Excerpted from Will Richardson’s new TED Book Why School:  How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere. Richardson offers provocative alternatives to the existing education system, questioning everything from standardized assessments to the role of the teacher. In this chapter, “Real Work for Real Audiences,” Richardson envisions students creating work that is relevant and useful in the world outside school.

By Will Richardson

So what if we were to say that, starting this year, even with our children in K– 5, at least half of the time they spend on schoolwork must be on stuff that can’t end up in a folder we put away? That the reason they’re doing their schoolwork isn’t just for a grade or for it to be pinned up in the hallway? It should be because their work is something they create on their own, or with others, that has real value in the real world.

I’m not even necessarily talking about doing something with technology. (Let’s face it, though: Paper is a 20th-century staple that has severely limited potential, compared to digital spaces.) There’s lots of creating our kids can do with traditional tools that can serve a real audience. Publishing books, putting on plays, and doing community service are just a few examples.

But what if we got a little crazy and added some technology into the mix? We could tell our kids, “You know, in addition to taking that test on the Vietnam War, we want you to go and interview some veterans, then collect those stories into a series of podcasts that people all over the world could listen to and learn from.”

Or, rather than having our students do that science lab write-up on the tadpoles in the pond behind their school, what if we rounded up a bunch of schools with ponds and tadpoles from all over the world, and then we all shared our data and observations with each other, analyzing how the differences in climate and geography affected native habitats? What if then published this global analysis online?

Or, instead of reading scenes from Romeo and Juliet to one another in the classroom, students could put on an interpretive performance, one we then broadcast through a password-protected live stream to parents and aunts and uncles and friends online, posting it also as a video on YouTube. Maybe we could even run a competition with other schools to see who could come up with the most profound or creative way of bringing the themes of Shakespeare into the modern world.

I don’t know about you, but as a parent, I’d much rather see this kind of work than the paper that comes home in the Friday Folder (or the Friday backpack). I’d rather know that my kids were creating something of meaning, value, and I hope, beauty for people other than just their teachers, and that those creations had the opportunity to live in the world. That they were thinking hard about audience. That they were learning how to network and collaborate with others. That they were developing “proficiency with the tools of technology,” learning to “design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes,” and becoming literate in the process.

Real work for real audiences is, of course, hard to find in the current standardized testing regime. How do you evaluate the San Diego Bay book project using a short-answer test? To assess this kind of work, teachers could co-create rubrics with students that identify what their work should address and what quality looks like. In this chapter’s examples, assessment might mean collecting targeted feedback from whatever audience might be watching that Romeo and Juliet performance or listening to those Vietnam veteran podcasts.

And, importantly, it might mean having students engage in some deep self-assessment on their process and product, an experience that would certainly prepare them to be better learners when they leave us. Our students are capable of doing authentic work that adds to the abundance in ways that can make the world a better, richer place.

Why wouldn’t we want to know they could do that?

flickr:CDsessums

“If you’re not feeling uncomfortable about the state of education right now, then you’re not paying attention to the pressures and challenges of technology,” said Will Richardson, a veteran educator author and consultant, at a talk at ISTE 2012. “We need to acknowledge that this is a very interesting moment, and even though in a lot of ways this isn’t what we signed up for when we went into teaching… as educators, it’s our job to figure it out.”

Seeing the balance move from a place of scarcity of information to over-abundance on the web — and the ability to “carry around the sum of human knowledge on our phones” — Richardson said educators must start thinking of schooling differently. “This abundance has the potential to be amazing, but it’s not amazing if we don’t do anything with it,” he said. “What is access to all this stuff if you don’t know what to do with it?”

To that end, Richardson proposed a challenge to educators to unlearn three important things that have been taken for granted as immovable, unchangeable ideas.

1.   DELIVERY: The notion of delivering knowledge and information from teacher to student has already been upended. “Kids will not put up with delivery too much longer. They’ll expect something much different,” Richardson said. Rather, educators must hand over control of learning to kids, and understand that there are lots of ways to learn what they need to and want to learn.

“We have to stop being in charge of the curriculum and allow kids to create their own education,” he said. Educators should ask themselves: how am I helping kids develop important skills, dispositions, and literacies they need to create their own curriculum, to find their own teachers, to create their own artifacts that will more closely align with ways they’ll work when they leave school? “The delivery method we use in most schools, what we own and deliver to kids, that will have to change,” he said. “We have to relearn in a way that allows kids to own and drive it.”

2.   COMPETITION: Rather than comparing test scores and grades of schools and of teachers, we should drive education forward on the basis of cooperation. We should use the best ideas of what

others are doing, other classrooms and other schools. “Do we fear someone else is going to take what we’re doing? But isn’t that a good thing, if it’s good practice?” Richardson asked. There’s a larger gain by being transparent. “We can’t fight the greater world problems as well through competition as we will through cooperation.

3.   ASSESSMENT.  Richardson, an outspoken critic of standardized testing, pressed the point that current assessments measure fact memorization, not students’ skills. And with automated essay scoring being used, the range of knowledge is becoming more and more narrow, he said. “If we don’t assess what we value, we will end up valuing what we assess,” he said. “As a system, we’re not assessing what we value.” Richardson does not even favor “open book” or “open Internet” testing, asking the simple but unsettling question: “Why are we asking them questions they can easily find?”

As educators grapple with the shift — in their roles within the classroom, and in the larger context of what’s changing in education — Richardson said they may experience a series of feelings. “You might feel anger, grief, or excitement that kids will learn in a lot of different ways,” he said. “But you have to look at your own learning practice and innovate.”

Try assessing one thing differently, he suggested. Ask students to tap into all the sources they have, then bring other teachers into the classroom and let them influence the discussions. And, of course, engage others in these discussions.

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What’s stopping you or your peers from making a meaningful change in your teaching practice? What are the “yeah, but” arguments you hear when you propose a new idea, a way to do something differently?

Rob Mancabelli and Will Richardson, authors of Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education, asked a few hundred teachers to list the “yeah-buts” they hear from other teachers, administrators, and parents.

The audience attending the packed ISTE Conference yesterday had a long list of complaints and objections they’ve heard along the way.

Here are just a few:

Yeah, but:

• It’s not safe to let kids experiment on the Internet.
• We need to block and filter sites.
• It’s always been this way.
• Is it standards-based?
• We don’t have this technology in our school.
• We don’t know how to use this technology
• It’s disruptive to the classroom.
• Will it help our assessment scores?
• It’s not rigorous enough.
• We don’t have enough bandwidth or infrastructure.
• We don’t have enough money.
• There’s no room for this in our curriculum.
• Teachers can’t be trusted.
• It has a negative effect on the brain.
• Does everyone have to do it? Why isn’t something that you do, if you’re so interested.
• Students are cheating when they look stuff up.
• It’s too fun.

Richardson and Mancabelli have some advice for frustrated educators who run into the proverbial wall when they propose new ideas: appeal to the nay-sayers’ emotions, rather than their intellect.

“Often our response to a ‘yeah-but’ is one of defensiveness and this can sometimes derail the conversation,” wrote Trevor Shaw in a simultaneous chat during the session.

In addition to listing all the rational reasons why the idea might work (introducing critical thinking, introducing autonomy, showing trust, engaging thought), ask them: “What’s at the root of this for you? Why don’t you think you can’t make this change?”

Chances are you’ll hear some interesting answer, which can then be rationally addressed.

For example, if you’re proposing a new way of using cell phones in the classroom, and you hear objections about how it’ll take too much time to figure out how that might work, your rational tactic, Mancabelli says, could be:

• Explaining that investing time up front will pay dividends later. The learning curve always gets easier after the first try.
• Offering ways of reallocating time, such as using a faculty meeting or departmental meeting for professional development.
• Suggesting a couple of half days for students so that teachers can work together on professional development.
• Teaching people to use social networks so they can learn on their own time.

But that will only go so far, Mancabelli says. You have to also dig into the emotional objections. Ask them, “What’s your feeling behind it”? You might here one or more of the following:

• I’m already overwhelmed with all the work I have to do.
• If I don’t succeed at this, I’m afraid I’ll make a fool of myself in front of not just other teachers but also the students.
• It isn’t fair that I have to learn about one more thing.

Now that you’ve gotten to the bottom of the issue, you can address the emotional concerns. These are some of Mancabelli’s suggestions:

• How long do you think it’ll take to learn this? What’s an appropriate amount of time to set aside?
• Invite them into a conversation about how long this change is going to take.

• Ask them what they need to succeed.
• Tell them that there is no bar to get over.
• Give them permission to fail.
• Provide support if they run into roadblocks by reallocating funds, if you need to.

When it comes to allowing access to blocked sites at schools (read the Department of Education’s list of rational reasons, those in favor can appeal to the emotional side of the argument. Ask students to share about their online lives, and how they keep safe. Tell educators that it’s part of their job to prepare kids from pitfalls of social media sites. Ask them: “Wouldn’t you be more scared about kids accessing sites without proper training and guidance?” And of course, lead by example: share your own work online on open,collaborative sites and bring in others who do, too.

See the entire presentation here. And how appropriate: as with most everything Richardson does, it’s on a collaborative site: a Google Doc.

Flickr: CoreyLeopold

A week after the intense media spotlight of Education Nation, NBC’s foray into the education reform movement, conversations in the robust online community are going full force. Though there’s broad criticism of the event — of teacher-bashing, of political duals trumping important issues, of grandstanding and finger-pointing, of media’s fickle attention span — the topic of education has inarguably bubbled up to the top spot of public dialogue.

That’s the good news. But as the parent of a public-school student, I wonder how all this talk is going to shape the classroom, and by extension, how my daughter learns.

Will Richardson eloquently addresses this topic in his post “The Wrong Conversation.” His main point is, without intending to oversimplify it, that educators should invest their finite time and energy in innovating and pushing boundaries on a day-to-day basis in their classrooms, rather than trying to hash through the loudest and most controversial fight du jour. That fight, he says, is not clearly defined, changes moment-by-moment depending on who’s holding the bullhorn, and above all, distracting to the public and those who are doing the heavy lifting in classrooms.

Will also points out that the public at large may not be ready for the true education revolution — the start-from-scratch theory that supplants our current understanding of what education is: a school, a classroom, a teacher speaking to students, and students absorbing and regurgitating information.

The mainstream is not yet open to the opportunities for learning our students now have, due in large measure to these technologies, and it’s nowhere near open to the idea that because of these innovations, the best outcome for our kids may be “schools” that look very little like what they look like today.

Admittedly, the idea that schools will fundamentally change — from the very structure that defines the space to the actual instruction and learning part of the equation — can be alarming to the general public. Isn’t it anarchy? The idea that the teacher’s role may be changing from instructor to guide, that the community may be involved in developing curriculum and becoming a part of the “school” day, that learning just for learning’s sake may not be the main objective of education, all these ideas can be destabilizing.

Parents might ask: if there’s no school setting, where will my kids go all day? If they’re not tested on what they learned, how will I know they’re learning? If the teacher isn’t the expert on the taught subject, who is?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, either, but I’m heartened to know that these conversations are taking place and that there are smart people on the case. Here’s more from Will’s column:

We should all be innovating, testing new models, failing, reflecting, trying anew, sharing the learning with others who are working on the edges in their own classrooms and projects. I know that’s hard because it’s not valued and supported in most places, and I know most teachers simply can’t or won’t. It’s too hard. There’s no time. Too many barriers. But those that can, must right now. Because the reality is we simply don’t have the media, the money or the muscle to compete with the current narrative about schools, and to fret over that fact I think cuts deeply into what energy we do have to think clearly about what’s best for our kids. And because in the long run, this conversation can’t be about schools first. It has to be about learning. And through that lens, we need to be advocates for whatever is best for our kids, whether at times that might be a technology over a teacher, an online community over a school, a passion based project over a one-size fits all curriculum, a chance to create with strangers of all ages over a classroom of same-age kids working hard to game the system. Those types of innovations will at some point get the notice of the mainstream.

His readers respond in different ways. A couple of teachers agree it’s time to focus on teaching — the task at hand:

WM Chamberlain:

I don’t know how much emotional energy I have wasted on these topics lately, but I can say it has been too much. It is time to refocus, spend much more time on the things I can control in my classroom, and as my students say, “Do work.”

Debbie Sisco:

There is much work to be done and I refuse to waste what precious time I have getting caught up in what they have to say. I know they have big microphones… but we sre blessed with the gems. We are, every day, given opportunity to stand in the halls of our schools and talk face to face with the future as it pours from the doors of our school busses.

One reader begs to differ, convinced that participating in the media attention is critical at this time:

Tom Hoffman:

What you’re missing is that if we lose this larger policy battle, which we might, all conversations end. [To get the attention of the Department of Education,] there needs to be some negative energy.

A valid question about logistics.

John Patten:

How do you involve communities in the development of curriculum when the community is not confident in their ability to do so and their greatest concern is just the ability of their children to get to school in one piece.

Apprehension on the part of educators:

Brian Crosby:

I have been talking to teachers both at my school and elsewhere, and maybe 1% even have a clue anything is happening and they are mostly thrilled not to know. I’m not saying that is good – but they are so scared, they don’t want to know.

Giving up on the feds:

Kevin:

Perhaps a better strategy would be to burn the current model to the ground and start over. The private market is your BEST hope for building what you want.

An argument for staying vocal in the fight:

Stephen Lazar:

In NYC, the biggest school district in the country, we are about to go the negotiating table to determine a new teacher evaluation system. If those of us who want to push students to be good, critical 21st century citizens are not at the table, an evaluation system will be created that places perverse incentives for teachers and administrators to fight against the kind of learning we know our students need.

A glimpse of the future:

MWeisburgh:

Until I find a better way, I am telling people that the goal of education for the first few years should be to teach kids how to learn on their own. Once they have the knowledge and skills to know how to learn, the goal of education should be to give them engaging assignments so that they can learn on their own and with their peers, to get some feedback on how they are doing, and to intervene where there are problems.