Tag Archives: school 2.0

Apr 03

Teach Kindness

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[In my attempt to push my own thinking, I'm continuing to unpack in writing some of the things that I say a lot. I always say that I want SLA kids to be "thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind" -- and I do -- so I thought it was a good idea to take those words apart a bit. This is part four. Thoughtfulness, Teach Wisdom and Teach Passion were the first three parts.]

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-”God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater

High school is not structured to teach kindness.

There is almost nothing about the traditional high school structure that would encourage kids to believe that the adults value kindness. Think about it. The factory model of education that persists in most American high schools are designed to limit meaningful human interaction, not create it.

  • 40-50 minute classes
  • Students seeing up to seven or eight teachers a day
  • Students having different students in every class
  • 100 point grading scales and class ranks that encourage students to compete against one another
  • No longitudinal relationships between students and teachers, so there are few opportunities aside from extra-curriculars for teachers and students to know one another over time.
  • Little to no time for meaningful collaboration among the adults

So much of the current overarching structure of high school is fundamentally individualistic, isolating and solipsistic. What’s incredible is that most teachers went into the profession because on some fundamental level, they care about kids. And without a doubt, individual teachers in schools all over the world inspire students with their acts of kindness despite being in a system that discourages rather than encourages kindness as an institutional value.

That has to change.

We have to recognize that teaching kindness is more than just modeling “being nice to kids,” we have understand that kindness is the essentially the act of extending one’s self in the care of another. Aristotle defined it as “helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped.” (http://rhetoric.eserver.org/aristotle/rhet2-7.html) And kindness is central as a profoundly important action — virtue, even — most of the major religious and philosophical movements from Judeo-Christian to Islam to Buddhism to humanism. It is, therefore, a moral imperative to create the environments in our high schools where kindness is more easily and powerfully modeled and taught.

So then what are structures that more powerfully lend themselves to learning environments that are more kind? How do we make it easier for students to be kind to one another and easier for teachers to model kindness by being able to be kind to their students?

  1. Create spaces for students and teachers to know each other over time. For SLA, that’s Advisory. When students and teachers have a community where people can know each other not just as students and teachers of a subject, but as people, that is a powerful opportunity for kindness. In addition, when students are encouraged to see teachers as their advocates, it gives teachers the opportunity to model kindness.
  2. Create more opportunities for students to feel part of a community in their classes. Schools  teach “Humanities” classes so that students spend more time with the same group of student, schools integrate science and math, schools loop students and teachers for more than a year so that the community of learners can stay together.
  3. Simplify the grading systems and do away with individualized class rank. Educators like Joe Bower (http://www.joebower.org/) advocate doing away with grading entirely, but there are less extreme steps schools can take. Schools can move to a 4.0 GPA without plusses and minuses so that students are less competitive about their grades. Schools can report broad categories of class rank to colleges (Top 10%, top 25%, top 50% – this is what we do at SLA.) All these are ways to dial down the competitiveness of high school and allow students to become more invested in the success of all members of their community.
  4. Have students identify and solve real problems. Many educators are using the framework of Design Thinking (http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/) to help students develop empathy as they learn how to listen to identify problems and seek solutions.
  5. Create channels for positive interactions between home and school. Schedule fifteen minutes once a month in a faculty meeting for teachers to write positive emails to students and parents about great things they have seen in the classroom so that students and parents can see that school-home communication is more than informational and punitive.
  6. Have shared spaces. Put tables in hallways, make the Main Office community space, don’t put the principal’s office in the back of the office. Eat lunch together. And then, when you are together, laugh. Laugh a lot.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a start. The adults who spend their lives in schools are overwhelming kind people. And students are capable of profound acts of kindness. The structure of school must do more to enable and enhance and support that.

What changes to the structure of school would you make to enable us to model kindness for children?

Apr 02

Teach Passion

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[In my attempt to push my own thinking, I'm continuing to unpack in writing some of the things that I say a lot. I always say that I want SLA kids to be "thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind" -- and I do -- so I thought it was a good idea to take those words apart a bit. This is part three. Thoughtfulness was part one and Teach Wisdom was part two. ]

One of the critiques of this generation of young people is that they are apathetic, and it is our experience with the students we meet both in and out of SLA that the critique is no more apt in this generation than in our own or in the ones that came before us. The young women and men we teach are looking for a reason to care about more than what society is telling them is important. They are looking for a reason to be more than the stereotype of youth culture that is portrayed through mass media.

We have to ask ourselves — how often does school give them that reason?

In most schools, the things students care most about are extra-curricular – sports, drama, newspaper, marching band, debate – and students across the country endure class for the right to participate in the thing they actually care about. When I coached, I knew I had students who were keeping their grades up for the right to play and little else, and every coach I’ve known has similar stories. And while I wasn’t against using eligibility as a way to motivate an athlete, I have to ask – why is this o.k.? Why is it o.k. to tell students to endure the seven hours of classes and two or three hours of homework so they can enjoy the hour or two of the activity they are most passionate about?

And the thing is, the “soft” lessons we most want to teach are there to be learned in extra-curricular activities. Watch an athlete run sprints to train for the season or the lead of a play work a scene for hours or the editor of the school newspaper edit article after article – this isn’t just about “fun,” this is about passion.

And yet we partition off all of the work to the world of “extra-curricular.”

We have to help kids care as much about the curricular as they do about the extra-curricular.

Make it relevant: If we cannot help students to see how what they are learning in our classes is relevant to their lives, then how can we ask the overwhelming majority of our students to develop a passion for what we teach? And while there will always be a percentage of our students who fall in love with our subject because of its beauty or intrinsic interesting-ness, that’s not good enough. It is the difference between teaching Hamlet primarily through the literary structure devices Shakespeare uses or using it as a text to examine how our own human struggles to figure out who we are and how we should act as part of a continuum  of a hundreds year old struggle to make meaning of our lives.

Make it real: Have students create real artifacts of their own learning that have impact in the world. High school students can create public service campaigns for their neighborhoods around environmental / scientific issues. Students can create documentaries and submit them to film festivals. Students can debate the meaning of historical events and the impact they have on our society today. They can do fieldwork science, getting out of the pre-canned laboratory and doing field research in the world at large. And students can engage in all manner of engineering projects from building apps to building small-scale solar installations. And in all these examples, make sure that students are not just asking the questions we have given them, but that they are asking and answering their own questions, building knowledge and meaning from their own line of inquiry.

Make it live in the world: Whether through leveraging the web, creating opportunities for performance, or simply creating gallery walks within the school so students have the opportunity for peer critique, we must make sure that student work is more than just a dialogue between student and teacher. When students have authentic audience and can therefore see themselves as having an informed – if not expert – voice in the world, students will develop passion for their work. Be aware, that merely blogging to blog grows old, and we must work to create real opportunities for audience, rather than just counting on the somewhat overwhelming nature of a Google search to create audience.

Make it last: When students move from unconnected project to unconnected project, students can lose the sense of urgency and passion, but when students have the opportunity to see a project through multiple revisions, through multiple iterations, it becomes theirs. When students care enough about a project to hand it down to younger students to continue the work, you know that students have a passion for what they have created.

Schools can be places of great passion where students learn what it means to be scholar-activists, fully invested in authentic work that matters to them today, not someday.

When we do this, we will fully realize the promise of the idea that school should not just be preparation for real life, but rather that school can be real life, not just after school, but all day long with students and teachers who are making meaning relevant to the lives we all are leading now, as well as growing thoughtfully into the lives we will live tomorrow.

Mar 31

Teach Wisdom

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[In my attempt to push my own thinking, I'm continuing to unpack in writing some of the things that I say a lot. I always say that I want SLA kids to be "thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind" -- and I do -- so I thought it was a good idea to take those words apart a bit. This is part two. Thoughtfulness was Part One.]

If you google “Definition of wisdom,” you get the following definition:

Wisdom: Noun

1. The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment; the quality of being wise.

2. The soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of such experience, knowledge, and good judgment. (https://www.google.com/search?q=Definition+of+wisdom)

We think of wisdom as something that only comes with time. Traditionally, the young person is head-strong, the elder is wise. Societally, we think of wisdom hard-earned — and interestingly, it is often gained by those who are not considered “good at school” — it is the stereotype of the elder who learned at “the school of hard knocks.” It is not something that we traditionally think of when we think of high school students to the point where when a young person actually displays these traits, we say they are “wise beyond their years.”

And yet, if we are to help students to become fully realized citizens during their time with us, helping them to develop “soundness of action” and “good judgement” — in other words, wisdom — during their time with us is essential. Because intellect and knowledge without the wisdom to apply those ideas thoughtfully can be profoundly dangerous.

So then, wisdom becomes about decision-making and action-taking, but the accumulation of wisdom is about reflection. Wisdom is about understanding that “doing” is not the end of the learning process, reflecting on what we have done is. Wisdom is about learning from your mistakes, but then — importantly — being able to apply those lessons not only so that you do not make the same mistakes again, but that you can imagine and foresee mistakes before they happen.

Wisdom means not falling so in love with your own ideas that you cannot see the unintended harm those ideas could do.

So how we do help our students to become more wise?

Do Real Stuff: We have to dare kids, help kids, support kids to attempt great things, struggle, reflect, learn and try again. That is the cycle through which wisdom is gained. But we rarely reflect on the things we do not care about. When kids are engaged in work that matters to them, work that is authentic and has real meaning, we create the conditions for students to reflect and gain wisdom. The coach who has students watch game footage and critique their own performances, both individually and as a team, is doing more to help her students become more wise than the teacher who covers the content of a World History class at blistering pace.

Be Scholar-Activists: It isn’t enough to do real work that matters. We have to help students see that work in the context of the work that has gone on before us. That is why it is important not just to study history but to develop the tools of the historian. When our students see themselves as scholar-activists, they place their actions in the stream of human history and they can learn from the mistakes of the past while they endeavor to take action in the present.

Be Willing to Live in the Soup: Life is messy and there are few absolutes. When we own that publicly with our students, encouraging them to come with us on our own journeys of figuring all of this out. In a conversation on Twitter, Bill Ferriter wrote, “Learning only happens when there is tension between what kids think they know and what they see in the world around them.” (https://twitter.com/plugusin/status/318394936233951232) And he is right, it is in that moment of conflict between what we think we know and what we experience that meaning happens. We need to help our students understand that we — all of us — are forever engaged in what Alvin Toffler said was the process of learning, unlearning and re-learning. (http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Alvin_Toffler/) And our students will be far more willing to listen to that message if we model ourselves.

In the end, our willingness to engage in reflective practice with our students, our dexterity in creating the conditions for students to engage in real work that matters, and our ability to help them see themselves and that work in the context of the never-ending stream of human history — in short, our ability to help our students to become more wise, is the most important thing we can do. If our students can learn from their experiences with us, when they still have a safety net, we will have enabled them to make better decisions about their own lives when they leave our walls. And if we have helped them to be more thoughtful about wise about their world around them, then we have helped them become better citizens for the world at large.

Mar 29

Thoughtfulness

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[In my attempt to push my own thinking, I'm continuing to unpack in writing some of the things that I say a lot. I always say that I want SLA kids to be "thoughtful, wise, passionate and kind" -- and I do -- so I thought it was a good idea to take those words apart a bit. This is part one.]

Once we accept the premise that the purpose of school is to help our students become fully realized citizens of a modern world, we have to ask ourselves what are the universal traits of the modern citizen?

We want people who are thoughtful.

Not “thoughtful” as a synonym for “nice.” Our world needs people who are truly “full of thought.”

There has long been an anti-intellectual thread to American society and sadly, school has probably done as much to perpetuate it as it has to eliminate it. By catering to the “right answer” and a reinforcing curricular decisions that taught kids in a top-down, “we know what is best to learn” fashion, we have long sent the message that thoughts that are outside the proscribed canon — and therefore kids who are outside the proscribed canon — are not o.k.

When we treat our classes as lenses on the world, not walled-off silos, we allow students to make connections to other ideas in such a way that will allow them to connect idea to idea, thought to thought, in ways that can be never-ending.

When we honor the ideas our students have and dare them to push those ideas further, we teach students that the world of ideas is a place they can live.

When we model thoughtfulness by deconstructing our own ideas in public, we teach our students that thoughts are not fixed, final and perfect, so that students can understand how reflective practice can lead us to deepen our ideas.

When we are open as teachers so that student ideas can influence and change our own — so that we are a learner in our own classrooms as well — we teach students that authority has no monopoly on ideas, on “right.” A teacher who is willing to say the words, “I never thought it that way,” to a student in a classroom opens a child up to the power of their own ideas to influence others, and that is an invaluable lesson to learn.

And when we create an inquiry-driven, project-based curriculum, where students can take the ideas of the classroom, make them their own, go deeper into the ideas that most speak to them, and then build artifacts that reflect their ideas and the path they travelled to develop them, we let students see the power of their ideas made manifest in the world.

In the end, the hallmark of a great school isn’t the number of ideas, facts and thoughts of ours that our students remember at the end of four years, it is the sheer number of ideas, facts and thoughts they discovered that built on the foundations we helped them to build.

It is the thing a test can never measure, and we have to do it anyway.

We must help our students be thoughtful.

Mar 24

Organize

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So the question before us is how do we affect change?

For folks who are arguing for a more humane, more inquiry-driven, more citizenship-minded, more modern education, it seems daunting. The forces that seem to be working against this kind of education are many. We are out-spent by those who would argue that workforce-driven, test-measured education is what we really need in this country. Worse, the very language of our best ideas often seem co-opted by those who, in the end, seem to be creating a very different kind of schooling than what our best ideas are really about.

And the traditional advocates for public schooling – teachers unions – are caught in a fight that, while linked to the kind of issues that affect modern schooling, are not the same. While issues of workers’ rights, collective bargaining, teacher evaluation or any of the other issues facing teachers are incredibly important, historically, unions have not been the drivers of pedagogical change.

What we need now is a new kind of organization – one that unites teachers and student and parents and admins who all believe that school can be more powerful than it is now. Maybe this isn’t a national organization at first. Maybe this is district by district, school by school. Maybe the time has come for fewer “Education Nation” moments, and more town halls.

We are living in a time when there is a national movement with incredible wealth that is arguing for a vision of education that seems to ring false for many of the people who are walking the walk in schools now – teachers, students, parents and admins. Perhaps the answer is to win the argument on a different stage – the hyper-local stage. And with social media and the speed of communication, is there any doubt that those arguments could spread?

What if – in cities and towns all over the country – we saw parents and educators (who are often the same people, it should be noted) and students and community members come together to discuss their best vision of what they hope school to be? What if, rather than the rhetoric of “fixing broken schools” that we hear so often from the edu-corporate reform movement, we had a grass-roots movement articulating our best ideas for what we hope a modern education could be? And what if we actually all worked together to make those dreams real – parents, students, teachers and admins all working toward a common vision and a common plan? Think we can do better than what we have now?

Maybe that’s what we need – hyper-local, globally-networked organized groups of citizens who believe that inquiry-driven, project-based modern schools are better than what we have today.

 

Mar 19

SLA Students Make Anti-Violence PSA

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Since this blog is called “Practical Theory,” I think it is important sometimes to show the powerful, practical work that kids can do. This is a PSA made by SLA 11th graders for their English class. We need to always remember that kids care deeply about their world, and they are capable of sharing a vision of that world when we give them the tools and give them the chance.

What if high school wasn’t just preparation for real life? When we treat high school as real life, kids can do work like this:

Feb 25

Teach Kids Before Subjects

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Ask any teacher what they teach, and you’ll get the typical responses:

“I teach science.”

“I teach 3rd grade.”

“I teach English.”

Words matter. And when we give those answers, we miss a chance to humanize our classroom every time.

We should always remember that we teach kids. And that matters. Say the first set of answers out loud and then say the next set out loud.

“I teach kids science.”

“I teach 3rd graders.”

“I teach kids English.”

If we around going to create more student-centered schools, then we need to start by actually mentioning the students when we talk about our classes and our profession. Before we expect everyone to be able to do it, perhaps we should actually say it first.

And what is important about this is that it does not suggest that the things we teach the kids are unimportant. Science is important. English is important. 3rd grade is important. But they aren’t necessarily important in their abstraction. They have to be important to the kids we teach. It is in the intersection of the kids we teach and the subjects we teach that meaning and learning happen.

What could happen if teachers started using this language? Could it start us at doing a better job of seeing the kids in front of us as people, not just as students of a subject? Could it remind us that it isn’t enough to love our content, but that we have to love the kids we teach too? Could this be the first step we all agree to take in building human – more humane – schools?

In the end, our kids should never be the implied object of their own education, and we can start changing that with the very language we use to describe what we do.

Feb 20

Inquiring Minds Really Do Want to Know

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Turns out, the two-year olds have it right.

When they ask“Why?” it is a pretty important question. They are trying to make sense of their world, and while most parents can quickly tire of the question, those two-year olds are on the right path. We want our students, years later in school, to still want to figure out their worlds.

So what happens in the intervening years? How do we go from the natural curiosity of the two-year old to the practiced detachment of the stereotypical teenager? What is it about school that teaches kids to not care about their work — and by extension, their world?

The ultimate stereotype of the American classroom is still Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Ben Stein is profoundly unlucky in getting any student in the classroom to care about the Smoot-Hawley tax. And maybe the Smoot-Hawley tax is irredeemable, we don’t know.  But those kids in that class will never know because the teacher was asking questions he knew the answer to, and the students had one job – to parrot back those answers.

That pedagogical approach is long since past its prime – if it ever had one in the first place.

An inquiry-driven pedagogy is – at heart – about asking questions we do not know the answer to. In Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes:

“A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. He is testing a hypothesis by putting the question to nature.” (http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/pirsig.html)

And while the overwhelming majority of teachers are very good at the “facts” of their discipline, we have to get better at using those facts to help students build meaning by asking powerful questions that ask them to apply knowledge, attack problems of their own design, and come up with their own ‘small-a’ answers.

Inquiry really requires people — students and teachers — to live in the uncomfortable places, and that’s hard. Inquiry requires that we all develop a nimbleness of mind so that we do not give in to the orthodoxy of our own ideas. That’s important for students and teachers (and principals) so that we can start to really hone our skill of deep thinking.

And an inquiry-driven education does not preclude content – in fact, to the opposite, it makes content all the more important. For kids to tackle a problem they see in their community requires them to have a complex understanding of the problem before coming up with a worthwhile solution. For kids to engage in deep inquiry and make real decisions about what they think and understand about complex issues requires them to have synthesized a great deal of information.

It is the difference between simply having kids learn the facts and figures of the Smoot-Hawley tax – to return to Ferris – and having students question the relationship between commerce and government, study the historical evolution of that relationship and then decide for themselves what they believe the role of government in influencing the market.

And if we want our students to really be thoughtful scholars and citizens, don’t we owe it to them to teach them how to think for themselves?

Feb 19

School Must Be Real Life

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“You will need this some day. “

It is the thing that all of us as teachers have said to our kids at one time or another. As teacher-tropes go, it is one that makes some sense to use. Why would a fifteen year old care about when the Magna Carta was signed? Why does a third grader really care about the different kinds of rocks?

But fifteen year olds do care about power dynamics and fairness. And third graders are fascinated by their surroundings. And it turns out, understanding the world around you means understanding a great deal of the content that we teach. But it is up to the teachers to help the students to make the connections between the world of school and the rest of their lives.

At EduCon 2.5, Philadelphia superintendent Dr. William Hite told the attendees that teachers must be masters of both content and context, imploring the educators present to make school relevant to the lives their students lead.

I would go one step further. It is not enough that we help students understand how important school is, school must help our students understand how important they are to the lives we all lead. David Perkins, in his book, Making Learning Whole, writes about helping students to play the “junior varsity” game of the world they live in.

At SLA, our students have built sustaining bio-walls, they have planned a major education conference, they have created public service campaigns, they have made original films, and they have interned at over 100 sites all over Philadelphia. Whenever and wherever possible, we endeavor to help our students see their work as having real meaning now. Like the rest of our lives, not everything we do is the most meaningful thing ever done, but we strive to never teach in isolation, giving kids work that has no connection to the lives they lead.

This is at the heart of what we mean when we talk about inquiry-driven, project-based learning. And it is an important way we make sure that we work toward empowerment over simple engagement. Students will do the scut work necessary to make real connections and do meaningful work when students have ownership of the world and see how the work is important – both to their lives and to the lives of others.

And bizarrely, adults rarely are willing to spend the time learning things that are not of interest to them. All we have to do is walk into a school professional development session on the latest mandate from central office and see a group of teachers who look as disengaged as any stereotype of a teenager in a high school class could be. But walk into a school session where teachers are engaged in authentic action research or collaborating with peers on curriculum development, and you will see the learners we want to see in our own classrooms.

Why would we expect our students to be more willing to learn disconnected and inauthentic lessons than we are?

So it is incumbent upon us — in all classes — to find ways to make the work of the classroom have meaning. This means teaching mathematical problem solving so that students can apply a mathematical lens to the challenges around them. This means helping students to think like scientists and helping them do real scientific research and experimentation. This means teaching students that to think like social scientists and historians is to draw connections between the past and present, and that the space between the social scientist and the activist is slim indeed. And it means teaching students that the stories we read and the stories we tell have resonance in the way we learn, the way we live and the way we work.

It isn’t that we expect students to solve problems adults cannot. This isn’t about over-reaching about the ability of children. It is about understanding that there are plenty of challenges that are hyper-local or youth-oriented where they can make a difference either on their own or side-by-side with adults. And it is about understanding that we should not squander the energy and ideas of our young people by telling them that their ideas will matter beyond the classroom walls someday rather than daring them to share their ideas and make a difference today.

When we challenge students to make connections between the content of the classrooms and the context of their lives, school can be more than preparation for real life.

School can be real life.

Feb 18

Chase the Right Goals

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One of the most basic concepts in curriculum design – and one we use extensively at SLA – is the idea of “backward mapping.” At its most basic, backward mapping means that you must have some idea of where  you want to go before you plan to get there. It is one of those common sense ideas that, when applied to a unit plan, makes things go much more smoothly.

The funny thing is I don’t think we do a great job of backward mapping when it comes to the notion of what we hope kids to get from school itself.

What is the purpose of school? What do we value, and what do we want for our kids?

If one were to look at the metrics that we measure, one would think that we value showing up (attendance,) reading and math (test scores,) doing what you’re told (grades) and finishing up (graduation rates.)  And on some level, that is what is valued in school today. But is that really what we value? And are learning those things really the best purpose of school?

At the parental level, parents want school to help their children to be able to succeed. Many CEOs would like schools – especially the public ones – to produce a steady supply of competent workers. And when we has the larger questions of what society needs from the children in school, the answer is everything from the idealistic – we need to citizens who can better our world – to the cynical – needs students were educated enough to become workers, but not so educated as to upset the status quo.

So school itself isn’t it that easy to backward map. When one unpacks the many pressure points on school, we find that the “end” that we have in mind for our students is not so clear-cut.

So what should we consider to be the goal of the modern school?

First, we must admit that which we do not know. We have to admit that we do not and cannot claim to know what the world our students will inherit will look like. So the notion that we can prepare kids for the 21st century workforce is both an act of hubris and a far too narrow goal. We have to admit that we are handing our children challenges, both environmental and social, that will require them to be far more  resourceful than we have had to be.

And so we must help them to become the citizens our world will need them to be. In many respects, the skills we want our students to be able to develop are no different than the best of what we have always wanted for our students, only now I do not believe we have the luxury of merely hoping for them without naming them.

If we are to embrace the notion that the purpose of school is to help students to become critically aware, fully realized citizens, then let us understand the skills that must then follow, and let us then rethink our schools and our curriculum and our assessments in an attempt to build the systems and structures that will help our students achieve those goals.

Let us help our students develop an agility of mind because we can already see that the world is changing more and more rapidly.

Let us help our students develop their creativity, not just as artists, but as artisans as well, because we want our students to be able to be creators across whatever milieu are necessary.

Let us help our students become more thoughtful – truly full of thoughts, because we want them to be able to understand the complexity of the world around them and take deliberate action, aware of and willing to own the consequences of their actions.

Let us help our students develop wisdom because the world will need them to be far more wise than we have been. Let us help them to see that action without reflection, that invention without forethought has not led us to a sustainable world, and that they will have to be wise beyond their years to solve the problems they face.

Let us help our students develop their passions. Let us help them to see that care begets care, and that by being willing to fully engage in the world instead of ironically holding it at arm’s-length, they will live an enriching life and they will enrich the lives of those who come in contact with them.

And let us help them to be kind. Our students will live in a time where their community will be more broadly defined – more global, more diverse and more inclusive than any other time in human history. If our students learn empathy and kindness, they will have the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from more people than we could have ever dreamed.

The challenge is to backward map the schools that chase those goals. But it is a challenge worth taking.