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 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...]
The Moons are Aligning
I was lucky. I completed my teaching degree in the 1970’s during a time of new ideas, new directions and new thinking. It wasn't just a time for hippies and Woodstockers, but importantly it was also a time of provocative and open discourse around education, which inspired vigorous public conversations around the role of school and theories of learning. Those were exciting times when the writings of Illich, Reimer, Smith, Graves, Postman and Weingartner came to the fore, built on the ideas of people like Dewey, Montessori and others from decades earlier. In between my ‘extra curricular’ activities as a college student, we had the privilege of being given time to engage in deep discussions around a diverse range of educational philosophies that came from those writings which subsequently had a profound impact on the choices I have made in my life. It was time when educators across many countries were inspired to believe that the conditions under which young people were learning … [Read more...]
Bells and Cells and other Big Fat Myths
How much of what we do every day is part of a routine, habit, or in some cases almost a ritual? I know that for most of us the getting out of bed, shower, teeth thing certainly is, but when it comes to our work the context of the question shifts, and maybe it’s a cause for deeper reflection. Take school bells for example. For most schools, some loud noise, usually a bell is a signal for students to move to class, or move to a new class. It’s an organiser, keeps kids in the places we want them to be, but are they really necessary? It’s not a debate I want to continue here, but they are plenty of examples and discussion online, and it’s just one of the many practices we take for granted as a necessary part of a school day. What I am interested in are the assumptions that underpin such practices. On the one hand maybe it does make sense to have an audible means of organizing large numbers of students, on the other there is an argument that this is an opportunity to support a culture … [Read more...]
Rethinking the (Under-)Education System
"Great intentions are what spur people to collective action, and without such intentions, the inspiration that is fuel for real breakthroughs never combusts. People must be inspired, moved, called by mighty intentions to act." ~Umair Haque A phrase I find myself using more and more these days (and probably mispronouncing) is "raison d'être" or reason for being, as in asking school leaders "why does your school exist?" The easy answer is "to educate our children!" For centuries, that was probably good enough. Everyone knew, sorta, what it meant to be "educated." You "learned" a lot of stuff about different subjects. You learned how to read and write and work with numbers to some acceptable degree. You were "prepared" for life, for a job or a college. You looked pretty much like everyone who was "educated" before you, passed the same tests, got over the same bars. But what if being "educated" isn't about that any more? What if being "educated" today means that you can educate … [Read more...]
Word of the Day: Heutagogy
As a journalism major and a long-time English teacher, I have a deep interest in words and the way that they are used. If you've been following along here for a while, you know that I struggle mightily with many of the words and phrases that we bandy about in education because I find many of them to be either a) not very clearly defined, or b) co-opted by other interests right out of the box. The most obvious example is "personalized learning" which purports to mean giving students more choice and autonomy over their learning but in practice means a more individualized path through the curriculum. In fact, the phrase missing from most of the terms we use like "learner-centered" or "student-centered" or "collaborative learning" is "of our curriculum" tacked on to the end. Very rarely do we really mean giving kids more agency not just over how they learn but, importantly, what they learn as well. Another one of those popular phrases is "self-directed." Of course we want our kids to be … [Read more...]
The Zen of School Change
Right now, there are eight Tibetan Monks staying at my house. They’re sleeping on floors, couches, and my kids’ beds. (My kids are now on my bedroom floor.) They’re with us for 10-days as they do healings and meditations and school visits. (They made it down to Science Leadership Academy on Friday, in fact.) Only two speak English. And the best part is that the llama geshe (the monk with what amounts to a PhD.) does his personal meditation through cleaning. Our kitchen is spotless! This is the third time in five years that we’ve hosted monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India as they tour the US to raise funds for their work. It’s been a powerful experience that started in the first minute of the first visit. The group had just driven through a horrible snowstorm from Scranton, Pa to our house, a trip that should take a couple of hours turned into five. As I greeted the first monk out of the van in the blowing snow, I said “Long day, huh?” He smiled and quietly replied, … [Read more...]
Schools That Learn
Every now and then when I have some free time between basketball tournaments and conference presentations I actually do some reading using these things called "books." Some of them I actually have to hold in my hand and manually turn paper pages. Shocking, I know. Some have been on my shelf for a long time, like The Skeptical Visionary: A Seymour Sarason Education Reader. If you've been reading my columns here at EML or the posts on my blog, you know that Sarason is a huge influence on my thinking about schools. Some of those books, on the other hand, get one-click delivered, like Schools That Learn by Peter Senge. Suffice to say, those two books have me thinking this week. First, let me say that just the idea of "schools that learn" is compelling to me. It's a question that I've already started asking administrators and teachers at the districts I visit: "Is this a school that learns?" While I'm going just on intuition here, by the looks that I get when I offer up that … [Read more...]
Fixing What We Broke
Is it me, or does it seem like much of what we're doing in education these days is trying to fix what we ourselves break when it comes to kids and learning? I mean, what does it say that our kids come to us as creative, innovative thinkers when they're five or six years old, but most of what we're now rubbing our hands about in education is how to get kids in school to be more creative and innovative? I know that in the most watched TED talk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson asks straight out "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" But if you wondered even for a moment as to the answer, the evidence isn't hard to find that says schools must be doing that. Recently, I landed on The Teacher's Guild site, which looks like a group of educators who are exploring the use of design thinking to improve the school experience. All good. Their first "challenge" for educators from anywhere in the world to solve through design is this: "How might we create rituals and routines that establish a culture of … [Read more...]
This New School Year, What Do You Believe About Learning?
I want to circle back to a post I wrote in this space a couple of months ago regarding the "Pedagogic Creed" of John Dewey and the model that he presents for clearly articulating your beliefs about learning. I've begun asking the leaders at the schools I'm visiting if they've ever written down what they believe about how students learn, and you won't be shocked to learn that to date, none have. Granted, it's a small sampling size of about a dozen, but I know that for many of these folks it's the first time that anyone has asked them the question. To be honest, I find it really troubling. As much as we like to talk about the "modern" aspects of learning here, the focus of all of our work is just plain learning. How does it happen? How can it happen more effectively in schools? And what role do people play in that interaction now that we are surrounded by so many technologies and people and resources? If these are not the questions we are asking on a daily basis in schools, why not? … [Read more...]