That Crazy School Down the Street...

Last week a 38 year veteran teacher at our neighboring local high school decided to share her feelings about our school with her class. She referred to us as, "That crazy school down the street." Of course her intention was for us to hear this comment and question our work, but the result of that comment had a very different effect than what she thought. We felt relieved.

If we are to change education and empower students to learn, create, and think, we have to make fundamental changes to public education and the factory mindset that underpins the establishment. And how do you know you are making those changes? Just listen to who is unhappy and who is thrilled. Thanks for the unintended encouragement!

Hills and Valleys

Occasionally we have a friend of who drops in to have a chat with us at Design39Campus named Jordan. Chats with Jordan are more like being lead through a jungle of ideas on a high speed journey through the worlds of mathematics, physics, biology, and sociology. Serious integrated thought and you just have to hold on for the ride. This week, Jordan talked us through some of his latest thinking on hills and valley crossings. And this relates to education...give me a minute.

This is an oversimplification, but here it is. Human societies became hierarchical through evolution. The power of the group and the alphas to lead, kept us safe. When cities first appeared, the hierarchy continued. In fact, the powerful tended to cluster around what was perceived to be the most powerful place and often it had an hill either real or artificial. The rules around who had rights and access to power were clear. If you didn't want to participate, you faced a "valley crossing" to get to somewhere else. In this valley you faced the wilderness and beasts of all types. If others were with you, they would be small in number, and the risk to your life was great. The reward...you may find a new hill to climb. One in which the old rules could be rewritten. Of course the society created on the new hill will soon be like older one. New rules perhaps, but the new game would be played with a predictableness found in the old hill.

But the hills Jordan was really interested in were the mental ones that came along with this evolutionary adaptation. Businesses, institutions, schools...all have hills. From the tops of those hills you can see a certain distance. You have an ordered system with clear rules and the general feeling of safety. Things just work a certain way. Newcomers to the hill may look at it and decide early on it isn't worth the climb for whatever reason. The leaders who started the hill climb may see it isn't the right hill after all and leave it. On the way down the other climbers may think they are crazy. 

In the worst case, the old hill is collapsing. The thing that allowed for the rise of this hill is imploding and while some people are fleeing others are using sheer force to keep that hill together. An illusion of course, but some people refuse to see the writing on the wall. 

By now I am sure you see why this is an intriguing idea to me when we think about the future of education. We have built a hill out of top-down, command and control, teacher as sage type of thinking. All of the traditional structures around this reinforce compliance and have no interest in leaving this hill. This hill is crumbling before our eyes. Students sitting in rows, getting informated by experts, memorizing stuff a committee thought important 20 years ago...falling apart. The information revolution is eroding this hill faster each day.

Being a teacher for over two decades, I have seen the rise and fall of small hills too. Right now we are seeing a collapse of the high-stakes testing regime and state content standards. At least the check-off lists variety. Common Core is the new hill and time will tell if it really turns out that way. Certainly we have entire groups loudly protesting as they leave it already.

If you want to know who is in the valley, searching for the next hill in education, follow the conversations on Twitter. Chance are you are one of them if you are reading this blog. The people on the old hill don't know how to use Twitter, usually. Look for teachers who are shifting the power structure in their classrooms. People who challenge everything about school.

I would argue the next hill in education is going to be one where the leadership is more flat, personalization of learning the norm, inquiry the process, and the pace of learning will vary depending on the student. At the center of this are teachers who care about the whole child and aren't enthralled by teacher's guides or textbooks. And these teachers have to be smarter than ever. Not encyclopedic, but able to adapt and learn just as fast as students.

Valley crossing requires people to be far more entrepreneurial than most hill people are used to. It is very tempting to just join the old hill community and fit in. It is in our genes to do so. That's why the crossing is so difficult. It isn't necessarily the dangers we face in the valley, but the internal battle we have to go against our biology and take that leap.

It's Not About US

WHY TEACH LITERATURE?

Literature, like art, reflects the values of a culture and there is the potential for deep personal reflection when reading literature. The problem is literature is often taught by bibliophiles who can't imagine what it is like being in the head of someone who hates reading fiction. The best lit teachers are the ones who help students see the reading of literature as a thinking task and learn the secrets to the ways in which literature is constructed. Then students can connect with the themes and ideas and have thoughts of their own.

Nothing is worse to young readers than a teacher who imposes an interpretation onto a novel as the right one and then becomes self-righteously angered over students who aren't fascinated by the ideas that fascinate them. There is a narcissism in education that invalidates all efforts to teach. It's not about the teacher or their beliefs! It should be about helping students understand themselves within the context of culture. 

Shakespeare can resonate today because of the universality of the stories. But why must the first exposer be a teacher-centric slogging through pages of old english with a teacher who is so enthralled by everything Shakespeare she has a Philodendron named Hamlet? Students should experience Shakespeare as plays as intended by the author. This gives the students the opportunity to overcome the language barrier by seeing the story in context as THEY make meaning. Then the teacher can help them dive deeper as they ask questions. 

Focus on the learners and have some empathy for their perspective. If not, teaching literature becomes mere ego broadcasting of the teacher and her values. Students may as well not be there for that because at the end of the course they have just navigated another authoritarian points game and haven't been challenged to think beyond themselves. Just thank God the class is over and, "I never want to take that class again" becomes the only take-away.

Beyond that, If your goal is not helping students be fascinated by literature, or math, or whatever is being taught, then you are wasting time and dooming what you value to irrelevant mutterings. The world is changing fast and authoritarian structures are falling apart everywhere. If literature instruction is to survive, teachers have to shift the focus and help answer the WHY on a daily basis with students and help them become fascinated with the world of ideas. Our culture needs our stories to transmit values. It is about who we are as a society and not simply being a mirror for the teacher to see themselves.

AdaptED versus AdaptIVE

Adaptive Schools

This week our Design39Campus leadership team participated in the first part of Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar training in Los Angeles. Our facilitators were Jon and Carrie, pictured with our team above, from UCLA Center X. Highly recommend this seminar to anyone interested in collaboration and supporting inquiry.

There are many ideas to explore and practice and I was struck by two big "Aha!" moments that became blog-worthy to me. One is a stream of thoughts connected to my my last blog entry on Scarcity vs. Abundance. Related to that is the idea of ADAPTED vs. ADAPTIVE. Adapted refers to ways that living things have changed in order to survive in a specific environment or niche...specialization. The idea explored was how this specialized state prevents an organism from rapidly changing when environmental conditions alter. When organizations are adaptED, they are endangered species. AdaptIVE organizations find ways to change and grow within the changing environment.

Traditional schools are stuck in an adaptED world. They are operating as if nothing ever changes. The insanity of this thinking is the fact that schools are HUMAN organizations and humans are non-linear and ever changing. The fact that we have spent more than a century running schools in a linear, mechanistic manner is beyond unfortunate. Linear thinking and linear schools are fundamentally at odds with human needs. It's not that things have now changed, this system has never been a true fit for humans, it's just the pace of change was so much slower in the past it wasn't as obvious. 

Now the out of balance tire is spinning so quickly that the banging sound is becoming obvious to more and more people. There is a convergence of ideas and thoughts around the need to be adaptive from many different arenas. The chart below lists a few that I keep running across.

ADAPTED	ADAPTIVE
Linear Fixed mindset Specialized (Narrow focused) Programs matter Just-in-case teaching People must "buy-in" to the program Everything seen as cause/effect The sum of the parts add to the whole Like clockwork Clutching to tradition and often rigid Production orientated	Non-Linear Growth mindset Generalized (Big picture) Relationships matter Just-in-time learning Experimenting with options Cause/Effect not closely linked The sum of the parts add up differently and aren't always predictable New patterns create new possibilities Open to new ideas and flexible Process orientated

The second "Aha!" moment for me was around INQUIRY. So often education runs on the factory conveyer belt thinking model. This applies directly to INQUIRY and the Common Core. Teachers who are stressing out about Common Core are not getting the point of the shift. INQUIRY is not about producing a product or a piece of evidence every day to be cataloged in the factory checklist of grading. INQUIRY is about thinking, being curious, conferring, investigating, a questioning process, an invitation to transmit thoughts or feelings... it is all about PROCESS. 

How liberating to imagine a space where children just process and think for chunks of time! Teachers can just orchestrate the space for inquiry and monitor the process. In order to do that, teachers have to become skilled at collaboration and inquiry. This is why Adaptive Schools is so vital to the work of schools that want to shift from an adaptED world view to an adaptIVE one.