What if school was more like this?

This was written by George Couros who is Division principal of Innovative Teaching and Learning for Parkland School Division in Alberta, Canada. He is suspiciously well dressed and has the healthiest head of hair I've ever seen. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here.

by George Couros

Here is a little activity that you can do with staff when returning to school to get the wheels turning on project based learning inspired by this awesome video.

Take the Alberta Education Competency Wheel below:

Then watch this AMAZING video below about a self-initiated project done by a pretty cool kid:

As you watch the video, write down all of the things that the student did on his own to meet the expectations as listed in the “Competency Wheel”. Are all elements touched upon in this project? Discuss some ideas or projects that you can do with students that would be similar as a whole staff or within teams.

You could also discuss this article that has some lessons taken away from the video (quote shortened below):

1. Boredom is more of a statement about the person than the situation. “Hey Caine…want to come spend the summer with me in the back of my barely-trafficked auto parts store?” For most kids this would be summer vacation equivalent of the kiss of death. There was no gaming system. No swimming pool. No television. A perfect excuse for “I’m booooooorrrred.” But NO. Caine looked around and saw opportunity. Everywhere. Cardboard boxes, packing tape, gadgets and doo-dads. He chose not to be bored. It’s totally a state of mind. 

2. Keep working while the world ignores you. How long was it before Caine had customer #1? How many entrepreneurs or artists would have given up by then, or stopped working at their craft and improving their skills? Caine approached his arcade with craftsmanship and fervor, and that’s what I aspire to do too. 

3. Your craft will cost you something. Did you notice the prizes in the arcade? Caine’s own toys. His vision for his arcade required (demanded!) that he use all of his resources to make it work, and this meant forfeiting his own stuff for the sake of his vision.

Better yet, show the video to kids and discuss the wheel with them. Get them thinking on projects that they can initiate that would include these elements and would be something that they are interested in doing. Perhaps have them do some proposals of projects that they can do that would be an all year idea or could be used as the basis of a capstone project.

Learning Patience

In China they say someone plants the Giant Bamboo seed.

In that first year someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

In the second year someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

In the third years someone waters it, fertilizes it, cares for it -- and nothing happens.

Sometime in that fourth year, someone waters it, fertilizes it, and cares for it -- and it suddenly shoots up 25 feet tall.

I believe this anecdote has a number of implications for education:

• Having high standards is one thing, but standardizing both what and how children will learn with a a fixed pacing schedule is quite another. Children are not merely widgets that teachers simply assemble at their respective grade-level work stations. Demanding all children to meet a certain standard by a certain "best-before" date defies what we know about how children learn. We shouldn't need research to tell us this.

• Rewarding or punishing teachers based on how a child does in their class in one year makes as much sense as punishing the first year farmer or rewarding the fourth year farmer.

• If we don't trust the farmer to properly seed, water, fertilize and care for the Giant Bamboo then it might make sense to dig up that seed each year and measure its progress. If we don't trust teachers to properly educate students, then it might make sense to constantly or even obsessively measure student growth. If we can imagine how doing this would hinder the growth of the Giant Bamboo, what are we doing to our children when we implement test & punish accountability regimes?
• While some kinds of Bamboo take years to show growth, others take far less time. The same goes for the kids -- ranking, sorting and filtering with tests that act like arbitrary gatekeepers condemn one kind of learner to someone else's definition of success.

Rhetoric of rigor

Tougher standards.

Higher standards.

Raise the bar.

Rigor.

For too long education systems have bought into the rhetoric that confuses harder with better. It's as if some brainiac woke up one morning and decided we can "save our schools" by ratcheting up standards for kids that educators already have a hard time coercing into learning what distant authorities believe to be important.

The underlying message here is that school is something that must be done to kids. When we see learning like this, is it any surprise that we justify the use of what Frank Smith called "the intrusive mass of unnecessary external controls in which teaching and learning have become embedded, including testing, grading, and contrived competitiveness"?

Under the tyranny of this system, the adults tend to focus mostly on what the students fail to learn, rather than on what they are learning, which likely has more influence on their lives. In other words, we are drowning in the deficiency model of Schooling (with a capital S).

Under the tyranny of this system, children come to learn that learning is a chore, or as Frank Smith puts it:

The main thing we learn when we struggle to learn is that learning is a struggle.

It's time we put rigor in the grave where it belongs and liven up our vocabulary for learning with a more preferable word: vigor.

Where rigor may demand compliance, vigor brings engagement. And where there's interest, achievement follows.

Do standards subjugate students?

Old School is not a place - rather it is a state of mind that ultimately thinks very little of the mind, and there are as many problems with this kind of education as there are Old School Teachers.

Old School is more interested in what teachers are supposed to teach than what the students are learning, and it is this premise that the Tougher Standards movement is built on. And yet how often is the idea of standards ever questioned? What are the chances you'll see at your next conference a session titled "Do Standards Subjugate Students?"

Reflecting upon one's beliefs can be a very productive use of time, and I can think of no better time to do so than when we have come to mindlessly accept something as a given truth. When questions are no longer answered because questions are no longer being asked, it's time to pause and reflect. In his book, The Schools Our Children Deserve, Alfie Kohn encourages us to do just that:

These days, anyone looking for a cause without controversy would do better to come out in favor of higher standards for our schools. It's a safe bet that almost any audience will vigorously applaud such a sentiment, since it is widely agreed that our educational system is in deep trouble and that raising standards is the solution. On the other hand, whenever agreement is a bit too quick and consensus a little too broad, it's worth taking another look.

I have a problem with distant authorities who are pedagogically even further removed from the classroom than they are geographically dictating what everyone else should learn based on their personal assumptions about what it means to be well educated. In her book One Size Fits Few, Susan Ohanian adds:

Give a Standardisto a pad of paper and a pencil and he goes nuts making lists of essential knowledge - without ever laying eyes on the children who must learn it.

I believe at the heart of Ohanian's criticism is the idea that there is something inherently wrong with seeing an education as something planned and provided for us, and the only thing worse than a curriculum made by someone else is one made by someone who never cares to know us. When children are not welcome to play an active role in not only what they learn but also how they will do so, there is only one way they can experience school - that is controlling.

When the teacher's role is less about artfully guiding students to thinking and reasoning for themselves in a kind of logic gymnasium and more about dispensing right answers and disciplining wrong ones, we openly choose to ignore the roots of real learning. Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others.

In his article Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests, Alfie Kohn warns us:

On the one hand, thinking is messy, and deep thinking is very messy. On the other hand, standards documents are nothing if not orderly. Keep that contrast in mind and you will not be surprised to see how much damage those documents can do in real classrooms.

Considerable research has demonstrated the importance of making sure students are actively involved in designing their own learning, invited to play a role in formulating questions, creating projects, and so on. But the more comprehensive and detailed a list of standards, the more students (and even teachers) are excluded from this process, the more alienated they tend to become, and the more teaching becomes a race to cover a huge amount of material. Thus, meeting these kinds of standards may actually have the effect of dumbing down classrooms. As Howard Gardner and his colleagues wisely observed, "The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Learning is not like instant mashed potatoes; kids have not been through an industrial process of cooking, mashing and dehydrating to yield packaged convenience learning that can be reconstituted in the classroom in seconds by simply adding curriculum or standards.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have; the idea of fixing school by simply 'doing what we've always done but better' (read: raise the bar) has held a monopoly over school improvement and education reform for too long.

At the very least, before we ask for guidance on how to best implement externally imposed standards, we should ask whether doing so is a good idea.

Prescription vs Construction

The teacher who plans without student input will be no more successful than a bride who plans her entire life without having a groom.

So let's be honest, planning is guessing.

Now there's nothing wrong with guessing, but let's make sure that we don't make prophets of ourselves. Year plans, lesson plans, curriculums and standards typically ignore the very clients they have been made for. This is why for the longest time these tools have been labelled guides. But is it just me or have they become rules?

When and why did this happen?

The answer is elusive, but I'm convinced it has something to do with mistrust and a gross misunderstanding for real learning.

Mistrust drives manipulation. It you don't trust teachers as guides, then it's easy to justify the need for rules. Prescriptive planning tends to turn learning into linear fabrications when real learning is non-linear and constructed.

Plans need to remain as vague as possible with the understanding that they should never play more of a role prescribing the learning than the kids constructing it.

The problem with improvement

The key to educational reform is simple. Promote higher and higher standards by continually raising the bar, and the learning will take care of itself.

Right?

I mean, who in there right mind could oppose higher standards? What would that mean? That you promote lower standards?

And here is where policy makers who are not educators bully their critics. They create a false dichotomy that forces people to polarize towards either one or the other. Well, quite frankly, who wouldn't feel the urge to gravitate towards the Tougher Standards Movement.

But if we stop and think about this whole 'raise the bar' kind of educational policy making, I think we can bust open the destructive forces that are poisoning our attempts to reform education.
 
Alfie Kohn writes about the paradox that is the Tougher Standards movement in his article Standardized Testing: Seperating Wheat Children from Chaff Children.

About a year ago, Deborah Meier and I were having one of those dinners where we try to figure out the fundamental nature of the Tougher Standards movement before the check arrives. On that particular night we stumbled upon a very dark possibility, one that is perhaps best communicated in the form of a thought experiment. Suppose that next year almost all the students in your state met the standards and passed the tests. What do you suppose would be the reaction from the politicians, businesspeople, and newspaper editorialists? Would these folks shake their heads in frank admiration and say, “Damn, those teachers are good”? That possibility, of course, is improbable to the point of hilarity. Every time I’ve laid out this hypothetical scenario, audiences tell me that across-the-board student success would immediately be taken as evidence that the tests were too easy.

So what does that mean? The inescapable implication, as Meier points out, is that the phrase “high standards” by definition refers to standards that everyone won’t be able to meet. If everyone could meet them, that would be taken as prima facie proof that the standards were too low – and they would then be ratcheted upward – until failures were created. Despite its sugar-coated public-relations rhetoric, the whole standards-and-accountability movement is not about helping all children to become better learners. It is not committed to leaving no child behind. Just the opposite: it is an elaborate sorting device, separating wheat from chaff. And don’t ask what happens to the chaff.

Frankly, I'm not willing to subscribe to a pedagogy that defines success by the number of kids that are required to fail so that others may be defined as successful.

As a classroom teacher, I can totally relate to Kohn and Meier's discussion. I taught a boy named Garett who once told me:

Marks are like a doggy pile. It feels good to be on the top, and I'm one of them, but what about the students who need to be on the bottom so I can feel good.

For a grade 8 boy, Garett was remarkably reflective. He was very successful in school and had become accustomed to achieving all the accolades at school. When he said this to me, I could tell he was empathetic towards those less fortunate than him at report card time.

Kaylin, on the other hand, showed far less empathy towards her fellow classmates when she said:

I like to compare myself to others because it makes me feel good to do better than others.

This kind of compare and compete attitude is a zero-sum game that gets us no where. And the sooner we see that the Tougher Standards movement is contributing to this problem the better.

Standards and Standardization

I had the good fortune of listening to Sir Ken Robinson speak in Calgary, Alberta. He said many many inspiring things that evening including something to this effect:

"There is nothing wrong with having high standards, but who said that having high standards means everyone has to do the same thing. Having high standards and standardization are not the same."

So if we don't have to standardize in an effort to provide high standards for our children's education, then why is there so much standardization? Alfie Kohn writes about cui bono in his book Punished by Rewards. Cui bono meaning: who benefits?

Standardization rarely is in the best interest of student learning. Instead, standardization most benefits those who wish to collect data that can be analyzed and compared - allowing teachers, students and schools to be 'properly' ranked and sorted.

It's about ranking rather than rating.

I propose that we liberate our children's learning from their standardized prison cells. Personally, the best thing I ever did in order to liberate my students was to abolish grades. Without grades, I no longer felt like every student had to do the same assignment or same test. I didn't need 'data' that was quantifiable nor did I need to compare one student to another.