21k12

NOTE:  For 2011-2012 the goals deadline is November 1.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Last week I spent a few days visiting a very wonderful, creative, and lovely school, Seacrest Country Day in Naples, Florida.  While there, in conversation with a pair of terrific high school Science teachers, I was turned on to The Big History Project, a Gates foundation funded initiative to bring this interdisciplinary curriculum to high schools, based in large part on the vision and wisdom of historian David Christian, whose TED talk, which we showed today at St. Gregory, is above.

The TED talk is terrific: Christian uses terrific visuals, short videos, and a well-designed timeline to articulate the “threshold” moments in the universe’s history, and identifies what makes possible the development of greater complexity in a universe governed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics.    Most interesting, of course, is the role of collective learning: that only by learning with and from each other, and sharing that to pass it forward, can we sustain and advance our greater complexity.   As Christian concludes, however, with greater complexity comes greater fragility: we have an awesome responsibility as humans, we who alone have crossed the most recent threshold, to sustain our accomplishments and our creativity.

At the very end of the TED talk, the Big History project is mentioned, and it is explained more thoroughly in the video after the jump (more). (more…)

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In recent posts I have made the point that we can better promote the learning we want for our students via “backward design,” assessing what we aim for and then working backwards to promote learning that will ensure success on our assessments, and the point that “digital natives” may be digitally comfortable, but that does not mean they are digitally sophisticated (or digitally fluent).

So it is in keeping with both previous that I write to share my interest in, and at least preliminary enthusiasm for, a recently retooled and now more broadly available testing assessment from ETS, the “iSkills.” The test aims to provide schools a fascinating way to assess (and, as a result, stimulate and motivate) the teaching and learning of more sophisticated “digital fluency” in our schools.

One important quick note: when you look at the online site for iSkills, it gives the distinct appearance of being available only to higher ed, but I have been assured and guaranteed that secondary schools of all kinds are welcome to participate and they think it suitable for students tenth grade and higher.

I had the good fortune to participate recently in an ETS iSkills webinar, and I am fascinated by the tool. (The 70 slides displayed above were the program of the webinar, and are extremely informative for interested parties.)

Much of the session was dedicated to defining the importance and nature of digital fluency; it occupies a spot among critical thinking, 21st century skills, information literacy and ICT: Information and Communication technology proficiency.

“Digital Fluency” as a term aims to capture critical thinking and communication in an online environment.  Surely most of us recognize that the world is going to continue to increasingly require of our students (and ourselves) powerful online and digital savvy in critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills, and we should be looking for more terms and concepts to capture this emerging and essential skill.  (more…)

In recent weeks I’ve observed a growing conversation about how best to advance both character education and the learning of 21st century skills.

What is increasingly widely recognized is the idea of backward design: that we can promote learning of our intended outcomes if we put greater emphasis on our assessment of these intentions.  Students know what to strive for, and teachers over time find themselves giving greater attention teaching and having students demonstrate the things upon which teachers know they’ll have to assess and report.

The recent New York Times Magazine cover story, What if the Secret of Success is Failure?, tells the story of two schools in New York City working to develop a clear set of intended character outcomes for their students.  At one school, KIPP, they embedded these outcomes in a formal report card element, highly quantified and if I understand correctly, a part of the permanent record.

[KIPP] started working to turn it into a specific, concise assessment that he could hand out to students and parents at KIPP’s New York City schools twice a year: the first-ever character report card.

At the other school, Riverdale Country School, the school was avoiding formalizing the character goals into a formal report card, in part because of concerns that students would “game the system” if it became high stakes, and so instead they were working to find ways to bring these character goals into the culture of the school.

“I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” [Riverdale Head of School Dominic Randolph] explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”

We here at St. Gregory believe we are seeking and finding a middle ground between Riverdale and KIPP in our approach to a character and also 21st century skills report card supplement.    This has been a central thrust of our efforts in the past three years to elevate the importance of and the development of these skills in our program, and to better fulfill our mission to promote and cultivate in our students Character, Scholarship, Leadership and Innovation.    Our approach has been to develop a KIPP like report card for these qualities, but use it as a formative guide for students to self-assess, collect feedback from their teachers, and set goals with their advisers, rather than as a high stakes summative assessment which would then be “gamed.” (more…)

I greatly admire author Cathy Davidson, and I very much wanted to love this book, but sadly I don’t.

Now You See It comes from an exciting intellect, a scholar and an academic, a sparkling enthusiast and vigorous advocate for the “new learning” modes that my blog here promotes and celebrates.   Davidson’s focus is the university, and as a Vice Provost at Duke she led that university forward in meaningful and important ways; now at HASTAC she is clearly one of the nation’s most important educational thinkers and innovators in her work seeking to transform learning to modes that are contemporary, relevant, engaging, and preparatory for students.

So why I am so disappointed in the book?  As I’ve reflected about it, I think my main sadness is that in her advocacy for students being online and networked, and in her defense against what we all can recognize has been at times a loud and emphatic backlash against the problems of multi-tasking and digital distraction, she seems to work so hard to defend her turf that she allows for no compromise, no middle path, no synthesis, and the extremism of her position and/or rhetoric undermine her very argument and what are our shared goals.

There are terrific elements in the book.   She relates exciting educational innovations that she helped to pioneer at Duke; I am very inspired by the way she implemented the iPod experiment with undergrads at Duke, a “calculated exercise in disruption, distraction, and difference,” and the great advances in creativity, collaboration, and communication that unfolded as a result. (more…)

Some may be surprised to learn that I have a fondness for and mixed appreciation of Waldorf education, and that I am a Waldorf parent.

I appreciate much about the Waldorf approach, including its attention to developmentally appropriate learning, its emphasis on storytelling and mythology, its peaceful, calming, and focusing rituals, its embrace truly and deeply of whole child education, its naturalism, its “handwork” instruction and emphasis on craftsmanship and “making stuff,” and, in part, though I am conflicted about this, its affirmation of and mixed contributions to the cultivation of the imagination and creativity.   The students write and create their own books throughout the grades, which I think is terrific, for example.

Its philosophy about the exclusion of technology in the lower grades I can accept, up to a point; I think there are perfectly good and logical reasons to reduce or minimize technology in the early years of learning, though I draw the line in a different place than does Waldorf (a difference of degree) and I don’t draw it quite so absolutely in my own educational vision.

The concentration upon handwriting which seems to me to take up an awful lot of classroom time is a bit misplaced in the 21st century, but this is hardly a central issue when considering broadly Waldorf educational practice.   I’m given much greater pause by what is to my observation an inordinate amount of K-12 class-time used having all students doing exactly the same thing in unison.  It rubs me the wrong way, watching entire classes using an hour to draw exactly the same picture  or write exactly the same words or recite exactly the same math facts following the teacher’s modelling and always commanding direction.   I value diversity of educational philosophy across the breadth of our planet’s many schools, and I certainly respect Waldorf education’s right to use this approach, but this particular widespread practice is not to my preference.

So it is with particular interest that I read today’s New York Times front page article on the Waldorf school in Silicon Valley: A Silicon Valley School that Doesn’t Compute. 

Let me make my position clear: this is not journalism that belongs on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.    I think it is a very disappointing bit of snarky journalism that informs readers, a little bit, about Waldorf practices, condescendingly, but has as its primary purpose a not-so covert agenda to advance the paper’s ongoing attack on the use of computers in learning in its problematic series, Grading the Digital School.   The Waldorf school in this piece then, and Waldorf education in general, is only a pawn for the reporter Matt Richtel’s antagonistic crusade, and I want to caution Waldorf supporters from happily accepting their work being exploited this way.

What do we learn in this article that is being showcased on the single largest journalistic stage in any seven day cycle, the front page of the Sunday New York Times?   That some digital company executives  send their children to an expensive private school in their region, which they are among the few in the region to be able to afford, which doesn’t use technology for teaching young children.   (what percentage of the digital company executives? The article doesn’t say, but surely it is very small)

This is an anecdotal and almost entirely meaningless report: after all, every industry has among its many employees a wide diversity of educational philosophy.

(more…)

Rest assured: anonymity and confidentiality will be preserved here.   No mention of the school, fine as it was, or my fellow visiting committee members, excellent as they are, will be uttered here.

I write often about the value contemporary digital tools can offer our students and ourselves in learning to be better collaborators, and I want to share the very successful experience I had this week using google docs for such collaboration with an accreditation visiting team of 13 as we worked together for four days preparing our substantial report.

We took the bold step (not that bold) of being the first team in our accrediting association to forgo flashdrives in preparing the report and instead using, nearly exclusively, shared google word docs for our collaborative report writing.

Traditionally in my experience of about eight visits, individual team members each write their own report sections on their own laptops.   Then, commonly, they print them out, and share their printed copies with colleague/team members, asking for notes and mark-ups on their drafts.   To do so they have to go through the motions of printing, getting the papers to their colleague and back (as everyone is moving around), and then deciphering the comments/markings on the paper, and entering the changes manually back into the draft document.  Sometimes versions are emailed back and forth with changes made, which can be more efficient, but I always end up with multiple versions of the same document, and have made changes in one version while someone is editing an alternate version, and then have to reconcile what have become two divergent versions– and I have to keep track of which document is now the current and updated version.    Then everyone has to ensure getting the right version to the chair, by flash drive hand-off or email.    When the group works together as one on drafting the major commendations and recommendations, things are written up on a whiteboard and then have to be transcribed later into a document which can be emailed out to all but doesn’t allow for shared editing.

Instead– consider the value of working together on shared docs as we did.   The joy of there always being only one version of a document, never multiples that must be reconciled and identified as the most current or accurate.   The delight of having multiple editors working simultaneously, with no passing back and forth, whenever they wish and from wherever they are.   The chair having always, at any moment, access to check in and observe how each and every report is proceeding, able to identify emerging themes in the write-ups of a dozen different team members, and then upon completion having at the ready every document in one place.   (more…)

Links of interest:

New York Times article about Character report cards: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html

NAIS monograph, Value Add Measurements of Learning: http://www.nais.org/sustainable/article.cfm?ItemNumber=151607

Contact for the PISA Based testing for Schools pilot in Canada: For any questions, please email pisabasedtestforschools@oecd.org or Charles Cirtwill at charlescirtwill@aims.ca

Good Morning St. Gregory students and teachers:

Thank you for attending our special ceremony marking the life of the man who was perhaps the greatest innovator of our lifetime; it is especially appropriate that we do so here at St. Gregory because we are a school which celebrates innovation and is particularly committed to “creating innovators,” and we want regularly to affirm the excellent work you all do as especially innovative students and thinkers.

Let me also thank all of you who “dressed like Steve” today to mark this day of honor and remembrance.

Steve Jobs was a remarkable innovator; let me highlight three elements of his innovative mindset and practices.

First, in technology, he, more than any other computer designer before or since, reinvented computer technology to serve users– we humans– as user-friendly, intuitive, devices, able and available for discovery and application from the moment you pressed the “on-button,” with no manual required.   This was an enormous advance, as I well remember when I opened the box on my first Macintosh in 1984: with the Mac, computers became our devices, rather than we being their devices, it seemed.    Jobs continued with extraordinary advances in user-friendly, intuitive use tools such as ipods, iTunes, iPhones, and much more, and revolutionized not just our tools but our very understanding of what it is to develop technology which serves regular, every-day creators and communicators.

Second, no computer inventor has had a finer sense of design and aesthetic appeal; for Steve Jobs, every tool had to be a work of art also, demonstrating extraordinary and exquisite sensibility and sheen. (more…)

Kudos and congratulations to the EdLeader21 team for another great day and a very successful launch to their national conferencing.   I am feeling very appreciative and delighted to have been welcomed to and included in this group, and it is an honor and a privilege to have the chance to participate alongside these impressive educators in the common cause of 21st century learning.

Thirteen thoughts, in no particular order:

1. Throughout the day there was an important emphasis on the role of the broader community in the work of planning our educational future.   Constituencies have to be engaged, and really included in the process of setting on a course of becoming a 21st century school. In Ken’s presentation on Seven Steps for Becoming a 21st Century District, he emphasized this, and it is Step number 2: it is essential, he said, to do this before steps 3-7.    He also placed limits on the role of the public: they are essential to defining the student outcomes, but let’s be clear: we develop consensus with public constituencies on the what, but not the how.   The public, he emphasized does not or should not play a role in specific curriculum or pedagogy.

The importance of the public communication also came up in a table conversation, when Bob Pearlman underscored it as a core component of a 21st century school.   The vision, the plan, the agenda should be clearly and well communicated on the websites, outward and inward facing, and school-leaders should be strong public and online communicators to their constituencies.

An example of this kind of public communication as part of community building and constituency support development was this video shared on Tuesday in the Ignite sessions and comes from the Albemarle County School District (VA) and its fine superintendent, Pam Moran (who sadly we missed seeing at the conference).

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2. Interesting Resources Discovered or Highlighted. 

• Videos of 21st century instruction at P-21. 
• West Virginia Teach 21 Resources. 
• Buck Institute for Education
• Edutopia
• New Tech Network: Such a fount of resources and information on excellent practices.
• KnowledgeWorks (more…)

My college studies took place in large part on my first-generation 1984 Apple Macintosh, my essential tool for writing, editing, and creating.  Today, my iPhone is my umbilical cord to the wider world, the way I connect to family and friends and the way I access anytime, anywhere, an enormously wide world of learning and information. Pixar films have been a defining element of my parenting, as we have enjoyed together each and every one of these masterpieces which unite with joy and compassion visual art, narrative, and technology.

Steve Jobs was the Edison and the DaVinci of our lifetime, but he may have been greater than even that: his genius for invention, innovation, and design transcended, and his ability both to envision a different way of using technology and bringing that vision to life has been deeply transformative.

Take the time to see his famous Stanford address, if you haven’t already.

Do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.  If you haven’t found it yet keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.  And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.  So keep looking, and don’t settle.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life…  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.  You are already naked; there is no reason not to follow your heart.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Happy to report on the completion of a terrific first day, the first ever in fact, of the national meeting for the new “PLC for 21st century education leaders,” EdLeader21.

The sense of camaraderie here is palpable: this is a group of 150 dedicated, passionate educators who share a vision, across nearly 30 states (at present), for ensuring their (our) students develop the 4 C’s, the skills to a high level of proficiency that are so critical, always important but more critical than ever before, of communication, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration.   Also clear is the admiration and appreciation felt from this population for EdLeader21’s leader, Ken Kay, the founder and longtime, now former, President of P-21, the Partnership for 21st century skills.

Today’s sessions only began at 3pm, with a warm and upbeat introduction by Ken and then a set of nearly 20 “ignite” sessions by various attendees.   Ignite sessions follow a very strict format: each presenter has five minutes to make their presentation, and their presentation is built upon 20 slides which advance, automatically, every 15 seconds.   It is fast-paced and a bit breathless, and sometimes is just way too hurried to be meaningful, but it is also a great way to hear a wide variety of perspectives and gather a great amount of wisdom in a time efficient way.

A reception and dinner followed; during dessert we were asked as tables to consider what topics were missing from tomorrow’s agenda, or what we’d like to work upon in more detail, and it was great to have this opportunity, which is not at all what happens at most conferences in my experience.   Ken and the organization’s Chief Learning Officer Val Greenhill deserve good credit for the things they have done to make this feel more like a learning community of shared interests and a commitment to learning together, in contrast to a typical conference. Our organizers also offered a nice touch in the charming conversational tone of the event program, unlike anything I have seen elsewhere.

Some other thoughts on the day and on EdLeader21:

1.  Assessment is King.  No other topic had even a quarter the amount of attention that Assessment did, in my observation.  One of the key quotes in Jared Cotton’s presentation (below) spoke to this: “We value what we measure rather than measure what we value,” with the strong inference taken that we all, accordingly, need to rething what we measure to get our values more in alignment. (more…)

Our school, St. Gregory, is in its second year as a 1:1 laptop school, and it has been a very important and valuable advance for our students’ ability to research, to stay connected, to organize their calendars and school works, to communicate with teachers and peers, to publish some of their student work, to blog, to use digital video both as consumers and creators of knowledge, and much more.

We took what I believe, two years ago, was a somewhat unusual approach to becoming a 1:1 school, but one which I think will become increasingly common, so much so that perhaps in a few years it will be the new normal.  We knew that many of our students already had laptops they were using, at home and sometimes at school, and we decided to to build upon that foundation, structuring our program which invites students to bring their own device (BYOD), and supplementing it with a school-provided netbook to those who chose not to (or were unable to) provide their own.    I think this was the right bridge, but we may move to a format soon where all students are expected to provide their own, and we give a stipend of some sort to support those who need it.

We did this hybrid BYOD approach partly for the financial savings, partly because it seemed redundant to ask so many students who have their own already to buy a school device, but also because we saw a new format emerging, using the resources of the could in a OS neutral way to tap in the rich resources of the web and empower our students as creative and critical, digitally fluent, web users.   This was not about using educational software pre-installed on the school-provided laptops; it was about supporting and expecting them to be networked Web 2.0 users.

I should make clear that the strongest influence on my thinking about this BYOD approach as we developed it 18 months ago was the work and writing of Peter Gow at Beaver Country Day.  (See related post, with a long quote from Peter, here). (more…)