Learning to Change

Unpleasant Truth about Education #47: Kids learn more deeply in school when participating in extracurriculars than they do when being taught in classrooms.

That's one of the many provocative conclusions drawn by authors Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine in their book In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. It's a fascinating in-depth look at how learning happens at three very different schools in the U.S., and it's also a primer on what we can do to bring more authentic learning opportunities to students on a regular basis.

In this hour long podcast, we talk about what deep learning actually is, what some of the barriers are to making it happen within the traditional school structures and systems, how teachers and leaders can reframe their practice, and why it is that more powerful learning conditions are easier for some teachers to create than others.

Here's a quote from the book to whet your appetite:

In the spaces that teachers, students, and our own observations identified as the most compelling, students had opportunities to develop knowledge and skill (mastery), they came to see their core selves as vitally connected to what they were learning and doing (identity), and they had opportunities to enact their learning by producing something rather than simply receiving knowledge (creativity). Often these spaces or classrooms were governed by a logic of apprenticeship; students had opportunities to make things (newspapers, collections of poetry, documentary films, theater productions, debate performances) under the supervision of faculty and / or older students who would model the creative steps involved, provide examples of high-quality work, and offer precise feedback. Not coincidentally, the most successful teachers and extracurricular leaders whom we encountered had themselves been apprenticed into their fields in a similar way—and these experiences had helped them develop a stance about what they were doing that differed from the “teaching as transmission” view that was so prevalent (Kindle 6-7).

Enjoy!

For over 30 years, Gary Stager has been at the forefront of those arguing for a more constructionist approach to learning. In this podcast, he discusses the power and importance of letting students experience learning by doing in every interaction with school.

Gary has been greatly influenced by the work of Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert, and many others. His keynotes and presentations around the world continually push people's thinking about the ways in which children and adults learn most powerfully and deeply.

Don't forget to check out Gary's Constructing Modern Knowledge Summer Institute which will be held July 16-19 in Manchester, NH. Now in its 12th year, CMK is a unique, deep-dive into learning unlike any other featuring amazing speakers and thought-provoking ideas for classroom practice.

Gary's Blog

Constructing Modern Knowledge Press

Gary on Twitter

Watch the live webinar/podcast interview with Gary on Crowdcast

 

A lot of schools tout a "global curriculum," but not many can say that they have a truly global campus. But that's what "Avenues: The World School" is building. With physical campuses in New York City and Sao Paulo, a Shenzen, China opening this fall, schools developing in Miami, Silicon Valley, London, and Mumbai, and now an online campus for grades 6-12, Avenues may be the first school to truly span the world.

In this podcast, Tim Carr, Co-Head of the Avenues Online campus not only discusses the ambition of sharing a common experience of school across continents, but also about how to bring "transformative" change to traditional schools as well. As the former head of the Jakarta Intercultural School, Carr turned a highly successful traditional school into an even more successful progressive school.

Be sure to explore the Avenues World Elements (pictured here) as one example of what it means to have a clear roadmap for the outcomes that you want your students to achieve. Make sure to click on a few of the boxes to get a picture of what they've tried to do to build not only common language but also common practice.

Is it possible to create a different school experience? Given the chance to do things really differently in your school, what would you do?

That's the opportunity that Peter Wieczorek has as the director of Northwest Passage High School in Coon Rapids, MN, a public charter school that is pushing the envelope when it comes to carving our new ways of preparing students for the world today. They are creating a different school experience!

While a lot of schools are doing project-based learning, as you'll hear in this podcast Peter stresses that at Northwest Passage projects are chosen by students, based on their interests, and supported by a staff of educators that is adept at making sure students learn deeply and navigate all of the expectations of the state standards and assessments.

But what might be most out of the box for the school is that they offer students over 20 "expeditions" which are overnight excursions of up to two weeks into the real world. The emphasis is on building relationships between students and adults and create learning opportunities that simply can't happen inside the four walls of the school.

If you're looking for a story of school that is driven by student agency and autonomy, you'll enjoy this interview immensely. When you finish listening to this, please check out our podcast with Megan Power. She discusses Design39campus which is another public school doing great things.

What if diversity is NOT the goal? That's the question that our two guests dive into in this our 60th episode. Bruce and I chat with with Homa Tavangar and Eric Dozier who are collaborators at the Oneness Lab where they "seek to discover, learn and live models of cohesion and unity, toward building a better world." Together, Homa and Eric help schools and organizations "unlock mindsets that are truly global" in order to build our collective capacity to have the "social-emotional skills needed simultaneously for global citizenship and local engagement."

Homa is the author of Growing up Global: Raising Children to be at Home in the World. And Eric describes himself as "cultural activist, singer/songwriter, and educator leveraging the power of music to promote healing, justice and racial reconciliation."

Tune in to hear Homa and Eric's perspectives on the power of knowing history, learning how we build qualities of deep respect and relationships, the importance of reflection, and creating opportunities for shared community experiences. Our guests share insights and strategies into how school leaders, teachers, and parents can embrace the vital need to lead learning of global, cultural and racial competence.

In this episode, Bruce and I chat with with Stephanie Rogen, author of a great new book titled "Creating Schools That Thrive: A Blueprint for Strategy." Like the title implies, it's a roadmap for schools who are on a journey to create mission and vision driven change that's relevant for modern times.

Stephanie's work with schools around the world is deeply focused on the importance of common language, how to utilize design thinking in a change process, and how to build cultures that support innovation. She also talks at length about how our current narratives and structures about schools get in the way of change at all sorts of levels.

Stephanie is a consultant, coach and facilitator to educational and not for profit leadership. She has worked with a diverse range of nationally recognized schools and not for profits ranging from Columbia University to The White House Project. She also served as Educational Advisor to the 2015 Sundance Selected Documentary "Most Likely to Succeed."

Education is changing, and schools are still struggling to adapt. That's the key takeaway from this interview with Rich Halverson, co-author of Rethinking Education in an Age of Technology which just came out in its second edition. First published in 2009, Halverson's book is one on the most underlined and dog-eared of all of the books on my shelf, and after listening to this podcast, I think you'll have a pretty good sense of why.

In this podcast, we talk about the good and bad of personalized learning, the digital divide as it applies to learning opportunities, and the growing trend toward learner agency. We also discuss the what the future holds for those schools who are unable to figure out a path forward that incorporates a different vision for what education is and needs to be.

A former high school teacher and administrator, Rich is currently a full-time professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He's also a Fellow at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.

Given the opportunity to start a new community public school from scratch, what would you build? What process would you employ? And if you really wanted to create something really different, how would you convince parents that really different is not something their kids need but also something they should want?

Those questions and more are the core of this fascinating conversation with Megan Power, co-founder and designer of Design 39 Campus, a four-year old public K-8 school in the Poway, California Unified School District. As you'll hear, Design 39 is not a different school on the edges. It's different through and through. Megan focuses on the very intentional and deliberate process that she and her team used to bring the school into existence, and she talks at length about how to change the mindsets of both students and parents when it comes to what the classroom and school experience should look like.

Megan has been in education for 17 years, and spent the last year as a Campus Teacher Ambassador Fellow for the US Department of Education. She was recently selected as one of 20 to Watch by the National School Board Association with the purpose of identifying emerging leaders that will help shape the national education conversation for the next 20 years. She was also selected the 2009 Time Warner Cable National Teacher of the Year.

Links:

Design39 Campus

Show notes coming soon.

Why do so many students leave high school without the ability to write in compelling and interesting ways?

According to John Warner, author of a new book titled "Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities," it's because we're teaching them to write to a test, not to real life audiences. But that's only one of many problems with schools today, places in which well meaning and talented teachers are constrained by outdated expectations and a lack of appreciation, and where students are constrained by standardization, stress and much more.

Warner, who is also a columnist for the Chicago Tribune as well as a blogger for Inside Higher Education, suggests some wholesale changes in the priorities and commitments we keep in schools. Among them to grant more agency to both students and teachers to do meaningful work that matters, to get rid of the scourge of grades, and to generally reduce the amount of stress that today's high schoolers are feeling in their lives.

This 45-minute interview touches on a wide range of topics relevant to anyone seriously interested in rethinking the status quo of schools.

Resources Mentioned:

Why They Can't Write by John Warner

I Love Learning, I Hate School by Susan Blum

Modern Learners Podcast #44 with Susan Blum

Modern Learners Podcast #38 with David Gleason

The Testing Charade by Daniel Koretz