We have the Parternship for 21st Century Skills, of course, but this seems to be only one dimension of what many talk about when they mention 21st century education.

I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around it, so to get some help from my colleagues and compile all of the various thoughts and ideas about the concept into one place, I’ve put together a Google document called “Compare & Contrast 20th/21st Century Education“. OK, not a spectacular title, I admit. But I thought that if we could generate a list of how modern education can, should, or does differ from the “old way” of doing things, maybe that would help me get a better handle on it. And if it helps some other people in the process, so much the better.

To take it to another level, Kim Printz (@paperwerksart on Twitter) asked me this tonight:

So I’ve added a section at the bottom of the document to share ideas about what to do with this list. Where should it go? How can we use it to impact schools and students? Come join both parts of the conversation, and add your thoughts to the list. Then take the list and share it with someone: a colleague, a parent, a principal. In the end, what matters most is not how we define 21st century education, but how we apply it to help students learn.

“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?

I said for many years that if I could make that kind of difference in just one student’s life, my whole career would have been worth it. I still believe that. But why should I be satisfied with that?

What if I made it a mission not to inspire one child, but to inspire every child. What if I set a goal to do it not just once in my career, but every day?

What if school could be a place where experiences like that happen not by chance, but by design? What if we set out to engineer an environment and a process and a community where lighting a fire is the rule, where shining moments are the routine. What if every child in our care left school every day feeling valued, encouraged, smart, and capable?

Every child. Every day.

Is it even possible? I’m not sure I’d even know how to begin. But I can’t help but think it’s worth trying to figure out. What do you think?

I’ve been reading Garr Reynolds’s book &EAN=9780321525659&itm=3" target="_blank">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.

Lazy curriculum design can result in similar problems:

• Course outlines crammed with more material than can reasonably be addressed in a year
• Meaningless activities and ancillary materials added to make dry content more “fun” or engaging
• “Teacher-proof” scripted lesson plans, and textbooks containing all the instruction and explanation
• Poor design based on what all the other publishers/districts have done before

The cure is the same for curriculum as it is for PowerPoint presentations.

SIMPLIFY

Every year we add new content to the curriculum and rarely remove anything. With the abundance of information readily available to us in so many places, we need to strip curriculum design of most of the details and focus on the core ideas, what Wiggins and McTighe call Enduring Understandings.

As students explore the depths of these understandings and wrestle with the essential questions we ask them, they will naturally seek out the other content they need. Teachers can also bring in other resources as necessary to supply information students can’t find or don’t look for on their own.

CONSTRUCT MEANING

Everything built into a curriculum must connect meaningfully to leading students towards understanding the core ideas we want them to develop.

Smothering a dry, overcooked, under-seasoned meatloaf with ketchup doesn’t improve the meatloaf at all. It just makes it easier to choke down.

Creating a better main dish may be a lot more work, but how much greater is the meal, and how much easier is it to come back for seconds? If our curricula connect with our kids in a deep and meaningful way, we won’t have to slap on the cute games and meaningless decorations to make them want to engage with it.

FOCUS ON INTERACTION

So much curriculum today is designed in a way that the delivery almost doesn’t matter. It makes no difference which teacher presents it. In some cases, the teacher isn’t even necessary, with a thorough textbook, pre-fab self-correcting worksheets, and computerized activities. Actually, in most cases the class isn’t necessary either.

The real learning should not be housed in the curriculum, but in the interactions that take place between students and teacher. Discussion, problem solving, collaboration, disagreement, persuasion, and consensus challenge students to manipulate ideas.

Language skills aren’t learned in a vacuum. Real communication about real ideas and real problems is what will build students’ skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

DESIGN

Curriculum designers—and I argued recently that all teachers should consider themselves in this category—need to understand principles of good design. Design is not just the ketchup on the meatloaf. Design starts with fundamental choices about the ingredients and their proportions. We need to consider universal principles of design, such as unity, balance, harmony, contrast, patterns, proportion, functionality, scale, and even white space.

We will not find simplified, focused, meaningful, thoughtful curriculum by shopping the education trade shows. We will not get a curriculum which is a guide for both facilitating interactions among students and providing a launching point for a teacher to create a rich atmosphere for learning by picking something out of the publisher catalog. We can only get it when we learn how to create it ourselves so that we can take what is given to us and tear it apart, rethink it, redesign it, and make it work for us instead of allowing it to drive us.

I haven’t had time to process much (if any) of what I’ve absorbed in the last two days, and I’ve probably missed more than I’ve managed to catch. As I have time to go back and review my notes, revisit the sessions (thank you Elluminate!) and think about all that I’ve learned, I’m sure I will come back and share. But for now, it will just have to be raw and unpolished.

First, Educon really and truly is as advertised: it’s all about the conversations. Some were deeper than others, some were more formal than others, but all of them were worthwhile and helped me grow.

There are so many things I will take away from this conference (besides that I will be back and next time I’m bringing more of my friends with me). I think the biggest is the power of a PLN. I would not be here if it weren’t for the network of people with whom I have interacted online through Twitter and Second Life over the last two years. I wouldn’t even know about it, and it happens in my own backyard every year!

I was stunned at how many people I already knew here—and that none of them were people I’d ever met before Friday. All of my connections with people here (and there were dozens) were online.

And that’s the second thing I learned: online makes a huge difference…but it will never replace face to face. Having a live, focused, extended conversation with a flesh-and-blood person is such a different experience. Even when I “know” someone online, to talk to them in person, as I had the opportunity to do with many people this weekend, is so much richer. Now that I have added that dimension to all of these relationships, now that there is a real face and a real voice and a real presence to attach to the virtual ones, the conversations I have from this point on with them will maintain a depth that they never had before.

And that’s the third thing I learned: face to face isn’t enough any more. None of these people work with me. None of them live near me. (Well, actually one of them lives a couple blocks over, but he might be moving soon.) If this conference were all we had, the conversations we started this weekend would now be over. But since I already have relationships with them in my online network, we can continue the discussions, elaborate and extrapolate on them, take them in new places and put them into action.

I can’t recall the context, unfortunately—it may even have been in a conversation about Educon—but I remember someone recently using the analogy of drinking from a fire hose in reference to an experience they’d had. That’s what Educon was like for me. A barrage of information, ideas, challenges, thoughts, new paradigms gushing uncontrollably past me. I gave up trying to collect it all about ten minutes into the first panel discussion.

But even what I was able to grab was so rich and rewarding that it will take me a while to process, and some of it I may not be able to act on for a while. Those few drops are still powerful enough to significantly affect my thinking and hopefully will translate into action in my job and in my life. Over the next few days and weeks I will try to go back and gather a few more of the drops that I missed. My PLN will help me find even more of them.

If I had to boil it down to one takeaway from the weekend (and I can’t, there are too many, but I’m going to be obtuse and try anyway), it’s this: Don’t be afraid to do. Everyone here who is doing innovative, exciting, challenging things with students and schools is a practitioner making it work in a real world and a real situation that has the same kinds of constraints and complications that we all do. They are not miracle workers, and they are trying, struggling, and often failing. But they keep doing because it’s going to mean more kids learn more.

Perfect doesn’t happen. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

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.

Gifted students, like the rare tree in Seattle, have unique needs. They have an often unappreciated value that can seem surprising to some: in their attempt to save sixty or seventy dollars, the arboreal bandits destroyed a $10,000 treasure.

But the real issue isn’t that we so often miss the value of our gifted students. It isn’t that we have a few rare gems to pick out from among the ordinary stones. The issue is that we even consider any child to be a “typical” or “average” one. Every single person in every single classroom is a $10,000 treasure. Every student has unique interests, abilities, needs, and talents. Every child deserves to be nurtured, respected, and cared for.

So why do gifted students deserve special treatment, then? They don’t. What they do deserve is to be treated as the individuals they are. They deserve to be taught at their level, at their pace, respecting and nurturing their unique qualities. Just like every other child in the classroom. If we don’t, we run the risk of allowing someone to come in and destroy our own rare trees.

The staff at the Arboretum are still mourning their loss because the tree is irreplaceable.

So are our children.

I am soon going to need a new car. The one in this picture would be just about perfect. Care to donate to my replacement fund? Yeah, didn’t really expect so.

So why is it that you’re not willing to help me get the transportation I need? Because you can see that what I’m asking for is really a want. It may very well be that my car needs to be replaced soon, and having reliable transportation is in fact important to me, but there’s no real reason I need to spend almost $67,000 to get it.

The distinction between wants and needs is not always so clear, especially when it comes to educating our children. In the years I have been a teacher and a parent, one of the most frequent sources of conflict between parent and school has been disagreement about whether something is a need or simply a want.

When these conflicts arise, it’s helpful to step back and refocus on goals. While we would all love to have a Lexus education for our children, sometimes the Chevrolet is sufficient to accomplish the job.

A few thoughts to consider when you find yourself on either side of a difficult discussion about what a child needs in school:

• Remember that this is about the student. Focus on the goal you have agreed on. If there is no defined goal, then back up another step and talk about that goal before trying to plan for it.
• Remember that everyone involved in the discussion is fighting for the same thing, ultimately: the welfare of the child. Rather than being opposing forces in a battle, think of everyone at the table as being members of the same team with different specialties. Being on the same team means that we all win or lose together.
• List all of the options being considered, as well as any options that were rejected. Consider each in light of the goal, and from the student’s perspective. Often by putting things down in writing, we gain clarity about the difference between wants and needs.
• Be honest about the strengths and weaknesses of each option. No plan is perfect.
• Avoid compromise. Although it is sometimes a necessary last resort, compromise often patches together bits of incompatible plans and creates something that is unworkable. Instead, aim for consensus.
• Sometimes there is no best option—just a collection of good ones.
• Consider asking the student for his or her input. Even young children can often express what they need in a way that helps cut through a disagreement.
• Don’t ignore the emotional responses of the parties involved. If a parent, classroom teacher, or student is strongly opposed to a plan, no matter how excellent it may be, it is not going to be implemented as designed, and it will likely fail.
• Everyone should walk out of a meeting feeling like they were heard and understood, and that the agreed plan is satisfactory, at least on a trial basis. Persuasion is fine, but if anyone involved feels like they were badgered into agreement or backed into a corner, no amount of effort on the part of the other parties will make it fully successful.

What other ways do you focus a conversation about how to meet the needs of a student?

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.

When I was in college earning my education degree, most of the research on learning came out of behavioral psychology: Pavlov, Thorndike, and Skinner. We learned how to mold our students’ skills and behaviors through drill and practice, rewards, and punishments. Instructional techniques were built around how to train students to become fluent in the reading and computation skills they would need to be successful in life.

Then, about ten years later, when I was doing advanced graduate work and earning my certificate in curriculum design, we learned that learning wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that. Curriculum shouldn’t be compartmentalized, it should be integrated. Instruction shouldn’t be skill-driven, it should incorporate higher level thinking. Assessments shouldn’t be designed around discrete facts, they should be authentic. At the time we read an interview with Lauren Resnick, a major researcher into learning and how it works. (The article is available free to ASCD members.)

I recently came across the article again, and although it is now twenty years old, Resnick’s comments are thought-provoking, not the least because much of what she said then still has not become widespread in the field.

If knowledge consists of small bits of information to be accumulated, then we know how it is learned and therefore how to teach it. In that case the pedagogy has to do with how you organize practice, how you structure and sequence the material, and how you manage motivation…. But if you view knowledge as something more than an accumulation of little bits, if you want students to understand and be able to use knowledge reflectively, that’s different. (Brandt 1988/1989, p. 13)

If you read the professional literature and listen to what is said in training seminars and workshops, you might think this belief that there is more to learning than discrete facts has pervaded our school systems. Resnick talked about how mathematics, for example, is not a collection of skills, but is an “organized system of thought” (p. 14). But the curriculum has yet to catch up with the past. Even twenty years later, textbooks still look essentially the same as they did then. They still are structured around the accumulation of facts and discrete skills, though they often fill them with lots of the latest terminology.

Teaching practices really haven’t caught up either, because our schools aren’t structured to facilitate it.

What people learn is virtually never a direct replica of what they have read or been told or even of what they have been drilled on. We know that to understand something is to interpret it…. It is not enough to focus on making an excellent presentation, because you cannot assume that your elegant explanation will be heard and understood in its entirety. In fact, you can be almost 99 percent sure that no child in your classroom will get it the way you said it. (p. 15)

And yet what do we see in many classrooms? Teacher at the front, telling students what to do, how to do it, and what to remember. I’m guilty of it myself, and I think on reflection it is a function of time. Planning and implementing the most effective forms of learning experiences take far more time than most teachers can spare. So we fall back on what is efficient, even if it is not as effective.

It’s not enough to stay comfortable with what we know how to do. If I keep teaching the way I’ve always taught, I can’t bring my practice up to date with 1980′s research, let alone what is happening in 2009. I don’t think we can even afford to say, “the system isn’t set up for it, so why bother?” Find ways inside the structure to start making changes toward a more student-centered, thinking- and problem-solving-oriented approach.

How are you making this happen in your classroom? What are the struggles you’re facing? How can we work together to overcome the challenges?

Reference

Brandt, R. (December 1988/January 1989). On learning research: A conversation with Lauren Resnick. Educational Leadership, 46 (4), 12-16.