Living on the academic calendar does weird things to your mental model of time, leaving most of us more comfortable wishing people Happy New Year in September than in January. Every step I take outside of the classroom weirds me out even more, as the administrative calendar always runs three to six months ahead of teachers and students. So this week kids and teachers grapple with exams, and my head is swimming with new schedule plans and logistics for the coming year.

I’m enough of a colored-block nerd to like scheduling as a task. It’s a puzzle with intertwined and non-obvious restrictions, one that can reward either balanced or monopoly strategies, and it SEEMS ripe with novel victory conditions. Unlike any of the games linked above, there’s the potential to have a tangible, positive effect on everyone’s day to day school experience.

Larry Cuban posted a great exploration around why school reformers lean so hard on structural solutions like block schedules, enforced common preps, or linked courses, even though most research and observation shows that structural changes alone are rarely effective. I think the answer might be obvious, but it bears repeating — structural changes magnify the speed and power of administrative level decisions.

If a moderate-size school wants to move away from content-based lecture classes and a model founded on student inquiry, then each classroom and and teacher will need to drastically rework their classroom practice. To start this process successfully means building a consensus among the staff, extensive professional development and creating new support structures among the faculty, but at some point the structure of the school and school day will need to change as well.

When these structural changes are made without those other components, without clear vision, faculty preparation and extensive support, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the reforms are markedly less successful. But I can see how well-intentioned people can make psuedo-rational arguments for that sequence of choices.* Changing the structure first shows that the school is “serious” about the new direction, thereby limiting the need for real consensus among the faculty. Switching to 120 minute block periods, the thinking goes, will force teachers to change their approach and seek out new PD resources. Perhaps the schock of a new structure will convince an entrenched teacher to look for their next school, rather than adjust their practice. The negative effects of jumping into structural change are not mysterious or unexpected. Often they’re fully anticipated but recast as motivating challenges, and as such, lackluster preparation becomes an “authentic” sink or swim moment. It’s the EdReform version of “we’ll fix it in post.”

I’m personally guilty of this form of magical thinking, to the extent where even now there’s a part of me that wants to argue “you just have to jump SOMETIME!” It’s true! If the school experience you want to create won’t thrive in 45 minute blocks, then structural changes will need to happen. Opting for smaller piecemeal changes waters down the transformative potential, and perpetuates the message that we should tweak, rather than rethink, our teaching practice.

But using those “big changes” without, or possibly in lieu of, the necessary groundwork is the ultimate sacrifice of image for substance. Instead of embarking from a position of consensus and committed vision, the hardships of a sudden transition reframe the process as a series antagonistic moves on the part of the administration. Now instead of grappling with the “sink or swim” challenges, there’s a host of toxic and damaging behaviors developing. Teachers who feel slighted by the transition will avoid changing their practice out of principle, waiting for the administration to lose focus, change personell, or just concede and move on to the NEXT major reform. The entire experiment enters into the cultural memory of the school as yet another stupid reform plan that “won’t work here.”

Which makes winter a hard time of year. Instead of finessing the details of making that crazy awesome schedule work for fall, administrators need to push deeper into classrooms that are already overtaxed with exams. Playing the schedule puzzle can be fun, but without the cultural backing of classroom teachers willing to change their classroom practice, it’s probably better to stick with the games.

* The malicious interpretation is that reformers and administrators define success in terms of implementations they can list on their resume, rather than the longterm success or health of those schools. Choose your favorite quote from The Wire or The Simpsons to illustrate.

That was the point where I realized that no matter what I was assigned to teach, I was still drawn to new tech and new (to me!) ideas. I realized that I needed to find a job where this hour, and all the others like it, were an essential part of work rather than an indulgence.

Today I’m at Fredericksburg Academy attending EdCamp IS-VA (#edcampisva), and I’m surrounded by people who must have had a similar moment. I keep moving between conversations that would, in isolation, be the hilight of a normal week. Everyone I’ve talked to is eager to share their plans, tools, experience and vision, all on a Saturday afternoon that’s otherwise ripe for napping.

The only other time I’ve driven this far south in VA was for a small Street Fighter tournament; an event which provides some surprising similarities to #edcampisva. Both provide a space and community for folk who constantly pokes at, play with and processes certain ideas. Here the conversations center around technology and reform, about institutional and academic structure, about encouraging authentic learning rather than option selects and character match-ups, but the communities are similar. Both groups full of manic, self-propelled learners, so passionate about their interests that they’ve learned to be cautious and circumspect in most other conversation spaces.

Almost a decade ago I had a choice to view my interests and passions as a distraction to be managed or as a pillar of my career and professional identity. After a few years feeling a bit isolated in Virginia, it’s nice to meet up with a community of other folk who made the same choice.

Why the hell am I so fascinated by text editors? Is this simply tool-obsessed procrastination, akin to the Blackwing nerds who “can’t write with anything else”? Or is there something substantive about choosing good tools?

I wrote all of my posts this month in ia Writer, both on the laptop and on the iPad. I love the look of it, love the sentance by sentance Focus Mode for editing, and the fullscreen mode is a decent substitute for Writeroom. Clearly the finger-to-key experience isn’t substantively different than most other editors, but I found some benefit in having a dedicated tool for just blog writing.

But it’s never enough. When I needed critiques and revision, I pasted the full text into stypi. I still needed to paste into the WordPress client to add links, media and then finally post.

In my head I’m still dreaming of a smooth solution for all of that. (Maybe a Markdown plugin for WordPress?) But I feel like I’m at a comfortable equilibrium with this set of tools. At least until another new text editor shows up on O’Reilly Radar.

There was a strong narrative in the early days of blogging that suggested that if you approached the Internet with clear prose and an honest heart that you’d be able to blog your way to a better life. You can see versions of this in the Dooce / Wil Wheaton / Chris Hardwick story, and it’s still vibrant within the EdBlog community. Just start writing, just start Tweeting, just form a PLN, and The New Wonderful will invade your teaching life. Put your practice online and you’ll be rewarded with a new community, new friends, a new school or new job.

This narrative is magical thinking to the core, and I should reject it outright. “Clearly,” says rational brain, “those stories say far more about the talent of those individuals, not some universal power of blogging. Suggesting otherwise is nothing but hucksterism and snake-oil.”

That’s when the black dog, carrying our self-doubt and insecurity, arrives. “It’s not like you’re talented. If you started writing, it’d just be a big signpost of how inadequate you are, strobing in neon every day that your life fails to change. What do you have that’s worth sharing? Who wants to read a math teacher’s writing?”

One of the reasons I hold onto that narrative of transformation, and even propagate it in my own small way, is that I know the destructive power of those internal voices. I know the isolation of a being the last car out of the faculty parking lot. I know the bleak view from age 25, imagining a 35 year career dancing through the same soul crushing machinery. If the blog-salvation narrative is a fantasy, it’s necessary one.

But even without the intervention of the EdBlog VALIS, even with page-views measured in single digits, writing changes people. It’s not guaranteed to change you into Dan Meyer, but it will change you into a different and better version of yourself; the version that writes and keeps writing. Every post is a stab at the black dog Every post transforms the stuff you think into what you say, and that’s immeasurably closer to being what you teach and live.

Did Dan Meyer win the blog lottery? Did Wheaton or Dooce? Maybe so, but as it turns out, the math on this lottery is encouraging. Instead of a regressive tax, it doles out small but steady payments to everyone who plays, including a clearer head and more cogent arguments. It does eat time, but it returns a trickle of new relationships centered around those ideas you cared about enough to blog about.

So hooray for November! See you all tomorrow.

Keeping up with my disclaimers, I’m going to try to pick this apart using an version of the high school I attended, rather than drawing any experience or anecdotes from schools I’ve taught in. I attended a moderately sized wealthy suburban high school that was largely class-stratified, using various combinations Gifted/Honors/AP tracking to build non-overlapping social strata. As it existed in 199X, it was, by most public measures, a successful school. For this discussion, I’m going to refine it further into something closer to the school I experienced. That imaginary school had a graduation and 4 year college attendance rate near 100%. Although the socio-economic signifiers for this population are completely screwed and non-representative, it’s a useful thought exercise to think about what school behaviors contributed to this success.

My only answer, the answer that has shaped my approach to teaching for the last decade, is that a majority adults in the community were open and welcoming to students. Every teacher would reach out to a student that they felt an affinity for, or one who they saw in need, or one to showed promise and interest in their discipline. While there’s no way that every teacher can form a meaningful positive connection with every one of their students, but the dream of this approach is that the combined outreach of all the adults can somehow reach every student.

The reality is that the boundaries of this imaginary school precisely map where that dream fails. “Successful” students had enough sustaining, positive relationships with school-adults to outweigh or outnumber the interest-sapping, humiliating, crushingly negative experiences of adolescence, negative experiences that came from inside and outside school. “Unsuccessful” students didn’t have enough, and got pulled under or pushed away by the negative forces.

The “successful” student population isn’t homogenous, all living lives of quiet privilege and moving towards graduation on autopilot. Many students needed those relationships, needed the support from a teacher or coach, from the communities formed in a photo labs and practice rooms, to bind the school experience to their developing “real” selves.

OK, that got a bit flowery. Let me bring it back to failure.

I really do believe that enduring communities and relationships between diverse groups of students and adults is the strongest argument for the continuation of school in any form my parents would recognize. I think even in our successful schools, these relationships are the primary driver of baseline success, poorly quantified in attendance, graduation, and college attendance rates. These relationships are also at the heart of most stories of personal or institutional excellence.

From this perspective, I see a truth that, strangely, encourages me about school reform. Most of what students and teachers are engaged in throughout the day does nothing to encourage these relationships, and is often actively detrimental to them. It’s a testament to teachers’ commitment to students that these relationships form in spite of the bureaucratic hamster wheel of the academic calendar. We can experiment with new structures that actively encourage these relationships, look for new ways to give students more time and more avenues to connect with a school community ready to support them.

This is where I’m looking for new ways to “fail cheaply.” Ways to put committed teachers into contact with students in new areas and build relationships that sustain kids for a lifetime.

A small Twitter exchange with @dontworryteach reminded me despite the frustration, there is a real benefit to this interminable process. It’s the process of working the idea into actual sentances that exposes all the hand-wavey gaps that I narrate over. Years of meetings that function on constant interruption, half-statement and “yadda yadda” sentence completion have turned me into a lazy speaker. Taking that mush and building something solid, one word at a time, is where my head fluff turns into something moderately cogent.

The next logical step is to plan ahead and leave time for actual revision.

I’m opting for the discussion post, which is a bit laughable for the developing blog. But, whatever. Operate as if you’re living the life you dream of. We are what we pretend to be.**

The Seth Godin / Web2.0 / Startup culture suggests that to disrupt an excisting system, the innvoater has to fail early and fail often. The connectivity and data sensitivity of the web should give us the ability to extract the maximum ammount of data from each failed product, and then pivot from the results and try again.

At the same time, districts and schools across the country are engaged in a furious battle through legislation and litigation, to avoid or remove a designation of “failing” from their institutions. It’s tempting to say that “failure” matters more to schools than it does to startups, but that does a huge disservice to the passion and desperation that entrepreneurs carry with them every day.

Maybe the more important distinction one of scale. What would it mean to fail cheaply in a K12 academic setting? What goals can we set for our students and our communities that are so clearly, overwhelmingly important that we’re willing to accept and learn from repeated, ongoing “cheap” fails?

*

**Well, looky here! I do come stocked with aphorisms!

Obviously, right? That’s why I have a space on the school’s wiki where I make posts directed at kids and faculty. We all know the hassle that erupts when someone in the community takes any kind of comment from a particular teacher and generalizes it to the entire grade, division, school, district, ad nauseum. Any form of public speech brings those risks. Public, linkable writing is N-times more dangerous, and god-forbid something as impromptu as Twitter. All it takes is one teacher making an off-the-cuff reply to a snarky blog post and . . .wait, maybe we better rethink this positive social media policy again. Are we sure we want to do this?

While I recognize the need for disclaimer language, it stirs up a bunch of ornery in me. As halting and obscure as my writing may be, it’s my practice and I’m sticking by it. There are days when I’m actually proud of it. So while I recognize the systemic and legal necessity of providing the institution distance from each employee, I hate having to wave that flag myself. My writing doesn’t reflect the views of my employer, but more often than not it does reflect the views of this employee.

So, let’s disclaim. The words posted here come from an individual, not an organization. When I write about my hope for drastic changes to the K-12 classroom space, that does not reflect the current or immediate future policies of the school. When I discuss the central role of TMBG in the development of curious adolescents, I’m speaking from personal belief and not reflecting the curriculum maps of the school. The school does not operate a Writer’s Guild in WoW. The school does not have “productive farting around online” as an academic standard.

I started thinking about a positive frame for teachers and social media when I realized how skittish I was when positing about topics and ideas that are central to any meaningful discussion of K-12 ed. The direct consequence of a policy change should be that teachers weel empowered to write and imagine in public, even if those ideas move beyond the current operation of their current school. The secondary, and hopefully transformative, effect is that the school could see the huge reach and potential of their faculty, see the dreams that exist well outside 45-minute chunks of isolated content. Encouraging faculty to express their practice, pedagogy and experience means that those traits are now visible and available to the whole community!

I’ve seen the amazing outcomes from a small cadre of teachers blogging and thinking in concert. I’m twitterpated about the potential for a sizable community within a single school, providing meaningful channels of communication between distant grades and departments. If the benefit from that open engagement doesn’t grossly outweigh the downsides, then I think there’s a much deeper problem.

So, here’s the rest of the backwards story. This online course is built around materials from Nick Parlante‘s (yes, Coding Bat and Nifty Assignment Nick Parlante) semester long course. You can sign up now, and the class itself launches in February.

Last year when I taught a semester long CS elective, I found myself doing much the same thing. Trying to meet the needs of students with a huge range of experience and skill levels, I churned through hundreds of CS resources. Out of this hodgepodge stew, Coding Bat and the in-browser MediaComp exercises were clear standouts. Personally, I’m excited to revist those ideas in a cohesive curricular context.

But in our short Thanksgiving week, I had almost a dozen conversations with middle and highschool students asking about “how to learn code.” Normally I point them to the vast resources of the web and either CodingBat or Project Euler as a motiviating frame (or Python the Hard Way if they aren’t looking for motivation). This week I mentioned the cs-101 class, and then recieved a trickle of emails from students after they signed up.

So now, instead of jamming a full hour class (on the wrong campus!) into my schedule, and asking students to do the same, I find that I have a similar sized group looking to tackle similar material outside of the school day. They’re forming Wiggo and Google+ groups already, swapping resources and tips for getting started.

The combination of Stanford’s name and the promise of a fixed schedule has somehow created a new course, and a new type of classroom, for our school. I couldn’t be more excited.

Recently I’ve been wondering about how teachers learn and the effects of that unexamined practice. Teaching to our own personal learning style is one of the classic and cardinal teacher sins, and exposing that unspoken practice was one of the core goals of curriculum differentiation. How did that all work out where you are?

I wonder if it’s reasonable to expect teachers to approach their students, subjects and curriculum in a mode that’s completely distinct from their own learning experiences. Everyone seems to have a story about some infamous PD about differentiation or learning styles that’s presented as a time-crunched one-to-many lecture with xeroxed binders of support materials. Maybe the better PD option is to push teachers into new and unfamiliar learning experiences of their own, rather than try to describe the experience.

This thought haunts me when I watch teachers jump in to the “flipped classroom” process without any experience learning in a blended or distributed environment. I know that I’ve gained far more insight about the mechanics of teaching and learning in that new mode while following MIT’s Open Courseware Python material than I did from sampling Kahn Academy videos for familiar math skills. When I’m watching someone describe how to factor polynomials, I’m still living in my teacher brain, looking at the clarity or accuracy of particular statements, but I’m hardly invested in the process.. When I’m actually learning something new, an unclear phrase can destroy an evening! How can teachers judge the strength or effectiveness of their new practice without similar personal learning experiences on which to draw?

As a meta-teacher I’m looking for ways to make this process a tangible part of our school’s academic culture. As we move more and more of our learning resources into the public space, I want our faculty to enlist as active students in courses outside their departments and curricular comfort zones. Let’s make grappling with an alien set of ideas, with only a set of videos and Google Hangout as support, a part of every adult’s learning experience as well.

Maybe its just the bleak skies of November, or maybe it’s just a moment on the cyclical emotional calendar of the school year, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re coming closer and closer to a radical shift in how we practice and enact school. More learning, less schooliness.

* Then again, I distrust oppositional binaries.

On the drive home, a 5th grade teacher from my school, who had dropped by my session out of sheer polietness, said that she’d like to try implementing something like that in her class.

Crap. Now I have to actually support my progressive ed fantasy.

Wait a second, this is phenomonal. Now I actually get to live my progressive ed fantasy!

Over the last week, we introduced the process to the second batch of 5th graders. The hallways have been buzzing with crazy talk about a hundred ideas that have NOTHING to do with 5th grade curriculum or content, but everything to do with young people coming to grips with how they learn.

20% is not a project in the traditional sense. There is no due date, no mandatory subject matter, and there is no fixed set of required materials or tools. The overarching goal of the process is to inoculate in these enthusiastic and imaginative 5th graders the ability to transform an “this is cool” type of interest into an ongoing, productive passion.

This year, those initial interests range from WW2 battlefied tactics to clothing and fashion in colonial America to photography to video games and beyond. Yes, these are all impossibly broad and worryingly vauge. Have you talked to a 10yo recently? That’s how they see the world!

In the 20% classroom time and on the class wiki we’re trying to model how to DOCUMENT their developing interests. This is not a neat and orderly process for any student. They’re engaged in a constant back and forth conversation, digging deeper into WHAT they find fascinating and using specific questions to break apart the Big Idea into chunks that are manageably complex but still interesting. The core task of 20% is to have 5th graders make a “public” record of how they deal with all these smaller questions that lurk inside big ideas. It’s, sadly, not actually public becuase we haven’t decided how to handle student exposure to the real internet yet, but it’s open internally to all students and faculty. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

As a specific example, I’ll try to describe my experience with two 10-year old boys on Friday. During the class time, they had a shared word processing document open on each of their laptops, with a WW2 history/picture open between them. In 5th grade terms they were “writing a book,” which from an adult vantage point looked far more like a book report. They were taking a Big Idea that they liked and smushing it to fit a school-shaped hole. What they were doing didn’t have much appeal for them, but it seemed like the best way to have the teachers let them continue thinking and reading about the things they liked.

Through some pointed questioning, I pushed them to identify WHAT they found engaging about the subject. When they settled on machines, materials, and tactics, I suggested that they look for a way to focus on that aspect. (Newsflash! Boys like tanks!)

One of them suggested making a model battlefield, which seems like a better match for their interests than writing a book report. But despite their enthusiasm, they were really hesitant to embrace the idea. Surley this was just some trick and the teacher was going to pull some multiple choice quiz out in a few minutes. They couldn’t actually make building models their project, right?

Why not? There’s a huge number of open questions – which theater? which timeframe? which battle? what scale – both in terms of inches and in terms of military abstraction (unit vs. division vs battalion) ? What kind of material for the terrain? Commercial models? Papercraft? 3D printed?

While they explore these more material and practical concerns, I’m certain they’ll wind up with an equivalent set of historical concerns. Who were the men who fought and died here? What was the lasting impact of this battle/campaign on the region and civilan population? What makes this battle/campaign “important”? This investigation process, moving from tangible goal to research to new questions and back again, is the heart of 20%.

Even though they’re awash in questions, one of the core components of the 20% program is that you should always been making something. For 5th graders and adults alike, it’s often difficult to separate the idea of your final project and end-goal, the thing you *really* want to be making, from the process that it will take to reach that goal and all the things you can make along the way. For young people with no familiarity with participatory net culture, or even personal journaling outside of the diary/confessional mode, this is a huge cultural and developmental leap. In the minds of these two boys, their elaborate 4 meter square perfectly scaled model will just materialize one afternoon.

So I’m trying to model as I teach, showing that what we build along the way can often have as much importance as what the end product. For me, this gets a bit complicated. I want to see school culture shaped around student’s personal and individual interests. In order for that to happen, everyone will need to know how to develop an idea from the first inklings of “I think I kinda like this” into a self-documenting exploration. If you write it, it could be on the web. If you said it, it could be a video on the web. If you like a picture, like it on a public Flickr album. Make a trail of your thoughts and interests for your own benefit, but put it in (semi)public just to see what happens.

So, here’s some more documentation of my process to help kids become better explorers and documentarians of their own learning process. Yeah, it’s a bit meta. Welcome to my life.

That simple idea simultaneously explains why I had the amazing opportunity to start teaching at 22, and strikes at the core of my concerns about middle school.

By way of background, the mailing list is one dedicated to CS teachers, specifically to ones looking for something other than AP prep support. The community is filled with K-12 teachers, university academics and gifted programmers (not mutually exclusive sets!), many of who share a deep concern that poorly conceived and inexpertly taught Intro CS courses do lasting damage to students’ enthusiasm and practice. As in many academic community, this community generally shares a belief that teaching an Intro course places huge demands on a teacher’s subject matter expertise, often in more subtle ways than advanced courses.

So there’s a real concern about teachers who just wing it, who run 30 pages ahead of their students in the textbook. In my head, it will always be the Rudy Huxtable Maneuver

This concern is at the heart of the Common Core standards, and at the heart of every state’s “well-qualified” teacher programs. For years it was my primary selling point as an educator – “Choose me! I’ve got enough grounding in group theory that I won’t make a hash of the arithmetic properties!” I don’t think I would have ever passed the Wu-mustard, but it was a good differentiator at the time.

I love experts. I think the recipe for a great content teacher is someone who ties deep subject knowledge to solid pedagogy and reflective practice. But I’m less sure that every teacher in a student’s life needs to be that pillar of content knowledge, or that students should access the teachers primarily through the lens of that subject.

In a school where every adult is an expert in one singular thing, where do students learn how to begin? Great coaches can encourage and train novice athletes, but their advice doesn’t reach kids who don’t see themselves as athletes. Subject expert teachers contribute to the Captain Planet / Bionic 6 / My Little Pony / Thundercats / Smurfs influenced, Orville Reddenbacher articulated disease at the heart of adolescence. “Do one thing, and do it better than anyone.” (Yes, I’ve complained about this before). That’s nice when you’re an old man with a popcorn popper. It’s a craptastic slogan when you’re 12 and feel alternately good at four things or horrible at EVERYTHING.

It may be impossible to *teach* something you don’t know, but it’s surprisingly easy to start learning something.

When I teach programming to 5th graders, I feel pretty confident being the expert. In my high school class, I’m happy to be a peer with a slightly richer resource base. I may feel a bit embarrassed when I drop syntax or define my data model badly, but making those mistakes on the board or in IRC seem important to me. How do you learn how dig out from under your mistakes? Here, let me show you! There’s a power in failing, honestly and openly failing, in front of students.

Middle school students in particular could use a lot more exposure to adults struggling to master new skills, especially skills that are within the reach of the students themselves. I’ll walk my pink ukulele into our student guitar club, knowing that my half dozen chords can’t keep up with anyone in the room. I’d love to see more language and history teachers struggling with math homework, math teachers fumbling with French pronunciation. Librarians on the LAX field! Coaches using the centrifuge!

Students definitely need access to experts. They need accessible and dependable sources for far-sighted advice and guidance about every subject. But they also need adults to be their peers in being beginners. They need to see models of enthusiasm in the face of failure, of perseverance to the idea of learning that’s not coerced by a grade. They need coaches and mentors that aren’t experts to stand alongside them through the daily struggles of learning.

But I’m going to run an experiment anyway and try to autopost at noon instead of hitting send when I finish writing. Which would be, you know, now. Now-ish.

Back to learning No Surprises on the pink ukulele.

This might just be rose-tinted glasses, but it was a good draft. Then we sent it to the lawyers, and it came back looking like every other AUP I’ve ever read.

We won something in that first draft, however unexpected. It gave us a set of statements that had the backing of teachers and admin, that set out our goals for the program and dreams for student use of the tools in positive and affirming terms. When I need to prepare something for parents, that’s the language I reach for. When I need to speak to students about any behavior problem, I reach for those statements along with our mission statement rather than the AUP. Students don’t need their nose showed in EXA-CTLY what they did wrong. They need to hear support and positive expectations from the adults in their community.

It’s that same hope that’s fueling my search for positive pro-social language regarding blogging and social media for our faculty handbook. I’ve been looking for other schools’ Social Media policy (if they have one), and what I’ve seen looks a lot like AUPs. There’s an exhaustive list of what sort of posting can get you in trouble. There’s some discussion of what kind of trouble you can get in.

I know how that affects teachers who aren’t yet involved with any PLN-style experience. They listen to the nerd encouraging them to use that stupid “what I had for breakfast” service, telling them to “waste” hours reading other blogs, and spend more hours writing. . . writing what exactly? “What do I have that’s worth writing about?”

Well, what they have, what we all have, is our classroom practice, and our constant on-going reflection. What we have is the universe of nuance and insight that spending a day in the classroom offers. What we have is the chance to lock in some of those crystal clear and confusing moments, before the rising tide of busy yanks them away again. What they have is the opportunity to define themselves and their teaching practice, to share the wisdom from a long and engaged career, or to establish their identity as a collaborative professional identity on a global stage.

Oh, but what does the faculty handbook say? To expect disciplinary action if you link to the school’s website from a personal blog.

I know why we have lawyers. I know why independent schools need huge handbooks full of every anticipated HR crisis. But to have JUST those things is to define avoiding a crisis as success. It’s building a school with an evacuation plan but without a mission or curriculum.

Any statement about our 1:1 program should encourage students. We’re providing you with these resources because we think that they’re the essential foundation for passionate and engaged living across all interests, hobbies, and disciplines.
We provide you these tools because we believe that if you use them hard, then you’ll become a better and happier version of yourself.
Even if you make mistakes, we’ll support you and work with you because we believe in the power and importance of those experiences.

Don’t our faculty deserve the same level of encouragement?

But several times in the last few weeks, I’ve been the in the midst of a sentence and realized that it had a “21st Century Skills” shaped hole lurking in the back half. That particular phrase is a poor choice for all the reasons Jeff detailed in 2008, but having a shorthand for the values and vision that I’m working towards is incredibly handy.

This is the impulse that gives rise to the flood of buzzwords and program names that haunt edtech. Given enough time, most edtech people will delude themselves in the same way, like coders who think that this time they can build the One True Language. Sometimes this means writing a book to unpack the vision of their own pet mnemonic, but post educators just use the phrase because it’s the phrase people use. Global slogans are poor tools for affecting change in small communities.

On the flip side, I’ve had the privilege of working with schools that derive incredible value from their mission and vision statements, even the seemingly vague ones. My favorite is from The Hamlin School in San Francisco:

Educating girls and young women to meet the challenges of their time.

Boom.

I mean, can you top that? It’s certainly not a strategic plan, but it does present the school community with some clear action items.
First: What are the most pressing challenges facing young women?

Second: Will our actions help educate and prepare our students to meet them?

Since one of the hardest things that a K-12 institution must do is decide what not to take into your mission, this serves as powerful and clarifying filter.

Which brings me back to my sentences with holes in them. Not only do I need a shorthand phrase for conversational use, but I need one that has specific and immediate relevance for everyone in our school community. As a school, we need a common image of an academic experience built around passion, inquiry and choice looks like.

Fortunately, we happen to have about 20 perfect choices wandering around our school everyday. Working at a JK-12 school means I pass members of the graduating class of 2025* every morning at carpool, and every afternoon during lunch.

So that’s my new collaborative challenge for every member of the faculty and staff at our school.

What does X look like for the class of 2025?

This question is my filter when looking at curricular changes, at new edtech tools, at new hardware or at new policies. What does this look like for the class of 2025? The goal is not to build that environment out of 2011 materials, or to reject anything that doesn’t reach those heights. Rather, it’s a basic compass reading. If our vision for 2025 doesn’t include age-segregated hour-long silos of content delivery, then chocies made to support that practice probably aren’t a good choice for us now.

In this light, I find some good reasons to support our teachers in their move towards flipped classrooms and the like. I certainly think that 2025 will have a lot more distributed and personalized tools for content delivery. But that’s a starting point, not a destination. Now let’s get those videos out onto the real web, for the whole world to view, critique and remix. Let’s pull apart the testing and evaluation structure and see what’s at the meaningful core of those activities. Because there’s a world of changes we need to make, and no matter how much we’d like, members of the class of 2025 have birthdays all the time!

Sometimes they bring me a cupcake.