Learning Out Loud

Education Reimagined is a Washington D.C.-based group committed to advancing learner-centered education for our nation’s young people. I’ve written about this group before, and they are all good people trying to do good things for kids.

Recently, Education Reimagined released topics for their “Learning Out Loud” series, on-line meetings scheduled throughout the summer designed to get conversations started about timely issues. I’ve participated in some of these conversations in the past. I would say most of them share ideas with little or no action after the conversation.

So instead of participating in this summer’s meetings, I thought I would offer my two cents here, trying to answer this round of ER’s essential questions. Here we go.

Conversation #1 focuses on the following question: How will a community-based ecosystem approach make our young people and communities stronger and more resilient?

Clearly, a community-based ecosystem can provide a clearer strategy and better resources for young people’s learning than most traditional school systems. I think it would be safe to say you could line up the 5-7 adults responsible for leading learning within the school-based ecosystem and find 5-7 community-based individuals as good or better than those presently working for the schools. I even think you could figure out a way for those community-based experts to have the time necessary to work with young learners, sort of like what Google offers its employees when it let’s them spend a certain percentage of time working on their own passions.

I think the roadblock to a scalable community-based ecosystem won’t be expertise or time. It will be school leadership unwilling to share the responsibility of building smarter and stronger young learners with anyone not employed by the school district. Sure, you might find a few schools here and there willing to share learning with their communities, but, by and large, schools and their leadership are trained to think they are the ones, and the only ones, who can teach kids (notice I didn’t say “Get kids to learn in deep and important ways.”)

Conversation #2 takes on this question: What can we learn from families and learners about what they want in their learning environments?

The answer to this question is “A lot.”

I remember Dennis Littky, who co-founded The MET School in Providence, Rhode Island, which started the whole Big Picture Learning movement, sharing a story with a group of traditional school leaders about the first few weeks of “school” at The MET. Dennis asked the group of high school-aged learners what they wanted to learn, thinking everyone would have an answer. Some did, but many had no clue. According to Littky, it seemed like no one had ever asked that question to those kids before. Naysayers told Dennis that it would be forever before some of those kids would answer that question, since most of The MET’s first class were rejects from the Providence public school system. But Dennis and his colleagues proved the naysayers wrong. Within a few days, a week at the most, all those high school rejects were working on learning plans that they designed, with support from interested learning leaders like Dennis LIttky.

But here’s the rub. Most traditional schools never ask this question, “What do you want to learn?”, to their young people. Instead, traditional schools already think they know what kids need to learn and hide behind the mantra “We’re the professionals, so we should know better than the kids.” And that’s a big mistake, because it takes all the negotiation process out of the learning conversation, and makes most learners passive to the district and state about what learning they will engage in.

Conversation #3 will focus on this question: How might we leverage learning from micro-schools and pandemic pods (Ouch! Maybe we could change the name?) for the benefit of young people and their families?

When I was part of a micro-school in the Houston Museum District awhile back, we continually invited school leaders from traditional campuses to visit, watch, and learn strategies they could employ and scale in their schools. Over the 3 years of the pilot, we probably hosted over 100 visits for traditional school principals and teachers. Do you know how many of those school leaders tried to import what we were learning in our micro-school?

One. We had one high school principal, desperate for improved 9^th grade performance in reading and math, who was willing to apply some of what we learned to his campus.

And this is what he did. He allowed 50 9^th graders to choose to work with two learning coaches, one skilled in literacy and the other skilled in problem-solving. He gave those two learning coaches and 50 9^th grade volunteers space and time to work on improving their reading and problem-solving skills, along with other agreed-upon work detailed in each learner’s individual learning plan. At the end of the year, these 50 9^th graders outperformed the rest of the school’s freshmen by nearly 2 years in their reading and math standardized tests.

When I saw these results, I asked the school leader when his district was going to scale up what he was now learning to other district campuses. You know what his answer was? He couldn’t get anyone in the district to get interested in the model. In fact, his direct supervisor wasn’t supportive because she told him that she just didn’t understand it.

If we can’t get traditional systems interested in leveraging what we are learning in such endeavors like micro-schools and learning pods (let’s leave the pandemic out of the title, shall we?), then all we have left are small “boutique” learning programs changing the lives of 100 kids here and there.

So Education Reimagined, please forgive me if I don’t participate in your three summer conversations. You see, I’ve seen this play before, and the final act is always the same. A group of excited, creative learning leaders talking between themselves about the change they are going to make for young learners, while traditional school districts lurk behind the curtain, waiting to pounce and extinguish such exuberance.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow, and there are some doosies. SVB