Join Me for Whipple Hill Webinar on School Change This Thursday

I will be interviewed in a Google Hangout hosted by Whipple Hill this Thursday, 5/9, starting at 2 PM Eastern Time.  Register here. Peter Baron of Whipple Hill has been following my journey around the country to visit more than 60 schools last fall, and the subsequent synthesis of the insights I gained from that unique experience.  He will prompt a conversation centered on how schools overcome the obstacles of change, turning innovation into an exciting experience of personal and professional growth, not one of fear and discomfort.

Join us and ask questions; we will get to as many as we can.  Those who follow this blog know I am not a techie, so this conversation is not about the nuts and bolts of websites and learning management systems; it is about how school organizations can more efficiently adapt to the demands of a rapidly changing world.

“What If” Creating Critical Discussion Points

Walmart is always looking at ways to reduce expenses, to find that fraction of a penny of cost reduction that will translate into millions of dollars of worldwide savings.  They looked at how macaroni and cheese is packaged and challenged their principal suppliers to reduce the size of the cardboard box.  The principal cost savings came not in reducing the amount of cardboard, but in the diesel fuel to truck the boxes to all their retail outlets.  They have saved millions in fuel cost.

Code-writing boot camps in the San Francisco Bay Area provide intensive 12-week courses in computer programming; the demand for web developers with these skills is insatiable and starting salaries for a good code writer is $80,000.  Typical tuition for the course runs $12,000.  One such camp is waiving tuition, charging instead 15% of their graduates’ first years’ salary.  So far they report they have not failed to receive compensation from a single student.

Over the last three weeks I have met with close to 500 independent school business officers, admissions officers, faculty, and students, and in every session I ask them to ask questions that start with “what if” and challenge, break, or discard major elements of their schools.  They have generated hundreds of such questions, any one of which might shift the revenue, cost, or value equation of their organization.

Hopefully there is no mystery in how the preceding three paragraphs are related!

Some key thoughts from this whirlwind of interaction:

• Few, if any, of the hundreds of “what if” questions these groups generated in a matter of just a few minutes are investigated in any detail in most schools’ strategic planning discussions.

• Business officers, students, admissions officers and faculty were all equally able to ask intelligent questions about finance, pedagogy, operations, facilities, and marketing.

• Many expressed frustration that they are pigeonholed into job-specific silos and are not allowed to engage in critical interdisciplinary discussions.

• Zero-based strategic planning, or even better, zero-based strategic thinking, should replace traditional strategic planning (this care of the NYSAIS business officers).

For more on the power of “What If” (Questions are the waypoints on the path to wisdom) see the chapter on The Art of Questioning in The Falconer.

Don’t Miss Learning @ The Martin Conference, Pt. II

This week I am highlighting reasons to come to the  Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence Summer Conference in June.  The Martin is leaping to the front of authentic educator professional development with a by-invitation-only line-up of national and international teaching leaders and rich, two-hour blocks of active learning…the death knell of sit-and-get conferences.  Here are a few more reasons you will want to register:

The two keynoters are national figures who represent the future of learning in America.  Pam Moran is Superintendent of Albermarle County public schools, and is proving that innovation through leadership can trump the political obstacles we often associate with public education.  Will Richardson has been a thought leader and oracle of transformed learning for years and will share both his passion and pragmatism in the second keynote address.

Design thinking will take a center stage as design/curriculum integration gurus Mary Cantwell from Atlanta, Greg Bamford from Seattle, and Bill Wolf-Tinsman and Dani Goldstein from Denver give active learning sessions in how to redirect your classroom so students ask the questions and find and solve the problems.

Throughout both days, leaders from the Memphis Area technology consortium MAIS-TEC will lead wide-ranging, hands-on lessons on bringing technology to the center of student-led learning. You will leave with real solutions that you can implement the next day in your own classes!

More tomorrow!  Register at the Conference site; based on the pace of registration, it is likely space will fill up in the next few weeks.

Don’t Miss Learning @The Martin Conference, Part I

As I have posted before, the Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence is leaping to the front of authentic educator professional development this June with a by-invitation-only line-up of national and international teaching leaders and rich, two-hour blocks of active learning…the death knell of sit-and-get conferences.  Here are a few reasons you will want to register:

Host school Presbyterian Day will roll out their unparalleled, home-grown lower school differentiated learning model.  Several schools have already sent teams to observe during the school year and were blown away by what they saw.  It is a game changer in terms of meeting each child where they are and enriching their learning outcomes, and it does not require a significant increase in costs.

Dynamic thought leader and middle school “first learner” Robert Dillon from St. Louis will help others to understand how a school can be a community change leader, and to develop their own expeditionary mindset and learning model.

The most courageous leader I met, among many, on my 3-month national EdJourney, Eric Juli from the Design Lab School in Cleveland will lead sessions on the critical shift, in any school, from “doing” to “learning”.

Perhaps the most iconic teacher in America today, John Hunter, founder of the World Peace Game and centerpiece of the multi-award winning documentary,  will give a plenary general session, sharing his thoughts on empathy, humility, and the role of the student-owned classroom.

More tomorrow!  Register at the Conference site; based on the pace of registration, it is likely space will fill up in the next few weeks.

From the Mouths of Babes

Tell me again why strategic planning takes a year, costs tens of thousands of dollars in consultant fees, and produces inside the box ideas?  Another way?  Read on!

Yesterday I was happy to work with a group of faculty, staff, and trustees at Poughkeepsie Day School who are generating the schools updated strategic plan.  On the drive down from Boston in the morning I thought I would ask Head Josie Holford (@josieholford) if we could bring in some high school students for the hour workshop of design thinking, post-ups, and “what-ifs”.  For a school like PDS, dedicated to progressive learning, it was not a problem to grab some students to join the conversation.  As we Tweeted out yesterday, in less than an hour this mixed group produced two massive boards of “what-if” ideas, mapped by both impact and degree of difficulty, and then created potentially game-changing ideas for increasing enrollment demand. The student voices were every bit as contributory as those of the adults in the room.

But the coupe de grace was to come.  4th-5th grade teacher David Jordan (@DavidJordanJr) had quietly sent an email to his own students, asking them for their “what ifs” that might lead to significant change in how and what they teach or challenging core traditions.  By the time he got home that evening, his “email box was littered with responses” and here they are, unedited. Let me repeat: these are from 4th and 5th graders, with no lead in or prep from anyone:

• What if there weren’t any teachers and children were just given a schedule to work off of and goals to reach?
• What if kids controlled what they learn about?
• What if we got to choose anything we learned about; any subject and anything within that subject?
• What if instead of homework during the year, we had a week or two more of school?
• What if students created their own schedule?
• What if you could learn what you wanted to learn, without curriculum structures from a school?
• What if school was about what people really need in the world?
• What if students were allowed to follow their curiosities? With time allotted and teacher support during the regular school day.
• What if classes were grouped and regrouped multiple times to match how knowledgeable (this was originally “smart” but they changed their wording when they clarified it to me in the morning) people are?
• What if there were more than one teacher in a classroom?

Are you kiddingt?  I have visited schools all over the country struggling to find another few minutes in the day and a 4th grader suggests doing away with homework and extending teh school year by a couple of weeks?  Brilliant! Thanks students and adults of PDS for taking a risk with me in this workshop…it paid off!

 

Learning in Maine at Remarkable Kieve-Wavus

Moon-set at dawn from “my” porch.

Every time I am in a new place of quiet beauty I thank God for waking early in the morning when the world is new, when the mist is still rising off the lake, two paddling loons trail V-ripple wakes across the shimmering reflection of the setting full moon.  On a morning like this I am first sad that I don’t have an expensive camera and great photographer’s eye, and then happy that I don’t, the better to quietly record the moment in space and time, one that is gone with the rising light, the arrival of clouds, the season’s turn, winter freeze. It is late April; there is morning frost on the carpet of last winter’s brown dead leaves, and the undergrowth shrubs are starting to bud.

One does not come to Kieve-Wavus by accident or by whim!  It took me over six hours to drive here from the heart of the Hudson River Valley.  In the early evening I dropped down to the shore of Damariscotta Lake, an hour north of Portland on the granite Maine coast and found my host Thomas Steele-Marley (@Steelmaley) waiting for me at a rustic two-story guest house on the grounds of the Keive Camp, a place where no doors are ever locked and the canoes lie overturned in the trees waiting for the next cohort of young Maine-sters to arrive for a week of learning. We walked through the now-quiet camp, the latest group of students having departed yesterday, ate a home-made pizza in “my cabin” on the lake, and talked of many things.

Kieve-Wavus has been here for more than a century, a place for young boys and girls to come and learn about the nature of Maine, the foundations of leadership, and themselves. It is also the home of the Kennedy Learning Center, a place where adults come on retreat, where there are no televisions, cars, or the next airplane to intercede. I won’t reprise their program here; go to their website.  I will only say that this is “old school” in the most pure sense of the expression.  This is the place the Progressives had in mind when they told us that experience is the best teacher.

In September 2014, Thomas and his wife Lisa and their team are going to start their Bridge Year program here, a gap year for students who have finished middle school but who want to take a breath before diving in to the high school rush to the college line.  Their first class will be 24, co-ed, and they plan to grow to 40 or 60, or maybe more over time as the program refines. (Lord knows they don’t have a problem with finding space here to build another dorm or two!) They are developing a unique program based around student-owned, experiential learning that will envelop traditional classroom subjects, not start with them.  They have the world of coastal Maine at their doorstep, a learning space in which to weave the diverse life paths of their students into a common learning community for the year.  I don’t know exactly what it will look like, and the good thing is that Thomas does not either.  He knows the bounds of the system, and within those bounds the learning community will develop through inspection, introspection, and experience.  This summer, they will host a three day Educators Conference in late July (see their web site for registration information), limited to just 20 participants, to jointly investigate this type of experiential learning, using the incredible resources of Kieve-Wavus to see it through the eyes of the student.  I hope to come back to participate in the conference; get in touch with Thomas to learn more.

Saturday was as good as it gets in Maine in the spring, close to 60 degrees of flawless sunshine with just a slight southeasterly breeze.  I joined Thomas, his family and two of the dynamic, young Bridge Year faculty for their first paddle of the season, kayaking on the salt water out of the Kieve-Wavus boat house and landing, tide-pooling around Hog Island, and back for a lunch of local produce.

In the afternoon we had one of the more remarkable conversations of my career and I won’t begin to write about it now.  Shoshana Zuboff and Jim Maxmin are world-renowned authors, educators, speakers, consultants to industry from Harvard and MIT, respectively.  They are experts in change, innovation, turn-around, and so much more.  We spent five hours talking about changing education, schools and learning.  I will share some of this as time goes on; I have a lot of their writing to catch up with!

Thanks to Thomas and the marvelous folks at Keive-Wavus of a weekend for the memory banks, and I look forward to keeping deeply connected with them in the future.

Two Other Voices of Learning

This very short post is why we can stop worrying about exactly what “it” is, that place where every great educator knows that real learning is taking place or about to take place or has the future potential to take place.  This is what we work for.

This from a friend who has taken her son out of a very good school to try homeschooling for a year.  What a great learning experience for both of them, and a lesson for all teachers:

I value the days where he has frustration and boredom. I see them as precursors to a breakthrough. When he is dissatisfied, he is more motivated to identify what he really wants to do. I’m learning to let silence be in our conversations, instead of rushing in with suggestions. He is beginning to take a more active role in his learning, and I’m thrilled to be part of the journey.

And this passed on to me by a colleague who linked a teacher friend to my TEDx talk.  It means these last 30 years in the wilderness pondering why educators would not listen to such simple truths were worth it!

Diana...oh my I cried at certain points. He has really, really brought it all together and states it so well. I loved his comparison of Education as an ecosystem or an industrial model and his one word answer “Dewey”. I often wonder how many new teachers just out of school even learned much about Dewey!

Going to bed happy tonight, high in the Hudson Valley, wondering only why a great country like ours cannot overcome silly disputes to get the planes to fly on time!