Practical Theory

So last night, the Science Leadership Academy Home and School Association threw the first huge fundraising night in our history. In a true collaboration between home and school, the school had a silent auction last night which raised a sizable chunk of money, but just as importantly, brought over 150 parents, teachers and friends together for an evening to celebrate and support SLA.

It is on nights like last night when you can see the power of a school community. Our Home and School parents were incredible -- the auction was a monster. It took hours and hours and hours to pull together, and I know there were moments of trepidation and frustration as no one knew if we could really pull this off. And the teachers and students created some amazing Advisory baskets that added a great flair to the night. And the end result was incredible. Not only did we have a great financial night, but it was a great chance for teachers and parents (and grandparents) to talk to each other and celebrate all that we have accomplished in our time together. We also had a couple of tables of student work so parents could see what the money we were raising goes to, and it is amazing to compile a cross-curricular pile of work and really see the imaginative and powerful and thoughtful work that kids do at SLA.

And for senior parents, it was also a time to recognize that our time together is approaching an end... some students have already gotten into college, and we were able to celebrate that. Other (most) parents are still playing the waiting game, and we shared the anxiety of that whole process. But overall, what we shared is a sense of a four-year journey together. It's one of the joys of a small school -- you know the families... you've been with them... through good and bad... and therefore impending graduation is both a very happy and a little bit sad thought. We even had talk of an alumni association as several parents told me they weren't quite ready to let go of the school yet.

In the end, it was a wonderful night, and this blog post is in part a recognition of the amazing community of SLA teachers and families, and a huge thank you to everyone who made the night happen, and an even bigger thank you to everyone who has contributed to making SLA a place I look forward to going to every single day. It is a wonderful community, and I am privileged and thankful to be a part of it.

Tags: sla

[No... he doesn't really mean it.]

A little over a year ago, Gary Stager wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the new-found Democractic fascination with bashing teacher's unions -- and why that is about as counter to Democratic ideals as one could imagine. Today, his words are all the more true.

Blaming educational problems on teacher unions is even more absurd when you consider that states like Texas have no teacher unions. Is Texas immune from student achievement challenges? Hardly.

The larger question is a matter of leadership and employee relations. How does reducing teacher creativity, independence and responsibility for decision-making help instill those qualities in the children they teach? How does alienating teachers, placing them in rubber rooms or attacking their motives make them a partner in school reform? How does insulting your base and violating a fundamental American liberty create a wise and more just society?

Do you want your children taught by defensive or depressed teachers who feel assaulted by the community they serve? How does that state of affairs contribute to educational excellence?

If the educational neocons succeed and break the backs of teacher unions, what do they think would happen? What would magically occur the next day? How are schools expected to improve? I demand that these Democratic tough guys and gals tell me what they will do next.

Go read.

Tags: stager, NCLB, politics, obama, unions

... with the following important message:

GOOOOOOOOOOO PHILLIES!!!

Game One was a thing of beauty. How about that Cliff Lee? How about that Chase Utley?

(And how about that Ruben Amaro? He took the World Champions and made them better without giving away the farm system.)

GOOOOOO PHILLIES!!!

So after reading E. D. Hirsch, Deborah Meier, Diane Ravich, Nel Noddings, President Obama's speech and Robert Pirsig, the students of Modern Educational Theory have written their first draft of their vision of what school should be. These are first passes at these ideas, and these are purpose statements that will evolve over the course of the year. Here was the structure of the assignment:

We, at this point, looked at several different views of education, from Deborah Meier's vision of democratic education, to Robert Pirsig's "Church of Reason," to Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch's views of core knowledge, to Nel Nodding's ethic of care, to President Obama's speech on the first day of school.

Now, it is your time to take your stand.

You are to write a two page position paper creating your vision of what school should be.

Your paper should consider the following points:

• Clearly define your vision of school:
• What is its purpose?
  
• Why is it good for the individual?
• Why is it good for sociery?
• What does your vision of school value? Prioritize?
• Given this vision of school -- what differences would you see in the structure of school when compared to a "traditional" school?

We read each other's papers and you can see the comments beginning to evolve. Their current assignment is this:


I'm really thrilled with much of the thoughtfulness that the kids display in the essays. It is, obviously, clear that the kids have been at SLA for years, but I don't think that's their only vision of what school can be -- which is important to me. The kids have their own thoughts, and I'm really interested to see how these visions continue to evolve.

So... please, feel free to comment on their essays (commenting is moderated because of spam, but I'll approve them, I promise!)

Tags: moderneducationaltheory

There is an inspiring article in today's New York Times about the Ted Ginn Academy -- a school started by a security guard / football coach. It is a story about an unlikely, non-traditional educator who built a school that is succeeding for students where others have failed. It is not unlike the stories being told about KIPP and Mastery Charter... a group of dedicated educators going above and beyond and saving every child.

And that's where I have a problem.

They aren't... and papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are so excited for this narrative, that they are perpetuating the myth.

From the article:


And later in the article:


And I'm left with only one question:

What about the other thirteen kids?

Maybe some moved... maybe some decided that the Ginn Academy wasn't for them... but did any of them struggle so much that they transferred back to the "traditional" schools they left? Were any of them encouraged to leave by administration who saw that the kids were not on board with the school? What are the stories of the other thirteen students? The article reads as if everyone is going to graduate from Ginn, but clearly, not every student made it through the school.

Lest people think I'm beating up on the school, I'm not. If they average a 76% on-time graduation rate in their first year in a district that averages 54%, that's a huge victory. Your first year, you figure everything out, and inevitably, some students leave the school as you shake out what the school really is. To do as well as they've done is awesome and important and noteworthy -- it just doesn't sound as good to the New York Times.

[Full disclosure -- SLA is on track to graduate 90% of the original students in our starting class from our school (and all the students who have transferred in) -- and I'm amazed by those numbers and the incredible work our students and teachers have put in to get there... and yes, we chose our kids.]

But the bigger question is -- why does the media insist on perpetuating this storyline? Let's take the KIPP schools as an example... there is now enough evidence to suggest that KIPP schools have a high level of attrition... and while there doesn't yet seem to be research to define exactly why that is happening, we can assume that not every student who left KIPP or Ginn Academy (or SLA, for that matter) left because their families moved... some students left because they weren't having success.

How different would the current educational conversation be if the KIPP folks said, "Yes... in some of our schools, 25-40% of the families choose to leave KIPP, but KIPP isn't for everyone, and for the students who stay, we do right by them?" What if these schools admitted that it would be much harder to have the success they have if they didn't have the traditional schools to send kids back to when it didn't work out? What if these schools admitted they didn't have all the answers, and instead had to admit that, yes, they do amazing things for many students, but they haven't figured out how to get to a significant percentage of their population, despite Herculean efforts?

Why isn't that the dialogue right now? Because it's not as easy to raise millions of dollars on "We're figuring it out too?" But that would only explain one piece of that puzzle... why is it that Jay Matthews, the New York Times, the Education Empowerment Project, the US DoE and so many others so willing to promote a myth?

Because it is easier... because if we could only believe that we could solve all the problems of educating students in poverty with charismatic school leaders and hard working teachers... and that all the kids who don't get the education they need are simply being underserved by those lazy teachers... that would absolve our society for not being more just, more equitable, more fair. We could point to those schools that succeed against all odds and say, "See... if they do it, every school should be able to do it." It is a myth that keeps us from really understanding what is necessary to solve the problems for the children of our cities. It is the myth of the schools that have solved the problems.

Except those schools haven't.

Not completely. Not for every student. In the end, those schools -- like all our schools -- struggle and fail to reach every kid.

Just ask the other thirteen.

[Tom Hoffman has been carrying the water for the ed-tech crew on this issue for the past few weeks -- if you haven't been reading him lately, do.]

The Common Core State Standards Initiative has released its English standards, and the standards are open for comment until October 21st. I strongly encourage you to look at the standards and make comment - I find them hard to read, because I think they are poorly written, but standards often are.

The National Standards movement obviously has its seeds in No Child Left Behind, but not just in the obvious ways. National Standards is an idea that sounds great on paper. It, like NCLB, sounds like a great idea, but of course, like NCLB, it's a better sound bite than it is policy.

There are plenty of reasons to question this movement, but here's the scariest part for me. This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.

What has kept many of the major players in that industry to commit completely to the on-line education / "content delivery" game is that with 50 different state tests and standards, there is a reasonably high barrier to entry to the market. Once there is a national curriculum and a national test, we will see a further blurring of the line between "education" and "training" where kids are given online instruction and online assessment that can be delivered to any student, regardless of geography.

When I was at the FCC this summer, Jim Shelton of the Department of Education, expressed a vision of education where we could find the best math lecturer in the country and deliver that lecture online to all students everywhere. That is the vision of educational technology that is behind these standards. It has the risk of the ultimate deprofessionalization of teachers and depersonalization of education.

There are billions of dollars at stake on these standards and the money and the access to power is on the side of the folks who want to create the standards and the tests that assess them, and the avenues available to teachers and parents (unions, PTAs, etc...) have largely been asleep at the switch. This is a movement that will profoundly change how schools are run and governed and profoundly change the way students will learn. This isn't about whether or not people think that all students should be able to write a thesis statement. This is about how students are taught that information, how they are assessed on that information, and on the role of big business in teaching and assessing them.

If we want a say in the future of school -- the time is now... if it is not already too late.

So here is one of what may be two proposals for ISTE this year... I've also been asked to be on a panel, so we'll see... but this proposal is a version of what I've been thinking and writing and talking about for the past few years, and with the current political winds, I think it is all the more urgently needed.

Session Description: To have a say in the school reform debate, we must articulate a clear vision of what 21st Century schools can be. Join the conversation.

Purpose & Objectives: What is the defining vision of the 21st Century school, and how do we create schools that can realize that vision? Can we build a pedagogical framework that allows all stakeholders to use technology to change the way we think about schools and create a transformative experience for all involved? Examine the issues of school design, staff development, curriculum design, technology infrastructure, home and school interaction and administrative functionality in a One-to-One environment to make the true 21st Century school a reality.

Outline: The format will be an interactive session where attendees are presented with questions about the functionality of schools as they try to adapt for the 21st Century. Attendees will have a "front-loading" short lecture (5-10 minutes) with each issue and then be asked to work in small groups to come up with a vision of each aspect of school life in a 21st Century model.

Tags: iste

The students and faculty of the Science Leadership Academy -- and all the amazing folks who give of their time and energy and ideas -- are again hosting EduCon! This year's EduCon 2.2 is now open for registration and for the call for conversations!

This conference only happens because so many people are excited to come together and share their ideas and passion. We have some amazing events lining up for this year, but the sessions -- the things that the community creates and imbues with meaning -- will always be the heart of the conference. So please, consider coming, and considering submitting a proposal to facilitate a conversation.

About EduCon 2.2:

Now, perhaps more than ever, it is important that a community of educators come together to share a vision of what our schools can be. Proposals are due November 1st. Registration will be open without late fee until mid-January.

Tags: educon22, educon

Anna Deveare Smith is one of my favorite American artists (and not just because she was on The West Wing.) She is a gifted actress, author and playwright, but even more importantly, her "documentary theater" style of writing and performing displays a respect for the diversity of voice and opinion that makes up the American mosaic. (See her TEDTalk which is a piece from her show "On the Road: A Search for American Character for an example.)

So it should come as no surprise that she has the ability to capture the range of the debate on health care in this country in an OpEd piece in today's New York Times. Here is her introduction:

Over the last few years, in preparation for a new play, I interviewed doctors, patients and healers about the human body, its resilience and its vulnerability. Although our conversations were not primarily about the health care debate, they do reveal many of the feelings and thoughts of the people in the audience President Obama will address tonight.

At a time when civility and rational discourse seem to be at an all-time low, her ability to listen so intently and bring across the myriad voices of the debate without irony and without judgment is so important. We all can learn from her ability to listen for the humanity in our voices.

Go read.

Tags: anna_deveare_smith, health_care

[I'm teaching a twice-a-week class on Modern Educational Theory this year to a (mostly) senior class. Here's my intro letter....]

To the students of Modern Educational Theory,

The American student spends approximately 16,000 hours in compulsory schooling from Kindergarten to 12th Grade, and while students can learn an incredible amount about the subjects we study, there is very little learned about the institution of school itself. So this class, then, is an attempt to turn the lens inward and study the societal construct that is school itself.

We will look at the educational movements of the 20th Century and early 21st Century in an attempt both to understand how we have gotten to this moment in time and how we may move forward to create the schools our society needs -- whatever we may decide that to be.

The class will feature a fair amount of shared readings of educational theory, and we will also look at the mass media portrayal of the American high school as well as following how the blogosphere has changed the way students, parents and educators talk about school. I'm hoping to line up guest speakers from a variety of educational perspectives to talk to us about their ideas as well. My expectations for you are that you do the pre-readings so that our discussions can be lively and spirited, and that you come to class willing to engage with the ideas of the other members of class, even when (especially when?) they challenge your own ideas. My goals for this course are for us to challenge the assumptions we come to school with and for all of us to deepen our understanding of what school can be.

Yours truly,

Mr. Lehmann

In a little over a week, the first class of the Science Leadership Academy starts its senior year. The students will, as a major part of that senior year, embark on a year-long Capstone project where they tackle an idea or a problem of their own design. All students have to create a proposal, detailing how they will incorporate the five core values of the school -- inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection -- into their capstone to create something original and meaningful. Ideas we have heard cross all disciplines, as students want to do original science research, create and stage original plays, design web-based applications, research the history of education reform, and much more. To do this, they will need mentors -- people with expertise in a myriad of fields -- who will be on the other end of an email or a Skype call when the students need a hand. Students will also have mentors at the school. Advisors are responsible for helping the students stay on-track and subject area teachers will serve as on-site guide as well. But we need you too. Please considering giving an hour a week to be a capstone mentor. You can sign up at mentor.scienceleadership.org, where you can tell us what kinds of projects / areas of expertise you would be able to support.

From the site:

The Senior Capstone Project at Science Leadership Academy is an opportunity for students to demonstrate what they have become over the course of high school as scholars and individuals. It represents the culmination of four years of intellectual growth towards an independent and self-directed learner who can contribute meaningfully to his or her community. As such an ambitious intellectual project, we are looking for mentors in all fields interested in working with students to develop their own ideas and facilitate their progress toward a meaningful product that truly demonstrates our core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. While students are working to develop their own vision of what it means to lead, your participation as a role model of leadership and creativity will be hugely beneficial to them. As a Capstone mentor, your role would be of an advisory nature, in conjunction with two teachers at the school, providing guidance, feedback, and your wealth of knowledge and experience in a mutual relationship designed by the student and yourself.

Please consider volunteering your time as a capstone mentor for an SLA student. (Mentors will be contacted for clearance, etc... to ensure that students are working with an appropriate mentor.)

Tags: SLA, Capstone, volunteering

Today, I had the opportunity to present some ideas about the need for teacher development to the FCC National Broadband Planning Workshop. I was on the panel talking about ways we can harness E-rate monies to help teachers re-envision what schools can be. And to do that, I had to talk a little bit about what schools can be.

Our panel was the last of three on education today, and by the time we got around to our panel, I admit, I was a little fired up. I'd listened to speaker after speaker talk about the promise of broadband technologies as being able to standardize content and results. Jim Shelton, Under-Secretary of Innovation for the DoE offered a vision of education where we found "the best lecturer on fractions to deliver the best lectures in the country, and then every student could watch the lecture and do the problems as many times as they had to until they got it." (And yes, on some level, that bears some resemblance to my Inversions post, but not really.) Other speakers talked about online learning that seemed to my ears to tell a story that had much more to do with training than education, and for me, they really are different. (And I think that's an idea I need to explore more, because it seems to me that our national focus on standardized curriculum and standardized outcomes might be tracable to a conflation of education and training, but that's for another post.)

So this was the kind of room that I never thought I'd get to address... FCC policy makers who are looking to re-write the national broadband policy. This felt as high-stakes as any room I'd ever addressed, and I wrote out more notes than any speech I've given since a Beacon graduation.

I think the scariest thing about today is -- as I listened to the speakers -- there is a growing movement in America to give up on schools. If we as educators want to be a part of the coming conversation about what learning looks like, we must offer a compelling vision of what schools can be. We must be willing to examine our own practice and be willing to change. And we must engage parents and students in the conversation, because if we don't, the "education economy" will end up recreating schools in a way that, in my opinion, will leave us good at training, but poor at learning. Jim Shelton said in his remarks today, "There are businesses that want this market, so they will create opportunities for kids." That's not the vision of education I have for my children, and it's not the vision of education I have for the students in my charge.

Despite that, I am, as I wrote recently, optimistic that the pace of change is changing, and that more and more schools are rethinking their practice. I just worry a great deal that the time that we have to do this for ourselves is running out. That is the sense of urgency that I think came through in my voice today.

Interestingly, the WebEx webinar that the FCC set up was acting wonky for a lot of folks, so I just turned on my uStream channel and broadcast my part of the panel out. Here is the uStream of the speech:



And what follows are my notes from the presentation. You can hear that I did some editing as I went:

Slide One:

• E-rate funding has created the technical framework to revolutionize education, by wiring thousands of schools across the country, therefore there is -- in many places -- the technological infrastructure to re-imagine what schools can be.
• However, the complaint we hear too often from too many people -- educators, students, parents -- is that despite the infusion of millions of dollars of wiring, hardware, etc... we are not seeing change happen quickly enough where it matters most -- in the classroom.
• Stand outside any high school at dismissal, and you will see kids pull the devices that have been banned from pockets and backpacks. Increasingly, school is becoming a place that has little or nothing to do with the ways kids live the rest of their lives. This must change.
• I argue that is because we must allow teachers the opportunity to re-envision what their classrooms can be, and the only way to do that is to give them the time and training they need to get there. We -- all of us -- parents, educators and students -- must be willing to rethink many of the basic assumptions we have about what our classes -- our schools -- can be. E-rate must help us re-imagine what school can be by helping educators, students and parents rethink what school can be. This does require changing the funding formulas to allow more Priority 2 funding, allow for teaching training -- especially where broadband is less of an issue -- and raising the cap as the demand for broadband continues to grow and our definitions of school continue to change.  (Reference slide)
• Example: Clayton Christensen, in his book Disrupting Class, makes the claim that by 2019, 50% of all high school classes will be taught either fully online or in a "blended" fashion, with between 30% and 80% of the interaction happening online. There's no question that as we become a more and more wired society -- and as schools increase their bandwidth -- there is no technological reason this cannot happen, but what will those classes look like? How will they be taught? Who will teach them?
• The point is this -- if we spent billions wiring schools, we must also commit to spending the money to help teachers leverage the tools in their classrooms.
• Neil Postman says certain technologies are not additive, but transformative. Guttenberg as metaphor for schools.

Slide Two:

• So what does that look like? (Talk briefly about SLA -- 1:1 laptop public school in Philly / partnership between SDP / TFI. Full use of blended learning, with all classes happening on and off line.)
• Broadband technology allows for a student-empowered learning that puts the power into the hands of children, not by devaluing the classroom, but by revaluing it. 
• The single greatest challenge is to help students make sense of the world today. We have gone from a society / school system of information scarcity to one of information overload.
• But a student, sitting at home, logged onto a webinar isn't the answer. The classroom needs to be revalued as a major part of the solution. Yes, there is no question that learning should not be defined by time and space the class occupies in real time. There is no question that the power of broadband is that learning -- "class" -- can now be 24/7/365. But ONLY if we make sure to continue to close the gap between the access students have in school and what they have at home.  But also, that does not mean that classroom -- real or virtual -- is obsolete. The classroom should be where we come together and make meaning, because we know that synthesis and collaboration work.
• If all we do with broadband technologies is create a system with more efficient ways to "deliver content" with pre-determined objectives and pre-determined, all we will have done is repeated the mistakes of the 1950s when we thought TV would revolutionize our schools by delivering the best content in the world.
• Instead, we need to understand what our schools can be when they become transparent through the use of broadband.

• When the classroom, the teacher at the front of the room and the school library are not the end and be all of gaining information, schools can become truly inquiry-driven. We can start with the questions the community asks together and end with reflections on the answers we find.
• Schools can be empowering -- what held down the progressive school movements of the past 100 years was not that the ideas were wrong, but rather that it often just took too long to create the authentic examples of learning. With the tools at our disposal today, students can research, collaborate, create, present and network in truly meaningful ways. We actually have the tools to achieve John Dewey's dream of what schools can be.
• Schools can be transformative -- when we harness broadband technology, students can be authentic voices in the world. (Tell the bio-diesel story.)

Slide Three:

• None of this happens without teachers. We need to find a way to leverage e-rate funding to help teachers profoundly change their pedagogy. Because teachers are, in many respects, more important than ever. But, in many respects, their role has changed.
• Innovative, Inquisitive and Wise.
• Innovative: We need teachers who are willing to change -- who understand that our society has changed, and our schools need to change.
• Inquisitive: We have to be learners as well. And we have to care more about the kids in front of us than we do about the store of content we can recall from memory.
• Wise: More than anything else, this is what we need from our teachers. Kids are trying to make sense of an ever-changing world, with more access to information than ever before -- some good and some bad. What our teachers need to help our students do is turn information into meaning and meaning into wisdom.
• E-rate has done the first piece of the puzzle -- it has, for 1000s of schools, brought the bandwidth to the door. Now we need to help our dedicated national teaching faculty be a rich and vital part of the change.

• (Remember to thank the FCC.)
  

Tags: education, future, FCC

 
When we started SLA and I found out that I didn't get to site select my secretary, my wife told me that I was dead -- that if I got the wrong secretary, the school was doomed to fail. I got insanely lucky, in that Diane LoGiudice chose us, and as a result, we have a kind, dedicated secretary who does everything in her power to take care of the whole school.

Every school needs that person... a great school secretary is the glue that holds the school together. They are often the "mom" for dozens of kids. They are the memory of the school for when principals forget (and we do, often.) They usually play about a dozen roles in the school above and beyond whatever the job description happens to list.

As a school principal, I am incredibly lucky to have Ms. Diane at SLA. I was really lucky in my teaching career, in that Nancy Greenhouse was that person at Beacon.

Nancy Greenhouse (in the center of the photo in the red wrap) was the founding office manager / secretary at The Beacon School in NYC. She was the person who knew how to get resources for your class. She was the person who could keep track of the student activity account for twenty different teams and thirty different clubs. She was the person who warned you about the mood of a parent when they called looking for you. And she was the person who, for almost every young teacher who started their career at Beacon, pulled you aside when you made a mistake with a student and let you know, because the student went to her afterwards.

When I was the dean at Beacon, I worked closely with Ms. Greenhouse on any number of projects. She told me about how some teachers treated the office staff as servants and how some teachers treated them like gold. I saw first-hand how she quietly juggled dozens of tasks... how she was the quiet voice in the ear of the administration, able to say things to the principal that others couldn't always say. And she was a voice of reason and frequent sounding board for me as a young administrator-in-training. And she was very proud of me when I left Beacon to start SLA.

She was, as the principal has said, the conscience of the school. And she taught so many of us -- adults and students alike -- so much.

Nancy Greenhouse passed away on Wednesday, August 12th. She was still working at The Beacon School, still quietly helping to run that school. She is survived by her husband and her son Jason, Beacon Class of '98, and the hundreds of students and teachers who were lucky enough to have known her.

We talk a lot about the importance of teachers in our schools... but too often, the support staff -- the folks who do everything to make sure that the teachers can teach and the students can learn -- aren't part of the dialogue of school reform and care. So, in honor of Ms. Greenhouse -- and in honor of every school secretary like Ms. Diane and Ms. Greenhouse who works hard to make our schools better -- please, when you go back to your schools in the fall, on your first day back, make a point to say thank you to those people in your school who give so much of themselves, even if they never stand at the front of a classroom. Tell them how much you appreciate everything they do, and tell them that you know they do more than you are even aware of. Thank them and mean it, because all of our schools are better because of the people like Nancy Greenhouse who do this work with us.

Tags: beacon

I spent today with about 150 administrators from the Winston-Salem, NC school district. It was a really wonderful day, as we spent six hours looking at what innovation can look like and how administrators can look at the systems and structures of their schools. (The slideshare is at the bottom of the post.)

And what struck me was how quickly the conversation is evolving. Yes, people still are nervous about using the tools and still want to know about how they are going to make this all work, but days like today, when a superintendent sits with his administrators for six hours and does the work right along with them, when Moodle comes up as part of the conversation, and over half the room has heard of it, a significant number has used it as part of a pilot project with the district, and when I demo it for ten minutes, several principals start imagining what's possible, and a district technology administrator calls two members of her team, and suddenly, there's an impromptu meeting about how to get schools up and running on Moodle if they want it, and ways we trained folks, etc...

I've been feeling this for a while, lately... that the conversation at the local level is moving in the right direction in a lot of places. The tools are new anymore, and many places have pockets of innovation and now many folks are asking how to do it systemically. And more and more administrators are looking at school change beyond just the test scores. We're not ignoring them, but I'm hearing principals and superintendents say things like, "Yes, we need to do well on the test, but we also need to do what's right for kids."

There are days when I am greatly pessimistic about the growing education-industrial complex and the "monitization" of education. But then there are days when I get to work with teachers and administrators who work hard and believe in their schools and their teachers, and who see a need to innovate in their buildings and their districts and who have been listening for the past several years, and who (I believe) will be engaged in some truly innovative practice as we move forward.

And to that end, I'm now in Maine, spending the next three days at MaineLearns as Maine extends its state-wide 1:1 initiative to the high school level. I can't wait to talk to the folks here and see what lessons we can learn from one of the most truly innovative state-wide initiatives we've got going. (Does a state-wide middle- and high-school 1:1 initiative count toward "Race to the Top" funding? And if it doesn't what does that say about the Race to the Top? But I digress. Today is for feeling hopeful.)

I'm about 80% of the way through Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn. (Yeah, I know... I'm the last one to read it.) There's a lot that's very interesting about the book, and while we should critically examine the book, it is still a fascinating read.

If nothing else, it is continuing to make me think about how much more could happen in our classrooms if we created more opportunities for students to learn basic skills and content outside of class, rather than inside class. I've been thinking a lot about math class. How many students would learn math more efficiently if they could watch math videos, narrated by a teacher with problems done "on the board" as they watched with multiple examples of concepts (think geometry here, as an example) that speak to different learning modalities.

So what of class, then?

Then, class, rather than being a time when all kids sat and received the instruction, could be the time when they reinforce skills by doing problem sets, worked on real-world application projects, collaborated with teachers to reinforce concepts, etc... in some ways, it's an inversion of what we traditionally think of as a math class. Right now, in traditional classrooms, class is where the teacher demonstrates concepts (often with some time for individual reinforcement and work), but the bulk of application / practice / etc... is done at home where there isn't much chance for help.

If we use technology to invert that idea, so that kids could watch the teacher's demonstration of the skills and concepts at home (and with the ability to rewind when necessary,) we could allow kids the opportunity to apply and practice their knowledge in the space where they can get help, collaborate, etc... doesn't that make more sense?

(Interestingly, I was trying to imagine what that would look like in an English classroom, and I realized that is, in many respects, similar to what we do already when we ask kids to read the book at home, and then come in and interact with the community to uncover the deeper aspects of the text. Hm.)

Tags: disruptingclass, learning