Finding Our Way on the S-Curve .. confident, competent, contemporary learning

Last year, a middle school teacher commented that students wanted to share their stories “with the world” and so they wrote scripts, directed, acted, and turned their stories into a variety of ‘silent” videos posted to YouTube. Some question whether such videos count as a form of written assignment. However, the kids described what they did as not just a writing assignment, but as writing for an authentic audience. They saw their final work as representing a high degree of commitment to both quality of process and final product. As one young girl noted to me when I asked about using her video in a keynote, “This project took a lot longer than writing just a paper.”

Contemporary tools provide kids with learning choices that didn’t exist in the classrooms of our past. Even as transitions of “stick to quill to ink pen to pencil to keyboard” and “manuscript to printing press to digital book” have occurred over time, those transitions essentially resulted in the same output by learners – processing some version of print on paper.

Learning times are changing though.

With contemporary tools and access, today’s kids can create a range of  projects from games to videos to image-rich transmedia projects as they pursue learning. The only limits to their work often happens to be the hours in the day and the commitment of their teachers to letting them use contemporary tools during school time – rather than forcing them to power down because of rules.

When young people “make” their own learning, it creates the potential for them to share personal collections and project work that emerge from their curiosity, passion, and interests. They become creators, curators, and communicators of learning, and develop ownership for what, how, and why they learn in school. Through contemporary tool use, they build their own learning pathways through work that’s important to them, rather than depending on a teacher to direct them down a path. They begin to process design as a way of thinking about what tools they choose – Pinterest, collage makers, Voicethread, Minecraft, blogs, wikis, Scratch, Youtube, Vimeo, photo sharing sites – to best portray what they want to share and why.

What are the implications for using contemporary learning tools that we need to consider as educators?

The role of teacher has never been more important to facilitating young people as they move into a post-Gutenberg mode to “search, connect, communicate and make” learning. The passivity of the old Gutenberg mode of “write, print, read, recall” demands far less of educators in terms of mindset changes than teaching for contemporary learning.

For our kids to use new tools for learning purposes means that we educators, regardless of age or technology skills, need to explore, discover, and experiment with those tools as well. We have to take risks, experience dissonance, and expect mistakes and failures as we try out new learning paths ourselves. As MIT’s Juan Carlos Mendez- Garcia indicates from his work, finding the “S-curve” of growth as a learner has the potential to both increase our confidence and competence in using new tools ourselves.

I believe, just as with our young people, we educators also are curious, passionate, and engaged in pursuing our own personal and professional interests. Our kids aren’t bored learners at heart and neither are we adult learners. However, the Gutenberg mode of learning creates passivity in us all. To see beyond that model, I push myself to both listen to what kids are doing as learners and to try out new tools myself. After all, if I’m not willing to put the time in to find my own S-curve and take on personal learning challenges, why should I expect that from anyone else?

favorite-poets (at my Pinterest Boards)

Why not Children as Teachers – not just Learners?

This morning I glanced occasionally at a range of adolescent orangutans engaging in problem-solving play and stick-based learning with, and from, each other on an Animal Planet show. They were teaching and learning together as mammalian young have been wont to do across time. It reminded me of an I-search question that’s been on my mind for a while. What if we set up school communities to more formally and informally situate children and adolescents to teach and learn together in multi-age opportunities as they’ve always done? What might be different and why? And does the rationale still make sense for sustaining our current paradigm for single-age learning communities, a paradigm that only developed in the early years of the 20th century?

Orphaned orangutans, Borneo, Andy Bingham

While visiting Irish educators and observing in multiple school settings with @irasocol, our conversations often centered upon how highly effective and supportive use of multi-age classes leads children to learn from other children. We dropped in on a range of multi-age learning communities from large, diverse urban to tiny, 2-teacher Gaeltacht primary schools (K-6 in U.S. terms.) Despite my experience with some multi-age classrooms when I was an elementary principal, it was eye-opening to witness the ethos of multi-age learning that’s so deeply embedded in Ireland.

In this class, level 6 routinely teaches Level 2

In Ireland, primary teachers have a difficult time envisioning a single grade classroom and they consider deep literacy acquisition and the nation’s high literacy rate as related to multi-age opportunities to build vocabulary, learn concepts, and scaffold learning across disciplines. They also saw this model as creating a culture that socially advances appropriate behaviors at work and play by and among children, causing significantly less devotion of time to teaching children “how to do school.”

Versions of this comment also surface from local teachers in our very few systemic multi-age settings, such as a K-1 classes, as well as from teachers who loop up with children to the next grade.Teachers in multi-age  communities  or those that stay together for more than a year seem to spend less time enforcing rules and more academic time working with children – in Ireland or here. This seems important given the concerns of educators about never having enough time.

Since May, I’ve also had the chance to watch multi-age, really multi-age communities from 7-18 years of age attending #coderdojos in both Thurles,Ireland and Albemarle, Va. In Thurles, my friend and colleague, Pam O’Brien, @pamelaaobrien, provided an opportunity to experience my first #coderdojo. This summer, I was in and out of a local school observing #coderdojo participants over four days in my own district. In both cases, children relished the opportunity to play and work with each other, often in antithesis of the stereotypical images of tech learning and learners. Instead, girls taught boys and younger children helped older ones code in Scratch, HTML, and with Lego robotics design software. Age was not the greatest variable. What the kids knew and could do was though. Sometimes the adults were the teachers. And, sometimes children taught the adults.

#Cvillecoderdojo: kids teaching kids

When six-year-old Sean in Thurles was asked what he did when he got stuck creating a Scratch game, he pointed to an 11-year old red-head, Steven. When I posed the same question to Steven, he turned to a 20-year-old college student and said, “she helps me when I need a hand.” At our local #codedojo here in Virginia, the teaching team started out with 4 relatively age-based coding rooms. By the end of four days, the kids were working together with as much as ten years difference in age to search, connect, communicate, and make.

As a result of thinking about the possibilities of multi-age teaching and learning, I was drawn back to reconsider the “hole in the wall” project of Sugata Mitra’s. In this educational “experiment,” Mitra, in 1999, first placed secure computers in walls and made them accessible to children who have no schools in their community. Then, he watched. Over time, the children worked, played, and figured out how to use the technology, connecting to the Internet, creating music, and playing with applications. Then, they began to teach and learn with each and from each other. Outside school. Outside adult teaching.

These observations of recent have led me to consider how little we advantage learners by creating opportunities for them to learn together, with and from each other, as storytellers, writers, readers, problem-solvers, creators, builders, designers, engineers, producers, makers, researchers, and decision-makers. How might opportunities to teach and learn from each other more deeply facilitate all young people to remain curious, passionate, engaged, connected, and futuristic in their thinking and doing?

working together to problem-solve maths

Adults are the first models for learning.  By nature, they’re also teachers in the home as parents and by profession as educators. However, children, too, in their DNA are teachers and learners, too.  Mammalian young learn from each other with the same ease as  taking their first breath. So, why do our U.S. schools, in general, not take advantage of that versus trying to isolate children from each other in the learning process? In the natural world of orangutans what scientists label as learning from each other; we, in the education world, label as cheating.In Ireland, I saw children share their project work with each other and use it to scaffold and advance their own work- a very different way of thinking about learning than we practice here.

But, think of the potential to maximize learning in schools with a “many to many” rather than “one to many” teaching and learning approach. While commonplace in both the 1800s multi-age schoolhouses of America and in the “hedge” schools of Ireland, the multi-age community disappeared in the United States as we modernized our one-room schools into factory schools that became ubiquitous in the 1900s. As in most of Europe, Ireland’s commitment to multi-age learning did not.

I wonder to what degree the single grade nature of our current factory-driven, teacher-directed elementary classrooms has contributed to the social and academic learning gaps with which we are concerned today. Does the single grade system that we use really make us more efficient or effective to borrow from the business language that emerged from the work of Frederick Taylor and Elwood Cubberley? Or not?

Teaching and learning together occur naturally in children’s tree-house building projects in community backyards. However, such informal multi-age “play, teach, learn” experiences seem to be fast disappearing from our culture, just as multi-age learning evaporated with the advent of 20th century schools.  Watching the Olympics, I think of all the games that older children have taught younger children to play, naturally and without much adult intervention. Given our historical and evolutionary dispositions to play, teach, and learn in multi-age communities, why would we be so surprised to see contemporary children teaching and learning together, whether abandoned in the mean streets of India or dropped off at a #coderdojo by their parents?

After observing multi-age communities in Irish classrooms and coderdojos, adolescent orangutans in Borneo, and Mitra’s “hole in the wall” child-teachers, I wonder why we wouldn’t begin to redesign our schools to take advantage of this natural capacity of young people to teach, not just to learn?

source: http://www.educationinnovating.org/files/blog-posts/Hole%20in%20the%20wall.jpg

In what ways could we create multi-age learning opportunities in our schools? Why not set that as a goal this year? It could be a game changer for contemporary learners – and you.

In the Garden: Seeking and Finding Connections to Land, Air and Water

I spent some time yesterday reflecting upon a Connected Educators Month EdTechtalk: Teachers Teaching Teachers in which I participated last week with a diverse group of educational thinkers. Our conversation centered for me upon the critical importance of the interconnecting edu-ecosystems that we are building, one educator at a time. However, beyond the virtual connectivity that’s so essential to increasing the learning power of today’s youth, there’s another area of their connectivity I believe we’re neglecting.

Fritillary butterfly on coneflower

Young people will face complex challenges in their adult futures- economically, politically, environmentally, and socially. Those challenges increasingly relate to the earth beneath our feet, the winds that blow across our continents and oceans, the temperatures that drive climate changes, and waters that sustain life. The Butterfly Effect governs the interactivity of seemingly chaotic systems across our world, far more than we ever thought when we first learned of Conrad Lorenz’s concept.

Connectivity is a given in the lives of our young people; allowing them to search, connect, communicate and create with others beyond the boundaries of physical communities, states – and nations. However, as we build virtual connectivity into learning spaces for all the right reasons,  in my opinion we must also reestablish a deep connectivity between children and the natural world so they can understand and process the deep environmental challenges of the coming decades. Indeed, their future may depend upon connectivity with each other and connectivity with the natural world- not either/or, but both.

The Earth’s natural spaces were the first learning spaces of humans, but our children are increasingly disconnected to those spaces. I first wrote the post below a couple of years ago while reflecting upon the importance of the natural world to learning. It feels even more relevant today. After a bit of editing, I decided to finally post it here.

Learning from the Garden

The early morning work I do in the garden reminded me on this morning what challenge really means when your survival depends upon providing your own food. Each season on earth marks time in months, years, and centuries of peoples’ intensity of effort to simply eat. We middle-class Americans who can so easily pop down to a grocery or convenience store to pick up the most basic items of sustenance – milk, bread, meat, potatoes- or to a farmers’ market to select heirloom tomatoes grown locally, are mostly out of touch with the struggle of humankind to simply eat.  This morning I confronted the loss of summer food supply; damage from deer gone wild because of one forgotten disconnect of the electric fence – peppers and cucumbers eaten down to the stems; tomatoes showing the first sign of blossom rot; and squash bug eggs on the underside of my crookneck leaves. Kneeling in red clay, simmering in summer humidity, I reconnected with my grandfather- me as learner, him as teacher- and the important lessons to be taken from the land.

the road to home

I grew up on a farm and understand the agrarian calendar well. My suburban-raised son does not. I have continued, throughout the ever-increasing number of seasons of my life, the habit of planting each year what has become a smaller and less tidy garden space than those of my childhood.

My family farm became a learning tool as I traced my grandfather’s steps across sugar-sand fields in the low country, not too far inland from Charleston, along the slash of a river named the Edisto.

The Edisto

Those fields held lost riches of natives from the Woodland Culture and we often would pause, eyes caught by birdpoint, scribed pottery shard, or flint chip, slipping such treasure into a pocket to keep it safe. Near our river and fields, live oaks stood, relics of centuries past, their limbs spread to ground; drips of Spanish moss sheltering acid-rain etched marble, chiseled with names of those who followed the natives onto this land. Through his stories and observations, my grandfather taught me to appreciate the role of the water, the land, and the air in supporting the lives of people who had lived and continued to live on and off of that land.

All of these generations past depended upon the skills of those who understood the give and take of living off of the land. Each successive wave who inherited the soil, the water, and forests discovered how tenuous survival can be. I learned that from my grandfather. The seasons of my own gardens have been, I hope, a learning gift passed from my grandfather to me to my own son.

Unfortunately, droughts and hard rains come to the land these days in chaotic cycles that leave humans confounded by the patterns of nature. But, I know this. My tomato plants depend upon a steady state of water or they will develop blossom end-rot, falling from the vines slightly ripened, blackened, and unfit to eat. I learned from my grandfather how to avoid tomato rot- there are rules to follow if you know to do so. It’s such a simple thing in Virginia to increase water supply or add a bit of calcium to the diet of my tomatoes.

When I see the rot of tomatoes as I did this morning, I also think of my mother’s Irish Catholic ancestors who came to this country during the Potato Famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Today, we gardeners plant potatoes hybridized and resistant to the same killing blight that starved the Irish into an agonizing history of emigration and death. They had no such choice. When we pick up a bag of store-bought potatoes, we forget how close the relationship of land and people must be to those who depend upon it for survival. Today, we expect the potatoes to just be there.

hut abandoned in Ireland mist

Although, like me, many Americans descend from ancestors who lived close to the land, and some who died because of the vagaries of nature and food supply, our industrial and technological relationship with food has removed us from understanding the role of the land in human ecology. Michael Pollan says that we don’t shop much around the edges of the supermarket- we shop on the inside lanes where the processed food is stacked. Whether it’s at home or school, our young people learn little about the connectivity of the natural environment to their lives. School lunches are an example of that.

vine ripened

Today, these few rotten tomatoes, several pepper and cucumber plants damaged by the deer that plague my world, and droplets of golden eggs hidden under squash leaves led me to question what’s worthy to learn in a day and age of hyper-changing technologies in our world.How important is it for our young people to understand the relationships of land and food to their own survival; the patterns of weather, the food chains in which we figure, the shaping of cultures, politics and even religions, the ages through which civilizations pass, the migrations of peoples, and even the rise and fall of nations caused by our relationships with the natural world?

What do young people really need to know about stripped-down corn, packaged on Styrofoam and kept cool in the fresh vegetable bins? Or, the gulf shrimp on ice about which I overhead someone recently comment, “I’d rather not know where they came from”? What’s important to understand about the origins of sliced and diced tomatoes stacked neatly in cans on a grocery aisle? How do we communicate the value of good stewardship to relieve man-made stresses upon our environment? Why should we teach the connectedness and dependency of humanity upon the natural world for our very life’s breath and next meal? What’s worthy of learning when our children are often far removed from working the land? Why should we care about our children’s relationship to the land, air, and water around them?

High School Ecological studies of the pond

With global access we can find today’s media version of the Starving Times that decimated the 17^th century Jamestown Settlement and 19^th century Ireland. Far away from us, but perhaps closer than we think, humans live in starvation on the edge of death in the drought-weary world of West Africa. There, the peoples of Chad and Niger and six other countries eat leaves from trees and grain from ant hills to stave off death. Maybe as many as 15 million people face starvation in that region alone.The world’s population grows, the planet warms, and water shortages persist. And, our children take standardized tests that have little to do with learning how to find solutions to those critical problems.

We can write standards that cause us to learn the facts of the Potato Famine of the past and West Africa of today. We can measure that Virginia’s young people have learned what the Starving Times were in the first Anglo colony of America. That’s easy- 4 responses- choose one of the above.

However, this morning’s reflections cause me to ask if we want the kind of citizenry who can pose informed questions and craft informed perspectives about what went wrong in the recent mostly forgotten Gulf environmental disaster?* If so, what do we need to do to ensure we don’t create a future that looks like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

Perhaps we simply begin, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, by connecting our children “back into the garden.” **

gardening with preschoolers

(*see @jasonflom on Edutopia for discussion group of educators on learning from Gulf Oil Spill)

(**see @paulallison for more about East-West School for International Studies Gardening Project in NYC)

(**see@timlauer for more about Lewis Elementary Gardening Project in Portland, Or)

(**see grow veggies for Quick Start- Albemarle school grow local projects)

(**see @traceysaxon for more about Sutherland Middle School’s garden to food to compost project)

(**see @cwd4H for more about Yancey Elementary School’s Veggie Village in Esmont, Va)

Experimenting with Learning New Stuff Isn’t Just for Kids

I’m continuing to play with a free collage-making app that I recently downloaded… and wondering about its use as tool for learning. I can see kids using it as a way of organizing digital images to visualize themes, describe content, play with words, create stories, and work from an endless trove of their own ideas to use such tools for personal learning and collaborative sharing. Today, I’ve created a simple collage to capture different ways that kids and teachers use learning spaces – exploring choices, preferences, and opportunities inside and outside classroom walls.

This learning spaces collage represents a very tiny slice of possibilities and potential for and of learning. It’s about entry points through a crayon box full of learning tools, projects, processes, and space designs. It’s about the definition of teacher and learner as synonymous with passion, imagination, curiosity, invention, creation, design, building, engineering, producing and consuming in a Post-Gutenberg age of search – connect – communicate – make, both face-to-face and virtually. It’s about learning work and learning play, sometimes in buildings we label as schools and increasingly everywhere but in such buildings.

Here’s my collage creation on learning spaces – likely not a final draft, and my first attempt using some of my flower images. I am experimenting with backgrounds, borders, sizes, and choosing and placing images. It’s about figuring out how many images are too many or too few, just as a writer needs to know when there’s enough words on the page to call a poem a final draft.

While I don’t have either training in or particularly good intuition about anything that draws upon artistic capability, I continue to try to make sense of the arts as a pathway to learning. I’m fortunate to live in an age in which contemporary tech tools make my work on improving that capability not just easier but more accessible, just as using an Universal Design for Learning process provides a multitude of choices for any child who need different support and tools to access the information they need to navigate school curricula. Accessibility today includes opportunities to connect with collaborative learners not just in my face-to-face community, but also virtually. Collaborative learners willingly offer their own questions, ideas, resources, and feedback, and in doing so, we learn together.

Finally, for me, it’s not about the final product at this point. It’s about the process of learning to create the product. I’m just glad I don’t have to worry about a grade on this assignment.

Flowers

Bridge to College: Valued Space for Learning

Holy Cross Abbey

The mark of a land’s worth isn’t found in its monuments. It resides in its children.

Bridge teens at work together

From boys hanging out on a free afternoon at the Bridge to College program in Dublin to a four-year old sharing her perspective on what was important for me to know about the Rock of Cashel, I was reminded in a recent educational trip across Ireland that if we listen to their voices, children will lead us to what’s important to them, not just what’s of worth to us.

Within the Bridge to College learning spaces, educators understand the value of teens coming together to work on challenging third level projects that they otherwise would likely get little chance to do in their second level programs in Dublin. They also understand the power of young people owning their own learning or as Bridge staff say,

“ … learning is a door that can only be opened from the inside.”

Jack, Keith, Sean, and Brian are young Dubliners who chose to spend their free Wednesday afternoon hanging out at the Bridge space to share perspectives with @irasocol, @_conorgalvin, and me about what works well @Bridge21Learn and what doesn’t work so well in their home schools when it comes to their learning potential.

“We learn to take initiative here, to have a sense of freedom in our work, and we’ve come to enjoy learning – unlike in school where we don’t get a choice of learning and where it’s all shoved at you – here we get to teach ourselves, we can learn from books, the Internet, and each other. What we learn that’s helped us back in our schools is the courage to express our own ideas.”

These boys articulated the basics of lifelong learning that cut across time. It’s what the best teachers have always provided to learners or that learners have found on their own – curiosity, choice, freedom, self-directedness, options, courage, and voice.

Kevin Sullivan, a computer programmer who came to volunteer at the Bridge a few years back but never left, now serves as a program coordinator. He says he loves working with the kids far more than he ever enjoyed his day job as a programmer. He also understands that what students take away from the Bridge experience is much more than simply learning technical skills using computers. “They come here often thinking they’re working on technology, but they’re really working on learning to work together.”

While this work may seem a perfect fit with what some in Ireland label as the Minister of Education’s push toward an economy-driven education, the mission of SUAS, sponsor of the Bridge to College programming, is one of social transformation:

“ … change education and you change the world. Key issues are not just about access but also quality – helping children and young people to go beyond the 3Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) to realizing their full potential to enable them to positively shape their futures and that of their communities and countries.We believe that we need an education system that also develops the 3 Cs: Character, full Capability and Commitment to others. This requires many changes: including a shift from a more instructive based approach to experiential learning within a values-based ethos.”

Located in Trinity College’s Oriel House on Fenian Street, the Bridge is an amazing learning space. From the painted murals on walls to the physical arrangement of spaces, young people work together here to explore how to power up their own ideas to influence the future of Ireland and serve others in their communities today. It’s a comfortable space, even though it’s equipped with old technologies cobbled together so the kids can explore project work – becoming in a matter of hours designers, makers, creators, engineers, team members, and leaders.

A learning space at the Bridge to College site

Created with support from a variety of partnership sources including both the Dublin City University and Trinity College, the Bridge to College space aims to help young people dream of futures that they otherwise might not have available. But, it’s not just about dreaming. One of the boys said to me, “I’m going to college. That’s not something I would have thought before coming here.”

Reflections by a Bridge to College teen learner

We’ve in my school district our own versions of the Bridge – AVID – being the most developed one.

Yet, I’m struck by the possibilities of different ways and spaces in which to learn as demonstrated in the Bridge. Offsite learning opportunities seem to offer a freedom and responsibility to learners that’s a bit lost in our U.S. schools. When kids come together for a week to accomplish challenging work, it creates a different, more intense, way of experiencing the necessity of collaboration in teams to accomplish what’s in front of you.

Could the Bridge to College Change “Normal” School?

In that afternoon visit, we were surrounded by the words of young people at the Bridge. Hanging from ceiling mounted mobiles, tacked to bulletin boards, and in animated chatter, the words of the kids say “we know what’s important to us as learners.”

Dr. Conor Galvin, lecturer at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning of the University College Dublin, told us that we would find learning magic at the Bridge to College, And, we did.

It’s a critical message and take away for me as I walk back into  schools here. It’s a message worth remembering.

World Peace Game: No Standard Problems – or Solutions

This past week, I had the opportunity to travel by bus to the Pentagon with John Hunter, career teacher and creator of the World Peace Game, twenty-three of the latest crop of 4th grade world peace gamers, 2 teacher-colleagues, the children’s principal, and Chris Farina, documentary film maker of “World Peace and Other Fourth Grade Accomplishments.”

The kids were invited guests of the Office of The Secretary of Defense and they arrived at school early that morning with dossiers in hand containing their white papers and questions on the critical issues of the world. After the children settled into seats on the bus, John chatted with me for a few minutes about the trip, visiting some education topics near and dear to our district’s work to ensure all young people engage in work that engages, challenges, and provides choice and opportunity to pursue passions and interests. John shared first how the children prepared for the trip and his philosophy for “unfettering” their learning.

“Each child was expected to do extensive research and develop a white paper and questions about countries they represented so that they could engage intelligently with adult policy experts on topics of interest. They are people – they are young people -in the learning adventure, their uniqueness appears; there’s no separation or line of authority they aren’t afraid to broach when asking questions and seeking information. When we take the fetters off and the false boundary lines and parameters , they have an unfettered imagination and ability and when given the chance in their own young, youthful way they can develop things that we adults in our staid and traditional way might not even see. “

John Hunter’s been in a Ted Talk - generated international limelight for the last two years for a couple of reasons. First, he represents for all educators the best of creative genius and fabulous facilitation of learning among young people. John also happened to be in the right place at the right time when Chris was looking for a film to make. John is extraordinary, no question about it. He’s the best of ambassadors for extraordinary educators who create amazing learning spaces for children in public schools everywhere. He’s quietly reflective and a wise practitioner of the art and science of teaching. But, when he speaks, others can’t help but listen.  I sometimes say that all teachers who love to teach, love to learn, and value the capabilities of all young people have a bit of John Hunter in them.

“Children show us what they can do when we remove anything from in front of them that might get in their way as people. They come to us as experts in something already. We need to use those strengths and build on those strengths.”

The daylong trip to the Pentagon makes for an interesting story about the current crop of world peace game fourth grader gamers who engaged with twenty-five high level staffers from generals to top policy makers. They even had a chance to chat about global warming, office phones, and other topics of interest for almost half an hour with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I’m not sure anyone else got that kind of time from him that day, but the children did.  Senior policymakers in the Under Secretary’s departments engaged in dialogue with the fourth graders about world issues from the current problems generated by the conflict between Israel and Iran, China’s relationship with Tibet, Yemen’s terrorists’ camps, Mexican drug wars along our border, and, the mistreatment of Syrian people by Bashir al-Assad. They then participated in a simulated press conference in the Pentagon Press Room with Press Secretary George Little.

Not much of what these children demonstrated in their learning could, or would, be assessed on the typical standardized tests they take each spring. John has thought a lot about assessment over the years and what it really means in the big scheme of lifelong learning. He sees a much bigger picture than the current reality educators face today.

“We assess for a unit, a day, a lesson, a week, a month, a year. Interestingly enough, what’s been a revelation to me of recent is that over the 35 years I’ve taught, I’m finding kids are coming back through social media from ten or twenty years ago and talking  about something they learned years ago and saying ‘you said that and I’ve been able to use that in my life.’ What an amazing thing that we educators seem to reach through time – and life becomes the assessment. Perhaps we need to start to open our assessment window beyond our classroom and look at assessment as lifelong.”

It was a wonderful day for me to observe what happens when children have worked with a teacher who has total confidence in their capability (and, no they aren’t all “gifted” by label requirements although no one who watches them can doubt their giftedness as a team of learners) and sets high expectations for a kind of creative and critical thinking work that cannot be measured with 4 choices- one correct response. For over thirty years across multiple school districts, school levels, and demographics, John’s “kids” have consistently performed in ways that transcend the 20th century paradigm for achievement and the accountability outcomes defined for today’s public school learners.

You see, John Hunter is a dreamer. He’s dreamed of no minimums for learning. He’s dreamed of children who will grow up to change the world. He’s dreamed of unlimited opportunities for children who otherwise would be limited by desks in rows and a teacher lecturing them about factoid trivia that represent the unimaginative, de-contextualized instruction to which so many children have been subjected for decades. John encourages children to be imaginative, playful, and passionate about learning. Thus, when they visited the Pentagon, they put themselves on equal footing with adults, a partnership of respectful learning.

“You see the video monitors on the bus. One of the children asked when we got on the bus this morning if we were going to watch a movie. One of the other children said, ‘no, the movie’s in your mind today’… what a great thing that their imagination is their canvas, not some Madison Avenue firm developing their imagination for them…”

John is a believer in the power and voice of children as learners. He sees his job as:

“planting the seed of possibilities in children and connecting them to the larger vision of our country and world… I don’t know the answers to give them. It becomes an adventure for everyone in the classroom everyday. They have to develop their own questions … what they need to know, so they can figure out what other things they need to know.”

Pentagon officials who didn’t know the story of John’s work asked several times if these children were “from private schools.” I proudly told them that these were children from a regular public school and that many more teachers and children just like them were back in schools in our district. They were surprised by the seriousness of the children’s pointed questions, and their public school education.

As one chief policymaker said, “you were fierce in asking senior leaders some very important and tough questions.” It struck all of us that John’s created an environment where children don’t see a hierarchy in their work with their teacher and their classmates. The Pentagon officials considered whether they need to attend less to protocols that block them from challenging each other. It’s a lesson for educators everywhere who dream of children who think independently about challenging problems, not ones looking to the teacher to tell them what to do.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Inscribed_bamboo-slips_of_Art_of_War.jpg/300px-Inscribed_bamboo-slips_of_Art_of_War.jpg

At the end of the day, the children engaged in what’s known as a “hotwash” exercise – one used by Pentagon officials to debrief their own work.  The kids shared feedback for the adult staffers, pulling philosophies from their reading of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War – and their own experiences,  “think forward; don’t be afraid to change your plans if what you’re doing isn’t working; remember, war isn’t the answer.”

The staffers, in turn shared what they thought we should hear. Many of them noted that it had been a “favorite day at the Pentagon; I am inspired by these fourth graders; I am reminded of a teacher who inspired me when I was a child….”

Then one policymaker said something which made me stop and think about the accountability movement left over from the 20th century to which the nation’s children are subjected each day.  “We use creativity and imagination every day to solve problems around the world.. we need more people in America who can do what you are doing in your class….”

I’m struck after visiting the Pentagon with twenty-three 4th graders and John Hunter  that there are no standard problems in today’s world- global warming, water problems, economic crises, political differences, war – and no standard solutions. Yet, we educators spend our time teaching kids to pass standardized tests of standardized objectives found inside standardized programs and curricula that demand no creativity or imagination to generate solutions.

Maybe the Department of Education should talk to the Pentagon.

Imagine Joy … as the goal

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to hang out with kids and educators at our regional Destination Imagination(DI) Tournament. Quite a few of the young people on teams at the regional tournament attend schools in my district. Their spirit, passion, and excitement entice attending crowds who delight in watching these kids work and play. A positive atmosphere exudes from teams before, during, and after project performances. It’s a joyful place to be.

Rising Stars

At the recent tournament, I observed two grandmothers, who sat side by side to watch a Rising Star team, the youngest of the children who simply come to demonstrate their projects. The grandmothers were enchanted by the children’s skit about a robot who came to life.  On a gym floor, a high school all-girls team, pros from years past, wowed the judges with their expertise in designing, creating, building, engineering and presenting a space exploration project for “assembly required.”  Their girl-built, fully mechanized front end loader performed without a flaw – sheer joy to watch.

Year after year, the DI tournament delights everyone who comes to see these teams at work. if there‘s one thing all of the young people who recently wandered the school’s halls seemed to have in common, it’s their enthusiasm. In fact, these wanderers – from second graders to college students – reminded me of a long-ago BMW commercial that proclaimed a desire to not just build cars, but to create joy.

It strikes me that many teachers across the United States would “die for” a DI Saturday morning hallway feel every day of the school week. It’s the best of what the most interesting and challenging classrooms have always been for children – spaces where they can apply, analyze, evaluate, and create.

Observing at DI tournaments has led me to question whether the traditional achievement goals we’ve set should be key areas of focus for today’s learners? I wonder what the DI teams would say about goals that results in work that looks like this?

Does this create joy?

DI kids and BMW commercials remind me that the endgame of learning is more than reading, writing and doing math proficiently, with or without the use of adaptive tools such as netbooks,  smart devices, or paper and pencils. Learning without joy kills interest, enthusiasm, and ultimately drive. When joy’s present, it’s almost impossible to disengage kids of any age from learning in the moment.

Learning issues children face in today’s classrooms often represent instructional failures resulting from an inherent 20th century mismatch of one-size-fits-all, factory education with the natural variance among young people who develop differently, learn differently, and assess differently. These differences have always existed, regardless of economic background, capability, gender, handicap or ethnicity. And, in reality, we can all find ourselves handicapped as learners, losing touch with the sheer joy of learning simply because of our mismatch with the learning environment, teacher, tool, schedule, or program.

On the other hand, when kids can access the learning environment, learning work, learning time, learning tools, and teacher support they need, even the sky doesn’t limit what they can accomplish. The work of the librarian in this high school is a case in point. When she redesigned library spaces to include a music production studio that integrated content and the arts, some of the school’s disengaged learners became students in all the best and most productive ways a teacher might desire.

In watching what happens when kids get access to developing capabilities that transcend 20th century curricula, I wonder, in this second decade of the 21st century, is it good enough to focus on reading, or any content area, as an isolated goal for learning work?

Are the needed goals really about STEM, literacy, social studies, or even the arts? Or, should goals be aligned with learning to access and use knowledge – to search, connect, collaborate – as young people choose from a variety of tools and multiple formats as drivers to create, invent, make, build, engineer, design, and produce?

Here’s what one joyful “at-risk” fifth grader listed as goals he’d like to accomplish by the time he turned 100. Who wouldn’t want all our young people to have such lofty goals including the acquisition of “awesome mind power?” But, where do his goals fit with those of educators who must spend precious time selecting vendor-aid instructional programs, developing time-intensive educator evaluation measures, and using more difficult standardized tests to enforce the teaching and learning of 20th century content and low-level skills?

If I Live to be 100, I'd like to ...

Despite the intensifying pressures of the last decade, children have been going to factory schools, not very joyful places, for a long time. Phillip Schultz, dyslexic Pulitzer Prize poet, reflects on the impact of factory schools upon his learning world, “I was put in the dummy class, kicked out of two schools, seen as hopeless, and I accepted that.. an awful lot to adjust to.”

We all can recite stories of dropouts who once carried gifted labels, bored mathematical thinkers waiting with patience for engineering schools, sensitive writers and artists who see school as “killing them softly,” and learners, handicapped or not, who yearn to graduate or drop out – so they never have to sit and do time in class again. These are not new school stories. However, we can change the stories young people tell about their learning.

Today, we need to take a lesson from both DI and BMW. Joyful learning commits us to our work. Joyful learning should be a goal for every child, including those of today’s children who, not unlike Phillip Schultz, continue to find themselves lost from learning in our contemporary classrooms. We can’t change the past, but we can change now and the future. After all, it’s not the educators or learners who’re broken. It’ the system that’s broken – one that was never designed to support success for all learners.

The Destination Imagination and BMW basics of creativity, teamwork, and problem-solving are essential competencies for success in college, the workforce, and as citizens and family members. Kids shouldn’t have to sign up for a DI team to get access to these basics. When a teacher integrates DI “basics” into pretty much any content, s/he becomes a teacher who is not just teaching, but creating joy as a baseline of learning.

Creativity, Problem-Solving, Teamwork

How different would our school-day hallways be if we loaded as many joy-laden learning tools as possible into our educational toolkit and then used them well?  How much more pleasure would we all derive from our day jobs – educators and learners alike?  What might the results be if learners could routinely create, problem-solve and work as valued members of diverse teams?

Why not pledge to bring joy into the classroom for a moment, an hour, or a day each week  for the rest of this year? What’s the cost of that?

Joy powers commitment and passion. It renews energy. It excites. It creates a sense that we can accomplish anything. It’s an essential outcome of our inalienable right to  “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  It’s a gift that “keeps on giving.”

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(thank you @jengrahamwright for sharing your 6th graders’ movies- I loved this silent movie- especially the joyful bloopers!)