Spark Series: Jenny Finn

What does it mean — and require — to be free?

This is the question of American history — and we are, to put it mildly, horrible at answering it

As The Guardian put it last week, “the problem isn’t that American democracy is about to be overthrown; it’s that America isn’t much of a democracy to begin with.“

For that reason, tonight’s Spark Series event with Jenny Finn is a MUST.

In 2014, in the hills of rural Appalachia, Jenny founded Springhouse School, an intergenerational learning community “with life at its center.” 

As she puts it, “we are actively reimagining education and believe learning is a lifelong journey that should be centered around vitality, meaning, and cultivating wholeness to better serve the world’s emerging needs.”

Put another way: Springhouse is a community that understands what it means — and requires — to be free. ??

“If you feel unprepared from the inside out and are wondering what your gift is,” says Jenny, “we have a program that can help you get to know yourself more deeply.”

So join us tonight, January 12th, at 8pm EST via the usual link, so we can craft a better way forward, together.

This is how we #changethestory . . .

Seed Talk TONIGHT: Kim Carter on the future of #learning

I first met Kim Carter a lifetime ago, not long after she opened a public school in New Hampshire that remains, to this day, one of the most innovative and life-affirming I’ve ever witnessed.

In response, I wrote about Kim and her school in my 2009 book, American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community (you can read that chapter here) — and it’s true, Kim is a master of democratic processes, structures, and spirit. But since then, I’ve learned some of the myriad other deep wells of knowledge that this former librarian possesses — and TONIGHT, at 8pm EST, you’ll get to learn some of those things, too, when Kim joins us for what is sure to be a memorable Seed Talk.

How do we make learning more meaningful, and relevant, and real?

What does an environment of transformational learning actually look like — and require?

And what is the future actually waiting for us to do, today?

Join us tonight, via this link — and bring your questions, and your curiosity.

Let’s Scrap the High School Diploma

This month, schools across the country are hard at work preparing auditoriums, printing programs, checking commencement speeches, and readying for the arrival of one of our society’s most cherished rites of passage – the high school graduation ceremony.

Perhaps by this time next year, we can do our students an even greater service and scrap the high school diploma altogether.

OK, maybe not next year, but soon. After all, almost every component of today’s traditional diploma reflects yesterday’s traditional thinking – if by yesterday we mean the 19th century.

It was 1893, to be precise. That’s when the first blue-ribbon commission was assembled to study the nation’s schools, which, at that point, were still largely decentralized. Among its findings, the ten-person committee recommended that “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil.” Not long thereafter, the College Entrance Examination Board was established in order to create a common assessment and set uniform standards for each academic subject. Couple those developments with the rise of the Industrial Era, the exponential growth of immigration, and the need to move an unprecedented number of students through the system, and you have the seeds that slowly gave shape to the public schools we have today.

Although these developments were clearly pivotal in fueling American growth in the 20th century, it’s equally clear that same system is ill-suited for the particular challenges and opportunities of the 21st. Which brings us back to the high school diploma – a document that still depends, in most places, on the same set of required courses, the same set amount of “seat time,” and the same set of curricular content that students have been studying since the end of the second World War.  No wonder that more than half our students have been classified as chronically disengaged – and that figure doesn’t even include absentees and dropouts!

We can do better. But first we need to shake free from the comforting familiarity of the pomp and circumstance of high school as we have come to know it.

The good news is that several schools across the country are already taking this courageous step. One such place is the Monadnock Community Connections School, or MC² for short (mc2school.org). A public school of choice in New Hampshire, MC² was founded to fulfill a distinctly 21st century mission: “Empowering each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice, effectively and with integrity, in co-creating our common public world.” As school founder Kim Carter explains, “Learning at MC² is personalized – so it can be tailored to each student’s learning needs; experiential – because students learn best by doing; negotiated – so that students can participate in decisions about what they will learn; and community-based – because learning takes place through a variety of community interactions.”

As you might expect, MC²’s goals and mission force it to look quite different from the typical high school. Instead of annually promoting kids from one grade to the next, students at MC² cannot progress until they have demonstrated mastery in a set of core competencies. Students spend as much time learning out of the school building as they do in it. Every student must write a 100-page autobiography in which they reflect on the people and events that have shaped the person they have become. And no one receives a diploma until they have successfully made a public presentation of their own personal growth and preparedness for adult life. (You can view a few of those presentations here).

In schools like this, the old adage is turned on its head: children are to be seen and heard. In schools like this, academic learning is balanced by an equal emphasis on emotional and vocational growth. And in schools like this, teachers and administrators have stopped relying on Industrial-Age benchmarks, and started identifying which Democratic-Age habits of mind and being will be most essential to their students’ future success as global citizens.

To create places like this for every child, we don’t need to sacrifice our desire for greater rigor, equity or accountability – but we do need to scrap many of our most time-tested symbols of schools, and of schooling. Redefining the requirements of a high school diploma is a great place to start.

NYC Innovation Tour

Those of you living in the NYC area have a cool opportunity worth taking advantage of this coming April.

IDEA, aka the Institute for Democratic Education in America, is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure that all young people can engaged meaningfully with their education and gain the tools to build a just, democratic, and sustainable world.

IDEA helps transform education by showcasing what works in education and equipping others to learn from it. And this April 3rd-5th, IDEA will shepherd a group of people through an “innovation tour,” during which participants will explore four exemplary NYC schools, with opportunities to see and experience classroom and school culture, discuss instruction, and meet with school leaders.

IDEA’s Innovation Tours offer an in-depth opportunity to really see and engage with the most innovative schools in the U.S.  The NYC tour will take participants through the NYC iSchool, Urban Academy, Calhoun School, and The Green School.

Tours are designed to offer participants a chance to see dynamic schools in action, to learn from school leaders about the challenges and evolution of their culture and instructional program, and finally, to discuss ideas and applications with other teachers, students, parents, school board members, business leaders, and policy-makers involved in the tour.

Tour participants will also attend Columbia University’s Seminar on Innovation featuring IDEA leaders Kirsten Olson, Scott Nine, and Dana Bennis on Monday evening, April 4th. Tour costs average $300 per person or $150 without housing. Registration details, itinerary and further information can be found at www.democraticeducation.org/tours/newyork.

Check it out. And if you do, report back on what you discover!

Building Democratic Learning Communities

On July 28, I participated in a live web discussion about democratic learning communities with Classroom 2.0’s Steve Hargadon.

It was an interesting and sometimes chaotic discussion. While Steve was asking me questions, participants from all over the globe were also typing questions and comments in a dialogue box. So please excuse my occasional flightiness when Steve asked me a question — it’s because I was trying to have about ten conversations at once!

Click here to listen to the audio of the conversation, and please post any additional comments or ideas. Thanks!