What's Become Clear

Have you ever learned something that later on down the road you realize that your life would have been easier if you hadn’t learned it? Well I have. Several years ago my good friend Tammy Worcester attended a national conference. When she returned she asked me if I’d ever heard of a man named Roger Shank. I hadn’t. Tammy went on to tell me that I needed to read his book because he been a wonderful presentation as a keynote  speaker.

So I purchased Roger’s book, Coloring Outside The Lines. I loved the book and so I decided to contact Roger. The rest, as they say, is history. Over the ensuing years I have paid close attention to the work that Roger and his many talented colleagues are doing. They have reshaped how I think about schools. Which can be a very frustrating thing because there is so little we can do to change schools.

You see, Roger has made me see how what we do in schools has little to do with learning, especially learning that will enable the student to be a more productive member of society. In Roger’s words, “How we teach is antithetical to how we learn.” Roger talks about, “natural learning” and how it is different than what we do in schools. So here’s a quick look at the difference.

Natural learning occurs when an individual wants to learn to do something:

1. The learner has a goal. The more ownership the student has in the goal the better it is, but a skilled educator can create goals that motivate the student.  All learning occurs when the student does something, the goal is to learn to do that “something.”

2. The learner must then develop their own plan for achieving the goal. This plan is the path that the student has chosen to follow in pursuit of his goal.

3. As the student begins to implement their plan they will have expectations.  In their mind they believe they know what to expect as they proceed with their plan.

4. Along this path there will always be expectation failure or surprise. It’s inevitable nothing can be learned without either failing or being surprised that their plan succeeded.

5. Following expectation failure or surprise is the explanation that leads to student learning.  This explanation can come in many forms. It can be a teacher explaining, a video, a book, a website etc. This is the moment that learning occurs.

In natural learning the cycle is constantly repeated. If you think about it, it’s how we learn everything. How you learned to walk, how you learn to talk, how you learned to crochet, how you learn to fish. It’s also how you learned to read and how you learned to calculate.

So how does this compare to what we do in schools? Let’s look at our approach in traditional classrooms.

1. Explanation

2. Explanation

3. Explanation

4. Test

This is exactly the cycle we follow in traditional classroom. Our hope is that the students will remember what we told them long enough to regurgitate it on the test. And more and more that test is becoming a high-stakes State administered standardized tests thanks to No Child Left Behind.

So Roger has led to a great deal of frustration on my part. As they say ignorance is bliss. And my life as an educator was much easier before I considered how kids actually learn. –  Steve Wyckoff

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I used to be surprised, I’m not anymore. It used to be noteworthy when I would read a book and the author would give some advice to help individuals overcome the effects of public education. Today I’m more surprised if I read a book and they don’t give advice to help individuals overcome the effects of public education.

Just recently I have read Linchpin by Seth Godin, Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port, Drive by Daniel Pink, and Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan. In each of these books there is significant advice for the reader about how they might overcome the learning that they experienced in public school. And these are just a few of the recent examples.

One of the reasons I’m sure I see this a lot is because I read so many books that deal with how to be successful in the 21st century. And our schools have nothing to do with being successful in the 21st century. Our core curriculum has nothing to do with preparing students to be successful as adults. While there is some movement in our high schools to try to do a better job it’s the side dish, not the entrée. Their focus is much more on improving standardized test scores, and preparing kids to go to college. And even in those subjects that don’t do standardized testing, raising test scores is still their excuse for not changing education.

Our two-year post secondary education institutions, community colleges and technical colleges, are doing an excellent job of preparing their students for the real world. Unfortunately we lack emphasis in K-12 schools to prepare our kids to attend those post secondary institutions that prepare students for industry-standard certifications and associate degrees, that lead to high-paying, highly satisfying careers.

I was especially struck by Dan Pink’s description in Drive of the two kinds of work that exist today, the algorithmic and heuristic. Our schools focus almost entirely on preparing students to do algorithmic work, and almost completely ignore preparation for heuristic work. This, in spite of the fact that estimated 70% of all the new jobs being created involve heuristic work. So perhaps the advice that the authors give to overcome the effects of public schools is important and valuable. – Steve Wyckoff

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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

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Why can’t schools change? It’s an interesting question. If you ask many educators they would say that schools have changed dramatically. I disagree. I think what goes on inside some classrooms has changed dramatically, but not schools. We do use more technology in classrooms; projectors, computers, smart boards, etc. But what we’re doing inside those walls is basically the same thing we’ve done for over 100 years. And sadly, with pretty much the same curriculum. Oh there have been some changes, but mostly tinkering inside the old format.

Some people believe that we need to change the rules so that schools look different. But then I can show you examples of schools that look dramatically different than traditional schools and are functioning within the same rules, regulations, and policies. So the rules must not be what is impeding our ability to change.

Other people think that a tradition that is over 100 years old is keeping us from changing. That we’ve done school the same way for so long that the belief system, and the culture around schools is too entrenched to change. These people often see parents as the biggest reason we can’t change. That parents demand that schools look like they did when they were students.

Still more people believe that the arcane rules for admission into college keep us from changing. That the emphasis on preparing every student to go to college forces schools to behave exactly as they always have. They believe that the Carnegie unit, Departmentalization, focus on standardized test, etc. are the fault of universities.

A cause that is never considered among educators is that perhaps we lack the leadership to make changes. School administrators are of the opinion that they are no longer managers, but rather leaders. I’m not sure I see any difference in their behaviors from when they were managers. I don’t think that continuous improvement of traditional processes constitutes leadership when there is a need for real systemic change.

There is also a school of thought that educators are risk-averse by nature, and that has a whole, are very, very reluctant to change. But when I talk to business people they feel the same way about themselves. Being resistant to change seems to be, to a large degree, human nature, and not reserved for educators.

And last, but certainly not least, there seems to be an non-articulated argument about the purpose of schools. There seems to be a “venn diagram” of purposes for schools. Prepare kids to go to college, prepare kids for the workplace, to give them a broad liberal education, to indoctrinate them for society, etc. The conflicting camps all want schools to change in a different way, therefore causing gridlock.

I think, in my humble opinion, that each of these is a characteristic of a centrally controlled bureaucracy. And there is no bigger centrally controlled bureaucracy than public education. Bureaucracies were designed to guarantee compliance, and stability in systems and processes. There is no system with more stable systems and processes nor more compliant than public education.

So what do I think the chances of real systemic change are? Zero. Nadda. None. In fact I think the bureaucracy has moved from the state level to the federal level with a corresponding increase in stability and compliance. I chuckle at the federal government’s insistence that they are encouraging real systemic change in schools. My observation is that they are causing exactly the opposite effect. Our schools have become test preparation Academy, whose sole purpose is to prepare kids to increase their scores on standardized test.

So what’s the solution? I believe the solution is “mission impossible.” The elimination of the educational bureaucracy at a time when our country is moving in the opposite direction seems hopeless. I keep looking for that ray of hope, but every time I see one, the results never seem to pan out. I don’t think there is a rule that America has to stay the best. Time will tell.- 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’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.

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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.

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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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This morning I was sitting in my easy chair, drinking a cup of coffee, going through the first e-mails of the day, and thinking about going to work. When an iChat window popped up from Becky. The chat read, “When did Wichita State University make the final four in basketball?” I quickly opened a new tab in Firefox and Googled, “Wichita State University  in the final four.” I scanned the results of the search, clicked on a link to Wikipedia, and found that Wichita State had been in the final four in 1965. Now, I was aware that Wichita State had made the final four sometime in the 60s but I wasn’t exactly sure what year.

So I quickly typed into the chat window, “1965″ and hit the return key. I knew why Becky was asking, she watches the morning news, and each day they have a trivia question. Occasionally, she will call in and win a gift of some sort. Let’s face it, you can only use so many rain gauges . Anyway, a few minutes later, she returned my chat and tells me, “you’re so smart!” after they had given the answer.

So I wonder, was I smarter because I could use Google successfully, or would I have been smarter if I had known the answer from memory? This is an interesting educational question. You see in schools today we reward kids for what they remember. So if a student is blessed with an excellent memory they are considered to be “smarter” than other kids. But how much stuff can you remember and recall on the spot? Should we, on the other hand, reward kids who know how to use tools wisely and find the information they need, when they need it, and then use it?

I’ve yet to see the standardized test that measures how well students can use 21st-century tools. What I have seen are the test scores on standardized tests, by school building, and by school district, in the local newspaper. And in fact I could see comparisons of standardized test scores in newspapers all across the state in country. I guess they must think that intelligence is measured by how much you can remember.

Each semester I  have the pleasure of speaking to students in the College of Education at the University of Kansas. Most of them are freshmen and one year removed from high school. So I always ask them, “did you take a test in high school last year that  you got an  “A” on? But if you took the test today, you couldn’t pass it.” Every hand in the room goes up. That’s almost 200 students each semester who in essence are telling me they were considered to be smart because they can remember something for one specific day, and one specific test.

I then always asked them, “Then did you really learn that stuff? If you can’t remember it, and you can’t use it in a different context, did learning really occur?” After I’ve asked these questions I always let them visit with each other and talk about their responses to my questions. The room is always a buzz with excited conversation.

So I guess my point is, I believe I was a lot smarter for being able to use Google to find the answer to the question than if I just remembered the answer to the question. What do you think? Which do you think represents being smarter? I look forward to your comments.

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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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