I had the great privilege of delivering a commencement speech at a small school in New Jersey last week. It was the first speech I can remember that I wrote and read verbatim. Thought I'd share it here for posterity and, hopefully, to spur some thinking. Please read it as if you were an eighth grader! --- Members of the faculty, parents, honored guests, and most importantly, this year’s graduating class at CHPS, it’s my great honor to have the chance to speak to you today, and I sincerely thank you for extending the invitation. I have to say that I’m a bit nervous. Even though I’ve given speeches in over 20 countries around the world, to audiences as big as 3,000, I’m a bit nervous today for this is my very first address to a graduating class of any type. I did give a speech to one graduate recently as my son Tucker, my “little boy” who grew to be a 6’ 5” basketball star thanks in part to spending countless hours practicing his shooting technique in this very gym where your … [Read more...]
Modern Learners Podcast #16: Helping Students Build a Presence Online
To what extent should we give students the opportunity to create their own presence and, dare we say it, brand online? On the college level, that's being done with the project "Domain of One's Own" which was started at Mary Washington University a few years ago and now has expanded to many other universities. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the school provides every student with a personal space on the web, hosted by the school, and administered by the student. It's a way of teaching both digital literacy and digital citizenship in an age when being online is more and more a requirement for learning, for business, or just about anything else. But what if we moved the idea of a Domain of One's Own down to the high school level? Can we wait until college to provide students with a space online? That's the question that Bruce and Will discuss in this podcast. Specifically, they talk about a must read post by Martha Burtis, one of the originators of DOOO. You'd be well served to … [Read more...]
The Paradox of Success
As the school year comes to an end in the Northern spheres, and many attend graduation ceremonies and start throwing caps high into the air, it may be opportune to consider just how we define success. While no doubt we want everyone to be successful in their own ways, taken to an extreme the school sports can soon start to look more like a ribbon ceremony with every participant getting a ribbon or medal just for taking part. On the other hand, I’m sure we see too many instances of over enthusiastic parents who want their kids in as many competitive sports as possible, sometimes when they’re barely out of nappies, so they can “get used to the way of the world” or something like that. Which brings us to the way the world does function, and for many decades, the corporate sector largely measured its success on profit and share price if they were a public company. However in stark contrast, in the mid-‘90’s John Elkington developed the quite radical notion of “the triple bottom … [Read more...]
Are Your Schools Tracking These “Trends” on the Internet?
What are the "Internet Trends" that educators need to wrap their brains around? That's the question Will and Bruce kick around as they take a deep dive into Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report released last week. They don't discuss all 355 slides in the report, but they do pick out several top level themes and discuss the impact those trends will likely have on schools. Such as: Continuation of the Move to Mobile Adults spend 5.6 hours a day on devices and 3.1 hours specifically on mobile. To what extent will schools need to support learners in finding balance in life? How will we help students learn how to be physically and mentally healthy in the face of this very connected world? Also, what responsibility do w have to make sure students know about the data their mobile phones are tracking and sending to advertisers? Voice Search Voice recognition software is actually meeting the threshold of human accuracy. More products are being developed that are powered by voice. Twenty … [Read more...]
Small Communities, Tightly Joined
For most people, learning with others as opposed to learning alone is a no brainer. Learning is social by its very nature, and while there are certainly moments where it happens through deep reflection and application in isolation, we ultimately seek to share our learning with others and, in turn, learn with and from them. That’s been the awesome sauce of the Web since its inception, this idea that we can learn with others in ways not restricted by time or geography. We can build tribes of co-learners online that can push our learning much further than the limited networks we have in physical space. And we can share what we’ve learned with larger audiences, to greater effect, archiving all of it in various places using various tools that we choose to use. As I’ve said many times, aside from having children, the Web has been the most transformative event in my life. I’m thinking about this once again because this week I’ll celebrate my 16th blogversary. At this time way back in … [Read more...]
When Leaders Leave Can Change be Sustained?
What needs to be in place for high-bar change initiatives in schools to sustain when the leader of that change initiative retires or moves to another school or district? That's the question Bruce and Will discuss in Episode #14 of the Modern Learners Podcast. Too often, "hero leadership" is the driver of change. Not often enough are their cultures that feel deeply invested in change that can not only survive a change at the top but also drive the process to replace them. This includes building capacity in teachers, students, and especially parents to understand a new narrative of schooling and advocate for consistency and coherence in that vision from one leader to the next. Building that culture takes time and intention, and Bruce and Will discuss some practical ways to make that happen. Because the last thing anyone wants to have happen at the moment leadership leaves is that the people on the bus begin to panic about reaching their destination. Also in this episode, a first … [Read more...]
The Most Important Talent Search in the World
As you sit back and watch the NBA’s playoffs or whatever sport grabs your attention at this time of the year, think for a moment about the talent of the people you are watching, and more specifically, when and how that was identified. For some it was obvious from an early age. For others, they had to work hard at it and wait for a scout to see them in action. In both cases they had the good fortune to see their talent and passion align. Given the obscene amounts of money that sports stars can earn today, it’s only natural we find more and more parents eager ( sometimes over-eager) to identify sporting talent early and do whatever they can to see a child reach their full sporting potential. The same can be said about creative talent. However, while we do nurture young talent in music, theatre or art, the opportunities for fame and fortune are certainly a lot of less, even though the occasional "star is born." So what about the rest? What about the 99%+ of other kids who … [Read more...]
Overcoming Obstacles
In this new podcast episode, Will and Bruce discuss the barriers to making change happen in schools. First, they reflect on the work they have done with school leaders recently. They often begin work with school leaders by asking the leaders to identify the barriers to school change. Before they get too far, it is important to define the school change Will and Bruce and the rest of the Modern Learners team is aiming to push. School change is not only about adding technology, Genius Hour, and Makerspaces. The change we support is change that moves agency over to the learners. Bruce took a guess as the barriers Will heard from leaders at his workshop a few days ago, and he divides the typical responses into two categories: compliance and hesitation on the part of faculty. Those two components were certainly shared by the leaders Will was working with in addition to parent expectations, higher education's traditional expectations, time, and budget. Will tells the story of asking … [Read more...]
The Roots of Change
At the "commencement" session for our first cohort of Change Schoolers this week, amid some fun awards and the popping of a cheap bottle of champagne, I gave the final reading, a snip of something that I hoped would tie the bow on our work together. Naturally, it was about change. And not surprisingly, it was by Seymour Sarason, one of my biggest influences, from his book Letters to a Serious Education President. It went: Unless we start with "what children are and where they are," unless we start with their questions, what they are curious about, what they want to learn, we perpetuate the tradition of pouring knowledge into them and requiring them to set aside their interests, their curiosities, their wondrous, question-asking worlds. That does not mean that where we start is where we end. Our obligation, and as a society it is our most important one, is to impart our cherished values to our young, to ensure the continuity of these values, truly to conserve the best of our … [Read more...]
It Really is Time to Change School
What were you doing four years ago? For some that might seem like a recent memory, while for others so much water has flowed under the bridge it seems like forever. For Will and I, it was a conversation over a great bottle of red that launched Modern Learners. One thing that all of us do know is that in those four years we have witnessed more change in the world around us than we have ever seen before. That thing called the internet, effectively non-existent 20 years ago, linked 1 billion people by 2005, 2 billion people by 2010 and 3 billion people by 2015. Now, over half of humanity is online. So what’s changed in our schools? For too many, not much, but for an increasing number the past four years have meant a big shift in thinking about what school could and should be. Hopefully that’s you, but then maybe you’ve been in that space for longer than four years, so the exciting thing for you is... now you’re not alone. For one thing, you’re now part of the rapidly growing … [Read more...]