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.”

Getty

“Polynomial functions!”

“Trig identities!”

“How about the properties? Commutative, associative, distributive.”

So unfolded a laundry list of what a group of math teachers considered the more painful and less necessary concepts covered in the average high school math curriculum.

The laments, aired at EduCon 2.5 in Philadelphia at Science Leadership Academy last weekend, were part of a discussion around how to rebuild math instruction under the radically different—and admittedly unlikely—parameters posed by moderator Mike Thayer, a math teacher at Summit Public Schools in New Jersey.

Thayer, who also has a background teaching high school physics, proposed a scenario in which high school freshmen would take a one-year course (or a one-semester course in a block scheduling system) that covered the essentials of Algebra 1 and 2, Geometry, and possibly parts of Trigonometry. Any additional math concepts might be learned in a cross-disciplinary fashion through other courses. For example, chemistry teachers would be responsible for teaching

students the basics of logarithms while covering the pH scale. Biology teachers would explain concepts of exponential growth to their students when discussing species population and reproduction.

The rationale of such a course, Thayer said, would be to create a version of math instruction that more fully lives with the inquiry-based learning approach embraced by the Science Leadership Academy, the public magnet high school where the conference took place. His vision—which hinges on what he concedes is a large assumption that students would enter high school competent in basic computational thinking—is for a course that would both streamline a high school student’s general math experience, and empower and encourage them to learn additional math skills to solve real-world problems of their own interest.

As one teacher at the discussion put it: “I’d like to delete polynomial functions, but I’d like my students to see a roller coaster and think, ‘There must be math involved in that,’ and to go online and try and figure that out.”

Thayer asked the teachers to consider four questions as they imagined the hypothetical course:

1. WHAT STAYS AND WHAT GOES? Consider both what concepts would get more or less emphasis, as well as what method of learning (lectures, work sheets, group work, collaborative projects, etc.) would work best.
2. NEXT STEP FOR STUDENTS? Options could include more advanced mathematics courses, independent mathematics projects, courses in other subjects that included applicable advanced math concepts, or some combination.
3. HOW WOULD TEACHING CHANGE? Choose which lessons you’d save and which lessons you’d skip. Envision whether you’d use the same kinds of exercises to develop students skills, and whether you’d structure class time in the same manner, or perhaps utilize it differently.
4. WHAT WOULD YOU ASSESS? Tests should reflect the purpose of the course, to develop students’ understanding of the theoretical and practical purposes of math.

Most of the discussion during the 90-minute talk focused on the first two points, and the group generally agreed the course would need to focus on changing student thought processes.

“What I am hearing is that if we would like to really make math meaningful for our students, we need to do things to create the ability for them to be truly mathematical thinkers,” Thayer said at one point after hearing a few responses.

There were, however, disagreements over the relative importance of concepts. And a couple of teachers even asked whether geometry would fit within the parameters of such a course.

The group also questioned whether a focus on real-world math applications would be the most likely way to spur students into independent investigation, and whether that focus could create an unintended bias in the kind of material covered. As an example, teachers noted that using tools like 101 Questions, a website that asks users to think of a question related to a displayed image, could result in an excessive focus on proportionality.

Thayer encouraged such discourse, suggesting it would be essential in his new model.

“I think the first thing for us, in order to be masters in context as well as content, is to recognize our strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “I would love for somebody else to be able to come into my classroom and explain why [a concept] is important.”

In a speech at EduCon earlier that morning, Philadelphia public schools Superintendent William Hite stressed the need for teachers to move from content to context expertise. And in a later discussion, Science Leadership Academy founding Principal Chris Lehmann conceded such an approach could be more difficult in a math classroom, but not impossible.

Thayer, meanwhile, warned that if math teachers didn’t find a way to make that difficult shift, they could be marginalized.

“Most of the stuff we teach” in traditional courses, he said, “the Khan Academy does it for free.”

Flickr:mrsdkrebs

The following is an excerpt of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School, by 17-year-old Nikhil Goyal, a senior at Syosset High School in Woodbury, New York.

Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab’s Human Dynamics group.

“Today’s problems — from global poverty to climate change to the obesity epidemic — are more interconnected and intertwined than ever before and they can’t possibly be solved in the academic or research ‘silos’ of the twentieth century,” writes Frank Moss, the former head of the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Schools cannot just simply add a “creativity hour” and call it a day.

Principal at High Tech High, an innovative, project-based learning school in San Diego, California, Larry Rosenstock, points out, “If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”

After indicating the problem at hand, scoop out the tools, research, networks, and people required to get it solved. Get out of your comfort zone.

In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class. Instead, we need to arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums. What does learning look like in this model? Letting kids learn by doing — the essence of the philosophy of educator John Dewey. He wrote: “The school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the playground.” Let kids travel to places, work with mentors, and inquire about the world around them.

Diana Laufenberg, former teacher at the Science Leadership Academy, described to me, “The role of inquiry is the starting point of learning. School-based education has always been about telling and getting of information, rather than exploring or investigating.” Let kids create for themselves. We can start by employing project-based learning, where students probe real world problems collaboratively. Back in 1918, William Heard Kilpatrick wrote a famous article laying out what he called the “project method”: a curriculum based on “wholehearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment…the essential factor [being] the presence of a dominating purpose.” In project-based classrooms, learning literally comes alive.

CASE STUDY: BRIGHTWORKS

Let’s examine three institutions: The Brightworks School, a K-12 private school; Stanford d.school, an institute of design; and the M.I.T. Media Lab, a graduate program.

The Brightworks School in San Francisco, California, which opened its doors in September 2011, epitomizes a new style of learning. Founder Gever Tulley told me, “If the pedagogical unit of traditional public education is a day divided into a series of 45 minute periods, then the pedagogical unit of Brightworks is the arc, which is divided into three phrases.” Each arc, he says, has a central theme.

The first phase of the arc is called exploration. “Within this phase,” Tulley says, “we create a landscape of experiences populated by passionate people who have devoted some portion of their lives to an aspect of the topic.” The children begin a journey looking through a kaleidoscope of perspectives and eventually mold a clear statement of what they intend to accomplish in the next phase. The second phase is expression. Tulley notes, “During this phrase, the mixed age teams work together, sharing skills, to take the ideas to completion — within the deadline.” The final phase is called exposition, where the public gets to view what the kids have done.

The first topic of the previous school year was cities. For three weeks, the students looked at the history of cities, how cities work, and the future of cities. 18 field trips were built into their schedule. Almost every day, Tulley explains, “we went into the city to see something or work with someone who has dedicated their life to some aspect of the city. Be they in waste water management, city planners, or architects.”

“The point is to see the topic in as many ways as you possibly can,” says Tulley. “Part of that is to expand the notion of cities in the students’ minds.”

Note: project-based learning is not necessarily expensive. He reveals, “If you look at the net aggregate cost of putting a child through a nearby public school in terms of public expenditure, at Brightworks, we do not spend anymore on kids in our private school in terms of net aggregate cost.”

CASE STUDY: STANFORD D.SCHOOL

At the Stanford d.school, projects drive the curriculum. Bringing majors from engineering, business, medicine, science, and design to come together to solve real or abstract problems is the underpinning of the institution’s philosophy. The goal is to have students become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Its founder and director is David Kelley, whose mission is to transmit “empathy” into his students to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges posed in class and regain their creative confidence, often lost in the early years of schooling.

Based on the axioms of what Kelley has called “design thinking,” instead of being spoon-fed problems to solve, students must first define problems themselves through observation, research, and dialogue. After, students visualize and brainstorm potential solutions with one another in the stage of “ideation.” Next, by means of prototypes, students make sketches and three-dimensional models of potential ideas to iterate continuously. Lastly, students make the final touches on a finished prototype.

The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world, sustainability, health and wellness, and K-12 education. From extracting water for irrigation in Burma to supplying solar lanterns for the poor in rural India and Africa to building infant warmers in Nepal, these students are certainly making their mark on the world.

CASE STUDY: M.I.T. MEDIA LAB

Similarly, the M.I.T. Media Lab has an anti-disciplinary approach to learning. Their research program is “focused on inventing a better future through creative applications of innovative digital technologies.” Instead of lectures, grading, and tests, roughly 25 groups of graduate student researchers and a few undergraduate researchers work with faculty members and scientists on a research topic. Due to its non-linear and collaborative process, fascinating innovations are born from Aida, a dashboard-mounted robot for cars and trucks to a trillion-frame-per-second video to Huggable, a robot teddy bear companion for pediatric hospital patients.

How can we evaluate projects? We can’t grade them the same way as tests. Gever Tulley offered me a very relevant hypothetical situation.

“Suppose you and I decided to build a boat. Our hypothesis might be: we can build a boat under $30 using recycled materials and sail it across the Hudson River. Our teacher or mentor can help us shape that to ensure that the challenge meets our cognitive and intellectual development. If the teacher thought the task was too easy for us, he or she might add a twist — the boat needs to have two masts or sail power. Half a day, a few times a week, you and I would work on this project and we have a deadline.”

“Suppose then we build the boat, drop it in the Hudson River, and it sinks. No one has to tell us that our boat is not working. We don’t need the ‘F.’ Its unnecessary and inappropriate. That first version of the boat could have been a hypothesis. We learned from the experience and the next version will be more well thought out. So after going back to drawing board and making tweaks, we test the final version. We find that the boat sails well downwind, but cannot sail upwind.”

“What grade should a teacher give? Is that a ‘C’ because it only went in one direction? Or is that an ‘A’ because we tried a bold idea but we neglected 3,000 years of sailing history and would have been able to sail it in both directions if we had done our research? You can’t decide. The feedback from the boat is its own incentive to improve our thinking for the next project.”

The point is that evaluation is no longer about giving a single number, but rather a documented process from start to finish. At the Brightworks School, students will leave with an iPad, filled with all the projects they completed in their term. Plus, portfolios and publishing your work online is one of the biggest motivators for kids. When she was teaching at the Science Leadership Academy, Diana Laufenberg said that if you Googled her students’ names, you would find an entire web history linked to them. Couple that with the fact that in project-based learning, kids are working on something they have a passion for, thus they have a stake in the outcome and will keep trying even when something isn’t working. That’s true in life as well.

Brightworks School

PROJECT-BASED LEARNING IS MESSY

Why hasn’t project-based learning picked up yet? There are a few reasons. First, the model of education says principal Chris Lehmann where kids sit in rows, read textbooks, and hear lectures has lasted so long, because it never goes that wrong. “It’s boring as hell, but most principals don’t yell at their teachers if they walk by their classroom and all they see is a quiet classroom with kids reading the textbook. No one gets in trouble.”

“If you go into a classroom,” says Lehmann, “where there isn’t that structure, kids aren’t exactly on pace, projects look messy, and it’s loud, teachers have gotten in trouble for that.”

Second, the way students attempt to learn via projects does not work. Tulley says, “It amounts to kit-based experiences in 45 minute periods. ‘We’re going to do a biology kit.’ We already know that those recipe like exercises do not stimulate creativity.”

I also spoke with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur on this issue as well. He says, “You can have students do laboratories and hands-on activities and learn nothing, because they are following the cookbook and going through the motions without having their brains on. The word ‘hands-on’ is overused and abused.”

The role of the teacher in project-based learning as Laufenberg likes to say is an “architect of opportunity. Through a scaffolding strategy, they help us make sense of what we have learned. Still, teachers must understand that learning is uncomfortable, messy, and complicated.” Get over compliance and control!

In a summary published on Edutopia, Brigid Barron and Linda Darling-Hammond reviewed numerous studies and found that:

1. Students learn more deeply when they can apply classroom-gathered knowledge to real-world problems, and when they take part in projects that require sustained engagement and collaboration.
2. Active-learning practices have a more significant impact on student performance than any other variable, including student background and prior achievement.
3. Students are most successful when they are taught how to learn as well as what to learn.

As the old adage goes, “Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand.” Harvard Professor Howard Gardner said to me that schools should incorporate the best of two models of learning: a hands-on children’s museum, which encourages open-ended exploration, and an apprenticeship, which provides a more structured environment for practicing meaningful skills in an authentic, real-life context.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to learn the boring stuff before you start applying it. Start rolling around in the dirt from the get go.

Nikhil Goyal lives with his family in Woodbury, New York. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry, Fox and Friends, Fox Business: Varney & Co., NBC Nightly News, and Huffington Post.