Dangerously Irrelevant | @mcleod

David Brooks said over at the New York Times:

The crucial social divide today is between those who feel the core trends of the global, information-age economy as tailwinds at their backs and those who feel them as headwinds in their face.

And that’s really it, isn’t it?

We have a majority of schools and leaders and educators and policymakers for whom the rapid changes around us feel like strong headwinds, negative forces that continually buffet them in the face. Technology that expands access to others… An ever-shifting, complex, hyperconnected information landscape… The ability to learn whatever we want at any time, in any place, on any path, at any pace… Global economic competition and cooperation… These are all seen as dilemmas. As problems that must be managed and minimized. As destructive challenges to retreat from, often because of a deep longing for a nostalgic yesteryear that was simpler, easier, and allegedly ‘better.’

And then we have the minority of schools and leaders and educators and policymakers for whom the rapid changes around us feel like tailwinds at their back, propelling them forward into unique opportunities to rethink education and do better by kids. These are places that are diving into the constructive complexities and emerging with new beliefs and new mindsets and new practices. They are finding ways to enable deeper thinking and greater student agency and more authentic work – and utilizing digital technologies all along the way to help facilitate and enhance these new forms of learning and teaching.

The headwinds people could learn a lot from the tailwinds people. They could garner ideas about how to pilot new initiatives. How to plant seeds of innovation and grow them in productive ways. How to move more quickly in order to be more relevant. How to empower children and youth and teachers in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. And so on…

Likewise, the tailwinds people could learn from the headwinds people. How to proceed thoughtfully. How to recognize the potential negatives and address rather than ignore them. How to validate the felt needs of communities without being dismissive. How not to get too far ahead of others who just aren’t there yet. And so on…

Ultimately the future lies with the tailwinds people, of course. ‘The future’ always wins. Whether we embrace the world around us or resist it with both heels dug in, the forces of technology, globalization, and learning possibility inevitably will carry the day. As I said in a long ago blog post, 

I think it is becoming increasingly clear that our current system of education is going to go away. There are simply too many societal pressures and alternative paradigms for it to continue to exist in its current form.

The only question, then, is: How long are we going to thrash around before we die?

Where do you fall? How do you and your educators and your schools and your communities view the changes around us? As headwinds or tailwinds? Or something else?

Image credit: Against the wind, Vinoth Chandar

Here are some questions that you could discuss with students during a 20- to 25-minute advisory period. These might be particularly apt for middle and high schoolers. If each advisory took notes and then you compiled the responses at the school level, I bet that you would learn some interesting things about the youth that you serve and spark some useful conversations with your teachers and administrators.

1. What are some interesting or surprising ways in which you use technology at home to connect, share, and/or learn? (examples might include making videos on x topic, participating in a learner community around y topic, posting stop motion films, hacking their Minecraft server code, setting up and selling items in their own online shop, sharing their original artwork or music or writing or photography, participating in community or charity or political work, highlighting their athletic or crafting skills, gaining skills in a new area of interest, or…)
2. How is your technology use at home different than your technology use at school? Which seems more empowering to you and why?
3. How is your technology use different than that of the adults around you?
4. How can we close whatever gaps exist between home uses of technology and school uses of technology?

What would you add? Let me know if you do this!

Today is the 10th birthday of Dangerously Irrelevant. I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging for an entire decade. It seems like just yesterday that I was at the University of Minnesota and considering whether a blog might be a good idea (it was). Although I still feel young (‘I’m not dead yet!’), I believe that a decade of continuous blogging may make me one of the elders of the edublogosphere (for example, using the word ‘edublogosphere’ most definitely dates me!).

A huge thank you to everyone who is a loyal reader and to all of you who have been willing to engage with what I share. I have learned an incredible amount due to your willingness to leave comments, extend conversations, suggest resources, connect me with others, tell me that what I just wrote was stupid, and so on. Together we are amazingly powerful. I am greatly appreciative of my last ten years of learning with you.

Although it’s been a quiet summer here as I have navigated selling a home, buying a home, relocating my family, starting a new job, and sending my oldest child off to her first year at college, you better believe that I will be ramping up here again in the next week or so. Looking forward to the next decade of blogging!

Three days after the launch of Pokemon Go here in the United States, a central office administrator told me that his superintendent had emailed the entire district leadership team, warning them about the game because “six teenagers already had been killed by wandering into traffic while playing the game.” The administrator with whom I spoke said that he was concerned and also curious about what I thought.

A five-second Google search shows that the superintendent’s email is completely false. Some other funky, mostly harmless stuff has happened – as well as many positive stories too – but six teenagers killed in traffic is not one of them. There are a number of Pokemon Go hoaxes floating around and, of course, the usual handwringing, freaking out, and alarmism that accompany the launch of any new technology popular with young people.

I gently explained all of this to the administrator, and he was quick to note that this was not the first time that the superintendent had been alarmist regarding youth and technology. We had a good conversation and he walked away feeling more relaxed and informed.

The larger issue is our obligation as school leaders to avoid irresponsible fearmongering. Our messages and behaviors influence our educators and communities. They usually trust the information that we send them as principals and superintendents. I am pretty certain that we have a deep obligation to at least do some basic fact-checking instead of disseminating easily-disproven falsehoods. Otherwise we contribute to the fear and anxiety that already exist regarding youth and technology and impede our own technology integration efforts.

If we wish to facilitate digitally-rich learning spaces so that our students can use learning technologies in interesting and instructionally powerful ways, we can’t keep weighing down the fearful side of the balance scale…

I was given ISTE’s Award for Outstanding Leadership this afternoon. That was fun.  

Today was a great day for Iowa at ISTE. In addition to myself… 

• Leka DeGroot was given the Kay L. Bitter Vision Award for outstanding PK-2 educator. 
• Leslie Pralle Keehn was named as an Emerging Leader. 
• Denise Schmidt-Crawford received the Award for Excellence in Teacher Education. 
• Shannon McClintock Miller – who is an Iowan even if she moves to Colorado – was awarded a Making IT Happen jacket.

#IowaRocksOut

Two years ago this fall, Jose Vilson launched EduColor. It’s a website, it’s a hashtag, it’s an email newsletter, it’s a weekly chat, it’s a call for social justice. Most of all, as he and the other organizers say, it’s ‘a movement, not a moment.’

Many of us haven’t paid too much attention to EduColor. Maybe it’s because we’ve never heard of it (now you have). But maybe it’s because we don’t recognize the privilege that allows us to not feel any urgency to attend to the needs of our colleagues of color. Maybe it’s because we’re too focused on our own thing to worry about that other thing over there. Or, honestly, maybe it’s because talk about racial and other inequities makes us uncomfortable and we don’t know how to effectively participate and be of support.

It doesn’t take much effort to sign up for the twice-per-month EduColor newsletter and follow the #educolor hashtag. And, at a very minimum, we should do those two things. Not because of social justice hectoring or out of some sense of privileged guilt or because we think it makes us look good but because the resources that are being shared and the conversations that are being held are IMPORTANT. In a nation that soon will be ‘majority minority’ but definitely has a long way to go toward equity, all of us need to be more aware and more action-oriented regarding the concerns of our friends, neighbors, students, and educators of color. Yes, some of the things that we read may make us uncomfortable. But you know what? As Jose says, being uncomfortable needs to become our new comfortable. How are we going to meet the needs of all of our children if we can’t put uncomfortable topics on the table and discuss them? How are we going to remedy the ongoing racial disparities in resource allocation, school resegregation, negative media, disciplinary punishments, achievement gaps, instructional neglect, college and career readiness, digital equity, and many other educational areas if we’re not willing to face them head on with the awareness, humility, regret, and courage that they deserve?

The historical legacies of racism continue to linger large today and they manifest themselves on numerous ongoing fronts when it comes to schools, teachers, and students. EduColor is a good place to start thinking more deeply about these issues. You will meet some new people and, more importantly, you will probably learn something and might even be energized to take productive action. Head on over there and sign up. And send your colleagues and students there too. It will only take a moment. (and you might be inspired toward movement)

Louisiana just passed a law mandating that all students learn cursive in grades 3 through 12. That’s right – all the way through high school. Not computer science. Cursive…

Beth Mizell, the state senator who sponsored the bill, said that she wanted people to have a signature. Perhaps she was so busy sealing her scrolls with wax that she missed the signal fire message that electronic signatures are now legally valid, even in Louisiana? Plus, if it takes Louisiana students ten full years to learn how to sign their name in cursive, maybe their education system is in even worse shape than I thought. Education Week gave Louisiana a D+ in overall public education performance in its most recent rankings and that was before the latest educational budget fiasco. I doubt that this law is going to improve that ranking any.

Other legislators supported the bill because documents such as the Constitution are written in cursive. Old documents also are written in Latin and Greek and Sanskrit but I don’t believe that Louisiana has passed laws on those yet. FYI, ardent readers of ye olde Constitution, perhaps this may be of service to you on your way to the pony express station?

Cuneiform as college and career readiness, anyone? Quipu?

Image credit: Quipu, Lynn Dombrowski

Apparently between 1998 and 2010 we killed kindergarten. Lots more testing. Much less music and art. Fewer centers and unstructured play time. Fewer student-driven activities. Greater disregard for young children’s variation in development. More emphasis on teacher-directed instruction and textbooks and worksheets…

We knew this but now it’s not just widespread anecdotes. We now have comprehensive research on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Comments credit: Winter math and literacy packet NO PREP (Kindergarten)

David Freedman said:

The College Board has suggested a “college readiness benchmark” that works out to roughly 500 on each portion of the SAT as a score below which students are not likely to achieve at least a B-minus average at “a four-year college” – presumably an average one. . . .

How many high-school students are capable of meeting the College Board benchmark? This is not easy to answer, because in most states, large numbers of students never take a college-entrance exam (in California, for example, at most 43 percent of high-school students sit for the SAT or the ACT). To get a general sense, though, we can look to Delaware, Idaho, Maine, and the District of Columbia, which provide the SAT for free and have SAT participation rates above 90 percent. . . . In these states in 2015, the percentage of students averaging at least 500 on the reading section ranged from 33 percent (in D.C.) to 40 percent (in Maine), with similar distributions scoring 500 or more on the math and writing sections. Considering that these data don’t include dropouts, it seems safe to say that no more than one in three American high-school students is capable of hitting the College Board’s benchmark. Quibble with the details all you want, but there’s no escaping the conclusion that most Americans aren’t smart enough to do something we are told is an essential step toward succeeding in our new, brain-centric economy – namely, get through four years of college with moderately good grades.

via http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618

Similarly, ACT estimates that only about 28 percent of recent high school graduates meet its alleged ‘college-readiness benchmarks’ in all four subjects of reading, English, math, and science.

For the record, the 6-year graduation rate in 2013 for first-time, full-time undergraduate students who began at a 4-year postsecondary institution in fall 2007 was 59%. Not all of those graduates have B- averages, of course. But, nonetheless, perhaps these definitions of ‘college readiness’ from SAT and ACT are too stringent?

Image credit: B, Nadège

Dave Winters sent me a very nice message today thanking me for my TEDxDesMoines talk, Extracurricular Empowerment (Getting Beyond Fear). But what was even more fun was getting to see the compilation video of his students’ genius hour projects at Cascade Middle School. This is a touching, inspiring video and is a great idea for any school that wants to capture and share the enthusiasm that can accompany student-driven learning. Happy viewing!