think for themselves, to observe, to interpret, to plan and to course-correct.

 And he frames it for a twelve-year-old as

Starting point for your 12-year-old: "School's important, but being able to think for yourself is more important. We should talk about how people learn to do that."

Perhaps these articles could be part of the basis for a good discussion led by our new principal about our current assumptions about what our students are going to need to be successful in the workforce. As a bonus article, we could add in The Career Of The Future Doesn't Include A 20-Year Plan. It's More Like Four:

The particulars of Hasler's young career can appear exotic and, yes, flighty. But his essential experience--tacking swiftly from job to job and field to field, learning new skills all the while--resembles the pattern that increasingly defines our careers. According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4, down sharply since the 1970s. This decline in average job tenure is bigger than any economic cycle, bigger than any particular industry, bigger than differences in education levels, and bigger than differences in gender. (Since women are more likely to interrupt their careers for child rearing and caregiving, their average time in a job is even shorter than a man's.)

Hmm, reminds me a bit of this.

Things I Want My Future Principal to Read: Old School or Bold School?

My longtime principal (more than 25 years at our school) recently announced he'll be retiring at the end of the school year, which means we'll be looking for a new principal. (I'd link to the job posting, but it's not posted yet. (Update: Position is posted.) While I don't have any direct say in the hiring process, I've naturally been thinking a bit about what qualities I would want in a new principal as well as what questions I'd ask in the interview process if I were part of it.

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much the past year or so. That's for several reasons, not the least of which is that both my day job and my personal life have been somewhat overwhelming. But it's also because I haven't felt like I've had that much to add to the conversation. I felt like I needed to come up with some original thinking to make it worthwhile to hit the publish button, and I just didn't feel like I had that much original to contribute. Thinking about hiring a new principal, however, has made me want get back to my earlier blogging style which was much more of a link-blogging effort, linking to other interesting items and occasionally adding a thought or two of my own.

I think it might help me crystallize my own thinking in terms of what I'd like to see in a new principal.  Now, I'm not naive enough to think that my future principal is likely to be reading my blog, but stranger things have happened and perhaps some other folks out there (either current or future administrators) might find some use in it as well, so here goes.

So the first item I'd like my future principal to read (and think about), is Will Richardson's latest for District Administration: Are You an Old School or a Bold School?

Right now, we need bold schools, not old schools. By that, I mean we need schools to take serious steps to not only reinvent themselves, but to step out and advocate for a new, more meaningful definition of what learning means for our students, one that goes beyond simply “higher student achievement” or “increased student performance.”

Bold schools are places of questions, not answers. When much of what we currently think is important for our students to know is just a few taps on a phone or a Google search away, our central mission can’t be to deliver and test for content mastery. Instead, it must be to develop deep dispositions for learning by supporting sustained inquiry into both the content and context of whatever subject students are tackling. 

I would like my future instructional leader to read this short article, and then lead our faculty in a meaningful discussion around some of the issues it raises. This, of course, would need to be in the context of a larger staff discussion surrounding the purpose of school, and the purpose of our school, but I think it would be a good starting point.

In our current age of data-driven, accountability-above-all-else schools, I'm realistic enough to understand that our new principal will need to be able to navigate in those waters. But is it too much to ask that we also get a principal that has a bold vision for what our school can become, that can not only retain what is great about our current school (and there is much that is great), but can also lead us to someplace better, to reinvent ourselves and create, as Will says,

[S]chools [that] are steeped in cultures where everyone, both educators and students, are seen as learners first.

I want both my new principal and my school to be bold. I think our students deserve nothing less.

Sixty Months

I wonder what implications this article from the February issue of Fast Company has for the future in our classrooms?

After more than 100 years of dashed hopes, several companies are coming to market with technologies that can safely transmit power through the air – a breakthrough that portends the literal and figurative untethering of our electronic age.

The article describes three main variations of this technology. The first, inductive coupling, was scheduled to make it to market this month. Basically, it’s a charging pad, and you drop any device (that has the right electronics to utilize it) on it and it will recharge.

No more tangle of power cables or jumble of charging stations . . . And the pads are smart: Their built-in coils are driven by integrated circuits, which know if the device sitting on them is authorized to receive power, or it needs power at all. So you won’t charge your car keys. Or overcharge your flashlight.

It’s initially being made available to police, fire-and-rescue, and contractor fleets, and is also being integrated into a truck console (think a box connected to the electrical system of the truck, and contractors drop all their rechargeable devices into it while driving from place to place.)

The second variation is radio-frequency harvesting, which works across distances of up to 85 feet, and is also supposed to be available this month.

In this system, electricity is transformed into radio waves, which are transmitted across a room, then received by so-called power harvesters and translated back into low-voltage direct current . . . down the road, it will appear in wireless boxes into which you can toss any and all of your electronics for recharging.

But it’s the third variation which is the most tantalizing: magnetically coupled resonance (dubbed “WiTricity” by its MIT inventor). This one is supposed to be available in 12 to 18 months.

Like acoustical resonance, which allows an opera singer to break a glass across the room by vibrating it with the correct frequency of her voice's sound waves, magnetic resonance can launch an energetic response in something far away. In this case, the response is the flow of electricity out of the receiving coil and into the device to which it's connected . . . Importantly, then, WiTricity doesn't depend on line-of-sight. A powered coil in your basement could power the rest of the house, wirelessly.

The rest of the house – or your classroom.

Say you’re a classroom teacher. (Altogether now, “I’m a classroom teacher.” Thanks.) And let’s assume for a moment that you’re not in a 1:1 environment, and that you’ve been assuming that it’s going to be quite a while before your students each have their own computing device that works reliably and effectively in your classroom.

But then you notice that netbook computers are getting pretty darn good at a price point of around $300 to $400. And then you read this article and realize that in the next five years (conceivably), that the price of that very capable netbook could easily drop to perhaps $150 (or the iPhone could evolve into the netbook space at that same price point), and either of those might include the necessary technology to receive “WiTricity” right in your classroom, so no more worries about batteries going dead.

So, if you’re that classroom teacher (or principal, or central office administrator), and you’ve got sixty months until that’s a reality: what should you be doing right now to get yourself – and your students – ready for that very-near-future? You’ve got sixty months – shouldn’t you be getting started?

2020 Vision on DesignShare

(The bottom portion of this post is cross-blogged at DesignShare.)

DesignShare is a virtual collaboration of school design professionals working around the world. They facilitate ideas and resources about best practices and innovation in schools from early childhood through the university level, focusing on the design of learning environments, with their target audience being primarily school architects, designers and planners. Christian Long is the President and CEO, and many of you know him from his think:lab blog.

When I created the 2020 Vision presentation back in November, Christian left a comment and also e-mailed saying that he would be using it with various audiences of school architects, designers and planners. I thought that was pretty cool, and he was nice enough to follow up to say that it went well and that he would probably use it again. Then about the first of January, Christian contacted me and asked if I would be interested in sharing it with the DesignShare audience:

Imagine that you’re talking to a room of 25 diverse school architects who are working with passionate school leaders/board members, all trying to get their arms and minds around the idea of the school of the future. They don’t yet know what they don’t know, and they need a provocative kick in the pants to imagine beyond their own world experiences. They’ve asked you for ideas. A way to future-think. Imagine writing a 2-3 page ‘introduction’ to your video – the context/history, main theme(s), the essential questions, and a bit of background context on the way you are using this to help your own district look forward. Imagine that after reading this introductory piece, they’ll watch your video…and want to learn more.

I said, “Gulp,” but – after a few emails - ultimately agreed (Christian is hard to say no to).

The result is now on DesignShare, as part of a series of articles on the future of school design (including a great article by Chris Lehmann). Christian also kindly gave me permission to post it here on The Fischbowl as well, which I’ll do in a moment.

But first, I wanted to briefly reflect back on how I/we wrote this article. I wrote a rough draft and created a Google Doc, then invited Christian to collaborate. I don’t think he’d ever used Google Docs before, but quickly figured it out and left comments and suggestions on my rough draft. I then went back and revised, he then went back and commented some more, and we repeated that process quite a few times. When it was finally ready for publication, Christian just took the Google Doc and basically pasted it into the DesignShare website (with a little html clean-up, I’m sure).

This is a process that could not have happened even five years ago. First of all, he never would’ve seen the presentation or let me know of his use of it or his interest to publish it on DesignShare. Second, we wouldn’t have been able to collaborate so seamlessly using something like Google Docs (yes, we could’ve emailed, but there’s no comparison). Third, you wouldn’t be reading about it now. And, don’t forget, Christian and I have never met. He’s in Texas (when he’s not traveling around the world) and I’m in Colorado, and we were able to come together, collaborate, and publish ideas that will be shared with school architects/planners/designers around the world, without ever meeting face to face. (I think we may need a new definition of what “meeting somebody” means.)

I still find this just so amazing . . . anyway, here’s a copy of the DesignShare article (very slightly modified to fit the blog better).

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“Creating a 2020 Vision for School Design”

“The kindergartners that start in the fall of 2007 will graduate in the spring of 2020. As architects of schools, you need to have a 2020 Vision. Your client’s and children’s futures depend upon it.”

by Karl Fisch*****

Note: Like many others who spend time reading various education-oriented blogs, we ran into a most amazing video presentation called “2020 Vision” that was put together by a Colorado (US) based educator named Karl Fisch that truly put into fresh new perspective how kids’/students’ lives are radically transforming before our eyes. His video (and 2 others) were put together to help his own teaching colleagues ‘get it’ when it comes to embracing new technologies to help empower their students for the students’ own futures (not just our pasts). And after only a few months, the videos suddenly went global in a very word-of-mouth viral manner, and they have continued to gain notoriety in all corners of the blogosphere. So we thought we’d ask Karl if he’d write an open-letter to the school design community based on the work he’s done to help his own school community embrace the emerging future of learning. We hope you’ll find the videos challenging and affirming all at once. (”2020 Vision is the 2nd (third one here - K.F.) video you’ll be able to play down below straight from this page).*****

Anticipate the future.

That’s something that the folks that work in schools - and the architects that design them - have to do every single day. In order to truly meet the needs of students, we really have to predict the future. My staff has spent the last year and a half trying to anticipate the future, trying to figure out what we need to do differently to adequately prepare our students to be successful in the 21st century. A century that we feel is going to require different skills, different abilities, different habits of mind than the last century did.

How can we change the way we teach or, more importantly, the way students learn, for them to be happy, successful, and productive citizens of the 21st century?

As part of this process, I developed three presentations for my staff:

• one that looks at the past (“What If?”), via Google Video,
  Google video is no more, so here it is on YouTube:

• one that looks at the present (“Did You Know?” that appears via YouTube, modified with permission by Scott McLeod),
  
  
  
  
• and one that looks at the future (“2020 Vision”; via Google Video version).
  Google Video is no more, so here it is on YouTube:
  
  

The first two were obviously easier to create, but the third one - looking at the future - was tougher because we can’t predict the future - at least not yet. So how could I get my staff to prepare for it? It’s tough to be the one that’s supposed to have the vision and then tell folks that you really don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. But I felt it was important for them to have some kind of plausible vision of the future to think about and discuss. Even if it turns out - as it surely will - to not be totally accurate. As long as I got the general trends right, it would make it much easier for my staff to anticipate what skills and abilities and habits of mind students would need in the future - and therefore we could make the necessary changes now to make that happen. As a result of our ongoing staff development, and helped along by the presentations, my staff is beginning to have a vision of the future. Right now it’s mostly a bunch of individual visions, but we are working together to create a collective vision for our school, our students and our community.

School architects face a similar dilemma.

You are tasked with creating buildings that will serve the needs of educators and students far into the future. But how do you do that when we are in a time of such rapid change? How can you possibly design a building that will meet future needs when those future needs could be so very different from today’s needs? Just like educators, you need a vision of the future. We can’t change the past - it’s already happened. We can’t even change the present - as the moment passes too quickly. The future is the only thing we can change. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Shouldn’t we get started?

The future is a lot like the weather.

Everyone talks about the future but nobody does anything about it. Who can see the future? Nobody can (at least not yet). But what if it’s your job to see the future? What if you are supposed to be the one that has the vision?

Who needs to see the future?

Well, lots of people.

Weather forecasters, farmers, investment managers, CEO’s, politicians – you name it, just about everyone could benefit from some insights into what the future will bring. Weather forecasters would be pretty happy with getting the next three days worth of forecasts right all the time. Extend it out to ten days and they’d be ecstatic. If they could be fairly accurate on temperatures and precipitation for a region for the next year they could retire happy. Farmers match up pretty well with weather forecasters.

Likewise, investment managers and CEO’s have a little bit longer viewpoint, but not by much. Many investment managers focus on quarterly numbers, then building to a 1-year, 3-year and perhaps 5-year return on investment. CEO’s and their corporations also focus on those quarterly numbers and, if the CEO is lucky, he or she makes it to the end of any five year plan. Politicians – at least in the United States – rarely focus on anything longer than the next two to four years, knowing so much will change with every election that they don’t have to focus on anything longer than that.

But what about educators?

K-12 educators may have the toughest job of all.

When a child starts Kindergarten, the school system makes a commitment to educate them for the next thirteen years. Implicit in that commitment is that the student will be prepared to be successful in the world as it exists thirteen years from then. That they are prepared to enter college, the military, or the work force with the knowledge and skills that are deemed necessary at that point in time – thirteen years in the future. As if that isn’t daunting enough, traditional wisdom holds that those thirteen years of education should really prepare students for the rest of their lives, at least until they retire, so sixty plus years out from when they start kindergarten.

This has never been easy, but when the world was changing at a relatively sedate, linear pace, schools could change slowly and still be successful. In a time of rapid change like today, in exponential times, it is next to impossible. When the predicted top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004 (former Secretary of Education Richard Riley); when a $1,000 computer will exceed the computation capabilities of the human brain in 2023 (Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near - and in this article); when a $1,000 computer will exceed the computation capabilities of the entire human race by 2049 (Kurzweil again) – what are educators to do?

So what do we do?

What can teachers and administrators, school board members and taxpayers, school architects and students - do? Nobody can accurately predict the future in a time of such rapid change. Educators instead just focus on making their “quarterly numbers,” getting their students through the next unit or the end of the semester, trying to do well on mandated tests, and generally doing their best and hoping for the best for their students. School architects just focus on the bottom line, on submitting the lowest bid that meets the minimum specs, and then trying to come in on time and on budget - hoping that the price of steel doesn’t go up too much in the interim.

But in a time of rapid change, that’s not going to cut it.

We need to have vision, even if it isn’t one hundred percent accurate. It doesn’t need to be, as the future in a time of rapid change is likely to be much stranger than most predictions. The vision doesn’t even have to get most things right, just enough of the general trends so that educators can start moving – both themselves and their students – in the right directions. Because this isn’t something that can be addressed by incremental improvements. You can’t leap a 20-foot chasm in two 10-foot jumps. We don’t need incremental improvements, but revolutionary ones (Kathy Sierra, for one, talks about this here and here).

That was the impetus behind writing one version of the future.

To give educators – and everyone concerned about education – one possible vision of education in the near future. Maybe by having one possible vision of the future we can get beyond our natural resistance to change.

I ask teachers, “Are you ever going to be 18 again? Are your students ever going to be your age? Should we be preparing students for the world as it was when we were 18, or for the world as it will be when they are our age?” I would think school architects would ask their clients some questions as well (in addition to those). Maybe along the lines of, “What are your core values? What are the three habits of mind you most want your students to leave your school with? Do your current school designs support those values and habits of mind? How could a new school design not only support those values and habits of mind, but actually foster them?”

Instead of throwing up our hands and saying, “Everything’s changing so fast. How can we possibly know what’s going to happen so why even bother,” we get to work envisioning what our students are most likely to need to be successful in the 21st century – and then preparing them accordingly. Because who can see into the future? Teachers can, every time they walk into their classrooms and look into the eyes of their students. But if their classrooms are built for the past, preparing our children for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, then the future looks pretty bleak.

School architects – at least the really good ones - have a very tough job.

They are tasked with building schools that are supposed to serve the needs of students forty to sixty years into the future. For architects that think schools are just buildings - just walls and floors, ceilings and doors - that’s pretty easy. But the problem with school as building, with a lowest-bid mentality, is how do you put a price on inspiration? How do you measure the building’s impact on the learning, the hopes and dreams of the tens of thousands of students that will read what’s on those walls, walk on those floors, stare at those ceilings, and pass through those doors? Do you simply want to shelter, or do you want to inspire, the students of the future?

Albert Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge.

He didn’t mean knowledge wasn’t important, but that it wasn’t sufficient. Schools built today must be designed to not only meet the needs of today’s students, but of multiple future generations of students that will live and learn in a constantly and rapidly changing world. We need to build schools that learn, schools that are flexible enough to adapt to meet the future needs of teachers and students. We need to harness our imaginations now in order to build schools that can inspire future imaginations.

School architects need the vision to design not just buildings, but learning spaces.

Professional learning environments where teachers and students can learn together as they boldly go into the future. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, although I have some ideas, but I do know that architects need to have a vision of the school building of the future that doesn’t try to meet the needs of the past.

Just like educators, school architects don’t have to get the vision exactly right, but they do need to have one.

We no longer live in an industrial age, so why do we have industrial age classrooms? Is it necessary (or appropriate) to have thirty-six individual desks in neat rows in a room with four walls and a door that we close to keep the rest of the world out? Do we need an assembly line mentality, where a bell rings and widgets (students) move to the next spot on the line? Do we need a system where all the raw materials (students) must be dealt with in the same way or they are tossed off the line as defective (learning disabled)?

Or do we need an environment where students are both respected and nurtured, where they are treated as professional learners, where they are seen as individuals that can contribute to the common good? Where they are viewed not just as passive consumers of information, but as active producers, who add meaning and value to the information. An environment where students are encouraged to interact, not only with others in their classroom, but with others in their community - and in communities around the world. An environment that views students as the ultimate “knowledge workers.” Which environment would you like to learn in?

The kindergartners that start in the fall of 2007 will graduate in the spring of 2020. As architects of schools, you need to have a 2020 Vision. Your client’s and children’s futures depend upon it.

Students: Want To Redesign Your School?

Via Christian Long:

Grade 9-12 students are invited to create the ideal 21st century learning space, with a chance to win up to $10,000 in scholarship money. See www.redesignyourschool.org for more information.

I don't know much about this, but Target, the American Institute for Architects, KnowledgeWorks, and OWPP Architecture are sponsors - any AHS students up to the challenge?