I got thinking about history the other day.

How do we know what we know about the people around us? Our lives overlap in various ways. We experience things together, we talk, we share, we collaborate. If I want to know more about someone, I can give them a call or get together with them for a cup of coffee, and we can talk. We ask questions, we share thoughts and dreams, and a connection is made. History is about the relationships between our stories. It is a growing, changing thing. My story is different today than it was yesterday, and I’ve added a small bit to the web of history by the things I did today.

The day someone dies, their story, and whatever history they were connected to, is complete. The cement has set. Anything new we may have to find out about them is already there in the things they’ve left behind. This is the real job of the historian: to assemble the clues and fragments left behind by the people who can’t tell us their own stories any more.

So the ones who really write the history are the ones who leave things behind. And this is precisely why I think it is important for teachers and administrators to blog. What will future historians have to work with when they are trying to piece together the story of teaching in the twenty-first century? Do we want our story to be told by politicians and the press? Do we want to be defined by the view from outside?

Teachers have always been in a position to create history and define a legacy through the students whose lives we change, and that is still true today. But we have a unique opportunity to tell our own story daily. If others listen to that story and create a conversation with us, the history is that much richer. Only while we are living that story can we add to the conversation and build an intricate, intimate picture of our lives and the lives around us.

Everyone’s story is interesting to someone, and everyone’s story is important to history. What history will you create today?

For the second in our summer series, Tony Baldasaro (@baldy7 on Twitter) brings us this reflection on his views about gifted education. Tony is the Chief Human Resources Officer and the Personalized Pathways Administrator for the Virtual Learning Academy Charter School. This article was also cross-posted at Tony’s blog, TransLeadership.

What excites me about the shift in education away from the classroom-centric model we have all been a part of over the last century, is the fact that students are less dependent upon the teacher and/or the system for all knowledge.  Students no longer have to attend school to attain their knowledge, they are as Nagel describes, “free agent learners”.

Because of that, students have the opportunity to break from the long-standing categories we so often use in education.  Terms such as “slow learner”, “hands on learner”, “troubled student”, “active student”, “solid student”, “middle-of-the-road student”, “talented student”, “straight A student” and yes “gifted student” are simply constructs of our educational system and they most often only provide clues as to how the student learns within the narrow confines of that system. The “straight A” student may be intelligent, but I’ll bet they are also also very compliant and diligent in getting their homework done and being attentive in class.  They are very good at playing the part of the industrial model school student that the “conspiracy” of school was intended to create but are they good at solving problems, being creative, unlearning that which they have previously learned so they can be relevant?  Do we really challenge these students to use their gifts to their fullest potential or do we simply moved them along the conveyor belt, sending them off to college with the tools to continue to be “good” students?

The “active” student is one that doesn’t fit our system well, yet fits in the world’s chaotic and unpredictable system very nicely.   To make that student fit within our educational model, we drug, punish, and belittle the student until they either comply to a degree in which they can be tolerated, or are pushed out of our system all together.  The real shame here is that many times there is an assumption that these students are not gifted, when in fact they are, they simply don’t play the game by the industrial model rules that were established a century ago.  Our choice has been to change the student to fit the model instead of changing the model to fit the student and by doing so, we have missed an opportunity with a whole bunch of gifted students.

How often do we work to control our students?  Think of that student who challenges our systems.  Think about your reaction to that student.  Now think about your reaction to that student when you know they are right and our system in wrong.  Unfortunately, most of us squelch that student and often without a true explanation as to why.  We say that it is, “complicated” or “for their own good” or “they will understand when they are older”, instead of embracing those students, their ideas and their input.  Instead of acknowledging that they are rightfully challenging the way we educating them because our system is not working for them and they want it to.  Their “challenges” are pleas for help, not the acts of betrayal we so often portray them to be.

My point here is that we have so narrowly defined what it means to be “gifted” in our system of education, that we fail to either see the gifts within each student, or we fail to push students beyond the model we have been a part of for so long.  I fear that as long as we define “school” and “learning” so narrowly, we will continue to miss the the opportunity to cultivate the gifted student found in all students.  As long as we continue to define what it means to be “gifted” by the system which so narrowly defines how we learn, we will not truly find each of our students’ gifts.  It is why this shift toward free agent learning, with the categorical freedoms and the power to self-define our gifts, is so intriguing.

The Cabs of Times Square, by joiseyshowaa

I had a wide-ranging conversation over coffee the other day with David Timony (@drtimony on Twitter). One of the things that came up was the idea of students as consumers. David is doing research about what constitutes an expert teacher, focusing on teacher behaviors that influence student perceptions of expertise. It got me thinking about how we treat teachers and students in the big picture and the business of education today.

For a long time, educators have been told we need to run schools more like businesses, that the students are the consumers, and we need to let the market drive our methods. We should measure student performance and student reaction like corporations measure consumer preference and adjust our methods to produce the outcomes (increased sales) that we are looking for.

I have a problem with this approach, though. It presumes that the students are passive recipients of the education we are producing. It also leads to a market where many of the producers (schools) resort to manipulative and deceptive tactics to increase the numbers. We only need to look at recent news on Wall Street to see that reliance on one metric to judge performance can not only cause problems but it can affect the entire economy. Is this really what we want for education?

What if we turn the model upside down? What if we think of the students not as consumers but as the producers?

In the marketplace, corporations have a lot of control over their product, their methods, their advertising, but they are ultimately dependent on the consumer to judge their products and make them successful. The consumers also provide a great deal of feedback to the companies about what works, what doesn’t, and how they can improve their products to make them more successful. In addition, corporations have to work within an existing environment that dictates much of what they must do to succeed: laws, tax structures, suppliers, competition, investors, and so on.

If students become the producers, they will have to work in the environment created by the schools and teachers, including curriculum, standards, and so on. The teachers become the consumers, providing feedback and guiding the learning process (roughly parallel to R&D in the corporate world).

This model is far from perfect, of course. There is a great deal about learning and about school that doesn’t fit into the business approach. But if we’re going to be asked, or even required, to do business like a business, then let’s really examine that model and think hard about what it means for kids.

This is the first in a summer series of guest posts by members of my personal/professional learning network. Mary Beth Hertz is the technology teacher and technology integrator at Alliance for Progress Charter School in North Philadelphia. She can be found on Twitter at @mbteach and blogs at Philly Teacher.

What I want to express in this blog post is not anything new or innovative. It is nothing that hasn’t been said before.  However, it is something that’s been mulling about in my brain while I was drinking my morning coffee and watching the Twitter stream from the Discovery Educators Network Leadership Council Symposium.

A video kept getting re-tweeted in the stream so I figured I’d better check it out.

You can watch the 2 minute video, Microsoft Labs 2019 Vision:

As soon as it started I felt like I was watching a car commercial. It was flashy, well-produced and fast-paced. I honestly was not that impressed. I guess what people felt was that it was a window into what the future holds for technology and digital devices.

That I won’t deny.

The name on the video is “Microsoft Office Labs 2019 Vision Montage.” This is the vision that Microsoft has for our future.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Many things.

For one, why are we letting Microsoft dictate what the future of digital life will look like? We could make the same statement about Apple or Sony or any other companies who manufacture digital products.  Many of these companies do use customer input and feedback to improve their products, but in reality we are all consumers of what these companies feed us.

What does this mean for education? It means that we need to be putting our students to the task of deciding what THEY want their future to look like. We live in a time unlike any other in history. Our natural resources are disappearing, we have devices that are more powerful than ever before and we have tools that allow us to connect with people thousands of miles away in a matter of seconds.

Companies like Microsoft are not in the business of planning for the future of our children as members of society or for the future of our global community. We must empower our students with that charge. It is they who will inhabit the future. We must also ensure that we empower ALL students to take part in the building of future society, not just the ones who are privileged and can afford it.

There are many obstacles to overcome when we begin to ask our students to solve real world problems. Solutions to real world problems don’t fit on a standardized test. Solutions to real world problems take time to understand and even more time to solve. Solutions to real world problems require a restructuring of school as we know it.

I have been having various conversations (and sometimes debates) about what it means to be a teacher and a learner in the 21st Century. Some of the conversation has been focused around guiding students to understanding rather than delivering content, creating learning environments where learning is a connected and social experience, and infusing technology into learning when it can transform the learning experience.  The world our students will inhabit will require them to collaborate with peers, understand social media tools and be problem solvers within their own communities and the larger world.  We need to prepare them for that world.

Schools need to allow for tinkering. Tinkering with ideas, tinkering with materials, tinkering with students’ perceived limitations. Tinkering teaches children how to learn from failure. Tinkering teaches children how to think about a problem or a project from many perspectives. Tinkering allows children to build self esteem and feel pride in what they do. Students who tinker are the students who build our future.

Some examples of what I’m talking about:

• The Tinkering School teaches children how to build and guide their own learning. While it is not a true ‘school’ it is a model that could be replicated on a smaller scale within the school curriculum. (Listen to the founder’s TED talk here.)
• Philadelphia High School Students Design the Car of the Future
• Project Based Learning motivates students to solve real world problems–Edutopia article
• Sylvia Martinez writes extensively about tinkering on her blog, GenYES

There are those who will look at these words as a ‘pipe dream,’ ‘utopia’ or ‘fairytale.’  To them I would argue that we must have a Vision. If Microsoft can construct a vision of what it thinks the world will look like in 2019 then we as educators, parents, community members, lawmakers and general stakeholders in the world need to have a vision, too. Even more importantly, we need to let our children begin to build their own vision for their own future and give them skills to make it real.

How would you sort these?

Take a look at this picture. If I asked you to sort them into piles, how would you do it? OK, now do it again a different way. No problem, right? Again. Took a little longer for you to think of a way to sort them this time, didn’t it?

I’ve done this with kids and adults of various ages. The first few times we sort, it’s simple and straightforward. The next few times it starts to get more challenging. Eventually there are people sitting there thinking, “There is no other way to sort these!”

When people have gotten to this point, I’ve said something along the lines of, “You have to stretch your thinking. Be creative!” This would often just result in frustration for both of us.

Now I know why. According to this article in Newsweek, telling someone to “be creative” can actually have the opposite effect, closing off their thinking and making it more rigid.

So how can we help our students become more creative? Try some of these strategies:

• Plant the seed. Instead of a vague “be creative,” tell someone, “give me an idea that only you could come up with.” According to Marc Runco of the University of Georgia, this simple switch in directions can double the student’s creative output.
• Make it messy. Creativity is squashed when students feel like they are looking for one right answer. Give students problems that have multiple solutions. Even better, give them problems with no clear solution. Mucking around in the problem solving process can free up creative thinking.
• Never accept the first answer. Even if a student gives you the response you were expecting, say “Can anyone think of another answer?” or “Is there another way to do that?” It sets an expectation that one answer, even if it works, isn’t the end of the process but just the beginning.
• Teach creativity techniques. We often think of creativity as some sort of ethereal aura that some people have and some people don’t. In fact creativity is a skill and a process. It takes work and it can be taught. Techniques like SCAMPER can give kids a concrete handle on something that can seem abstract and complicated.
• Reverse the roles. Instead of giving an assignment to students, ask them to tell you what they would do if they were the teacher. “What would you ask the class to do to show they understood this unit?” Share the best ideas with the class and let them pick their assignment.
• Get out. Changing the perspective can change students’ thinking. Hold a class in the cafeteria, or the auditorium, or the football stadium. Or in a living room, on the sidewalk, or in an amusement park. Rearrange your classroom or your schedule.

And before you think, “That’s not possible in my school,” take a minute and come up with a way to make it happen that only you could think of. Or ask your students to figure it out. You might be surprised at what they think of.

So what did I miss? What are your surefire methods for getting your students to think and work creatively?

Last week I wrote about how design principles should apply to curriculum. I’ve been thinking about one of those elements in particular: the idea of white space. This isn’t really a new concept, but I think it bears some examination.

Curriculum today is very full. We do our best to stuff every little thing that may have some importance or relevance to a subject into the 180 day school year, and since it won’t all fit, we assign the rest as homework. Any teacher who has been teaching for more than a year knows that there is no practical way to complete the entire prescribed curriculum in one year, even if you take the tour bus approach and just point out the highlights to the students as you cruise by at seventy miles and hour.

I’m no longer convinced that the purpose of curriculum is to assemble in one place all the important “stuff” that a kid should know by the end of the school year. There’s too much that’s important anyway, we won’t all agree on which things are truly important, and the volume increases almost daily.

So what if curriculum instead were designed with holes, with a certain amount of white space? In visual design, the white space does a few things: it brings attention to the other elements of the design, it allows them to breathe, and it helps make them dynamic. Taking out some stuff and leaving more space in the curriculum can do similar things for the student.

Invite. Curriculum should first be built so that the student wants to engage with the content. It should be active, it should be interesting, it should be personal. Make it real and relevant. Start with where the students are. Connect to their interests and their worlds.

Inspire. Next the curriculum should motivate students to want to learn about the subject. The word inspire originally meant “to breathe into” or “to infuse life by breathing”. There is very little breathing room in today’s curriculum. Kids have no time to breathe in and reflect on their learning. They just have to cram it in and move on.

Ignite. Finally, the curriculum must light the fire. Leave students at the end of the unit or school year feeling like there is so much more to explore and so much deeper to go. If we ignite their passions and their natural curiosity, they will continue to pursue it on their own.

I remember so many times “discovering” a subject as a teacher that I thought I had no interest in learning about, but when I really engaged it (because I had to teach it), I found it fascinating and went on to study it on my own. I think a well-designed curriculum can do that for students.

Understand that I don’t believe curriculum can do this alone. None of these things can or will happen without an excellent teacher. Curriculum doesn’t live until students and teachers interact and engage it. But a strong curriculum will give the teacher the tools and resources to accomplish these things more easily.

Accomplishing this is the real challenge, of course. How do we create a curriculum that does these things? How do we anticipate where kids are when there are so many different varied experiences around the world? Perhaps this is an argument for purely locally designed curricula, but I’m not sure that’s practical. What do you think? How can we make this happen? Or is it just a fantasy that will never become reality?

Due to the nature of this post, the Department of Blogging requires that I begin with this statement:

Notice: The consumption of raw or undercooked blog posts may increase your risk of thought-borne illness.

Be aware that the ideas I’m going to share here (a) are undercooked and need some additional processing before they are complete, and (b) likely come from a variety of other sources, so if I’ve not given the proper credit for everything here, please let me know in the comments.

On my flight back from ISTE 2010 in Denver yesterday, I finished reading Presentation Zen. In it, Garr Reynolds presents, among other things, a concise explanation of the principles of visual design that one should use when creating slides for a presentation.

Being an educator, I began to think about how those principles would look if we applied them to curriculum design. Here is where my brain has gone with it so far. (And this is the undercooked part. I’m sure some of these won’t or can’t work, and I’m sure there are elements I’m missing. Chime in on the comments to help me sort it all out.) My goal is to elaborate on at least a few of these in future posts.

Signal vs. Noise Ratio. This is about sticking to the message. What is the point or the goal of the curriculum plan? If there is anything in the plan that gets in the way of that goal, eliminate it.

Picture Superiority Effect. People remember pictures better than words, so in essence, this principle means show, don’t tell. Presenters use visuals to activate emotion and connection between the audience and the content. In terms of curriculum design, I think we need to take it further. Not only should visuals be an integral part of every curriculum design, but we need to ensure that learners interact with and manipulate what they are learning.

Empty Space. A key to making visuals cleaner and more effective is to incorporate white space. Reynolds says, “empty space in a design is not ‘nothing,’ it is indeed a powerful ‘something,’ which gives the few elements on your slide their power.” We tend to treat curriculum as if we are packing for a vacation: get as much as we possibly can into the fewest number of bags. Bring extra clothes in case of unforeseen mishaps, and bring a big variety in case the weather takes an unexpected turn. Empty space in our curriculum design might give students a chance to breathe and reflect.

Contrast. Visually we use contrast to make something stand out. When was the last time you saw a curriculum where certain elements were deliberately arranged to stand out against the rest? We notice and remember what is different.

Repetition. Visual patterns help a presentation audience follow what is going on. Curriculum should be designed the same way: in predictable patterns that enhance the message without becoming trite and simplistic.

Alignment. Again quoting Reynolds, “The whole point of the alignment principle is that nothing in your slide design should look as if it were placed there randomly.” So often I have seen things dropped into the middle of a unit that seem like it’s there just because. Alignment means that everything in a curriculum design is there on purpose and with a conscious connection to other elements and other parts of the curriculum.

Proximity. Finally, clustering related items together helps cement the connection to the viewer. If the student has to expend energy trying to figure out why a unit is structured the way it is, then the structure isn’t working for the curriculum.

Okay, so help me avoid making all my readers ill by helping me cook this. What have I missed? Is this overly obvious, or is there something worth digging out more?

I just finished a session at ISTE 2010 by Chris Lehmann (@chrislehmann on Twitter) on Thoughtful School Reform. Besides turning a lot of my assumptions upside down (which happens every time I hear anything he says) and having far more to process than I could possible fit into one blog post (so I won’t try), I walked away with an interesting question. It was not something he addressed directly, but it was embedded in many of the points we discussed in the session:

“Who are the learners in your school?”

What answers would you get if you asked this question tomorrow? I suspect that in many cases, if the askee didn’t just look at you like you’d lost your mind, they’d say, “Uh, duh, the students?”

If that’s the only answer you get, though, there’s a lot of work to do. Everyone in a school needs to be a learner, needs to think like a learner, and needs to be treated like a learner. Teachers, volunteers, parents, aides, facilities staff, bus drivers, and administrators all need to understand that they are part of a learning community. Everyone still has something to learn, everyone has something to teach.

We make an effort in our family to eat dinner together as often as we can. Even if it’s only a brief time, we are deliberate about making it happen. Dinner often interrupts stuff the kids are more interested in, like playing outside, surfing the Web, reading, and so on. Our youngest son typically will pick at his food, eat a few bites, and say, “I’m full.” While, we’re not looking to get our kids in the habit of eating when they’re not hungry, we’re also responsible for making sure he’s not malnourished. So we’d tell him, “You can’t possibly be full yet. You need to eat a little more before you can leave the table.”

What was funny, and now a family joke, is that it didn’t take long for him to catch on, and instead of telling us when he was done, he started asking, “Can I be full yet?”

I don’t believe there is a single person involved in any school who has the right to ask “Can I be full yet?” The answer should always be no.

I’m thinking that this would be a great interview question. The answer would tell you a lot not only about the perspective of the applicant, but also how they are likely to work with their colleagues and parents.

I’m curious too about your thoughts: What are the implications and consequences of asking (and answering) this question? I’d also be interested in finding out about people that actually do ask this, and what kinds of answers you get. What are you going to do tomorrow to start changing what answer people give?

While working on my model classroom presentation for this afternoon, I discovered a metaphor that helped me crystallize one of the things that makes learning today radically different than it was when I was in elementary school, and gave me a better grasp on how and why teaching and schools need to be different.

In the 1970s, writing a report was like buying fast food. I remember writing reports on many topics in elementary school: Morse code and Iraq are two that specifically leap to mind. (When we were selecting our countries to report on, I picked Iraq because I thought it was cool that the name ended with a Q. Yeah, I know.) I selected my topic, went to the library, found a book, read it (or more likely, skimmed it), then sat down to write my own version. Report writing really wasn’t research then, it was more like retelling. Like fast food value meals, someone else had really done all the work of taking the information ingredients, processing them, and putting them together into styrofoam containers and paper cartons. All I had to do was pick meal #2 and consume it.

School today is still set up for our kids to be fast food knowledge consumers. State and federal governments have already done the work of selecting what kinds of things are on the menu. School districts and textbook publishers have already chosen the ingredients, developed the recipes, and prepared the food, ready to deliver to the students. And just like fast food, it all looks and tastes pretty much the same everywhere. A Whopper in Denver is identical to one in Philadelphia.

Simply being a consumer is no longer sufficient. In the seventies, kids (and most adults for that matter) couldn’t access information directly. We only had limited sources, and all of them had been preprocessed for us by others. Today, on the Internet, we can tap directly into the raw data. The problem is, many of us still just consume it the same way we used to. We’re getting fresh produce and meat, but we are eating it raw.

We must teach kids not how to pick a good value meal, but what do do with the ingredients they have. We have to teach them how to create their own meals. We’ll begin by following recipes, but we have to also teach them the principles behind the recipes, the thinking that went into creating them, and eventually how to develop their own recipes. They need to know how to select quality ingredients, and which ones go together well. They need to develop their palates so they can experience the enormous variety of ideas and relationships that exist in the world. This will involve skills like critical thinking and problem solving.

Even this isn’t enough, though. I believe we need to get kids out of the grocery stores and into the fields. Teach them not just to select the right foods, but to grow them. We need to give kids the seeds, the tools, and the techniques for becoming their own knowledge farmers, to create knowledge and share it with the world.

And of course, all of this means that teachers have to get out of their own value meals and learn how to shop, how to cook, and how to farm. I suspect that at least for a while we’ll all be learning these things just half a step ahead of the kids, but that’s okay. What matters is that we recognize that there’s a world of cuisine outside of the food court and that we’re willing to live there.

Two themes are emerging in what I’m learning here at ISTE 2010. These aren’t new ideas by any stretch, even to me. It’s just that they are being driven home in very powerful and deep ways.

The world is small and flat. Not precisely in the sense that Thomas Friedman meant in his book, but in the sense of connections and relationships. As I said yesterday, I can hardly turn around anywhere without seeing someone I know, or meeting someone I’ve conversed with on Twitter. Today I met Jeff Agamenoni and Sue Waters, from Montana and Australia respectively, and with whom I have chatted many times over the last couple of years. (Sue, of course, reminded me almost immediately that I forgot to bring her the chocolate I promised her. And then I took her seat in the Blogger’s Cafe. Great way to treat someone I’ve just met.)

When our students leave our schools, they are going to land in a world where they need to relate not just with people who live and work near them, but with people around the world. It’s not optional any more. Everyone is your neighbor. Distance is now measured not in miles but by your ability to connect with different channels. The more communication tools you know, the closer you are. Kids are going to have to be able to find people and be found, to build their own digital homes and tell their own digital stories.

Which is the second theme I’m seeing over and over:

Design is an essential skill. Garr Reynolds in his book and blog, Presentation Zen, talks about how often people treat design as an afterthought, as though it’s decoration to be painted on after making the content. But design is much deeper. It is ultimately about effective communication and facilitating connection. If a valuable message is obscured by poor design, the message will lose power, or the recipient will give up before it gets through.

Just as kids have to learn how to connect with the world and manage those connections, they have to learn how to effectively use the principles and tools of design to enhance their communication. The only way we will ever be able to teach those skills is to use them ourselves.

So my first takeaway from the day is that all educators, not just the ones who like that “technology stuff,” have to become connected and become designers. It’s not optional anymore, because we will be putting our kids at a disadvantage if we don’t get there.