I’ve been reading Garr Reynolds’s book Presentation Zen (and am a fan of his blog, too). I picked it up because I wanted to improve my presentation and design skills, but in the process I’m seeing some parallels with curriculum design.

We’re all familiar with the “Death by PowerPoint” scenario:

Some of the characteristics typical of bad PowerPoint presentations:

• Slides crammed with content
• Meaningless clip art, animations, and effects
• A superfluous presenter
• Poor design based on stock templates

PowerPoint, used poorly, can cripple a powerful message. In fact, the use of PowerPoint as a communication tool may even be partly to blame for the disaster that destroyed the Space Shuttle Columbia.

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Keteleeria tree stolen from the Washington Park Arboretum

Last week a tree was cut down in Seattle and is probably now sitting in someone’s living room, wrapped in lights, festooned with glittering ornaments, and draped in tinsel. This would not be much of a story, especially in December, except for the fact that the tree in question was an exceedingly rare specimen of Keteleeria evelyniana, a conifer native to China, that had been transplanted ten years ago to the Washington Park Arboretum. The staff arrived on December 9 to discover that overnight someone, presumably looking for a free holiday decoration, had removed the tree.

Asked about its appearance during an interview on NPR, the plant collections manager for the Arboretum, Randall Hitchin, said, “In general aspect, it looks like a conifer: tall, dark green, symmetrical.” Sort of like your run-of-the-mill Christmas tree? “In the dark,” Hitchin replied.

Gifted children can be like the K. evelyniana. To an untrained eye, or to those who don’t know the difference (or care to know, as in the case of the tree thief), most gifted kids look like your typical, run-of-the-mill kid. In a classroom of students, it is often easy to miss the unique qualities that make them stand out, that make them rare specimens.

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Thanks to my network on Twitter I saw two TED videos yesterday that got me thinking about (and then rethinking) my ideas about teaching and learning. (Incidentally, if you haven’t spent any time perusing the TED site, take some time right now and do it. You won’t be disappointed. I’ll wait.)

The first came to my attention through Matt Perman’s blog, What’s Best Next. Daniel Pink recently gave a talk called The Surprising Science of Motivation.

Though his talk is geared at business leaders, it has obvious applications to education. The key idea here is that extrinsic, contingent motivators only improve performance when the task in question is narrowly defined with a clear goal and obvious route to achieve it.

The problem is that we want our students to learn how to solve non-obvious, messy problems that don’t already have optimal solutions. But our curricula, our system, and our teaching methods are still based on (a) transmitting knowledge and wisdom from experts to novices through (b) rote application of routines and skills, using (c) extrinsic motivators such as grades to increase student performance. We operate our school systems and manage the employees the same way. We may paste new labels over the old cover, but the fundamental structure and philosophy remains the same.

Almost universally, according to Pink, the social science research of the last forty years says that higher incentives lead to worse performance. So what does that say for our system that is based on increasing performance by rewarding the top performers? Pink summarizes it this way:

Traditional management is great if your goal is compliance.

This leads me to believe that the underlying purpose for the education system in the United States (and likely elsewhere) is to facilitate compliance rather than learning.

Pink offers an idea that seems radical, but I think has some potential for schools: 20 percent time. In companies like Google, the employees are permitted to use twenty percent of their time to work on anything they like—complete autonomy. In companies that have used it, a significant amount of the “real work” ends up getting generated during the 20 percent time.

What would this look like in schools? Students would have the equivalent of one day per week to spend on learning anything they choose to learn in any way they choose to learn it. Complete autonomy. Teachers would be a resource to support the learning instead of directing it. No one would say, “No, you can’t do that in school.” Students would have the freedom to choose the tools and means and sources of learning.

Critics will say we have hardly enough time as it is to cover the required material. Giving away one-fifth of the school year would be madness! Maybe then it’s time to seriously rethink what is “required.”

The flip side of this is that we will still have core content during the other eighty percent of the year that some students will have no interest in learning. If the traditional incentives don’t work, how do we get students to be motivated to learn?

The second video I saw inspired me and gave me a glimpse of what teaching might look like if we move away from those extrinsic motivators. Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speaks on Music and Passion:

Zander says something that is as true for teachers as it is for conductors:

The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. My job was to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining you get to ask this question: “Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

I have to become a conductor. I don’t transmit knowledge to my students. I only have the ability to make students powerful, to awaken possibility in them. They are already learners. I just have to frame the content, the questions, the ideas in a way that makes them passionate about learning it. Easy? Hardly. Important? Absolutely.

Test scores, incentives, and other extrinsic motivators probably aren’t going away. But as an individual teacher, when I turn my attention to those, I lose sight of my real job. Instead I must ask myself every day

Are their eyes shining? If not, who can I become so that they do?

The tension hangs in the air like wet snow on tree branches. Flight Director Gene Kranz listens as his team tells him the command module does not have enough air or power to return to Earth. In this scene from the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris, playing Kranz, utters the now-famous line verbalizing what the team—and the audience—felt: “Failure is not an option!” (Kranz, by the way, never actually said those words, though he did borrow them for the title of his memoir.)

The Apollo 13 astronauts of course made it back safely, and the intense search for solutions to impossible problems still makes a riveting story.

In public education today it often seems like we’re living this Hollywood scene. Federal policy mandates that five years from now, one hundred percent of our children will meet grade level standards in reading and math. Failure is not an option. And why not? If you believe that all children can learn (and I do), what’s wrong with setting high expectations for achievement and doing everything we can to see that students meet those expectations?

There is plenty of debate about that very question, but that isn’t my focus here. What concerns me is how the expectation of success and achievement can get translated at the classroom level. I frequently see this idea that failure is not an option applied to daily assignments and tests. Teachers have no-tolerance policies about missed homework, for example, or grading scales that doom students who do not pass every test.

This is particularly evident with gifted students. I often hear both parents and students say that since these students are so capable, any grade below a certain level is unacceptable and likely means the student is simply being lazy. The response is often punitive, requiring extra “make up” work or retests for partial credit.

It’s easy to forget that gifted students may have the ability to learn quickly and comprehend at a deep, sophisticated level that other students don’t, but this doesn’t mean they already know everything or can do everything without instruction and guidance.

It also doesn’t mean that a lack of success automatically means a lack of effort. Young gifted children are used to success. Things come easily to them, often automatically, and they learn rapidly without even realizing they are learning. Without fail, though, every child hits a point where content is beyond their ability to absorb instantly, and they need to begin applying conscious thought and systematic effort to their learning.

Most children reach this point early in life, often before school starts. They find out that sometimes things don’t go right the first time, and they develop ways to cope with it, persist, and grow.

But gifted students may not reach that point until later, sometimes not until middle or even high school. When they finally do hit the wall, they often have no concept of what has happened, and they don’t know how to respond.

It’s important for teachers to teach all students, and especially the highly able ones, how to fail successfully.

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down. (Mary Pickford)

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed. (Michael Jordan)

We can’t afford any longer to treat failure like an end. Instead, we need to rethink it and consider it a beginning. I’ve written before about how to deal with perfectionism, and those suggestions apply here as well. Here are a few other specific things that teachers can do to create an environment that nurtures learning instead of stifling it:

• Redefine the word “mistake.” In your classroom, a mistake should always be an opportunity for growth and learning, never a failure. Which naturally leads to
• Give second (and third and fourth) chances. Any student who does not achieve at the expected level should not be labeled as lazy or a failure. Instead, give them the opportunity to relearn and try again. School should be the one place where it is completely safe to mess up over and over until you can get it right.
• Celebrate growth. Instead of focusing only on accomplishment, give every student the opportunity to experience the pleasure of success by redefining it. Progress should be considered success, not just rising above a target level.
• Reward effort. Giving as much (if not more) attention to students who work hard and take risks as to those who demonstrate more traditional types of success, we send the message that our classrooms are a place for working and trying, not just for accomplishment.
• Model failure. By showing students how to deal with times they don’t meet their goals or expectations, we give them tools to cope when it happens to them. We also let them see that mistakes and failure are a normal part of life.
• Set students up to fail sometimes. Especially with gifted children, there will be times that the more important lesson is how to recover from failure rather than to experience success. Set students up to fail by giving them a task they do not have the skill or knowledge to complete. Then help them pick themselves up, think about what happened, determine what they need to do to succeed, and walk them through that recovery process.

Try these in your classroom this year. Create a different atmosphere and see what happens to attitudes and learning.

Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter speaks to students and community members in the Centennial School District's Special Experience Room.

I had the amazing opportunity to hear Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter speak, albeit briefly, at my school on Saturday. He was attending the 40th Anniversary celebration of the Special Experience Room, a planetarium and multimedia space in the McDonald Elementary School in Warminster, PA.

Fifty years ago this month, Carpenter and six other men were selected to become the first Americans in space as part of the Mercury program. Part of Carpenter’s message to the gathered group was to encourage students to stay in school, and that through hard work and determination they could accomplish great things. Some might consider the message to be cliche and no longer relevant to today’s world. But I think it’s important to remember the value and necessity of diligence and effort.

Carpenter commented about how we have accomplished so much that was unimaginable fifty years ago, and he expressed hope for a bright future, confident that we will be able to do things in 2059 that we can’t begin to conceive today.

The former astronaut, who insisted that he was today just “Scott” and that the title of Commander Carpenter had long since been left behind, pointed out that the eight-year-olds sitting in the audience—of which my youngest son was one—were exactly the right age to become the first person to stand on Mars.

Educators must more than occasionally remind themselves that the students sitting in front of them today really are the leaders, inventors, creators, explorers, designers, teachers, builders, and discoverers of a world that doesn’t even exist yet, except in the imaginations of those same children. The only way those imaginings can possibly become reality is if we nurture them. Education isn’t about knowledge any more. In fact, it isn’t even about giving students tools and the skills to use them, because we don’t have the tools they will need to create that future. We must teach them how to lead, invent, create, explore, design, teach, build, and discover for themselves.

What an awesome and terrifying responsibility we’ve been given. Just as the Mercury astronauts launched America and the world into space and opened new frontiers, new discoveries, and new ways of living, so we have the power to launch our children into their future. I pray we do so thoughtfully.

In my position as a gifted support teacher, I have the opportunity each day to work with regular education students and their teachers. Last week, I had the pleasure and privilege of joining a first grade class, taught by a wonderful, talented young teacher. (I can say that now that I’m no longer in the “young” category.) It isn’t often that I get to work with primary grade students, and my experience in that classroom got me thinking about the way we do things in school and about the verbs we use to describe it.

During our lesson last Friday, we were doing a science experiment. The students have been learning about rocks, and the investigation that day was called “Washing Rocks.” Sounds like a yawn-fest if ever there was one, even to me, a science geek.

But when the students heard we were going to do science, there was such obvious joy and excitement in the room. The teacher, Miss Hill, briefly reviewed what the students had done the previous day, then announced (with what I have learned is typical first-grade-teacher enthusiasm) that today they would get to wash their rocks! One little girl in the room was so full of glee at this announcement she couldn’t contain herself. She cheered, “Yay!” and clapped her hands as only a six-year-old child can. This was a revelation to me: she couldn’t wait to learn something, but even more important, she walked into every experience, no matter how small, with the expectation that she would learn.

Throughout the half-hour experience that followed, while the students were dipping their rocks into cups of water and watching what happened as a result, there was an intense buzz and energy in the room. Every single child was engaged in the process, every one had perceptive observations, and every one was having his or her world expanded at least a little.

Those students were learning, and more than just what happens when a rock gets wet. In a half hour, they learned about how to look closely at something and see the details; they learned how to share, both materials and responsibilities; they learned that sometimes you make a mess…and then how to clean it up; they learned how to communicate an idea with someone else; they learned the power of a shared experience; and they learned that learning is exciting.

Too often we spend our time in school doing the wrong verb. So much of school is about educating instead of learning, and the differences are vast. Students learn, but teachers educate. I look at a room full of first graders and I see children who are thirsty for knowledge and understanding.

I fear that the response of many educators to that thirst is to pour a bucket of water on their heads. The results are about as effective, too. After years of telling teachers they need a drink and getting doused instead, I think our students become soggy and cold and uncomfortable. It’s no wonder that when I visit many fourth or fifth grade classrooms, I see students who simply want to get through the day. They’ve learned how the game is played: education is going to happen to them regardless, and it makes little difference whether they bother to learn. When they ask why they need to learn it, or whether they may learn something they’re interested in, or how it connects to their real world, we just educate them harder or slower or louder or faster, pouring on more water. We quench the fire instead of the thirst.

I for one am beginning to choose my verbs more carefully. I want to focus on learning, not educating. I want to engage students, not deliver instruction. I want to discover, not cover. What other verbs do you need to use more wisely?

Yesterday I wrote about feeling conflicting emotions about truly making a difference in education. This morning I read an article by Lisa Parisi which scores a point for hope against futility. If enough teachers could really get on board with this and really live differentiation instead of just talking about it, maybe we could start to turn the ship. Now how do we coordinate the effort and have more impact? One blog post at a time, I suppose.

The more I think about this idea of looking at students in terms of their future instead of our present, the more I experience two simultaneous yet conflicting emotions: hope and futility.

The hope comes when I hear other educators promoting similar ideas. Barbara Barreda wrote today about this, commenting that when she sees alumni returning to her school,

…who they were as students and who they have become often are very different. Their growth, wisdom and direction sometimes challenge the assumptions we made when they were students. We have had many pleasant surprises but what is troubling me is that I was surprised! I was chagrinned that I still held some underlying assumptions about these students.

Barreda also refers to an article by Damien Lopez which argues convincingly that we need to think about education for elementary students in terms of preparing them for college. It isn’t that we expect every child to go to college, but that we have to stop assuming that certain children won’t.

Both of these articles highlight the importance of seeing a child from her future instead of determining that future based on our present.

But while I feel hope about the possibility of seeing this kind of shift in perspective, I can’t help but feel that the whole attempt is futile. There are so many forces pushing back on educators to prevent just this kind of thinking. As just one example, consider the way we evaluate the effectiveness of schools today. The entire system is explicitly designed to take our attention and energy off of long term goals and look only at incremental improvements in a few narrowly defined categories.

I believe, like many others, that education is in the midst of a significant change. My hope is that I will live to see a better system on the other side of the change. My fear is that the change process will crush my passion for educating children and drive me out of the profession. My dream is that I would rise above the fear and make some kind of difference. There is a plaque on the wall of my house that displays a quote by Janos Arany, “In dreams and in love, there are no impossibilities.” May it be so.

I watch this and realize that I should be enthusiastic, energized, motivated, and excited about the potential and opportunities for an explosion of new learning that could take place.

So why instead do I feel depressed, defeated, and hopeless? I am at a place where the cynic in me is winning the battle and crushing the idealist. I want to innovate, but my own weaknesses and lack of knowledge coupled with what seem to be endless barriers in the system convince me daily that it will never happen.

I can address my own flaws, and I am. I can chip away at the barriers, and I am. But are there enough people doing the same? Can we overcome the enormous inertia that continues to drive the system on in the same direction? I hope so, with the little bit of hope I have left.

I’ve been pondering a post about all the reasons we tend to resist meeting the real needs of the exceptional students in our classrooms. Yesterday, Tamara Fisher said it better than I. This should challenge every one of us, regardless of how much we think we’re doing for our gifted students, to reflect on our practice and our assumptions.