Chris Lehman, Principal of SLA – Keynote at PETE&C

Four biases …
1) School 2.0 is progressive education with 21st century tools (go back and re-read Dewey) … it is easier than we think … we finally have the tools to realize Dewey’s dream
2) Citizenry … not workforce – our job is not to co-create, with our students, the 21st century citizens. By doing that, we’ll get the workforce we need … and the activists, artists, parents, etc
3) Educators, parents, and students know more about school than politicians … but how do we regain that power we have ceded to others
4) Public Education is the cornerstone of the US democratic experience – without it, we don’t have a true democracy; RttT is about segmenting and fragmenting us by creating groups of winners & losers

The Great Big Question: How can we have so many passionate, dedicated educators in our schools and still have so many problems?
-overwhelming majority of teachers care passionately about children and work very hard, so why is there a problem?
-we must fix the system: put a good person into a bad system and the system will win every time

The world in which we live: the maddening paradox of education 2010
We graduate more students from high school in this era than we have ever before in our history (not just numbers but by %age) … and yet, we talk about our failing schools and “the good old days” (which weren’t actually so good)

Data Driven Decisions
-assumes that you use good data — but good data is not cheap or easy to collect
-the data we use to measure our students is the cheapest data available (the multiple choice scantron test)
-in fact we have great data on our students – it’s the work they do every day and we need to make that matter again

Accountability = External … Responsibility = Internal
-we have ceded control
-we live in an era of accountability
-we need to change the language because it trickles down
-if we want to own our schools and our kids, we must take responsibility ourselves – that will trump accountability

“Just a teacher” syndrome
-too often we resign to the idea that “I’m just a teacher”
-teachers have great influence
-don’t sit back and allow school to “happen” to students – fight for what we believe in

How? We organize …
-not in the unionization sense … unions cannot rest on the notion “we know what’s best for teachers” because that loses the higher ground to groups that say “we know what’s best for kids”
-teachers need to lead the way
-we should call politicians on the carpet, but we don’t
-if we don’t want to stop this happening to our schools, we must stop them

Education … not training
-today we are training students to follow directions or do a job that may or not exist
-in reality, the jobs aren’t there but it’s easier to blame schools than the lack of jobs
-if we want kids who can figure out what it’s going to look like, it’s not about teaching them to take a test, it’s about teaching them to think

A big problem … a lack of humility
-“I did everything I could, it’s not my fault the kids didn’t get it” … we have to admit that we fail: if a we fail a child, then we failed
-Politicians claim they know all there is to know – “we just have to do it” … nothing but hubris

A related problem … the discussion is a-historical
-it’s as if we never tried to fix schools before
-“schools need to be more like businesses” … we’ve done that – that’s why we follow the factory model
-we need to be better scholars of our own profession and know what came before us
-“why do we do it this way?” because we always have

“What the school system needs to understand is that its strength lies, not in the strength of the central organization, but in the strength of the individual school, not in making one school like another, but in making each school a distinct unit. The need of the system is the preservation of its units, so that each school can keep itself alive, wide awake, responsive to its people, easily adaptable, the best of its kind.” – Angelo Patri – A Schoolmaster of the Great City (written in 1917)

“What’s Good?” is a better question than “What’s New?”
-we chase the new …
-the best collaborative tool is the one we agree to use together

Tell a Better Story … We Must Have Vision
-we need a better way to talk about education

You Can’t Standardize
-how do you have differentiated instruction and standardized testing, standardized curriculum
-differentiated instruction, differentiated schools
-if differentiated instruction is good, then so are differentiated classrooms, differentiated assessments

We Learn Best When It Matters To Us
-“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.” – John Cleese
-MIT media lab – lifelong kindergarten
-“All children are artists but we beat that out of them in school.” – Pablo Picasso

Things are Different … How Do We Deal With That?
-kids are learning differently … in too many schools, we ask kids to divorce themselves 7-1/2 hours a day from the way they live their lives
-it’s as if we deny them the oxygen they breathe …
-however, if discipline is your first priority, you’ll never get to your second
-rather than ban cell phones, let’s teach kids to use them well, use them intelligently

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” – Alvin Toffler
-What do we have to unlearn in our schools?
-As teachers … what are we willing to unlearn and relearn? What practices are outdated?

“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” -John Dewey

So what do we do? Ideas are easy … implementation is hard …

Have a vision and build everything around that vision
-bring people together, build consensus
-what do we believe? how does our school reflect that?
-refer to Coalition of Essential Schools 10 core values; Christian Long Learning Manifesto

What do you want for SLA kids?
-thoughtful (meaning, full of thought)
-wise
-passionate
-kind

… if they are, they will be able to figure the rest out

Caring Institutions
-we teach kids, not subjects
-for a mission statement to matter, you must be able to point to systemic processes that do it
-change your language: stop saying “I teach science” … say “I teach kids science”

Advisory Program
-every adult has a group for 4 years of HS … 20 students
-powerful for students – they always have an advocate
-powerful for parents – they always have a point of contact
-powerful for teachers – they hold each other accountable

Inquiry Driven
-what are the questions we can ask together?
-true inquiry … the one question we never know the answer to: “What do you think?”

Student Centered
-it’s not about us, it’s about them
-cannot say “I taught it, they didn’t learn it”

Teacher Mentored
-kids need adults, especially in this changing world
-teachers that kids see every day can be the most important adults in their lives

Community-Based
-we can learn from many
-schools are not babysitters
-schools cannot be black boxes
-technology can help – you don’t need to be IN the school to be part of the school

Collaborative
-synthesis works: my idea is better when it intersects with yours and is made better by it

Passionate
-school has to matter
-dare kids to do work that matters – when you do, they will do it well

Integrated
-the day has to make sense
-we ask kids to shift gears too rapidly (especially in a 42-minute period day); then we’re surprised when they don’t remember what happened in 1st period
-integrate the subjects thematically so that they all make more sense

Meta-cognitive
-we need to think more about thinking
-won’t remember details, but will remember how to think, learn

Authentic
-assessment as real and transparent
-the best assessment is of the work the students do

Understanding Driven & Project Based Classrooms
-how we organize the learning
-traditional classrooms are recall-based: at the end of a unit when you really want to know what the kids have learned, what assessment do you give? If it’s a test, then the project is the assessment (otherwise you do assessment-based learning with projects along the way)
-projects have to be about REAL work – challenging, rigorous, and authentic
-if you really want to know if kids have learned something, make them do it, apply it, transfer it

What do we gain in this model?
-authenticity, engagement, learning

What do we lose?
-the illusion that we can measure everything a child has learned
-the idea that we can have it all look the same
-the idea that this is easy … because this is hard?

Technology Must Be Like Oxygen
-ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible
-part of what we do all the time
-we have to stop talking about it so much
-it’s not about a “blog project” … the ideas must come first

Relevance
-why do we take away cell phones, ipods?
-what are the kids doing wrong?
-paraphrasing Neil Postman: certain technologies are not additive, they are transformative (i.e. the printing press)
-we have schools + computers … but what we really need is brand new schools
-we have to give kids access to the tools but then we have to change our pedagogy

Transparent
-we can invite the world to our schools
-use moodle to create a walled garden; use droople when you want to publish

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TEACHER IN THE AGE OF GOOGLE??????
-we have to be willing to transform our role as teachers
-we still have one last thing to teach our kids and it’s the most important: wisdom