Kids, Curiosity, and Credentials—Part II (Alternatives)

I ended my previous post by asking how we can truly engage all students. This isn’t a new question, nor is the obvious answer—find their interests, and nourish them—anything new. Ninety years ago Eugene Randolph Smith, founder of my school and a leading figure in the Progressive Education, harped on and on in his writing about “interest” being the central factor in student motivation and student success. He believed then that kids were capable of figuring out and then involving themselves meaningfully in things that mattered, and I believe it now.

In Smith’s time our school did not give conventional grades but conveyed the quality and depth of a student’s learning through narrative reports. Some schools today use a similar system, which seems to work on a small scale perhaps in part because it is so distinctive. The beauty in such a system is that it turns on each individual student's story, a story (in schools) of the confluence of personal engagement and curricular opportunities and expectations.

But more broadly, it’s not the report cards (or lack thereof) that matter, it’s the program, those curricular opportunities and expectations, and the answer to the engagement question must lie there.

There are is at least one broad theme to any answer that is to work for kids, from the un-schooled to the credential-obsessed. This is to shift curricula—and assessments—toward topics and modes of work based on what matters to students—worthy work on topics of authentic importance—and toward the kinds of collaborative, creative, critical-thinking-based project work that is precisely what the evangelists of 21st-century learning are calling for. It’s even essential to make communication—writing, reading, speaking, listening, representing, viewing—an important part of this work. Four of those 21st-century C’s, all knocked off in one approach to teaching and learning!

To do this well we may have to shift our thinking about credits and credentials. At its best, this work goes where few schools have dared to tread and asks questions whose answers remain obscure if there even are answers at all; certainly there is seldom one “right” one. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and can inspire students to the deepest and richest kinds of grappling with ideas, perspectives, institutions, and even their own values and dreams.

Here’s an example: Every fall and spring the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is overrun by middle and high school students following their own interests in a weekend festival of interests and curiosity. The Splash (November) and Spark (March) programs offer incredible smorgasbords of workshops and minicourses that appeal to every kind of interest—and for no credential other than the experience itself (although I suppose you could add participation to your activities list on an application). “A" students and un-schoolers alike gather to follow their bliss in hundreds of directions--check out last year's menu.

A second example: Now in its second year, the amazing NuVu Studio program , a design-studio based program founded by folks from M.I.T., Harvard, and elsewhere who wanted to apply that methodology to learning across a range of problems and disciplines in as real-world-centered a way as possible. Twenty-some kids (a majority from our school, it must be said) at a time spend a term at NuVu working on open-ended, ill-defined problems of real social import and learning enormous amounts about things that haven’t quite so much mattered in their conventional school experiences—but which tend to “stick” and matter a great deal as they proceed back through their “regular” schooling. All students get from NuVu by way of credential is a narrative report, although sending schools may count the experience as elective credit. But the words of the narrative, like the addition of Splash to an activities list, can never express even of a fraction of the internal power of what the student experiences and learns.

Schools today need to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the credential culture and focus on ways to inspire students in a thousand new directions. This does not mean (necessarily) abandoning conventional classes and courses of study, but rather focusing not on piling up credits and test scores—which will in fact take care of themselves, if the new learning is well designed and well delivered—but on developing experiences that feed, and feed on, the energy of each student’s fully engaged intellect.

Kids, Curiosity, and Credentials (the fifth C?)--Part I: The Challenge

One of the challenges of 21st-century education is that educators have failed to put together a set of standardized assessments that assess all of the kinds of things that we believe are essential to success as a learner in our time. The “Four C's”—creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration—just aren’t that easy to “test” in the mass ways that states prefer as a way to appease or unhinge their citizens and that colleges like because a handful of numbers can easily be filtered by overworked admission offices.

We do have instruments like the College & Work Readiness Assessment and the High School Survey of Student Engagement, which measure aspects of these Four C's in their way. But on the whole we’re stuck for the moment with an alphabet soup of state assessments, SATs, AP exams, and the ACT. The argument could be made that the IB—International Baccalaureate—might come closest to the current ideal, including as it does a broad array of assessments beyond the prescribed examinations, but it still falls short as a perfect solution--and it comes with a pretty tightly prescribed program.

In my day job I work with kids and families on the challenges of searching for, applying to, and choosing colleges, which I think we can all agree is largely constrained by the standard ingredient list of the U.S. application process: recommendations, testing, transcript, application, essays. Within each category there tend to be further constraints, or at least a need to ensure that the pieces are intelligible to the admission officers reading the files. On the student (and parent) side, there is the eternal compulsion to polish and pad that can turn the process into something as warped and distasteful as those pre-teen beauty pageants.

I imagine that most of us have tried to imagine a better way to organize the admission process for colleges and next schools, at least in reaction to the news media's glee at every opportunity to “expose” the extreme levels of competition that characterize the struggle for access the Ivy League and the independent pre-schools of New York City. Sick and sad, we think, although it’s all too easy to get sucked into the game ourselves.

In the end, of course, we are told that it’s all about credentials: credentials for admission, credentials for employment, credentials to validate time and energy expended. It is the society we live in, I guess; it even makes me wish that someone like Bill Bryson would apply some wit and wisdom to a study of how this all came to be. Credentials, alas, persist as the fifth “C” of 21st-century education.

In an earlier day—when competition was neither so fierce nor such a source of anxiety and anguish—the credentialing industry was less developed. Kids could play in the woods rather than spend two nights a week playing town soccer, and they could curl up in a corner of the public library and read rather than spend weekends and evening cramming for the SAT.

Credential culture has put intellectually curious and creatively inclined kids in a strange position. Many such children are fortunate to have interests that align with the goal of amassing little badges and certificates—just the thing for selective admissions!—while at the same time having most of what they do satisfy not some external expectation but an inner itch. Thus, it tends to work out for most of them.

But not for all. The world—even our world—is still blessedly full of kids who are labeled as “other-directed”: focused on things not of school nor of conventional sports nor of “the arts.” These are the collectors, the experts on esoteric subjects, the players of obscure (or online, which offer no “credentials” at anything less than the world championship level, or at least no credential that most kids would venture to share in a world where gaming is so easily blamed for all the ills of childhood and adolescence) games.

How many of these kids lurk in the obscure recesses of your school, unrecognized except by a few friends and the occasional teacher as other than “underachievers” who “don’t seem to pay enough attention to their schoolwork”? These are the kids who are quietly un-schooling themselves even as they spend six or eight or ten hours a day in school—kids who are truly not letting school interfere with their educations. They may even be demonstrably and frustratingly among your “brightest” students, but what you are offering is of little interest to them.

The question is, What can schools do to engage the students who aren’t in it for the credentials but who are in it for the knowledge, the skills, the sheer excitement of doing or learning something that fuels their true internal fires?

I will propose an answer in my next post here in a day or two.

Sir Ken Robinson, TEDxLondon, and the Independent School Response

Back in 2008 Sir Ken Robinson was a featured speaker at the National Association of Independent Schools Annual Conference (when the hashtag #NAISAC08 wasn’t even a glimmer in some tweeter’s eye). He got a huge round of applause, and he generated buzz that lasted for hours, at least until people got into their planes, trains, and automobiles and headed back to a world of midterm examinations, board meetings, anxious families, teacher hiring, and all the things that energize late February and early March in independent schools.

To whatever extent, in the past couple of years Sir Ken has rather gone viral in the world of education, and like Daniel Pink (another #NAISAC08 featured speaker) his name alone has become a sort of synecdoche for “innovation, change, creativity”—to the extent that I almost feel the need to ask readers’ pardon for invoking his name.

After that conference I came home with mind a-bubble and dashed off a piece that was published as a back-cover "Commentary" in Education Week as “The New Progressivism Is Here.” In that essay I attempted, clumsily, to suggest that the kinds of constructivist practices touted by Sir Ken and long promoted (at least in the independent school community) by the likes of Grant Wiggins, Heidi Hayes Jacobs, Howard Gardner, and others were entering the mainstream as natural evolutions of the progressive ideals of earlier generations. The New Progressivism, I proposed, was poised to become the recognized body of Best Practice. I even spent several years filling a blog with further observations and thoughts on the New P.

Sir Ken Robinson keeps promoting his ideals, and in retrospect I am rather grateful that the New Progressivism never caught on as a concept, as the “P Word” (New or old) has a way of derailing substantive conversations about education in all kinds of unfortunate ways. I just finished watching a large chunk of TEDxLondon, “The Education Revolution,” which was inspired, opened, and closed by Sir Ken. I was delighted—ecstatic, even—to hear him proclaim that “the principles of alternative education [that is, the practices and emphases that I had called the New Progressivism] are the principles of education,” at least as it should be and increasingly is being practiced.

Conversations about change and innovation in education, Sir Ken also noted, “are not happening in a vacuum—not in a cultural vacuum, not in a historical vacuum.” It was nice to hear him remark on the historicity of the ideas that he propounds so well, and it was even nice to hear him acknowledge some of the innovative educators and schools of the past whose successes—and arguably whose failures—have contributed much to current-day thinking.

From my perspective one of the most important points that Sir Ken made in his TEDxLondon closing was in reference to “mainstream” schools, and their role in—and often their absence from--talk about innovation. This was true to an extent for the conference as a whole, where un-schooling and non-institutional approaches to education played a significant role, as if many of the participants are perhaps ready to give up on the idea that established institutions can make significant changes in their ways of doing education. But at least Sir Ken, noting an initiative in Los Angeles that involves the public schools there, seems to have a bit more hope.

North American independent schools, and their counterparts elsewhere on the planet, probably qualify in most minds as the epitome of “mainstream.” While I think that’s not quite accurate, it’s close enough to make me want to jump up and down—as featured speakers at so many other NAIS Annual Conferences since New York in 2008 have made me want to do—and say, “C’mon, guys, let’s get to it! Something is afoot, and something is here!” It doesn’t matter whether you call that something the New Progressivism or simply a comprehensive new understanding of “the principles of education,” but the imperative for change is well and truly upon us all, and we must respond.

I have great hope—and I am lucky to work in a place where I see that hope being realized daily—that independent schools, with their stores of cultural, social, political, intellectual, creative, and fiscal capital, can offer a response that is not just reactive—a practice adopted here, a new policy there—but in fact profoundly and seriously innovative, and innovative in proportion to the real challenge. To paraphrase a tweet from my boss from a TechCrunch Disrupt! San Francisco session last week with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, Real innovation is about solving problems that are hard and valuable, and not just solving simple problems in clever ways.

I can’t think of anything harder and more valuable that educating kids (and ourselves) well for the world we live in and the world we shall be living in. Independent schools have to embrace “the principles of education,” as the best thinkers understand them today, and bring themselves and their faculties up to the highest level of implementation while encouraging even further, and bolder, exploration.

The time is here!

Your Father’s (and Grandparents’) Teachers—A Measured Appreciation

I’ve preached hard on the need for schools to embrace change and innovation as they adapt their work to the requirements of a new age and new markets. The schools of tomorrow can’t be like the schools of yesterday or even today, not in the way they think about curriculum and pedagogy; we can’t be stuck in a rut. I hope I don’t sound as though I despise everything that came before, uh, me, or that I’m one of those shrill voices condemning all the educational practices of the past as crimes against children—I’m not. This is my attempt to put some perspective on the relationship between "old times" and our own.

It’s certainly conventional wisdom now to make the claim that schools today must produce something (that is to say, provide learning experiences for kids) substantially different from an old, “industrial” model. “Schools used to be in the knowledge distribution business,” a friend has written, as if the essential measure of graduates in 1910 or 1950 had been in fact how much stuff—course content—they knew. (It makes me wonder a bit about the implied inverse, that we’re no longer about either knowledge, or distribution, or both. But of course that’s utterly wrong, too.)

I’m old enough and I would maintain fortunate enough to have spent time with grandparents who were all born in the nineteenth century, even before William McKinley became president—a long time ago. One was an educator, one a banker and civil servant, one a homemaker, and one an artist. All attended public schools in booming cities, two in the Midwest and two in the Northeast.

Except for the educator, who arguably spent a portion of his life professionally passing along some of what he had learned in his high school classes to his own students, I’m going to put forth the radical idea that what these worthy people took away from their pre-World War I high school experiences had no more to do with “knowledge,” in the pejorative sense that we use it today as an agglomeration of facts and principles learned by rote, than what we want our students today to take away from their multimodal, multigenre collaborative problem-solving projects.

Somehow we have it in our heads that our forebears were treated like robots, trained in schools that beat knowledge into them, like the ability to diagram sentences and decline Latin nouns, that was regarded as necessary preparation for work on the factory floor, a pre-marriage career in the stenography pool, or the life of a traveling salesman. Teachers of this era, we surmise, were apparently equally robotic, fortified (intoxicated, even) by their ability to inflict corporal punishment and no more understanding of the way their students thought or learned than they were of Professor Einstein’s latest equations. In this formulation, the poorly trained teachers in the old, “industrial” model depended on brute force to disseminate pointless knowledge, because that is what the Industrial Age demanded of its workers and their families.

Arrant and even arrogant nonsense, say I. Whoever was teaching my grandmothers and grandfathers (or yours, I dare say), probably had no more belief that the facts their students were asked to learn (all those dates—the worst!) were required for a meaningful life than you do when you ask students to learn the essential content that underlies the big concepts on which those projects are based. If the teachers of yore didn’t know basic neuroscience or Piagetian theories of development, the best of them learned from their students (as most of us still do, day in and day out) what they really needed to know (as human teachers, not robots): how their students thought, how they acquired understanding, what motivated them, and what turned them off.

It may have been a bit less elegant than our more scientific ways, but in the hands and hearts of patient, caring people, it was “knowledge” enough to inspire millions of children and to help shape their characters in particular directions. If wrists were slapped or humiliations inflicted, such were the unfortunate vagaries of the times as well as the probably uneven quality and nature of teachers and their lives—and there are still plenty of educators, even in these enlightened times, who have been known to “blow it” and do something stupid and cruel and dismissive; you can slam the door on a child’s aspirations just as easily via Smartboard or email as from the chalky dais of an airless Victorian classroom. We still have our share of “bad”—or at least vocationally misdirected—teachers, even with all we know about psychology and the art of hiring.

Nor did the portraits of Washington and Lincoln on their classroom walls make my grandparents into mindless jingoists, any more than knowing a smidgen of Latin made them into successful workers or parents. What the grandparents took away from school was not rote knowledge, but an understanding of how they learned, the idea that there would always be more to learn, and in some sense how the world outside their own households functioned. In their later lives they diverged (as people do) into Republicans and Democrats, smokers and disapprovers, family-driven and civically engaged, workaholics and dreamers, voters (in time) and scoffers. The skills they learned in school were not perhaps any more or less appropriate to their dramatically changing times (Think about it: Born 1896, died compos mentis 1992—what must that have been like to live through?) as the vaunted “21st-century skills” we ask our students to learn today.

I have to believe, even if public discourse in their day didn’t make much of these ideas, that the best of the men and women who taught my grandparents held in their teacher minds the notion that intellectual curiosity and flexibility, a kind of suppleness of thought and the ability and disposition to keep on learning, were central to what they were trying to get across in the classroom. We ought not dismiss their motives, even if it is easy for us to pooh-pooh the model that memorizing the parts of speech of Latin or German verbs was good training for learning how to use, say, an electric vacuum cleaner or adapt to the evolution of automobile pedal function and placement from the Model T to a 1958 Oldsmobile 88.

I will happily grant that the kind of “real world” problem-solving and a number of modern practices in curriculum and assessment design probably move us and our schools closer to helping students connect school learning to the development of lifelong curiosity and adaptability than did exhaustive grammar exercises or memorizing lists of English monarchs. But I am not going to condemn the teachers of the past as pedantic or unenlightened automata nor the schools in which they taught as nothing more than brutalizing assembly lines of thoughtless, heartless learning. Even a cursory look at the experiences of real people (because I cannot believe that my small family sample is unique) indicates that they deserve far better.

I imagine a magical circumstance in which the teachers who encouraged my grandfather (the teacher) to apply to college and who prevailed on his millworker parents to give their son a shot at higher education were suddenly transported, in a sort of reverse Connecticut Yankee way, to a classroom at my own school in 2011. They might have to update their chops as teachers (and they might actually be extremely relieved at being liberated from drilling students on material they themselves might have found dull), but I think their instincts and hopes for their students would put them right in the best kind of groove as effective educators in our time. They clearly believed in kids and put their most effective time and energy not into diagramming sentences but into helping kids reach worthwhile goals in ways that would enrich their whole lives.

News! "WHAT IS A SCHOOL?" released as an e-book

Last winter I began this blog with a series of posts under the heading “What Is A School?” I am excited to announce that the series is now available—updated and with an introduction—as a e-book.

Subtitled, “A Philosophical and Practical Guide for Independent School Leaders, Trustees, and Friends,” What Is A School? explores the essential aspects of what independent schools are and must aspire to be in the next decades. It has some Old School elements and some cheerleading for seriously innovative practice—elements that preserve what is most vital and worthy in the independent school experience while pushing the boundaries of best practice in management, leadership, program, and vision.

As the subtitle suggests, the intended audience for What Is A School? is anyone who plays a leading role in setting the course for a school or schools—administrators, board members, teacher leaders, faculty members, and in fact anyone who cares about a particular school, for independent schools in general, for the state of education, and above all for the students for whom independent schools exist.

At the moment the book is available for Kindle through Amazon, for the Nook at Barnes & Noble, from Apple at the iTunes Store, and for other e-book readers that use the .ePub format through MyBookOrders.Com.

I modestly hope that Not Your Father’s School readers will enjoy What Is A School? and pass the word to friends and colleagues who might be interested.

Standards for Effective Teaching—Got Some?

511 followers. 82 views. 1 response.

This was the outcome of a Twtpoll I posted (on Twitter, naturally) a couple of weeks back. I had been chatting with a colleague at another school on the topic of standards for effective teaching, and it occurred to me to ask my Tweeps, “Has your K12 school developed and published its standards for effective teaching?”

It seems like a reasonable question. After all, independent school thought leaders and accrediting bodies have been nagging at schools for twenty years or more to implement consistent, regular programs of teacher evaluation. This isn’t like giving every kid their own iPad or dropping AP courses or football—just a necessary evolution in the way we all need to be doing our work.

About ten or twelve years ago I was at one of the “Eloquent Mirrors” workshops offered by Steve Clem of the Association of Independent Schools of New England. Speaking of schools’ evaluation systems and teacher performance, Steve rather puckishly asked, “And you have all articulated your standards for effective teaching, haven’t you?” I guess he knew we’d all be looking at our shoes; we were.

I came home that day and started working with our academic program team to cook up a process for us to create these standards as a full faculty. The morning of one professional day, a full faculty meeting, and a couple of team and then department heads meetings later, we had something we rolled out of which we felt pretty proud: We had our standards, nine of ’em, each with a couple of subcategories. (You can find them on page 9 of our downloadable Teacher’s Guide to Life and Work.) They came out of a full-faculty brainstorm with a couple of rounds of full-faculty feedback on several drafts. The process was not only pretty painless but also inspired some great conversations about teaching and learning and what it means to be a teacher and a professional in our community.

So when I put my poll up I figured I would hear from quite a few people that they either had their standards or were working on them. Otherwise, how could anyone actually be evaluating teachers?

I know that not all of my Twitter followers are in schools, but quite a few are, but I was unprepared for the result. Eighty-two people had looked at the poll, and 81 of them didn’t even have an answer; perhaps a “no” or even a “not yet” might have felt too embarrassing even to put down. And by the way, that single (“yes”) answer was mine—I had thought I should prime the pump, so to speak.

Grant Wiggins and others have been telling us since the 1990s that we need to let kids know the categories in which their work is being evaluated and the standards by which we are measuring their performance. I know that doesn’t always happen, but most teachers know that information on all this offered beforehand not only guides kids toward doing better work, it also saves a lot of explanation and confusion later. It makes our lives, and our students’, simpler and better.

And I’ll admit that when we made our standards we didn’t actually drop them into our developing evaluation system for a couple of years—at least until people got used to the idea and indeed until members of the faculty recognized their positive value as offering some clarity to the feedback teachers would receive; they actually asked for them to be incorporated.

But it’s 2011, and I guess I might have thought we’d come farther along since I went to that workshop. Steve must be awfully tired of seeing people look at their shoes whenever he rolls out an “Eloquent Mirrors.”

I guess what is reflected in those mirrors might not have changed as much as I might have thought. But getting to those standards just wasn’t that hard, and now, more than ever, I think schools need to be having all the conversations about teaching, learning, and professionalism—what it means to be a 21st-century educator—that they can organize.

The Independent School Value Proposition

As the economy stalls and some schools look at empty desks, there is quite a lot of talk about the “value proposition” of independent schools. This is simply the bottom line in the calculation based on the question: Is sending my kid to this independent school worth it?

What gets factored into that calculation, of course, is the big question. It’s all about brand, signature programs, values, college and next-school lists, prestige factors, campus bells and whistles—on and on. Some people have even tried to set the calculation up with actual numbers.

That’s great, and probably a worthwhile exercise, but I’m going to try to reduce the value proposition to lowest terms, terms that may also point toward ways that schools can work to make this calculation come out in their favor.

Here’s my simple formulation: A school’s value is measured in the degree to which it can stoke the capacities of kids to be the best possible versions of themselves and the degree to which the school extracts those capacities—at an appropriate developmental levels—while they are at the school; all of this is in preparation for a life beyond the school in which the process of independently discovering capacities and then stoking and expressing them becomes automatic.

I’ve worked out some metrics for this, even. Humor me, if you will, by focusing on your own school as I go through them:

First is what I call the Parent Thrill Factor. This is the measure by which parents at your school are thrilled by their child’s experience. The best empirical gauge I can come up with is the frequency of occasions on which your parents, listening to parents of children in other schools, feel a flush of pride, satisfaction, and relief—as opposed to unease or even pangs of buyer’s remorse. It might be hard to gather the data on this, so I suppose one is left with parent participation in annual giving as a second, more concrete, measure.

Second is the degree to which graduates of your school go on to lives that continue to enact the highest values and aims of your school. Superficially this may be about college majors and vocations, although even more telling are the deeper choices graduates make about how to live their lives: their social and civic activities, the ways in which they shape their relationships and share their values and passions among families and friends, and the ways they continue to engage with the world as a place of constant learning. Some of these elements might actually be quantifiable somehow, but I am not aware that anyone has devised the units or the scales.

Third is the Faculty Thrill Factor, measurable at graduation ceremonies by the number of smiling head-nods per faculty member per graduate, as graduates walk across the stage and give their old teachers, coaches, and advisors a few seconds in which their students’ character, accomplishments, and growth flash before their eyes—values-based developmental biographies in miniature. If the school is really providing transformative experiences, you can feel an almost constant buzz from the faculty section.

The hardest metric to figure out, I guess, is how students actually respond to their school experience. Maybe there’s a shining-eye factor or something like it, but I won’t pretend to describe it. I suppose, at the risk of being misunderstood, that it might be worth looking at next-school and college lists—not for those prestigious names that have served as quality proxies for a century or so, but rather for real breadth that indicates that the school is inspiring and supporting students in a variety of interests and passions, from the arts to the sciences to intercultural exploration to … whatever. The individual school names on these lists are supposed to be about the kids, not about the school, but even so, an aggregation that covers many interests and different types of experience says something great about a school.

A few years ago our faculty worked up a set of core standards or values, which we keep around (they’re posted on the wall) as guides and touchstones for our work. As I have been thinking about this post it occurs to me that the sentence, “An education at our school will expand and develop student capacities in _______” (fill in the blank with each of the ten areas specified in our standards) is a pretty good statement of our value proposition—as long we continue to hold up our end of the bargain, to make good on the assertion.

Stoking capacities and extracting behaviors based on them, and building the confidence and habits of mind to continue building and using these capacities—and continually discovering and developing new ones—through a life of meaning and purpose, is what schools are supposed to be all about. The “how” matters of course, but it is that essential work, and the degree to which a school is successful in doing it within the context of its expressed aims and values, that is the essential measure of whether a school is worthy of the tuitions it charges and the efforts of everyone—faculty, students, families, alumnae/i—who supports it. This is the value proposition to which every independent school must aspire.