Practical Theory

In a little over a week, the first class of the Science Leadership Academy starts its senior year. The students will, as a major part of that senior year, embark on a year-long Capstone project where they tackle an idea or a problem of their own design. All students have to create a proposal, detailing how they will incorporate the five core values of the school -- inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection -- into their capstone to create something original and meaningful. Ideas we have heard cross all disciplines, as students want to do original science research, create and stage original plays, design web-based applications, research the history of education reform, and much more. To do this, they will need mentors -- people with expertise in a myriad of fields -- who will be on the other end of an email or a Skype call when the students need a hand. Students will also have mentors at the school. Advisors are responsible for helping the students stay on-track and subject area teachers will serve as on-site guide as well. But we need you too. Please considering giving an hour a week to be a capstone mentor. You can sign up at mentor.scienceleadership.org, where you can tell us what kinds of projects / areas of expertise you would be able to support.

From the site:

The Senior Capstone Project at Science Leadership Academy is an opportunity for students to demonstrate what they have become over the course of high school as scholars and individuals. It represents the culmination of four years of intellectual growth towards an independent and self-directed learner who can contribute meaningfully to his or her community. As such an ambitious intellectual project, we are looking for mentors in all fields interested in working with students to develop their own ideas and facilitate their progress toward a meaningful product that truly demonstrates our core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. While students are working to develop their own vision of what it means to lead, your participation as a role model of leadership and creativity will be hugely beneficial to them. As a Capstone mentor, your role would be of an advisory nature, in conjunction with two teachers at the school, providing guidance, feedback, and your wealth of knowledge and experience in a mutual relationship designed by the student and yourself.

Please consider volunteering your time as a capstone mentor for an SLA student. (Mentors will be contacted for clearance, etc... to ensure that students are working with an appropriate mentor.)

Tags: SLA, Capstone, volunteering

Today, I had the opportunity to present some ideas about the need for teacher development to the FCC National Broadband Planning Workshop. I was on the panel talking about ways we can harness E-rate monies to help teachers re-envision what schools can be. And to do that, I had to talk a little bit about what schools can be.

Our panel was the last of three on education today, and by the time we got around to our panel, I admit, I was a little fired up. I'd listened to speaker after speaker talk about the promise of broadband technologies as being able to standardize content and results. Jim Shelton, Under-Secretary of Innovation for the DoE offered a vision of education where we found "the best lecturer on fractions to deliver the best lectures in the country, and then every student could watch the lecture and do the problems as many times as they had to until they got it." (And yes, on some level, that bears some resemblance to my Inversions post, but not really.) Other speakers talked about online learning that seemed to my ears to tell a story that had much more to do with training than education, and for me, they really are different. (And I think that's an idea I need to explore more, because it seems to me that our national focus on standardized curriculum and standardized outcomes might be tracable to a conflation of education and training, but that's for another post.)

So this was the kind of room that I never thought I'd get to address... FCC policy makers who are looking to re-write the national broadband policy. This felt as high-stakes as any room I'd ever addressed, and I wrote out more notes than any speech I've given since a Beacon graduation.

I think the scariest thing about today is -- as I listened to the speakers -- there is a growing movement in America to give up on schools. If we as educators want to be a part of the coming conversation about what learning looks like, we must offer a compelling vision of what schools can be. We must be willing to examine our own practice and be willing to change. And we must engage parents and students in the conversation, because if we don't, the "education economy" will end up recreating schools in a way that, in my opinion, will leave us good at training, but poor at learning. Jim Shelton said in his remarks today, "There are businesses that want this market, so they will create opportunities for kids." That's not the vision of education I have for my children, and it's not the vision of education I have for the students in my charge.

Despite that, I am, as I wrote recently, optimistic that the pace of change is changing, and that more and more schools are rethinking their practice. I just worry a great deal that the time that we have to do this for ourselves is running out. That is the sense of urgency that I think came through in my voice today.

Interestingly, the WebEx webinar that the FCC set up was acting wonky for a lot of folks, so I just turned on my uStream channel and broadcast my part of the panel out. Here is the uStream of the speech:



And what follows are my notes from the presentation. You can hear that I did some editing as I went:

Slide One:

• E-rate funding has created the technical framework to revolutionize education, by wiring thousands of schools across the country, therefore there is -- in many places -- the technological infrastructure to re-imagine what schools can be.
• However, the complaint we hear too often from too many people -- educators, students, parents -- is that despite the infusion of millions of dollars of wiring, hardware, etc... we are not seeing change happen quickly enough where it matters most -- in the classroom.
• Stand outside any high school at dismissal, and you will see kids pull the devices that have been banned from pockets and backpacks. Increasingly, school is becoming a place that has little or nothing to do with the ways kids live the rest of their lives. This must change.
• I argue that is because we must allow teachers the opportunity to re-envision what their classrooms can be, and the only way to do that is to give them the time and training they need to get there. We -- all of us -- parents, educators and students -- must be willing to rethink many of the basic assumptions we have about what our classes -- our schools -- can be. E-rate must help us re-imagine what school can be by helping educators, students and parents rethink what school can be. This does require changing the funding formulas to allow more Priority 2 funding, allow for teaching training -- especially where broadband is less of an issue -- and raising the cap as the demand for broadband continues to grow and our definitions of school continue to change.  (Reference slide)
• Example: Clayton Christensen, in his book Disrupting Class, makes the claim that by 2019, 50% of all high school classes will be taught either fully online or in a "blended" fashion, with between 30% and 80% of the interaction happening online. There's no question that as we become a more and more wired society -- and as schools increase their bandwidth -- there is no technological reason this cannot happen, but what will those classes look like? How will they be taught? Who will teach them?
• The point is this -- if we spent billions wiring schools, we must also commit to spending the money to help teachers leverage the tools in their classrooms.
• Neil Postman says certain technologies are not additive, but transformative. Guttenberg as metaphor for schools.

Slide Two:

• So what does that look like? (Talk briefly about SLA -- 1:1 laptop public school in Philly / partnership between SDP / TFI. Full use of blended learning, with all classes happening on and off line.)
• Broadband technology allows for a student-empowered learning that puts the power into the hands of children, not by devaluing the classroom, but by revaluing it. 
• The single greatest challenge is to help students make sense of the world today. We have gone from a society / school system of information scarcity to one of information overload.
• But a student, sitting at home, logged onto a webinar isn't the answer. The classroom needs to be revalued as a major part of the solution. Yes, there is no question that learning should not be defined by time and space the class occupies in real time. There is no question that the power of broadband is that learning -- "class" -- can now be 24/7/365. But ONLY if we make sure to continue to close the gap between the access students have in school and what they have at home.  But also, that does not mean that classroom -- real or virtual -- is obsolete. The classroom should be where we come together and make meaning, because we know that synthesis and collaboration work.
• If all we do with broadband technologies is create a system with more efficient ways to "deliver content" with pre-determined objectives and pre-determined, all we will have done is repeated the mistakes of the 1950s when we thought TV would revolutionize our schools by delivering the best content in the world.
• Instead, we need to understand what our schools can be when they become transparent through the use of broadband.

• When the classroom, the teacher at the front of the room and the school library are not the end and be all of gaining information, schools can become truly inquiry-driven. We can start with the questions the community asks together and end with reflections on the answers we find.
• Schools can be empowering -- what held down the progressive school movements of the past 100 years was not that the ideas were wrong, but rather that it often just took too long to create the authentic examples of learning. With the tools at our disposal today, students can research, collaborate, create, present and network in truly meaningful ways. We actually have the tools to achieve John Dewey's dream of what schools can be.
• Schools can be transformative -- when we harness broadband technology, students can be authentic voices in the world. (Tell the bio-diesel story.)

Slide Three:

• None of this happens without teachers. We need to find a way to leverage e-rate funding to help teachers profoundly change their pedagogy. Because teachers are, in many respects, more important than ever. But, in many respects, their role has changed.
• Innovative, Inquisitive and Wise.
• Innovative: We need teachers who are willing to change -- who understand that our society has changed, and our schools need to change.
• Inquisitive: We have to be learners as well. And we have to care more about the kids in front of us than we do about the store of content we can recall from memory.
• Wise: More than anything else, this is what we need from our teachers. Kids are trying to make sense of an ever-changing world, with more access to information than ever before -- some good and some bad. What our teachers need to help our students do is turn information into meaning and meaning into wisdom.
• E-rate has done the first piece of the puzzle -- it has, for 1000s of schools, brought the bandwidth to the door. Now we need to help our dedicated national teaching faculty be a rich and vital part of the change.

• (Remember to thank the FCC.)
  

Tags: education, future, FCC

 
When we started SLA and I found out that I didn't get to site select my secretary, my wife told me that I was dead -- that if I got the wrong secretary, the school was doomed to fail. I got insanely lucky, in that Diane LoGiudice chose us, and as a result, we have a kind, dedicated secretary who does everything in her power to take care of the whole school.

Every school needs that person... a great school secretary is the glue that holds the school together. They are often the "mom" for dozens of kids. They are the memory of the school for when principals forget (and we do, often.) They usually play about a dozen roles in the school above and beyond whatever the job description happens to list.

As a school principal, I am incredibly lucky to have Ms. Diane at SLA. I was really lucky in my teaching career, in that Nancy Greenhouse was that person at Beacon.

Nancy Greenhouse (in the center of the photo in the red wrap) was the founding office manager / secretary at The Beacon School in NYC. She was the person who knew how to get resources for your class. She was the person who could keep track of the student activity account for twenty different teams and thirty different clubs. She was the person who warned you about the mood of a parent when they called looking for you. And she was the person who, for almost every young teacher who started their career at Beacon, pulled you aside when you made a mistake with a student and let you know, because the student went to her afterwards.

When I was the dean at Beacon, I worked closely with Ms. Greenhouse on any number of projects. She told me about how some teachers treated the office staff as servants and how some teachers treated them like gold. I saw first-hand how she quietly juggled dozens of tasks... how she was the quiet voice in the ear of the administration, able to say things to the principal that others couldn't always say. And she was a voice of reason and frequent sounding board for me as a young administrator-in-training. And she was very proud of me when I left Beacon to start SLA.

She was, as the principal has said, the conscience of the school. And she taught so many of us -- adults and students alike -- so much.

Nancy Greenhouse passed away on Wednesday, August 12th. She was still working at The Beacon School, still quietly helping to run that school. She is survived by her husband and her son Jason, Beacon Class of '98, and the hundreds of students and teachers who were lucky enough to have known her.

We talk a lot about the importance of teachers in our schools... but too often, the support staff -- the folks who do everything to make sure that the teachers can teach and the students can learn -- aren't part of the dialogue of school reform and care. So, in honor of Ms. Greenhouse -- and in honor of every school secretary like Ms. Diane and Ms. Greenhouse who works hard to make our schools better -- please, when you go back to your schools in the fall, on your first day back, make a point to say thank you to those people in your school who give so much of themselves, even if they never stand at the front of a classroom. Tell them how much you appreciate everything they do, and tell them that you know they do more than you are even aware of. Thank them and mean it, because all of our schools are better because of the people like Nancy Greenhouse who do this work with us.

Tags: beacon