Flickr: Scratchpost

If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution?

“Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,” said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school Science Leadership Academy for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at SXSWEdu last week.

1.   BE FLEXIBLE.
The less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students’ voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning. But that requires a flexible mindset on the part of the teacher. “That’s a scary proposition for teachers,” Laufenberg said. “‘What do you mean I’m going to have 60 kids doing 60 different projects,’ teachers might say. But that’s exactly the way for kids to do interesting, high-end work that they’re invested in.”

Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. She finally relented — with the caveat that they not resort to cliches. In turn, the students turned in one of the best video projects she’d ever seen: a well-produced, polished video about Americans’ dependence on pharmaceutical drugs that was dense with facts backed up by students’ research. “And I almost killed this project,” she said. “There are vastly creative minds that are capable of doing intensely wonderful things with their learning but often we don’t let that live and breathe. Thankfully I got out of their way and let them do the work they were capable of.”

2.   FOSTER INQUIRY BY SCAFFOLDING CURIOSITY.
Teachers always come up to Laufenberg wanting to learn more about her progressive pedagogy — and they invariably ask, “But when do you just tell them things? Don’t you have to just tell them sometimes?”

Laufenberg’s answer: Get them curious enough in the subject to do research on their own.
“Kids don’t come to class just burning to know about the War of 1812,” she said. “And you just saying they have to know the facts is not good enough. But here’s your chance to bring them along as a person and get them to learn about it.”

For example, in exploring the subject of American identity with her history students, Laufenberg asked them to come up with words that convey to them the abstract idea of America, or what it means to be American. Many of her students came up with the words “greedy” and “ignorant” — a trend she saw echoed throughout many of her classes during her years teaching at SLA. “I got a clear vision of where my students were,” she said.

She asked her students to find images that epitomized America, then asked them to talk about their ideas with their peers, studying data about immigration, taking the American citizenship test themselves (most received an average score of 3, across the board regardless of age), so they could understand the processes and become personally invested in the subject.

“Rather than saying, ‘We’re going to study immigration,’ I took them through a process where they become interested in it themselves,” she said.

3.  DESIGN ARCHITECTURE FOR PARTICIPATION.
“There are so many ways that kids can be active in their learning, beyond the standard call-and-respond business,” Laufenberg said. It may be hard to do with 140 students, but if you consider all the available tools at your disposal, ideas can start to take shape.

Example: Laufenberg asked her students to watch President Obama’s State of the Union address and respond to what they watched and heard. She gave her students the option to either post comments on Twitter (fully public), Facebook (semi-public), Moodle (walled garden) or for low-tech participants, play Bingo with key words the students anticipated they might hear.

Though some goofed around a bit with comments (“Our school is so cool, we’re tweeting the State of the Union”), at the end of the speech, students had posted a total of 438 tweets and 18 pages of Moodle chat. (Interestingly, no one went on Facebook, though she had set up a separate conversation on the school’s Facebook page.)

Laufenberg was not surprised with the high quality of responses she saw from her students. “Does Obama have the power to reform and adjust how the other branches work?” one student tweeted. “He’s not touching on Iran issue… not a good sign,” another posted. “High school dropout laws, rebuilding jobs in our country, and more equipment in schools… me gusta,” wrote yet another.

“I could have them face off against any pundit the next day,” she said. “They understood it. None of it went over their head — they were making meaning of it. They were offering their own opinions, participating in the conversation.”

Laufenberg used every tool she had at her disposal as a framework for her students to build their learning around.

4. TEACHERS TEACH KIDS, NOT SUBJECTS.
As most teachers know, when students recognize that teachers are personally invested in their success, they do better, and that affirmation of students’ disposition can help students achieve more. “You can’t ask kids to take risks if they don’t trust that you care about them,” Laufenberg said.

5. PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING.
During the weeks and months that led up to the election, Laufenberg’s students got into the neighborhoods and brought back stories from voters at the polls. Though they didn’t always feel comfortable asking strangers questions, they went ahead with their assignments anyway. “If none of it is ever real to them, if it’s only in books, it lacks interest,” she said. “They want to do real stuff, but we are perpetually underestimating what kids can do.”

6. EMBRACE FAILURE.
Laufenberg made a point of defining the difference between “blameworthy” and “praiseworthy” failure. Blameworthy failure is when the student just decided not to participate in a project. But praiseworthy failure is quite different: kids take risks and experiments knowing that they might not get it right the first time.

“No one talks about cancer research as blameworthy failure,” she said. “We don’t expect a five-year-old to be able to shoot free-throws immediately. It’s a process, and we value it in other things, but not when it comes to school. Kids are not coming in as perfect little products or machines — they’re human beings in the process of becoming.”

In the engineering industry, for example, there are “failure festivals” and “failure reports” during which engineers discuss the processes they’ve tried that didn’t work. “We need to have kids do that with their own learning,” she said. “Be self-aware enough to do something with that information.”

7. DON’T BE BORING.
“I always told my kids, if I got boring, they should let me know, and if they got boring, I’d let them know,” Laufenberg said. But here’s the twist: kids may actually choose boring because it’s easier, it’s known, it’s quantifiable. “They know what they need to do to get a good score,” she said. When it’s not boring, when the answer is not predictable, that’s when kids are actually challenged more.

8. FOSTER JOY.
For a government history teacher, this last directive has been a tall order. But Laufenberg made a point of trying to create a space where her students were valued, where creativity was paramount, and their voices were allowed to shine through.

“It’s incredibly taxing work, but one of the most exciting and meaningful ways to create transformative spaces,” she said.

Above all, what she wants to instill in her students is a sense of self-sufficiency.

“If by the end of the year, they still need me, I haven’t done my job,” she said. “I’m not coming with them to college. They have to be self-driven, independent thinkers.”

Watch Laufenberg’s fascinating TED Talk “How to Learn? From Mistakes.”

For many schools across the country, today marks the first day of a new year. In addition to thinking about tools that help boost educators’ teaching practice, this moment might be a good time to pull back and think about some big-picture ideals, too. Here are a few to consider.

1.   INFUSE PASSION INTO LEARNING.

Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning. Educators who focus on integrating kids’ own interests and passions into the curriculum will see them flourish as learners. Educators can think about integrating such practices as showing relevance of what students are studying to life outside school, connecting with parents, and using digital media as a way to spark interests and spreading ideas.

2.   TRY SOMETHING NEW.

Jumping Into the 21st Century. For both veteran educators and newbies, the temptation to stick to what’s acceptable and what’s been done is hard to overcome. Educator Shelley Wright talks about how she took the plunge and redesigned the entire structure of her teaching practice. Her goal? “Changing to a student-centered, skill-based, technology embedded classroom,” she says.

3.   CONSIDER THE FLIPPED CLASSROOM MODEL. 

The Flip: Why I love It, How I Use It. Educator Shelley Wright shares why she’s decided to flip her classroom. “I don’t believe in assigning videos every night as a substitute for my own lecturing. To me, that’s simply the traditional classroom rearranged, not flipped. I use the flip when my students need to absorb a few chunks of new information to continue learning. I don’t use it to front-load information at the beginning of a unit. I think that can rob students of the experience of authentically building knowledge and skills as they encounter new concepts. I use flip time to create curiosity in my students.”

4.   TAP INTO STUDENTS’ IDEAS.

How to Turn Your Classroom Into an Idea Factory. Design thinking isn’t just for engineers and designers. It can be applied to every aspect of learning — from generating ideas to the iteration and execution phase. Here’s how educators can foster innovation in the classroom.

5.   CONSIDER THE FUTURE SCHOOL DAY.

The School Day of the Future is Designed. “It’s not too big of a leap to want the school day designed around notions of how we naturally, and individually, learn,” writes Sandy Speicher of IDEO. “Designing the day around discovery of information, connections to real world challenges, discussions digging into our experiences with the world. Here are some examples of how futuristic scenarios are actually happening now.”

Brightworks School

Students building a cafe at Brightworks School in San Francisco.

By Suzie Boss

The following suggestions for turning K-12 classrooms into innovation spaces come from Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, published in July by Solution Tree.

How can we prepare today’s students to become tomorrow’s innovators? It’s an urgent challenge, repeated by President Obama, corporate CEOs, and global education experts like Yong Zhao and Tony Wagner. Virtually every discussion of 21^st-century learning puts innovation and its close cousin, creativity, atop the list of skills students must have for the future.

If we’re serious about preparing students to become innovators, educators have some hard work ahead. Getting students ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges means helping them develop a new set of skills and fresh ways of thinking that they won’t acquire through textbook-driven instruction. Students need opportunities to practice these skills on right-sized projects, with supports in place to scaffold learning. They need to persist and learn from setbacks. That’s how they’ll develop the confidence to tackle difficult problems.

How do we fill the gap between saying we must encourage innovation and teaching students how to actually generate and execute original ideas? The answers are emerging from classrooms across the country where pioneering teachers are making innovation a priority. Their strategies vary widely, from tinkering workshops and design studios to digital gaming and global challenges. By emphasizing problem solving and creativity in the core curriculum, these advance scouts are demonstrating that innovation is both powerful and teachable.

Across disparate fields, from engineering and technology to the social and environmental sectors, innovators use a common problem-solving process. They frame problems carefully, looking at issues from all sides to find opportunity gaps. They may generate many possible solutions before focusing their efforts. They refine solutions through iterative cycles, learning from failure along with success. When they hit on worthy ideas, innovators network with others and share results widely.

In the classroom, this same process corresponds neatly with the stages of project-based learning. In PBL, students investigate intriguing questions that lead them to learn important academic content. They apply their learning to create something new, demonstrate their understanding, or teach others about the issue they have explored. By emphasizing key thinking skills throughout the PBL process, teachers can guide students to operate the same way that innovators do in all kinds of settings.

Here are eight tips to borrow from classrooms where teachers are reinventing yesterday’s schools as tomorrow’s idea factories.

1.   WELCOME AUTHENTIC QUESTIONS.

Good projects start with good questions. Listen closely to students to find out what makes them curious. Instead of presenting them with ready-made assignments, invite student feedback when you are designing projects. Make sure your driving questions for projects involve real-world issues that students care about investigating.

2.   ENCOURAGE EFFECTIVE TEAMWORK.

Projects offer an ideal context to develop students’ collaboration skills, but make sure teamwork doesn’t feel contrived. If projects are too big for any one student to manage alone, team members will have a real reason to rely on each other’s contributions. Teach students how to break a big project into manageable pieces and bring out the best ideas from everyone on the team. Offer them examples of innovations (from the Mars rover to the iPad) that wouldn’t have been possible without team efforts.

3.   BE READY TO GO BIG.

Innovators have a tendency to think big. They know how to use social networking tools to make a worthy idea go viral. Encourage students to share their projects with audiences beyond the classroom, using digital tools like YouTube or online publishing sites. Help them build networks to exchange ideas with peers and learn from experts around the globe.

4.   BUILD EMPATHY.

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Innovators who have empathy can step outside their own perspective and see issues from multiple viewpoints. Approaching a problem this way leads to better solutions. Teach students strategies for making field observations, conducting focus groups or user interviews, or gathering stories that offer insights into others’ perspectives.

5.   UNCOVER PASSION.

Passion is what keeps innovators motivated to persist despite long odds and flawed first efforts. Find out what drives students’ interests during out-of-school time, and look for opportunities to connect these pursuits with school projects. Ask students: When you feel most creative, what are you doing? What tools or technologies are you using? Their answers should set the stage for more engaging projects.

6.   AMPLIFY WORTHY IDEAS.

In today’s flat world, where access to information is ubiquitous, innovation can happen anywhere. Opportunities to support good ideas are also getting flattened. Philanthropy and venture funding, once reserved for the wealthy, have been crowdsourced with online platforms like Kiva (www.kiva.org) and Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com). To participate fully in the culture of innovation, students need to be able to do more than generate their own ideas. They also need to know how to critically evaluate others’ brainstorms and decide which ones are worth supporting. Develop classroom protocols for students to critically evaluate each other’s ideas. They may decide to throw their collective energy behind one promising idea or pull components from multiple teams into a final project.

7.   KNOW WHEN TO SAY NO.

Being a critical thinker also means being able to spot ideas that aren’t ready for prime time. Bold new ideas may have bugs that need to be worked out. An approach that appears to be a game-changer may be too expensive for the benefits it affords or may have unanticipated consequences. Give students opportunities to look for potential pitfalls and know when to say no.

8.   ENCOURAGE BREAKTHROUGHS.

Will students come up with breakthrough ideas in every project? Probably not, but you can encourage them to stretch their thinking by setting ambitious goals. What would students be able to do or demonstrate if they were truly operating as innovators?  Provide them with real-world examples by sharing stories of innovators from many fields, including social innovators who tackle wicked problems like poverty or illiteracy. Share the back stories of breakthroughs to show how much effort went into each inspired idea. Let students know they can’t expect to reach breakthrough solutions to every problem they tackle. Finding out what doesn’t work can be a useful outcome, too. Genuine innovation is indeed rare—but worth recognizing and celebrating when it happens.

Brightworks

When we envision a well-rounded, progressive education for our kids, we think of a vibrant environment that nurtures students’ passions, provides structure for rich and deep learning, a place where kids can get their hands on projects that are meaningful to them.

That’s the goal at Brightworks, a small, K-12 private school just starting its second year in San Francisco: to re-imagine traditional modes of education so that curiosity and creativity hold sway over standardized tests and worksheets. But in the course of creating this space for students’ interests, the school has also had to refine some of its original ideas to make room for realities like assessments and how to group students.

Brightworks first opened last fall, billed as a progressive school that allows kids to follow their own passions. It’s organized very differently from traditional schools. Teachers are known as “collaborators” and the curriculum is centered on “the Brightworks arc,” which divides learning into three phases – exploration, expression, and exposition – based on a central theme. The students explore a theme, design projects around that theme, then present their work to the community. The idea is that these projects – such as building a wooden stage for a play they’ve written or using aerial silks to demonstrate kinetic energy – provide the context for learning core academic skills.

As with every experiment, the first year has provided plenty of opportunities for refining, according to founder and co-director Gever Tulley.

“It’s been a great year. We’ve had great moments and we’ve had hiccup-y moments,” Tulley said.

Or as one parent, Amanda Moore, puts it, “It’s been everything we expected and nothing we expected.”

CREATING A STRUCTURE

While the school still follows the basic “arc” structure it started with, Tulley says there have been a lot of refinements. One major change has been how students are grouped. The year started with kids of all ages — six to 12 — working together on everything. But that proved problematic. What’s easily graspable to a 12-year-old might be far over the head of a six-year-old, and what might be new and interesting to a six-year-old could bore a 12-year-old. Now, students are grouped into age-based cohorts, or “bands,” so that age-appropriate work could move along more smoothly.

What happens during the day is more or less fluid at Brightworks — in fact, a typical day is hard to describe, as the school values spontaneity and student-directed work. Overall the typical structure involves a few key parts: 1) Morning Circle, when the entire school gets together to check in and make announcements; 2) “band” meetings, or small-group reflections where students check in with one another and the teacher about where they’re at in a certain project arc and what they plan to do that day; 3) Exploration or Expression phase activities, often involving a field trip or a visit from a professional in some field; and 4) Closing Circle time when the entire school gathers again to reflect and part ways.

The Brightworks Arc

Tulley admits that the collaborators still struggle with the most appropriate way to integrate core academics into project work. “You don’t want to compromise the quality of the project phase by cramming a math exercise into it,” he says, but there are still plenty of teachable moments (building wooden structures involves math, for example) and collaborators are trying to build their knowledge base and comfort zones around those.

MEANINGFUL ASSESSMENT

“We’re still in a lot of discussions about meaningful ways to assess children without the harm of grading and testing,” Tulley says, adding that many students at traditional schools have optimized the ability to cram for a test, then to purge the information post-test. “I think that’s something that we’ll develop over time.”

Student assessment at Brightworks takes the holistic approach. At the end of last year, teachers pored over student work, progress, accomplishments, behavior, and everything else that contributed to a student’s experience and put together a two- to three-page narrative assessment sent home to parents. These assessments were specifically tailored to each student, but were based on a template that Brightworks staff put together based on “all of the things we want our students to eventually be,” says Director Ellen Hathaway — including qualifications in academic areas.

The assessments covered three areas: students’ project-based learning, social and emotional learning, and skills acquisition and quantitative learning, according to Program Coordinator Justine Macauley. “Rather than assessing the students’ work product, we looked at their work and development during the process of their project,” asking questions like, Are they a supporter of other students’ projects or do they spearhead their own? Do they listen to others? Do they self-advocate? What subject areas do they gravitate to? and How adept is the student at organizing him/herself, their projects, their process?

This coming school year, staff will be looking at the same three areas broadly, but with more specific focus on certain areas depending on the projects and the arc topic, Macauley said.

Another change is the frequency in assessments: They’ll happen three times a year, instead of just once, which Hathaway says will be more effective and far easier for teachers to manage.

A YEAR IN REVIEW

Many parents and collaborators are excited to be part of the growing Brightworks community and are surprised by the positive effects the school has had on its students. Others are skeptical about both the model and its execution. Does this open-ended, student-driven approach mean that kids aren’t learning core academic skills? Is there too much time for free play? Are there adequate assessments in place so that learning can be measured?

One of the critics, who commented on the previous article on Brightworks, responded to a few questions via e-mail on the condition of anonymity. Despite an appreciation for the school’s mission, the commenter — who claims to be familiar with the inner-workings of the school — finds that the departure from traditional curriculum at Brightworks forgoes academic rigor, daily structure, and basic classroom management. “Children need schedules to feel their environment is a safe and predictable place,” the commenter said, adding that there may be “students as old as 10 who don’t know how to do multiplication or how to use a dictionary. “There are basic skills we need as adults to succeed in our culture, like critical thinking, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing information.”

These are common concerns when teachers and parents investigate a model like Brightworks. Is it okay to let a child learn to read and to do basic math later than what’s typically done in traditional schools? Do students exercise critical thinking and analysis at Brightworks, or does the lack of structure inhibit learning?

For Amanda Moore, a teacher whose daughter is six and attends Brightworks, the results are evident in what she sees everyday. “The real feature of my day is that I show up at 3:30 and she does not want to leave. She feels empowered by her education. She understands that she’s responsible for things,” Moore says.

Brightworks

Students work on projects throughout the school day.

Adds Tulley, “Each child has his or her personal narrative through the school. That seems to be working really well. They each have an individualized experience. It feels like they have a story to tell; it feels personal.”

That’s also important for parent Angela Wall, whose nine-year-old will attend Brightworks this fall. During the past few years while her daughter has attended traditional schools, Wall says she would see her “flourish during vacations in developing her curiosity and seemingly become frustrated” during the school year. “I want her to be set up with a lifelong love of learning,” Wall says. “And I’m not convinced that the education she’s currently involved with is doing that. I see it squashing some of her passions, slowly.”

Wall says she arrived at Brightworks as a huge skeptic, grilling the collaborators and founders about academic skills, assessment, and even college admissions without standardized tests (although apparently, Brightworks has been talking with Stanford University about providing different admissions requirements for students who’ve been schooled in alternative ways). And she left feeling “very very inspired and ignited intellectually,” finding that Brightworks prioritizes collaboration between students and the ability to tackle a problem, embrace failure, and try again above all else – key skills in a collaborative age.

NOT FOR EVERY CHILD

Still, this school is not for every child, nor every parent, and part of Brightworks’ struggle is to accurately assess a kind of educational model that doesn’t have much precedent. “What we’re trying to develop is something difficult to test: the habits and abilities of a lifelong learner, someone who seeks challenge and enjoys looking at topics that they haven’t encountered before,” Tulley says.

Though for some parents, this kind of experimentation is worrisome, for parents like Amanda Moore, it’s ideal. “My six-year-old is learning how to draw a bird,” she says. “She’s learning math by measuring a wing span. I’m less worried about her being able to meet a reading benchmark. The question is, can she meet a challenge?”

Above all, says Tulley, Brightworks’ commitment to grow and evolve in conversation with its parents and community will be the key to its success. This coming year will involve more vetting and relationship-building with some of the professionals and experts they’ve brought in to collaborate with educators, for instance. They’ll also bring in a fresh crop of educators to accommodate a few more students and develop a more focused, pre-planned Brightworks arc.

“It may all fail,” says parent Angela Wall, who has committed to trying Brightworks for a year. “But I also want my daughter to know that people fail – and that when you go through failures, you figure out how to move on.” Sure, she says, “I’m taking a leap of faith with this school. But I’m willing to take that leap.”

Flickr:ScratchPost

Amidst a sea of tech devices, and at a gathering of more than 18,000 educators interested in technology, a surprisingly human message rose above the noise at this week’s International Society for Technology in Education.

Kicking off the big event, where crowds overflowed from one packed room to another, Sir Ken Robinson, renowned author and international education adviser, proposed the idea that technology is not the only driver for learning.

“The problem now is resisting the notion that technology is the answer to everything — it’s clearly not,” Robinson said. “But what part of the equation does technology best speak to?”

Robinson, who’s been outspoken about the need to change the education paradigm, emphasized that educators shouldn’t be pushing (or be pushed toward) the gratuitous use of technology. He posed thought-provoking questions that got to the heart of what every stakeholder in education wants: what does it take to engage students — not just within a standardized curriculum, but in their own learning? What are the roles of technology in doing this? And what are the implications when it comes to implementing practices and policies?

In the hunt to find the next Holy Grail in education technology, Robinson said we may be losing sight of what teachers are best at.

“We should get rid of the words ‘curriculum delivery,’” he said, referring to the multitudes of tech platforms. “It’s an art form to teach, the judgement of what might work today may not work tomorrow.”

Teachers are the connective tissue in helping kids find not just subjects at which they test well, but what they’re passionate about, he said. “You often don’t know what you’re passionate about because you haven’t been introduced to it in the right way,” he said. “Teachers provide that stewardship we need,” he said.

For teachers, helping kids find their passion outside the confines of standardized curriculum and testing can be a messy endeavor, but worth the challenge. Marc Prensky, author of the book BRAIN GAIN: Technology and the Quest for Digital Wisdom, added that, rather than finding different ways for everyone to do the same curriculum, we need to find a way to allow individual students to create their own pathways to learning.

Though technology could help in this realm, the value that great teachers bring to the equation is immeasurable against what software can do, Prensky said: providing empathy and helping students find their passion by providing a wider place to look.

“Helping students find their passion will lead them to achievement,” he said.

Ever the pithy presenter, Prensky proposed to the audience four ways teachers can do this.

1. LISTEN. It’s impossible to encourage students when we don’t know what their passions are, so above all, teachers must listen to their students. “Or else what we get is ‘cellophane kids,’ when a teacher looks right through them to the curriculum and test scores and kids become invisible,” he said.
2. RESPECT. Adults and kids don’t respect each other as much as they should, Prensky said. “The war between digital natives and immigrants is over, and the natives have won! So let’s move forward to mutual respect and wisdom,” he said. We need both technology and strong pedagogy, but we need to include kids’ voices in how we make decisions about learning. “All education decisions come top down right now,” he said. “The next century is about changing that.”
3. OVER-EXPECT FROM STUDENTS. Today’s kids have far greater capabilities than ever been before, not less. “What’s making them better is connecting their brains to technology wisely,” he said. Let’s step up our expectations of them in that regard.
4. DO WHAT YOU KNOW IS RIGHT. “Teachers know what kids need, but someone has convinced them to just cover the curriculum,” he said. A teacher’s job is to help equip kids  with skills to function and thrive in the digital future, and though that could be challenging because of conflicting policies in place, that’s the definition of courage.

Check out Gever Tulley’s TED Talk about the importance of tinkering. Read more about Brightworks, Tulley’s San Francisco school, which opens this fall.