Tag: 21st Century Skills

The Singularity is Coming. What Should Schools Be Doing About It?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on The Singularity is Coming. What Should Schools Be Doing About It?

Whenever I want to get a feel for the national mood, I look to Hollywood – and the films it thinks we’ll pay to see. In the post-911 malaise, there was the dystopian world of The Dark Knight. In the era of extended male adolescence, there’s just about anything from Judd Apatow. And now, in the shadow of the Technological Singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.

What’s the Singularity, you say? That’s the moment when the whole game board changes – the moment when artificial intelligence purportedly pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with) human intelligence. Hollywood’s best effort to portray it thus far is Spike Jonze’s Her, the unsettling story of a man who falls in love with his operating system, which also happens to be the first artificially intelligent OS (think Siri with a personality, and a conscience, and Scarlett Johansson’s voice). But there are others: Lucy, the film about a woman (curiously, also Scarlett Johansson) who begins to use 100% of her brain’s capacity; Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp plays a dying scientist who gives the Grim Reaper the slip by uploading his mind to the mainframe; and then, starting October 10, there’s Automata, a story about the moment man-made robots acquire a consciousness separate from their creators.

Not coincidentally, that film is set in 2044 – the year most tekkies predict the Singularity will occur. If this sounds too far-fetched for you to take seriously, consider that the person most associated with the theory, Ray Kurzweil, is not some crackpot scribbling manifestos from a cabin in Montana, but the Director of Engineering at Google – a company that has been buying up all of the most advanced robotics companies in the world over the past several months. And if that isn’t enough to get your attention, consider that the people who will be charged with making sense of this brave new world – young adults like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Her – are not some abstract future version of humanity: they’re today’s Kindergartners.

Knowing just how much the world of tomorrow will differ for the kids of today, it’s curious that so many of our most passionate contemporary debates about school reform – from high-stakes testing to the achievement gap to the growing controversy around the Common Core – are about content knowledge. This fixation is a remnant of our Industrial-era model of schooling, in which the undisputed objective was to cram as much information as possible into the minds of schoolchildren.

By 2044, however – actually, a lot sooner than that – people will have near-instant access to the totality of human wisdom. What, then, should the schools of the future be designed to do? And how will they help today’s five-year-old navigate a world of unprecedented technological, ecological and ontological promise and peril?

There are a lot of possible answers, but here’s one that seems simple enough: start focusing less on what we want kids to know, and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this – not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which we reach a new endgoal, which is a set of skills and dispositions that can guide young people through life, and equip them to solve problems we can’t even conceive of.

At the Mission Hill School in Boston, educators have decided four characteristics matter more than anything else: forethought, perseverance, production, and reflection. At the MC2 School in New Hampshire, there are eighteen habits to work towards, from critical thinking to self-direction. At the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, it’s just five – inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection; and at Indianapolis’s Spring Mill Elementary, it’s a set of twelve that includes traits like empathy, integrity, and cooperation. I could go on.

What these schools demonstrate is that every school doesn’t need to aspire to a single, universal set of skills and dispositions; just that that every school needs to decide for itself, of all the characteristics the ideal graduate of our school could embody, which ones must they embody – and how will we know if we’ve been successful?

The latest research about how people learn affirms the value of this priority shift. As Paul Tough writes in How Children Succeed, “what matters most in a child’s development is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” Cal State University’s Arthur Costa makes a similar point in Learning & Leading with Habits of Mind: “We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it,” he writes. “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.”

That’s right. And that’s the sort of mindset I’d like my five-year-old son to have at his disposal, whether he’s navigating his way through middle school, or making sense of a not-too-distant future we are only beginning to imagine – with Hollywood’s help.

(This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.)

The Learning Revolution, Circa 2012

Posted on | by Sam

Six years ago, a funny Englishman gave a stirring speech about how schools were stifling the creativity of their students. Today, Sir Ken Robinson is a worldwide celebrity, and his TED talk has been seen by as many as 100 million people.

How did that happen, exactly? And what is the state of the learning revolution Robinson urged us to launch?

The first answer has a lot to do with TED, and the ways it has become an unparalleled global phenomenon and idea accelerator. But it has more to do with Robinson, and the ways he was able to – clearly and cleverly– articulate our education system as it is, and as it ought to be. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original,” he argued. “By the time we get to be adults, most of us have lost that capacity. We have become frightened of being wrong. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

The second answer has a lot to do with the impact of those words, and the ways in which our education systems have started to move – slowly but surely – in the direction of Robinson’s recommendations. In particular, I see three trends worth noting:

  1. Shifting Endgoals – In 2006, it would have been impossible to suggest that anything other than content knowledge was the desired endgoal of a quality education. The rest was fluff, and if you couldn’t measure it, it didn’t matter. Today, however, there is an increasing recognition that content knowledge is actually the means by which we acquire a quality education, while the endgoal is a set of life skills or habits we can rely on throughout our lives. This paradigm shift was foretold by Robinson, whose talk centered around one of those skills – creativity. It has since expanded to include a rotating cast of others, from critical thinking to collaboration. And it will continue to reshape how schools see their work, both strategically and morally, requiring a new wave of creative thinking about how we assess both student and teacher learning and growth.
  2. Growing Grassroots – Robinson was right to urge people to stop waiting for policies to change before they themselves change. The only way a learning revolution will begin is if we heed the advice of Myron Rogers, who advised us to “start anywhere, and follow it anywhere.” That means recognizing each individual school is, as Ken says, its own school system, and insisting that educators start being more proactive in how they reimagine the structure and purpose of school. Scores of networks and organizations are already doing just that – from Expeditionary Learning to the Institute for Democratic Education in America. More communities are joining every day. And eventually, the policies will have no choice but to catch up.
  3. Emerging Leaders – In schools and districts across the country, a new wave of leadership is emerging with the confidence to speak publicly against the dysfunctions of the current system and think strategically about how to transform education for the long haul. Montgomery County superintendent Josh Starr is one such example – the leader of a massive network of schools and educators, a passionate believer in working collaboratively with all stakeholders, and an astute communicator who relies on everything from podcasts to Twitter to community book clubs. “I see my work being as much about helping people understand how we learn as it is about balancing budgets or driving student growth. These are community-wide conversations we all need to be having, and my job is to help seed those – and to keep learning alongside everyone else.”

It’s instructive that the most watched TED talk in history is about public education – despite the mainstream media’s ongoing reluctance to provide anything more than cursory coverage. Sir Ken’s talk is a reminder that people everywhere recognize that there is no issue more important to our future than the education of our newest generations. And his message, fittingly, is that we are the people we’ve been waiting for all along.

(NOTE: This article also appeared on Huffington Post as part of its TED Weekend series.)

Faces of Learning San Diego — High Tech High

Posted on | by Sam

A little over a month ago, I spent a few days on the campus of High Tech High (HTH), a remarkable network of schools in San Diego that are, simply, among the best examples of public education our country has to offer.

As you can see from the video, what distinguishes HTH is its ability to think differently about what a public education should look like — and accomplish. The schools are all housed in former Navy barracks, giving the school and its hallways an airy, open, almost half-finished sort of feel. Student artwork is EVERYWHERE, as are engineering and design projects, from robots to a whole wall of bicycle wheels, all connected via a long, single chain. It’s impossible not to feel creative — or at least to want to try something new.

Beyond the aesthetics, I asked Ben Daley, HTH’s Chief Operating Officer, to help me understand the keys to their special sauce. “We make sure our teachers have time to plan with each other,” he began. “Their day always starts earlier than the students, so there’s built-in time for teachers to coordinate what they’re doing and provide the kids a more integrated learning experience. We’re also doing a lot with videos of our own teaching, so we can study our own practices and find better ways to improve our teaching. And of course we have our own graduate school of education, so the overall learning culture for adults is of such a quality that it can’t help but be passed down to our kids.”

Indeed, HTH is the first school I’ve ever visited that literally houses its own graduate program on site. (Could anything be more logical?) As Ben and I talked, we ran into Stacy Caillier, who runs the program. Smiling as she spoke, Stacy explained what makes the program distinct. “For over 75 years, the average American High School has followed three critical assumptions that have become deeply ingrained in our understanding of what school needs to look like: segregate students by class, race, gender, or perceived academic ability; separate academic from technical learning; and separate adolescents from the adult world they are about to enter. Here, we try to overturn all of these tenets — we group students heterogeneously; we integrate our curriculum; and we embed students in the adult world of work and learning. By extension, our graduate program is designed to prepare educators to both design and assume leadership in this sort of learning environment, and to do so in a learning community that is collaborative, challenging, and very much grounded in the day-to-day world of the classroom.”

As part of its missionary spirit, HTH had spent the previous months building an impressive and eclectic local coalition of individuals and organizations, as the San Diego manifestation of the Faces of Learning campaign. I was in town to bear witness to its first public gathering, an impressive evening of storytelling and strategic planning.

Interested in learning more? Check out this short video of the event — and join us in imagining the possibilities of a movement of adults and young people — in search of better places to work and learn.