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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

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...]

Last month, we missed a bit of an anniversary here at Modern Learners, three years of writing and making that total over 330 posts, 199 newsletters, a slew of whitepapers, podcasts, masterclasses and goodness knows what else. Add to that the recent addition of Change School to the Modern Learners "portfolio" and even I have to admit that what started as 30-minute conversation between me and Bruce on the way to the Melbourne airport back in 2013 has evolved into a pretty impressive body of work, most of it successful, but with an appreciable number of learnable moments along the way. For however long you've been a part of our journey, sincere thanks for reading, watching, listening, and/or participating. One thing that always has struck me about our work here is how driven it is by questions. How can we help parents become better informed about the world as it relates to education? That was our attempt with Raising Modern Learners, now dormant, but still a good idea, we think. (If … [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, EdSurge ran a post that asked "Is Your EdTech Product a Refrigerator or a Washing Machine?" The premise was simple. If your product is like a refrigerator, the pace of it's adoption in schools will probably be pretty fast since you can just "plug it in" to the existing infrastructure and culture. Washing machine type products, however, have much longer (or slower) adoption curves because they require additional plumbing and construction. In other words, they don't fit into the current operation or narratives of school as easily. But while the article makes a semi-interesting point about tools, I think it misses the bigger, deeper question about adoption curves around learning in the larger sense. To be blunt, our adoption curve for productive learning (learning that sticks and leaves kids wanting to learn more) in schools in general pretty much stinks. And we know this (even though we don't like to admit it.) I mean, how many of us would be willing to … [Read more...]

As we work through our busy lives, I’m intrigued by how readily we seem to accept so many of the assumptions that impact on that work. I don’t think for a minute that this is something we do consciously, but when you have so much going on in your life, you simply don’t have the time or inclination to reflect or test the veracity of what we assume to be correct. Take our use of proxies. As Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame outlined recently in his annual newsletter, a common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can be more effective or efficient in what you are seeking to achieve. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. It’s the sort of language and double-speak that clumsy bureaucracies thrive on, and the education sector is certainly no exception. It can happen very easily in large companies, public sector organizations or schools. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re … [Read more...]