School 2.0

The EduCon 2.3 Call for Conversations is open!

As many folks know, the students, faculty and parents of the Science Leadership Academy are hosting EduCon 2.3 on January 28th - 30th, 2011. EduCon has been successful in the past because of the incredible energy and spirit that everyone brings to the weekend. The conversation-style sessions are - and always have been - the heart of the conference. So please consider submitting a proposal to create and facilitate a session.

Session proposals are due October 20th. And we really hope for another year of incredible conversations!

Registration for EduCon 2.3 is now open! You can go to the conference site or straight to the Eventbrite registration page.

If you are unfamiliar with EduCon, it is the conference we host at SLA that looks to investigate the intersection of progressive pedagogy and 21st Century Tools. All sessions are dialogic / conversation based, as opposed to traditional lecture-based professional development.

From the EduCon 2.3 website:

What is Educon?

EduCon is both a conversation and a conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

Guiding Principles of EduCon

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
   
2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen
   
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
   
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
   
5. Learning can — and must — be networked

EduCon 2.3 is Jan 28-30, 2011. Registration is open. The conference costs $150 - $100 for School District of Philadelphia teachers.

We hope you can join us!

(Playing with language a bit in this post... not sure this even qualified as a half-baked idea...)

I was thinking about the Special Education concept of Least Restrictive Environment and the idea that many of the concepts of special education, such as an Individualized Educational Plan, are concepts we should want for every student. And I was thinking about a conversation I was having with another principal a while back about the use of cell phones and iPods and such... the conversation went something like this:

Principal: I don't let students use iPods and cell phones in school.
Me: We do... I mean, I often work with music playing, so why not let kids choose to do so?
Principal: Well, it might be fine for some kids, but not for others. And I think it just serves as a distraction.

So... a month later, that conversation bubbled back into my brain, and I came up with the right response. Banning all these devices when there are many kids who can use them wisely and well is not putting kids into the least restrictive environment for their own learning.

Yes, there are some kids who struggle - despite many opportunities to figure how to manage it - to use technology in a classroom without it serving as a distraction. Let's admit that. At SLA, we have, at any given point in time, about 1% of our population on "Simple Finder" because the teachers or the parents have requested that the laptops have restrictions put on them for a while. And we do have some kids who get their cell phones taken from them in class because they don't respond to repeated redirects if they are misusing them in class. Those instances are absolutely the exception, not the rule. (In talking with colleagues, I'd say that cell phone misuse is much lower at SLA than it is at schools that theoretically ban their existence.)

But banning their use or locking up every laptop would hamstring so much of what we do, and it would not be, for the overwhelming majority of students, the least restrictive environment in which they could - and do - learn.

Let's take a tip from Special Education and in the coming school year, try to make sure our schools are the least restrictive environments for learning they can be.

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So... I was at the Mobile Learning Institute at the Smithsonian Museum today. I was talking about the ways museums and schools can use digital media to share goals and collaborate and create really powerful learning experiences for kids. More importantly, I was listening to some really interesting people talk about what they were doing in education.

I met with David Gagnon and learned about what his group at U. of Wisconsin is doing with Aris Games, and my mind immediately began racing to all the ways SLA could harness this technology to do some amazing place-based storytelling.

But this was also a chance for me to talk to some museum people about some ideas I've been kicking around with folks at The Franklin Institute. Some folks in the poster sessions in ISTE were doing some really amazing things with QR codes, and at the time, I was thinking that we could collaborate with some student-led projects at TFI where we embedded QR codes around the museum to create an enhanced experience for museum visitors.

What if, for example, kids designed physics experiments around the exhibits of The Franklin Airshow and people could read a QR code that led to video explanations of the experiments and the math behind it? What if the QR codes led to a wiki with much more detailed information about what you were looking at than the museum write-ups are able to give? What if the QR codes led to a survey you could take or a way to take part in an on-going conversation about the exhibit? How could that enrich the experience for museum goers, and how could that create an incredible -- and on-going -- experience for the SLA student-designers? The tools to do more place-based learning with mobile devices (and with the laptops to create the experiences) are getting more and more robust. We just have to start to get creative about the way we harness them.

And as a final thought, it was experiences like today that speak to why we need to make an effort to get out of our comfort zones. This was not my usual group of folks today, and I am -- and hopefully SLA will be -- better for it.


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I was reading the always thoughtful, always thought-provoking David Warlick today. His new post The Big Buzz at ISTE This Year - A Fourth "R" suggests this year we are moving toward a much needed revolution in education. And certainly, I am someone who believes that change (and innovation) is desperately needed in education, but I find myself very wary of the word "Revolution." Perhaps it is because that's the word being used by folks like Tom VanderArk as they call for a brand of education (and education management, really) that I cannot support, but no matter what I find myself less of a revolutionary these days.

I prefer to think that what we are doing is evolutionary.

So I threw that idea up on twitter, and it engendered some good conversation. Among the best is what Gerald Aungst (@geraldaungst) comments:

@chrislehmann But doesn't evolution also imply gradual change over a long time? Could some things need revolutionary change now?

To which I say yes... evolutionary change is harder and slower, and there's definitely many things about education that I would want changed tomorrow, but I worry that revolutions are often bloody. I worry that revolutionaries aren't always the most reflective or humble types. I worry that the fervor of revolution doesn't always lead to good things. And I worry that the rhetoric of revolution will lead us to ignore or devalue all the good work that has been -- and continues to be done -- in schools.

To use SLA as an example, I don't see SLA as a revolutionary school, I do see it as an evolutionary school. SLA works within the traditions of Dewey and Deb Meier and borrows from the free schools and from the open classrooms, and we then try to look at the best potential of what is in front of us and wed those ideas to those powerful ideas of our past. And I believe that willingness to recognize the debt we owe to those who have come before us has served us very well... both in our best moments and in our most challenging ones. It means that in our best moments, we always were reminded of our roots and of where our ideas came from, and in our most challenging moments, it reminds us that others have stood where we stand, and not to give in to frustration, because we weren't the first to struggle and we won't be the last.

But then Greg Thompson (@akamrt) wrote:

@chrislehmann I think we need a word between the two. Can we expect the current system to evolve w/o it carrying the bad DNA along w/ it?

And perhaps we don't have the word we need. Because even "evolution" suggests a natural progression, and that's not what I'm calling for either. I want to see us change, grow, evolve, so that all our kids can have the schools they need. But I also want the adults to be smart and wise and kind in their desire and quest for that change. I want them to be respectful and understanding of how difficult that change is. I want them to celebrate the incremental changes those around them make while never stopping to work for greater change. And I want the (r)evolution to be done in a way so that it doesn't require proverbial bloodshed, and I want it done in a way that does take the best of what we have been, the best of what we are... and marries to the the potential of what we can be.

I don't know that "revolution" gets us there. I see its appeal. But I think we we're trying to do might be harder than that. But I think if we strive for this kind of purposeful evolutionary change, we might get there in a way that is healthiest and sustaining for all involved.


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Yesterday was my ISTE session - Beyond Tools: Thoughtful 21st Century School Reform. It was at 8:30 am on the last day in one of the big 200 seat halls - a challenge of energy to say the least. I really wanted to make sure this was an interactive session, not a lecture. It might be because I've done a bunch of keynotes lately, but I really don't want to talk at people, I want to talk with them. And while, not surprising, much of what I was talking about in this session was, well, what I often talk about, my goals was to use the ideas I am most passionate about as a frame to get other people to talk about what they are most passionate about -- and how to start to think about creating schools that reflect those passions. (A perhaps unnecessary aside... the problem I have is that I really lay out what I believe about the big ideas of schooling when I do keynotes or workshops... and I hope I have had an evolution of those ideas, but it can be hard to radically change what I talk about.)

So the goal was to front load some of the ideas of reform as a framework for talking about school vision, and then to give the participants a chance to dream themselves. Once given a chance to dream, then the hard work starts -- what changes would schools have to make to achieve those dreams? How will you problematize those very good ideas? How will you build buy in for those ideas? And what happens if you actually achieve those goals? In all this, it is powerful for me (and I hope for the session participants) to be able to use the journey we have walked at SLA as a frame for those questions, but in the end, it matters more that participants frame those questions where they live and work and learn.

What struck me most about the session is what often strikes me in workshops I have done like this -- we have such incredible wisdom and expertise that often goes unrecognized and unhonored in our schools. People had powerful and meaningful ideas and they were able to see the changes necessary... and the pitfalls they face even if they were to "get their way." Teachers and administrators can, with a bit of a vision-push, see a clear and beautiful vision of the schools their communities need. And they can see the work necessary to get there. That's the most hopeful thing I can imagine.

So here's a question I have... and forgive me if it is presumptuous or in any way egoist. Something about today's session struck me as important... as real and powerful and resonant. (And yes, as I said, it's not wholly new. Somehow, the mashup of stuff I've done before felt really good.) And I really am somewhat consumed right now by the idea of 1,000 conversations all over the country where we dream big. Scaling EduCon is a powerful way to do that, but maybe there's an intermediary step.

If the work we have done at SLA, and some of the talks I have given about the ideas that unpin our school, is useful, perhaps the session I did today could be replicated. Is it possible that a school could bring together a group of teachers and students and parents and administrators and watch either the TEDxNYED or the #140 Conf talk and then tackle the questions from today's session (located in the slidedeck above) as the start of a larger dialogue about how to reimagine their school community? Because, in the end, a session at ISTE is great -- and I went to a bunch this year that inspired me -- but the work that needs to get done is on the ground where we live. More and more, I believe that grass roots reform, the hard work done by educators and students and parents, is our best bet to get the schools we need in this country. I want to know how to help... I am wondering if today, I stumbled into a way to be useful.

What do you think?

This was my fifth ISTE this year, and it was a fantastic experience. On a personal level, I kept insanely busy, doing work as a presenter / facilitator with the Leadership Bootcamp, CoSN's CTO Forum, the Online Learning Institute and my own session, but I also was able to attend sessions led by Bernie Dodge, Howard Rheingold, Jane Krauss and Suzie Boss, Jeff Mao and I spent a lot of time in the poster sessions, talking to students and educators about their ideas and projects. In between, I caught up with old friends, met with new collaborators, listened to folks who have an ear on the policy world of Washington, DC and even snuck off to watch the USA soccer match. (I'm still not over that loss. What a great team we had this year.)

I took tons of notes in sessions... from Bernie Dodge, I was able to deepen my thoughts about the relationship between engagement and empowerment. Bernie's work has been important to me for over a decade now, and his thoughts about being savvy and careful about what we consider "the engaged learner" caused me to reflect on the "Shifting Ground" piece I wrote for Principal Leadership magazine back in the fall. More than ever, I believe deeply that engagement is a step to what we really want to see from our students -- empowerment.

From Jeff Mao I was able to compare the state-wide roll out the Maine 1:1 laptop project to our 500 student laptop program. It was fascinating to me to hear how so much of the Maine roll out had incredible common cause with what we do at SLA. (It probably shouldn't. I leaned heavily on the Maine resources when we were starting SLA, but both Maine's and our ideas have evolved since then.) The biggest "aha" take-away came when Jeff talked about how (most? many?) schools in Maine do a parent workshop on the laptops and what it means to give them out as they allocate them. We don't explicitly do that, simply because we never thought of that. Marcie and I talked about that idea after the session, and we will be doing that this year. I wonder how many of the hiccups we see in 9th grade around laptop use we can mitigate with better pro-active parent education.

Jane and Suzie's session is going to get its own blog post, because it was just so rich and so very important to the work we do at SLA. They ran a session on the inquiry process as the foundation of project-based learning. There will be more on this later, but it was just lovely for me to take part and look at inquiry through their lens. There was, not surprisingly, incredible common ground, but there were new "tricks of the trade," and I've got a new book for my reading list - "Change by Design" by Tim Brown of IDEO. His ideas about the perfect brainstorm could have great resonance in our classes, and I look forward to taking it back to SLA.

Howard Rheingold's session on developing our students' (and our) CRAP detectors was an engaging and interesting session that, more than anything else, showed how even a visionary like Howard Rheingold has asked himself what are the limits of the ideas he champions the most. For him to have to deal with the distractions of the laptop in the classroom and to be frustrated by it was really interesting. There's more to unpack there too.

There's more specific detail, of course, but those are the big session reflections. I was really happy to spend so much time this year back in sessions. I have a strategy that I'm not going into those sessions looking for the "big" moment, but I want to honor all the small moments of learning that allow me to shift or deepen my thoughts, and I felt that in every session I went to. That's a great feeling to walk away from ISTE with.

And the general feel of ISTE was different for me this year. There was no big new social tool like Twitter that everyone was trying to learn. (Although, the iPad was clearly the "new" technology. There were hundreds of them.) This year, to me, it felt like there was a deepening at work. People weren't running around as much for what's new. Many of the people I talked to were looking to figure out how to make sense of what they already had learned.

Perhaps this was the year we won the 'battle of the tool.' This year, I didn't hear anywhere near as much of the 'What is... X,' instead I heard more debate about the efficacy of the use of tools in various places. That's good. That's healthy. Smart, rational people should disagree about that. We should be striving and straining to figure out what this really looks like if we get good at it. That's a community growing up and getting ready to take on a larger role in the national education debate. Good.

And perhaps a last thought on that. Now isn't the time to settle for easy answers to those questions. The easy work is either largely done. People know online learning, social networking, blogging and wikis exist. Now we have to decide what we believe about those things... how, where and why they can - and can't - be used... what we gain and lose when we use them... and what school might look like when we do. These answers aren't easy and facile. And we are going to need leaders who define visions of education that have a defining pedagogy that take us to transformative places. The community of people I saw at ISTE this year is ready for that conversation. Let's have at it.

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Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about how to scale... how to grow the School 2.0 movement. I've gone back and forth about what is necessary... do we need a national organization to be a defining counter voice to some of the edu-capitalist organizations that seem to be getting a great deal of heat? Do we need advocacy in Washington that is more targeted? Or are we best as a grass roots movement that makes change every day in classes?

The answer, of course, is probably all of the above.

But what is doable, possible, immediate and powerful?

The more I listen to teachers and parents, the more I talk about the ideas that I am most passionate about, the more I hear people wanting road maps that will allow them to change their schools where they are, the more I am truly convinced that a smart, grass roots movement might be the thing we need.

What if we all tried to dream big about what we can imagine schools could be where we lived?

What if we brought together teachers and parents and students and community members if cities and towns all over the country and shared a vision and then discussed ways to move our schools closer to that vision?

And what if we aggregated the stories and ideas and dreams that came out of all of those meetings? And what if there were some common ideas to the structure and meaning of the meetings and those formed the core of a grass roots movement? How much change could we affect?

And maybe what we've been able to start with EduCon can be a model.

So let's start 1,000 EduCons all over the country. There are some models for that already. The folks at Co-Learning out in Colorardo have done it. But let's network the events. Let's aggregate the ideas. And, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "Friends, they may call it a movement."

So here's the core values of EduCon:

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
   
2. Our schools must be about co-creating -- together with our students -- the 21st Century Citizen
   
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
   
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
   
5. Learning can -- and must -- be networked
   

Here are the major pieces of the conference -

• The pedagogy of the sessions should match the pedagogy of the conference.
  
• Discussions, not lectures.
  
• Ideas over tools.
  
• Longer sessions.
  
• Time to reflect and talk.
  
• Share a meal.
  
• Involve students and parents.
  

People all over the country have amazing ideas. Let's come together and talk about them where we all live.

And then let's make sure we tell the world about it.

Who knows... we might just make a difference.

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I had the opportunity to speak at the New York City 140 Characters Conference yesterday. #140Conf is the brainchild of Jeff Pulver and the conference explores the powerful effect of social media on the world today. Jeff asked me to speak about the power of social media to change education, and for me, the chance to talk about some of the ideas I am most passionate about to an audience that most educators don't often have access to. I'm incredibly thankful to Jeff for the opportunity to speak to the conference, and my only regret is that I had to zip in and zip out so that I could get back in time for Parent-Advisor Conferences. Here's the talk:

My take-away from the conference -- and from the reaction to my talk -- is that people really are passionate about education, and that so many people outside the "echo chamber" of education / ed-tech folks get that something is wrong with where we're going with school right now. There are some "Have To's" that yesterday taught me:

• We in education have to continue to work hard to tell a better story than the current national story-line of "broken schools being taken over and teachers being fired."
  
• We have to understand that it is no longer enough to do powerful work if no one sees it - and that's true for students and teachers.
  
• We have to be willing to be activists as well as educators.

What #140Conf reminded me is how much non-educators want to believe in schools... and how deeply they care about what is going on in education. Let's have the courage to talk about what schools can be... about what keeps us from getting there... and about how we can involve the whole community in overcoming those obstacles.

Thanks again, Jeff, for allowing me to be a part of #140Conf... it was an amazing day.

Thanks to David Bill and Arvind Grover and the whole TEDxNYED team for getting the TEDxNYED videos up online! Here's my contribution to the day:

It was an amazing, amazing day... and it really was an honor to share the stage with so many brilliant minds. And for me, the most incredible part of the day was watching our SLA students do such an incredible job of filming and broadcasting the event. What you don't quite catch unless you pay very close attention is how close to really choking up in the very beginning I was when I was talking about their participation. (It happens about one minute in.)

Watch all these talks. There are ideas here to deconstruct, apply, reflect upon... and talk about.

Thanks again to everyone involved.