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Archive for the ‘Tony Wagner’ category

The “K” Playbook: Professional Learning for a Lifetime*

April 5th, 2011

dancing-house-prague(google image)

A mentor once said to me that he had never seen a kindergartner arrive at school with the idea that he or she was not a learner. During my professional years spent as an elementary principal, I cherished the opportunity to “kid-watch” kindergartners on a daily basis. The block area served as a favorite space of the kindergartners- and me. Here the fantastical imaginations and risky behaviors of five-year olds led them to design and construct post-modern expressionist structures reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s most interesting work.

I learned kindergartners aren’t afraid to explore the intersection of disparate materials that leads them to create whimsical, sometimes even absurd architectural spaces – towers, homes, castles, even whole cities- combining Legos, wooden blocks, aluminum foil, cardboard- whatever they could find in the kindergarten co-laboratory. Turned loose, kindergartners epitomize the dispositions of lifelong learning. They are adaptable, flexible thinkers who will play in the sandbox for hours, despite their short attention span in circle time. They love math and science and writing and painting and music and mythical stories and non-fiction information and chasing each other and dancing- all in the name of learning.

Tower Building

Taking a page from the kindergarten playbook, I wrestle with how we can grow the passion for learning inherent in kindergartners in our own work as educators. What it means to educate and be educated takes on new meaning in today’s technology-driven world. The task of educating young people who will graduate from our high schools with the capability to add value to our communities and workforce presents a challenge unique to these times. Our country’s very economic survival depends upon our educational community doing its best work ever in the history of public education.

We educators have watched Shift Happens (Mcleod and Fisch) on YouTube, read Tom Friedman’s the World is Flat, and listened to Tony Wagner push us to not just focus upon the national achievement gap but also the global one. Yet, the momentum necessary to make necessary changes never quite gets us off the ground. In fact, as Larry Cuban noted in 1992 in the article, “Computers Meet Classroom. Classroom Wins”, reforms do not change schools, but rather schools change reforms and, in such a way that little change ever occurs in schools.

A lifelong quest as an educator has been to figure out why we educators are less likely to change, indeed to incorporate new learning into our work, than almost any other field. I have come to believe that the potential for“deep change” in which knowledge, practices and processes shift is a function of the availability of substantial time for our own adult learning- something that is in little supply in America’s Pk-12 schools.

We educators have little time to play in the sandbox; to explore the intersections of disparate ideas, disciplines, and cultures that would lead us to create, design, and invent the curricula, assessments and instruction necessary to provide learning sustenance to contemporary learners. Instead, teachers work long hours during a 200 day school year, using what daily planning time is available to accomplish clerical and administrative tasks related to operational details of the job. Little to no time exists for a typical Pk-12 educator to read, think, reflect, collaborate, write, study, listen, converse, create, problem-solve; indeed, simply learn. This situation is inconsistent with other professions in this country and with the professional life of educators who work in high performing educational communities around the world.

I have come to the distinctly simplistic perspective that our educators need more unencumbered professional time dedicated to learning and that if they had access to such time, education would be transformative for learners and learning. However, expecting educators to acquire and use skills and then assimilate rapidly shifting technologies into their work with students, means coming to terms with the fact that integration of new technologies, new pedagogies, and new content demands far more time than our teaching educators are obligated to work in traditional contracts and on traditional calendars which do not serve us well in the twenty-first century.

Time to work together

On the other hand, some aspects of educating young people well in today’s world aren’t a lot different than 10,000 years ago. I suspect the best tribal teachers knew the value of team learning, hands-on approaches, practice, coaching and high levels of Bloom’s. For early Homo sapiens, teaching well surely meant the difference between the life and death of a tribe’s young people. Our earliest teachers knew that neither they nor their pupils could afford to rest as learners, but rather that they all had to constantly adapt and flex as they acquired new knowledge and skills essential to survival. Tony Wagner describes the skills that teenagers need in this century’s colleges, workforce, and communities as survival skills, too. These skills include Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence, Agility and Adaptability, Initiative and Entrepreneurship, Effective Oral and Written Communication, Accessing and Analyzing Information, and Curiosity and Imagination.

Opportunities to develop and use Wagner’s skills don’t typically emerge as a result of traditional curricula, instruction or assessments used in most of America’s public schools. If Tyack and Cuban are correct, not much will change as a result of any of our ghosts of reform – past, present or future. So what will it take to drive home the deep change needed so that our digital learners get the learning spaces they need today? And, if educators have little opportunity to engage in and assimilate new professional learning, why would they not remain closed and resistant to change?

Lifelong learning is essential to practitioners in the field of education. We must provide time for our teachers to continue learning if we expect them to embrace meaningful and necessary changes to transform schools of our past into schools for the future. This means providing significant time to try out new strategies and tools, to build relationships with each other as learners, and find the value inherent in participating in both virtual and face-to-face learning communities.

Time should not be either a luxury or an excuse for educators to do the hard work and play essential to their own learning. Just as in kindergarten, creative and inventive ideas in the block area or sandbox come with the time to think, to collaborate, to try out different construction materials and strategies, to analyze, and decide what to do next. Expert kindergarten teachers purposefully schedule the time needed for young children to do the messy work of learning. School calendars and contracts that reflect the time needed for educators to engage in their own learning work are a must. The biggest challenge is finding the funding, and, even more important and scarce, the will to make the necessary changes in structures leftover from the agrarian and industrial ages of public education. Perhaps, if our communities and educators believed our survival depended upon it, change would happen tomorrow.

*I first composed this piece 12/09 and never posted it until #edchat reminded of it tonight.

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Posted in assessment, Authentic learning, Big Idea, Bloom's Taxonomy, Coaching, Collaboration, Creativity, critical thinking, cross-disciplinary thinking, Curriculum, disruption, educational reform, Harvard Graduate School of Education, imagination, Innovation, interdisciplinary thinking, Pam Moran, Pedagogy, Relevance, School Community, teaching, Tony Wagner, Uncategorized

Tags: David Tyack Did You Know Frank Gehry karl fisch Larry Cuban lifelong learning scott mcleod

Dueling Dichotomies of Technology: Autobots & Decepticons

July 16th, 2009

By Jason Flom, Ecology of Education

Pop Quiz

(Complete the following sentence with the answer you think is better than the others):

Technology is

Good.

Bad.

Indifferent.

Transformative.

All of the above.

If you picked 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you’re right! Congratulations! Nice work!

By itself, technology is neither good or bad. In fact, when sitting on a shelf collecting dust it is relatively neutral, indifferent (at least for now). However, if being steered by whim or intent, it transforms into something else — a transformational catalyst with the potential for positive or negative impacts on the world.

What’s more, once we start using technology to solve our problems with technology, we travel a slippery slope that can only lead to Optimus Prime.

Regardless of the where it leads, technology is here to stay. Case in point: In numerous fake studies conducted in my imagination around the world, when given the option between 1. Refrigerated beer or 2. Having to see Rush Limbaugh romp around in a fig leaf, most people chose refrigerated beer.

However, there is a more sinister (if accidental) division separating the world from itself — access to resources and technology.

While keeping Rush fully clothed is good for the planet, keeping pace with the rapid increase in technological advancements without equalizing global access may not be. Our insatiable appetite for the latest and greatest techno gadgets may well prove to set the stage for an epic battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons. (And just to be clear, we in the developed world are both.) Paradoxically, access is both the good and the bad.

For the places that have the latest technology, it has transformed the way people interact with information, problems, and perhaps most importantly, with each other. In fact, the last 10 years of technological developments have already begun to reshape how we look at learning and the future of learning. More and more research is pointing to the positive impact technology can have in shaping learning environments and outcomes.

For places that do not have access to technology, the gap separating them from the rest of the world is expanding. The divide between the haves and the have-nots grows exponentially.

The problem is that few elect to be the have-nots. In another series of fake surveys in my head I found that most people did not want to be poor, famished, and living without many of the modern conveniences that we in the richest nations take for granted.

With the global digital divide a stark and sobering reality for many around the world, those with access are not waiting idly by for the rest of the world to catch up.

And for good reason. Besides being able to watch Jon Stewart at our leisure, technology enables us to see what possessions people other than our neighbors have, allowing us to covet and demand luxuries we didn’t even know existed. (But that we absolutely must have.)

We see. We want. We get. We toss. Repeat. Often. The more the better.

The trouble is that the have-nots also want those things too. (Alright, that isn’t the problem, exactly.)

The real problem between the Autobots (technology’s transformative potential in fostering communication and collaboration) and the Decepticons (technology’s transformative potential in how we prioritize our needs vs. wants), is sustainability. Let’s face it, many of the resources we depend on are relatively finite. There is simply not enough for everyone to have everything.

And here’s the hard pill to swallow: we who use technology in hopes of making the world a better place — we are as much a part of the problem as those who use it for ill.

Check out this quick and easy Footprint Calculator. It gives the results as the number of Earth’s it would take if everyone lived the same. As a point of reference, we’d need 4.3 Earths if everyone lived like me. 4.3 Earths! Uh-oh! Am I Megatron?

There’s really no way around it: our frantic pace of advancement and acquisition will one day reach a point of where our increased demand will meet decreased yields — of oil, metal, minerals, and/or places to dispose of it all.

I’m not suggesting we abandon ship, don robes, all become possession repudiators and battle against any form of transformer. Far from it. We need transformers (aka: innovation) in order to grow and lessen inequalities the world over.

I am suggesting we prepare students for thinking critically, asking questions, working together, and building the skills that matter most for dealing with the problems that I helped (and am helping) to create. For every problem technology solves, another is created. And the world that is coming, is not the world that was or even the one that is now. Things change. Students need to be prepared to learn and adapt, and to be effective agents of change.

We, as educators, need to see beyond the textbooks, the standards, the assessments, and even the technology to the greater world beyond. Tony Wagner of Harvard Graduate School of Education, in his new book, The Global Achievement Gap, makes a compelling case for survival skills that our graduates will need to survive in a new globalized economy.

I think Kelly Hines had it right to suggest that when we think about quality teaching “It’s Not About the Technology”. However, I also think Kelly Hines had it right to wonder, “Or Is It About the Technology?”

When it comes to teaching, learning and collaboration, interactive technology has already proven itself to be a paradigm shifting catalyst whose impact has only just begun to transform education and global culture. We should be ever mindful, however, of seeing it as the silver bullet, the Autobot without a Decepticon counterpart. Students need to be prepared to utilize technology without becoming beholden to it. However, the iPhone and its ilk are so woven into the fabric of our society that we can expect the ripples of its invention to extend far into the future. Even if it all were to crash now. (Which I hope it doesn’t. I’m really looking forward to the next Ironman installment.)