[TEDxFrontRange]
[Generations: Wonder + Wisdom]
(Applause)
So I really don't like speaking at large groups,
even though I've been doing it for almost 30 years
since the classroom of 70 kids
in the civil war in Liberia
The truth is, what I prefer is speaking with large groups,
structuring some opportunities for us to think together,
or a word "participation".
So I'd like to spend our 10 minutes together,
thinking about what could happen if more of us peek into the windows
of our school buildings,
or better yet if more of our students
actually spend more time peeking out of them.
Are you prepared for that?
I'd like to use a technique as we talk about this issue
called "Fist to Five".
So you can participate with me as we talk.
Basically, if I ask a question
you raise a fist in the air at me.
I know, you are not very comfortable.
But if you give me a high five, that's great
we've got some agreement.
Any number in between is okay,
also a two a four
just so long as it's not that one, okay?
Let's keep it civil.
So let's try.
Are you prepared?
"Fist to Five".
Great. Okay.
If you'd rather participate than be spoken at,
don't you think that's true
for the students who sit in our classrooms day in and day out?
Your children really need to be prepared to be participate.
How many of you know what would take
to prepare children for the mid 21st century?
"Fist to Five"
What do you think?
How many of you would know?
And while asking yourself that question,
did you stop to think they are already two decades into the 21st century?
So that maybe the question ought to be,
Why are we trying to prepare kids for the only century
every single one of them has ever known?
I think the answer of that question
is because our generation
is not terribly comfortable with the 21st century
And so we try to make it feel more and more
like the 20th century that we knew.
And we certainly do that in education for the last 30 years of that longer
Teachers have been asked,
or more often tasked to "design with an end in mind".
And that's a very famous phrase in education.
What it means that somebody comes up with "standards",
and asked teachers to teach them
and then tasked them
so that we know what students know what unable to do.
Now the decision to do that is from a single perspective in our schools
that would be adults.
Although it might be better to say it's from some adults in our governments
and our corporate boardrooms.
Standards are necessary in teaching.
I'm not advocating doing away with the standards.
But they are really not "why" I teach,
and they are really not "what" most of our students
come into the building every morning to learn.
Teaching and assessing those standards is a decision
that comes from thinking about what adults should do,
in order to make sure adults are getting it right.
Not what kids should do.
And it's really more about management perspective
than it is a perspective that's focus on the learners.
So you might also call it,
a POLICY question.
And I think from years of doing this work,
the education policy only gets really interesting
if we focus on the learners
and the "what" and the "why" questions that they have,
rather than the "how" questions for adults.
So, I'm thinking kind of like that opportunity
Fist to Five?
Do you wanna talk about "what" and "why"?
Am I seeing lots of fives? Good.
When we admit the "what" and "why",
I think there are two perspectives that come up.
This is the first one. Authenticity.
Now authenticity, I think it comes naturally from people
who want to hire our students,
who want to know our kids understand the real world
but parents are increasingly asking authenticity
and so are our students.
Authenticity is basically what everyone wants in education,
even those who wrote the standards.
After all those common core standards here are about
they were written to prepare kids for collage or career after school
so that they must be pretty authentic
except that if we spend so much time teaching and testing them
the students never get to use them after school,
until after school.
When we wait until after school for that,
then we are missing the point
that we adults adopted in the first place,
because we thought they would be relevant.
Relevance is the second question I think we have to consider.
Relevance is different from authenticity
because it's not an end teachers can hold in mind.
Students in my room write about that?
Fist to Five? What do you think?
Can teachers know what's relevant to you?
Relevance is something that is in students' minds.
And if we are going to understand that,
students need to participate in conversations with their teachers.
Sometimes in conversations with their community,
like you see here,
and sometimes even getting teachers in their community to talk to each other
so that we know what's relevant
for our students.
Now education like that is about more than subjects.
It's about participation,
and empowerment.
And I think it's really good
because that's kind of why we created public schools in the first place.
So students could be prepared not just for collage and career,
but for life in our society.
And in our society,
we take it as a given that they are certain big standards
that we get to work with but that we try to use those standards
to do something that is relevant for everyone.
This is America. You are with me on that, right?
Fist to Five?
We don't mandate one answer
that everybody is supposed to follow, right?
Okay.
So that's why I think that if we think about education in this way
we realize that the standards are not the end in mind,
but it means to be end in mind.
And that's important because students live in a new culture of leaning
The phrase comes from Dagg Thomas and John Seely Brown in Stanford
this graphic comes from a workshop I gave to teachers in North Carolina last year
Students are now surrounded by enormous learning opportunities
that go far beyond the school walls
And as a result, a lot of them are starting to check out of school
They may not do the work, or they may just do the work for a grade,
and neither of those is a good decision,
when it comes to participate in our society.
But I think what they are telling us as a generation
is there not very wild about the decision
that we are making about education in this society, either.
So I think we have to ask ourselves.
What can we do to help this generation sees those opportunities
that are around them right now and this new culture of leaning,
while leaning about what previous generation instead,
when they had their chance.
And as an answer to that questions,
using schools to mandate a single answer for all kids
through standards
is not going to be able to work.
It's just simply not complex enough.
Holding an end in mind, posting in our world,
and testing it 50 days an year,
is not going to work.
And that's why I think the complexity is the third thing
we really have to think about.
Now complexity is very different from rigor
a phrase you hear a lot about it in schools.
Rigor is how hard something is.
Complexity is what results
when students take something they are leaning,
try to apply it to a challenge,
and then try to learn from that experience
and because that has those phases
it's much more dynamic and individualized
and that means we are no longer going to be able to test
for a single answer with what students do
with those standards.
We are going to have to look at what students do
as a whole community
and give them some advice
about "why" and "what" they are contributing
is for a good society,
or maybe some coaching.
Some of the most amazing programs that I had a chance to work
within the last ten years
are doing exactly this:
They are doing away with the tests whether pencils or paper,
or on computers,
and they are replacing assessment with opportunities
for kids to go out to their community
and use their learning for a credit.
Do they sometimes make mistakes when they do that?
Absolutely.
How many of you have made a mistake at work in the last month?
Fist to Five, fist being none, five being, yeah, Ok.
There are really exciting thing about these kids?
Is it the often do better in the world of work
than we do as adults?
Precisely because they've not been prepared for it.
It's a lot easier to think outside
that box that we always talk about
when you weren't told it was there in the first place.
So I think we need to change our invitation
to students when they come to school
We need to stop asking and testing whether they prepared
We need to start inviting them by saying,
"What would you like to do with the learning we have to offer?"
And then we need to empower them to do it,
This should be our end in mind,
and this should be our policy.
And the great thing is
that no one in this room has to wait for a policy maker to mandate it.
You can get involved tomorrow.
By working with a teacher to help them design
an authentic and meaningful project
or by serving as a mentor to a child
who can't quite figure out the way they make it in school
but might really be able to make it outside of the box in life
Would you like that opportunity?
Fist to Five?
That's pretty good.
Because that's my idea worth spreading
And I would love to live in the world
that I think we can build
if we spread it together.
(Applause)