#exponentialchange, #disruptiveinnovation, and …#CE14

Papyrus. Printing press. Microprocessor.

Change can occur in quick bursts that may advance or even retro-grade civilization, but in the moments of our daily lives we often think of change as a slow drift. The pencil I used as a child, as did my mother, and my mother’s mother and perhaps even hers before her was invented in 1564 and has mostly been constructed in the same way ever since. The pencil once was an essential tool in my elementary pencil box, the college bio lab, my own teacher’s desk, and in my admin office. Then the need for a pencil changed for me – and the rest of the world, too.

 The 1:1 pencil device of my schooling was replaced suddenly by my smart phone “pencil”, circa 2007. Now I reach for my phone to record lists, make notes, compose messages, capture images.

My pencil is a relic from a time just past Gutenberg’s era. His printing press fueled 1450’s connectivity, a revolution that emerged when writers’ final drafts turned into books, broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines. Writing tools changed. Quill pens, pencils, rubber erasers, fountain pens, ballpoint pens, typewriters, whiteout tape and liquid emerged, all evolving technologies that advanced the capability of writers to record at a faster and faster pace. The printed page opened knowledge to people who otherwise would never have learned to read. It was …

Disruptive Innovation at its best

Just a little over 500 years after Gutenberg, the microprocessor was invented, an innovation as disruptive as the printing press. As a result we now live in a time of exponential post-Gutenberg change, a historical turning point equal to the Renaissance. Humans today search, connect, communicate, and make, linking the world through rapid-fire use of contemporary technologies.

Change does not drift along incrementally in our time.

Not in today’s careers, businesses, hospitals, homes.

And Not in Schools Either

Skyping In Kindergarten

Our kids no longer pull encyclopedias or non-fiction texts off the shelf to do research. They search the globe for accessible expertise, experts, and others with similar learning interests. The thought that paper books have appendices for citations versus hyperlinks in a digital document doesn’t even make sense to them.

They don’t limit their connectivity to peers in their class, grade level, school, or even their local community. Their tools move with them, allowing them to connect anywhere they can catch a wireless signal. They feel isolated in homes, cafes, cars, and streets when those signals are absent. They understand the language of connectivity – mobile, cellular, fiber, satellite up and downlinks, broadband, bandwidth, gigs, virtual, GPS/GIS, portals  – words that didn’t have any context or meaning for me until after my 5th decade had almost passed.

Teens no longer define communication as writing on paper, creating a snail- or e-mail, making a phone call or watching a television show, movie, or listening to a CD. Communication is about instant connectivity with peers, teachers, family everywhere – for them community exists all over the world and print in another language isn’t a barrier thanks to Google’s translator. They aren’t limited by devices that allow them to simply write. They dictate tweets, listen to text messages, “OTT” chat, share images profusely, and download music, books, and other media of interest.

They produce in any format in which they desire to communicate and upload at astonishing rates. They are are part of a human exploration and file sharing network that is changing the world. They are the most connected communicators in the world’s history.

Finally, our kids don’t define learning as limited to what’s on the board, in a lecture, or between the pages of a textbook. As humans have since the beginning of time, they yearn to “make” as a pathway to learning. Kids don’t want to power down their creativity.

They are intrigued with what they can make with older technologies from lathes and sewing machines to contemporary programming languages and music beat production tools. Give a first grader some cardboard and you’ll end up with a robot or a house. Give a middle schooler a 3-D printer and you’ll end up with a prosthetic hand to donate to a handicapped child or a “Dr. Who sonic screwdriver flashlight.” Give a high schooler the time to create and you’ll end up with a choreographed dance or a phone app.  Today’s kids are …

A New Generation of Inventors

Educators long have known from experience and research that learner engagement begins with hands-on, exploratory and experiential learning. Now some educators, parents, business executives, and politicians realize the “more of sameness” built through two decades of mass standardization has resulted in a generation of young people who have had to find their own pathways to active learning outside of school. They may be bored in school but they aren’t bored outside of it. Many of our younger generations spend time in post-Gutenberg “search, connect, communicate, and make” opportunities. While taking tests, listening to lectures, or doing worksheets they think about what they are going to do next. They aren’t waiting until after state tests are completed to go on their own version of field trips, pursue interesting projects, or engage in fierce debates about global issues.

They make learning happen in spite of us. They can because they are connected.

As October’s Connected Educator Month inches toward November, how might we accelerate the exponential change in learning opportunities that Connected Learners need?

How might we push not just beyond our own learning horizons but challenge colleagues who fear relinquishing the power and control inherent in Gutenberg-driven teaching?

How might we do something tomorrow to power up learners in our care? If we do, I believe we will unleash a passion for learning in young people unlike anything we’ve seen in the test prep classrooms of the last two decades.

A Summer of Maker Learning

Coder Dojo Maker

“… Design and thinking is … idea of making creative leaps to come up with  a solution… allows people to not just be problem solvers with explicit, but also tacit knowledge… they are learning by doing… coming up with solutions by making things.”

Bill Moggridge, former Director (deceased)                         Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum                           Design and Thinking, the Movie

Public educators and young people have lived in a world defined by standardized test results for well over a decade. We now see millennial educators entering our profession, having grown up in what I sometimes refer to as the “test prep” generation. They, in many cases, never experienced some of the learning opportunities that older generation teachers remember or experienced themselves as children.  In many public schools, field trips, school plays, guest speakers, in-depth discussions, inquiry projects and hands-on activities no longer exist.  In others, professional positions from art teachers to librarians have disappeared from our school staffs. Imagine the recess play that used to be the norm in elementary schools, but now often is the exception.

Consider time. Consider resources. Consider children.

Consider these questions.

How are our schools better spaces for learning and learners as a result of the standardization movement? Are our little “widgets” happier, more creative, more capable critical thinkers? Can we say they’re learning to … play well with others … contribute positively to their communities … acquire competencies needed in contemporary and future workforces?  Can they access and use the learning knowledge they need from multiple sources both virtually and in the real world?

A Summer for Young Makers

This summer, I’ve had a unique opportunity to watch children of all ages across my district engage in maker “summer school” curricula, one not predefined by standardization or test-driven results. They’ve created, designed, built, engineered, produced, played, marketed, and contributed as they have worked to make, take apart, problem-solve, and understand what it means to learn through your hands and mind. In doing so, they’ve balanced the use of embodied and encoded languages, the DNA of human learning. I’ve walked spaces where children are improvising jazz for the first time, learning how to use a drill, making soap, constructing squishy LED circuits,  designing cardboard buildings and arcades, building robots in every form and material imaginable, and programming in computer code from Scratch to Python.

Maker Corps and Maker Kids

Our district’s elementary maker summer camps were fueled by our Maker Corps affiliation with MakerEdOrg. In  another elementary school, children both made and marketed their wares to raise funds to donate to the SPCA. A diverse group of high school students participated in a Leadership Academy designed to infuse a cadre of different leaders into their school. They built teams and designed a project to wash cars, earning money for Habitat for Humanity. Over 800 learners ages 5-18, worked in multi-age Coder Dojos to develop and extend coding skills, making games, websites, and programs. Middle school summer schoolers participated in cooking classes, learning all sorts of key math and reading skills along the way. And, the jazz makers – kids who came together for two weeks in beginning to advanced jazz camps – culminated their summer learning with a free concert at the downtown pavilion.

A Spark that Inspires Teachers and Learners

The educators who worked with our young people this summer say “these kids have been so engaged, fun, excited, curious, hardworking, and collaborative. And, some are kids who really struggle with ‘doing school behaviors’ during the regular year.” Rather than a summer school experience centered in tutorials and repetitive practice work designed around standardized tests, our kids have built complex language through experiential learning in rich environments, been challenged to use math, science, history, and the language arts as they’ve designed and created – everything from jazz to video games.

Why are we focusing on #make2learn and #learn2make as a pathway to lifelong learning rather than the current test prep mania? Because educators everywhere know that children who are bored by school work, turned off by worksheets, tired of listening to adult talk, and stripped of opportunities to stretch their hands and minds are kids who struggle to sustain attention and value learning. Those with effective “doing school behaviors” might get their A’s and look like good students but they also often feel disconnected from joy and passion for their work as learners.

Boredom in school is the number one reason listed by dropouts for dropping out. It’s also felt by our top students – not because of content lacking rigor. Rather, it’s because teachers  today feel compelled to fly through a scope and sequence of standards so their students acquire information paced so students will have covered what they need for a test one spring day. Teachers often feel compelled, if not required, to subtract from their teaching the very things that engage and entice children as learners – field trips, special guests, extended discussion of interesting topics, hands-on projects, inquiry activities, and interdisciplinary opportunities.  In subtracting the school experiences that enrich and extend learning, opportunity gaps between  middle class children and children living in economically disadvantaged homes only grow wider.  “Test prep” disadvantages all learners as experiential learning has been subtracted from our classrooms and schools. Our children who face challenges associated with risk factors are disadvantaged the most.

Why is it that big, huge corporations get beat by kids in garages? … because they’re inventing the future.”

Roger Martin, Dean                                                      Rotman School of Management                                       Design and Thinking, the Movie

Making is a process, not a “one-right answer” end in mind. It’s a process of learning,  developing knowledge, pursuing interests, and developing the confidence and resilience that comes with making mistakes, too. It’s not a bottom line of measuring what students know in standardized test results. Rather, it’s a bottom line in which lifelong learning is assessed when kids show what they can do with what they know.

Making is the fuel of America’s inventive spirit; its citizen-thinkers, workforce, entrepreneurs, artists, and solution-finders.

That’s why we value our kids spending time as active makers of their own learning – a competency built for a lifetime.

Leadership Academy

On Fence Designers and Citizen Thinkers**

Who are the learners today who learn in the moment because of their own interests or because they need to do so? The learners who don’t just learn on command when we want them to learn? Where are the citizen-thinkers who tinker to learn and who get their hands dirty, perhaps earning a callus or two along the way? Could the “culture” of creativity and innovation we so highly prize in America be an outcome of skills we developed within families and communities as we fought first to survive, then to subsist, and, finally, to expand from East to West? Is that culture still breathing? Are our schools on their own when it comes to educating America’s young people? Are we in what America’s top CEOs call a creativity crisis? Where are our fence designers today?

When I reflect upon the ingenuity of early colonists homesteading in the Blue Ridge, it’s pretty obvious to me that despite a lack of “school” education, these families depended upon deep creative and critical problem-solving capabilities. Sometimes I wonder if schools were ever a source of this nation’s creative genius or whether our creativity and passion for innovation emerged as a socio-cultural skill of survival that continued to be honed across generations until… today.

Perhaps our capacity for creative genius is being dismantled not just by the longstanding reductionist, industrialized, one-size-fits all schools we have inhabited for generations but also by our current capacity to acquire the resources to buy, service or replace on a whim. Or, maybe despite our urge to still repair or fix things around us, our creativity’s being defeated by technology advances that lock us out of problem-solving possibilities. I suspect it’s a combination of all of these. As the digital divide fades away, will the next divide be between those who can create and respond in the moment with innovative solutions and those who cannot? How important are concrete experiences to honing creative and critical thought?

It struck me as I chatted recently with a local plumber at work with his seventeen year-old son that his son was learning something that most of our children are not. They were working on an older neighborhood home with a mash-up of pipes carrying water inside and outside, from well to drain field. I watched this young man work with his father to problem-solve the size and length of pipe needed, how to find underground pipes they needed to locate, and where to drill through an unanticipated concrete, not cinder block, footing.

I simply listened and watched as the two of them worked together, sorting through a series of multi-step problems that involved spatial relations, mathematical-analytical, verbal-linguistic, and kinesthetic intelligence; with a healthy dose of deductive reasoning on both their parts. They didn’t use any computer-based technologies, but rather a few old-fashioned technologies that most of our kids today can’t name, let alone use: the pick-axe, the shovel, the measuring tape,the level, the square, and the pipe-wrench. Many today disdain these tools as beneath them, but I was struck in watching these two at work that perhaps the lack of these tools in our children’s lives is one reason we as a culture appear to be losing our creative edge.

Discovering Bending Moment in First Grade

I think about my visits to schools over the course of this school year. While I love seeing new learning technologies being used by young people, I also appreciated second graders measuring with unifix cubes and handmade rulers, middle schoolers playing stringed instruments, chemistry students in goggles analyzing mixtures in old-fashioned test tubes, and kindergarteners with hands covered in blue finger paint. I loved the imagery created by the first grade teacher in her rocking chair reading from a picture book with children gathered on the floor, second graders chasing each other in a healthy game of tag, and high schoolers outdoors at lunch hanging around picnic tables and lounging on the ground.

Comfort, Creativity, Collaboration, Critical Thinking

In reflection, what I most value is the level of activity and engagement everywhere I look in our schools from fifth graders using iPod touches to race hallways in an in-school scavenger hunt to third graders dancing with their music teacher. Isn’t it this movement of thought processes that defines how we connect with our creative genius? When I see minds in action, not passively contained in rows, I believe that the intellectual juice of this nation can still power deep learning through the vast array of tools at our disposal, inside and out of the places we call schools.

library studio musicians

These tools represent the dichotomy of our struggle to teach this techno-generation: how we capitalize upon using new technology learning tools while making sure our young people don’t lose the capability to use old technology tools as well. When we power up our young people with the “high-tech” learning tools we make available in our schools today, we can’t lose sight of the fact that we must still power up our young people with musical instruments, paintbrushes, Legos, beakers, bones, pulleys, picture books, woodworking tools, kitchen stoves, blocks and more.

Using Power Tools Requires Problem-Solving, Creativity, and Teamwork

Our youngest children need to have their hands on a variety of tools, but our eldest do as well. All of our children need time to socialize face to face, not just in text bytes. I want our young people to graduate with the skills to problem-solve how to fix a leaky faucet or rewire a lamp that stops functioning. I don’t want them to always feel compelled to search the Internet for an “Angie’s list” problem-solver for all their household conundrums.

I want them to…

• wander parks, fields, forests and their own yards, taking time to not just glance past a Viceroy butterfly or mantis but also to ask questions and seek answers about that which they don’t know
• be inspired by music from a range of genres and time periods – to grow up savoring the natural world and the arts
• understand scientific concepts that underpin how things work, what things are, and systems that explain and support life
• engage in passionate dialogue about the rights of humankind through informed perspectives based on deep knowledge of history, politics, religion, and culture
• speak a second, and maybe even a third language, but especially to understand the language of mathematics and,
• see themselves as poets, narrators, conversationalists, and consumers of literature

I guess what I am really looking for is a nation committed to creating a learning renaissance with an infusion of enlightenment thrown in to extend and challenge the thinking of young people who represent the future. And, yes, I’d also like to see our young people use technology to connect, communicate, and collaborate with the world; to draw upon the experts, their peers, and the breadth of resources that together make pathways to deep learning universally accessible to all of our young people.

We now have the capability to turn on a faucet of learning opportunities unlike anything in the history of humankind. But, shouldn’t we make sure our kids don’t lose the capability to problem-solve as the best of plumbers and fence designers do while also learning to produce and create in the clouds?

** I first wrote and published this at Edurati Review.