Changing Learning: the Making of the Learning Genome Project October 29, 2012

So many of you have offered tremendous support, donations and a megaphone to spread the word about the Learning Genome Project.  I am so grateful!  Today I thought I would lift the curtain just a bit and share a behind the scenes look at the Learning Genome Project.  My plan was to do this in video form using Screenium or Screeny. Those plans were foiled when NEITHER worked even with updates.  #sigh  Instead, I’ll write out my story and take you on a picture journey of how it all took place.  If you haven’t had a chance to lend a helping hand, it is not too late.  Honestly, even $1 makes such a BIG difference!  If everyone of my readers gave just $1, this would be taken care of tonight and we would be able to start the next phase of development. Click here to help out now!

I come from a family of entrepreneurs.  If it doesn’t exist or it can be done better, that is what you do.  This mind-set can be a bit of a curse…once I get an idea in my head, it is like a broken record that plays over and over until I do something about it.  My dad is prime example of this, he started Koostik with a styrofoam cup and an iPhone. Once the idea was there, it stayed until he saw it realized…in this case that means a growing company and product in Restoration Hardware and Red Envelope.  He is awesome.

For me this process started as I dug through curriculum and worked to supplement it with technology tools.  The idea was to “fill” the gaps with technology tools that would make the curriculum work better for students.  As I went through publisher after publisher, I started realizing that the problem wasn’t a lack of technology (if you have read this blog for any amount of time, you know that is a BIG realization for me). The real problem was that we were trying to address the needs of an incredibly diverse population of kids with a one-size-fits-all curriculum.  The troubling thing for me was that I sat on the committees that made the curriculum decisions.  I was sold (just like everyone else) on the premise that these curricula had “differentiated” instruction.  I have come to hate that term.  You know what it means?  It means that curriculum companies can sell more curriculum because they add in a highlighted section that says “differentiation!” and gives a one-size bigger or one-size smaller approach to the exact same problem.  As I went through all of this curriculum, I couldn’t shake the feeling that adding in a bit of technology wasn’t going to solve the problem.

As a computer teacher, I taught 435 students every week.  I taught the same 435 kids for 6 years.  I saw them grow up, learned what made them tick, watched the frustration grow when they didn’t understand a learning objective.  These kids were amazing. They were brilliant. They all had strengths and weaknesses that made them special. They all have a different understanding and approach to the world.  We were stripping all of that uniqueness away and making them learn everything the same. We were expecting that they would learn the same things, the same way, and at the same time.  Ludicrous! Nothing in life or growth and development happens this way, and yet that is what our education system is built on?  This was really troubling for me.  I couldn’t shake that it shouldn’t be that way.

In 2010 I took a year away from teaching for health reasons.  During that year, I acted as an educational consultant for many area schools.  This period of time re-emphasized those stirrings that I was having about education. This curriculum wasn’t working because it assumed too much sameness. I saw brilliant, gifted kids losing their passions because it wouldn’t get them into the swanky private high school (that looked just like every other school). How sad that we ask kids to give up their areas of gifting to get to the next level of learning.  Something is wrong!  One day I was working my way through curriculum, supplementing the holes with technology tools.  I was listening to Pandora Internet radio.  A song came on that I had never heard before, by an artist that was also new to me.  I frantically searched for something to write on so that I could remember this new find.  I remember thinking, “how amazing that we have come to a place in history where we can use technology to predict something as personal as music.”  I was truly amazed that I could put in one piece of information and through a series of algorithms, Pandora could predict other music I would like.  If it can work with music, surely it could work with curriculum.

This was the birth of that niggling thought that wouldn’t go away.  This was the beginning of the Learning Genome Project.  I had recently been introduced to a programmer (@ianchia) through@Doremigirl on Twitter.  Ian and I had shared many conversations about what education apps could look like.  This time it was my turn to ask a question.  I wanted to know if it was possible to program what was in my head.  ”Well of course.”  Ian introduced me to some wireframing tools and I was off and running.  Over the next months, I dreamed up how the Learning Genome would work.  I thought about the students that I wanted something better for. I thought about the frustrations I had as a teacher. I dreamed about a tool that would make the whole process easier.

Teachers share something in common: we all want the very best for our students.  There are a few problems with this.  First, we don’t always get to choose what we will teach. Many times our school or district hands us the curriculum and says, “go.”  This is not conducive to doing the best we know how for every child.  Second, we don’t always know that there is a tool/lesson/resource out there that could make all the difference for each student.  Third, we have a limited time to search for that perfect tool/lesson/resource.  A lot of system problems to overcome.  If Pandora can do this for music, I can do it for education.

I started researching how Pandora works, what happens in the background that makes my experience possible?  Pandora is called the Music Genome Project because it used the Human Genome Project as its inspiration.  In the Human Genome Project, genes are mapped out.  In the Music Genome Project, the “genes” of music are mapped out.  I called my version the Learning Genome Project.  Together, we will map the genes of education, those attributes that help us find commonalities that match the right content to each student at the right time.

First, we need to collect information about the learner. If we don’t know the learner, we can’t know what content best fits their needs.  This is, in short, the best student information system ever.

Next, we have to know enough about the school and the classroom to make recommendations. It does us no good to recommend an iDevice app if the school has no access to that device.

We also have to know something about the lead learner (the teacher).

After we have the profile information, it is critical to know where students are in their learning. What needs to be learned?  This is the individualized learning plan…each student has one.

 

From within the ILP, teachers, students and parents can create and have input on the learning goals.  These learning goals inform what happens in the hub of the genome.

When the learning goal has been identified, the genome “hub” comes into play. This is where resources (lessons, videos, apps, experiments, activities, etc.) are matched and recommended for the student.  Much like Pandora, a learning channel is created.

Teachers (and students) can expand the results to view more information about the recommendation.  From here it can be added to teacher and student planners, and materials for the curriculum can be selected.

Teachers can see all student assignments within their planner. Here they can create groups for overlaps of student learning.  They can also create whole-class events.

After a student completes an activity, they record it within their ePortfolio.  This is all completely integrated.  Within the portfolio they can keep notes, documents, pictures, video and badges.  Badges help students have a bread trail of where they have been in their learning.  Portfolio’s are forever associated with a student, from year to year it travels and grows with them.  Students can also have the option of downloading their portfolio for offline viewing.

In addition to portfolios and planners, the Learning Genome Project includes wiki, blog and photo tools.

Community tools keep students, teachers and parents in collaboration.

My brother and I had many of the same teachers growing up.  We are very different people with 5 years separating us.  My favorite teachers were not his.  We had very similar experiences, the same outstanding teachers. But some teachers connected better with me than him.  How do we help every child have influence of a “favorite” teacher?  I created Twitacad.  Even if that teacher isn’t in the child’s school, there is a blended learning component that makes that connection possible.

Twitacad offers teachers and students a platform for sharing, communicating, and learning.  It is all tied in to the Learning Genome. Everything works together.  Virtual teachers are listed as teachers for parents, students and other teachers to interact with.

The Learning Genome Project has assessment tools built-in.  Assessment is based on mastery of a skill or concept.  This is directly related to what is happening in the student portfolio so that students, teachers and parents can view evidences of the learning.

How does content, resources, tools, lessons, apps, videos, etc. get into the genome?  It gets tagged with its learning attributes by incredible teachers around the world like you.  We all contribute to this project and we all benefit from it.

The hub (resource aggregation) portion of the Genome is free to everyone.  Every child deserves an education tailored to them.  Additional portions of the Learning Genome Project (planners, ePortfolios, blogs, wikis, Twitacad) will be a subscription based service.

The Learning Genome Project is not curriculum.  It is a sorting tool that pulls the best options for every child.  Teachers will be able to sort results based on price, Bloom’s Taxonomy level, standard, subject, and type of resource.  This will tell you what curricular resources will best meet every child’s needs.  Every time a resource is used, it gets rated by both student and teacher. Resources that are highest rated will be recommended first.

This is truly a quick overview of the Learning Genome project.  There are so many intricacies and features that will make it revolutionary to education.  The one hang up? I need help funding it!  Sure, I could go and get some venture capitalists to fund it. The problem: I want the force that drives what happens to the Learning Genome Project to be what is best for kids…not what best impacts the bottom line.  I believe that if we all put a little into this project, that we can create something revolutionary.  We can all have a part in transforming education for the world.

I hope you will join me.  I hope that you will realize that $1 and a few minutes is a small price to pay for a resource that has the potential to reach every child in the world.  This is a small price to pay for our future.  We can do this.  Please click here and donate now…then spread the word to everyone you know and encourage them to do the same.

Becoming Fully Alive October 2, 2012

|Originally posted on iLearnTechnology.com|

Big, sweeping changes don’t seem to happen overnight, as quickly as we might like.  Thirty, forty, or a hundred years go into those sweeping changes: race relations, animal testing, women’s rights, recognition of addiction as a disease.  And yet, in each case, there was a turning point.  Those handful of pivotal moments when someone(s) decide it must be different and that in this moment in time, change will begin.

For me, this pivotal change happened in October of 2010.  Two years ago.  That moment of “it must be different” led to a school. Anastasis Academy.  In many ways, Anastasis feels like it happened over night (we started a school in 4 short months!) and in other ways, it feels like it will take years before the vision of Anastasis is realized.

Sweeping changes happen over time.  Often, they are hardly noticeable as they are happening.  This explains the 5-year-old, struggling through their ABC’s who is ‘suddenly’ reading.  When did that happen?!

People often ask why I don’t write more about Anastasis.  The whole process has been incredibly organic and hard to describe to someone who isn’t seeing it unfold with me.  I can tell you about students who are becoming fully alive and discovering that they love learning.  Until you see this happen before you, until you hear the students talk about it, it is really a weak representation of what is happening.  Here we are in year two. In a lot of ways, it has felt like a harder beginning.  This is strange in light of what happened last year…starting a school in 4 months from a place of zero.  I think it feels harder because the vision of what could be is being more fully defined and dreamed up each day.  There is this sense of frustration that it isn’t here yet.

The change is hardly noticeable as it’s happening.  It is organic and creeping.  Sometimes I overhear students talking animatedly about figuring out ratios, and exclaiming over learning what portion of the population lives on less that $1.25/day, the change is happening.  The vision is being realized one moment at a time.  These kids are becoming fully alive.  Those teaching them are doing the same.  We hear parents describe what we do to others.

This is community.

This is family.

This is church.

This is Anastasis.

This is the beginning of sweeping change, where students can be fully alive and learn how to properly manage their freedom.

So, we will go on wishing that we could already see the full realization of this vision, but we will also rest in the hardly noticeable moments of change in this journey.  We will appreciate the moments in time that keep everything from happening at once.  We will rejoice as we watch it all unfold in it’s perfection. We will wait anxiously for the day when this type of learning is available to children everywhere in the world.

 

 

***While we wait, consider joining in this mission to help students be “fully alive” in their learning.  Donate and spread the word about the Learning Genome Project.  This is the vehicle we will use to share this vision with ALL children.

40 Days to Personalized Education: A call to action September 20, 2012

*** If you need the cliff notes version of this post, skip down to the Call to Action section!

Last year I had a “hunch” about learning…specifically about curriculum.  That hunch turned into a full-fledged idea and a mission to do better for kids.  Everywhere.  Along the line I met some truly incredible people who taught me things I didn’t know how to do before.  Like wire framing (thanks @ianchia), and pitching ideas (thanks @houseofgenius), and how to go about picking up programmers (thanks@toma_bedolla).  Now I’m ready to share the culmination of all this work with you.

This isn’t just a post to tell you about what I’m doing, it is a call to action for everyone (yes, even you).  It is a request for you to join me in this mission in whatever form that may take.

I have a vision: to make personalized learning a reality for EVERY child. 

I know, it is big.  It is also doable.

For those who are new to following me, here was my original “hunch” written here,Dreams of Education:

“The problem with curriculum and textbooks is that they complete thoughts.  Curriculum and textbooks give the impression that learning has an end.  That when you have made it from cover to cover, the job is done.  I know in my own schooling this was true, I thought that school was teaching me what was important and that anything outside of the curriculum wasn’t important or relevant to my life…wouldn’t they have included it otherwise?  How did curriculum get this way?  Well, people realized that there was no possible way to cover every facet of learning, so they stripped it down to what they thought was important.  The problem? What is important to you may not be what is important to me.  What’s more, something that is very important to me may have been cut all together so I don’t even get the chance to know that it is important to me.  Humans tend to like things that are definable, we like things that we can put into a neat, orderly box and carry out in a predictable way.  It feels safe and manageable.  This is what led me to the following hunch:

What if curriculum was more flexible?  What if curriculum/schools/learning looked more like Pandora.  If you aren’t familiar with Pandora, it is an online radio station that plays the music that it thinks you will like.  You type in an artist or song and it creates a customized radio station just for you.  It is remarkably accurate.  Pandora almost never gets it wrong for me.  It is like they have a direct line to my brain and can predict what song I would like to hear next.  When it is wrong, I can give the song a thumbs down and it apologizes profusely for the error and promises never to play that song again on my station.  The other thing I love about Pandora: I can have multiple radio stations.  Because sometimes I really couldn’t think of anything in the world better than Frank, Dean, and Sammy; but other times  I also want a little Timberlake, Whitestripes, or Bangles.  What if curriculum looked like that?  What if learning happened as a result of typing in one subject or topic that a student was enamored with and a completely personalize learning journey began playing out for them?  What if students were led through a journey that was completely customized?  What if they had several stations mapped out for them?”

I believe this is possible.  I believe it is within our reach to create a completely personalized learning experience to every unique child.  I believe that we can honor humanity instead of treating our kids like widgets in a factory.  I believe that teachers should be teachers, focused on the needs and development of the child instead of teaching the masses through scripted curriculum.

This is The Learning Genome Project.

The Learning Genome Project will empower teachers and parents to become engineers of learning by providing each individual student the exact content they need, at the exact moment they need it.  The Learning Genome will enable students to explore the process of inquiry, experimentation, discovery and problem solving.  Instead of learning how to pass the next test, we will enable students to construct meaning and learn how to transfer that meaning to new life context.  At the hub, the Learning Genome is a platform that aggregates resources and, using a series of algorithms, provide recommendations of the BEST resources to meet the individual learning needs of a specific child.  The Learning Genome creates those serendipitous moments of finding just the right learning tool to meet the needs of children at the right time.

Much like Pandora finds that perfect piece of music, the Learning Genome will find the perfect piece of learning material to aid the student in learning.  The key to the Learning Genome’s success is crowd sourcing.  I will be drawing on educators around the world (that’s you!) to help me tag curriculum, books, lessons, videos, apps, websites and other educational content.  This collection of tagged content lives in the centralized ”cloud” and wil allow users around the world to find and access materials that best suit student needs.  By gathering information about the individual student’s learning style preferences, multiple intelligence strengths, social/emotional levels, interests and passion, the Learning Genome can help teachers to create customized learning maps for each individual.  This portion will be free. Every child deserves a unique learning experience.

In addition to the Learning Genome Hub (the aggregate), the site will include a complete Student Information System, planning tools, e-portfolios, e-learning, individual learning plans, assessment and blogging tools.  All of these will work seamlessly together for you go-to for learning and planning.

Changing the world here.

Call to Action

So…how can you help?  I’m glad you asked!

1.  Learn more about the Learning Genome at indiegogo.

2. Please consider investing in this mission (see the awesome perks that includes below).

3.  Blog about the Learning Genome with a link back to the indiegogo campaign (be sure to link to those posts you write in the comments below!)

4. Tweet about this project…a lot.  Let’s completely take over the Internet with tweets about the Learning Genome and taking over education for kids! Please make sure to link back to the indiegogocampaign so that others can learn about it! Use the hashtag #standagain (because after all, we are helping children “stand again” in their learning)

5. Offer your time as a Learning Genome Content tagger or beta tester

6.  Mention us on Facebook and like us on Facebook!

7.  Did I mention spread the word? Seriously, that is SO helpful!  You never know who might see that tweet and drop a couple thousand (or more) to make this project go!

8.  Time is of the essence.  I have 40 days starting NOW to make this happen.  eeek!  I need your help!

So, what are the perks to helping with this project?  

$5  gets your name on the Learning Genome Change Makers page.  You are changing education. That makes you a big deal.  I want everyone to know what a big deal you are!  I know many of you don’t think that your $5 can do anything.  Wrong.  According to my cluster map, I have hundreds of thousands of visits to this blog.  If each of you pitches in…we all win fast!

$10 Remember all those cool Bloom’s Taxonomy posters I made?  This campaign is now the ONLY place you can get them.  These are 8.5″ x 11″ versions of the poster.

$30 Learning Genome beta tester. You get the inside scoop and ability to play before ANYONE else.  I know, pretty cool.

$60 EXCLUSIVE A full size large-format print of my Bloomin’ Peacock mailed to you.  That awesome little Peacock looks even better large.  Did I mention this is the ONLY place you will get a big version of this?

$500 Even more EXCLUSIVE  you get all of my Bloom’s re-imagine posters in the large format.  Perfect for your classroom, library or as a gift to your favorite teachers.

$1000  My Searching for daVinci webinar for your school.  What better way to spend your professional development dollars than learning how to create a daVinci like culture of learning at your school?  Worth it!

$5000 For my corporate friends who want to see their logo in lights as a company that supports education and changing the world.  If you have an education company, The Learning Genome Project will be the place to be seen.

 

We have $85,000 to raise.  It sounds like a big number.  We can do it together.  I figured if I am going to lean on crowdsourcing to transform education, the funding should be crowdsourced too.  How awesome will it be to join together as an education community to say, together we transformed the way learning is done.  We changed things for every child in the world.  Yeah, it’s big.

The Education Betterness Manifesto December 28, 2011

Last year I was inspired by an excellent post written by Umair Haque on Harvard Business Review called “The Betterness Manifesto“.  In it, Umair writes about building a better 21st century.  I was pointed to the post originally by @ianchia who regularly cheers me on to do work that is meaningful, and was reminded of it again when Umair tweeted a link to it last week.  Because I relate everything I read and experience back to education and learning, I re-wrote “The Betterness Manifesto” post as it relates to my thoughts about building a better education system.

With permission from Umair, this is my Betterness Manifesto for education:

So you want to build a better education, but how?  Consumption of enough content and material alone won’t do it.  We must reach forward for a complete reboot in education.  We must yearn for betterness.

Betterness in education requires:

1.  Companies that don’t get into the business of education to push a political movement or to make a profit at the expense of our youth.  Instead we need to support education companies that can be profitable, but that profit by doing really meaningful stuff that matters.  Start investing in, and supporting, education companies that are sustainable and have real substance that will impact children positively.  Support those education companies that take an interest in, and engage, the education community.
2. People and businesses who will take an interest in what is really happening in local classrooms.  Don’t take the word of major news organizations that thrive on scandal.  Instead, visit classrooms, find out what is really happening, discover the real needs of education.  Volunteer in a local school, take a teacher out to lunch and discover what the learning landscape is really lacking.  Give something of yourself.
3.  People who will put their money and words behind educational movements and companies that do awesome stuff that is made with love, ethics, and passion (they DO exist!).
4. Administrators, lawmakers and educators who will stand up to, and quit, curriculum companies who push something that is meaningless (i.e. curriculum designed to help pass a test created by said curriculum company).  Betterness in education can’t come as a result of companies churning out toxic junk.  Only support education companies that do meaningful work.
5. People who will involve themselves in building a school community of talented, passionate support.
6. People who will become a volunteer, mentor a child, get involved.  Do something.  Support those that do something that benefits the children inside of a school more than it benefits themselves or their political agenda.
7. People who support what they really think matters.  Do you want children who learn to be critical thinkers and problem solvers? Quit supporting standardized testing.  Do you want children who have their gifts and talents nurtured? Stop purchasing boxed curriculum as a one-size-fits-all education solution.  Do you want students who arrive at school ready to learn?  Ensure that every child in the community is well nourished and healthy.  Support what it is that really matters.
8. Educators who will continue to do what is best for kids every day.
9. A learning environment created with children in mind. A place where students can inquire, discover, explore, experiment and problem solve. A place where they can acquire skills and knowledge not to pass the next test, but to construct and transfer meaning to new contexts.
10. Administrators who will let their teachers be teachers. Administrators who build a dream team and then support them to be their best every day.

It is only when each of us stand up and take responsibility that we can work toward a better educational future that impacts us all.

Let’s together change the fabric of education and, subsequently, our future.  Real change doesn’t happen as we wait on politicians and the big six (curriculum publishers) to make a shift.  Real change begins with each of us, educators and non-educators alike.  Education is an institution that has touched every one of us, some positive and some negative.  It is something that we all have the responsibility of pouring into and working toward betterness. Currently we are making poor decisions by trying to fill in the gaps with the same old toxic junk (one-size-fits-all curriculum, standardized testing).  We are the freest people in history, it is time that we started educating accordingly.

Every revolution begins from the bottom up.  If we are truly fed up with the current education mess that we find ourselves in, then it is time to do something about it.  The current system needs to be rejected and refused. It is up to us to build a better education opportunity instead.

 

Thank you Umair for the inspiration, the launching point, and agreeing to let me write an education version of your great “Betterness Manifesto”.  Here is to betterness in all capacities of life in 2012!

Ways I hope to bring betterness in 2012:

• Continue working to make Anastasis Academy a betterness education model that can spread.
• Launch the Learning Genome that will take steps to customize the learning landscape for every child.
• Continue connecting with passionate bottom-up educators around the world through Twitter, blogs, conferences, and the Reform Symposium.

 

What Dreams May Come: A Sneak Peek into Anastasis Academy November 11, 2011

It’s a pretty incredible thing to see dreams come to fruition.

For me it started with an obsession and passion for creating rich learning environments where every student was recognized as an individual. In that first post I wrote:

“I have a dreams of education. I have dreams of the way that schools should look. I have dreams of kids who find their passions. I have dreams of schools as rich learning centers.”

I had dreams of stripping the “vanilla” away so that passions could emerge.

Dreams of ditching that boxed curriculum that we call an education and watching the factory model fade into the rear-view mirror.

Dreams of ending the practice of viewing teachers (and students) as expendables.

I had dreams of schools that were beautiful, that were designed with students in mind.

Dreams that education would stop looking so much like the McRib.

Dreams of breaking free of the box, of valuing students and teachers,  of using the right tools, of a school where a student’s inner da Vinci can break through, of a school that customizes learning.

I shared dreams of more fabulous failures.

The dreams started trickling into reality in March of this year (2011).  In March I started getting some hints that these dreams weren’t really all that far-fetched.  By May I had officially started a school.  In August we opened the doors to Anastasis Academy with our first 50 students in 1st through 8th grade and had hired a dream team of 5 truly incredible teachers to lead them.  In four short months we went from dreams to reality.

At Anastasis Academy, we lease space from a church building throughout the week.  We have our own wing with classrooms, a playground, a gym and a kitchen.  All of our furniture is on wheels.  This makes it easy to adjust space daily based on needs, it is also a necessity since we use shared space.  Twice a week we move all of our belongings across the hall into a storage room (if I’m honest, this is the part we could do without!).  We can’t complain about the space.  It is pretty incredible!

You will notice that we don’t have rows of desks.  No teacher’s desk either.  We have space that kids can move in. Corners to hide in, stages to act on, floors to spread out on, cars to read in.  We are learning how to learn together, learning how to respect other children’s space and needs, learning how to discipline ourselves when we need to, learning how to work collaboratively, we are learning to be the best us.

You won’t see a worksheet at Anastasis. We use iPads.  That isn’t to say that we ONLY use iPads, in fact, you’ll often see us building, cutting, pasting, writing on a whiteboard/chalkboard and even paper.  We do a lot of blogging, a lot of reflecting, a lot of Evernotting, a lot of cinematography, a lot of discussing.

Every morning we start with a 15 minute walk outside together…as a community.  We invite parents and siblings to be a part of our morning walk. Occasionally we have the dogs join in on the fun.  After the walk we come inside as a whole-school for a time of devotions. Again, this is a time for us to build community, to foster the culture we want for our school.  Families are invited to join us every morning.  We always have at least one family and, many times, multiples.  We pray with each other and for each other. We have hard conversations and funny conversations. We think together and challenge each other.

Matthew West joining us for devotions!

Our inquiry block is a time for hands-on transdisciplinary learning.  This is my VERY favorite time to walk through classrooms.  It is incredible to see the joy in discovery.  It is incredible to have a second grade student with dyslexia discover an app to make stop motion animations, teach himself how to use it and proceed to stand up before 7th and 8th grade students to explain how stop motion works.  I wish I could bring you all through the building during this time.  Every time we have a visitor the students pause long enough to describe what they are doing, the learning that is happening. I often have to pick my jaw up off the floor. These kids are amazing.

We have no curriculum. At all. Zip. What did we do instead? We hired the very BEST teachers we could find.  We gave them a base level of skills that we wanted students to have- an outline if you will.  We used the Common Core Standards as our baseline.  We don’t use the standards like most schools do. We use them to make sure that our students have the building blocks and foundations of learning in place.  And then we let our students and teachers GO. The standards are not a weight we are tied to, they are the underpinnings that make it possible for us to soar and take our learning anywhere.  When you look at the Common Core standards they are pretty underwhelming.  I’m glad they are! They provide us with just enough momentum to propel us forward and then off we go on a journey of learning!  We also have our big inquiry questions in place.  From there, we go where the learning takes us, bunny trails and all.  It is pretty fantastic.  Today one of our primary students came out to see me and said, “Look at this boat I found in this new library book. Can I try to make it?”  My answer: “Absolutely! What materials do we need?”  Together we made a list of all the materials I needed to pull together for him.  Tomorrow he will build that boat he is fascinated with and find out if it works the way he has planned.  That is learning!  Tell me what boxed curriculum allows time for that to happen? None. That is why we don’t have it.

In the afternoons we have more “content” area subjects (i.e. math and language arts).  In the primary grades this means students building the skills they need to support their inquiry.  In the intermediate grades this means honing those skills for better communication and more thorough inquiry.  Again, we don’t work from a boxed curriculum. We find the lessons, approaches, and materials that work for the individual student.  Sometimes this means working with manipulatives, sometimes it means exploring measurement outside, and sometimes it means using an app.  It changes daily based on the needs of the students.

We have mixed age level classrooms.  We do this for a lot of reasons.  Most importantly, it is good for older and younger students to work together and learn from each other; it is vital that a child be able to work at their developmental level and progress as they are ready to; and it deepens inquiry when students with different perspectives work together.

Once every five weeks we invite the parents to join us for Parent University.  This is a time for us to help parents understand this new way to do school.  Detox, if you will.  It is a time for us to show parents what best practices in education look like, why grades aren’t all they are cracked up to be, why play is important.  It is a time for us to think and laugh together. It is a time to get questions answered.

Also every five weeks, we hold a “Meeting of the Minds”.  This is a parent/teacher/student conference where we all get together and set our road map for the next 5 weeks.  Students write goals with the help of their teacher. They have ownership over what they have done the last 5 weeks and tell mom and dad what they have planned for upcoming 5 weeks.

Every Friday we have a learning excursion or an opportunity for an “Anastasis Serves”.  Learning excursions are field trips all over the place that help students start to recognize that learning doesn’t just happen when we are at school.  Learning happens everywhere we are and, if we are paying attention, all the time.  Anastasis Serves is a time for our students to give back to the global community.  Sometimes this is a door-to-door scavenger hunt for donations, sometimes this is learning about orphans around the world, or packaging cookies and letters to send to our troops.

We don’t do grades, we do assessment all day every day while we learn.  We don’t do homework, we pursue our families and passions at home.  We don’t do worksheets, we do interesting (sometimes frustrating) work. We don’t do boxed curriculum, we do on-demand learning.

We do mistakes. We do community. We do collaboration. We do messy. We do play. We do fun. We do technology. We do learning.

How do we do all this? We have a 12 to 1 student teacher ratio (or less).  We have incredible students, parents and teachers.  We have stinking smart board members who are invested in our success and trust our judgement calls.  We set our tuition at $8,000 (per pupil spending in our district) to show that even though we are private, this can be done in the public schools.  We started with nothing…well almost nothing, we had dreams.  There was no capital raised, no fund-raisers, no huge donation. We started the beginning of the year at $0 and put blood, sweat and tears into it.

This is not to say that we have it all figured out, that all of our students are perfect, that all of our staff or families are perfect. We are perfectly imperfect as every school is. We have days when the kids are BOUNCING off the walls, we have disagreements, tired teachers, stressed parents, a founder who has occasional melt downs (that would be me), students who need extra love and support, tight budgets, parents who demand different, scuffles, sniffles and band-aids…lots of band-aids.  There is nowhere else I would rather be. No other group of people I would rather work with. No other students whose germs I would rather share. This is my dream.

There are moments throughout the day when I am stopped in my tracks by the realization-this is my dream.

Look where you want to go and steer in that direction: How a blog started a school June 24, 2011

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samburnett/4860845868/

I never took drivers ed, but when I was 14, my parents took me to a driver safety course.  I remember very little of the night but one thing that stood out was the phrase: “look where you want to go and steer in that direction.”  The course instructor was offering solid advice for what to do if you hit a patch of ice and lost control of the car.  That advice stuck with me and, as I navigate Colorado winters, is something I practice regularly.  As it turns out, this has been good advice for education and life as well.  Sometimes you have to not only look at where you want to go, but steer in that direction as well.  This is how a blog led to starting a school.

I started Dreams of Education on March 8, 2010.  At the time I had filled my Google reader to the brim with post feeds from educators around the world.  I was being inspired and fed daily by my world-wide personal learning network and yet in the schools I was in, saw a very different reality of education for kids.  I had kept iLearn Technology since 2007 and really enjoyed blogging there.  To be honest, it was easy to just write a review on technology tools and how they could be used in the classroom.  It was also safe.  I didn’t have to reveal too much of myself.  But in March of 2010 I couldn’t stay “silent” any longer.  I needed a place to dream and invite others to dream with me.  I used this blog to look at where I wanted education to go and started steering in that direction.  Here I am 478 days later starting a school.  It sounds much more neat and tidy and perfectly planned in writing than it is in reality.

During this time last year I had just left a teaching position I really loved.  I had to leave for health reasons and to be truthful, I wasn’t completely ready to leave.  I loved the students I taught.  They energized me and gave me a sense of professional purpose-they needed me.  I had just packed up my classroom and handed off my job to another. It was freeing, and terrifying, and exciting, and rotten.

I always felt like a bit of an outsider at the school where I taught.  I couldn’t seem to just let the status quo be and was constantly pushing the envelope and questioning why we did everything the way we did.  I consistently felt a sense of urgency for change because we were dealing with kids who kept growing and couldn’t wait around for us to get it right next year.  I couldn’t accept the ‘good enough’ mentality.  I found the place I fit in on Twitter and in an online network of educators from around the world.  Here I found other educators who believed that kids deserved better now.  Suddenly I wasn’t an outsider but part of a movement in education to make a change.  Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for the school where I spent the past 7 years.  It provided a place for me to grow and interact with other wonderful educators and gave me the freedom to develop my own programs and work with teachers.  At the end of the day, we just have different visions for learning.  I was willing to push for change, they were comfortable in the routines that they had in place.

Leaving my classroom and my students was hard. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, it felt like summer never ended because come August I wasn’t preparing my classroom and computers for the following year.  No re-imaging machines, no bulletin boards, no sending cards over the summer to my students. It was strange.  I worked with several area schools on social media, technology integration and professional development.  I took home boxed curriculum and dreamed up ways to expand their offering with technology and more engaging activities.

On September 28, 2010 I was working on aligning technology activities to reading curriculum.  As is my habit, I was multi-tasking. Listening to Pandora, chiming into #edchat on Twitter, tinkering with new tech sites, and working on the curriculum alignment.  As I was working and chatting and listening a song came on that I had never heard before.  I scrambled to find a sticky note so that I could write down the artist before the song changed (for the record it was Zee Avi).  I sat there amazed that technology had come to the point that it can predict what kind of music I will like based on just one bit of information.  Because I was elbow deep in the ridiculousness that is boxed curriculum, I started to wonder why curriculum didn’t look more like Pandora.  I threw out the following on Twitter: “What if curriculum looked more like Pandora?”  Immediately I started getting retweets and comments like, “say more about that” and “exactly, curriculum should be more customized.”

I couldn’t seem to shake the idea of curriculum looking more like Pandora. For a blogger that means it is time to sit down and write.  Over the summer I had gotten into the habit of starting every day with a TED talk or RSA animate video with breakfast.  That morning I happened to watch Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.  I started wondering if there might not be something to these hunches I was having and wrote the post When Hunches Collide.  It has been my most popular post on Dreams of Education to date.  In the post I wrote out some thoughts on curriculum, hiring teachers, community involvement in schools, #twitacad, and innovation lab.  The post was truly just a collection of unfinished thoughts, a place to get them out of my head.  I didn’t know it at the time but September 28 was a “steer in that direction” kind of day.

In the first weeks of December, one of my Twitter PLN @DoremiGirl introduced me to @ianchia.  Ian is an app developer in Australia who was working on an app called Send Felicity and was looking for input from educators.  Yoon knew that I geeked out about technology, specifically Apple products, and introduced us.  Ian and I immediately hit it off.  After a handful of fantastic conversations I told Ian about this crazy idea I had to make curriculum look more like Pandora.  I wanted to know from a developer standpoint if this crazy idea was feasible to even build.  Ian reassured me that it was possible and pointed me to some tools I could use to prototype my idea.  Suddenly it seemed like I was surrounded by people who were pouring into helping make my idea a reality. Business minds who were making recommendations, developers who were pointing me toward wireframing tools, educators who would listen to my craziness and reassure me that it was worth pursuing.  The Learning Genome was born.

One of the business people I met along the way introduced me to an educator in Denver Public School System.  He told me very little about him just that “you should meet, I think you might find some overlaps.”  Jason and I set up a time to meet at a local bookstore.  I showed up, he did not. Miscommunication in dates/times.  That weekend was the COLearning 2.0 conference in Colorado.  Several teachers that I used to work with joined me at the conference.  A discussion began in the first session about how classrooms could look different.  One of my colleagues and I were IMing each other like crazy as the discussion unfolded.  A gentleman sitting across the room from us was saying all of the things we were typing back and forth. It was a little creepy, like we had some how tapped into this guy’s brain with our instant messaging and were now controlling his thoughts.  After the session, my colleague @matthewquigley went to talk to the gentleman whose mind we had been controlling.  As it turns out it was none other than the Jason that I was supposed to meet at the book store.  Small world.  We talked more about what schools could/should look like. We dreamed together right there in the hallway and made plans to meet the following Monday.

Jason has been developing a new school design.  He has re-imagined the school day, year, staffing and financial model.  His goal was to open a charter school in DPS based on this model.  The problem: he wasn’t exactly sure what learning might look like in this new structure.  Light bulb moment.  This is why the business associate wanted us to meet.  I walked Jason through my Learning Genome prototypes and described my vision for how learning could look different.  Synergy.  At the conference, Matthew and I mentioned that we had been dreaming for years about what a school could look like and that someday we would like to start a school of our own.  We were thinking YEARS down the road.  Jason challenged us. Why not now?  Jason has quite the educational background and has been involved in 13 school start-ups. He let us know that the 6th month time frame we were staring down was a big task but not impossible.  We were intrigued.

Jason met with me in March to sketch out a rough timeline of what it would take to start a school by fall of 2011.  It was a lot.  Never one to back down from a challenge, I started seriously considering the possibility and even spat out a few blog posts casually mentioning the idea.  At the same time, I wrote a post here about Charlotte Mason because I had just completed a day of internship at one of the schools I was working at.  The leader of the school pointed some prospective parents to my blog (who happened to know me from my previous teaching position).  In addition to seeing my Charlotte Mason post, they saw my “working on starting a school” post.  The next day I got a call from two families asking me about the school I was starting.  We talked at length about the vision of the school, what it could look like and what it could do for kids.  The families asked if we could sit down and talk more about it.  On March 29 three incredible families agreed to take on this journey with us.  Anastasis Academy was born.

This blog, Dreams of Education, started a school.  It let me look at where I wanted to go, leaving it up to me to steer in that direction.  Those little hunches that came one blog post at a time turned into big ideas.  I think all too often in education we spend so much time looking at where we want to go that we forget the steering in that direction piece.  The vision is important but without action it remains just another good idea.  We can’t wait for someone else to tackle education.  Our students can’t afford to wait for us to get it right in a few years. Their needs are here and require answers now.

It is up to us to look at where we want to go and steer in that direction.

 

**I am learning that there is a story being told through the creation of this school. This post is just a SMALL piece of that story.  If you are interested in how my partner in crime @matthewquigley fits into all of this you should check out his new blog.  I’ll work on getting him to keep posting

Education is life: a call for more fabulous failures March 12, 2011

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending a Charlotte Mason philosophy internship.  You know that you are doing what you are meant to do when the thought of a 8 hour day of education philosophy training sounds like fun.  I love the discussion of education, learning, and humanity.  I marvel when I read the works of Charlotte Mason, this is a woman ahead of her time.  While I don’t subscribe to all of the Charlotte Mason philosophy, at the core, much of what she believed holds merit and is important in the discussion of education.  As I read, narrated, discussed, and observed classrooms, I jotted down notes…of course, because I am a blogger, those notes look suspiciously like a post.

Before I get into the meat of my thinking, here is a little background on Charlotte Mason (1842-1923).  Charlotte Mason was a British educator who devoted her life to improving the quality of education.  Charlotte fought for education for all, believing that all children deserved a quality education regardless of their social status or class.  She believed that education was an atmosphere, discipline, and life.   The Charlotte Mason philosophy is most widely used as a home school curriculum but is also used in classrooms around the world.

First I have to put this quote out there because it is just so fantastic: “Textbooks are sawdust for the mind-children need food.”  Couldn’t agree more!

Every philosophy of education has two parts: an anthropology (a belief about human nature- what does it mean to be a person?) and an epistemology (understanding the nature of knowledge).  It was Charlotte Mason’s belief that children are whole persons (as opposed to limited beings who will one day arrive at person hood).  This is an important distinction because it drives what she believes about the nature of knowledge.

“The reason is, perhaps, that we regard a person as a product, and have a sort of unconscious formula, something like this: Given such and such conditions of civilization and education, and we shall have such and such a result, with variations.”

“We attempt to define a person, the most commonplace person we know, but he will not submit to bounds; some unexpected beauty of nature breaks out; we find he is not what we thought, and begin to suspect that every person exceeds our power of measurement.” (emphasis added)

For me this emphasized that children are not products. They are not widgets to be passed through a factory where they will be stripped of their individuality and person hood by being fed sawdust (boxed curriculum) and measured by a standardized test.  Every child exceeds our power of measurement. By measuring and tracking students in this way we are limiting them.  Measurement is quantification for purposes of classification. This type of measurement leads to the “carrots” and “sticks” that we see in education.  We dangle good grades, pizza parties at the end of the week, and graduation in front of students like carrots while at the same time using the “sticks” of failure to coerce students to act in a way that we have deemed acceptable.  Assessment on the other hand helps students formulate the next steps of learning based on current weaknesses.  Did you see the distinction there?  Measurement seeks to satisfy our insecurities by giving us information that can be used to classify.  Assessment seeks to inform our decision-making process for next steps.  The difference is that assessment challenges students so they can know the satisfaction of growth.

What we do right now is teach students to avoid shame by gaining praise.  Isn’t that the way our grading system is set up?  Kids play the game to win. Some decide they can’t win the game and stop trying (the C and D students who have so much more potential but refuse to play by our rules). Others decide that the certain failure isn’t worth even entering the game and drop out all together.  They think, “this game has nothing to do with me, I’m not playing anymore.”  Is it any wonder that some of our most creative, innovative minds couldn’t wait to get out of school or dropped the game all together?  What are we, as adults, showing students we value here?  It certainly doesn’t teach children that we value them as people.  They pick up on this.  This is precisely why Monika Hardy has to let her students “detox” from the system before they can fully enter into the Innovation Lab space.  We have to stop regarding students as “incomplete and undeveloped beings (who will one day arrive at the completeness of man)”.  Instead we need to see students as “weak and ignorant persons, (whose ignorance we must inform and whose weakness we must support, but whose potentialities are as great as our own).  The “ignorant” language may feel a little harsh from our cultural standpoint but all she means here is that they are uninformed and don’t yet know what they don’t know.  I love how she ends that passage she says, “We cannot do otherwise than despise children, however kindly or even tenderly we commit the offense.”  So many schools are committing that offense. Couldn’t this be a teachers job description?  It is our job to shed light to ignorance and support students in their weakness?  Isn’t that what learning is all about, discovering that there are things we don’t know and strengthening our areas of weakness?  Allowing room and opportunity for fabulous failures.

Because children are persons, they must have liberty.  Charlotte makes the distinction between liberty and license.  License says I get to do what I want all the time.  We all know this culture well. We are immersed in the “do it if it feels good” culture in the United States.  It isn’t that those things are always bad or wrong, but to live by chance desire makes us slaves to our own will.  What we must do is train children in such a way that they properly manage their freedom.  Understanding that they could do whatever they want to do but that they shouldn’t always follow those “chance desires”.  This is what it means to act as an adult, knowing our liberty while properly managing it.  Within this managed liberty, we introduce children to learning opportunities they may not have pursued on their own, knowing that sometimes deep satisfaction takes time and incubation.  The Green Dot that I mentioned in this post. Exposing children to what is good, true, and beautiful and encouraging them in their weakness to that place of deep satisfaction.  Struggle and delight…both are essential for growth.

I love Charlotte Mason’s careful attention to “Living Books”, the idea that children can enjoy and appreciate good literature. That we don’t need to water down and strip literature down to the facts for students to learn (i.e. textbooks).  As children read together they should narrate back what they are reading, to offer those ideas the chance to solidify and take hold.  This is the narration portion of reading. During narration teachers are not to “tease them with corrections”.  I observed this many times throughout the day, students narrate as a class telling back what they can remember from a passage.  After one student has narrated back as much as they can remember the teacher asks the group, “is there anyone who has an addition or correction to make?”  Students self-correct, collaboratively add to the narration and then return to the text.  At this time, students go back to key phrases, and ideas and follow-up with their own understandings, questions, and reflections as a class.  The important part to this process is that the object (in this case a book) must be worthy of study.

“…mere information is to it as a meal of sawdust to the body; there are no organs for the assimilation of the one more than of the other.”

“Look at any publisher’s list of school books and you shall find that the books recommended are carefully desiccated, drained of the least suspicion of an idea, reduced to the driest statements of fact.”

Don’t you love that language?  I don’t know about you but my education resembles that statement, particularly the history books that I encountered in school… carefully desiccated, drained of the least suspicion of an idea, reduced to the driest statements of fact.  That pretty much sums it up!

Charlotte Mason didn’t believe in coddling children.  In an age where over-protection is a culture and every effort is made to make sure that kids are safe (to an extreme), this is one quote that I especially appreciated:

“Let us hear Professor Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, the Indian scientist on one of his conclusions concerning the nervous impulse in plants, ‘A plant carefully protected under glass from outside shocks looks sleek and flourishing but its higher nervous function is then found to be atrophied. But when a succession of “blows” (electric shocks) is rained on this effete and bloated specimen, the shocks themselves create nervous channels and arouse anew the deteriorated nature. Is it not the shocks of adversity and not cotton wool protection that evolve true manhood?”

This had me thinking about the way we carefully protect students from the outside shocks of technology and social media…only to later find students atrophied.  Part of learning is making mistakes in an environment where those “blows” are not detrimental to the point of demise, but rather cause evolution of thinking.  Later she follows with:

“But teaching may be so watered down and sweetened, teachers may be so suave and condescending, as to bring about a condition of intellectual feebleness and moral softness which it is not easy for a child to overcome. The bracing atmosphere of truth and sincerity should be perceived in every School; and here again the common pursuit of knowledge by teacher and class comes to our aid and creates a Current of fresh air perceptible even to the chance visitor, who sees the glow of intellectual life and moral health on the faces of teachers and children alike.”

Kids can smell watered down teaching from a mile away, they don’t want anything to do with it.  Kids curiously seek out active engagement and experiences that they can learn from.  Often what we offer is far from either of these because what we are seeking (certainly in U.S. education) isn’t a love of learning but for a love of marks. We build our classrooms around success and failure. The problem with this, is that children come to label themselves (as we have labeled them first) as either successes or as failures in school and consequently in life.  What we should be teaching children is that every day they have a new brain, it looks different from yesterday because new connections and relationships were made. This is a far different message because it lets students know that they are never finished growing. That every day there is growth to be made, something to be added.

Education is life.

 

Indiana Wesleyan University is a Christian College offering a range of courses including its popular Master in Education program.

Operation Customized Learning: The Learning Genome Project February 19, 2011

“We have organized schools not by how kids learn, they have been organized by an easy way to teach.” -Daggett

In September I mentioned a “hunch” I was having about education and learning.  Since September I have fleshed out that hunch into a business model, prototype, and wireframe and am currently working with a team of programmers to make it a reality.  Last night I presented this idea at the House of Genius and got some great feedback.  It made me want to know what my PLN geniuses thought about the idea!  I would love your input on this project as I move forward, are there things that aren’t clear in my explanation of what I am doing? Ideas for how to improve it? Recommendations?  Below is a little background as to the “why” I am pursuing this project along with a brief description of my solution.

Education is currently operating from a factory model where students are treated like widgets. We push them through a system and expect that the result will be “educated” citizens who graduate with the exact same skill set to go to college or get a job.  Compounding the problem is boxed curriculum that schools use to meet standards.  That boxed curriculum reaches one type of learner in one way.  It is scripted and artificially paced.  The problem: we aren’t dealing with widgets, we are dealing with children, each with different interests, learning styles, passions, abilities, and developmental levels.
As a result of this educational model we have uninspired, unmotivated students that aren’t truly educated.  We don’t teach them in a way that really equips them to be successful in life.  We teach them how to play the system. That if they read the bolded words in their textbook-they can correctly fill in the worksheet, if they memorize the worksheet they can successfully regurgitate it back on the test. Repeat the process and they can graduate with an impressive GPA. That kind of “education” can go directly from a students eyes to their hand, only occasionally taking up residence in their brains.  This is what school “success” has been defined by, and it is getting worse.

Sometimes students will get lucky and learn from a teacher that can draw out passion and inspire learning; but with increased standardization and testing, teachers don’t have time to differentiate for every student. What’s more, they don’t know what they don’t know and may not be able to find the perfect lesson/website/book/video/manipulative for the student.

As a teacher I am deeply concerned about individualizing learning as much as possible, recognizing that every one of my students had unique gifts, talents, passions and that they bring something to the world that no one else does.  I started thinking about how we have managed to customize everything from ringtones to hamburgers.  We have managed to customize absolutely everything in our worlds except for education.  Pandora is a great example, enter one song or artist that you enjoy and an entire “customized” playlist is created based on that one song.  You end up discovering artists and songs that you didn’t even know existed, and 9 times out of 10 it becomes a new favorite.  If we can do this for music, why can’t we do it for curriculum?  This is where my solution comes in, right now I’m calling it the Learning Genome.  The Learning Genome is a platform that allows a group of approved educators (experts) to tag curriculum based on a set of learning attributes (much in the way that music is tagged for Pandora).  This tagged curriculum works in tandem with a student profile, an individualized learning plan,  learning goals (that can be pulled from state standards or learning benchmarks), and a school profile.  Teachers can enter a lesson or book that a student enjoyed, and based on that input a customized curriculum can be created for every student.  Just like Pandora, the Learning Genome would allow for multiple learning channels. The multiple channels are essential because students have a variety of interests and learning modalities.  Now teachers don’t have to endlessly search for the perfect curriculum for a student, the results are delivered to them.  Differentiation within the classroom becomes much easier.  Teachers can tailor curriculum to meet the individual needs of students in their classroom. Every child benefits from the ability to learn in a way that makes sense to them.
I’m working to make the Learning Genome completely free for educators (and parents/homeschool educators) to use.  The curriculum delivered will be a mixture of free/open-source and paid-for content (lessons, books, websites, videos, manipulatives, etc.).   The larger vision of the Learning Genome is to make it a complete learning management system complete with a virtual mentor program (Twitacad), electronic portfolios, blogs, wikis, planners, and an ability tracking system.  Those additional features will be added after the “hub” of the Learning Genome is in place.

The Learning Genome will be available to every school, everywhere. To fully realize the vision of customized education, I am working with a team in Colorado to start a school that will use the Learning Genome as the foundation for individualized learning.

As I said, this is a brief overview of a REALLY big project but I would appreciate any first thoughts that you have: good, bad, and ugly (but not too ugly ).

Searching for da Vinci February 10, 2011

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59372146@N00/4295400745/

True learners are multidimensional, they are passionately curious about the world around them. The Gateway to 21st Century Skills blog wrote a few posts about Leonardo da Vinci, the quintessential example of a Renaissance Man, that got my wheels turning today.  da Vinci was a scientist, inventor, painter, sculptor, architect, cartographer, mathematician, and the list goes on. He had an insatiable curiosity and was deeply creative and innovative.  da Vinci is still highly regarded as a brilliant creative genius, his thirst for learning is just as relevant today as it was 500 years ago.  Here is my question, is the current education system set up to foster the da Vinci’s of the world?

I think education likes to imagine itself as creating a population of individuals who excel in a range of subject areas. After all, we include a variety of subjects and topics that we push students through so that they can learn a little bit of everything.  The problem: our students don’t really excel at any of them because they aren’t given the opportunity to become passionately curious about any of them.  The curriculum that we offer students is one dimensional, it’s purpose has become to prepare students for testing.  Did you get that? We have created a system that prepares students to take a test. Created by the system.  What do the tests tell us? That we have students who can pass tests.  Does that sound like educational incest to anyone else?

Let me give you an example from my student teaching experience 9 years ago.  When I was an elementary student, I didn’t have to take the state test for Colorado (CSAP) because it hadn’t been invented yet.  I took the ITBS test about every 3 years and thought nothing of it.  When I started student teaching, I was curious about this state test that I would be preparing students to take (and we were encouraged to teach students how to take it).  When we got the practice tests in, I flipped through to see what sort of content the test covered.  I wanted to make sure that I had equipped my students with the necessary knowledge so that they wouldn’t have those freeze moments that can throw a students into  standardized test tail spin.  As I was flipping through the 3rd grade test I read the following question:

If you wanted to learn more about Whales, which letter would you search under in an encyclopedia?

Now, don’t cheat and look below at the answer….you said “W” didn’t you?

That would be wrong.

The choices given to students: B, M, T, or F

Seriously.

The correct answer: M for mammal

The answer my 3rd grade students would guess: B for Beluga Whale

Number one: IF any of my students were searching for whale, you know where they would look first: Google. It wouldn’t occur to most of them to go to the encyclopedia as a first reference.

Number two: If my students were searching for whale in the encyclopedia they would look under the “W” first. You know what? They would find whale. They might eventually also explore mammal under “M” when they looked at the bottom of the article and read “see also mammal”.

Number three: This is the most ridiculous line of questioning that I have seen, what information exactly is that question trying to glean? That my students can think critically to solve a problem without an obvious answer?  I would say they did pretty well by choosing “B” for Beluga Whale.

Are we creating a culture that nurtures the da Vinci’s of the world?  No, we are creating a culture that has lost all sense of curiosity, passion, and exploration. We create a culture where there is one correct answer, that we will give you, so that you can pass a test.

If the current culture doesn’t foster a da Vinci outlook on the world, what kind of culture could?  One where students were allowed to explore passions. One where students were allowed to view learning as life. One where students could see that subjects of learning are not really separate entities, but rather that learning is multidimensional, overlapping, and interwoven.  When I look at what da Vinci accomplished, it is apparent to me that this is someone who understood that all learning is life, it is connected.  I suspect that da Vinci didn’t set out to be a jack of all trades; I suspect that he set out to learn and as he learned it led to other disciplines, interests, and knowledge.  What results: a man who was able to use his unique talents and giftings to change the world.

If we send all students through the exact same subjects, the exact same way, to meet the requirements on the same test, do we have any hope of fostering students who are able to use their unique talents and gifts to change the world?  Or, will they graduate from high school with a degree that sends them into the next system where they are now expected to undo all the learning that has made them look the same and decide what makes the unique?

I’m sending out a call to create the da Vinci culture.

Asking the right questions January 11, 2011

Today’s #edchat topic for discussion on Twitter was: In a time of cut backs in education for the sake of the economy, should sports and extra curricular clubs take a back seat?

Those “extras” we are referring to: the arts and physical activities (sports).  For me, this #edchat topic succinctly summarizes what is wrong in education today.

There is something wrong with a system that considers the arts and physical activities as expendable.  Being “educated” has come to mean one thing: having a critical mass of a certain kind of knowledge so that one can perform well on a test.  What type of knowledge have we deemed important?  Literacy, math, science (and in some cases engineering and tech to round out the STEM initiatives).  Aren’t we more than this?  I like to think that I am more complex and “whole” than the sum of these few subjects.  Isn’t there more complexity to life than just literacy and STEM?

Who has determined that these tests accurately measure all there is to know about being successful, being human?  I would like to meet those who create these tests. If what shows up on the tests is reflective of who they are as “whole” people, I think that they must be very one-dimensional and dull.

Want to know a secret? I don’t think I want my students to be “successful” if a test is the only measure of success.  I want my students to be thinkers and problem solvers, to discover their gifts and talents and use those to shape a better world. I want my students to be creative and innovative. I want my students to be whole.  If we truly believe that students are more than just the sum of the subjects taught in school, how can we think of cutting out the programs that make them more whole?

The problem with the conversation is that it has become an either/or scenario.  Either we cut the “extras” or we have massive debt. Either we cut the “extras” or we have to cut one of the “more important” subjects. This isn’t an either/or conversation.  Those “extras” are part of learning.  The “extras” are part of what makes us uniquely human.  Those “extras” are not special and separate, they are a part of that wonderful tapestry that makes us human.  To cut them out and treat them as expendable is to treat students as a machine whose sole purpose is to have a single outcome: perform well on a test.

I think the problem goes even deeper.  When you ask students, parents, or most teachers why we want them to do well in school, the focus is usually on graduation.  We want them to graduate…with honors.  Why?  Because, then they can go into debt to pay for college (of course!).  Is anyone else looking at this problem with jaw on the floor?  What happens after college? We search for a job where we can follow directions and earn a paycheck that we can use to pay off our college debt.

College used to make sense.  In a world that wasn’t well-connected, where you couldn’t flip on your computer and be connected to an expert for free, we relied on college to be a place to go and learn to think from the best.  Learning isn’t reliant on institutions any more.  Learning happens in-spite of the institutions.  I seriously struggle with the why of a university experience in the year 2011 (I struggle with the why of schools the way they look right now too).  When I think back to my university experience, what I remember is those few (3) professors that I had that made a difference in my life. I still have all of my lecture notes and correspondences from those professors. They were exceptional for what I needed.  Outside of those 3 professors the biggest impact was my life outside of academics. The rest of the experience: worked through so I could have the piece of paper that said I did it.

Back to the #edchat topic: should we cut the extras in light of a struggling economy?  This is the wrong question to ask. The question should be: In light of a struggling economy, how can we adjust our budgets and priorities (priorities being those things we spend money on) to include the “extras” as part of an education that meets the needs of the whole child?

We try to keep answering these questions with the same unimaginative thinking that dug us into this hole.

Just for a moment let’s stop and think about the arts and physical activities.  How many math and physics problems in textbooks use sports as a story problem?

Can you see where I am going with this?  Why are we teaching math and physics through artificial story problems out of an antiquated textbook?  Why aren’t we saying, “let’s go test this out with a game of baseball”?

We aren’t thinking creatively enough about how to solve these problems. We try to segment, and rank importance, and test. Instead we should be looking at how to solve the problem in new ways.  Life is complex.  When you look at nature it doesn’t segment itself off into subjects that are done separately.  Nature is art, science, math, language, engineering, physical all in one. It happens together seamlessly.

Watch a baby, or any young animal, as they figure out life. So much is happening simultaneously that involves language, math, science, physical activity, engineering, and art.  This is how we learn to walk, talk, engage others, and keep ourselves safe. This is the way that life happens and it is the way we learn.  The real problem is, as soon as we enter school, we stop life from happening and try to erect artificial boundaries and understandings to get a single outcome.  We strip away “extras” that teach life skills like pride, respect, collaboration, teamwork, and citizenship. We reduce students to the sum of 5 subjects.  Is it any wonder that depression levels are at an all time high? Is it any wonder that we have a population that is obese?  Is it any wonder that every advertisement we see promises us a better life?

We need to be more creative, we need a paradigm shift in the way that education is done. Our thinking has to shift away from one where certain subjects are more important than others. We have to reconsider priorities and how money is spent.

Think about how dollars are spent in your school-most likely a large amount is spent on:

• Boxed curriculum (heavy emphasis on those 5 subjects, heavy emphasis on one result, heavy emphasis on meeting one type of students needs.) The boxed curriculum is purchased and taught so that students will do well on the standardized tests.
• Standardized (or other forms) of testing
• Copy budgets (anyone know someone who prints off EVERY email that lands in their inbox?)
• Textbooks (out of date as soon as they are published)

In my mind this isn’t rocket science.  Adjust your priorities and the money will be there.  The real problem is that right now our priorities are all out of whack.

I propose a new question:

In light of a struggling economy, how can we adjust our budgets and priorities (priorities being those things we spend money on) to include the “extras” as part of an education that meets the needs of the whole child?

If we can think of new ways to answer that question, the original question will be a non-issue.