February 20, 2013 1 Comment

Putting Students in Charge

Do yourself a favor and spend 15 minutes of your time to watch this video.* It’s a great example of what high school should look like for most students in this country.

Ok, you might think this type of independent, student-driven learning might not be appropriate for every kid, especially those who have been force fed six, seven, eight years of test prep indoctrination and don’t know anything different. I certainly know lots of high school teachers who will tell you that their students couldn’t possibly handle this approach to school.

However, the principal at this school clearly explains why students need to be deeply involved in the design of their own educational experience.

My personal and professional investment in these opportunities is to create a school in a way of educating young people that allows them to be completely invested. And to stop trying to move every kind of human being through the same gate.

I think the more options we have in our schools, the more students we will help develop into the kinds of citizens we need. And that it’s ok for you to need a little bit of a different approach from mine.

We need to offer more options, with more of them designed by and with the students themselves. The fact that this program was developed by one of those students only lends the approach more credibility.

And is probably the reason why it’s likely to remain an idiosyncratic niche in the American educational system.

*Despite the pleadings of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson to watch their trailer, hit the skip button.

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September 4, 2012 Leave a Comment

Here We Go Again

It’s the day after Labor Day in the US, the opening day of another school year around here, and in many other districts.

I’m not in the classroom anymore1, but I still get a pleasant feeling of optimism every fall as we start, with the belief and hope that every student will be successful. I’ve been fortunate to have that largely optimism realized by each following June, with a few exceptions, of course.

Even with that, I still think we need to make some major changes to the standard academic calendar observed by most schools, as I ranted about a week or so ago. In a comment, Chris wondered why it was so hard to close schools in June and open them again in September.

I want to know why it’s so much work to start and stop. Have a chance to engage in some reflection and planning. Stop the mail, put the laptops away, and plan for when the painters can come in and touch up the walls.

This is hard?

Actually, opening and closing school is not all that difficult, I just think there are better ways to use time, money and effort involved in the process.

I certainly agree that we need to build some downtime into school to reflect and plan, for students as well as teachers. However, I would rather see that time spread out over a year-long schedule rather than clumped into one big break.

A calendar that continues to break the year into four quarters with a three week break in-between is the most common year-round plan, and one that our district experimented with in a few elementary schools. The three-week break would still offer plenty of family time as well as much better opportunities for remediation than waiting until summer.

Combine that schedule with some new instructional and curriculum ideas2 and we would have one big step towards some real reform.

Anyway, regardless of my wild ideas for change, I hope everyone shares the same optimism for their students as we begin this new school year.

1 In case you’re new to my mess, I’m one of those evil, lazy central office types whose students are more mature than most high school students. A few only slightly more. :-)

2 For example, not all students require four quarters to learn Algebra 1, while some could use more time. Not restricting learning to one nine month year would allow for more flexibility.

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August 26, 2012 1 Comment

Time to Change the Calendar

Tomorrow most of the teachers in our overly-large school district return to their schools, getting ready for the kids to show up the following week.

Another school year begins.

And we have another opportunity to consider just how much is being wasted by clinging to our traditional academic year.

This particular idea pops back into my head twice a year as I watch all the effort being expended preparing to close schools in June, only to allocate even more to open them again two months later. Not to mention all the time not devoted to student learning during the process.

Michael at The Principal’s Page, who starts by telling us how much he loves his summer vacation, has also come to the same conclusion.

Except the fact that after 18 years of this I am now convinced summer is a waste of time.

We put so much effort into shutting down school for the summer.

Then we put twice as much into starting school back up again in the fall.

I’ve heard all the rationale for keeping the current system, including the one about kids having all kinds of special opportunities offered during summer. Programs like the institute for the arts, STEM camp, and tech adventure camp around here.

Programs that should be part of the “regular” curriculum.

However, I also wonder about the message being sent to students, parents and the community when “serious” learning is segmented into ten months, then it stops and the “fun” learning occurs during the other two.

For these and many other reasons, The Principal is right. It is way past time for the idea of a “school year” with a 2-3 month summer break to go away.

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August 20, 2012 1 Comment

A Very Solid Business

Between media companies looking to schools for new revenue streams and charter schools as investment opportunities, I think I’m in the wrong end of the education sector.

Charter schools, as you might remember, were supposed to be innovative alternatives to “traditional” schools, funded with public money and often serving poorer communities.

However, according to something called Entertainment Properties Trust, they might also be a nice addition to your investment portfolio.

What is Entertainment Properties Trust? According to its website, it is “a specialty real estate investment trust (REIT) that invests in properties in select categories which require unique industry knowledge, and offer stable and attractive returns.”

And the website also says this: “Our investment portfolio of nearly $3 billion includes megaplex movie theatres and adjacent retail, public charter schools, and other destination recreational and specialty investments. This portfolio includes over 160 locations spread across 34 states with over 200 tenants.”

The video interview with the CEO embedded in the Answer Sheet post is quite strange, although not especially unsurprising given the concerted effort of politicians to sell off as many public resources as possible to the highest bidder.

I especially enjoyed this little piece of analysis.

Well I think it’s a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a very high-demand product. There’s 400,000 kids on waiting lists for charter schools … the industry’s growing about 12-14% a year. So it’s a high-growth, very stable, recession-resistant business. It’s a public payer, the state is the payer on this, uh, category, and uh, if you do business with states with solid treasuries. then it’s a very solid business.

Pick companies in the right states, the ones willing to divert lots of public money into charters, and you have a winning investment.

What we don’t get from the charter industry, and most independent charters as well, is a better education for the money spent, one of the claims often heard from their political advocates.

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June 17, 2012 3 Comments

Creating Schools for the Weird

In his book “We Are All Weird“, Seth Godin offers a short but interesting manifesto on how the age of mass (mass marketing, mass manufacture) is fast disappearing as the concept of “normal” becomes obsolete and the audience/customer splinters into thousands of tribes (another of his concepts).

Godin’s primary audience is business people, of course, but in this book he does offer a brief look at education, which is probably the “mass” institution in this country that is the most resistant to change.

At the end of that section, Godin offers a simple proposal for transforming American education.

A different approach to education is almost impossible to conceptualize and seemingly impossible to execute. The simple alternative to our broken system of education is to embrace the weird, to abandon normal. To acknowledge that our factories don’t need so many cogs, so many compliant workers, so many people willing to work cheap.

It’s simple but it’s not easy. It’s not easy because we can’t process weird, we can’t mass produce students when we have to work with them one at a time or in like minded groups. We can’t test these kids into compliance and thus we can’t have a reliable, process-oriented factory mindset for the business of education. No, it’s not easy at all.

When we consider whom we pay the most, whom we seek to hire, whom we applaude, follow, and emulate, these grownups are the outliers, the weird ones. Did they get there by being normal students in school and then magically transform themselves in to Yo Yo Ma or Richard Branson? Hardly. The stories of so many outliers are remarkably familiar. They didn’t like the conformity forced on them by school, struggled, suffered, survived, and now they’re revered.

What happens if our schools, and the people who run them, and fund them, stop seeing the mass and start looking for the weird? What if they acknowledge that more compliance doesn’t make a better school but merely makes one that’s easier to run?

My proposed solution is simple. Don’t waste a lot of time and money pushing kids in directions they don’t want to go. Instead, find out what weirdness they excel at and encourage them to do that. And then get out of the way.

Ok, so maybe you don’t like the idea of calling your students “weird”. Substitute “unique” instead. Godin’s ideas still make a lot of sense, although maybe with less impact.

I know I’ve ranted many times in this space about all the many “leaders” proposing reforms to the education system modeled on business principles. However, this approach is more about relating to the needs of people than about reforming traditional business methods.

Although many policy makers may view learning as an assembly line process, it’s really all about many, many unique, individual people in our classrooms. And any experienced teacher will tell you they’re all weird.

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May 17, 2012 1 Comment

The Dangerous Parts of School

Jessica Hagy, who writes/draws the wonderful Indexed blog, has created a great list of Nine Dangerous Things You Learned in School for the Forbes website.

All the items, including the graphs/drawings that accompany the words, are right on target but number 5 ties directly to my rant from yesterday about giving kids options in their post graduation plans.

There is a very clear, single path to success.

It’s called college. Everyone can join the top 1% if they do well enough in school and ignore the basic math problem inherent in that idea.

It’s very dangerous to believe in one right answer to any part of life, with the possible exception of stuff like “do I jump out of a plane without a parachute?”.

But the best of the bunch is number 7.

Standardized tests measure your value.

By value, I’m talking about future earning potential, not anything else that might have other kinds of value.

Of course, there are more than nine dangerous things we learned, and continue to teach kids, in school, and in writing the draft of this post, I was trying to think of a few of them.

However, this morning Doug jumped in and added many of those I was considering so instead of repeating them here, go read his thoughts.

I would only like to extend the idea in his number 6: not only don’t you need to be smart at everything, you can and should get smarter through out your life beyond school.

That’s coming from a math major who learned to write and appreciate language long after finishing “school”.

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May 10, 2012 1 Comment

Recovering From Failure

The New York Times Learning Network blog has an interesting lesson on the topic of failure, with some good examples from sports, business, the arts and other fields.

It also asks students to consider some interesting questions about failure in their own lives and those of people they know.

Can failure be useful? Can you think of examples, from your own life or someone else’s, when it has led to something positive?

How is failure defined and dealt with in your family, your school, the activities you do outside of school, among your friends and in your community? Which of those definitions and responses to failure seem fairest or best to you? Why?

What can be done to avoid failure? Should people try to avoid it?

What is “failure” and what is “success”? Who decides?

Missing, however, is any real consideration of failure as it applies to school. What happens if you fail the midterm in English 7? What recovery options do you have for getting a bad score on the SOLs?* Suppose you get a 1 on an AP test?

We really don’t deal well with the concept of failure in school, especially in helping students learn from it and discovering options for recovery. Maybe in sports, possibly the arts or other “non-academic” contests. But for most kids, failing a class or a grade means they will repeat it.

But the most likely scenario is that they get to cover the same content, often using the same materials and teaching techniques, often in the compressed time frame of summer school. And usually with only slightly better results, not anything we might call “success”.

Doing the same thing in the same way hoping for different results.

Is that how people recover from failure in real life?

*For those outside of Virginia, that’s the acronym for our spring standardized tests.

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