PILOTed

Can you know too much?

I’m reading a fascinating book, Unsafe Thinking by Jonah Sachs.

The book advocates for us all to learn how to be nimble and bold. One thing that may hold us back is our existing knowledge.

While it’s common sense that the more you know, the more competent you become, there is a point where knowing more about a topic may just stultify our thinking. That when we encounter new situations, we are more likely to try and fit them into things we already know, than to look for novel solutions, as in the chart below:

As we learn more, we become more competent, but at some point we become entrenched, and our ability to come up with novel solutions starts decreasing.

But, the more often we expose ourselves to situations where we have no skills, the better we are able to maintain our problem solving and creative abilities. You become more competent in a wide variety of situations when you try something that makes you feel uncomfortable and exposed.

So take some time to learn a new language, a new sport, or a new dance.

And, there's an exciting set of upcoming topics on Edchat Interactive, starting with two in August. Check them out! And participate.

Making an impact on kids

What should every principal be doing to make schools more effective at preparing every child for adulthood?

The Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, part of North Carolina State University, lays out an 8 step plan. The Friday Institute works with teachers and principals around the US on leadership and instruction.

Mary Ann Wof, Elisabeth Bobst, and my friend Nancy Mangum just codified their methods in the seminal book Personalized and Digital Learning, published by Harvard Education Press.

Of course, it begins with vision. If you don’t know where you’re headed, how are you going to get there? But vision isn’t what a principal dreams up and then communicates. And vision is not consensus. You can’t expect every person in an organization to commit to an untested vision. An effective vision emerge from collaboration and conversation with a core representation of stakeholders, it builds momentum, and eventually consensus from success.

Very few successful schools operate top down, with hierarchical and rigid management. Change management principals and distributed management are central to most successful schools. The formal administrators of a school are neither omnipresent, nor omniscient. Really good schools task teachers and instructional coaches with key aspects of change and improvement.

All successful schools empower everyone. The children are empowered, given agency over what and how they learn. Teachers work together to develop and improve professional practices. Parents play a role.

These are just three of the eight steps in the plan, and the book provides practical advice for each, with examples and “try this now” exercises.

And you’ll have the chance to learn about all eight of these principles live and online with the Friday Institute’s series on Edchat Interactive. Register here for the first session, which will be Thursday, January 11.

Finnish Schools and EdTech

Finland. Everyone knows Finnish students outperform students from every other nation on the globe. Finland is the Holy Grail of education. The top of the top. 

And I got to visit two Finnish elementary schools this week and talk to educators, kids, and administrators.

How does EdTech drive Finnish performance? 

Finnish success in education has nothing, nada, to do with education technology. There were other common threads, which I'll list below.

These were two very different schools. The first is out in the country. There are 42 students and 2 teachers. The school covers grades K to 6. There are three main classrooms, plus classrooms for special purposes. In the first period, the teacher was addressing 2^nd and 4^th graders in the same classroom. In the second, the 4^th and 6^th graders were in the room.

The second school had just under 400 students with about 20 teachers. We got to visit 5 classes, talk to the principal (and teachers and students) and tour some of the special rooms.

In both schools, the classes were very similar to classes in the US. Math is math. Language arts is language arts, although Language arts in Finland is FLA (Finnish Language Arts) not ELA (English Language Arts). The teacher explained, asked the students questions, assigned work in the class, and handled any special needs of the students. During the teacher explanation, the teacher used a projector to share her or his screen on the front of the room. There was no other use of technology. The larger school had 40 tablets which could be used by students. And they had just purchased 4 robots for a robotics lab, and were figuring out how and who should utilize them. But tech wasn't used in any of the classes in either of the schools that I observed, other than the class projector hooked to the teacher's computer.

The content was very professional. Teachers had a teacher version of the student workbook, with notes on how to introduce the subject, what points to make, where students might have problems, options for student assignments, alternative ways to reach students, and extras that the teacher could throw in. Just like most textbooks anywhere else.

The teachers were knowledgeable, professional, and personable. Just like most teachers I’ve met everywhere.

What’s the secret to Finland’s success? Here are some of my observations.

Students get time for active play. School periods last either 45 minutes or 90 minutes. After each 45 minute period, students get 15 minutes of free time, and after each 90 minute period, students get 30 minutes of free time. During the free time, students go outside to run around as long as the weather isn’t too bad.

Teachers get free time. While there is generally a teacher or other adult assigned to watch over the kids during their free time, for most of the teachers, this is their free time as well.

Teachers get time to plan. Teachers are generally expected to “teach” for 24 hours a week, and they get 3 hours a week to collaborate and plan.

Teachers have autonomy. There are curriculum guidelines, but in general, teachers are expected and allowed to decide what and how to teach. Teachers are professionals, they are treated as professionals, and know what works for them in their classes. I asked if teachers could choose their own textbooks, and was told that yes, the textbook and/or workbook was selected by the teacher. I then asked if two teachers of the same grade in the same school might use different textbooks, and was told that while it is preferable if all the teachers for a grade in a school used the same content, it wasn’t a requirement. The teachers have always been able to collaborate and select materials that work for all of them.

Non-academic courses are baked in. Kids don’t spend all their time in school on the academic subjects. They take 2 hours a week of sports, and 2 hours on topics that include art, music, shop, and crafts. Both boys and girls learn to work with wood (including independent use of saws, hammers, and blow torches) and how to sew.

The result seems to be that the kids want to learn and the teachers enjoy teaching. Certainly the achievement levels cannot be refuted. One principal remarked, “As adults, what you remember from your school is not what you learned, it’s how you felt. And that’s what a teacher does, to make you feel good as a student in coming to school and learning. And it’s my job to make the teachers feel good about coming to school and making the kids feel good about learning.”

Here are some other observations from my time in Finland.

Many people say that Finland is a homogeneous society, and that’s the reason for Finland’s success (in schools and quality of life). I observed that something over 10% of the kids were of color. It seemed that color was not a life determinant. The kids seemed to play together, collaborate, learn together, and when I asked the teachers and principal, they supported this observation.

Finland schools have three levels of intervention when students fall behind, which is not dissimilar from many schools in the US. There are specialists who can help out in a class, and breakouts where the reading or math specialist can help struggling students so they can catch up with the rest of the class. There was some concern that this may be changing as some political parties are looking to reduce taxes and school funding and encourage privatization.

Finland does not have the extremes of wealth and poverty that exist in the US. The government acts as a safety net, and I did not see the poverty that I sometimes do in the US. The well-off people I talked to were proud that their country took care of its less well-off, although at the same time, they would love to have some tax relief. They understood that there would always be that tension, and they accepted that Finland had reached a fair balance.

Here are a few photos.

The Finnish school with 42 students:

The Finnish School that has nearly 400 students

The mobile library van visited both schools.

Classrooms had every configuration, from traditional rows to clusters of desks to relaxed, reflecting the teacher's style

Gaming the Brain

Yesterday, in an ASUGSV preconference webinar, Michael Moe, Lauri Järvilehto, Marja Konttinen, and Tom Kalinske discussed how education around the world is at an inflection point, and what we can expect.

Games have always been engaging and instructional. A game is nothing more than complex problems waiting to be solved. For example, Lauri’s young daughter knows 140 Pokémon by heart, but it’s questionable that that will be a skill that will prove useful later in life. The issue has been that fun games are typically low efficacy for targeted knowledge and skills acquisition, and games that were designed primarily for learning have been boring. And gamification, trying to lay game-like elements over traditional learning activities, has shown some but limited utility.

While the technology for engaging video games has been around for a while, we are just starting to learn how to harness play scalably, in order to create learning opportunities that are both engaging and that teach to learning objectives.

A great game puts you into flow. It’s challenging enough to remain interesting, but not too challenging to become frustrating. When you are accomplishing, growing, and develop a sense of competence you are hooked. When you first feel a task is impossible, and then realize you can and then have solved it, you experience fiero. The human mind is conditioned to play, and play becomes a game when people start seeing how well they are doing; great games involve others as a team and/or as competitors. In games, we become conditioned toward action -> fail –> learn -> succeed -> reward, a pattern inherent in the growth mindset, persistence, and grit.

Both schools and learning content are changing to adapt to game-based learning.

Games for learning have to be able to stand on their own as fun, challenging games, AND they have to have learning goals. Game developers are finding that they need to interact closely with subject matter experts during game design in ways that previous instructional designers never did. It’s not enough to find the formulas and algorithms that underlie the field; the game has to incorporate what makes the field fun and challenging. When you are playing a game, and your adrenaline and heartbeat go up, when the game makes you cry and laugh, the experience and learning are deep and personal. A great learning game ignites the same emotional attachments in the game play that practitioners experience when they practice.

On the other hand, learning through a game is not like learning from a book. Games aren’t linear. Players have a degree of agency not normally experienced in school. Games generally have multiple outcomes and multiple paths. Early adopter teachers have been using video games like Minecraft and World of Warcraft to teach for years, and we are starting to see their best practices filter through to other classrooms.

Examples of how the game-based learning is evolving include

• Big Bang Legends from Lauri’s and Marja’s company, Lightneer, which is a problem solving game around particle physics.
• Minecraft and MinecraftEDU, now from Microsoft, which engage kids to build, program, and problem solve
• And TeacherGaming which is surrounding engaging commercial games with educational activities so that they can be utilized by teachers.

It’s great when kids (all of us really) are so absorbed in what we are doing that we don’t even realize we are learning. This happens in great games, and also in problem-based learning.

And if you’re interested in problem-based learning, maybe join us on Edchat Interactive Thursday March 9 as Kevin Brookhouser discusses how to implement 20Time learning.

Recharge with 20Time

Endorphins make us happy.

Endorphins are opiate like molecules that are produced at neural synapses. They produce a euphoria and sedation, and increase the pain threshold. They are known as the happiness hormone.

We naturally increase endorphins when we achieve a personal goal and when we learn, which then often induces us to set more goals and learn more. This sets up a virtuous feedback loop, where certain behavior leads to feedback which encourages more of that behavior.

It’s not a great leap, then, to see how allowing students to set their own achievable learning goals could lead to increased happiness and increased learning. It doesn’t have to be all or none. Even letting students devote 20% of their school time to personally chosen projects can have an incredible effect.

And since most of us are in education because we’ve set our own goal as enabling kids to succeed, that students’ increased learning will increase our own happiness as well.

But,

1. How can we give students the ability to choose their own learning goals and activities when we already have too much to cover?
2. How do I get started?
3. What if the students come up with really bad projects?
4. I already work really hard, I just don’t have more time to manage all these student projects.
5. What if my school won’t let me, or parents object?

These are what are called “obstacles”. They exist so that we can continue with what is comfortable instead of taking risks and embarking on the unknown.

Not that they are trivial. But each has many possible solutions.

And educators such as A. J. Juilani, Kevin Brookhouser, Don Wettrick, and Sherry Crofut have tried it and couldn’t conceive of going back. They’ve found that 20Time, also known as Genius Hour, has re-energized their classrooms and their careers.

If you think this might be of interest to you, we are having a discussion on 20Time with Kevin Brookhouser on Edchat Interactive on Thursday, March 9. For more information and to register (free), click here.

On the importance of being thoughtful

Fake news, character assassination, and logical fallacies have gotten us where we are today.

Can we at least agree that we will train our students to make more cogent arguments than those we have witnessed regarding political issues and actions?

Where do we start?

Students who understand

• What is the purpose of an argumentation essay?
• What are its elements?
• What is excellence in each of the elements?

Will be better able to form and critique communications that are based on evidence, rational, and persuasive.

Argumentation changes the reader’s point of view, brings about some action on the reader’s aprt, or asks the reader to accept the writer’s explanation of an issue.

Kathy Glass articulates that a good argumentation essay will introduce a topic, state an opinion or claim, support the claim with reasons and relevant evidence, acknowledge alternate or opposing claims, and provide a conclusion. Supporting a claim involves facts, statistics, expert testimony, anecdotes, and examples through quotations, paraphrasing, and summarizing.

While persuasion often uses appeals about the credibility, character, or authority of the writer (or speaker) or an appeal to the audience’s self-interest, sense of identity, or emotions, argumentation convinces the audience through evidence and logic rather than emotional appeals.

Students need to learn the difference; both in their own communications and in the communications of others.

You may want to listen to Kathy on Edchat Interactive as she describes and models concrete strategies to impart these skills in students on Thursday, February 16.

Unless you’re happy with the current level of discourse.

Student Behavior Now a Federal Concern

There are at least two conditions necessary to fill a bucket with water. You have to put water into it, and the bucket can’t leak.

Similarly, we can’t just feed academic content to students and expect them to succeed; behavioral success and academic success are interrelated. ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act), the recently passed federal elementary and secondary education authorization, finally acknowledges this.  

Specifically, ESSA calls for development of consistently positive and safe school and classroom settings, student engagement, and decreasing discipline referrals. Importantly the act declares these activities as a valid use of Title I funds, and schools receiving Title IV funds must document and assess how they are doing this.

Do we need this?

Do we have students who are behaviorally acting up because of academic frustrations? Do we have kids who can’t sit in a seat, can’t work independently, or who can’t work in a group?

As Howard Knoff points out, the goal is to replace inappropriate student behavioral problems with the appropriate responses so that students can self-manage and become independent learners. Instead of individual initiatives to handle the many situations that contribute to behavioral problems (for example bullying, trauma, poverty), we need an overarching multi-tiered approach:

• Positive environment
• Articulated behavioral expectations
• Communication and teaching of those expectations
• Motivate and hold students accountable for appropriate behavior
• Consistency, across time, students, settings, and situations
• Special situations: preparedness to adapt to different settings

The first step for educators (and schools and districts) is awareness.  Dr. Knoff has compiled a series of questions we all need to ask ourselves:

1. What am I doing to promote high levels of effective interpersonal, social problem-solving, conflict resolution, and coping skills/behaviors by all students?
2. How can I promote high levels of critical thinking, reasoning, and problem solving skills by all students?
3. Am I learning and sharing effective classroom management with other teachers in my school and PLN, and specifically, are there techniques to handle the issues that sometimes result in office discipline referrals?
4. Are there ways I can involve parents and the community to support student self-management

And then?

On Thursday night, October 20, Howard is going to lead a discussion with educators about effective multi-tiered approaches in a free discussion on Edchat Interactive. Then on November 9, he will continue the discussion on behavioral interventions for challenging students. Feel free to join us by registering here.

You Say You Want Creative Students?

Myth: No one really knows what creativity is.

Creativity is an activity that produces something that is both new and task appropriate. It can’t be just new, and neither can it be just useful. It’s that simple.

Myth: The most creative people are mad geniuses.

There is no connection between mental illness and creativity. Creative people are more likely to be in better moods, better physical health, and more resilient in the face of trauma.

Myth: A creative person is creative in anything.

Creativity is actually domain-specific. If you are creative in cooking, you are no more likely to be creative in music or physics or some other unrelated area than anyone else. In fact, people are often creative in one way, but not in another. For example, divergent thinking (coming up with multiple ideas) and convergent thinking (honing in on a best or plausible idea) are two completely different forms of creativity.

Myth: Offer a reward to spur the most creative thinking.

People tend to be most creative when they are doing something because they want to do it; rewards can actually kill creativity. Giving people (even students; after all, many of them are people, too) voice and choice can be an effective way to spur creativity.

Myth: Creativity is effortless.

Yes, Picasso ate a banana before painting, and yes, Albert Einstein was a dreamer with a messy desk. But it was hard work, revision, failure, extensive knowledge, persistence, and innate talent that made them giants.

Myth: We want more creativity in our society and schools.

Society and schools are built on rules, and the average person is trained to value conformity. Many studies show that teachers, workers, and most people have an unconscious bias against creativity.

Say it ain’t so! Isn’t the education sector different, don’t we value creativity in our students?

Not according to Andy Hargreaves, of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

When we faced low student achievement, did we put our efforts into helping teachers innovate and improve? Nope, we came up with rubrics and broke down teaching into prescribed recipes and basic skills that supposedly would produce mediocre student achievement across the board. A low goal we failed to achieve.

And this movement was only stopped by student and parent protests manifested in the opt-out movement.

What’s next?

Myth: Just provide choice to schools, parents, and teachers, and education will get better.

That may be one condition, but Hargreaves points out that it’s clearly not enough. Sometimes, school autonomy doesn’t result in the professionalization of teachers. And sometimes greater teacher autonomy results in lower risk taking, and weak results.

What seems to work is a collective autonomy, or a collaborative environment. While teachers make the majority of their decisions alone for their own classes, the decisions and results are shared and discussed with other teachers.

Let’s dispel with the myths about creativity and forego shortcuts to student achievement. We know how to spur creative learning and teaching in schools. It takes work. It takes autonomy. It takes collaboration. And it’s accomplished through deliberate design around the principles of creativity and community, not standardized pedagogies for easily measurable basic skills.

Bibliography:

Hargreaves, Andy, Blooming Teachers, RSA Journal Issue 1 2016, pp 34-39

Kaufman, James C., The Creative Construct, RSA Journal Issue 1 2016, pp 25-27

Collaborate to Learn and Teach

If we view our jobs as givers of knowledge, then our goal is to present information. This goal is well defined and measurable. “I presented chapter 3 today.” Done.

This doesn’t necessarily lead to students actually learning, though.

If we view our jobs as leading learning, then student, and our own, learning becomes a collaborative activity. And studies show that when learning is collaborative student motivation and achievement soars. But it also becomes more complex, there are myriad obstacles that get in the way of advancing knowledge and skills. Will the students put in the time and effort? Are they paying attention? Do they have the base skills to learn? Can we motivate them? Having the good intentions of becoming co-leaders or co-laborers is just the start. Being a collaborative learning leader required purposeful practice.

Lyn Sharratt and Beate Planche have researched the conditions and skills necessary for collaborative education to drive student learning. The key factors that contribute to effective collaboration:

• A nonjudgmental approach to learning
• Time to work with peers during the day
• Opportunities to practice
• Being a participant in inquiry
• Having an inquiry approach modeled
• Seeing exemplary practice
• Watching a video of a Collaborative Inquiry process in action

Dr. Sharratt and Dr. Planche have written a practical, how-to book on ten themes for achieving proficiency as learning leaders: Leading Collaborative Learning: Empowering Excellence.

They will be discussing four tenets of collaborative learning live at 6:30PM Eastern time on May 9 on Edchat Interactive. You can find out more and register here.

A book or a video can present content. The best educators lead learning.

Sharratt and Planche’s research presents a map to refine our skills as co-leaders and co-learners, which is something no book or video can do.

Games in Education Symposium Wrapup

On August 6-7, 1^st Playable hosted the annual Games in Education Symposium in Albany, NY.

This is a free event for educators to get hands on advice in game based learning, and I was able to attend (and present) on the first day.

Keynote with Peggy Sheehy

The symposium started with Peggy Sheehy keynoting. “There’s a word for most games used in the classroom,” she began, “boring.”

But even bad games can have educational value, and the best game based curricula involves the kids in the design process. Begin with two questions for the kids:

1. How can I best teach this?
2. How do you want to learn it?

Kids today are the future, and the future isn’t sitting in rows taking tests. Schools need to be more like a game; when you get it wrong, you just do it again until you know how to do it right. In school in particular, and in society in general, we pit the seriousness of work against the frivolity of play, when we should be maximizing the outputs of work through deploying fun and engagement of play.

There were tons of breakout sessions, from fun ways to flip your classroom, digital games of Middle School Science Learning, Teaching Computer Science with App Inventor,  and the NY STEAM Girl’s Collaborative.

ARGs with Paul Darvasi and John Fallon

Using the real world as the field of play. Paul Darvasi and John Fallon (the real one, not the guy at
Pearson) have created Alternative Reality Games to teach a variety of subjects. One of the most recent was to teach digital literacy and privacy. Students became immersed in a mystery, trying to figure out who was trying to amass information on US and Canadian citizens in order to control them, and in the process found out just how much information was available about them, how that information could be used against them, and how to protect their identities. Another recent game was the Ward Game, re-enacting the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in the classroom. Their tips:

1. Develop a compelling narrative and story
2. Create emotional connections
3. Repurpose space in the classroom and school and place them into the game (diplomas, newspaper articles, announcements, posters, etc.)
4. Create false documents that look like real ones
5. Use social media, like fictional characters on FB or videos on YouTube
6. Get collaborators who can play characters or face email or social media accounts
7. Use a variety of game mechanics, like quests and missions, timers, puzzles, cyphers, codes
8. The correct solution to a puzzle or quest must be obviously correct to the participants

Game Jam with Games4Ed

After lunch, Kimberly Heftje, Marianne Malmstrom, Steve Isaacs, and I (all of Games4Ed) ran a 45 minute session where participants broke into small groups to create their own game based learning curriculum. Four groups successfully created activities that used existing games to teach science, ELA, and math along with 21^st century skills such as problem solving, planning, and collaboration. All participants will be able to re-enact those processes back in their own schools to expand on that curriculum or to create their own with their fellow educators.

Closing with Marianne Malmstrom

In a closing session for the day, Marianne Malmstrom gave a talk on creating space for student-driven learning.

Are the things we teach and assess in education the most important things for students to learn? If we fill up schools and class time with all the stuff in the standards and assessments, there is no place left for learning, we will be too busy teaching.

As the adults in the room, we are the experts in life; we don’t have to be the experts in content. And bookending Peggy’s comment, Marianne’s conclusion was that if we would just listen to the kids, they’ll tell us how to teach them.

My only regret is that I was not able to stay around for the second day. I heard Steve Isaacs’s keynote was epic!

Coming Up

I am in three speaking proposals for SxSW Edu. Please vote:

• ARG! Let’s Create Games for Learning: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/54757
• Power Up STEM Professional Development with Games: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/56393
• Edu-gaming: money, morals, and games in classrooms: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/53244

We have a great lineup for Edchat Interactive over the next week:

• August 20: Hacking Education with Mark Barnes: http://www.edchatinteractive.org/upcoming-seminars/august-20-hacking-education
• August 25: Games Jams with Matt Farber: http://www.edchatinteractive.org/upcoming-seminars/mattfarberaug2015

Looking to see as many of you as possible at the BMO Back to School Conference in NY September 10 and at Ednet 2015 in Atlanta October 4-6.