(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.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad