The Morning After

(It is 8:00 A.M. The school-board member has coffee and a headache)

I'm not suggesting schools focus on student enjoyments and interests because it might be fun and might help student engagement.

I'm suggesting we center our schools around children's identities and passions, on developing their goals and giving them learning experiences that are meaningful to them, because IT IS THE ONLY WAY we can fix the crisis in our schools right now.

Anything else is just screwing around.

It's a crisis. Let's act like it's a crisis.

Let's act like these kids are actually important to us. Let's act like they are important to themselves.

Learn from the kids the system fails to teach.

Part of the reason I haven't posted much this Fall is....I think my ideas and beliefs are pretty well-represented by what's already here; and partly because I've got so many irons in the fire right now with respect to education activism that as one seeks priority over the others in turn, my work has been a little disjointed and unfinished. 

Then there is after all, my School Board work. That has always claimed priority over my other activities.

And then there is that business of making a living.

There is, too, lots of stuff I'm working on that I'm NOT really interested in broadcasting...developing relationships with others in my community who agree with me about the direction our district ought to take...or, as Lisa Nielsen puts it, "picking the low-hanging fruit" so I have more support for my issues on the school board.

One way to use this platform is to respond to issues that come up in the news, and recently, the Bangor Daily News had a story that I think ties in very neatly with what I'm trying to do.

Here is Damion Saucier, 19, of Belfast, Maine, who went on a tear through town this past summer. He's managed to turn the incident into an opportunity to turn himself around, but as I read the article I wonder how we could have done better by him.

The article is very clear that his public school did nothing for him. His story is typical: a smart, independent kid, he saw a system that needed to control and domesticate him and he simply refused. Sometimes kids simply can't fit into the tight spaces school requires; they can't shape-shift and blend. They have to be who they are; they have no choice. And if who they are doesn't fit into those tight spaces, there's a build-up of pressure and something's gonna blow.

We say we want our kids to be independent thinkers, but what we have here is a classic case of the system failing one independent thinker.

And it's not like he's not capable of scholarly thought. He likes math and physics.  He's capable of understanding complex subjects, and takes a great interest in technology. Still, school was a blank for him. 

Saucier speaks of a recent period of his life in which he retreated into himself, a period of “self-pity, self-loathing,” in which he felt like “a room without walls,” passing through the world without connecting with it.

“I never thought I was going to amount to anything,” he said

If we are not holding our school system responsible for this, we should. There is no excuse for a school system to NOT be part of the solution for a kid like Damion.

The first purpose of schools should be to find out who these kids are, and then devote time, resources and support to helping them become the people they want to be.

We keep kids all day, every day, and we make them sit still and learn stuff they find meaningless. What they do find meaningful is of little interest to this system. You need to learn what they tell you to learn, when they tell you to learn it. Sometimes a subject may click with a student; a stopped clock is right twice a day, too.

Who are those buildings for, again?

Shape our schools around the identities, the passions, the learning needs of our children...whoever they are. Respect them. Learn from them. Give them breathing room, space to grow and find out who they are.

If you don't know how that's done, look at the Big Picture.

Do you want to play golf, or....?

It amazes me how much effort — in time, money and resources — people will devote to not changing education.

Evidently, adults want kids to continue to be powerless in school...but we're going to go through Herculean efforts to make it look like things are really going to change.

That's why I'm turning to Jane Fonda as Leona Lansing in the HBO series, The Newsroom. Take a minute to listen. I'll wait.

Now, do you want to change education or do you want to fuck around?

I'm sorry, I know foul language is offensive to some, but Leona Lansing hits the nail of my impatience, frustration and growing anger right on the head. I've been repeating the punchline to myself for days. It just keeps popping up in my head.

Let's look at the standards-based or proficiency-based system that we are "moving toward" in my district, Maine's RSU 3.

Here's the model that's being held up to us as the One True Way out of the mess we send our kids to every day: http://www.edutopia.org/chugach-school-district-reform

It looks good. We're getting kids through important learning goals by letting them decide how to go about learning it; and at their own pace they "level up," achieving goals and moving on until they have all learned what they should learn, in their own individual way.

What could possibly be bad? 

Just that we're dismissing the one thing that can get kids to believe their learning belongs to them. We should be teaching kids that they are the only ones who hold the ticket to their own learning. That's exactly what we fail to teach them, when we cling to standards, or "learning goals."

Ultimately this is a failure of adults to understand who children are and what they need; a failure to respect children. This failure occurs despite the fact that children are perfectly constructed learning machines; turn them on and they go.

They are force-fed learning from the time they are 5. Occasionally a teacher reaches a kid, but a stopped clock is also right twice a day. The successes don't negate the overall failure.

That's the missing message of the Chugach Miracle. What has been lost?

1. An chance to explore what is most meaningful to them and see where it leads.
2. The opportunity to build the self-respect that comes from accomplishment.
3. The ownership of what they learn.
4. A sense that learning might be something more than "having been taught."

Every parent I've ever talked to says they want their kids to be critical thinkers, problem-solvers. They want them to learn to make good choices, to collaborate, to create. But with the standards-based or proficiency-based system, they are getting a long march through a state-mandated, 12-year course of study. Kids are the very last consideration in this education model.

The standards-based system is built to support the profit juggernaut of the Common Core, standardized curriculum and standardized testing. It's not built for kids. It's built for bureaucrats. Wait....who are schools for, again?
Distressed that so many kids don't know anything about basic civics? Do you think the answer is to have them sit in a room and learn the branches of government? Of course not. Get kids involved in issues that are meaningful to them, let them find out who to talk to about making the changes they want made. They will be able to imagine their own place in their community. That's the only thing that will get them truly interested in civic involvement and democracy.
And if they choose not to get involved, if they aren't interested in issues, that's ok.

We need to just repeat that until we believe it. It's OK!
What they are learning is that when they choose to care about something, they will be able to go after it, learn it, master it. We all talk about the importance of life-long learning; why do we feel we have to stuff kids full before they leave public school?
Either we support kids or we don't. Honoring student self-determination is the only thing that will really "work;" and when I say work, I mean work for kids, not for whatever preconceived ideas we harbor about what kids need.
So do you want to play golf, or do you want to fuck around?

What's next for The Minds of Kids?

I'm overdue for a First Post of the School Year. In the three months of carting off to craft shows and replenishing supply between them there was little time for writing cogent blog posts on educational change. The good news is I had a lot of replenishing to do; one of my best seasons selling jewelry in the seven years I've been doing it. But I have been thinking about this stuff almost constantly though...and making plans.

Here are some questions for you:

1. How can we build a movement of change to counter the "education reform" agenda that wants schools to be places where we teach kids what is measurable, and then test them on what was "learned." Almost all the parents I know will say their hope for their kids is that they will learn critical thinking and problem solving skills, innovation, creativity; discover the world around them and their place in it. But are all those skills measurable? Nuh-uh. So why aren't more parents getting angry about what schools are doing?

2. How can we help ordinary people tell truth from nonsense, as a lot of both is thrown around in this mess called the Education Crisis?  Most particularly, how can we do it on a low budget, not having the nearly infinite resources of those on one side of the debate?

3. The brain is a lazy organ, say the folks who study this sort of thing. It doesn't learn unless it understands why. But when a kid says, "Why do we have to learn this?" more often than not they are shushed. Some teachers go out of their way to give kids a picture of why the learning they are engaging in is necessary to them. But when the student still doesn't get it, what then? The brain is still in the dark.

But that's how schools function. Learn what I tell you to learn, and it doesn't matter if you want to or not.  Why is top-down, traditional education still what we find in classrooms everywhere, when we know it's goes against how learning happens?

4. How do we move the agenda of student-driven education on a local level? With pressures from outside to comply with Common Core Learning Standards, with achievement scores well below that level that NCLB insists must happen by 2014, with funding sinking and districts under pressure to make drastic cuts, what's a school board to do?

If these look a lot like the questions I have been asking all along, you are right. This time, though, I am focused on strategy, and I have a few pathways that I am building -- pathways that will define my own participation in this movement.

My biggest question has been, how can I use both my passion and my skills and talents to help the movement to transform public education?

What is my next, best move?

What comes first, the student or the standard?

First: how can you tell the difference between a student and a standard?

They both begin with ST. One has six and one has seven letters. One ends with a D, the other with a T. So I guess they're pretty different.

A standard, in education, is a learning goal; a student is a human who spends a large portion of his/her time in learning activities; usually involved in some sort of formal educational institution.

In public education, one comes first, the other follows.

According to the past ten or twenty years of education history,  Alfie Kohn's "bunch o' facts" have come first. The teacher starts with those facts, figures out how to teach them, and then makes the transfer to the students. These facts have lately been organized for our convenience into a progression of learning goals called standards, taking a student from Kindergarten through 12th grade.

The newfangled "standards-based" or "proficiency-based" education system that many of us have been hearing about is said to be an advance in how we do public education. This is because, in generous acknowledgment of the differences between children, the elements of speed and method of learning has been been partly given over to the student's control (at least, that's the theory.) Students can decide for themselves how and when they learn that same "bunch o' facts, compressed and reorganized into learning standards.

Then there is the student: the person in the learning institution who is responsible for learning the standards.

So which comes first?

We are told that this newfangled system is the best of all worlds; that the system focuses education on both the student and the standard. How's that done, exactly? "You can learn in whatever way and at whatever pace you want, as long as you learn what I tell you.  And forget about jumping ahead or skipping around: you have to do it in a certain order."

This is our education revolution?

I don't believe you can ever make BOTH the student and the standard come first. I think that unlike the poor chicken and her egg, this is not a circular proposition. One will always push out the emphasis on the other. Either we get kids through the State-mandated, 12-year course of study called the Common Core, leaving students entirely out of the decisions over what they have to learn, OR we make the  focus to discover and nurture the desire to learn that exists in each child, and devote time, support and resources to helping them become the people they want to be.

 To paraphrase Ira Socol, What happens when an institution forgets what its purpose is?

As soon as standards supersede the wishes and needs of the student, the learning game’s been lost. I have invented a new word for it: what learning becomes when students are unwilling to do it but aren't given a choice. It's called "faux learning," or "f'learning." We need to stop thinking that learning can take place if the learner is unwilling. Motivation is a complicated thing, and it's dicey to generalize to this degree, but for the most part, if the learner is unwilling to learn, learning won't take place. How many kids in public education are not learning, but f'learning?

If we toss out the standards, liberate ourselves, as adults, from the notion that there is "stuff" that all kids need to learn; if we lay aside our own personal "sacred cows" of education, do we create a "white space" in our classrooms? A happy nothingness, something like Harry Potter casting an "imperious curse" on his friend Hermione? A void in education, an opportunity for absolutely nothing to take place?

If you take the lessons, the "standards" out of the classroom, what you have is a room full of children.

Do children have standards?

Children have what is inside them; they have the sum total of their 5-17 years of life and experience.

Their learning standards begin with who they are. If we acknowledge that a child is a fully-actualized human being, then who they are and what they do and know RIGHT NOW matters as much to them and to their world as that of any 45-year-old. They can progress from there to the people they see themselves becoming. So the standards they have "accomplished" or "mastered," (to use the nomenclature of the standards-based system) are what they know, what they fully understand. Their expertise; their passion.

Standards should be about children. Their "course of study" should start with who they are. What is a student's goals for personal success? Let's create that document, the Personal Success Plan, when they are in Kindergarten; let's work on it continually over the next 12 years, and let's make it the foundation of their activities. Their "standards." The working document of their journey through learning.

What Will Richardson can do in 5 minutes 42 seconds....

Short, concise, funny and compelling...


iste-presentation from Will Richardson on Vimeo.

The "Passion-Driven School:" Two great arguments that go great together.

There's an interesting connection between two blog posts I've read this morning. One is about student aspirations.

"What we need is 'a shift in emphasis from ‘raising aspirations’ to ‘keeping aspirations on track,'" says Annie Murphy Paul in her post, What’s the Best Way to Encourage Kids?

Turns out most kids start their school life with pretty high aspirations for what they want to do and be; it's the top-down, factory model of schooling that discourages kids from following their dreams.

I wanted to be a naturalist when I was in Elementary school...my first year at middle school made me think Science was boring and arcane and had nothing to do with staring into tide pools or knowing the habits of birds. I remember doing litmus tests with those little strips. Testing for acid or base didn't connect to anything that had any importance to me.

Which brings us to Larry Ferlazzo's blog post, which discusses new evidence of the importance of building on prior knowledge. From the study:

"...prior knowledge changes how ...images are processed, allowing thousands of them to be transferred from the whiteboard of short-term memory into the bank vault of long-term memory, where they are stored with remarkable detail."

Encouraging kids to pursue the dreams of what they want to be or do (even if it is a 6-year-old wanting to be a fireman) means building on what they know. Why do you want to be a fireman?  I love the big extendable ladder. Wow, how does that ladder work, do you think? And so on. 

These two concepts together lead us to a better argument for passion-driven learning -- arguments that are based on research as well as the necessity of refocusing the purpose of school. Rather than teaching content, we need to discover who these children are, and devote time, support and resources to helping them become the people then want to be.