I’m curious about curiosity. It's not something we have talked enough about in the past, but in a society that celebrates creativity and innovative thinking, I feel it will be a lot more prominent in the future. So when I hear someone say that it’s a pity their kids aren’t more curious, I wonder what their motivation in saying that is. Surely you must learn to be curious because you need to be curious to learn. So what’s going on? If we assume our young people arrive on the planet curious about the world around them, asking questions about anything and everything, what happens to them? Do they just ‘lose’ their natural curiosity and 'grow out of it', or is it that we really do manage to teach the curiosity out of them? If curiosity is really the essential food of learning, then the obvious question is, why don’t we focus more on developing searchingly curious minds as a priority in our students? While we’re tripping the 21stCentury learning light fantastic, maybe we should have been … [Read more...]
How Community Voice Can Drive Change in Schools with John Jungmann
How often have you thought of your school community as a driver for change? And if you have, how do you manage that? How can we establish better connections between what happens inside our schools and the everyday experiences of people in the wider community? In this episode, Will Richardson talks with John Jungmann, who is the superintendent of the largest school district in Missouri which you might be surprised to hear is Springfield not Saint Louis. John and his team are as good as you’re going to find in bringing in the community to what he calls the courageous conversations that we need to be having right now. But also in getting his students out in the community in the businesses and organizations where they can learn in real life settings around the things they have a passion for. Dr. Jungmann received his Doctor of Education from the University of Arkansas. Prior to being named superintendent at SPS, Dr. Jungmann was the superintendent of Liberty Public Schools and … [Read more...]
Diversity in a Complex World with Rafranz Davis
What’s required to build support for change in a diverse community? How do you tackle the big issues around change, when so many small ones are gathering momentum? What does it take to ensure that the day-to-day distractions that every school leader has to address don’t distract you from maintaining a focus on long-term sustainable change? In this episode of the Modern Learners Podcast, Will, talks with Rafranz Davis who is the Executive Director of Professional and Digital Learning for Lufkin ISD. She is also a highly regarded speaker at education and technology conferences across the U.S. Rafranz’s passion for creativity and student centered learning has driven her work in supporting Lufkin’s transition to taking more innovative approaches to teaching and learning through integrated computational thinking, makerspaces and community driven personalized professional learning. When Rafranz is not disrupting the status quo in East Texas, she can be found connecting with the … [Read more...]
The Only Skill That Really Matters
When you think about it, learning is a rather quaint, but deceptively powerful word which we continually use, abuse and misuse in our work almost every day. Yet we see it constantly trivialised and thrown about like confetti across so many different contexts it's no wonder that it's real meaning is then lost in so many of the critical conversations around the purpose of school. For some, it's simply seen as a measure of intellect when someone is described as being learned or scholarly; at other times it is taken as a function of teaching, as in the oxymoronic “she only learned what she was taught." Still many use it as a comfort word within schools when they talk about 'learning spaces" and being "learner centered." In recent years it has become fashionable to preface it with an adjective such as "flipped," "blended," "personalized," "deeper" et al. as if the word ‘learning’ on its own is simply not capable of conveying significant meaning. Now we all know it’s not … [Read more...]
Dare to Re-imagine
How often have you ever had to wait for a taxi that never seems to come, or in fact never does? And how do you respond to that prolonged wait? Frustration, anger? So, what was so different about Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp who, on a snowy Paris evening in 2008 also had trouble hailing a cab? Their response. They invented Uber. There wasn’t a start-up incubator on that street corner in Paris; they didn’t ideate or even iterate. They simply dared to re-imagine what alternatives might be possible. So how was it that every one of us who has been frustrated waiting for a cab didn’t do a similar thing? And by the way, why were so many cab companies so slow in responding to what was a very simple idea that could have been replicated so easily? It doesn’t matter whether you agree with Christenson’s thinking around disruption or not; Uber has not only disrupted the taxi industry but now also the prepared meals service, shared rides and much more. And of course, Uber is just one … [Read more...]
Who is Paying Attention?
A snowy start to the year can certainly slow things down a lot in the North of our planet, and below the equator, a sharp dose of summer will mean lying on beaches to enjoy the end of the summer vacation. So maybe we all did need a wake-up call to get us going this year. So, we can thank the politics of the world’s greatest democracy (sic) these past few weeks for bringing us back to reality, and make sure we were all paying attention. No doubt a few of you have had to recheck your calendars to be sure the year isn’t 1984, with all of our post-truths, and "alternative facts." But let’s for a second look pst the distractions, as difficult as they may be, and see what we can learn. Yes, we know we learn from great leaders, be they educational, corporate, or indeed, political. In politics, we’ve read about the courage and wisdom of people like Mandela, Lincoln or Churchill. In recent times, while I’m not sure we have seen a lot of "shining lights," I am intrigued by what Prime … [Read more...]
In Search of the Most Amazing Thing*
Have you ever found yourself looking for something when you don’t know what it is that you’re looking for? It usually happens when you are looking for solutions to a problem and you find habits of your past distract you from thinking clearly, and the most obvious answers evade you. In many ways, I think this reflects the problem we are facing in our schools today. On the one hand, there's a growing consensus across many countries that our schools are struggling to keep abreast of the scope and scale of changes in the world today, while on the other, finding solutions has proved both elusive and a real challenge. In the first instance, the problem is often misdiagnosed, usually by politicians or the populist media, and accordingly, the wrong solutions follow. We’re all only too familiar with examples of this which, while too numerous to list here, are noisily represented by rhetoric from one of three directions: We need more of the same (testing); we need to improve existing … [Read more...]
What Have You Learnt This Year?
As the year draws to a hectic close, and clichés like that one become more prevalent, I have been reflecting not so much on my best books or films or even restaurants of the year, but rather, on what I have learnt* over the past 12 months? Here at Modern Learners, we’ve spent another year, and dare I say another 40+ issues of this humble little newsletter that winds its way across 16 countries to thousands of loyal subscribers, extolling the virtues of ourselves as learners. And yet how often do we take the time to reflect on exactly what that has meant for us personally? We talk about being learners first and foremost, yet even as I say it, I take it for granted. In our schools our learners are usually assumed to be the students, and yet as teachers, learning is the work. If we describe ourselves as modern learners maybe we all need to more consciously re-evaluate the extent to which learning impacts our lives on a daily basis. It’s probably appropriate for us to reflect on a … [Read more...]
The Circus Around International Benchmarking
They used to say that everyone had a good time when the circus came to town. Well that may be true, but I'm not so sure that this is happening with the circus that has surrounded the release of the 2015 PISA results this week. While the PISA process itself is quite straightforward, it's the political and media storm that surrounds its release that creates the circus, and this release has been no exception. Every 3 years, PISA, an arm of the OECD, oversees more than half a million statistically sampled 15 year old students across 72 countries, complete assessments in reading, mathematics and science together with a range of questions focused on the student's background, demographic and access to resources. Whether or not you think triennial international education benchmarking is a good thing or not, it looks like it's here to stay, and the impact it has politically is now even more significant than ever. Many countries have made major education policy shifts in response to … [Read more...]
The End of the Beginning of New Credentials
Stay with me on this. Its a topic that I think warrants a little more than we normally share here, and I promise, no politics and no mention of the “T” word... I’m not sure if you’re fully aware, but right now there are signs of a fundamental shift in the way our students will access higher education in the near future, and ultimately it will have implications for K-12 which I feel we need to be prepared for. While we were all might have been enamoured with many of the early online learning innovations around the turn of the century such as MIT OpenCourseware and later that decade the pioneering MOOC’s of Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and Dave Cormier, the longer term impact was that it provoked us to further explore how the internet and ubiquitous access to technology could and should impact higher education. Who could not fail to be impressed when some 155,000 people signed up for the MIT course on Circuits and Electronics in 2012, while Sebastian Thurn and Peter Norvig’s … [Read more...]