Dangerously Irrelevant | @mcleod

My new book with Dean Shareski, Different Schools for a Different World, is getting some positive early comments. A sampling is below. Thank you, everyone!

1. Jeff Nelson

Different Schools for a Different World by Scott McLeod and Dean Shareski just hammered my thinking. Their work is not a long read. It’s about 60 pages. Don’t let that fool you. My favorite college professor, Dr. Ruth Slonim, once said, “Good writing is not when there’s nothing more to add, rather when there’s nothing more to be taken away.” This book is lean and dead on point. A literal wake up call.

2. Darren Draper

Scott McLeod and Dean Shareski have knocked it out of the park with their latest book. It’s practical with solid arguments and a length that every school administrator can manage, given their already-too-busy schedules. Outstanding work!

3. Silvia Tolisano is making motion graphics of quotes as she reads… Awesome!

via https://twitter.com/langwitches/status/909054876268756997

via https://twitter.com/langwitches/status/909210698542141440

Information literacy has been a hot topic of recent conversation. Many folks believe that web sites that traffic in false information and ‘fake news’ may have influenced the last United States presidential election. Traffic on the Snopes web site, which debunks false rumors, has never been greater. Ideological separation also is being driven by the ways that we sort ourselves in our schools, neighborhoods, friendship groups, political affiliations, and faith institutions. Already often isolated from the dissimilar-minded, we then also self-select into individualized news media and online channels that can result in walled-garden ‘echo chambers’ or ‘filter bubbles.’

To combat our growing concerns about fake news and filter bubbles, we’re going to have to take the task of information literacy more seriously. And that means rethinking some organizational and technological practices. As I noted in a previous blog post, our information landscape is changing both rapidly and drastically. Today we have a digital, online, hyperconnected, interactive, global information landscape that often is free or low-cost, fosters decentralized creation and participation and sharing, is frequently real-time, and has exponential reach. This landscape stands in sharp contrast to our older analog landscape that relied on ink on paper rather than bits in the ether, was expensive and thus primarily oriented around experts, fostered consumption and scarcity, and was fairly static and slow to change. As learning institutions bestowed with the societal charge of preparing informed citizens and knowledge workers, schools must help their students and graduates master the dominant information landscape of today and tomorrow, not just yesterday. And right now most schools are struggling…

School leaders can do several things to foster information literacy, combat fake news, and increase students’ information and technology fluency. One critical leadership behavior is helping educators understand that information literacy is everyone’s job, not just that of the librarian or media specialist. Being an informed citizen, being a critical thinker, being able to deeply and thoughtfully analyze complex texts – these have all been traditional student roles in schools but they are taking new forms in our emerging information spaces. Given the complexity of our new information landscape, we no longer can trot students down to the media center a few times a year to learn from the librarian about trusted voices, credible sources, and appropriate citation. All educators now must integrate information literacy in authentic and meaningful ways into ongoing digital and online work with students. Using our disciplinary expertise and experience, we thus can appropriately contextualize critical discernment. In other words, we must help our students dissect and understand subject-specific media such as false videos about the environment or websites dedicated to political untruths or viral myths about health care while they have us available as content area experts to help guide them.

School leaders also must recognize that in order for students to be actively engaged in – and critical consumers of – digital and online information channels, they must have access to technologies and online environments that often are heavily filtered or completely blocked. We can’t help our graduates be citizens and critical thinkers within spaces to which they don’t have access. This is particularly true if we want students to be actively involved within political, scientific, and other digital spaces rather than passive recipients. For instance, teaching online information literacy by pre-selecting a small handful of resources for students to analyze is vastly different from teaching students to navigate and make sense of our vast, complex online information commons.

School leaders also must create safe spaces for teaching and learning about controversial topics. Imagine, for instance, a high school government teacher who asked her students to follow the primary social media channels of the two primary political parties here in the United States. On the Republican side, students could follow GOP websites, Twitter feeds, and YouTube videos and subscribe to conservative blogs such as RedState, HotAir, Instapundit, and Michelle Malkin. On the Democratic side, students also could follow relevant websites, Twitter feeds, and YouTube channels, along with liberal blogs such as Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, Democratic Underground, and ThinkProgress. Sprinkle in a few other sites such as The Hill, Politico, FiveThirtyEight, Fox News, and CNN and we can see how real-time social media could be an incredibly powerful lens through which to view, discuss, and understand government in action, not just as abstract concepts from a dry textbook. I’m not sure how many teachers would be willing to try this, however, given schools’ traditional aversion to anything controversial. Principals and school systems must be willing to buffer a few anxieties in order to enable these kinds of meaningful learning experiences.

Schools also have to stop treating students as ‘digital natives’ who already are knowledgeable about and proficient with technology. Youth fluency with social and gaming technologies may imply certain levels of technology comfort but does not mean that students have the ability to use digital tools in academic- and work-productive ways. Not only is the ‘digital natives’ concept disproven by research, it also seems to grant us permission as educators to avoid the difficult challenge of fostering technology- and information-fluent students because we supposedly have little to teach them. Schools’ reluctance to own this challenge – perhaps because of our educators’ own lack of technology fluency – results in findings like the recent study from Stanford University that showed that students’ current information literacy skills are abysmal.

Finally, school leaders should recognize that those teachers who enable youth to actively interact and create online also are creating opportunities for students to learn essential lessons about responsible participation, sharing, contribution, etiquette, and digital citizenship as natural extensions of their classwork. This approach is far more meaningful and impactful than a few isolated media literacy sessions or digital citizenship lectures. We say that we want engaged citizens and critical thinkers. So let’s do a better job of preparing our students to be thoughtful consumers and active contributors within our new technology-suffused information spaces.

What is your school doing to help students with fake news and filter bubbles?

[cross-posted at Front and Central]

Image credit: Fake news figure, Stuart Rankin

As some of you may have realized by now, Dean Shareski and I have a new book out. Titled Different Schools for a Different World, it describes 6 key relevancy gaps between today’s schools and what students and society need from them:

1. Information Literacy. If schools are to genuinely prepare graduates to compete in a technology-infused information landscape, they must stop acting as they did when learning and teaching primarily occurred in analog formats. Instead, schools must begin to immerse students in the use of digital tools and in the outside contexts that surround those tools, and schools must do this in deeper and more significant ways.
2. Workforce and Economy. If schools are to genuinely prepare graduates for a hyperconnected and hypercompetitive global innovation economy, they must stop emphasizing low-level content coverage. Instead, they must focus on interdisciplinary thinking, interpersonal skills, and technological fluency: the skills that allow individuals to offer value and differentiate themselves in digital marketplaces.
3. Learning. If schools are to genuinely prepare graduates to be powerful lifelong learners, they must stop blocking mobile devices, digital environments, and online communities out of fear, nostalgia, or concerns about maintaining control. Instead, they must help students learn how to utilize these tools to foster powerful learning and extracurricular connections.
4. Student Engagement. If schools are to genuinely engage students in their learning rather than simply force them to comply with academic and attendance directives, they must move away from one-size-fits-all instructional models. Instead, they must find ways to make the learning opportunities students experience more relevant and personally authentic.
5. Innovation. If schools are to genuinely prepare innovators rather than “just tell me what to do” workers, they must stop disengaging students by using extrinsic punishments and rewards to govern classrooms. Instead, they must transform their learning spaces into the kinds of engaging environments of discovery, play, and intrinsic motivation that reward innovation.
6. Equity. And if schools are to genuinely address equity issues so that no child is truly left behind, they must no longer be content to provide exclusive access to technology and rich, creative technology education to those students who have the most advantages. Instead, schools must find ways to enable robust digital learning for all students.

In the book we also note some strategies to address each of the relevancy gaps and highlight some schools that are doing well on the 4 big shifts of deeper learning, student agency, authentic work, and robust technology infusion.

Our book is a call to action that serves as the framing volume for the Solutions for Creating the Learning Spaces Students Deserve series from Solution Tree. Other awesome books in the series include:

• Embracing a Culture of Joy, Dean Shareski
• Creating a Culture of Feedback, Bill Ferriter & Paul Cancellieri
• Reimagining Literacy Through Global Collaboration, Pernille Ripp
• Making Learning Flow, John Spencer
• Personalizing Learning Through Voice and Choice, Adam Garry, Amos Fodchuk, & Lauren Hobbs
• and, hopefully in early 2018, my and Julie Graber’s very-practical book on redesigning technology-infused lessons for deeper learning and student agency! (we’re working on edits right now) 

If you get yourself a copy of our new book, let us know what you think. Thanks. Happy reading!

As Dean Shareski and I worked together on our new book, Different Schools for a Different World, (released this week!), he encouraged me to update my list of building blocks for the future of schools. Here’s the new list (now 10 items instead of 8):

1. Project- and inquiry-based learning environments that emphasize greater student agency and active application of more cognitively-complex thinking, communication, and collaboration skills.
2. Community projects, internships, digital simulations, and other problem- and project-based learning experiences that foster students’ ability to engage in authentic, real-world work.
3. Competency-based education and standards-based grading efforts that shift the focus of assessment from seat time to learning mastery.
4. 1:1 computing initiatives (and concurrent Internet bandwidth upgrades) that give students powerful digital learning devices and access to the world’s information, individuals, and organizations.
5. The expansion of digital and online (and often open access) information resources that increase the availability of higher and deeper learning opportunities.
6. Online communities of interest that supplement and augment more-traditional learning communities that are limited by geography and time.
7. Adaptive software and data systems (and accompanying organizational models) that can facilitate greater individualization of learning content and pace.
8. Alternative credentialing mechanisms that enable individuals to quickly reskill for and adapt to rapidly-evolving workforce needs and economic demands.
9. Flexible scheduling that moves students away from 50-minute time chunks – and a prescribed number of hours and days in a prescribed location – and toward opportunities for students to learn longer, deeper, and in more places about important life skills and concepts.
10. Redesigned learning spaces that accommodate flexible, student-centered grouping and learning tasks rather than classrooms that are dictated by instructor or janitorial needs.

What would you add or change?

It was an honor to be featured on the Forbes web site last week. Robyn Shulman highlighted five ‘education entrepreneurs’ and included me on the list along with Vicki Davis, Will Richardson, Kristen Swanson, and Angela Maiers.

I know Robyn has more names on her list and will be sharing those over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more!

In Michigan, a student was suspended for using ‘profanity’ in a tweet that encouraged his district superintendent to clear the snow in the school parking lot. In Maine, a high schooler was suspended for tweeting that poor student treatment by administrators meant that “they’re asking to be the next Columbine.” And in Florida, a student was suspended for ‘cyberbullying’ a coach with a single tweet that allegedly just reciprocated the same insult that the coach had called her earlier.

As these and other instances show, one of the more recent challenges for school administrators is students’ use of social media to express their opinions. As Deron Durflinger, Superintendent of the Van Meter (IA) Community Schools notes,

The world we live in today provides ample opportunities for everyone to express their opinions on a variety of topics through social media. The focus in our district is always on helping kids learn how to use the tools that they have at their disposal in the appropriate manner. We want them to share what they are thinking, but we want to help teach them the right way to do it.

What Durflinger describes is frequently a difficult task and it’s not altogether clear that we’re navigating an appropriate balance between school concerns and students’ constitutional rights, particularly when our youth express themselves off campus.

Private schools have it easier – their ability to regulate student and educator speech is governed by contract. If they wish to enact tighter regulations, they merely change the attendance contract and then families decide whether they wish to comply or go elsewhere. Public schools, on the other hand, must navigate a whole host of constitutional protections, state laws, and court decisions.

The general parameters are relatively clear for public school administrators who face student speech situations. The U.S. Supreme Court said in its landmark Tinker v. Des Moines decision that the default rule is that students have constitutional speech rights and that schools must respect those absent a ‘material and substantial disruption’ to the school environment. Later Supreme Court cases articulated some additional exceptions, saying that schools can regulate student speech if it is vulgar and on school grounds, part of the school curriculum, or advocates at a school-sponsored event for the use of illegal drugs.

The same speech that may result in discipline at school, however, often can’t be regulated if at occurs at home. For instance, a school can’t suspend a student for swearing in his backyard even though it could at school. Similarly, a student that expressed unhappiness with her teacher verbally to her friends at home wouldn’t be disciplined, so it’s unclear why putting the same statement in electronic form makes a legal difference. The requirement of a ‘material and substantial disruption’ still applies.

This doesn’t mean that students can say whatever they want off campus. Student threats to cause real harm – like the implied threat in Maine – typically aren’t protected. And sometimes students fall under codes of conduct that accompany extracurricular participation. But in general, students are allowed to have opinions and they’re allowed to express those opinions, particularly when they’re not in school. School leaders can’t suspend students for off campus speech just because they don’t like what they said or how they said it.

Accordingly, I’m not certain that the Michigan student should have been suspended. Yes, he could have been more polite. And, yes, he could have used different wording. But the ‘profanity’ he used was on the lower end of the offensiveness scale (we hear it on network TV, for instance) and there’s not any indication that he was being anything other than a cheeky youth at home. (know any of those? if so, do they deserve suspension?) The suspension of the Florida youth is similarly troubling, particularly if her coach had used the phrase about her first (double standard?) and since bullying typically is legally defined as a pattern of behavior over time, not a single incident.

There are many more examples worth mentioning. The school hockey team captain in Alaska who made racist and homophobic comments on Twitter on his own time. The Wisconsin student who tweeted “eat sh-t” to the state high school athletic association. The Washington student who tweeted the same to the school superintendent. The 20 Oregon students who were suspended for retweeting. And the 12 Colorado students who were disciplined for ‘liking’ a fairly innocuous tweet from a classmate. All of these raise important issues about the balance between school concerns and student rights.

Yes, we want to help students learn polite and appropriate communication. And, yes, we want to prevent bullying. But we also must remember that the First Amendment is intended to protect speech that is unpopular and maybe even upsetting. We must recognize that students have a constitutional right to free expression – sometimes even when it’s coarse, antagonistic, or hurtful – particularly when it is off school grounds. The Supreme Court said in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette:

That [schools] are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.

As school leaders, we must take seriously our obligations to comply with the law, educate our students and communities, and model democratic citizenship and the protection of Constitutional rights. As Durflinger notes, “We can’t get caught up in putting rules into place that not only might violate student rights but also really only apply to 1 to 2 percent of our students. In other words, ‘don’t kill a fly with a sledge hammer.’” If the moral / ethical / legal / administrative angle isn’t persuasive enough, consider also whether we wish to pay six-figure settlements to our students for infringing upon their legal rights.

Let’s advocate that our students be more thoughtful when they tweet. And let’s be more thoughtful too about our own responses…

[cross-posted at Front and Central]

Image credit: Twitter (via Cañon City Daily Record)

The teacher transmits information to the student.

The textbook transmits information to the student.

The online tutorial or learning software or YouTube video transmits information to the student.

The student’s role is to be the recipient of what is transmitted.

The student’s role is to regurgitate what was transmitted with enough fidelity that the teacher or software system can check off that the student ‘knows’ it.

The student’s role is to be obedient and compliant.

It doesn’t matter if what is transmitted and regurgitated is of interest to the student. 

It doesn’t matter if what is transmitted and regurgitated is meaningful or relevant to the student.

It doesn’t matter if what is transmitted and regurgitated can be found with a quick Google or Siri search.

It doesn’t matter if what is transmitted and regurgitated can’t be applied beyond the narrowly-conscribed classroom setting.

It doesn’t matter if what is transmitted and regurgitated is forgotten by the student just a few weeks later.

What matters is that the student holds in her brain what was transmitted and regurgitated long enough to get the grade. We need to check the box. We need to move on. We have things to cover. Hopefully, enough of what is transmitted and regurgitated will stick – individually and collectively, across all students and all buildings – for those end-of-year assessments of factual and procedural regurgitation that we use to determine educator and school ’success.’

Transmit, regurgitate. Transmit, regurgitate. Transmit, regurgitate… Why do we believe that this model is adequate for the demands of a complex, global innovation society?

Image credit: Transmitting, Tim Haynes

Alan Blinder said:

American computer programmers have already felt the sting of offshoring. But as of now, accountants, lawyers, editors, radiologists, and the like really have not. So this will be a new experience for them, and it is predictable that they will not like it.

In Offshoring of American Jobs: What Response from U.S. Economic Policy? (p. 42)

Every day, the knowledge and skills necessary to justify the premium wages and benefits of workers in developed countries get ratcheted up a notch…

I had the chance recently to work with an awesome teacher-led school here in Colorado. Because the school already is pretty amazing, we spent most of our day and a half together fine tuning a few aspects of its work.

One of the core values of this school – stated front and center in its mission statement – is its commitment to guiding students to become self-directed learners. However, although the school had been working on this front for several years, there was still a lack of agreement across faculty about what that really meant. There were some great student projects occurring, but there weren’t common understandings across classrooms and grade levels. So we spent a significant amount of time in a structured process that allowed them to pin down a definition that they could all agree on (woo hoo! success!). Now in this school, if they’re going to call a student experience ‘rock star quality student self-directed learning,’ it’s going to have most of the following 7 elements (each of which they defined in detail) most of the time for most students:

1. student choice
2. student voice
3. student as director of own learning
4. student engagement
5. student risk-taking
6. student reflection
7. teacher as facilitator

If the student experience doesn’t have any of these elements, it won’t be considered ‘self-directed learning.’ And if the experience only has some of these elements, it will be considered one that is ‘working toward’ the end goal of ‘more student self-directed learning, more often.’

What was important about this process was not the variety of different facilitation techniques that we used or the ‘correctness’ of the end result. You might define ‘rock star quality student self-directed learning’ differently, for example. What was important was the productive, goal-oriented dialogue and that the school faculty was able to come to agreement about what will work for them so that they then could identify concrete ‘look-fors’ and action items. In other words, common, shared understandings are prerequisites for common, shared commitments.

I love doing this kind of facilitation work with educators. Too often in our schools we use big, important ideas or terms – critical thinking! technology integration! student inquiry! academic rigor! social justice! – that mean widely different things to different people. Because we never take the time to really pin down and define common, shared understandings (or, worse, we try to impose our understandings on others), we see significant variability as educators attempt to implement those ideas in their day-to-day practice. If we want to get an entire system to extraordinary, we have to get everyone in agreement about what that means…

As a school leader, when was the last time that you engaged in a structured dialogue that allowed you to see if your staff really agrees on what some big ideas mean in your school and what they look like in practice? Are you just assuming or hoping that everyone has common, shared understandings? 

[I’m one of five Digital Pedagogy Faculty Fellows this year at the University of Colorado Denver. I’ll be sharing my thoughts all year on this experience, starting with my time at the Digital Pedagogy Lab in Vancouver, Canada.]

Just a quick thought…

In K-12, we struggle with access. Most schools are trying to get more technology into their classrooms. It’s not a given yet that students will have regular access to digital tools and adequate bandwidth in their learning spaces. That said, most schools have expectations of teachers that they will integrate technology into learning experiences whenever they can and provide often-mandatory professional learning for instructors on how to do that with the students in their classrooms.

It seems to me that the opposite is usually true in higher education. Bandwidth is pretty robust on most postsecondary campuses and most students are bringing computers of some sort with them to college. Access seems to be less of an issue. That said, institutional expectations of instructors for technology integration in classrooms are fairly low. Professional learning opportunities for faculty are mostly invitational rather than mandatory and tend to focus more on moving courses online than on how to use technology with students in face-to-face classroom settings.

In short, access and expectations regarding usage are flipped:

[download this image]

Agree? Disagree? What is your experience?

[cross-posted at Thinq.Studio]