Finding Harvey |
| I’ve recently taken part in an interesting collaborative effort in which I reviewed a number of articles about schools trying to make fundamental changes in how, where, and for what reason learning happens in their communities. The ones that were most successfully progressing were the ones that took a big picture approach, looking at every aspect of school and community life to understand the role they played and how everything connected and interacted. We all know the expression that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but how often do we tweeze this apart to understand why? Adding laptops here, or a PD course there, are good steps and good parts, but it is the interaction between parts that creates the important added benefits. If there is no connection, no interaction, then you merely have a random assortment of costly programs. What’s worse is that each of these can be a distractor, so that those involved become so caught up in the minutia of each particular program they forget to understand how it links and contributes to the bigger picture. Add to this the very real possibility that some programs may contradict each other or negate their outcomes, and you end up with an end that is much less than the sum of its parts. There are no slackers in a good orchestra – everyone’s role individually is important, but it is the collaborative work that brings about the transformation. Yes, the violin section may be superbly talented and the piano solo breathtaking, but if they are playing in different keys or tempos, all you end up with is ear-splitting cacophony, convincing most audience members that, not only is the orchestra bad, but that the community could spend its limited funds elsewhere. On the other hand, when all programs and participants are working towards the same goal, what results rises above the individual components. In music, when tones of a pure harmonic scale are sounded simultaneously, another harmonic tone is created, a combinational tone. Denny Doherty of the singing group the Mamas and Papas called this the ‘fifth voice’. But it was more than just an additional voice. This harmony transformed the sound of the whole group from four individual voices into one new harmonic voice. Doherty even had a name for this voice - Harvey. (If you don’t know who the Mamas and Papas are, check out their harmony here). So, when it comes to transforming learning in your school, step back and look at the big picture. Don’t just add laptops or send some teachers to a PD session or rearrange the desks in a circle. Take the time - seize the opportunity - to rethink all your ideas of how, where, and when learning should happen. If you think laptops will enable more self-directed learning, than consider what perspective and knowledge the teachers need to have to make this happen, what type of ongoing professional learning will support them, how students should be organized to enable this, what curriculum and content mean in this context, what physical environment is most conducive to this type of learning, how time should be used, etc. Each piece should contribute to your vision and you should be able to articulate how it does. Don’t do what happens so often - get so distracted by one component, that implementing it suddenly becomes your singular goal (Yay, we distributed the laptops! ..or…Look – we’ve created a 21st century room! …..and so on). Always focus on the big picture. In so doing, make it your mission to find Harvey, too. |
| January 11th, 2012 @ 10:16AM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
Defining 1:1--More Than a Snappy Punchline |
| We live in an age of sound bites, elevator pitches, and Powerpoint bullets. And because of this, we live in an age of confusion. No wonder it is so difficult achieving a cohesive vision for learning and teaching or ever hoping to scale it. As soon as we introduce a word that seems to capture the power, the completeness of the change in learning that technology can catalyze, we begin to use it to the point of meaninglessness. As Peter Skillen mentions in his article below, “semantic drift” rears its inevitable head and what seemed clearly defined becomes murky, a catch-all phrase that can easily turn out to mean one thing and its exact opposite at the SAME TIME. An example of that is “reform” – good or bad? Back to basics or not? Does it involve conservation or transformation, or neither? Someone recently pointed out to me that the definition of one-to-one is beginning to change. Is it a laptop per child? Is it a ‘device’ per child (tablet, cell phone, iPod, ebook reader, laptop, terminal)? Does the child use it all day or does the computer belong to a desk in one specific classroom? What seemed so clearly defined twenty years ago – one-to-one - is now much less clear. When you compare the impact of one laptop that each student can use all day at school (and, we hope, outside of school) to the impact of having one eBook reader per student in one classroom, you’re clearly talking apples to oranges. So, what do you mean? Defining the changes we want to see and the goals we want to achieve is not about having a snappy punch line or catchy advertising slogan. We are not Mad (Wo)Men. To ensure understanding, we need to clearly define to all involved what our beliefs, goals, and expectations are, using complete sentences. When we use words such as ‘personalized’, ‘self-directed’, ‘global learner’, ‘online learning’, and “one-to-one” we need to define what that means for us in our context, what we would like students to be doing, what our goals are, and how we will assess both what students are doing and what teachers are doing to guide them. Conveying a clear message may take longer than an elevator ride, but it is worth investing the time and words now to avoid confusion and frustration later. (And, for clarity, when I say one-to-one or 1:1, I mean one laptop per child that s/he can use 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, all year round. To me, that's a foundational piece for contemporary learning.) |
| November 9th, 2011 @ 11:55AM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
Do We Really Want Change? |
| Economics and economic well-being constantly see-saw – one day you’re on the top of the world and then some bubble bursts or there’s a market ‘correction’ and suddenly, whoosh - everything begins to plunge. Technology changes so rapidly that the minute you buy the latest and greatest something, it’s out-of-date and the next, newest, best thing is already on the market. Our sense of place in the world can change rapidly, too– sometimes so suddenly that within an instant we see the sharp demarcation separating the “us” that existed before and the one that exists now. Change in schools, on the other hand, moves at a much different pace. At a frustratingly slow pace. More an edit than a change, a bit of tweaking here, a minor improvement there. Maybe that’s reassuring. While everything around us shifts, recreates itself, or is ‘revolutionized’, we can always count on school to be familiar, just how we remembered it. Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration – schools have and continue to modify themselves. But too much of this is merely tinkering around the edges, not change so much as enhancements and adjustments. We keep layering on new, somewhat improved, ways of doing the same old things. It’s kind of like the evolution of an old sod shack. Starting out as the only home that someone could afford to build, each new generation added on something - another room, another floor, an extension, a fix for some problem in one corner, a different one in another. Some of these changes were fundamentally necessary (a wood roof rather than a sod one, glass windows) and clearly improved the lot of all those within. But many of the added rooms, or pipes or systems, became totally useless/out-dated, were locked off, boarded up. Patched to allow this or that new functionality to be added, too big for its original foundation, the old sod shack soon becomes both costly and ugly and less a home than a relic. I’m not saying that school has reached this point just yet, but we need to be smart enough to know when something is worth further tweaking or if it’s time to start anew. And we don’t have to wait until the building collapses before we give up the old shack for something that will better suit our needs and expectations today and for our future. The trouble is, when a school does try to make a change, the push back from the parents, the community, and the media can be enormous. It seems that change is constant – as long as it doesn’t enter our schools. Take for example, the district in Oregon that has gone to a 4-day school week. (Not a massive change, more like a tweak, but it is a break from the old scheduling standards.) The students get the same number of hours in school as they did before (with the mistaken assumption that the number of hours is directly proportional to the amount and quality of learning, but that’s another discussion). The fifth day of the workweek is used for the teachers to meet and plan and work together to teach better in order to improve learning. Sounds good, right? So why did this story make the national news? It wasn’t because the newscasters were lauding the school’s efforts – most people interviewed were concerned or upset. (“Well,” harumphed one commentator to the school principal when told the teachers would be working together on the fifth day, “school isn’t for the teachers!” “No,” the wise principal responded, “it’s for the students - we’re trying to do a better job for them.”) No, it was because most people, complain as they may about the state of education and schools today, do not want them to change. Whether from fear, lack of knowledge, or just plain nostalgia, they constantly block new ideas and create barriers. True, there are issues to take care of and questions to answer, but change needs to start somewhere. Problems can be solved and questions answered. More importantly, we must work to overcome our wariness and avoidance of school change. We need to keep our vision and goal in mind and provide all children with the opportunities to be engaged, self-directed, and passionate learners. And we need to communicate a positive message to the media and our communities that change in the pursuit of these goals is essential. After all, we can’t live in the sod shack forever. The question I get asked most often when talking about re-imagining learning and schools is what schools are truly transforming the learning experience for students and exemplify the schools we imagine for the 21st century. Do you work at or know of one? If yes, please let us know about it so we can share this information with the AALF community. |
| September 14th, 2011 @ 12:54PM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
