21k12

Sharing today 3 recent TEDx talks by three of my fellow travelers in the 21st century and deeper learning movement: Grant Lichtmann, Julie Wilson, and Marc Chun.

Grant Lichtmann is probably most familiar  to readers here:  formerly of Francis Parker School in San Diego, and just now a Senior Fellow of the Memphis based Martin Institute, he attracted, rightfully so, a great deal of attention for his “edu-journey” last fall  exploring and examining innovative practices at 60 schools.

In his talk below, he shares the news that schools are “bad at innovation,” but he won’t accept that change is hard– homesteading the prairie was hard, but change is uncomfortable.     The work is about teaching into the unknown, and because we know the future less well than we ever have known it before, most important is that we become, and we help our students become, self-evolving learners.

I love what Grant says about the new “sphere,” building on previous ec0-spheres such as the atmosphere and the biosphere, we have a new sphere only about 10 years old: the Cognitosphere.   Yes.   He doesn’t make these same references, but his term captures so much of what I am so excited about in my reading of John Seely Brown’s New Culture of Learning, Stephen Johnson’s Future Perfect, Wellman and Rainie’s Networked, and Rheingold’s Net Smart.

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Julie Wilson is launching a new organization, the Institute for the Future of Learning, coming out of her graduate studies at Harvard with, among others, Tony Wagner.     In this talk, she speaks of the importance of making learning meaningful today, and doing so by being serious about student engagement, real world connections, essential questions, and authentic audiences.   She shares concrete and vivid examples of schools, some of them associated with the Deeper Learning and 21st century learning movement such as New Tech Network and High Tech High, doing this right, and she asks us to work together to bring this kind of authentic student work to all students.

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Marc Chun, formerly of CLA/CWRA and the highly regarded Performance Task Academy, and now at Hewlett Foundation’s important Deeper Learning Initiative, offers an important talk about Transfer: What is it, What does it require, how do we support it?  Transfer may be among the, or the singular, most important goal of all teaching: can students take what they learn in one context and moment, in our classroom say, and apply it, later, to a new challenge, effectively.

There’s good stuff here: standout is Marc’s metaphorical examples of 007 and MacGyver.   Sometimes we want students to take what the tools we provide them, say an exploding pen, and apply it to the situations which they encounter– directly.   Relatively routine, something we can practice again and again: this is important to develop confidence and the skill of applied problem-solving.

But, it is also very limiting.  As Marc points out, most of our students will end up working in jobs which haven’t been invented yet.  In the case of MacGyver, problems emerge for which he hasn’t been trained exactly.   These novel situations demand novel solutions, which he must craft from the materials available to him, drawing from an array of prior knowledge, blending it and synthesizing it.   For these skills, students need the skills of collaboration, of critical thinking, of learning how to learn: of deeper learning.

Students do need experience with both 007 and MacGyver learning challenges– but in our schools today, we need to work harder to provide a lot more MacGyver.

Enjoyed greatly presenting this morning to several hundred CT educators at their annual summit.

My topic: What can we learn about creating 21st century learning from innovative PBL schools such as High Tech High, New Tech Network, Envision Schools and Science Leadership Academy.  

I should make a quick note here: my lessons learned analysis is based on my 15 days visiting innovative PBL schools such as High Tech High, New Tech Network, Envision Schools, and Science Leadership Academy.

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Fairfax County, which is headed by one of the nation’s finest superintendents, Jack Dale, has recently posted up a comprehensive website about PISA/OECD testing in their district, and it is fascinating and impressive in many ways.

The video above, produced by America Achieves, which is active in the OECD testing initiative in the US, offers a nice overview of the Fairfax program, and demonstrates the seriousness of the way in which they in the district intend to use and apply the results to improve learning.

PISA testing, newly available for individual schools and districts under the name of OECD test, was recently praised by Tom Friedman in his column, and has long been admired by thoughtful and informed educators such as Tony Wagner.   Simply put, it is a better kind of test, much more designed to evaluate students abilities to use what they have learned to tackle new and complex problems, evaluating their application and analytic skills.   Below is a video about the PISA test. (more…)

St. George’s: A Distinctive Model Addressing the Achievement Gap

I had the pleasure of seeing this presentation last week at NPEA: I found the program described extraordinary and profound, and the presentation inspiring and moving.

The slides include in the beginning some colorful (and tragic) images of Memphis and some appalling stats about the poverty there, but the key pieces begin on slide 42.    The graphs are for some reason a tad off-kilter in this slide format, but I think they are still mostly legible.

The story runs like this.   An independent (private) suburban/affluent/nearly entirely Caucasian PK-5 school until about 15 years ago, St. George’s now is a three campus PK-12 school.  That story by itself is anything but unique.    The difference is this: one of those three campuses hosts a second, entirely parallel educationally, elementary program, but in a mostly African-American (but now also increasingly Hispanic), inner city Memphis neighborhood.

Both programs are of course entirely equally St. George’s; the ECE and elementary students at each campus regularly do activities together, such as Skype conversations, field trips and as they grow older overnight trips;  and both elementary campuses feed into a single middle/high school campus.   Whereas because of geography the suburban campus is mostly white (though less so now than it used to be) and the Memphis campus is mostly non-white, (though not entirely– it is appealing to Caucasian families seeking a diverse urban educational experience), the 6-12 campus is an integrated multi-racial program.

I believe myself to be very knowledgeable about NAIS/independent schools nationally, and I have to say, I don’t know of a single other comparable program.   I asked Bill Taylor, St. George’s head who presented this session along with his excellent Memphis campus principal, whether he was aware of any similarly structured institution, and he told me he was not.

St. George’s success in closing the achievement gap for the Memphis campus students is breathtaking, and evidenced by the stats seen on slides 45-50.   Slide 45 demonstrates that 100% of their 3rd grade students have achieved reading proficiency, compared to 42%state-wide and 20% in Memphis.  In the upper elementary grades, slides show proficiency rates in the sixties to eighties– not perfect, but still vastly higher than the city numbers.

They explained in the session that some additional educational interventions were called for– a slightly longer school day, an additional teacher in some classrooms– but on the whole, the effect, they believe, is a result of a combination of the quality of school culture, the excellence of their instructional program, and the height of academic expectations they have for all students.

In my opinion, every independent school, particularly K-12 programs,  in the US should be examining the extraordinary and exemplary St. George’s model, and exploring whether when they can match it.  Perhaps it will take a decade, (perhaps two), but it shouldn’t be impossible– indeed, now we know it isn’t impossible.