Here’s my new TEDx talk, or, as I like to call it, the video that makes you wonder when Sam will take his hand out of his pants.
Category: Learning
What if the city became the school?
I think it’s time to start thinking differently. Watch this and you’ll see what I mean.
Is It Time to Stop Making the Grade?
I got two very different emails this morning that underscore just how far our thinking has to move if we’re ever going to truly reimagine American public education in ways that are aligned with the individual needs of each child.
The first was framed around a provocative question — “Imagine if rather than waiting to scale [innovative] ideas [about schools], we focused on scaling each individual?” — and an even more provocative idea: building an app that allowed people to self-direct their own learning experiences and reimagine the city as the school. The point is not that THIS IDEA is the answer — read the piece and decide for yourselves how much merit it deserves. The point is that this IS the sort of outside-the-box thinking we need more of if we are serious about making the modern educational landscape more personalized and customized (and we should be).
Which leads to the second email, a link to a New York Times article in which five different people react to the latest progress reports for New York City’s elementary and middle schools — progress reports that continue to rate schools via the same A-F letter system we’ve used since your grandmother was dancing to Big Band Swing. As the Times editors frame it, “Proponents say the “A” to “F” grading system is one of the best ways to get parents to pay attention, but critics say that the city’s over emphasis on test performance skews the grades, making them unreliable for judging the quality of a school.”
I’m sorry — but is this really the best we can do? On one hand, I get it — the best way to communicate is to speak in symbols and languages people already readily understand, and there is no more widely-understood set of shared symbols than the ones we already associate with American public education. On the other hand, I repeat — if we are serious about making the modern educational landscape more personalized and customized, at some point we have to start creating new symbols that reflect our commitment to personalization and customization. And letter grades ain’t it.
To be sure, massive urban districts like New York City’s have a particularly heavy burden when it comes to reimagining the shape and structure of school, but that doesn’t mean they need to be helpless in the face of our most intractable societal memes. And as long as leading voices in education keep making decisions based on the easiest way to “get parents to pay attention,” you don’t need me to tell you what the rest of us will keep getting as a result.
This is Why Education Matters So Much
And young people like Malala are what’s at stake — in Pakistan and everywhere else.
This is What Great Teaching Looks Like
There’s a lot of talk nationally about the importance of teachers, and the need to identify what great teaching actually looks like — and requires.
Our search should start and end with people like Kathy Clunis D’Andrea.
A veteran educator at the Mission Hill School in Boston, Kathy epitomizes everything that’s good about the profession — and everything the rest of us need to pay closer attention to if we want to support a better, more holistic vision of American public education.
It starts with her three-part recipe for success: Love, Limits & Laughter. It succeeds because of her recognition that what matters most is equipping young people with an essential set of skills and habits that will guide them through life. And it endures because of her school’s commitment to create an environment that is consistent across classrooms, and grounded in shared values of trust, equity, and empathy.
See for yourself. And spread the word.
(This post also appeared on Start Empathy.)
This is How Youth (& YOU) Learn
Imagine if we acted on these insights?
The curious paradox of “Won’t Back Down”
Won’t Back Down, the new Hollywood film about two mothers determined to take over their children’s failing inner city school, represents everything that’s wrong with the present way we talk about school reform – and everything we need to talk about more in the future.
The Science of Learning (and of School Reform)
Here’s a strange but illustrative little animated short based off a short clip of a David Brooks speech, in which he lays bare one of the false assumptions about the brain that has led us down the wrong path for generations.
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve had my issues with David Brooks in the past — mostly because he’s so RIGHT half the time, yet he can’t seem to connect all the dots of his own emerging understanding of the extent to which we are, truly, social animals, and the extent to which that understanding should completely change how we think about schooling, and school reform.
If you’re interested in going a little deeper than 36 seconds into the science of the brain, and of school reform itself, I’d recommend reading this and this. In my mind, the implications of all this research are clear: We need to stop obsessing over what kids know, and start obsessing over who they are. We need to strike the right balance between the art and the science of teaching and learning. And we need to define the ultimate endgoal of public education as an essential set of lifeskills – and the content we teach as the means towards acquiring those skills – not vice versa.
This is what a day in the life of a typical American school district looks like
50 people. 50 different stories.
Is it what you expected?
This is what Special Education (in America) Looks Like
Imagine if the goal in America was to make every teacher a “special ed” teacher – and to give every student specialized attention? I bet we’d see less stigma, more individual and collective capacity to diagnose and meet the needs of each child, and a deeper investment in our nation’s teachers.
If that sounds like a pipe dream, bear one thing in mind — that’s how Finland already does it. Why not us?
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