A Trip to the Farm

“A kid today can likely tell you about the Amazon rain forest—but not about the last time he or she explored the woods in solitude, or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching the clouds move.”  Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

Sixth grade students at Greensboro Day School can tell you about both the Amazon rain forest and tell you about the last time they studied local flora and fauna first-hand thanks to a program initiated by our 6th grade science teacher, Craig Head.

Each year, Mr. Head takes his classes to his farm located in Rockingham County, North Carolina.  Over the course of a year-long study the students learn about the cycles of life on a farm. In the fall, they notice the leaves turning, the need to till the soil and plant new grass for the grazing cattle and gather fallen leaves for the goats. They spend time noting the water level in the stream bed, getting to know the farm animals, the chickens, the pea fowl, horse, cats and dogs, and the roles that each play in the ecology of farm life. They also have “solo” time to be by themselves, listening, watching, and reflecting from a quiet place along the river, deep in the woods.

“The shift in our relationship to the natural world is startling, even in settings that one would assume are devoted to nature. Not that long ago, summer camp was a place where you camped, hiked in the woods, learned about plants and animals, or told firelight stories about ghosts or mountain lions.” Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

In the late winter, the students bundle up for their trek to the farm to view bared trees, and notice piles of hay and animal waste composting and generating heat in near freezing temperatures. They learn how the compost needs air and moisture for decomposition, they greet the new calves and kids, and they note the brooding chickens and bring back eggs to hatch in their science classroom. They learn how the electric fence is grounded and the science behind why they get a shock when they touch it. The students walk through the budding blueberry field and learn how a late frost could damage or destroy the entire crop.

In the spring, they return again to discover mushrooms growing in the old canal leading from the now empty mill pond to what little is left of an old grist mill. They note how much the chicks, kids and calves have grown. They see blueberry bushes whose blossoms have been pollinated by the the bees in the nearby hives.  And, they pitch their tents in the river bottom to spend three days and two nights exploring the woods, writing personal reflections, playing in the stream bed, and sitting around a camp fire telling stories before they go to bed and gaze at sparkling, crystal clear stars.

There is much to learn about ourselves, our natural surroundings, and the science and mutually supportive ecology of our world. I’m glad that our 6th graders are discovering those relationships and having an opportunity to experience life disconnected from their cell phones, instant messaging, Facebook, online games, and the rigorous lives they lead from class-to-class, lesson-to-lesson and event-to-event in their “normal” daily lives.

Curiosity - A Key Ingredient for Lifelong Learning

Susan Engel, a senior lecturer and director of the program in teaching at Williams College, offers some perspectives from her research about children, teachers and curiosity in a recent article published in ASCD’s Online publication.

In a random study of teachers, she asked if they believe that it’s good for children to be curious, and they overwhelmingly replied that it is. Other adults also said that they value curiosity and believe that it’s essential to learning.

Research repeatedly shows that when people are curious about something, they learn more and better. Engel points out that “If curiosity has such a positive impact on learning you might assume that teachers are doing everything they can to encourage it. But that is not the case.”

Her studies show that there is a surprising lack of curiosity in today’s classrooms.

What she found was that over a two hour observation there were, on average, only 2 to 5 questions asked, and these were primarily asked by the teacher. Students were not exploring or asking questions about what they wanted to know or what they found interesting or worth exploring. Nor were they pursuing their passions and interests. Activities were overwhelmingly teacher directed, and students followed the adult instructions.

What we know is that children are innately curious and want to know the how’s and what’s of most everything.  Anyone who has spent time with a four-year-old knows this all too well. Their curiosity drives their learning, and through asking questions they begin to understand the world and how it works. Somehow, this questioning begins to dissipate as children enter school and their natural curiosity dwindles as they go through the grades.

So, what is to be done to help our children continue to be curious?  Engel says, “Experiments I've done show that children show much more interest in materials when an adult visibly shows how curious he or she is about the materials. In other words, children's curiosity can be fostered or squelched by the people they spend time with.”

She goes on to point out that a statement as simple as, “Let’s see what happens” can demonstrate what curious thinking sounds like. If we know that curiosity is something that we value in people, then what can educators do to promote it in their students and classrooms?

Engel believes that there are four things that we can do. First, we can hire teachers who are curious, teachers who are interested in knowing more about their students, and how they learn. Teachers who are interested in child development, the effects of their own teaching, or who have a deep passion or interest that they have pursued over the years know what it’s like to be curious and can help their students to pursue their passions and interests.

Secondly, teachers can simply count the number of questions that are asked each day. This practice keeps the importance of questioning foremost in the teacher’s thought and encourages him or her to find ways to encourage and support student questioning. Helping students to learn how to ask good questions is an important life skill.

Dan Rothstein, the cofounder of the Right Question Institute, believes that learning how to ask questions should be considered as critical as learning how to read, write, and do basic math. He thinks the ability to use questions strategically can make people smarter and better at their jobs, and give them more control when dealing with powerful bureaucracies, doctors, and elected officials.

Thirdly, Engel believes that students who are engaged in finding the answers to their own questions are better prepared for lifelong learning than those who simply learn well from others. And, lastly, she suggests that we measure curiosity, because as we all know, what gets measured gets taught.

If we are serious about preparing our students to engage in the post industrial work environment where they were expected to follow directions and move production from one work station to the next, we must help them to develop curious minds that want to seek out the answers. This can only lead to greater learning that is deeper and more substantive than what is found in most classrooms today.

Getting our students ready for their futures in the 21st century needs to include helping them to become lifelong learners, and unless they are curious and willing to ask questions, teach themselves and learn deeply, they will always await someone else to tell them what they are supposed to know and what they are supposed to do.

Online Education Changing the World

Last week, at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, there was an engaging discussion entitled ‘RevolutiOnline.edu: Online Education Changing the World’.

The session was moderated by Thomas Friedman, and the speakers included Larry Summers (former Harvard President), Bill Gates, Peter Theil (Founder’s Fund), Rafael Reif (MIT President), Sebastian Thrun (Udacity), Daphne Koller (Coursera), and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl, Khadija Niaza who has been taking MOOCs. (Massive Open Online Course)

The video recording runs for 68 minutes and is pretty compelling.

Highlights for me included:

• Friedman’s interview with 12-year old Khadijah Niazi, which illustrated how revolutionary and far-reaching the open education movement can be (the first 15 minutes or so);
• the Larry Summer’s quote (borrowed from Rudi Dornbusch) that “things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you think they could” (applied to online learning) (24:30); which reminds me of the Hemingway quote from The Sun Also Rises: "How did you go bankrupt? "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly" 
• the comments from Peter Theil about why students are not getting value for money in education and how this is serving to drive the disruption in higher education (from 30:33 to 35:00); and
• the remarks made by Bill Gates about peer-to-peer interaction and why online learning is working now when it hasn’t in the past (40:50), and the question of the ‘credential’ (41:45 to 42:05) and how, in the past, it was where you went and how long you spent there, compared with now where it is about proof you have the knowledge, independent of how you acquired it.

For me, the questions that arise from watching the video are: How do we ensure that that we're not perfecting the teaching methods of the '60s, but advancing the profession to the 21st Century? How do we enusure our future as an educational institution? Will we  gradually and then suddenly change and advance?  Or, will we gradually change and suddenly go bankrupt?

Video of the entire panel discussion at Davos:

Why So Many Schools Remain Penitentiaries of Boredom

I thought that my readers might enjoy this posting by Elizabeth English, the Head of School at The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles, California.

I don't know that all schools are "Penitentiaries of Boredom," but I do know that we must re-envision schools to be more in step with our current ways of doing business and culture. If schools are no longer the holders and deliverers of knowledge, what is their new role in this century? If the work place is no longer a factory, do we need to educate a populace to work in them?  What will the jobs of the future look like, and what skills will our students need?

Read Elizabeth's posting and see what you think...

Why So Many Schools Remain Penitentiaries of Boredom

"It's harder to change a school than it is to move a graveyard." Or, as it's also been said, "It's harder to change a history course than it is to change history." I think we can all agree that our schools should be among our most dynamic and innovative institutions; but despite the endless talk about school reform, they remain among our most ossified.

Take a look at the typical American classroom, public or independent, urban or suburban, and what you will see looks very much like the classrooms of the 19th century. Yes, slates have been replaced (in most places) with digital tools, but the structure signals the musty past: teacher as authoritative source of knowledge, student as tabula rasa. Or take the structure of the school day itself, typically divided into seven 45 minute classes. Believe it or not, that schedule derives from Victorian factories where industrialist Frederick Taylor concluded that workers were most productive when they changed stations every 45 minutes.

And it's not just the structure of schools that is chained to the past. It's the very content we teach and our purpose for teaching it. This has been true for at least a century, but the technological revolution has brought our schools to the precipice; the mandate could not be more obvious: evolve or suffer extinction. We are seeing more clearly than ever that school as we know it is becoming irrelevant to an entire generation. Drop out rates remain high, especially here in L.A., and far too many college students, who are ostensibly prepared, give up before the end of their freshman year. Why? Because they're disengaged. Even among our most educationally privileged, students arrive at college already burned out and cynical about the journey ahead. If college means another four years of primarily sitting and listening to someone else lecture, we've lost them already.

Authentic learning at its core is about doing, creating, constructing. Ask yourself, "What do I remember as the most rewarding and inspiring experience in school?" and the answer invariably involves something you created -- poetry you wrote, a computer program you designed, an art portfolio you assembled, biology research you conducted. We learn by doing. Unfortunately, it is a lot easier for a teacher to deliver information than it is to design a lesson that deeply engages the learner and asks the student to transfer and apply the skills and concepts of the course rather than simply memorizing them.

Teachers no longer need to be the "black box" in which information is stored. Instead, educators must become designers of doing. In this sense, teaching is a highly skilled craft, requiring not only explicit objectives, but a beautifully designed and irresistible learning experience that asks students think critically, solve a problem, create a product. Take for example an undergraduate course at MIT on designing a wheel chair for use in the developing world. A real world, altruistic problem is posed and students are challenged to solve it. Along the way, they must learn and employ the chemistry, geometry, geography, cultural anthropology, physics, etc. to prevail. Now that is relevance. Without doing likewise, our secondary schools will remain penitentiaries of boredom -- places where our children sit stupefied and often medicated so that they can remain silent and motionless long enough for the lesson to be over.

Our schools and teaching have to be worthy of a student's attention. I talk to students about what it means to be fully present-- to "attend," which comes from the Latin attendere, meaning to take care or take charge, to bend toward. Attending means so much more than merely showing up and yet when we utter the word in the context of school, it evokes passivity. Likewise, learning has become synonymous with collecting information or possessing the kind of knowledge that can be readily measured on a test. For those who are college bound, that means a standardized test like the S.A.T. But the true test of knowledge and understanding is applicability. Students want and deserve knowledge which they can apply to an authentic experience. Don't get me wrong, facts and content matter. But deep and enduring learning is always about more than mnemonics, and it's time our schools and curricula reflect this.

Yes, you need knowledge of the periodic table to do chemistry, but you don't need to memorize it if it's on your desktop -- electronic or otherwise. What matters is the ability to do something with the elements in the periodic table. But ask yourself, what's easier to design: a fill in the blank test for recall or an authentic chemistry experiment that may well have a messy outcome? This is just one of the tragedies of No Child Left Behind, or as I like to call "No Child Left Untested." Few experiences in life are less authentic than a standardized test. The humble times-tables were once memorized by a sort of chanted catechism; today, our youngest math students make lightning-fast calculations on an array of electronic devices which, ironically, most large-scale assessments forbid. Quick, what's 12 x 7? It's actually okay if you don't remember, offhand, because you no longer have to. Isn't that great?

Educational leaders have to have the courage to reinvent our schools for real this time. And our teachers must be teachers of children as well as teachers of their subject area. This means possessing pedagogical knowledge -- the tools in the tool belt to design a lesson for the students of the present and the problems of the future. Here's the bottom-line and the good news: the vast riches of the world's cumulative knowledge are literally at our fingertips every day, via tablet, desktop, laptop and cell-phone. True, there is such a thing as classified information, not accessible via our search engines, and there is plenty of misinformation on the web, too (for instance, I don't recommend that you diagnose your own appendicitis, etc.) But still, if you're interested in what the ancient Egyptians ate for breakfast, or how to carve a duck decoy, or simply want to learn to speak Portuguese, a few persistent mouse-clicks will summon this and virtually any other form of knowledge you desire, as if you have conjured an obedient djinn from a magic lamp. It's all there for us, and we don't have to remember much more than our new lexicon of user-names and passwords to enter what truly is a wonderland of information impossible to imagine a generation ago.

And here's where our schools become relevant once more: in teaching our children to evaluate and use that information in ways that are important and meaningful and to satisfy their fundamental human desire to construct solutions for the world full of engaging and pressing problems they will inherit.

Follow Elizabeth English on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MsEnglishTweets

What I've been Reading

Over the course of a year, in addition to articles and blogs that I read and follow, I try to get in as much book reading as I can. Here are some of the books that I've enjoyed this year:

I was curious about the book, Leaders Make the Future, after hearing speakers reference it at the last Southern Association of Independent Schools (SAIS) conference. In this book, Bob Johanson, from the Institute for the Future, looks at what his institute believes are the five external forces that will make us rethink how we lead our organizations. Because we used a similar way to look at our strategic planning process at Greensboro Day School, I was engaged right from the start. Whether we acknowledge them or not, the external forces Johanson shares are causing schools to rethink how they teach, what they teach, and how they help students to become tomorrow’s leaders. You can learn more about the work of the IFTF at: http://www.iftf.org/home/

I was immediately attracted to The Connected Educator, Learning and Leading in a Digital Age, because we are a 1:1 laptop school, and being connected is a critical part of our 6-12 program. Helping our teachers learn how to safely utilize the internet and use personal learning networks and blogs to expand their professional learning communities parallels the kind of networks we expect our students to develop. The authors, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall go into great detail about the power of diverse learning environments, connected learning communities, and how to improve teacher professional growth and development.

If you are an independent school educator and you’ve not yet read the NAIS Trendbook, you’re missing out on building a context for the challenges independent schools are facing today and will be facing in the very near future. We used it as a platform for our last administrative retreat when we looked at the potential threats and opportunities we face in the attraction and retention of students.

The Vendee Globe race comes around every four years and challenges solo sailors to sail 60-foot boats non-stop and unaided around the world. While 3,000 mountaineers have climbed Mt. Everest, only 50 sailors have ever completed this race, and the dropout rate averages 50% due primarily to equipment failure from the skippers pushing the boats too hard. The race is currently underway and you can see how the sailors are doing here.  Note that seven have already had to drop out.

Rich Wilson, a competitor in the 2008 Vendee Globe recounts his harrowing experience in his book, Race, France to France, Leave Antarctica to Starboard. His story is one of true courage and heroism as he rounds both major capes, and sails the southern ocean where the International Space Station houses the next closest human. I have a particular love for this book, as I raced competitively on San Francisco Bay and have a deep respect for the extreme difficulty of accomplishing what these sailors attempt.

Our school is taking on a three year ethical development program with the Institute for Global Ethics and we are reading How Good People Make Tough Choices and Moral Courage by Rushworth Kidder. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading both of these books because they eloquently outline why it’s so frequently difficult to make choices about the right thing to do. Kidder points out that very few of the choices we make are right vs. wrong decisions, which are rather easy to make. The tough ones are the right vs. right choices we have to make almost daily. These choices include those that bring into conflict loyalty and truth, the rights and needs of the individual and the community, short-term and long-term consequences, justice and mercy. Both of these books make us examine our values and offer a method that we can learn and teach our students for making good choices. The writing is deep and thorough providing terrific guidance in decision making for all of us.

Michelle Bostian, our LS counselor, is heading up our work, and you can learn more about what we are doing by visiting our Bengal Talk blog.

As you can imagine, my bed stand is stacked high with more books to read!

How to Avoid the Artificial Maturity Trap

This posting is from from the Leading Blog: a blog that reviews recently published books.

 

Children today are overexposed to information far earlier than they are ready and underexposed to real-life experiences far later than they are ready producing a kind of artificial maturity. Tim Elmore writes in Artificial Maturity, that “it looks so real because kids know so much, but it’s virtual because they have experienced so little.” He continues:

Today, because information is so prevalent, our kids assume they have [experiential knowledge] when they only have [informational knowledge]. With an abundance of knowledge, their confidence can soar, but it’s based on a virtual foundation. Without experience, it’s easier for knowledge to produce judgmental attitudes, bullying, and arrogance.

With all of this information kids think they are mature. And unfortunately, we do too. That’s part of the problem. How often have we seen a “smart” child and thought, “They are sure mature for their age.” Intelligence and maturity are not the same thing. (Of course, we see this same issue in “adults” too.) Elmore writes, “Except in rare cases, their knowledge has only entertained them. It has not produced anything real.”

Elmore provides reasons for why artificial maturity has become so widespread, but his real focus is what we can do about it. To transform artificial maturity into authentic maturity, we must concentrate on four areas says Elmore:

Emotional Intelligence. Mature, healthy people manage their emotions. This means developing self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

Character and a Sense of Ethics. Mature, healthy people live by a set of values and principles. They don’t merely react to what is going on around them. They have self-discipline, emotional security, core values, and a clear sense of identity.

Strength Discovery. Mature, healthy people who become the best versions of themselves are one’s who’ve stopped trying to do everything and focused on what they do very well. This means developing their natural talents and gifts, knowledge base, heartfelt passions, and acquired skills.

Leadership Perspective. Mature, healthy people live lives that don’t just revolve around themselves. They invest their lives in something beyond themselves. A leadership perspective involves a personal vision, responsibility, compassion, and initiative.

Developing maturity is centered on four key areas:

• Provide autonomy and responsibility simultaneously
• Provide information and accountability simultaneously
• Provide experiences to accompany teens' technology-savvy lifestyles
• Provide community-service opportunities to balance self-service time

In addition, Elmore believes there are four debts we owe our kids: clarity (fosters focused direction), transparency (fosters validation and vulnerability), consistency (fosters trust and assurance), and boundaries (fosters security).

There is far too much information in this book to cover it here, but here are a few more ideas from Elmore:

• Start inserting age-appropriate responsibility into your children’s lives right away. Avoid indulging and overprotecting them and creating hyperinflated egos. We are doing a disservice to young people if we remove their chance to fail.

• Enable them to take control of their lives; to boss their calendars. Hold them accountable and responsible for the choices they’ve made and don’t bail them out. Let them see that failure isn’t final and poor judgment is not necessarily poor character.

• Connect them to people (adults) outside their peer group. This generation doesn’t need you for information (they can get that without you), but they do need you for interpretation. They need mentors to help them make sense of the information and the world around them.

• Communicate that there is meaning even in the small, mundane tasks. Give them a sense of the big picture and how all the little things they do fit into the big picture of history, or of the organization, or of their community.

Authentic maturity is a leadership issue. Elmore concludes, “Our kids have what it takes inside of them, if we’ll just take them seriously and equip them for the future. As they enter adolescence, we must begin to treat them as young adults and train them to be both autonomous and responsible. Then, I dare you to stand back and watch them amaze you.”

Artificial Maturity is an excellent book to help us understand maturity—what it is and how it is developed. Not only is it helpful for developing it in children but the issues raised are good to reflect on for our own development

Collaboration and Cooperation

Developing 21st century skills calls for a closer examination of the power of collaboration and the role of cooperation in the classroom.

In their book, The Connected Educator, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Lani Ritter Hall speak to the importance of collaboration, cooperation and individual learning.

Collaboration is sometimes confused with cooperation. Cooperation is an individual approach to learning and the construction of individual knowledge done within a group. In this model everyone is expected to contribute something that anyone else in the group could have contributed. Each learner works individually on the same topic and then shares what he or she has learned in order to deepen the understanding of the group. Because the work is done individually, one learner’s failure to participate does not negatively affect the learning outcomes of the group.

In short, when in a cooperative situation, each individual’s contributions is replaceable; if a group member leaves, work doesn’t necessarily suffer; the group shares information that any member could have contributed; everyone works together on a common task; the group is structured.

Collaboration comes about when a learning group approaches a project or learning opportunity as connected learners, relying on one another’s knowledge, skills, talents and readiness to share. In this model, each participant shares his or her specific knowledge. Each brings some unique ability to the group’s project or task that helps to create success, and everyone works together to solve a problem.

In order for collaboration to be successful, each member of the group must invest in his or her personal knowledge-building before they have something to share. Personal knowledge is critical to creating a collaborative culture.

Technology makes connecting, collaboration and personal learning easier than ever before in human history. Through technology we can connect with others across continents and time zones to build collaborative learning communities that were not possible in the not so distant past.

Collaborative models of problem solving are the wave of the future, and through the use of technologies anyone can find a project on which to work or problem to solve where his or her individual talents, skills and knowledge can make a difference.

In the 21st century, technology has transformed how people connect, interact and collaborate to create knowledge. It offers our students unprecedented opportunities to learn and, as our GDS Mission exhorts us “… to become constructive contributors to the world.”