What's Become Clear

It seems to me that the only acceptable measure of school change is standardized test scores. I have a real problem with that. It’s not that I devalue standardized test scores completely, I do believe that they are one small indicator of how we’re doing. But when I see the over emphasis on standardized test scores I have to shake my head.

I hear the stories from teachers and parents about the crazy things we do in order to raise test scores. I’m completely convinced that we spend more time on test taking strategies, and memorizing material for tests, then we do on real learning.

I am constantly reminding myself, and usually anyone else that will listen, about the analogy of getting your drivers license. When you got your drivers license you took two tests, a written test and a driving test. It’s obvious which one is the more meaningful. In fact in most states, perhaps all states, when you renew your driver’s license, send you the test in the mail along with the answers. That’s because the stuff that’s on the test is meaningless in the real context of driving and we don’t remember it. The truly important stuff we remember because we practice it on a daily basis, and because for the most part it is non-conscious.

It’s not that the stuff being tested isn’t true, it’s just that out of context of driving its meaningless. For example, how far before you turn are you supposed to turn on your turn indicator? When I ask this question of an audience most of them get it wrong, not because they can’t drive but because the context of driving often times dictates using your turn signal sooner than the law requires.

It’s the same on our standardized tests. The stuff we test our kids on is true and in many cases used in context would be meaningful. But taught, and tested out of context makes what the student is learning meaningless.

We should be testing the student’s ability to use the context in new and, predictable and unpredictable situations. That’s when the material is useful.

I always cringe when I hear an educators talk about “improved achievement.” Real school change would include authentic assessment of the use and application of knowledge and skills in a contextually based problem. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

We’ve never seen the kind of financial cuts that are taking place in education today. Regardless of how you feel about school finance, and the ability of school districts to utilize their money wisely, the cuts that are being made today in the majority of school districts are painful at best. Decisions are starting to impact staffing decisions, including classroom teachers.

But every cloud has a silver lining. And often times the silver lining doesn’t show itself until much later. School districts are looking at ways to save money, cut costs, and yet at the same time improve the quality of the educational opportunities their students receive.

Down the road we’re going to look back at the decisions that are being made and many of them will have historical significance. Some because they devastated the district, and some districts will never recover from those decisions. But others will lead to creative and innovative solutions that will indeed increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the education our kids receive.

Our industry has been amazingly stagnant for the last century. We are long overdue to redesign major parts of our educational system; what we teach, how we teach it, how we organize to teach it, and how we assess what we have taught. Hopefully,  we will talk about, what the kids learned, how they learned it, where and how they were grouped to learn it, and how they demonstrated their understanding and use of what they learned.

Hopefully there will be enough examples of creative and innovative solutions that they will impact the educational system systemically. What would I like to see those systemic changes be?

I’d love to see all of our students emotionally (authentically) engaged in their learning experiences  on a regular basis. I’d love to see the content of what they are learning be the knowledge and skills that will make them more productive in their lives after school. I’d love to see them organized like we organize for work in the real world, in ways that allow them to collaborate with their peers and with experts from the fields of their choice. I’d love to see us scrap the entire standardized testing system and instead evaluate student learning based on the skills and knowledge they obtain which are aligned with their desired career  areas. I’d love to see teachers functioning as cold learners with the students, assuming a much more Socratic role. And most of all I love to see our students leave school loving to learn, and self-directed in their lives.

Is there hope? Only time will tell. Right now there is little reason for hope. Almost all of the discussions are centered on what to cut. On the other hand I was at the Topeka USD 501 Board of Education meeting last night and they are doing a great job of discussing the changes they can make to reduce expenses while at the same time focusing on improved opportunities for all of their students.

We can only hope that education and educators don’t blow it. – Steve Wyckoff

Tweet This Post

Erie school district has been blessed. By Mike Carson, Rose Frey, Ted Hill, and many many others who were involved in the transformation of their school. Erie high school is unique. What makes them unique is that their focus is on their students, and their student’s futures.

Erie high school has changed what the students learn, how the students learn, and how they organize the students to learn. In addition, while the students do take the state mandated standardized tests, their students are measured in much different ways than almost all other kids across the country.

The curriculum used in Erie high school is based on projects and problems designed by each individual student, based on their own interest, needs, and desires. And the results have been equally unique, students, and I mean all students, have far exceeded the normal expectations we have for high school kids. And, as former superintendent Mike Carson is fond of saying, “It isn’t just the head cheerleader and the quarterback that are doing great things.”

What Erie high school has figured out is how to not just expose their kids to curriculum with all the standards, but how to actually engage the students in meaningful work, whereby the kids learn the things that they want them to learn. Is it perfect? No. There have been, and continue to be, many issues. But unlike school improvement in traditional schools, they are getting better at the right things, rather than just getting better at what schools have always done.

I’ve observed for the last 40 years scores of creative an innovative projects. Some big, some small. The thing that they all had in common was a champion. The sad truth is, as soon as the champion moved on, and eventually they always do, the gravity of the status quo always pulled the project back into the mainstream and morphed it into a traditional program. There seems to be no way to make real systemic change in the educational system.

So I’m watching Erie high school with great interest. The superintendent has retired, as has the high school principal responsible for the project-based, problem-based learning curriculum. Other changes have been made with key personnel. My hope is that the model employed in Erie high school will spread across the state and the country.  The hope is that new champions have replaced the old champions.

I have low expectations. In spite of the fact that their kids are doing exceptional things and are truly well-prepared for the life they’re going to live; and in spite of the fact that it is actually cheaper to educate kids in this model; and in spite of the fact that we are in a financial crisis; I fear that it is impossible to actually make sustainable systemic change in public schools.

Time will tell.

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

I’ve given a lot of thought to the standardized test phenomenon. How is it that so many well-intentioned and highly intelligent people can have so much faith in such a detrimental process? I think I might have at least part of the puzzle figured out. We’ve been using standardized tests for decades, and educators through those decades have tried to convince policymakers and the public alike what a great job we’re doing by sharing our standardized test scores.

And we’ve convinced the public and policymakers how important they are. The problem is we liked our test scores when we could pick and choose which scores to report. Now that we have to report the scores of all kids they’re not, in our minds, nearly as representative of our efforts and success as they were when we only reported the best scores.

But I think the bigger issue is we’ve confused what standardized test scores represent to us. Over the years we became aware that bright, well-educated, highly successful students, did very well on standardized tests. We interpreted that to mean that if you have high standardized test scores you will be bright, well-educated, and highly successful. Our reaction as educators, and the reaction of policymakers was to say that if we had more and more kids obtaining high scorers on standardized test they two would be bright, well-educated, highly successful.

But the relationship is not causal, it’s correlational. And on top of that we’ve reversed the relationship:

Highly successful =  high test scores

THEREFORE …

High test scores =  well-educated

That appears to be the logic that all of us, educators and policymakers alike, seem to be following. Yet when I looked at the issue in these terms I didn’t believe it at all. We’re proving that we can raise test scores but there is a growing sense that our kids are less well educated.  And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of what “well-educated” means!

We’ve approached the evidence produced by standardized tests as if the relationship between the test and student success is causal. But in reality there is simply a correlational relationship between kids who are successful and their scores on standardized tests.

Tweet This Post

I’ve been preparing for a presentation that I’m going to do for the school board of one of the largest districts in the state. They are involved in strategic planning, and to their credit they are looking at all aspects of their school district with the intent to improve. My presentation is built around my belief about the biggest issues we face in education. I’ve given this presentation several times, each time modifying it as I clarify the issues in my mind.

I put about 1000 miles on my car this week which has given me a lot of time to clarify exactly what I want to say. But I wanted to put it in writing here because it always seems different when I put my thoughts into writing, or present them to an audience for the first time. So with that in mind…

The issue that I’m dealing with is the conflict between what academia considers to be a well-educated person, and what the greater society that we live in considers to be a well-educated person. The first, academia, is made up of our universities. The second mostly centers around the workplace.

I’ve often ranted that our core curriculum is over 115 years old and was designed by the Committee of 10 which was made up of individuals from the world of academia. In this world individuals who are considered to be “well-educated” have been exposed to the classics in literature, theoretical mathematics and science, and have studied the social sciences through abstractions. Being “well-educated” in academia is measured by what you know.

Individuals who are considered to be “well-educated” in the workplace are knowledgeable about the issues related to the work they do, but in addition their knowledge is concrete and can be applied to real problems in the workplace, adding value to the work being done. Being “well-educated” in the workplace is measured by what an individual knows AND can do.

I know that both of these definitions are oversimplifications, but I think I can provide proof of their accuracy. If you want to get into college the measure is standardized tests, the ACT and SAT. Furthermore, in Kansas and many other states, your high school curriculum cannot have been taken in “applied” classes. Your classes must have been taken in a setting where the content was studied in an abstract manner absent the context of the real world.

When I speak to the business community and I ask them if it makes sense that students should learn math in the context of real-world problems so that the math can be applied in a concrete way, they completely agree. When I tell them that a student who takes a math class in an applied setting does not meet the criteria set by the Board of Regents for entry into the regents universities, they are appalled.

If you look at the regents required curriculum for high schools in Kansas it’s the same curriculum that was designed by the Committee of 10. Sure, there have been modifications to the content over time, but the emphasis on the instructional style and the expectations of the student are still aligned with the curriculum that that committee designed all those years ago.

Making every student take this curriculum really wasn’t an issue in the industrial age. Students who did well in the traditional curriculum went on to college in numbers that were appropriate for the times. But gradually as it became more important to be “well-educated” in the workplace more and more students were encouraged to go to “college.” The problem that arose in the workplace with students who were coming to the workplace with college degrees was that they did not have the knowledge relevant to the workplace, nor the ability to apply the knowledge to real situations. This is a growing problem. Businesses report regularly that students are not for prepared for the work environment they are entering in the 21st century.

You’ve heard it before, somebody describing a college graduate as “book smart” with no common sense. I’m not sure whether or not the student had common sense, but I’m pretty sure they did not possess the appropriate knowledge nor were they skilled at applying the knowledge they had to real situations.

Up to this point the academics have won the argument, or possibly they have just been able to keep the tradition alive. But the reality is we believe that our kids will be “well-educated” if we continue in K-12 to expose them to a curriculum that is abstract in nature, unrelated to the real world, taught in isolation, and measured strictly by what the student knows.

I believe that K-12 schools should be about learning experiences where the students apply the knowledge and skills necessary to solve real-world problems. They should learn to use 21st-century technologies in conjunction with up-to-date knowledge to solve today’s problems.

An unintended consequence of this conflict is the outrageous emphasis on standardized test scores. Standardized test scores have been the traditional measure of whether or not a student is “well-educated.” As students have graduated from college and gone to the workplace there has been an increasing dissatisfaction with our incoming workers. The natural response has been we have to educate them better, schools need to do a better job.

The response of policymakers was to mandate practices designed to improve test scores, thinking that improved test scores would equate to improved workers. It hasn’t worked. I believe the problem could be solved if we could agree which kind of “well-educated” student we want to produce.

Tweet This Post

Drive by Dan Pink

One of the biggest issues that we face in education is that we are in adequately preparing our kids for their future. I recently finished Dan pink’s new book Drive, and sure enough more evidence that we’re not preparing our kids for the 21st century.

Let me explain. In his book he talks about two kinds of work. The first, algorithmic, “are those tasks in which you follow a set of established instruction down to a single pathway to one conclusion.” The second, heuristic, are  “tasks that are just the opposite. Because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution.” Now, which of those most sound like school. You got it, the vast majority of the work done by our kids in school is algorithmic. In fact, the measure that the public, well politicians anyway, love is the standardized test. Most of which measure how well the student follows established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion.

Interestingly, those activities in school that are most algorithmic are in our beloved core curriculum. Which by the way happen to be the classes that kids see as the most boring and irrelevant. On the other hand, those activities   which are the most  heuristic are found in the co-curricular courses, and extracurricular activities. Drama, band, art, newspaper, yearbook, athletics … you get the picture.

But here’s the kicker, again from Pink’s book, “McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30% of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work.” He goes on, “A key reason routine work can be outsourced or automated; artistic, empathic, nonroutine, work generally cannot.”

One of my favorite educational researchers Larry Lezotte always said, “What gets measured gets taught.”  Well, what we’re measuring in schools is the algorithmic stuff, that means that it will get taught! So we are doing a great job spending most of our time making sure that students acquire the skills and behaviors that are most likely to be outsourced to other countries.

What do you think? Leave me a comment.

Tweet This Post

Just a couple of years ago I started asking my audiences if schools were fine, they just needed tweaking; broken, they needed fixing; or obsolete, they need replacing. As you might imagine this provoked some lively conversation. When I first started asking the question the most common answer was, schools are fine they just need tweaking. But in the last couple of years the answers and the conversation have changed.

One of the real eye openers was when I was at Lawrence high school almost 2 years ago. Lawrence high school is almost literally in the shadow of the ivory tower. University of Kansas is just a few blocks away. So when I asked this question I thought that I might get a very emotional response supporting the way schools are today.

To my surprise, by a show of hands, about a third of the teachers in the room said that schools are fine they just need tweaking. About a third said they were broken and needs fixing and about a third said they were obsolete and needed replacing. I think I can generalize the groups that fit in to each of those answers.

Those who say schools are fine tend to be older, and teachers in core curriculum areas. Those who say schools are obsolete tend to be younger and not teaching in the core curriculum. The interesting group, those who say schools were broken, tends to be more of a mix in terms of age. But this tends to be the group who are more veteran teachers who just understand that something is not right with our educational system.

It really is impossible to stereotype the three groups. I often talk to very new teachers who think the system is absolutely perfect. In conversation with them their dream has always been to stand at the front of the room and teach kids. The current system suits them just fine. And some veteran teachers, especially in the core curriculum, think the system is perfect also.

The thing that is most disturbing to me, in the conversation with teachers who think the system is fine, is that they blame the students and parents for all the problems in the educational system. what they are really saying is if kids would come to us just like they did 25 years ago, and would be passive and compliant, schools would be wonderful. I always try to point out to these teachers that parents aren’t keeping their good kids at home and just sending us the bad ones. Kids, and society, are just different today, and we must change to accommodate those changes.

Of course all of these opinions are unburdened by data. But I can tell you there has been a dramatic shift over the last several years when I asked for a show of hands each of these categories. Where we lack consensus is what’s wrong with the system. And I’m always amazed how politically incorrect it is to even propose a discussion about the educational system as a system.

So you ask, what is my opinion? Well if you read my blog I think you know what my opinion is. I think schools are obsolete. Let me qualify that. I think that the younger our students are the better job we do with them. And the older our kids get the worst job we do. I’m preparing another blog post on this topic so more on that later.

It is my opinion, and again in a future blog post I’m going to go into this in more depth, that our system at the high school level is hopelessly obsolete. In three major areas we need an overhaul. First of all how we teach our kids is all wrong. If we truly want her kids to learn we must more specifically define what it means to learn. I think that it means that they not only retain the information long enough to take a test but long enough to use it long-term and unique situations. I think the only way we can accomplish that is by moving to a system where the kids learn by doing.

Secondly, I think that what we teach, especially in our core curriculum, is completely out of date. See my blog post on the curse of the core curriculum for more information. Our core curriculum is 115 years old and out of touch with our children’s needs in the 21st century.

And thirdly, how we organize to teach. We’ve had many discussions over the years about how important it is to have an integrated curriculum. The seven period day, carnegie units, and departmentalization have stood in the way of an integrated curriculum for decades. It’s about time to change them.

There are many more things to be said on this topic that can’t be said in this space. So stay tuned and in future blog posts I’ll expand on the ideas started here. In the meantime, leave me a comment. I’d love to know what you’re thinking.

Tweet This Post

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.

Tweet This Post

I just recently finished the book Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan … For the third time this is a fascinating book that  describes how the world of marketing has changed. As an educator I’m always thinking about how the changing world ought to, but rarely does, impact education.  So my brain has been working overtime connecting the ideas and concepts in Inbound Marketing with what we might potentially do in schools to take advantage of the same strategies.

The premise of the book is that marketing has changed from strategies that interrupt the potential customer to strategies that  entice potential customers to come to your website and purchase your goods and services. The inbound marketing strategies take advantage of the millions, if not billions, of potential customers That are specifically looking for the goods and services you provide.

As they point out in the book potential customers have become especially adept at ignoring and bypassing traditional marketing strategies. I’m a perfect example of this. I’m addicted to TiVo. And I never watch a commercial. I simply press the skip button and move on to where the show starts again. Oh by the way, I actually looked up on the Internet how to program my skip button to jump ahead 30 seconds. This means to miss a three minute commercial I simply hit it six times and I’m right at the end of the commercial. I don’t know who figured out how to do this on the TiVo remote, but thank you

So back to the book. There are many, many strategies and tools that allow businesses and all kinds of organizations to attract prequalified customers and enthusiasts to their website. Because of the sheer number of people on the Internet, there are many people at any given moment in time that are looking for exactly what you have to offer, that your task as an organizational leader is to simply help all of those people find your website. Where in the past your task was to interrupt as many people as possible to tell them about your products and services, whether or not they were interested.

So what does this have to do with education? We regularly send millions of kids into classrooms across America and interrupt what they want to be thinking, doing, learning and, most importantly engaging in, to tell them what we think is important for them to know.  Which is usually stuff that they haven’t got the slightest interest in nor do they have a context for learning it. It seems to me that there must be a way to tap in to the desires of our kids and at the same time lead to the learning that we want them to have.

One of the things that they describe in the book is the idea that most websites use the megaphone approach, that is, they speak into it and hope everyone hears. That’s exactly the approach we take in school. We stand with the megaphone and tell all the kids the same stuff. Maybe it’s time that we figured out how to invite kids from all over the world into a virtual location that meets their needs, necessitating the development of many locations that are all different, that can meet the needs of individual niche groups of kids.

Just a thought. So what do you think of this idea, leave me a comment below.

Tweet This Post

This is a post about books that is a little different than I would generally post in a discussion about a book. I’m going to generalize about four different books.

How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer
Talent Is Overrated – Geoff Colvin
The Talent Code – Daniel Coyle
Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

For me the interesting strand that ran through these books made me question a longtime belief that I’ve held. I was very much a believer in the research done by the Gallup organization that indicated that individuals had inherent talent. And that if an individual didn’t have that natural talent no amount of work would help them acquire it. At best they can only become mechanical at performing in that talent area.

But the research presented in these four books contradicts that thinking. And as they studied individuals who we’d been led to believe did miraculous things simply because of their innate talent, they found that that simply wasn’t the case.

There does seem to be some common elements that lead to great performances. There seems to be something very important about an individual who spends 10,000 hours in the pursuit of perfection. In addition it seems to be important that that 10,000 hours be accomplished within a 10 year period. But we all know somebody who has been on their job for at least 10 years, and has worked at it at least 10,000 hours, yet they are very average performers.

The third element that seems to be very important is the idea of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the practice of identifying specifically what the individual is doing incorrectly and working to improve on that specific area. Where most people fail to become experts is that they prefer to practice the things that are already good at, and neglect to practice the things that they’re not good at.

The example that they use in one of the books is that Tiger Woods will go out and hit a single shot hundreds of times on the off chance that he will need to make that shot once or twice in a season. Speaking of Tiger Woods, we have been led to believe that he  is just innately the best offer that ever lived. But when they actually studied his childhood, from the time he was old enough to sit in a high chair, his father had him watching his golf swing and talking to him about golf. And as soon as Tiger was old enough to stand he started hitting a golf ball under the tutelage of his father who was a golf instructor.

So what does this mean for schools? As I think about what our kids do for 10 years and 10,000 hours, and that they practice deliberately, the only thing I can consistently come up with is that they are taught to sit quietly and passively and listen to an adult. I’m not sure that that’s the behavior that we want our kids to be experts at. This certainly doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing kids learn, but for far too many of our kids they spin the 10 years and the 10,000 hours practicing just that.

Perhaps that’s why when high school dropouts or questioned they say that the reason they dropped out was because school was boring and irrelevant. And in the research,The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts report, they found that 88% of dropouts at passing grades.

So my suggestion read all four of these books and think about the implications for schools, our classrooms, and our practices. And by all means post a comment  below so I know what you think about this!

Tweet This Post