Idealism

At Educon this past weekend, I had many amazing conversations with educators, people interested in education reform, wild-eyed evangelists and more.  But one of the most telling moments was when Gary Stager asked, “When did idealism become a negative adjective?  I tell my grad students- You’re 22- idealistic is exactly what you should be.”

Educon as an “education/technology” conference tends to attract people who are dedicated to making schools all they can be, and others who want to make schools different, but are constantly finding the “Yes, But” in every sentence.

I was left with the impression this weekend that may educators have become real pessimists, and have lost much of their idealism.  After hearing story upon story of teachers having success with students from poor homes, from rotten neighborhoods and the like, you could hear someone remark that that case was the exception to the rule.  It made me think- How many stories of success and learning in relatively impoverished environments do you need before you decide that these stories are not the outliers and the one offs, but actually evidence that children may have potential, even if the deck is stacked against them.

The problem with this viewpoint, of course, is it doesn’t allow you to give up.  It means you have to reach every child, and not just the easy ones, either.  It means you can’t write off the disruptive kid, because with the proper teacher or a more interesting project, that kid might really start to blossom.  If you can, instead, look at some kids as lost causes and assume that you can’t make a significant difference, you get permission to fail and permission to stop trying.

I learned this weekend the real meaning of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Every time someone doesn’t expect a kid to achieve, every time we make a test easier so the passing rate goes up, every time we tell ourselves our school’s test scores are simply the fault of the proportion of ESL kids, or those with IEP’s,  we are short selling our kids and their potential.  We’re using grade inflation to mask any difficulties and let it masquerade as real progress, because that’s politically expedient.  Even if you have kids who don’t seem engaged, does that give you an excuse to stop trying to teach them?  Isn’t this just a way to let teachers off the hook from doing the really hard work required?

While programs like “Race to the Top” sound wonderful, a race also implies winners and losers rather than helping all boats to rise to the top.  I think we have to stop making education a competition. There’s a  competition between teachers and students, where teachers have to exert command and control over kids, and every psych experiment ever done has shown that no one learns well in a coercive environment.  The students push back, and there’s a giant tug of war going on where no one actually ever wins or moves forward.

I want teachers and students and parents to be idealistic about education.  We have to have high dreams and aspirations.  We may fall short of the “perfect goal” but if we never shoot for the target, we have no hope of ever even coming close.

Gary also quoted Seymore Papert, the father of educational computing and founder of the MIT Media Lab, as saying “It’s okay to worry about the work on Monday, as long as it’s also working towards what you need to do someday.”  We need to have the wide angle lens as well as the microscope working at all times, and keep an eye on the bigger mission.

The process of changing and improving education is difficult.  It’s something I’d love to see IDEO try to tackle, because rather that getting potshots from outside, I think education will only improve when people fully understand the problems from the inside out first.  And as long as we keep putting ridiculous pressure on our schools to meet relatively arbitrary standards in an arbitrary period of time, where we measure each classes achievement like a new set of widgets, rather than measuring an individual student’s growth over time, we keep educators locked in Maslowe’s basement, where they are constantly distracted with worry about the “food clothing shelter” aspects of school, and never have the time or the security to have truly higher aspirations of themselves or their students.

I am an idealist about education.  We have all the potential in the world.  We just have to be willing to harness it, to let go of the substantial fear that exists, and feel free to dream and experiment, and be willing to be wrong and try again, all the while keeping the best interests of the kid’s at heart.  It is possible.  It can be done.  But we have to be willing to be idealists, we have to be willing to be disappointed from time to time, and we have to be willing to dust ourselves off and try again as need be.

But mostly, we have to stop seeing Idealism as a pejorative, and instead, embrace it as the thing we should all aspire to become.

Tags: education, education reform, educon, Gary Stager, idealism

Rethinking (and executing) on Education

Educon 2.0 is an education unconference being held in Philadelphia this weekend, at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA). SLA is a progressive, public, magnet school for highschool students, and everything we think about high school has been re- engineered.

Classes are based on project based learning. Every child and teacher has a laptop, but all the tech toy have found their place not as gadgets, but as tools. There is some inevitable goofing off that goes on, but the kid and almost uniformly engaged in their education, in ways I could have only dreamed of before seeing it in action.

I sometimes look at different tools like Facebook and say “So what? I do like being in touch with my friends in this more casual way, but what good is it long term? SLA Knows.

One of the spanish teachers yesterday showed us her Facebook account. She took down her account from college, and placed restrictions on it so it wasn’t accessible and opened up another one to be used in conjunction with her class. She poses questions to her students in spanish, they answer back in spanish; they’ll ask what’s for homework, and the teacher has felt this has been another good way to create relationships with her students that extend beyond the classroom.

The relationships that are forming between teachers and kids are NOT peer to peer. But they are wonderful mentoring relationships, and the classes seem like what I envision all learning should be- explorations, guided by a leader, someone who knows the ropes and the path, and wants you to experience all the wonders for yourself.

It’s clear that the teachers are passionate about their jobs, and amazed at how well the concept is working in practice. The students have done things from create their own biodiesel and look at how efficient it is in engines, to creating their own podcasts and videos, as it fits in as a way to demonstrate their mastery of material.

All of the things Rick LaVoie and Dr. Bob Brooks talk about being essential for learning turn out to be core principals in this school. Learning is cooperative, not competitive. Faculty are cooperative, not competitive. Discipline is needed from time to time, but more often than not, the consequences fit the crime, and because the students can do an assignment not in one set way, but in a way that makes sense to them , there are few hard and fast rules to rebel against.

Rick LaVoie talks about kids having great BS detectors and knowing when assigments are “busy work.” This is a school where empowering the students means they speak up when they think something is BS. One of the teachers yesterday, Mr Kay said, “One of the beautiful things about this schools is we’ve empowered the students. One of the difficult things is we’ve empowered the students. ‘Because I said so’ just isn’t good enough here, and I have to be willing and able to justify myself. It makes me take a closer look at the work I am assigning and what I expect them to get out of it.” I can never imagine this happening in any of the schools I attended, and they were the poorer for it.

I know attending unconferences has made going to traditional conferences very difficult for me. I want to hear what other people have to say. I don’t want a pitch. I want to be able to ask questions. Likewise, I think after you see a school like this, everything changes, because you know what you dream of is not a dream, it’s possible.

How can school and education ever be the same once you know what is possible?

Now I will admit about wondering whether this model will work with younger children. I can see it working well starting in middle school, but I can see that it might have some issues in elementary school, just because kids don’t yet have the neural hardware to handle the responsibility this type of education requires. Kids at SLA have projects they need to do all the time, and portfolios to prepare, so there are no lack of standards, but it’s also perfectly clear to me that they are learning that they get out of an experience what they put into it. This is a powerful life message that many adults don’t understand, but it will be part of the educational DNA of these kids.

It would never occur to an o these children not to talk to an adult. They clearly feel nutured and supported by the faculty- the kids regularly come to school early and leave late. They have to kind of sweep the kids out of the school at about 6 pm when they lock up for the day. The faculty says they are still trying to figure out why the kids won’t leave after classes end, but I know why- it’s the same reason why I never want to go to sleep while I’m at podcamp- there is just too much interesting stuff happening, and you don’t want to miss a second of it.

If there was a mecca of education and cognitive activation, it’s this school.

Tags: education, education 2.0, educon, school 2.0, science leadership academy, SLA