At the beginning of this school year, Will Richardson, co-founder of The Big Questions Institute, wrote a letter to returning public school educators. Part of that letter can be found below:
“While every school is different, every school shares a common goal: to help children learn.
(If that’s not one of your goals, you may consider unsubscribing to this newsletter below.)
The question is, will you actually be doing that this year? Helping children learn?
The answer depends on how much fidelity you have between your beliefs about learning and your actual practice. So, here’s a framework for grappling with that question.
Step 1: Make sure you have a community-wide, shared definition of learning and how learning happens in human beings. One quick test is to ask a dozen or so random people (teachers, students, parents, etc.) “What does it mean to ‘learn’?” If the answers are incoherent, make it a priority to create a definition that everyone knows, supports, and can discuss. (We can help with that, btw.)
Step 2: Within the community, ask “what are the conditions that are required for us to live the definition of learning that we have created and shared?” Some answers we’ve heard are “passion,” “relevance,” and “agency.” Think about what you need to learn powerfully and deeply in your own life. Share whatever list of conditions you come up with.
Step 3: Use that list to audit your current practices and systems. For instance, if “agency” is a condition for learning as you’ve defined it, begin to take an honest look at just how much agency your students have to pursue learning on their own terms.
Step 4: Make a list of all of the systems and practices that you have in place that don’t support your definition of how children learn or the creation of conditions that support that definition. And be honest. Are 55-minute periods and an eight period day a condition for deep learning? Desks in rows?
Step 5: Work to change or eliminate those things that you are currently doing that don’t comport with the definition of and conditions for learning that you’ve articulated. Obviously, this isn’t going to happen overnight. Create a process and a plan for engaging in new ways of doing things that bring you more coherence. And make a commitment to changing things over time.
No question, we want our students to learn. We want that for ourselves and our colleagues as well. But the truth is that much of what we do in schools is incoherent when it comes to how learning actually happens and, in some cases, actually stands in the way of the deep and powerful learning we want to see happening.
No better time to reflect and reimagine learning in schools than right now.”
I find Will’s letter aspirational and potentially helpful to those who want to see change happen within our public school system.
What bothers me is that Richardson builds his entire argument for “making change happen” on a shaky assumption – that every school shares the common goal of helping children learn.
I worked 25 years in a large, urban school district. I served the district as a teacher, principal, and region superintendent. When I retired from the school district, I led an educational non-profit for 10 years, working with multiple school districts on leadership and classroom practice.
It might have been the state where I worked, but I never thought there were enough adults inside school districts that had as their “north star” the goal of helping children learn. In a good school, maybe 70% of the teachers and administrators fit that mold. In struggling schools, maybe 50%.
At that time, and in that area of the country, too many adults in schools were concerned about test prep, with learning being considered “icing on the cake.” At the same time, too many adults in schools were concerned with their own livelihoods, whether it was how much they were paid, how long they worked, or if they had hall duty.
I laughed when Will asked everyone that didn’t believe in helping kids to learn to unsubscribe from his newsletter. I wonder how many cancellations he had.
Although “Step 1” and “Step 2” seem to be a good place to start (helping a community arrive at a common “learning” definition and the conditions associated with that definition), it’s also an extremely hard thing to accomplish – especially in these times of division and separation.
Even if you’re able to arrive at a definition of learning and what condition are necessary for learning to occur, getting people to stop certain practices to start new ones is challenging at best. Witness what is happening in today’s public education system, after being rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of being shocked into changing their traditional practices, current public schools are more than happy to “return to normal,” focusing again on classroom practices that really haven’t worked for more and more of our young learners over the past century.
In 2005, Fast Company published an article titled “Change or Die.” In the article, the author tells the story of Dr. Edward Miller, then dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Miller told the story of patients whose heart disease was so severe that they underwent bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure. According to Dr. Miller at the time, “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle.” Those patients couldn’t stop practices that were killing them – smoking, drinking, overeating to name a few.
Change is hard and changing a system like our public schools is damn near impossible.
I applaud Will Richardson for trying to coach the traditionalists how to start the change process. His process is spot on.
The problem is most of those teachers and school leaders don’t want to change. Even if they did want to change, they don’t possess the power, discipline, perseverance to get the change done.
I’ll be away for a while, spending time in Vermont. I’ll be back October 7th.
Enjoy fall, if fall is happening where you live. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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