"Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned." ~Mark Twain It's been over a decade (yes...a decade) since I wrote one of my most commented upon posts ever (ah, those were the days) titled A Steep Unlearning Curve. One of the nice things about having 15+ years of thinking and reflecting archived online is being able to go back and see how things have, or haven't changed. In this case, it's feeling like the latter. To be blunt, in the 10 years since posting, none of the things on my list of "10 Things We Need to Unlearn" have we actually unlearned. In fact, I'm hard pressed to argue that we've even made inroads on any of them. That said, is anyone surprised? Yet, the idea that we need to unlearn huge swaths of the school experience is embraced by a lot of educators. Ten years ago, the comments on that post made that obvious. And I relearned that again last week when, without much thought, I posted the following to LinkedIn: I'm just wondering what my LinkedIn friends … [Read more...]

During one of our regular Roundtable discussions in Change School this week, one of our school leaders asked a very interesting question. “Given the number of books that have been written and papers that have been presented around  school change over more than 50 years by some very well informed and esteemed writers, why has there been so little change in schools and why do you think it will be any different this time ?” It’s a question that we’ve all struggled with from time to time, however, I do think the answer becomes a lot clearer if we step back and look at the bigger picture, which tells the story of school reform over the past hundred years and highlights why this time is different. Most importantly, it also gives meaning to the work of those who have gone before. For our purposes, I think that story beings early last century when  John Dewey,  Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and others started challenging the wisdom of the early traditions of the teacher-centered … [Read more...]

It's been a long time since I've written about tools, but today, I'm writing about tools. Tools that I use, or am learning to use. Tools that I think change the conversation when it comes to what we do in classrooms. Tools that make my learning world so different today from what it was even 10 years ago when a blog was still a "thing." And I'll start with a tool that I just heard about yesterday via Don Wettrick: Anchor.fm. I'm not sure that Anchor will become "the Snapchat of radio" in the sense of all that implies. But it's just kinda fascinating to me that anyone with a smartphone (read: any kid with a smartphone) can now create and broadcast their own radio station on the fly. What does Anchor do? It allows you to record your voice. Allows you to record phone calls. Allows you to pull music from your favorite services like Spotify and Apple Music (with an account, of course.) Allows you to take call-in listener questions. And allows you to publish it all, from your phone, to … [Read more...]

For a few days last week, the world’s biggest edtech event, ISTE in San Antonio, made me confront some harsh realities. Late on the third day, as I sat listening to our colleague Gary Stager’s ISTE session on the 50th anniversary of Logo, I was reminded of just how painfully incremental our adoption of computers in schools has been.  I mean, half a century is a long time, far too long a time for us to still be waiting to see what computers can make possible for learners. Nineteen sixty-seven might have been the year of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, but more significantly, it was also the year educational computing as we know it was born.  It was the year that Alan Kay gave birth to the concept of a ‘laptop’ computer for kids, which he sketched on a flight back to the US after working with Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert, and some young students.  And, importantly, it was the year that Papert and others released the first version of  a computer language for kids, which they called … [Read more...]

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...]