Dangerously Irrelevant

In my short time as an educator, I have already suffered through enough acronyms, initiatives, and memes to give me a dull sense of despondence not unlike some of the more deafeningly quiet scenes from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, I do not want it to be this way.

One of the first “movements” that I was introduced to was the Rigor & Relevance movement. This was followed quickly by an excited mentioning of “21st Century Skills.” I had never heard of such things and wondered how a new teacher of Calculus and Physics was supposed to teach students these skills. I tried to avoid my evolutionary response of squirting black goo from my eyes at the mere mentioning of another edu-trend, and I really tried to cut through the chatter:

I was told to teach for the jobs that have not even been imagined yet. I was told to teach for the student who will switch professions more times than my pregnant wife changes sleeping positions. As per usual, the question of how to do this was left largely unanswered. There was, however, a very inspirational YouTube video with a lot of appearing and disappearing buzz words.

So, I stand here before you, asking the question to myself and all other practicing teachers: How does the glut-of-information age affect how we run our schools? How do we realize that those students who look bored, might be so simply because they’re learning more outside of school rather than in it? How do you deal with the fact that the ability levels in your classes are going to become even more diverse?

This is really the heart of the “21st Century Skills” movement. After a walk-in-the-woods moment, I came up with these two solutions:

1. In class, I must make no qualms about my hatred for grades and earning points for anything other than learning. (i.e.: No notebook checks, homework, attendance points, behavior points, or other token economies)
2. I have to admit that I am no longer the most efficient content delivery system on the block. I am now nothing more than an experienced investigator, trained in the art of guiding younger hikers along the trail.

A. Points and grades are flotsam and nothing more. They are the burning wreckage of an over-used and over-assumed system of Pavlovian control that has created our school system’s stigma. This is a stigma so prevalent that it is often assumed: just imagine the comic portrayal of school in the Simpson’s, or think back to how many negative words are often associated with the start of school each Fall.

As a group of teachers, my building has decided to do something different. We’ve adopted the premise that learning matters. Grades — for now — are forced on us, so we’re going to milk that system for every ounce of learning we can get out of it. We’ve stopped grading practice (i.e. Homework), we’ve stopped using summative assessments as executioner’s axes, and most beautifully, kids have started to ask really fantastic questions. We call it standards-based grading, but the word “standards” is a misnomer: we create the standards, and use them as anchors for free-floating classrooms.

B. I am no longer payed to profess facts. My students do not need me in order to learn the conic sections, or to find the derivative of a composition of functions. My students do not need me in order to derive the equations of motion, nor to espouse the addition of vectors. This is quite possibly the biggest relief I have ever experienced.

I am now free to model for them what a life of learning looks like. I am now free to guide them through the often disastrous process of really getting something. What’s most euphoric, is that I can now take their questions and design instruction that may never happen again simply because I will never have the same students twice.

I’m still not sure how I’m supposed to teach for occupations that don’t exist, but I know this feels like a good start.

Shawn Cornally teaches Physics, Calculus, & Computer Programming in Eastern Iowa. He blogs at Think Thank Thunk. He is petrified of being irrelevant and ineffective in the classroom.

 “The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind–creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers,” says Daniel Pink on the opening page of the Introduction of A Whole New Mind. Of course, innovators still need to be able to (or have those around them who can) produce high quality products that are consistently good. As a result, the true victors of the 21st Century are the individuals (or more likely, the organizations) that are able to both:

• create innovative new services and products that connect with the emotions of their users
• produce services and products that are high quality, easy-to-use, and consistently improved

Apple, Inc.
One corporation that has been unrivaled in its success at simultaneously completing both of the above tasks is Apple, Incorporated. Led by Steve Jobs, Apple continues to create products that connect with the hearts and guts of consumers. Other companies simply do not elicit the same type of responses–tremendous rumors in advance of new product announcements, cries of excitement and disappointment when new products are announced, tremendously long lines when new products are first available (iPhone, iPad), and stores that are always full, even during the worst economic crisis worldwide since World War II. Steve Jobs and employees throughout Apple appear to be extraordinary “creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.”

At the same time, these highly complex products require tremendous feats of engineering prowess. The creators must be able to think logically, analytically, and in very linear, mechanical ways. There must be strong processes in place to check for quality and to make adjustments quickly and completely when bugs are discovered. In other words, Pink’s most significant skills of the ‘last few decades’–”computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, and MBAs who could crunch numbers”–remain vital to an organization’s success. Apple’s programmers, attorneys, and MBAs are all top-shelf, and the company’s bottom-line reflects this.

Apple’s is successful because it creates new products that resonate emotionally with consumers and because it utilizes standards and processes from both engineering and technology as well as business and law.

Meaningful & Relevant Learning-Creative, Innovative, and Emotionally Connected
What Apple manages to achieve provides an exact model for what all students deserve in our classrooms. First, classrooms must strive for learning to be meaningful and relevant. Learning should be real, hands-on, emotional, and differentiated, and assessment should be the driving force behind instructional decision-making.

When a classroom captures all of these “21st Century Skills,” it begins to fulfill the implications of Pink’s point regarding who will rule the 21st Century. Do students and teachers need to use classroom technology in order to achieve these characteristics? No. Does it help? Certainly–or, at least, certain technology does. Technology, and in particular the Internet, can eliminate barriers and give students the opportunity to create authentic work that has a real impact on the world. Their products can be published and disseminated with virtually no additional financial cost and with great speed and power.

Of course, helping teachers and principals understand and implement a 21st Century vision of meaningful and relevant learning is difficult. Educators need to:

• abandon their own experiences in the classroom
• re-create how a classroom looks, feels, and sounds
• reevaluate what concepts, content, and skills are most important for students to learn
• analyze how to assess whether or not students are actually learning these concepts, content, and skills

Integrating Standards & Relevant, Meaningful, Emotional Learning
Where do the standards fit in to a louder, more collaborative classroom in which consumption is trumped by creation and in which published videos and blogs triumph over pencil-and-paper tests?

First, like Apple, schools do not exist in a vacuum. Apple uses a variety of standards as the very foundation of the products, whether it is developing and using HTML5 or other open source codes that serve as the foundation for products like iChat and even the entire operating system, Apple accepts and uses these as a basis for its work. The learning standards that are approved by a State Department of Education are akin to these agreed upon building blocks of programming code.

Apple might claim that it could make more money and better products if it was not constrained by government regulation, but Apple is, and it has found ways to thrive within those parameters. Schools are likewise, but even more importantly, accountable back to society at-large. While educators may not always like or agree with it, schools must be responsive to regulation and influence from both the legislative process as well as from other sectors of society. This does not mean that educators should not, at times, push back in the name of sound instruction and social justice. At the same time, as high-stakes assessments and accountability show, schools do exist within a larger set of parameters–standards and high-stakes assessments that are based on those standards. As a result, like Apple must learn to thrive with accounting rules and intellectual property law, schools must do their best work using the existing state standards and by performing as well as possible on high-stakes assessments.

Second, just like Apple relies upon application developers and musicians and filmmakers to generate its content, the type of high-level, original work that students ought to be doing in a model classroom exhibiting 21st Century Skills requires these students to wrestle with deep content and concepts. There is nothing wrong with the fact that these concepts and content is derived from learning standards developed in a state capitol (or even Washington, D.C. as will likely be the case in the coming years). Simply put, the standards themselves provide the meat of what students are working with.

What happens when a classroom really utilizes standards as what students are taught while engaging students in these concepts, content, and skills with increasingly real-life, engaging, integrated, problem-based units of instruction? So long as students are continuing to be challenged with appropriate literacy and math skills in the context of these units, these students should perform at least as well on standardized assessments as students who are learning with more traditional instructional strategies, such as teacher lectures, worksheets, textbook readings, and quizzes/tests. Schools must be on-guard to ensure that they are teaching to the same standards regardless of the methods employed. When schools utilize the standards as the basis of their creative work to develop meaningful, relevant instructional units, students will be engaged in that work because it is appropriately challenging, emotionally engaging, and real. Most importantly, these students will be on their way to having the skills necessary to be successful in 21st Century Society and even to begin influencing that society today while still in the classroom as well as performing well on state assessments.

Jason Klein has been a teacher, principal, and, for the past few years, is now a School District Director of Technology in Suburban Chicago. Today, he can be found online at twitter.com/jasonklein.

Postulate 1: There likely has never been a greater disconnect than right now between the skills our factory-model schools give our graduates and the skills they need for success in a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected information economy.

Postulate 2: It’s increasingly difficult for most families to survive economically on a single income. Working families (whether they have one breadwinner or two) need someplace to send their children while they’re at work.

It used to be that our kids went to school so that they could then go to work. When you look at the driving forces behind maintenance of today’s schooling model (and, perhaps, obstruction of whatever new model eventually replaces it), is it more true now that we’re sending our kids to school so that we can go to work? Which is of higher urgency to us: their needs or ours?

Just thinking out loud here…

Image credit: Hiding to eat big bro’s lunch?

A new video from New Brunswick, in the Did You Know? (Shift Happens) style. Well worth a watch! 

Linda Darling-Hammond notes:

The factory model high school as we now call it was designed in about 1910 or 1920. The idea of that comprehensive high school was to cream off about 5% of the kids for specialized knowledge work. They would go off to college and fill the very small number of jobs that required that kind of thinking. The rest of the kids were supposed to be prepared for the farm, the factory, the mills – for you know, fairly rote kinds of learning. And over time vocational programs were put in place and other kinds of general programs.

The notion of these schools was that they were to select and sort kids, decide who was going to go where in the economy. Most of the work was not going to be thinking work. And we were going to crank them out on this assembly line process.

Richard Elmore confirms that the factory-school model continues today:

When you code classroom practice for level of cognitive demand . . . 80% of the work is at the factual and procedural level. . . . [Teachers] will do low-level work and call it high-level work.

So does Robert Pianta:

The average fifth grader received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning; this ratio was 10:1 in first and third grades.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics notes:

Agricultural workers = 2.12 million
Manufacturing workers = 11.67 million
All workers = 138.98 million

Overall share of agricultural and manufacturing workers = 10%

It’s 2010, and the vast majority of American jobs are in the services sector. Yet we continue to spend 80% of our classroom time (or more) on the skills needed for 10% of our jobs.

Principals, superintendents, school board members, and policymakers: Could the problem be any clearer? Isn’t this a pretty damning indictment of our inability to change? Aren’t you all supposed to be leaders?