You’ve had many fine days this school year: days when you’ve written analytical papers about Shakespeare and presented your Scientific research on an element of the periodic table; days you’ve toured the Getty Villa and raced chariots on Rome Day.

Your Mission Days were outstanding days, when you delved deeply to not just learn about but also practice our school’s core educational elements: Character, Scholarship, Leadership, and Innovation.

This may come as no surprise, but I was especially excited about your Innovation Days: what amazing things you did. You designed and executed a video newscast, planned a new garden project, researched the history of our school, and learned about the OSIRIS REX rocket mission to an asteroid.

In two projects you designed solutions to limitations of our campus: in each, you discovered underused but high potential places on our campus, you questioned repeatedly why they were not functioning effectively until you arrived at a better understanding of the problem, and then you generated solutions for these problems.

Problem-finding is at the heart of innovation, though it is sometimes underappreciated. As the Scottish educator Ewan McIntosh recently said,

While everyone looks at how we could help young people become better problem-solvers, we’re not thinking how we could create a generation of problem-finders.

In a fascinating book entitled 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, science journalist Michael Brooks tells of the many deep problems scientists are still struggling to understand, from the missing Dark Matter in the universe to the Placebo effect in medicine.  As he says:

The future of science depends on identifying the things that don’t make sense; our attempts to find anomalies with our curiosity and inquiry are what drive science forward.   The things that don’t make sense, are, in some ways, the only things that matter.”

You discovered your problems by your curiosity and your close questioning, but how did you work to solve them?   As I watched you, I saw you use several of the main ideas in a terrific new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, by Jonah Lehrer.

One thing you did was work in teams—which Lehrer explains is essential for innovation:

Group creativity [he writes] is becoming more necessary because we live in a world of very hard problems: all the low hanging fruit is already gone. Sometimes a creative problem is so difficult that it requires peoples to connect their imaginations together.  More than 99% of scientific fields have experienced increased levels of teamwork in published research, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20% per decade. 

One of the most successful company in the world is PIXAR: it makes movies which use awesome technology, tell wonderful stories, and are huge financial successes.   When Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, whom you recall died last fall,  designed the new PIXAR headquarters, he made sure that everything about the building promoted collaboration—he wanted the storytellers and the artists and the computer technologists and the marketing people to be constantly bumping into each other—he even made sure that there was only one bathroom for each sex in the whole place, so employees from all over would find themselves washing hands next to each other.   At Pixar, they believe “Technology inspires art, and art challenges technology.”

The second thing you did was Work hard, very hard, trying and trying again and again.  Lehrer tells us about Milton Glaser, the most successful graphic artist of the 20^th century, who says

Creativity is a verb, and it is a very time consuming verb.  It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real.  And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. 

It wasn’t uncommon for Beethoven to experiment with 70 versions of a phrase before settling on the final one.  ‘I make many changes, and try again, until I am satisfied.’

And third, you opened yourself up to new experiences, knowing that it is from the most unexpected sources that inspiration comes.    “The imagination is vaster than we can imagine.  We just need to learn how to listen. Sometimes the most important idea is the one we don’t even know we need.”

Research tells us that those who travel the most widely, or most often interact with people from other countries and other backgrounds, or seek out new experiences most frequently, are the most creative.  Lehrer says:

When  19^th c. Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge was asked why he would take breaks from writing poetry and attend  chemistry demonstrations in London, He answered “I attend the lectures so that I can renew my stock of metaphors.”

I am sure you all have your favorite Pixar films: in my favorite Pixar film, Ratatouille, Anton Ego, the imperious and acerbic restaurant critic  says  about the culinary genius who happens to be a rat, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

9^th graders, As you go forth to what I know will be successful high school careers, seek out the most interesting, challenging, and meaningful problems, and then imagine and innovate your way to the solutions, always remembering that it is by hard work, teamwork, and the mingling of ideas that you will be most successful.   Congratulations.

In the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is a character so stunning that she may become the iconic fictional hero of our century, much as Gulliver was to the 18^th, Natty Bumpo to the 19^th, and Clark Kent/Superman to the 20^th.    A loving friend and sister, a savvy and ingenious problem-solver, and, ultimately, a passionate and persevering advocate for her people’s dreams of justice, Katniss presents many faces of the 21^st century hero.

She can be seen as an exemplar of social entrepreneurship, which is the work of solving social problems creatively, collaboratively, and sustainably.

Dr. Tony Wagner has written a new book about how to “make young people who will change the world” and in it he argues that social innovation is of  importance equal to technological innovation. His book was published in April, two years after he spoke here at St. Gregory, right where I am speaking to you now, under the same slogan that is written above me.   In a charming coincidence, his new book is entitled Creating Innovators.

Social entrepreneurship is innovative leadership: it demands of its practitioners the habits of mind, the intellectual skills, and the character qualities that we at St. Gregory think of when we say we create leaders and innovators.

Among our graduates today are many who are already themselves social entrepreneurs.   Emily Hansen and Jaxon Rickel saw a social issue, education opportunity in Kenya, and designed a strategy to address it.  Quoting Mr. Roberts,

The work Jaxon and Emily put into the STG12Hour embodies everything we hope to teach our students about leadership and responsibility.  It began with a vision and a passion.  They took risks, invested long hours, created new connections, and along the way made many, many mistakes.  With each mistake brought an opportunity to improve their work, and that they did.

Mr. Roberts identifies in Jaxon and Emily a quality which Dr. Wagner says is found in the development of every innovator: Passion.   He explains that the journey of innovative leadership begins with play, the activities young people find most fun, engaging, even whimsical, and then advances into an energizing and motivating passion, finally flowering as a deep and abiding purpose.

We can see this journey of play to passion to purpose in the story of Katniss: her arc takes her from archery in the forest to feverish opposition to the injustice of the games to becoming the standard bearer of her people.     

It is also the character of Katniss which is so admirable. When we see her participating in the Hunger Games, we see how her view competitors as worthy of honor, dignity, and respect: we come to realize just as she comes to realize that she isn’t as much horrified to be in these games because she might have to die as she is because she might have to kill.

The enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant best articulates this type of morality in his ethical imperative: Act in such a way that you treat humanity never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Treat others always as ends in themselves, not as a means to an end.  Graduates, you know from your study of history that the ideological regimes of the twentieth century made exactly this mistake, murdering millions whom they saw as obstacles to their perceived-to-be perfect societies, but it doesn’t require genocide to make this mistake.

In a recent book entitled Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the 21^st century, Howard Gardner call us upon us to sustain the Platonic ideals in an age where moral relativism is rampant and digital technologies triumphant.  In the book’s central chapter, he explains that no matter how much the world is changing, goodness is timeless.    To quote

The first and primary sense of “good” has been with us over the millennia: it refers to how we treat our relatives, friends, neighbors: are we cruel or kind, generous or selfish, fair or unfair?

Dr. Gardner fears that this goodness is imperiled in our  21^st century, especially in the virtual communities we form online.  As he writes,

in a way that could not have been anticipated 25 years ago, people, even when very young,  are finding themselves members of large communities via the Internet; any participant in the digital media is necessarily connected to an indeterminate number of others

Now that we are digitally connected so tenuously to so many, it is more difficult than ever before to uphold our obligation to treat others as ends, to treat them fully with fairness, generosity and kindness.

In the face of this challenge, Gardner does not recommend disconnecting and unplugging; instead, he calls for “constructive engagement: far more than in other spheres of young people’s lives, digital media make essential the modeling and coaching of healthy habits.”  Graduates, for the sake of practicing goodness and respecting others in your digital worlds, it is incumbent upon you to seek positive role models and wise coaches,  and honor their good habits and recommendations.

The St. Gregory faculty and administrators you see here are such role models: they do constructively engage students in using the power and privilege of digital media responsibly and effectively.  These fine people are also exemplary practitioners of Kant’s ethical imperative: as advisers, coaches, directors, and mentors, they treat each student as an end in him or herself.   In just a few moments, you will have the opportunity to see and hear our teachers’ dedication to students as unique and idiosyncratic individuals.

Others have also heroically supported our graduates, including you, their friends and family members, whom we are so glad to have here today.  Another group who everyday demonstrate goodness by showing kindness, generosity, and fairness to our students is our hard-working, dedicated staff.    They deserve appreciation for all that they have done to make possible your graduation; several of them have been here for the entirety of your high school careers: Mary Babbitt, Holly Ainza, Abel Herrerra, Verna Mendoza, Darrel Patton, and someone very much in our thoughts and prayers this spring, Don Goetz.

Graduates, as you become ever-greater leaders and innovators, consider Katniss as a model: be bold, creative, collaborative, ingenious, passionate, and devoted to social justice while you never forget to treat others honorably and respectfully, as ends and never means.  Congratulations.

St. Gregory has a wonderful tradition, pre-dating the famous “Last Lecture” of Randy Pausch but very much analagous to that famous talk, of faculty members presenting a talk at Senior Night, a talk that is framed as what they would say in their  ”last lecture.” 

Dr. Scott Morris, our Chemistry teacher and Science Department chair, and my frequent collaborator on 21st century learning initiatives here at St. Gregory, delivered last night the following. 

(For last year’s talk, Finding Your Struggle by Fred Roberts, click here.)

—

The LAST LECTURE…. Tantalizing from an number of angles…

1) Barring some unlikely, but relatively simple, twist of fate, this is the LAST LECTURE you will get from me! (Now just hold your applause..)

2) I have tried mightily, in the last few years, to lecture less and less, and directed you to Do more.  Virtually everything I know is “out there” in the ether, and often in a more engaging format than blah, blah, blah (am I alone here?)

3) I believe that the days of the teacher centered classroom have passed, and we may be approaching the time when the actual last lecture will be given. Wow!

So, listen up and take notes if you learn best that way, but I’ll post it to the website anyway….

In the spring of 1974, I was you.  I enrolled in college in the fall, powered through my Bachelors degree in three years, earned my masters in two more, and my Ph.D. four years later.  I emerged in 1983, at the seasoned age of 26, for one brief and shining moment, one of the world’s leading authorities on soil erosion in semi-arid granitic mountain terrane [short-hand term for a tectonostratigraphic terrane, which is a fragment of crustal material formed on, or broken off from, one tectonic plate ]. I was the youngest professor at the University of Idaho, and my plan was world domination!

But convection currents in the heart kept the tectonic plates of human relations moving, and earthquakes along fault lines, and turbulent transfer in the boundary layer (as well as mixed metaphors) were inevitable.  In the end, I was forced to confront an inconvenient truth: by the time students got to college, they were beyond my power to save.  I watched freshman struggle and drop out, and bright students coast through superficial core courses, and no matter how tightly I drew the trappings of the Ivory Tower around me, and clicked my ruby slippers together, the end of that chapter was already written.  I was not changing lives, but my partner was, so there you go, and here we are.

It’s kind of comical when I think back on it– a young man so smart, and yet not wise. Yet I remain at my core, a simple bone collector.  Unable to ignore the emergent plant, the buried stick, the out-of-place cobble, the failed chemical reaction, the carapace of stretched rocks, the cloud type and position, the photon flux, and the ever-present voice in my head that chants: “The earth has a history, and every place tells a story!”  I. Just. Simply. Have. To. Know!

You should have three questions for me tonight:

1) What are the imperatives?

Clean your own house.

Tend your own yard

Wash your own car.

You will learn important things about yourself.

Begin with the end in mind.

Don’t waste food.

Love strong.

Look inward.

Be thankful everyday for hot water and refrigeration.

Make sure your emails have titles…

2) What are you proud of?

I am proud of my generous and moral children and my courageous partner.  I am proud to have been a part of the STG legacy, and I am proud of what you all will do (I guess that would be called pre-proud).  I am proud that in the 11 years I have served here, I did my best every day to make chemistry, geology, statistics, and environmental science new, personal and alive. I am proud to have kept difficult promises, and, to have lived if not small, then at least smaller than I could have. More than ever, the things that you can “do” to help the earth, are things you don’t do.

 3. What have you learned old man?

Well a lot! The constant, and often intricate ballet of kinetics and thermodynamics; the unrelenting progress of oxidation; the difficulty of digging a good hole for soil profile inspection; the troubling failings of valence bond theory (especially as it relates to paramagnetism) ; the tenuous nature of the liquid phase (and the concomitant wonder at the specialness of Earth); the power of Kinetic Molecular Theory; the amazing behavior of polydentate ligands, the difference between paper water and wet water; the saga of Western environmental history and development; the capabilities of Wolfram Alpha; the supremacy of Excel; the inadvisability of first period senior classes in the second semester…

I could go on and on (that is, in fact, your greatest fear at this moment), but I suspect that few of these things will be of lasting value to you.  So I have put together a much shorter list of 5 things that may either: save you mucho dinero, help with your future relationships, or perhaps give comfort during dark times.  In order of ascending importance, here they are:

Thing One:  A car is just a metal box with 150,000 miles inside of it.  If you take that to heart, I have just saved you probably $100,000 in the next 70 years!  That’s OK, you don’t have to thank me; you can owe me.

Thing Two: You cannot argue your way out of an argument.  I have been arguing about this with my wife for a long time.  Turns out she is right.

Thing Three:  Love changes you, but you can change love.  I think you will just have to grow into that one. But essentially it means you have some negotiating room.

Thing Four:  You can reinvent yourself; which is very cool.  I know this because I have done it, twice, and may well do it again.

AND Thing Five:  It is a big old goofy world out there, but you make your own luck, and on most days, happiness is a Choice!

Finally, a quick story (you knew it was coming)…. 

In June of 1982 my wedding day approached.  Lisa and I decided to have the ceremony on top of the First Flatiron in Boulder, Colorado.  It was an easy two pitch climb and almost all our friends were climbers of at least modest ability, so we anticipated no problems. Finding a “preacher,” however, did present a  problem.  Turned out that one of my aquaintances had a doctor of divinity degree from some mail order house.  He was also a climber of considerable skill, had a big personality, and was delighted to perform the ceremony.

At that time, in that place, you wrote your own vows, and so Lisa and I thought it would be a good idea to get together with the Right Reverend Randall Cerf and plan the big event. We met at a diner on 28th street for breakfast, and made small talk until everyone ordered.  Before we could get the conversation going, Reverend Cerf looked at us with an uncharacteristic serious expression and declared:

“You know, there is a difference between being involved and being committed!”  I was thinking: Whoa! That’s a little weird coming from this guy, but before I could get anything out, he continued:

“It’s just like what you are having for breakfast, Scott.”  I probably looked dumbfounded.  “What did you order?”  Finally I was able to respond:  “The same as you: eggs, sausage, toast, potatoes, coffee.”

“That’s just what I mean,” he said.  “You see, the chicken was involved with your breakfast, but the pig, baby, he was committed.

So, Commit yourselves, and Go! Go! Go!

photo: Alex Lunt’11

Last week we held our second annual faculty tech smackdown:  about 20 teachers and administrators presented one or two one to three minute presentations about ways they are using technology effectively in their work.

The slides above will take you through the tour, though some slides are less informative than others; much of the presentation was in the talking, of course.

The hour was fast-paced, informative, and enjoyable.  Over the course of the rest of the day (the smackdown was first thing in the morning), it seemed like there were many followup conversations as people took the inspiration from the morning to learn more.   The format is highly recommended.

The topics ranged a wide gamut:

• Studying volume in geometry, students use geometer’s sketch pad to design a duck and evaluate its displacement, and then convert it to google sketchup and then print the resulting design in our new 3d printer to obtain a prototype where the analysis can be tested;
• getting online on twitter to join educator hashtag #edchats, synchronously and asynchronously
• videotaping lectures and posting them on teacher websites, and how that advances learning;
• favorite extensions for Chrome, including send-to-kindle and awesome screenshot;
• schoology and edmodo uses in the classroom;
• AP English video projects;
• Wolfram Alpha uses in Science and Math classes;
• documentary videos in history;
• following congresspersons and senators on Twitter;
• the advantages of integrating ALEKS.com in math classes, and the resulting gain in student learning;
• open computer testing in theater history class;
• and more.

Below (or after the jump) are some of the videos shared or referred to in the slides:

Advanced History Documentary Trailer:

English Class Videos

Click here to see my suggested quotations from 10 books current a year ago, and here to read my 8 Suggestions for Graduation Speeches by Principals.

Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin

The dreams we need are self-reliant dreams. We need dreams based not on what  is but on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can  discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to  engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.

Amplified by the Web and the connection revolution, human beings are no  longer rewarded most for work as compliant cogs. Instead, our chaotic world is  open to the work of passionate individuals, intent on carving their own paths. That’s the new job of school. Not to hand a map to those willing to follow it, but  to inculcate leadership and restlessness into a new generation.

In the connected world, reputation is worth more than test scores. Access to data  means that data isn’t the valuable part; the processing is what matters. Most of all, the connected world rewards those with an uncontrollable itch to make and lead and matter.

Imagine by Jonah Lehrer

Human creativity has increasingly become a group process. Many of us can work much better creatively when teamed up…The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.”

Group creativity [he writes] is becoming more necessary because we live in a world of very hard problems: all the low hanging fruit is already gone. Sometimes a creative problem is so difficult that it requires peoples to connect their imaginations together.  More than 99% of scientific fields have experienced increased levels of teamwork in published research, with the size of the average team increasing by about 20% per decade. 

Creativity is a verb, and it is a very time consuming verb.  It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real.  And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. 

It wasn’t uncommon for Beethoven to experiment with 70 versions of a phrase before settling on the final one.  ‘I make many changes, and try again, until I am satisfied.’

When  19^th c. Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge was asked why he would take breaks from writing poetry and attend  chemistry demonstrations in London, He answered “I attend the lectures so that I can renew my stock of metaphors.”

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, quoting Jobs directly:

You would think that the CEO of Disney would be curious how Pixar was [being so successful.]  But during that 20 year relationship, he visited Pixar for a total of two and a half hours, only to give little congratulatory speeches.   He was never curious.  I was amazed.Curiosity is very important.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate.  The Beatles were the same way.  They kept evolving, moving, refining, their art.   That’s what I’ve always tried to do– keep moving.

What drove me?  I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders we stand on.  And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and add something to the flow.  We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to the flow.   That’s what has driven me.

Truth Beauty Goodness Reframed by Howard Gardner

The first and primary sense of “good” has been with us over the millennia: it refers to how we treat our relatives, friends, neighbors: are we cruel or kind, generous or selfish, fair or unfair?

in a way that could not have been anticipated 25 years ago, people, even when very young,  are finding themselves members of large communities via the Internet; any participant in the digital media is necessarily connected to an indeterminate number of others

we need constructive engagement: far more than in other spheres of young people’s lives, digital media make essential the modeling and coaching of healthy habits.”

Today a newly reigning cliche– lifelong learning, must become more than a cliche.  Learning ceases to be the targeted burden of childhood and adolescence; it becomes the privilege, but also the obligation, or an entire lifetime.  We now know that, contrary to long-held beliefs, the adult nervous system remains plastic, flexible, and capable of effecting new neural connections.

Disciplines can change fundamentally, splintering, coalescing, reconfiguring.  Moreover and crucially, nowadays much work is no longer discipline based- it is problem-centered (and appropriately so)); it involves interdisciplinary content knowledge as well as the capacity to work fluently and flexibly with individuals from different disciplines as well as different cultures.

It has become much easier for adults, both within and outside of educational institutions, to remain in tune and in touch if they so wish.  The ubiquitous media-old, new, mechanical, electronic, digital– enable that contact.   Anyone regularly engaged with the Internet and the web, anyone who blogs or reads blogs, will be as exposed as often as he or she likes to what is new, noteworthy, changing. 

Quiet by Susan Cain

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world.  One child is given a light saber; another a wizard’s education.  The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available power, but to use well the kind you’ve been granted.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford

There is a recipe for successfully adapting.  The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you’ve failed.

Creating Innovators by Tony Wagner

Increasingly in the 21st century, what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know… Academic content is not very useful in and of itself. It is knowing how to apply it in new situations or to new problems that matters most in the world of innovation.

There are three essential  interrelated elements to intrinsic motivation: Play, Passion, and Purpose.  Whether, and to what extent, parents, teachers, and employers, encourage these qualities makes an enormous difference in the lives of young innovators.

Innovators DNA by Clayton Christensen

Throughout our research, we were struck by the consistency of language that innovators use to describe their motives.  Jeff Bezos of Amazon wants to “make history,” Steve Jobs to put a “ding in the universe,” Skype Cofounder Niklas Zennstrom “to be disruptive in the cause of making the world a better place.” Embracing a mission for change makes it much easier to take risks and make mistakes.

Innovative companies are almost always led by innovative leaders.

Why do innovators question, observe, network, and experiment more than typical executives?  As we interviewed them, we found two common themes.  First, they actively desire to change the status quo.  Second, they regularly take smart risks to make that change happen.

Thinking Fast and Slow  by Daniel Khaneman

The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome: errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent, and biases cannot always be avoided; and as a way to live your life, continuous vigilance is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical: constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious.   The best we can do is compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.

13 Things that don’t Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of our Time by Michael Brooks  (turns out I had the copyright date on this book wrong– it is not a “current” title, but a 2008 book).  Still great.

The future of science depends on identifying the things that don’t make sense; our attempts to explain anomalies are exactly what drives science forward… Admitting that you’re stuck doesn’t come easy to scientists…. But once you’ve done it, you can continue with your journey.  In science, being stuck can be a sign that you are about to make a great leap forward.  The things that don’t make sense are, in some ways, the only things that matter.

 

Links:

Survey: What is your favorite School of the Future resource?

Google Doc: What do you view as Core elements of Schools of the Future? 

Shared Slides: Group Work, Sharing your Suggestions for Uses of Tech. 

Videos

It was great to share this presentation with my “home association” colleagues, ISAS Technology administrators and educators.

Above are the presentation slides, in which you should be able to find most or all of the books to which I referred,  and below are some of the videos I used in the presentation.

—

—

Cross posted from the Santa Fe Leadership Center newsletter/blog, for which it was commissioned and where is was first published April 12. 

Uh,oh, I thought at first, and then “oh-no:  Jonah Lehrer isn’t joining the dark side, is he?”  The title of the New Yorker piece previewing his forthcoming book Imagine read “Groupthink: the brainstorming myth.” Would he be yet another horseman of the Creativity and Innovation backlash, arguing to their readers (many of whom, after all, found their writing online, via Social media, or shared with them via some collegial network) that “groupthink” is the enemy and that original thinking and breakthrough creativity is being lost in the crowd and drowned by the information flood inundating us.

—

“Increasingly in 21st c., what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know.”

“Academic content is not very useful in and of itself. It is knowing how to apply it in new situations or to new problems that matters most in the world of innovation.”

“Transforming classroom experience at every level essential to develop capacities to become innovators.”

“Collaborative, project-based, interdisciplinary approaches to learning have a profound effect on the development of young persons [to become innovators].”

There are three essential  interrelated elements: Play, Passion, and Purpose.  ”Whether, and to what extent, parents, teachers, and employers, encourage these qualities makes an enormous difference in the lives of young innovators.”

“High Tech High and New Tech Network provide outstanding examples of educating students to develop innovation skills… Together, High Tech High and Olin College provide an outline of 8 years of educating for innovation.”

—

Regular readers here will understand with the enthusiasm with which I greet the publication of Tony Wagner’s new book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.  I’ve been a fan of Wagner’s writing since the Global Achievement Gap was published in 2008, a book which has influenced this blog’s educational vision perhaps more than any other single title.   “Creating Innovators” has been a theme both of my educational leadership and my blogging since 2009, when the Board of St. Gregory adopted it as a core component of our mission and our slogan/tag line.

This book, like Dr. Wagner’s previous one, has many different audiences; it is not a book exclusively for K-12 educators, and includes among its targets parents of young and school-age children, post-secondary educators, and, more generally, those many general nonfiction readers who have been influenced by Thomas Friedman to recognize that the “World is [Now] Flat” and it is essential that we confront the changing demands of our fast-changing times.   Frankly, there are times at which as a reader who is an educator I feel a little cheated that there isn’t more attention to and more information about what we should and can do to strengthen educating for innovation in K-12 learning, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recommend this book: I do recommend this book, wholeheartedly.

The book is built upon interviews with an array of outstanding young (twenty-something) innovators, and often also with their parents, teachers, professors and mentors.  Innovation here is defined broadly (which is fine) to include social innovation and entrepreneurship in addition to more conventional technological innovation.   Wagner has a narrative style which is different from that of some other nonfiction authors: as in Global Achievement Gap, but even more so here, he is generous with his interview subjects, allowing them to go beyond sound bites and wax eloquent and elaborate, sometimes for several pages.  (I find myself sometimes skimming the longest of these quotations; perhaps my attention span is too short).

The upshot for K-12 and post-secondary educators?  We are not currently succeeding in  ”creating innovators.”

The first and most extended profile interview is of Kirk Phelps, an inventor of the iPhone.  Kirk has twice dropped out of school, both Andover and Stanford, due to the “rigid curriculum” and the fact that there “was not too much innovation in thinking about the objective of the classes.”

In a second example, all we learn about the contributions of K-12 schooling was that she loved her art classes.   In the next chapter, one young social innovator says that “all the pressure from so many tests hurt my creative endeavors.”   And in one of the final subjects, we learn that “the educational system was never supportive…school was a detriment to his learning.”  Though there are a few exceptions, for the most part, young innovators did not become so from their schooling.  This section, and this strong thread, serve to underscore that Wagner’s intent is to inspire us to embrace our responsibility to, as the quote above reads, transform “the classroom experience at ever level.”

Although these young people become innovators not because of their K-12 schooling but in spite of it,  two themes emerge strongly in what made the difference for them: “Outlier teachers” and Project Based Learning.  

 I’ve written before about Wagner’s advocacy for outlier teachers; as important as this is, I think it pales in comparison to the emphasis here on the central value of Project Based Learning.   Throughout the book, again and again, in every profile, his subjects explain that, whether in elementary, secondary school or college, it was a project that lit their fire and sparked their imagination, that allowed them to “play” with a concept or practice in ways in which they then developed a passion which ultimately became their life purpose as an innovator.

• “Smart Product Design class at Stanford was transformational for me.”
• “The real learning takes place when they get into the lab.. in hands-on application approach to the material.”
• “Everything in grad-school was project-based.”
• Both young innovators had “experience with a transformational project-based course that was hands-on, interdisciplinary, required team-work, and encouraged risk-taking.”
• “Every class had a research component with a hands-on project.”

It continues throughout the book- the above are just a few snippets.   Certainly Wagner and I agree: schools are not being serious about cultivating students in becoming innovative thinkers and actors if they are not serious about implementing broadly and deeply (though not universally) high quality, rigorous, comprehensive, project based learning.

Wagner doesn’t take a lot of time to describe K-12 schooling which does exactly this, disappointingly.   Two outstanding, outlier, teachers are showcased, and then on page 153 there is a short shout-out to High Tech High, which was thoroughly described in Wagner’s previous book.  It is almost as if Wagner didn’t want to repeat himself or what he has already written, and I understand that, but I was sorry that the book couldn’t be more thorough here in painting a detailed and comprehensive picture of PBL school programs which are delivering the promise.   It was, however, terrific to see what I thought was an oversight in the previous book corrected: I have believed since 2008 that New Tech Network schools provide a Project Based learning curriculum equal to, and in some ways distinctly superior to, High Tech High.  Here in the new book, Wagner refers to New Tech as the second “outstanding example of how best to educate all students to develop their innovation abilities at the secondary level.”

—

(Fortunately, part of this book’s gap will be filled very soon by the forthcoming (July) book, Bringing Innovation to School by Suzie Boss (Solution Tree), an early version of which I have seen and, I am pleased to say, will include a section about educating for innovation at my own school, St. Gregory.)

—

Wagner does most certainly offer a marvelously rich portrait of a college program which creates innovators, Olin College; this is the best part of the book.

Quoting the founding President, Rick Miller “We’re trying to teach students to take initiative– to transmit attitudes, motivations, and behaviors versus mere knowledge.  Today it’s not what you know, it’s having the right questions. I see three stages in the evolution of learning.  the first is the memorization based, multiple choice approach, which is still widely prevalent; then there’s project-based learning where the problem is already identified; finally, there’s design-based learning where you have to define the problem.

—

In reflecting upon Olin’s outstanding program, Wagner states “The culture of Olin is radically different from the culture of most high schools and colleges in five fundamental respects,” and in doing so offers the best outline in this book to frame the key parameters of educating to innovate.

• Collaborative more than Individual Achievement.
• Multi-Disciplinary Learning more than Specialization
• Trial and Error more  than Risk Avoidance
• Creating more than Consuming
•  Intrinsic Motivation more than Extrinsic Motivation

It is not all-inclusive, but this could be a valuable starting place or foundations for schools and universities seeking to conduct review, self-appraisal, or planning toward becoming better at “creating innovators.”  Wagner situates his book’s three word slogan, play, passion, and purpose within the last of these five, explaining that “Teachers at Olin have an explicit goal of strengthening students’ intrinsic motivations to be lifelong learners, to be the architects of their own learning, their own careers, to bring into being that which they desire.”

Project-Based Learning doesn’t get its own bullet, but is contained especially within the fourth bullet, Creating rather than Consuming: “In classes at Olin, the primary goal is the acquisition of new knowledge.  The goal is to develop a set of skills– or competencies– by solving a problem, creating a product, or generating a new understanding.”   He goes on to discuss the way courses require final products and that seniors must complete a pair of Capstone projects.

The role of appropriate, mission aligned assessment is essential to in the work of educating innovators, and though it doesn’t earn its own bullet, but this too is embedded within the five concepts; one outcome discussed is the proficiencies of its graduates: “the evidence is that Olin students are very well prepared for graduate school and better prepared for work , with managers reporting that graduates act as if they’ve had three to five years of experience.”

Trial and Error as an approach is essential, and I am delighted to see it get this prominence.  What can we do to better incorporate a mindset that innovation is iteration, and that we can only develop and advance by trying, failing, and trying again?  Olin, as described here, offers a whole class in failure analysis, which has an assignment of a project: “choose an example of a failure, analyze it on their own, and present it to the class.”  I love this quote Wagner provides from an Olin student:  ”I don’t even think about failure here. It’s not a word we use. Instead, we talk about iteration.”

Problem-Finding is missing a bit from the five part framework.  It is highlighted in a valuable way earlier in the book, when one of the social innovators explains that the specific skill she wishes she had been able to learn in school was “problem identification.  It’s just so important.  I didn’t know the problem I needed most to work on when I started my organization. It would have been to helpful if someone had taught me to think about problems systematically.”   For more on Problem Finding, see Suzie Boss’ great edutopia piece, “Secret to Better PBL: Focus on Problem Finding.” 

Design thinking, which Wagner quotes the Olin President identifying as the third and culminating stage of quality education– going beyond project-based learning– is about exactly this systematic process of problem identifying, but we only touch on the surface of it in the Olin discussion, as as a component of the capstone SCOPE project.  Design thinking gets more attention in a subsequent, and also very valuable, discussion in this chapter of the Stanford Design School.  It is important for all of us working in this field to put more of a spotlight on schools which are advancing design thinking instruction.

As critically important as it is to transform learning in our schools to cultivate more innovative mindsets, it is in no way a smooth or swift process, and it will incur challenging disruptions.   Outlier teachers are outliers for a reason: they are not conformist.  Wagner asks toward the very end “are we prepared to not merely tolerate but to welcome and celebrate the kinds of questioning, disruption, and even disobedience that come with innovation.”

I know one of the questions I am left with is the challenging issue: at what cost?  What is it that we value that will be lost as our schools, many or most of them bastions of the liberal arts, the humanities, and the perpetuation of a canon of human knowledge, “transform” learning in the direction of High Tech High and Olin College?   Can we identify these losses, and then decide whether they are worth sacrificing for the value of “creating innovators?”

In my ideals, we teach and our students can learn the liberal arts deeply and more lastingly via an approach that is more situated in Project Based learning, and nothing is lost.   In the Olin discussion, Wagner celebrates the way the college “actively encourages students to pursue both engineering and the liberal and fine arts,” and that it is by standing at the intersection of humanities and science (Land) that we can be most creative.

But as I wrestle with advising my son on his ninth grade course choices– and see that in his final, 8th block, the options are Design Build Technology Innovation or Latin 2, (Spanish being already on the plate), I am stuck.  I think it would be so great for him to continue Latin– so as to better understand and appreciate the deep roots of Western society, so as to better understand the vocabulary and formal grammatical structure of our own modern English, so as to better recognize the myth and literature which informs so much of our culture– and I think it would be so great for him to take a course we teach at St. Gregory which is exactly aligned with Tony Wagner’s book, a PBL, problem-finding, design theorizing, collaborative, risk taking, trial and error, intrinsically motivated, open ended, iterative, playful, creative course.   How do my son and I choose? How do we as a society of 21st century educators choose if or when we are reduced to these zero-sum dynamics.

Surely let’s seek to rise out of the zero-sum equation– let’s look for the reconciliations, and help all our teachers and all our students, in every course, have the opportunities to pursue learning in the way our Design Build class runs, and with the methods of High Tech High, New Tech Network, Buck Institute for Education, and Olin College.

—

Sadly I missed NAIS President Pat Bassett’s Annual address at the NAIS Annual Conference, because I was presenting in the same time slot, but it was great to get to see it posted on the NAIS website, and I have taken the liberty of selecting out a few slides to share here.

After a review of the state of the industry, Pat argued that independent schools (and all schools, I’d add)  must strive to be informed about and attentive to developments happening broadly in our “industry,” to what is happening at the cutting edge, and be prepared to incorporate the best practices and respond accordingly to remain relevant and competitive.

In doing so, he called particular attention (as you can see in the slides atop) to three themes that are essential for any school to explore and examine in the quest to be relevant, compelling, and successful:

• Formative Assessment,
• Embedding Practical Skills for Greater  Problem-Solving Skills,
• and the Value of PBL.

1. Formative Assessment: Testing is obviously a highly sensitive and politicized arena; it is nothing less than a tragedy the way that high stakes, summative, end-of-year standardized testing has demoralized and deprofessionalized the art and profession of teaching and driven teaching down to a lowest common denominator approach of drilling students to pass the tests.    That said, this is a case where we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, where we still have to strive for a middle ground whereby we can use tools that gauge student progress and give us as educators valuable information on how to support, how to challenge, how to advance, how to uplift our students.

Pat’s slides on this topic, slides 2 and 3 above, come from a report prepared for and published by NWEA, the masterminds of the MAP testing which St. Gregory administers to students in grades six through eight.   For more on using MAP as formative assessment, click here.

The NWEA report, entitled For Every Child, Multiple Measures: What Parents and Educators Want From K-12 Assessments,   proclaims the following findings and recommendations, which are further illuminated in the video immediately below and the informative infographic at the very bottom of this post.  I have highlighted in bold the findings and recommendations which I find especially interesting.

Key findings from the study include:

1. Child-centered teaching and learning is a top priority for parents and educators.
2. Parents, teachers and district administrators think it’s important to measure student performance in a full range of subjects—and in the “thinking” skills that will be critical in life.
3. Parents, teachers and district administrators agree on local decision-making about teaching and learning.
4. Formative and interim assessments are perceived as more valuable by parents and educators.
5. Many parents, teachers and administrators question the money, time and stress spent on assessment.

Based on the findings, NWEA offers the following recommendations:

Recommendations for Assessment Developers and Policymakers

1. Broaden the dialogue beyond summative assessments and high-stakes accountability.
2. Focus on more than language arts and mathematics assessments.
3. Develop innovative ways to measure learning, thinking and life skills.
4. Encourage local decision-making on assessments that support learning.

Recommendations for State and District Leaders

1. Share decision-making authority and responsibility for teaching and learning with teachers, principals and school leaders.
2. Select assessments that provide timely and useful information.
3. Establish professional learning communities and provide time and training for educators to better understand the different assessments and effective use of assessment data.
4. Provide parents with comparative data on students at the district and national levels.

—

It is worth pointing out that some of these findings fall at one of two extremes: extremely obvious wishes and problematically distant resources.    Of course parents and teachers want things like child centered learning and that we measure skills beyond the narrow mathematical and reading fundamentals and that we better train educators on using these tools, and at the same time, we are too far off from having very many and very many useful innovative ways to measure learning, thinking, and life skills.

The second issue at hand is the question of “formative assessment.”  NWEA is, and I have been following them, planting a flag here, proclaiming a sharp divide between formative and summative assessment, the former good and the latter not-so-good, and then taking a side in this divide, arguing that their approach is mostly or especially formative.    It is easy to agree with NWEA and with Pat Bassett that formative assessment in its ideal form is a good thing, but I fear that it is awfully difficult in practice to maintain the sharp divide between the two approaches.    Formative can, awfully quickly,  become defined only in the eye of the beholder.  A test result which a teacher believes to be formative can, in the eyes of parents or principals, become viewed as summative judgment of whether a student is learning and whether a teacher is succeeding.   This is something I want to see happen, but we need to be wary about the possibilities.

NWEA is seeking with this new booklet publication both to demonstrate and develop public support for the development of more and better assessment tools which we can use effectively and formatively, and which we can use to measure key 21st century capacities and abilities, and for this we should be grateful and encouraging as well as attentive and prepared.

2. The Resurgence of the Importance of Practical Skills  In the previous era of information, when knowledge increased rapidly but access was sharply limited, it was important to spend years and years instructing students to master by memorization these domains of intellectual knowledge, at the expense of much else.  But now, it is not so much what we know as what we can do with the knowledge we can access, and confident, innovative problem-solving is what matters most.   What Pat Basset is calling for, drawing upon a fascinating recent essay in the The Chronicle Review, is to re-institute practical arts in our curriculum.

At our school we have been making some small but still significant progress in this direction, particularly in our middle school.  This is most well exemplified by our new Goat pen, which students have designed, built and maintained, and where they take care of the goats with great attention.

The Chronicle Review article is highly worthwhile: The Future of American Colleges May Lie, Literally, in Students’ Hands.  Some excerpts:

 They have emphasized that they teach students how to think, how to be engaged, world citizens—not merely how to do a job.

I agree that a liberal-arts education provides those intangibles. But maybe it’s time that instruction—at least at some colleges—included more hands-on, traditional skills. Both the professional sphere and civic life are going to need people who have a sophisticated understanding of the world and its challenges, but also the practical, even old-fashioned know-how to come up with sustainable solutions.

“If you are going to understand the world you live in, you need to understand how it got that way in a very practical way—you need to solve the problems that humans have been trying to solve for 10,000 years,” Maughs-Pugh says. “The goal was to engage people with addressing the fundamental occupations of humanity—dealing with food, shelter, heat—and gain insight into how humans have solved these problems or addressed these problems, and what the limitations are.”

A key to innovation may be not just understanding some of these technologies but playing around with them as well. Stuart Brown, a renowned expert on play and education, has pointed out that companies have found that the most adept and innovative engineers are people who played with their hands when they were young, building and dismantling things.

3.  The Value of PBL Pat Bassett’s third point in his survey of the horizon is well taken: the facts are that charter schools such as High Tech High and New Tech Network Schools are surging ahead of most NAIS independent schools in their design and implementation of high quality Project Based Learning, and educators everywhere owe it to our students and owe it to the future of our schools to recognize and respond accordingly.   At St. Gregory we have been studying PBL in our summer reading and in our school visits in Texas and California, and it has been great to see great advances in PBL in many places at our school, though we certainly still have great opportunities ahead of us to advance further.

Pat’s reference in this section of the presentation is to a recent free and highly recommended publication by High Tech High educators: Work that Matters: The Teacher’s Guide to Project-based Learning.  

Project-based learning’ refers to students designing,  planning, and carrying out an extended project that  produces a publicly-exhibited output such as a product, publication, or presentation.

It is related to enquiry-based learning (also known as inquiry-based  learning), and problem-based learning. the distinctive feature of projectbased learning is the publicly-exhibited output. We have chosen to focus on  project-based learning because it incorporates enquiry, and because, in our  experience, public exhibition is a tremendously powerful motivator for both students and staff.

There have been two key shifts that have reignited teachers’ interest in project-based learning and helped it to shake off its stigma. firstly, and most obviously, digital technology makes it easier than ever before  for students to conduct serious research, produce high-quality work, keep a
record of the entire process, and share their creations with the world.

Secondly, we now know much more about how to do good, rigorous projectbased learning, and we can evaluate its effectiveness. this guide draws upon a substantial (and growing) body of knowledge, bringing together tried-andtested strategies and protocols that all teachers can use.

Pat Bassett is, of course, right: it is incumbent upon every school which genuinely seeks to be an exemplary “school of the future” and site of genuine 21st century learning to reflect upon, examine, and explore the options for enhancing student learning with formative assessment, integration of practical skills as part of a broader program of problem-solving and innovation learning, and employing high quality project-based learning as a key element of the curriculum and pedagogy.