What's Become Clear

When we talk about school change there is always a discussion about preparing students for college. There is no doubt that in the 21st century those people who are the most successful tend to be those with the highest level of education. But not all college degrees are highly correlated with being successful in the 21st century.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and in fact later this week I’m going to be visiting with my friend Dr. Jackie Vietti, at Butler Community College to help me make sense of the whole question of college ready. You see, I can give you a whole pile of evidence that we are doing poorly when it comes to preparing kids for college, and that even many of those who make it through college, don’t get jobs that are high paying enough to pay off their college loans. So I am suffering from cognitive dissonance on this issue.

So I’ll tell you what I think I believe up to this point. I’m looking at college degrees from two perspectives. One, is the degree in high demand in society today; and two, is it a high skill degree? I’m still compiling a list of college degrees that I believe are high demand and high skill degrees. In this category I would put engineering degrees, many health science related degrees such as nursing, and some IT degrees. But I also put many two year technical degree, and even some industry certification programs. I’m sure there are others, so if you have some examples send them to me.

So that begs the question, are there some high skill low demand degrees? I think that some degrees in the sciences may fit this category; physics, biology, and chemistry. But I’m not completely sure of this.

And as I was thinking further about these categories I started to wonder if there are high demand and low skill degrees. I think there used to be, but I don’t think there are anymore. I think that liberal arts degrees used to be high demand and low skill. I think now liberal arts degrees are low skill and low demand.

when I graduated from college almost 40 years ago a liberal arts degree, like all college degrees, was the ticket to a good job. Today, that just isn’t true. Graduates with liberal arts degrees are perfectly prepared to go on to graduate school, but the jobs available for most of these degrees are for the most part low skill and sadly, low pay.

And therein lies one of our big problems. All of our K-12 core curriculum, and all of our gen ed courses in post secondary institutions are liberal arts courses. Which means we are spending huge amounts of our time, our most precious educational resource, preparing kids in low skill low demand areas, which the students see as boring and irrelevant. Perhaps it’s time as we talk about school change to begin to deal with the sacred cow of education … the liberal arts degree. – Steve Wyckoff

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I’ve been watching Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking. Fascinating stuff. But it got me to thinking how boring all of my science classes were. So I tried to reflect on why they were so boring and these programs are so interesting. And then it hit me, these programs are a story, my science classes were a string of endless, meaningless, many times incomprehensible, facts.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not promoting students listening to stories over actually learning by doing. But If we are going to continue in the traditional “chalk and talk” educational model, at least do it in a story that’s interesting. Will the stories be more engaging? Probably a little, but they will be much more entertaining. And I guess barring actual engagement at least entertaining is more tolerable for our kids.

Not the school change I would ask for, or hope for, but at least less boring. – Steve Wyckoff

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There is a growing conversation about the need for national standards. But do we need national standards? And what if they pick the wrong standards? I just finished Howard Gardner’s new book, Five Minds For The Future, and as always Dr. Gardner did a wonderful job. But, everything Dr. Gardner talked about, in terms of preparing high school kids, was aimed at preparing them for college. And the vast majority of our kids will not attend a four-year college and complete a degree.

In fact, only about 25% of our population ever finishes a bachelors degree. And, as I’ve stated before, more than 75% of our population will engage in work as adults that does not require a college degree. Less than a third of recent graduates at the University of Kansas obtained employment that required the degree they earned while at the University of Kansas.

So when we talk about national standards I can guarantee you that they will be designed to prepare every student to be admitted to a four-year liberal arts college. That’s problem number one. Problem number two is our students, in the 21st century, see those standards as boring and irrelevant.

Ask anyone, “If you ask high school kids to describe school in one word, what word would they choose?” The answer is almost universal, boring.

But we continue down this path as if establishing national standards that everyone has to follow will magically transform our students into highly engaged, well-educated, productive 21st-century citizens. It’s not going to happen.

We should be running 50 different experiments, one in each state, to see how best to prepare our students for the 21st century. How much evidence do we have to compile that centrally controlled bureaucracies are inefficient and ineffective before we unshackle schools to do its best for kids? -  Steve Wyckoff

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Compliance or engagement, which is most important? I am often concerned when educators talk about engagement that they are actually talking about compliance. Let me give you an example. I’ve seen several surveys that purport to measure engagement but when you look at what they measure they talk about students who get to class on time, students who turn in their homework, students who don’t miss school, and students to do their homework. To me those are all issues of compliance, students are doing what they’re told, when they are told, and how they are told.

Engagement on the other hand is much more about students that are so involved in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. So involved that they spend evenings and weekends working on schoolwork, not because they’re required to but because they want to.

But the most important issue around compliance and engagement is how well our students being prepared for their future. Students who are compliant are being perfectly prepared for algorithmic jobs. Those are the jobs that have established processes and procedures that lead to a defined correct outcome. That’s exactly what we prepare kids for in schools. Look at standardized tests, we want students to know exactly the right steps to come up with exactly the right answer. Algorithmic.

On the other hand, those jobs that don’t have established processes and procedures that don’t lead to one correct outcome make up about 70% of the new jobs being created in America. Yet in most schools little or no time  is spent with students in preparation for this heuristic types of work. Again, if you look at standardized tests they in no way reflect heuristic thinking.

So which is important compliance or engagement? Obviously the answer is engagement. Yet it’s not what we’re doing in schools. If we are going to prepare students for the 21st century  it’s important that they become self-directed, and problem solvers. And I don’t mean problems that have a well-defined process with one correct answer. For our students, having an educational system that is algorithmic by nature is boring and irrelevant. One of the keys to school change will be to quit focusing on standardized tests and instead preparing our kids for their future. That will mean making the educational experience heuristics in nature, not algorithmic. – Steve Wyckoff

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If  you ask high school kids to describe school in one word, what word would they choose? I’ve asked this question for years, I’ve had four answers, worthless, prison, sucks, and

BORING

I do get the occasional answer that varies from these four, for instance I had a professor from a College of education tell me that he was positive most kids would answer with words like, invigorating, interesting, and stimulating. I suspected he may have been abusing drugs.

Phil Schlecty says that we get kids who are engaged in one of four ways:

Authentically engaged: these are the kids that are so engaged in what they’re doing that they lose track of time. They look up and the bell is ringing, and they didn’t even know that the end of the period was at hand. These are the kids that Csikszentmihalyi would say or in “flow.” This is the state of engagement that we should try to achieve as often as possible, but rarely see especially in our core curricula.

Ritualistically engaged: these are the kids that say, “Don’t tell me what I  need to learn, tell me what I’ve got to do to get an A.” These are the teacher pleasers. They’ve learned how to play the game of school. Sadly when we talk about students being engaged, we mean ritualistically engaged. These are the kids that turn their homework everyday, show up to class every day and on time, smile at like they care, and do what they’re told.

Passive compliant:  these are the kids that say, “Don’t tell me what I need to learn, tell me what I’ve got to do to get by.” These are the students that the teacher has the unwritten agreement with, if they don’t bother the teacher, the teacher won’t bother them. Sadly these kids float through school making passing grades, just barely, never being authentically engaged, and never understanding the joy of being in a state of flow.

Rebellious: these are the kids that just don’t tolerate the system and let us know about it. Their needs aren’t being met but they refuse to sit by passively as victims of the system. They rebel in different ways, some angrily, some through passive aggressiveness, and some who just quit coming, either literally or intellectually.

I think the Phil Schlecty has one of my most often quoted statements. Phil Says

” A teacher’s job is not to teach kids. A teachers job is to create meaningful engaging work whereby the kids learn the things we want them to learn.” -  Phil Schlecty

I think he’s right on target. If we give kids work that is meaningful and engaging to them, and it teaches them the things that we want them to learn, we will have made great strides toward improving our schools. Our goal should be to constantly increase the level of authentic engagement on the part of every student in the system. – Steve Wyckoff

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Every school district has a mission statement, they’re all pretty much the same. In some way they all talk about preparing students to be productive members of society. But in spite of the fact that society has changed dramatically not just over the last hundred years but in the last 15 years, schools are doing pretty much the same things they’ve done for my entire life, and that’s a long time.

I think that the three most important things that schools try to accomplish, from their perspective, are:

1. Custodial care … make sure that we provide a place for every child to be in a safe secure environment.

2. Raise standardized test scores …  the growing emphasis on standardized test scores has almost every school obsessively focused on raising their standardized test scores.

3. Cover the content required by the Board of Regents for students to get into a four-year colleges … I’ve written many times about the core curriculum but as obsessive as we are about standardized test scores, we are even more obsessed with covering the content mandated by the Board of Regents, and in a manner mandated by the Board of Regents.

I’ve been spending time trying to make sense of this and thinking about what I believe the mission of schools should be. In fact I agree for the most part with the mission statements that schools have. The reality is they rarely have their systems aligned with accomplishing their mission. With that in mind three things that I believe are the most important for schools to try to accomplish are:

1. Custodial care … yes, it’s the same number one is traditional schools but I do think it’s important. I think it may look a lot different in that a safe and secure environment is necessary, but may not occur within the walls of the school.

2. A love for learning … okay, so I stole this one from W. Edwards Deming. Deming is one of the great thinkers of our time and he said if schools did nothing but send every student out into the world loving to learn that most of our issues could be dealt with more effectively. I agree completely. Our students come to school not even intending to learn, let alone developing a love for learning. They most often described high school as boring and irrelevant.

3. Self-directed … I believe that if kids love learning and are self-directed in their learning, whatever they need to learn to do to be successful, they will learn. In addition on top of learning they will learn how to do something with what they’ve learned. I would observe that over all the years that I’ve been involved with hiring and watching new employees integrate into the organization, the single greatest characteristic that they can have in the workplace is to be self-directed.

Tell me what you think I’d love to know your opinion. And to be honest my three most important areas of accomplishment are not written in stone, so I could be persuaded of others.

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I love technology. I’m a gadget guy. I use technology to learn. when I want to learn something new I google it, I look it up in Wikipedia, and I try to watch it on YouTube. And I always try to figure out what is the best tool to accomplish the work I’m doing, and to improve my productivity.

So what does that have to do with kids in school? I have the opportunity to interact with lots of educational technologists. And I’m always kind of disturbed by the discussions that occur between educators and the instructional technologists. It appears to me that the goal of educational technology is to make the things we have been doing in school for the last 115 years tolerable for the kids.

So why the title of this blog? It is my belief that we should be using technology with every single student in a manner that is much more congruent with how technology is used in the real world. What I see in schools is technology being used as a method to increase the engagement of our students in curriculum that they consider to be boring and irrelevant. As if somehow using technology will entertain the students enough that they’ll ignore their emotions, or lack of emotions, they have about the curriculum we make them cover.

Of course this isn’t a technology problem, it’s an education problem. It’s just that I’m bothered when I see technology used as a strategy to deal with a symptom rather than the systemic problems that are causing it.

Consider this, if we had kids using technology like it’s used in the real world, we would have to give them real world problems, or at least simulations of real world problems. That in turn would require us to integrate our curriculum, and tear down the silos between content areas. That in turn would mean that instead of covering a list of standards and benchmarks we would cover the things that are inherent in real-world problems.

The problem with that? Well obviously our kids wouldn’t be prepared for college after such an experience. But on the other hand, they would be much better prepared for the real world. Perhaps, we should have a discussion with postsecondary education, specifically the four-year colleges, about changing their requirements and their curriculum! And perhaps then we could change the core curriculum in our schools to meet the needs of our students rather than the needs of colleges.

I know this is a novel thought, and for some heresy, but perhaps colleges should look at how well they are preparing their students for the real world. Just a thought.

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Over the last month I’ve had the opportunity to visit with several friends and colleagues. It’s always great to catch up with people, especially those in your profession, that you don’t get to have a conversation with very often. These conversations were eerily familiar. But before I tell you about the conversations I need to tell you about the people.

Each of these individuals is highly successful in their particular niche in education. Each of them is positive, hard-working, and highly respected by their peers. They include nationally prominent speakers, directors of highly successful alternative programs, policy makers, instructional technologists, and school administrators. If you would observe them functioning in a professional setting you would applaud their efforts and results. You would also see that other educators look to them for leadership.

Each of the conversations was similar in that each had just finished a lively and positive professional conversation. But when we sat down to talk each began with a similar, rhetorical question. “Steve, what’s going to happen to education?” The conversations that followed included discussions about the insane focus on standardized tests, memorization and not learning, bored to tears students who are measured by compliance not engagement, the lack of innovation and creativity in education, etc.

These conversations were not out of the ordinary for me. Whenever I’m in a group as a presenter or participant, I always try to have one-on-one conversations where I can really get people to tell me their deepest feelings about our profession. I intentionally try to have conversations with those individuals who in the larger group are upbeat and positive.

It’s alarmingly common that in private these individuals tell me about their frustration level and diminishing hope for public education. And often times they ask, partially rhetorically, how are they going to keep doing what they’re doing. Each day for them is a struggle to remain positive and proactive.

I’m still connecting all the dots in my head, Dan Pink’s new book, Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us, really has me thinking. I’ve listened to it once but I need to listen to it again. And in fact I’ve even bought the hard copy so that I can look up some specific points. For those of you who know me, when I buy the hardcopy of the book it’s serious business.

So in upcoming posts I’ll try to explain what’s become clear to me about the educational system and what drives our educators. As always, leave a comment above to know what you’re thinking.

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I had a thought some years ago while visiting with some students at our charter school. It became clear to me that students do not come to school intending to learn. It was a real epiphany for me because I, like everyone else, assumed that kids come to school to learn, and that’s what the kids intend to do when they get to school. But it simply isn’t the case.  As I thought about that in the intervening years I think the kids come to school for three reasons.

1. serve time
2. get grades
3. socialize

I think those are the three reasons kids come to school, and not necessarily in that order. The longer students are in school the more they see school as something they just have to do for 13 years. I have a friend who as a principal would tell kids when they said, “this place is like a prison.”, that, “no it isn’t, in prison you can get out early for good behavior.”

Instead of learning, kids intend to get grades. And believe me, as a career educator, there is very little correlation between high grades and learning. Okay, so that’s probably an overstatement, but not a total over statement. Grades are much more an indicator of compliance, and the ability to please the teacher, then they are learning. I blogged about this before, but getting high test scores and high grades don’t necessarily mean the student learned anything long-term, nor could they use it in a unique situation.  Which to me are the real indicators of learning.

But the real intention of most kids, most the time, when they come to school is to socialize. Part of that is just human nature, we are after all social creatures and our kids have so many peers to interact with at school.  And even if they did come to school intending to learn socializing would still be one of their primary intentions when they come to school.

For me, as an educator, the saddest thing about this is how many of our kids associate “learning” with negative emotions. Too many of our kids think of learning as boring, irrelevant, tedious, and other negative emotions. Over the last many years I have probably asked the following question of over 25,000 people. I have only had four answers in all those years. The question I ask is this, “If you ask high school kids to describe school in one word, what word would they choose?” The answer that I get 99% of the time is “boring.” And in fact, on the slide I use to ask this question I also have the question, “Is boredom a desirable condition for learning to occur?” I know to ask this question on my slide because the answer “boring” is given so often. The other answers I’ve received over the years? Worthless,  prison, and sucks. None of these terms is very flattering.

But that all supports my position, when kids consider learning they see it as a negative. Which is truly sad because learning should be a personally meaningful experience. And if you consider learning, even for kids, outside of the classroom, learning is very meaningful and engaging. Just think about your favorite activity or hobby. You can get lost in it for hours. A students learning experience in school should be meaningful and engaging in the same way.

In fact, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology, has spent his life studying what he calls, “flow.” When Csikszentmihalyi talks about “flow” he talks about a psychological state that is very positive and exhilarating. His characteristics are worth looking at and will do that in a future blog post.

I see this situation as a challenge for educators. We need to change the educational experience of students so that it is meaningful and engaging on a regular basis for them. We do need to discuss the term “engaging” because, as Phil Schlechty has shown us, there are four ways in which students are engaged in our classrooms. That too the conversation for another day.

So what do you think? Think back on your school days and ask yourself what were your intentions when you went to school each day? Leave me a comment, I’d love to know what you’re thinking.

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You read that right, we are cursed by our core curriculum. Did you know that our core curriculum is over 115 years old? Did you know that it was created to make life easier on universities in 1892 America? Did you know that the president of Harvard University in 1892, Charles Elliott, formed the Committee of 10 to define the high school curriculum?

Take a few minutes and read the final report from the committee of 10 and you’ll be astounded. I put together PowerPoint slides that outline the curriculum designed by the Committee of 10, who completed their work in 1894. I’ve shown the slides often to audiences and asked them what it represents. In Kansas, where I reside, it is often identified as the Regents curriculum. The high school curriculum required of high school students in Kansas to gain admission to the six regents universities. I’ve shown the slides around the country with similar results.

And yes it’s 115 years old. And it needs to be questioned, and changed. Not only is it not appropriate for a student being prepared to be a productive member of the 21st century society, it isn’t even appropriate for preparing a student to go to Harvard University in the 21st century. That’s because the curriculum was designed to prepare kids to go Harvard University in 1894 and Harvard University has changed so dramatically since 1894 that students taking the curriculum now are ill-prepared.

In an age of customization and individualization a curriculum that is 115 years old is boring and irrelevant to the vast majority of our students in high school. When we talk about school reform and school change you never hear a discussion about junking the core curriculum. But that’s exactly a conversation that we should be having.

What’s even worse, in my state of Kansas, the Board of Regents won’t even allow the curriculum to be taught in applied courses, which only adds to its irrelevance for kids. If we were serious about a 21st-century curriculum, our students would be emerged in learning by doing experiences, that are contextually based in the real world. I think that it’s obvious that the younger the student the less likely they are to be able to learn abstract concepts without a real world context for learning. Yet that is exactly what we’re asking them to do. And we wonder why our kids aren’t prepared for the next level of education.

If we didn’t require core curriculum courses, I would be amazed if more than a handful of our kids ever voluntarily took courses in the core curriculum. If our core curriculum teachers had to compete for students like our elective course teachers do, I can assure you the content and instructional strategies would be far different than they are today.

But don’t be confused that I think courses are good. They aren’t. The way we put courses in divided silos only adds to the irrelevance for our kids. The world that our kids will live in is integrated and their learning should be also. And the context of what they learn should be the real world. We’ve allowed the academics in our colleges and universities to dictate what, and how, we teach long enough. Our job is not to please the professors at our universities, but rather to prepare our kids for their future.

So if you have an opinion on this rather controversy stand let me know by leaving a comment below. I look forward to hearing from you.

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