Learning to Change

We're in our second week of exploring power and power relationships in schools which is a topic that I don't think we reflect on nearly enough in schools. (Here's the first "power" podcast with Rob Fried.) There's an inherent tension when it comes to learning and power, namely how much power do you as a learner have in any learning interaction to choose not just what you learn but how and where and when. And one of the things that casts such a long shadow over this conversation is the fact that going to school is compulsory. Learners have no or very little choice but to attend a school which then decides almost everything about the what, where and when of learning. So right from the start, we take agency away from kids, and we rarely seem to think about the implications of that.

Someone who has been thinking about that for quite some time is my guest on this week's podcast. Sylvia Martinez is the co-author of what I think may be one of the best books on learning and schools in the last five years, Invent to Learn which has come to be known as "the bible of the maker movement." She's an advisor to the Stanford University FabLearn Fellows, and she has a long history in leading educational non-profits and in product design and development in educational games. And, she was one of the early designers of the software for that GPS navigational system that gets all of us to where we want to go in today's world.

All that aside, what I love about Sylvia is her genuine passion for creating environments in schools where teachers and students can explore learning on their own terms, and in this podcast, we talk about that as well as the dynamics of power in classrooms, the cultural movements that lead to change in schools, and the complexities around the idea of empowerment in the various hierarchies of schools. It's an important, and on many levels fascinating conversation.

As always, if you enjoy the conversation, why not head over to iTunes and give us a review and a rating? And tell your friends about our podcast as well. Thanks for listening everyone!

For more resources and links about this podcast, check out the "Podcasts" topic in the Modern Learners Community.

So it's a new month, and that means a new theme for our conversations, and it's a theme I've been looking forward to diving into, namely "power" and the ways in which power relationships basically define the schools we're in. Power is not something we often talk explicitly about in schools. It's a complex dynamic that is a part of almost everything we do, and it has a huge impact on any efforts we are making to change the experience of school for kids. And we are thinking about it...I mean how many times have you heard people talking about "empowering" students or teachers, which ironically is something we wouldn't need to do if we didn't disempower them in the first place.

And the way power works in the world is changing as well. As individuals gain more and more ability and agency to create and share ideas and make connections, they are finding ways to influence what happens in the world in good and bad ways, right? I don't know if you saw a recent study from Common Sense Media that found 54% of teens get news from social media, and “Of those teens, six in 10 say they are more likely to get it from celebrities, influencers, and personalities rather than from news organizations utilizing the platform.”

And that's just one example.

So, this month, the idea is to peel back some of the layers of power and look at what really happens in the interactions we have in schools, and to start that conversation, I got a chance to talk to Rob Fried, the author of several books, most notably The Game of School: Why We All Play It, How it Hurts Kids, and What It Will Take to Change It. And, importantly for me at least, Rob was the editor of The Skeptical Visionary: A Seymour Sarason Educational Reader. Those of you that hang around here for even a short while know that Sarason is one of my biggest influences and that his view of the world and particularly of power in schools is foundational to our work at Modern Learners.

In this conversation with Rob, we talk about how teachers and students can work with existing power dynamics, the difficulties of change because of power, and how we can recover our personal sense of power that schools in many ways take away.

As always, if you enjoy the conversation, why not head over to iTunes and give us a review and a rating? And tell your friends about our podcast as well. Thanks for listening everyone!

This is the fourth and final episode in our exploration of the theme community this month, and I want to say from the start, that this conversation you're about to hear on equity, community, and culture has been one that I've been struggling with recently.

There are many challenges and tensions that we face in schools and education today, but none may be more complex than the one surrounding equity in terms of race and gender. There's no question that white male privilege is finally being challenged in many healthy ways, and around the world I think what we're seeing is perhaps the last gasp for white males attempting to maintain power over the narrative of society. That's long overdue, but we have a very long way to go.

"I Don't Know What to Do"

For me personally, that struggle hit home about a month ago at a workshop I attended in Pittsburgh put on by Education Reimagined, a non-profit group out of Washington, DC. It was, in a word, transformative for me. As we were discussing ways that we could bring the idea of learner-centered education to schools as a way of changing the experience of school for the better for all kids, a number of people of color in attendance gave impassioned reflections on what it was like to live in a culture and a society that is still dominated by primarily white narratives. They argued with great emotion and frankness that these issues of equity reached well beyond schools and classrooms, and that there was still little widespread understanding of the injustices and fears that People of Color still carry with them today. It left me deeply moved, and to some extent speechless. I was almost happy when the white education secretary of a Central US state stood up at the end and said, "I don't know what to do" because she took the words out of my mouth.

Since that weekend, I've been reflecting deeply on my own biases, on the societal narratives that re so rooted in white history, and on what I can do to not be complicit in perpetuating them. I know I'm at the start of a journey, one that for me begins with reading the book White Fragility, and also begins with bringing more voices of people of color and sexual orientation into my networks and my interactions.

Creating Cultures of Community

Which leads me to today's interview with Tricia Ebarvia. Tricia is in her 19th year teaching high school English, and she’s the department chairperson at Conestoga High School in Berwyn, PA, located outside Philadelphia. She was a Heinemann Fellow from 2016-2018, where she wrote regularly about creating an inclusive literacy classroom, and she's developed into a leading voice around anti-bias, anti-racist pedagogy. She co-founded the #DisruptTexts conversation on Twitter and elsewhere, and she's the co-director of the Pennsylvania Writing and Literature Project.

Tricia and I talk about the difficulties of creating cultures of community, the many biases that educators bring to their work, and some ways in which we can begin to build more understanding of equity, race, and gender issues into our personal lives and into our classrooms. I learned a lot from our conversation and I hope you will as well.

Don't forget, if you like what you hear today, please head on over to iTunes and give us some love via a review and rating, and I hope that you'll continue the conversation around story with us in our modernlearners community.

So in case you may be new to the pod, each month we take on a different theme from four different angles, and this week, we're looking at our theme of community through our third lens, that of classroom practice. As in what would the classroom look like if the community itself was the curriculum?

That's a question that this week's guest Dave Cormier has been grappling with for over a decade. His work around "rhizomatic learning" has generated a ton of new thinking about what classrooms might be in the modern world. In this model, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.

That idea fits pretty neatly into the self-determined learning world of the Internet where we can choose our teachers, our information sources, and our experiences in profound new ways. But it's not as neat of a fit into traditional classroom systems, structures and, of course, curriculum.

In this episode, Dave and I talk about what a "rhizomatic" learning environment is like, the importance of language in change, the difference between complicated and complex, and the struggle to shift students away from being experts as students to, instead, be experts as learners. I'm sure it will tweak your thinking in good ways.

Fall Professional Learning

Don't forget to check out our two big professional learning opportunities coming this fall for those of you who are wanting to continue pushing your thinking and expand your global PLC in the process. Our 9th Cohort of Change School starts on September 30th, and at this moment we have a few seats left. It's an 8-week intensive dive into how the world is changing, the ways in which schools are already changing, and how you can lead a long-term, sustainable change initiative in your school or in your community.

And also check out the five Modern Learners Labs that we have on the calendar for October through January. My friends Gary Stager and Homa Tavangar and I will be in five different cities up and down the east coast doing these 2-day events that will exhaust and inspire you in very good way. Get all the details at on our Labs page.

And finally, as always, at the end of my conversation with Dave, I'll be back with three things that you can do right now to move your schools and classrooms to a deeper sense of community. Don't forget, if you like what you hear today, please head on over to iTunes and give us some love via a review and rating, and I hope that you'll continue the conversation around story with us in our modernlearners community. Cheers everyone...thanks so much for listening.

Welcome to our second podcast on the theme of "community." While the web has been around for about 25 years now, learning on the Internet really started way before the web was even in development. For those of us old enough to remember the days of computer modems and online bulletin boards, if you had the time and the money, you could connect to people around the world and learn all sorts of things through online communities that relied solely on text...as in no audio, video...not even any pictures unless you were able to draw them with the keys on you keyboard.

Back in those days, the Internet was a new frontier for connecting and learning, and there from almost the beginning was Howard Rhiengold, who I'm happy to say is my guest in this week's podcast, our second around the theme of community. Howard was one of the very early users on The Well, what many regard as the first real virtual community on the Internet. As you'll hear in this conversation, even on slow modems and expensive connections, many of the qualities and experiences that define community in our lives were present in those spaces. And what makes Howard's perspective so important is that he was the first to think deeply about the potentials and downsides of these connections. His first book titled "The Virtual Community," is a chronicle of those first interactions and questions for groups online. And I so appreciate the sense of perspective and history that this conversation brings to our current understanding of community.

For more links and resources associated with this podcast, check out the podcast topic in our Modern Learners Community. And don't forget to check out our previous podcast on the theme of community with Peter Block.

Next week, I'll be interviewing educator Dave Cormier on his suggestion that the community become the curriculum. See you then!

It's a new month as we turn into September 2019 and that means a new theme for our podcasts and for our conversations in MLC, our Modern Learners Community. Podcastwise, I'm a little sad that our dive into the theme of Story in August is over. What I've learned is that we tell stories in schools in more ways that we realize, and that the narratives that we create have a huge influence on how kids and teachers experience school on a daily basis. I really hope you enjoyed that series.

But now we're moving on to our next theme, "Community." It's another one of those words that we use often but don't fully define when it comes to our systems and practice. And At a moment in the world when so many things seem to be moving apart, we want to take a look at how we might work to bring things together, to create closer bonds, especially of course in the context of schools. In other words, what does learning within community look like, and what practical steps can we take to make community, rather than individuals, the operating system of schools.

Just a reminder, we do have some structure to this. As we do each month, we'll use the four parts of our Modern Learners Lens to guide our podcast conversations. This week, we'll focus on how community is built on our beliefs. Next week, we'll ask how our ideas about community are changing given the modern contexts we live in. Our third framing will be around classroom practice; what happens when the community becomes the curriculum? And finally, we'll explore how cultures in schools change when community is placed at the center.

I can't tell you how excited I am to kick off this series with the person who wrote the book on community, literally, Peter Block. Through his company Designed Learning, Peter has worked with thousands of people to use the community-building skills he writes about. And let me just say that his book "The Answer to How? is Yes" should be on every school leaders list who is looking to engage in meaningful conversations around change.

In this episode, Peter and I discuss the definition of community, the ways in which schools are focused on competition and individualism, and how to build a different narrative for what learning looks like in schools. Be prepared to be challenged and inspired all at once.

Hope you enjoy it, and don't forget, if you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and give us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app.

Real fast, inside of MLC+ this month, we are discussing Peter's book. Join us!

 

This is the fourth and final podcast in our series on the theme of "story," and I hope you've enjoyed listening to them as much as I've enjoyed recording them. As many of my guests have expressed, we are in between stories in education, and this is both a challenging and exciting time for us as we grapple with the barriers to change but also dream about the possibilities of what we might create together.

One aspect of the current story of schools that is especially important today revolves around our individual differences in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation and everything else that makes us unique. It's important not only in the sense of how our school cultures embrace or reject our differences but, more significantly, how we build the capacity of teachers and students to talk about and embrace these differences. At a moment where research shows our public schools are more segregated and separate than ever, it may be the most important story that we need to revise.

To that end, by guests today are Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi, the authors of an amazing new book titled "Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing our Stories of Race, Culture and Identity." It's a powerful anthology of individual stories that they collected during a year-long "gap year" trip across all 50 states that started right after their graduation from high school. They interviewed over 500 people asking them simply "Tell Me Who You Are." Let me just say, the stories are powerful.

In this podcast we talk about their journey, about how race and difference plays out in schools across the country, and what we can do to bring these conversations more fully into the classroom. If you're like me, you'll be struck by the honesty of teachers who freely admitted a weakness around how to create and facilitate cultures of understanding and acceptance in their classrooms and schools. Winona, now a sophomore at Harvard, and Priya, currently a sophomore at Princeton, are making it their life's work to help with that.

Show Notes, Links, and More

For more on this podcast, head on over to our Modern Learners Community where not only can you get a list of links and show notes, but also where you can join 1,300 other educators who are having powerful conversations and taking part in all sorts of professional learning activities that will build your capacity to change your practice and the experience of school for your students.

And finally, if this topic is of interest, check our our podcast from earlier this year with Homa Tavangar and Eric Dozier from the Oneness Lab.

Thanks for listening everyone!

If you listened two our previous two podcasts on the topic of "story" I think you'll agree that we educators are at an interesting spot when it comes to the way we think and talk about education and schooling moving forward. The old story that you have to be somewhere at a particular time with a particular teacher with a particular group of kids who are your same age from your same neighborhood to learn a particular curriculum at the same pace and be assessed the same way is breaking, not only because it makes little sense in a learning context, but because the world doesn't operate that way any longer. The question is, what do we as educators do to create a new story, a new way of thinking about what the experience of school looks and feels like for this latest generation of kids?

Few educational leaders are better positioned to answer that question than Mary Anne Moran and John Clements, co-principals of Nipmuc High School in Upton, Mass. Over the last three years, they have led a powerful process to create a coherent story of learning for their students that is increasingly different from the one most schools are telling. John and Mary Anne are alums of our Change School program, but more impressively they were named 2017 state principal and 2016 assistant principal of the year respectively. And their high-energy, inclusive approach to generating important and powerful conversations around learning in their school community are unparalleled in my experience.

As you'll hear in this conversation, while every school story and journey is unique, there are a number of important starting points that all leaders can take right away to begin the process of creating and telling a new story of learning.

And hey - we know you'll learn a lot from listening to John and Mary Anne in this episode, but if you're looking for a deeper learning experience, why not enroll in the course they've designed, which is available NOW:

Launching Modern Learning: First Year Strategies for Change

Creating an aspirational vision for school is exciting and inspiring work; however, it can be difficult to know where to begin in the journey to reimagine school.

You need support in your effort to redesign your school as well as actionable strategies that can be borrowed, adapted, and put into place. Our Launching Modern Learning course is designed to help you go from ideas to action.

Learn firsthand from John and Mary Anne through the engaging modules they've designed for you. There's much to read, see, and do in this course. The course content will challenge your thinking, inspire you, and leave you with practical takeaways you can implement immediately. It's the perfect learning opportunity for school teams, too!

No matter your "first" - first time in a new leadership position, first year launching a change initiative, or in your first steps of reimagining the school experience for your students, this course is for YOU.

Enjoy the podcast everyone, and if you like what you hear, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts!

All this month in the community we're talking about the theme of story, how the story of school and education is changing, and what we need to do to help create a new story for teaching and learning moving forward. And so along those lines, in this week's podcast I interview long time blogger, author, and futurist Bryan Alexander to help provide some larger contexts for how life stories are changing in general and how we educators might help our students navigate the next 20 or 30 years of transition.

I first met Bryan about 15 years ago at Middlebury College, and since then he's been one of my most respected resources for tracking how the world is changing and what those changes mean for education. Bryan is currently a senior scholar at Georgetown University and teaches graduate seminars in their Learning, Design, and Technology program. He recently finished Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education for Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming fall 2019).

As you heard in that opening snip and as you'll hear throughout this conversation, we are in and are heading into some challenging times on a lot of levels. But despite the obvious headwinds, what I appreciated more than anything about this conversation is Bryan's unyielding faith in "Generation Z", that group of late teen and early twenty somethings in which he and I both have two children. Our question now is how do we prepare them to flourish in this moment, and how do we prepare the next generation of students that are coming after them.

Don't forget, at the end of the podcast I offer up three things that you can do right now to get your brain and your practice more deeply wrapped around the ideas that Bryan discusses in this podcast. And for more resources related to this episode, head on over to the Modern Learners Community and click on the "Podcast" topic.

Each month our Modern Learners Community (MLC) , we take on specific theme, and in August, our theme is "story." As in what is the current story of learning we are telling in our schools, how is that story changing, and what might the new story be?

And so to kick things off this month, in this podcast I interview Stephanie Pace Marshall, whose life's work has been centered around the transformation of learning and schooling. She is the founding president of the National Consortium for Secondary STEM Schools, and a past president of ASCD, and most relevant to our conversation today, her book The Power to Transform: Leadership that Brings Learning and Schooling to Life, is all about her work to name a new story, create a new map, and design a new landscape for life-affirming learning and schooling.

If you've been following our work at Modern Learners, you know that we talk a lot about being "in-between stories" as in the traditional story of education is breaking down but we've yet to really get clear on what the new narrative is. What I found so interesting about this conversation is Stephanie's perspective on how the story we've been telling got started, and why it's seems to be shifting so dramatically right now.

As I wrote in our latest blog post, we choose the stories we tell about learning and schooling. We're not required to promote an old and dying narrative just because others want or expect us to. And to that end, the story that Stephanie tells at the end of our talk speaks to the power we have to create new narratives if we choose to do so.

Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

For more resources and links from this conversation, just click on the "podcast" topic in our MLC.