Learning to Change

In this episode, Will Richardson talks with Lawrence DeMaeyer about the realities of deep change at Peel School Board outside of Toronto, Ontario.

Lawrence received his Masters in Education from the University of Toronto, and in recent times has lead much of the development of many of the elements of the Peel School Board’s  Empowering Modern Learners initiative.

As such he is now Peel Board's coordinating Principal of Modern Learning and guiding the implementation of the new vision for modern learning. His responsibilities include:

* implementing the new vision: Empowering Modern Learners

* coordinating professional learning and training that aligns with Ministry of Education and district priorities

* championing e-learning

* supporting principals and vice-principals with technology and data-related matters

* supporting protocols and practices to ensure that all data is clean, accurate, accessible, secure and available for integration

* advising Learning Technology Support Services regarding the appropriateness of software and hardware solutions

Highlights from their conversation include:

* What are the learning outcomes that you’re aiming for and how can technology play a role in helping that to really happen

* How did you go about getting to that point where you could put a consistent definition to some of those bigger terms?

* How is this new vision vision different from what the traditional experience of classrooms has been in Peel?

* Why are we dividing our school day into 75 minute blocks or 40 minute blocks in some places and forcing kids to switch from a Science hat to a Social Science hat to a Math hat in 40 minute intervals?

* Given we work really hard as educators to try and control the learning outcomes for students.  We’ve predetermined what it is that they need to learn, and how they go about learning it.  That’s a very teacher focused, or teacher centered point of view or perspective on a learning process. What can we do about that?

* How do you unleash students’ ability to determine for themselves what some of their learning outcomes need to be, and how they’re going to go about building their capacity and competency to reach some of those outcomes?

* What is the role of instructional coaches? How can they best help teachers make pedagogy and their teaching and learning, the focus of how they use technology?

* Why it is important to provide teachers with some time to sit and talk about and work out for themselves, what a vision actually means in their school, with their community, in their classroom, and how they can leverage their own prior learning to make this happen, and where some of the gaps are.

* The importance of having top-down predetermined professional learning, whether it’s for administrators, or for teachers.

* Why you should be trying to get away the role, where we’ve taken away all the power and all of the voice and agency, away from the learner.

Transcript for the show

So, what’s it like to lead change at what may be the most progressive school district in one of the most educationally progressive places in the World?

Hey, everyone, I’m Will Richardson, and that’s the question we’ll be discussing in this episode from season one of the 2017 Modern Learners Podcast, where we’re spanning the globe to find leaders who are setting a higher bar for relevant, sustainable change in their schools and classrooms.

Lawrence DeMaeyer is the principal of Modern Learning for the Peel School board outside of Toronto, Ontario.  A board that serves about a hundred and forty thousand students.

In our newest podcast, Will and Bruce discuss the new Change.School learning community, and they talk about the history of Modern Learners and how it's led to this new push to raise the bar on reimagining schools. It's a little bit of backstory, but it's a lot of how we got to the "How?"

Change.School has its genesis in the thousands of conversations that Will and Bruce have had with leaders from around the world who are guiding change projects in their schools. In fact, it's built on the idea that despite being really hard work, reimagination is possible, that the ingredients are clear, but that every school is on it's own unique path to change. Right now, building leadership capacity to do high-bar change in existing schools is where the most important work in education lies.

The notes for this episode are short because everything you really need to know can be found at change.school. Yes, .school is now an extension!

How often have you thought of your school community as a driver for change? And if you have, how do you manage that?

How can we establish better connections between what happens inside our schools and the everyday experiences of people in the wider community?

In this episode, Will Richardson talks with John Jungmann, who is the superintendent of the largest school district in Missouri which you might be surprised to hear is Springfield not Saint Louis.

John and his team are as good as you’re going to find in bringing in the community to what he calls the courageous conversations that we need to be having right now.  But also in getting his students out in the community in the businesses and organizations where they can learn in real life settings around the things they have a passion for.

Dr. Jungmann received his Doctor of Education from the University of Arkansas. Prior to being named superintendent at SPS, Dr. Jungmann was the superintendent of Liberty Public Schools and Monett Public Schools.

Highlights from their conversation include:

* How can we ensure we are providing the right environment and the right experiences that really shape our student’s path?  Are they ready for the next thing in life and are we contributing positively to that or negatively?

* How can we help them discover their voice and are they ready for the next step?

* How should we define student’s success, when its a moving target in our world today?

* What does it take to provide and engaging, relevant and personal experience for every learner everyday,

* How do you figure out what is relevant for kids today and how do you assess whether what is actually happening in the classroom is in fact relevant?

* How can we help our students discover any meaning in the things they are learning?  What should know about the lens of relevance?

* How can we extend the ways in which we want kids to engage with the world around them?

* The importance of getting students out of buildings and into the community.

* How you can re-design your curriculum from a focus on remediation to exploration.

* Details of a summer externship program where teachers engage in business and industry and environment which include ways that they are never exposed to as a teacher.  This results in teachers coming back and telling stories about how they can change their class room and how they won’t teach the same way next year.

* Details of capacity building that they’re doing with the aid of blended learning mentors; and how growing capacity requires teachers to be given room to breathe, and room to think differently.

* Why the five traditional measures that are on the traditional accreditation structure may not necessarily priorities for your school community.

* Why it’s important to instill a culture of risk taking and support iterative failure. How you can build that into your leadership culture as well as your instructional culture.

* Why not just every student every day are learners but also our teachers our leaders, our administrative team and our board must be learners

* What the focus should be with modern tool deployments

* What it takes to develop the confidence for kids to begin to make their own schedule.The value of defining the must do’s and they’ve got may do’s.

* The importance of shifting the focus with your community around the input side of education, and why when you do the inputs right, then the results take of themselves.

* What matters most. Beyond test scores. The value walking out of school wanting to be a learner.

* Defining the portrait of a graduate.

What’s required to build support for change in a diverse community? How do you tackle the big issues around change, when so many small ones are gathering momentum?

What does it take to ensure that the day-to-day distractions that every school leader has to address don’t distract you from maintaining a focus on long-term sustainable change?

In this episode of the Modern Learners Podcast, Will, talks with Rafranz Davis who is the Executive Director of Professional and Digital Learning for Lufkin ISD. She is also a highly regarded speaker at education and technology conferences across the U.S.

Rafranz’s passion for creativity and student centered learning has driven her work in supporting Lufkin’s transition to taking more innovative approaches to teaching and learning through integrated computational thinking, makerspaces and community driven personalized professional learning.

When Rafranz is not disrupting the status quo in East Texas, she can be found connecting with the global education community as an advocate for STEM education, teacher voice, digital equity and diversity in edtech.

Highlights from their conversation include:

* The steps to a more student-centered and self-directed learning environment.

* Just how much agency should students have? How can a leader find a balance between where they philosophically fall on that spectrum of possibilities, and where your school district realistically will fall. How might you resolve the gap?

* The importance of leadership knowing that you don't have to allow a state or a score to dictate who you are as a school, but rather you look at what learning can be, and that defines your identity.

* How important is it to have a vision for what change will look like in the end?

* What role should does passion and interest play?  In looking at teachers as learners, how does passion play a role in teachers as learners first of all?

* How important is it to share work, and to make that work transparent?

* What does it take to nurture a culture shift, so that’s about more transparency and more sharing?

* Setting priorities around the right tools. If teachers are using tools in the classroom that were completely outdated, and you don’t have wifi coverage, what can you do about that?

* What are some of the dispositions that leaders of change need to have?  What are the most important qualities that people who are devoted to or really passionate about change?  What do they need to have in their make up?

* The importance of being connected, and how that should be a priority at every level and across all staff. Reading books, doing research, participating in action research; the value in having to extend beyond what your domain is.

* How we keep diversity in the mix not just in terms of race and gender; to keep people that come from different point of views, different spaces at all times.

* Why being uncomfortable is a good thing.

* How do you think technology can amplify a change in practice?

* The importance of connecting and learning with and from people from other places, other cultures.  Why we should do more to encourage our classrooms to connect and learn from and learn with and not just connect to fix.

* Is technology for learning more of an opportunity or a challenge for schools?

* The urgent need for our students to understand that the world is bigger than the zip code they live in.

* Why it is so important that we see kids developing as learners as much if maybe not even more, as they’re developing being learned?

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@RafranzDavis

This week Will and Bruce dive into a deep conversation about literacy and confirmation bias. The conversation was triggered by the New Yorker article Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds by Elizabeth Kolbert.

What Should Schools Be Doing?

Will points out that he feels literacy is a moving target, and to some extent creators are preying on our ignorance. It is easy to get caught in the echo chamber which is now referred to as confirmation bias in research. Reading what we already believe to be true and reading support for that truth leads to people not asking deeper questions.  We need to be sure we have a fact checking mechanism, and more importantly, we must WANT to know what truth is.  This leads to the underlying question, "What should schools be doing about this?"

There is well documented diminishing of curiosity in schools at the very time that we needs learners to be most curious. We must stop conditioning our learners to wait for the answer. They must exhibit the curiosity to ask questions and have the wherewithal to figure it out. Bruce expands on an idea in the New Yorker article, and he admits that he has begun to examine his own ideas with the intention to see the weaknesses.  That is the biggest issue in regards to confirmation bias. We are unable to see weaknesses in our own arguments. In schools, we must start to emphasize curiosity and questioning of our own beliefs. We must consider to question the cost of compliance in regard to curiosity.

Both Bruce and Will highly recommend checking into the work of Mozilla and NCTE. Their work on media literacy is really good, and can serve as an excellent starting point.

Parents have confirmation bias too

Parents have traditionally known what their children are doing at school because they did the same thing when they were in school.  However, with the rapid change in the world and education, we must change the story being told. Not much has changed in school communication. School newsletters, emails that are straight to the point, open house or showcase events, parent teacher conferences all are the same as they have been.  Many of these communication channels lack any emotional connection.

The future of work and literacy is different, and our learners are entering a world vastly different than 10 years ago. Every communication a district has with families and the community tells the story of the school. To an extent, schools need marketing to craft the stories we want to tell. In telling the stories we want told, we have the opportunity to build capacity in the community to know what the acceptable narrative of learning is.

Marketing helps change the questions

CCSD59 is a district who gets this. They have a very detailed branding guide. One of the lines in the guide states that when they take pictures of students the photos never look down on them. To put so much detail in a document about the district brand tells a story in and of itself. Some may look at a document like this as showing off or arrogant or even a waste of school funds. But Will and Bruce argue the transparency is worth it's weight in gold. When a school provides that level of transparency, the community knows what questions to ask and they are more likely to support the changes being implemented...because they can see them.  Parents are looking for support from school leaders, and you can provide that through telling the story. It takes courage, but it's worth it.

What does it take for a vision to become a reality, when you are able to build a change culture across a school or District? Specifically, what does it take for that culture to reflect a move away from the teaching toward learning and away from consuming to making.  

In this episode Will talks with Pam Moran, Superintendent who is an outspoken advocate for change that goes beyond labels and technology.  

They discuss a wide range of topics including what a Twitter culture means, making yes to default answer and how to get kids to stop burning their learning once they graduate.  Pam’s challenging yet optimistic vision is inspiring others to re-imagine their schools and their districts and we’re sure you’ll be inspired as well.  

Dr Moran is Superintendent of Albemarle County Schools and was recently named Virginia’s Superintendent of the Year. Facing the challenges of a demographically complex community having extremes of wealth and poverty, Dr. Moran has provided bold leadership to improve significantly the performance of the economically disadvantaged students in her district of 13,600 students.

Dr. Moran is a leading advocate of an educational model that prepares students for “success in their century, not mine.”  She emphasizes the value of student-led research, project-based learning and contemporary learning spaces that promote collaboration, creativity, analytical problem-solving, critical thinking, and communications competencies among all students.  

Highlights from their conversation include:

How do you move culture away from the teaching toward learning, and away from consuming to making.  

How to get kids to stop burning their learning once they graduate?

What it takes to inspire other leaders to re-imagine their schools.

How a Twitter culture can be used to increase the impact of professional learning for teachers, and build transparency.

The importance of teachers having a real sense of efficacy across their careers, and how it supports change.

The role and value of critical friends in supporting innovation in classrooms.

What it means to put teachers in control of their own learning; to empower their ongoing and continuing development as part of their role.

The importance of focusing on culture in developing a readiness for change.

How District leadership can be model learners and support teachers to innovate, iterate and share insights around their practice.

How a culture of ‘Yes’, is essential to exploring new directions and powerful ideas.

How you nurture those different conversations in your district, which then evolve the vision and how kind of focus or how concrete is that process?

Why you can't manage any organization, corporation or public or private by visible numbers alone.  

The responsibility school and District leaders have to support their profession beyond their own physical boundaries.

Why learning at school only really means something if and when they graduate that students then go out and continue to love learning, to be curious learners, to want to continue, to evolve and develop themselves as learners

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@pammoran

Dr Pamela Moran

Roland Barth

World Maker Faire

Most Likely to Succeed

John Dewey

Personal learning

Will and Bruce talk deeply about one of the biggest buzz words in education: Personalized Learning. They riff on this article from Wired. Will is a long time advocate for personal learning and not personalized learning. You can read his blogs about it here and here. So, you might be wondering if there is really a difference between personalized and personal, and trust me, if you talk with Will enough, you will be convinced that there is definitely a difference.

According to Will, personal learning is a culture and a mindset. Personal learning means shifting the agency to the learner. Teachers will need to give up control.

As the conversation continues, the two discuss the amount of money people in schools are spending on technology tools that claim to personalize learning. Bruce points out that we align school with content delivery. Vendors sell neatly packaged content because they cannot sell pedagogy. No one considers how relevant that content will be in the modern world. Bruce also cautions that technology that boasts personalized learning trivializes the role of the teacher as a professional. The level of complexity necessary to create an environment where children can learn is significant. The technology tools pedaling personalized learning experiences cannot take those things into consideration. The conversation ends with Bruce encouraging teachers, parents, administrators, and even students to have more critical conversations about the need to think more deeply about  what the learning environment should be for their kids and it shouldn't just be about picking up the latest and greatest personalized learning application.

We'd love to know what you think about this. Please head over to our Facebook group and leave a comment.  Also, if you'd like to know more about 10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning, grab the white paper here.

Dr. Art Fessler on How Transparency Can Lead Change

What's one of the hardest moving targets for leaders to hit when it comes to change?

Why would you want to create a branding guide for your district?  Why is the common language so important when articulating what change means in your school?

In this episode Will Richardson talks with Dr Art Fessler, who’s the superintendent of the CCSD59 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, which is a district Will has visited on a number of occasions over the past few years to see first-hand their efforts to bring a highly traditional school into the modern world.  Out of all the schools he has visited, he believes no one is doing a better job of communicating what real change looks like to the community than this one.

Dr Fessler was appointed Superintendent for CCSD59 in 2013; prior to that he was Superintendent at Oak Lawn-Hometown District 123 for 3 years, following nearly 13 years in Principal and Assistant Superintendent positions.

Highlights from their conversation include:

* How do we prepare the kids to be successful for their lives?

* Is relevance as a moving target? The best strategies that you use to help people define that relevance target from where it is right now right

* The value of leaders modelling as learners.

* The importance of moving from a deficit model of learning to a strength-based model.

* What it takes to drive a new paradigm and ask teachers to step out of their comfort zone and start collaborating with others and sharing their great ideas.

* What are the secrets to breaking old habits? Teachers have a lifetime of experiences that are contrary to what we’re asking them to do. What can you do to help them see benefit in changing practice?

* The value of common language

* What is the biggest change between a classroom that articulates the District vision versus the traditional classroom?

* The benefit of asking what you want your kids to learn and then how does that learning connect to our vision of learning?

* How can we get your teachers to ask deep, powerful, meaningful questions? Is there still a role for recall?

* Exploring some examples of a different type of ‘flipped learning’. How can we ensure our kids actually learn how to be learners; that they're asking the questions?

* The value in teachers understanding how children learn, and what role devices can play in their learning.

* How do we get kids passionate about coming to school?

* The importance of student autonomy, and the benefit of granting student’s agency over their learning.

* Who should control content, when and why?

* What we can learn from understanding how students learn outside the classroom.

* The benefits of transparency. Examples of the resources that schools can use to better communicate across all sectors of their community.

* How transparency impacts on change.

* How vision, branding and change should connect to bring a community together.

* Why culture is so critical. In particular the importance of building culture in a time of significant change.

* The importance of the conversations that parents are having with their children about the changes in their schooling.

* The importance of understanding the modern learning landscape

* How to address the challenges of change, and where a leader’s first focus should be.

Links to Topics Mentioned in this Podcast

@afess7

CCDS59

Modern Learners Podcast

Welcome to the Modern Learners podcast. We are excited to be launching this podcast as a way of connecting with our community. We'll use this medium to give you a glimpse into the discussions we have at Modern Learners with each other and others in the education space doing interesting work.

We are always willing to continue the conversations inside our private Facebook group. Please join us there and let us know what you think...especially if you disagree. We want to create the conditions for learning, and dissonance and discourse is a definite path to learning.

Finally, if you haven't grabbed our most recent whitepaper, you should grab it. 10 Principles for Schools of Modern Learning will reiterate the need for change in schools and begin laying the foundation for deepening our understanding of how to change.