[First seen when Arvind Grover blogged about this video. And in full disclosure, I’ve spoken at the CoSN, conference, and CoSN is the organization for whom this video was made, and been on a panel with Ken Kay, and my interactions with Ken Kay and Keith Kruger have been nothing but positive. With that…]

[5.21.08 — Updated with what I presume is the final version of the movie. In re-examining it, I am struck by how close it comes to being what I want to hear from CoSN. I love that Dan Pink is pointing out the foolishness of standardized testing. I love Ken Kay talking about the skills we need to value. But did we need to close with ‘the death of education and the dawn of learning?’ There are a few moments in that video that still, to me, undermine the message we most need.]

You’d think I’d love this video… and in fact, there’s a lot about it I do. I like that Ken Kay and Dan Pink are both talking about synthesis and the new skills that are going to be necessary for the 21st Century. That stuff is great.  But the video rings a little hollow to me. For a lot of reasons, I think it falls short of what we need… and of course, any five minute video will, but I’ve got some specific complaints, not the least of which is that this piece, which is very slick and well done, is, in the end, a piece of public relations by Pearson Education, but let’s deal with some of the content first.

I’m disturbed by the fascination with connection for connection’s sake that I see in the first few minutes of the video. I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world — just like they do on Facebook or MySpace — and the kids will learn. There’s a fallacy there, and my experience with how much really deep teaching of digital ethics we’ve had to do at SLA to counter all that the kids come in the door thinking about the digital world. Just introducing connection into our schools without a sense of what we want to do when we connect, how it changes things when we do it, and what we gain and lose when we change our schools this way. We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better. If we have learned anything from the failures of laptop initiatives in places like Liverpool, NY, it is just how hard it is to do this right.

And there’s something in that video that makes it seem like this is easy to do, and it’s not. We don’t want to just ape the rest of the world in schools. Schools should remain something different than the lives kids lead outside of school. That’s ok. That’s even good. Because I think much of the input that kids have outside of school (marketing, specifically, I suppose) isn’t a good thing. Schools should be different than that. Not the way they are now, but not the way those folks talk about it, either.

I just worry a lot that our ideas are being sold as panaceas, perhaps because they are being shilled by folks with a moneyed interest in them, and that makes it much harder to have an honest conversation about them. Because nowhere in that talk — which was produced and sponsored by Pearson Learning is there much of an honest discussion of just how hard implementation of these ideas actually is.

Because it is plenty hard… ask SLA teachers… it ain’t easy. And the problem is that our entire structure has to change to make it easier. You can’t teach 150 kids a day this way… you can’t have traditional credit hours… you have to find new ways to look at your classroom. Everything from school design to teacher contracts to class size and teacher load to curriculum and assessment — everything we do in schools — has to be on the table for change if we are to achieve the kind of schools that video is speaking about. The only thing that shouldn’t be on the table, and that the video actually hints that it should be, is the need for teachers in their day to day lives– the adults who can make a deep profound impact in kids’ lives.

And missing from this conversation is any sort of historical sense of education. The fact is ideas like the ones that Kay and Pink are talking about have been around in schools for a long, long time… just not in most schools because, as Heppel says, most schools the factory model. Well, it’s not technology that changes that, it’s sound educational practice. The technology can be transformative, but only when coupled with a sense of where you are going and why. Let’s not forget the last 100 years of progressive school reform as we look to change schools today. We have to learn from the lessons of the past — we must learn why the progressive school movement lost to the factory model as the dominant educational model in America, if we expect to be successful in whatever the next wave of school reform turns out to be.
 
And I don’t know… perhaps under it all, I have a sense that these folks think, "If we just change it all up, the kids will all suddenly just start learning like crazy" when that misses several points — 1) we still have an insanely anti-intellectual culture that is so much more powerful than schools. 2) Deep learning is still hard, and our culture is moving away from valuing things that are hard to do. 3) We still need teachers to teach kids thoughtfulness, wisdom, care, compassion, and there’s an anti-teacher rhetoric that, to me, undermines that video’s message.

I want to see us start problematizing all these ideas. I want our community to get more rigorous about our ideas. I want us to start talking about what we gain and what we lose when we make these choices because I think we have to be really honest or we’ll lose this battle. We cannot pretend these ideas "save" our schools, they create different schools — better ones, I believe — but very, very different ones, and that’s the piece I see missing. But the problem is that I’m not sure that’s the message this video was meant to bring out.

Because now we have another "Did You Know" style video. But now, it’s been made, not by a teacher trying to shake up a faculty, but by a multi-national corporation that has seen a 60% rise in stock price since 2003 and a product line that includes a district-wide web-based benchmark testing program. Perhaps that should give us pause and make us question the ideas in that video a bit more carefully.

Our schools need to change. There are a lot of ideas in that video that I agree with, heck, if you parsed that video carefully, you’d find some powerful similarities between many of the ideas and the keynote speech I gave last week. But let’s make sure we keep asking ourselves how these ideas are being presented and who is presenting them. And let’s make sure we don’t just stop with the five minute video, because these ideas are easy when presenting in sound-bite fashion. It’s, to quote the West Wing, "the next ten words and the ten words after that" that are the problem. We need to start questioning, asking why and then how… we need to start figuring out a myriad of ways to achieve those goals, school by school and district by district.

What’s so amazing about that video is how un-revolutionary it should be by now. What should worry us is that Pearson — and many companies like them — are ready to sell us the product that they swear will move us there. And I, for one, don’t believe them.

[Thanks to Dean Shareski for being on the other end of a Skype chat as I tried to parse out the ideas that became this post.]

Blogged with Flock

Tags: education, change, marketing