“We should name it Perseverance,” said my daughter. I totally agree. But is that always laudable, our perseverance? Can it also be laughable?

We walked home together yesterday afternoon. Suspended across the entrance to our covered parking space was a spider, centered in her beautiful web, patiently waiting for dinner. The frame threads led to anchor points that spanned the entrance, connected above and below and on both sides. The hub where she sat was perfect, the threads parallel and unmarked. We marveled at the amount of work it takes to make a web.

My wife arrived home from work later, driving, and not knowing about the web, drove through it as she parked the car. Whoops! These things happen.

My daughter and I discovered the demise of the patient engineering later. She looked for any evidence of the web and the spider on the red hood of our VW Golf. Nothing doing, there wasn’t a trace. We shrugged and forgot about it.

Until this morning. Suspended in the air, anchored to the entrance and to our red car, was the frame of another enormous web, just as meticulously executed, the spider once again in the center of the hub, waiting for dinner. My daughter looked at me. “We should call it Perseverance.” 

There’s a lesson here, I’m just not sure what it is. We like to teach about perseverance, and we should, and sometimes our schools are set up to support it (and often they are not). If at first you don’t succeed … keep trying, right? 

My wife recently helped me climb out of a moment of self-pity and moping. I was lamenting the perceived mistreatment of innovative ideas in the drive to change schools and schooling. She reminded me that my interests and beliefs are in conflict with the way things are often done at school, that change is hard, that a change maker by definition was taking the path less traveled by. And that meant far greater chances for non-acceptance and disappointment. 

“But it’s the only way I can imagine it worthwhile to work in education,” I lamely replied. There was a long pause. I suggested we go to the grocery store so we could quit talking about it. But I didn’t quit thinking about it. And she’s right, those of us interested in school reform in a meaningful way are indeed marching to a different beat and we should expect that other music will more often than not drown us out. But we march on.

Perseverance. A night’s work torn down during the banal act of parking a car. Yet she carried on, doing the thing she knows how to do best, building her web. That’s where I’d like to finish this story, right where she has made it despite all odds, catching her dinner in the newly constructed web, despite the adversity. But.

But in the long haul of school reform, when does perseverance start to feel a little ridiculous. I’m all for the power of yet (We haven’t made it … yet!), but what if we aren’t going to make it? What if we won’t, in the end, deliver schools where agency thrives and learning flows from the learner? What if top down push systems with carrot and stick motivation through tests and grades is the best we can do? Is rebuilding the web over and over, waiting at its center for results, really that laudable? 

Later today one of us is going to back the car out of its spot. The spider’s work will be gone again. She’ll have to decide whether to spin another web or not. She may decide to pick up and move to a new location, pick a new cause, quit trying to win against a ton-and-a-half of automobile.

I know I shouldn’t take a cue from a spider, nor interpret her work as a sign, but it’s so hard to keep pushing for change. Will there, in fact, be a web there tomorrow?

Ah, simulations. They can be such good learning experiences. 

But they require creative thinking, repackaging content, pre-planning, finding materials, perhaps  a lot of cutting and sorting materials into envelopes. They make you have to think like someone developing a new board game. They make you have to guess what will happen, what the learning might be, what might be productive to debrief. And above all, they require the teacher to take a risk because, after all, the whole effort might just cross over into chaos, observed by every student in the class. 

But they can be such good learning experiences. 

Bilge, a visiting scholar of Leysin American School (LAS) Educational Research, and I recently had the opportunity to participate in a simulation for a grade 10 English Language Acquisition (EAL) Pre-AP History class. Brian, the teacher, was looking for some help managing the simulation, so we jumped in. We got so interested we thought we would share the experience and reflect a bit on the value of making the effort to create, and improve over time, a simulation for the classroom.

The setting is the Indian Ocean in the 1400s. Ships are sailing between China, India, and the city-states on the east coast of Africa. Their holds are full of iron, pottery, silk, and other commodities. The distances the ships sail are incredible and the amounts of money enormous – at least when all goes well. The trading brings together people of different languages and religions, a mixing of cultures made tolerant through the promise of a healthy profit.

The students have read about trading during this era in their book. Now they are going to live it.

In total we visited three classes, seeing the simulation improve with each iteration. In the first version, with a dozen students, Brian, Bilge and I each worked as a harbormaster at a port, noting purchases and sales on accounting sheets. Because we were all busy managing our own ports, a bit of the overall coordination was lost, as Brian tried to be both simulation facilitator and harbormaster. The directions had taken a long time, Bilge and I were new to our roles, and time ran out before Brian could debrief the students about what they learned. However, the simulation was a valuable experience for the students since they were actively engaged and had the opportunity to use communication skills during negotiations with the harbormasters. The three of us talked about how it went, brainstormed some ideas, and Brian prepared for a different EAL Pre-AP History class the following day. 

In the second iteration, there were four adults. (Daniela the librarian joined Bilge and me as harbormasters so that Brian could focus on overall facilitation.) There were only four students in the class. We recognized that the student to teacher ratio wouldn’t be sustainable in the long term, but it was helpful for the simulation. Brain added in a few more hindrances (theft in the ports, ship repairs, and changing wind directions) and replaced the accounting process from the first iteration with images of coins and commodities to allow for “real” transactions. Now the students, as sailors and traders, had a clear goal: earn the most money. Buying low and selling high mattered. Developing efficient trade routes was obviously a plus. Avoiding thieves, repairs, and bad weather saved time and money. And bartering took on new urgency.

The second iteration ended without time for debriefing, which wasn’t ideal, since taking time to discuss what happened – and how it reflected the actual situation in the 1400s – is a key piece of the learning. However, the students enjoyed the simulation while performing their roles and got a general idea of the Indian Ocean trading of the era. We teachers debriefed one more time and Brian prepared for a third round, this time for a longer class period and in a larger room, and with a few more tricks up his sleeve. 

The third iteration was again with about a dozen students, but now just two adults, Brian and me. I was the harbormaster in China again, but the other two harbors were run by students in the class. Our materials were all ready ahead of time. Brian also set more specific conditions before we began. For me, in China, that meant I would only accept coins, no goods in trades at all. 

Brian started the simulation as the facilitator. The first traders in my harbor bartered hard. So hard they were a bit impolite, so I refused to trade with them. They left unhappy with me as a teacher, I think, though I was hoping they recognized they were actually upset with me, the offended Chinese harbormaster. Brian introduced some further fun into the simulation, requiring the crews of some ships to eat oranges (real oranges he had brought along) to battle the scurvy they were suffering from. Sometimes a ship got damaged while at sea and the crew, the students, had to sit for two minutes, symbolizing the need for repairs, and losing precious trading time.

Brian also stopped the action along the way (1) to quickly debrief and (2) to change the prices of some commodities. All those students who had been buying ivory tusks for the huge profits they expected in China were suddenly disappointed – the ivory market had crashed! I didn’t buy any of their ivory at all, making a face when they showed me their pictures of ivory tusks they thought were going to bring in so many coins. Brian’s short stoppages of the action were brilliant, introducing variables that changed the game and provided new material to debrief. And debrief we did, during this third iteration, because the simulation took place during a class period long enough to run the simulation and talk about what happened and how it was similar to the real trade that happened in the Indian Ocean.

Wow. It goes without saying that the students were actively engaged the entire class period – in all three iterations – that they actually made a bit of an emotional connection with trading that happened in the Indian Ocean over 500 years ago, and that they were able to connect trading back then with commerce and economics today.

To summarize, we paraphrase Polina, a Ukrainian student, who said this:

History isn’t about the past. It’s about understanding more about what is happening right now, and what is going to happen in the future.

We agree, Polina.

And would you like to buy some rolls of silk? Or some crates of tea? Get them now while the winds and the prices are in your favor!

Authors

Paul was joined by:

Bilge Kalkavan of the Faculty of Education at Hasan Kalyoncu University, Turkey. She became a harbormaster for this simulation during her stay at LAS as a visiting scholar; and

Brian Tynan, a grade 10 history teacher, who himself has sailed to many ports in his career. Kudos to Brian for taking the risk (and the time!) to run simulations in class.

Conrad Hughes is a principal at Ecolint in Geneva, Switzerland. In Fall 2020 he founded the Coalition to Honour All Learning, a group of school leaders representing about 50 schools across the world, all interested in rethinking the high school transcript (and assessment in general). 

Here is a reflection on his TEDx talk, The Problem with Schools, from April 2021.

“We have a problem in schools. We have a big problem. And it’s the way that we assess students.”

I’ve argued elsewhere that we should indeed take a look at how often we assess, to what extent our assessments are comparisons of students used mostly to sort them into categories, and even the need for so much assessment in the first place. In practice, I’ve had a hand in creating three programs at an international school that de-emphasize summative grading in favor of frequent and informal feedback: the summer school, 5-week exploratory courses in the middle school, and high school courses which focus on 21st century skills first, traditional subject content second. 

So it’s no surprise, I guess, that Hughes’ TEDx caught my attention.

Hughes is particularly interested in how we report student learning, most importantly on the academic transcript. He believes that school reform, including the move towards a system that promotes creativity and passion, needs to focus squarely on how we report learning to universities. We’ve all heard someone say that what gets assessed gets taught. Hughes is saying that what gets reported is what gets taught. So let’s change the reporting.

Otherwise, so Hughes, we run a great risk of squeezing out valuable learning.

Hughes reports that students he talks to – and he makes it a point to talk to each and every student in his school – report that they have lots of things they like to do, but not enough time to do them. Those things not in the school curriculum get squeezed out. 

In the end, “we’ve created a system that drowns out creativity and passion.” And it only gets worse as students move through the grades, until “so much of what students want to do they can’t do anymore, because of the way that we’ve designed high school.”

Ultimately, Hughes warns that we need to be careful what message we are sending to students. To those we might call Curriculum Different due to their personal interests and creativity, be careful of sending the message: “This is not your place. Your star cannot shine here.”

Hughes has three recommended action items: “Redesign the high school transcript (see the Learner Passport), empower young people to take ownership of their learning, and spread the word (see the Coalition to Honour All Learning). 

Here is my contribution to his second action item, empower, which he also frames in terms of assessment. The credit system – our reporting system – needs to be constructed in a way that allows students to express themselves. How things get reported also influences what gets taught, because both what is reported and how it is reported affects the relative empowerment of students. So here’s an idea our research department has been playing with this year.

What if – and here I encourage you to think in terms of “yes and …” instead of “yes but …” at least part of the curriculum was built in such a manner that students had the time and energy to pursue their interests – those interests Hughes says so many students report they don’t have time for.*

Let faculty be available to support students – by listening to student ideas, asking questions, bringing students together, referring students to other teachers, and finding outside experts and resources to support students. But let the students do the work, explore, find their own deadends, network, learn how to learn, discover what learning is lifeworthy, collaborate with others… That’s what we ultimately want for them anyway, right? 

And then, and here is the gem we’ve been returning to again and again all year, once students have shown interest and learning and progress with a particular idea, project, or innovation, recognize that learning with a credit. In other words, turn our current process on its head. Instead of finding or thinking up a curriculum we think students might like, placing them in courses, and inviting (cajoling?) them to work on that curriculum, why not ask them to work on putting together their own curriculum (work that reflects their interests and strengths) and then, once that work seems to be coalescing into ongoing learning, granting it credit?

We don’t have a whole lot of traction yet, but we call our nascent effort Above & Beyond. We have a few students demonstrating that they can create their own learning. We have a student who extended her IB CAS project by teaching computer programming to others, a pastry chef continuing the business she created in a course two years ago, a student taking advantage of online medical school workshops, a couple of guys designing and selling hoodies, and a student who formed an investment club. I bet, if you are in a high school, you also have plenty of stories of students who are pursuing their own interests. 

Help them as much as you can. Give them some more space, some more time. And give them some credit for their effort. Even an official credit. Sure, they thought the curriculum up themselves, it wasn’t our plan for them. But isn’t that the nature of lifelong learning? Learning to pursue the things you think up yourself? Schools are a great place to practice that. Why not legitimize self-discovered learning in the same way we do with class content we select for students?

Keep the faith, Conrad. A coalition to honour all learning, indeed. Change the transcript. Change how we think about learning. Grant our students a whole lot more agency.

A special thanks to Andie Flett for conversations about turning the credit system on its head, and Andie, Steve Porter, and Tom Cosgrove for their work in Above & Beyond.

*There are of course schools who have gone all in with this philosophy. One of my favorites is Agora. Let us know of other examples in the comments.

For the past decade, I’ve focused on supporting teacher and student agency at my school. For teachers, our motto is “Continually becoming the professionals we already are.” I’m realizing that for students we don’t have a particular motto. Help me out! What is a good student agency motto for a school?

Tim Logan, the host of the Future Learning Design podcast, recently interviewed A J Juliani about curriculum. Curriculum is so often developed before teachers even meet the students that we assume that’s a good idea. But is it? 

Future Learning Design

Tim and A J begin their talk with a mention of A J’s annual “failing report.” If I understood correctly, A J writes up his failures at the end of the year, presumably to see how much he has learned from them and how much he can continue to learn from them. Seems like a pretty good idea, actually. Is it a good or bad sign that I can immediately think of a number of things to put on my own list!

Juliani is an entrepreneur, and a list of failures is probably something entrepreneurs get quite adept at collecting. The ability to look that list straight in the eye and learn from it is for sure a trait of someone who has embraced entrepreneurial thinking. 

“We don’t think that everybody is going to have to be an entrepreneur when they graduate,” says Juliani. “But everyone is going to have to think like an entrepreneur.” So what might some entrepreneurial ways of thinking be and what might we question about the way we do school (if we want to get our students thinking entrepreneurially)?

Here’s a few ideas.

Maybe our adherence to tests as assessments could loosen a bit. Juliani asks point blank: “Who told politicians that tests work?” Well, they work for many things, but point taken. Tests have limits, over reliance on tests can form mindsets that might not be compatible with quality learning, and the way we tend to use tests doesn’t always encourage perseverance and grit (study-sit the test-get a mark in the gradebook-move on). 

So yes, we could look at assessment. Especially the ones that discourage risk taking (assuming there are some that don’t discourage risk taking). Ultimately, you want “to get students to care about the learning and not the grade. You don’t want kids just doing something for marks … we want them learning because they like learning.” 

Logan mentions a bit of a meme we’ve been seeing lately and something colleagues and I have written about: We should consider focusing on “a pull system instead of a push system. Everything gets pushed on kids, the master schedule, content, [it all] gets pushed on kids. And actually what we need to switch to is a pull system.”

This is a big ask for schools, since they are about the biggest push system around. I remember in grad school taking a curriculum course in which we worked on a needs assessment for several weeks. It seemed like a really good idea in the antiseptic setting of a grad course. But how many times since have I encountered a school context in which teachers had the luxury of time and flexibility to do a thorough needs assessment before jumping into the curriculum? At best it’s done for them. At worst it’s not done at all.

Juliani suggests three basic shifts in our thinking and practice:

1. when planning the curriculum, “DON’T start with the standards – start with the reason for learning. You want to get interest and buy-in, not compliance;
2. build a curriculum that has performance tasks … [as] assessment.” Don’t just give students one way to demonstrate learning. If the curriculum only has a test, then maybe you haven’t finished building the curriculum;
3. “We need to have windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors (see Rudine Sims Bishop) – in other words, the curriculum needs to be full of resources and materials that students relate to personally and that allow them to relate to the rest of the world, too.

Do that, so Juliani, “then your curriculum will be adaptable,” And maybe even reduce how often we push curriculum on students. Going further, “I really think that every community’s curriculum should look different.”

That’s a theme we can chew on for a long time. What would happen if the curriculum were different from community to community? Would society fall apart? Or might we be enriched as a whole through the interlocking weave of know-how? Might we even reach a heck of a lot more students by making many more local decisions, relevant to the folks right there in front of us?

Juliani claims that the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development found that locally created curriculum is more successful. Intuitively I can see this. Teachers can learn and adapt as they go, fit curriculum to the students they work with, and keep it alive. “They owned it, and they made it theirs, and they cared about it … They thought about instruction and assessment instead of just following a curriculum.”

This is an interesting question to pursue, since results that indicate the effectiveness of locally created curriculum calls into question a whole lot of currently accepted practices. More than likely, I suspect, there are good reasons for off-the-shelf curriculum and locally created curriculum to co-exist, depending on a slew of factors. That’s where it gets interesting. What are those factors and what blend of curriculum might be appropriate in all the various contexts in which we have teachers and learners? And if we’re aiming to develop entrepreneurial thinking, does a locally created curriculum serve us better?

A nice metaphor that Juliani and Logan pursue is the difference between “cooks and chefs.” 

Cooks follow a recipe given to them. Chefs experiment and put new things out there. They create, take risks, deal with failures, and hopefully learn from them. So the question is, how do we bend curriculum, and our approach to thinking about curriculum, to produce more teacher-chefs? And for that matter, more student-chefs?

Project based learning, genius hour, and choice are good starting points. Juliani points us to those themes in his own research. “We are going to lose our relevancy very quickly .. if we don’t shift much of our instruction, much of our assessment, to these types of practices.” 

And then he reminds us that we have to reconsider our assessment practices. Many current assessments, focused on content, will miss the benefits gained in inquiry based and project based learning. “If you take an inquiry based unit and then you test them in the same way as a traditional unit, I think that’s a flawed approach …”

Logan ends the interview by asking what positives there have been in the pandemic. 

“Educators are flexible, but the curriculum doesn’t tend to be. People realized that our system of schooling is not flexible. Thank goodness we had people that were flexible …”

“We have a broken idea of what it means to learn, what it means to teach, and what it is to measure academic achievement.”

See www.ajjuliani.com/blog/research to pursue these ideas further.

For the past decade, I’ve focused on supporting teacher and student agency at my school. For a few years I had the pleasure of working with Liam Printer. His independent drive to be the best teacher and colleague possible was inspiring. Liam continues to inspire at the International School of Lausanne, where he is a Spanish teacher and the teaching and learning research lead, as well as the host of The Motivated Classroom podcast.

The Motivated Classroom

Liam Printer lays out a simple and compelling argument for motivation. Students – and I would add teachers, too – need self-determination to build intrinsic motivation, and building intrinsic motivation in our students – and again, our teachers – should be our goal, since intrinsically motivated learners are often those who learn more.

Light a fire, in other words. Enlist the help of those you want to teach by getting them so interested they not only learn, they keep learning, and they start to teach themselves through their own investment in the good feeling that accompanies good learning. 

Liam encountered Deci & Ryan’s self determination theory after speaking with his advisor about the success he was having with Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS). My first encounter with Deci & Ryan goes back to the early 1990s, when my colleague and friend KimMarie Cole, at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, confided that she thought their theory was one of the most important things we had studied. It seems Liam agrees with KimMarie. It’s time, perhaps, to go back and do some more reading myself.

“It does come down to intrinsic motivation,” Liam says, and “we need to learn about how to motivate students and [about] what motivation is.”

Deci & Ryan lay out three conditions that need to be satisfied for a learner to experience self-determination, and through self-determination, intrinsic motivation:

• autonomy;
• competence; and
• relatedness.

If these needs are met, then you are likely to have greater intrinsic motivation and the potential for greater and deeper learning.

Liam words it this way: You see intrinsic motivation when people are learning out of love and personal interest. You have extrinsic motivation when people are learning for awards or to avoid punishments. While both have a role to play, the goal is increased intrinsic motivation.

If we think about a good learning experience we’ve had, as Liam suggests we do, we will probably realize that we didn’t feel “externally controlled.” In fact, we probably felt good with what we were doing, energized by it even, and we probably had a good relationship with our teacher and colleagues as we were learning.

I love this line of thinking. A J Juliani (see my blog about his conversation with Tim Logan) mentions how lectures sometimes get a bad rap. A J points us in the same direction as Liam, saying that if we want to go to a lecture because we are fired up about the topic, then that lecture can be a great way to learn, because we are there in the context of intrinsic motivation. Why lectures get a bad rap is probably because they are often delivered to an audience that is not intrinsically motivated. In other words, learners will give us teachers a bit of leeway with the mode of instruction, IF they are intrinsically motivated.

Liam goes on to mention that intrinsic motivation seems to decline as our students get older. We tend to see eager elementary students, basically, and disengaged secondary students. Deci and Ryan’s explanation includes the possibility that schools are not creating the conditions that support autonomy, competence, and relatedness, i.e. self-determination. I think Liam might add that schools are less focused on autonomy, in particular, as students get older. 

In his third podcast, Liam starts by reassuring us that building autonomy into the classroom doesn’t mean a laissez-faire, anything goes approach. “It’s not just free choice and free rein,” he says. The teacher can still direct learning toward course goals while creating conditions for greater autonomy. Better said: the teacher can be more successful in reaching course goals because there is greater autonomy.

We all need “opportunities to behave according to one’s interests and values.” Think about this statement for a minute in your own context. Do you get opportunities to behave according to your own interests and values? Do you get enough of them? To what degree are those opportunities, and the rate at which you have them, related to your job satisfaction? 

Students need to have “a sense of ownership,” Liam continues. He recommends that we, when possible in our classrooms, make sure students aren’t forced into doing something or coerced to do something for rewards or punishment. If you get rid of those things, then you are raising autonomy.”

What I particularly like here is that Liam is saying that teachers can begin immediately to create more autonomy, and therefore a greater chance for intrinsic motivation. Though he recognizes that traditional instruction in the language classroom (and I would add, in many classrooms, and in curriculum and assessment in addition to instruction) tends to suppress autonomy, we can do something about it. In fact, with greater autonomy we can improve both our student results and our personal job satisfaction. Improving one will improve the other.

As an example, Liam cites assessments. Simply having a variety of manners through which students can demonstrate their learning introduces greater autonomy. This opportunity is open to every single teacher, today. Perhaps you can’t change a final test, but you can change a formative assessment leading up to that final test. You can also, as Liam did when he taught at my school, have short assessments at the end of a class period, using simple cards handed to you by the students as they leave the room. Ask them to write down one thing they learned, or one way in which instruction could be changed so they could learn better, or one question they have for the next class period. Simple to do … and yet introducing just that much more autonomy in the classroom experience of your students.

“I wish,” Liam concludes, that “we didn’t have such prescribed curriculum to work within,” but even if we do, we need to think “Is there a better way for me to get this across that has the students’ interests, students’ lives, their hobbies … all part of the learning?”

I mention parallels in Liam’s comments with an interview of A J Juliani. Listen to A J and host Tim Logan on the Future Learning Design podcast.

Liam mentions being introduced to TPRS by Grant Boulanger, a Spanish teacher, trainer, and potter from Minnesota. World language teachers in particular will enjoy learning more about Grant’s work.

For the past decade, I’ve focused on supporting teacher and student agency at my school.

Matt Barnes recently shared some of the thinking that led him to start the Global Education Movement, a bottom up organization with no less a goal than implementing a radically different vision of education. If you are a reformer at heart, but perhaps plagued by doubt in the context of so much inertia of the educational status quo, this is a podcast for you (Overthrowing Education).

Matt Barnes lays out the three central ideas of the Global Education Movement (GEM) this way:

1. the parent’s role is central;
2. student agency and autonomy are required as soon as possible; and
3. we need a radical redefinition of educational success (focusing on one’s ability to learn).

The parent’s role is central for a couple of reasons. 

First, the dream is for education to be constructed by the student. A student should learn to create an individual learning plan in which they can pursue their own interests. The people who know the student best and can be the best advocate for the student are the parents. 

“Let’s explore the different areas of interest of your child and build a learning plan around that rather than a learning plan around getting to x, y, or z college.”

When you consider that school curriculum is determined before the teachers who work with that curriculum ever meet a single student they are going to teach, well, you can see where personalization isn’t the first priority of a school. Teachers may want to personalize, but they are highly constrained. Administrators may say they are all for personalization, but there you should push back. What exactly is going to be personalized? To what degree is that really personalization?

Secondly, the parent’s role is central because to actually affect change, teachers need to actively recruit parents to be champions for change. “Parents are going to win every time,” says Barnes. “If you want to really anger somebody, start to mess with their child in a way that they don’t think is right.” 

In other words, “the power lies in the parent,” so Barnes’ goal is “to get as many parents as possible to realize that there are ways that they can pursue some of what I’m addressing while still keeping their kids in the system … and that requires the parent to be activated in a way that most schools don’t actually want.”

Student agency and autonomy

Right at the top of the podcast Barnes presents two key questions:

• what is the definition of success?
• what is the definition of learning?

You might think it odd that many parents, teachers, and administrators don’t have an immediate  and clear answer to these questions. Perhaps you might forgive the parents, but certainly the educators should have a clear definition, right?

I assure you it’s not that easy. Will Richardson has been railing for years that schools need to start with their definition of learning. Why? Because a definition brings clarity – and because most schools don’t have one. Think Richardson doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Well then consider that the New England Association for Schools and Colleges, a major accreditor of schools, introduced an accreditation protocol in the last few years that starts with the requirement for any school looking for accreditation to create a definition of learning. Further, as a member of a school that has gone through this process, it’s neither easy nor is the end product universally accepted. It certainly isn’t rapidly adopted into the school’s culture, either. 

So parents, you’ve got to help your children forge their definition of success. By doing so, you are contributing to their sense of agency and their ability to take responsibility for their actions and to direct themselves. You are giving them an ability to learn how to learn – that skill that supersedes most others since it is broadly applicable across all circumstances one encounters.

Barnes believes that “by 12 years old, usually 11 or even 10 in some cases, the child can actually become so independent in their learning that they can begin to build their own learning plans.”

At home, I agree. My youngest, at 11 years old, is learning German and touch typing with apps, knows nearly as much about Harry Potter as Rowlings herself, thanks to endless YouTube videos, and cooks or bakes for us on Friday afternoons with her friends. She creates her own dance choreographies and trains for artistic gymnastics. She is the one who remembers her school schedule, what needs to be signed, and what homework and tests are coming up. I could go on, I’m the proud dad, of course, so more than a little biased. 

And I do have lots of contrary evidence at my school. Plenty of students 13 years and older routinely fail when given the space and time to self-regulate. They have lived command and control for so long that many of them don’t even realize they aren’t up to self-guided learning – at least in the school environment. I bet when they are at home on their own they are indeed able to pick up this or that and learn how to do new things. At school, though, they’ve been trained to wait for the teacher. This is a terrible thing to teach our young people.

So I try to create experiences at school that allow students to practice having the freedom of their own choices. And I have in the past done exactly what Barnes recommends: get the parents on my side by informing them exactly why we are doing what we are doing. 

“The parent can give the teacher cover,” in other words. Otherwise teachers who are trying to operate in a way that privileges a high degree of student agency will get negative feedback from the school itself (a strange outcome, but true) and quite possibly leave the system. Through doing so they perpetuate the command and control system they were working against.

A radical redefinition of educational success (focusing on one’s ability to learn)

Schools have a limited amount of time. (Actually, 12 years is massive, but it is at least a finite amount of time.) So to what degree should schools use that time to introduce as much content as possible versus focusing on a student’s ability to learn … well, to learn whatever?

Barnes reminds us that one hundred years ago, teachers had a certain amount of information in their heads that simply wasn’t available to students elsewhere. So they were teachers. Now that information is ubiquitous, students need coaches more than teachers. They need practice in separating knowledge from noise and they need folks who believe in them and ask questions about their work (see my blog about an interview with Sugata Mitra).

And this is what teachers want to do, according to Barnes. “I ask teachers all the time what they want, what is the dream environment for their learners … They want learners to be independent, they want learners to be excited about learning, curious, to be autonomous and have a high sense of agency. They want that. But the system they are in doesn’t. The system they are in is built to create dependent learners.”

Aargh! If that’s only partially true – that our schools are really very good vehicles for creating dependent learners – we have got a whole lot of work to do. Perhaps we can take solace in pinning our hopes to the content coverage – that knowing all that content will in fact lead to success. Well, ask yourself again what the definition of success should be. And imagine that Barnes is also right that universities are “actually not looking for the straight A / perfect SAT / volunteered at the Children’s Hospital type of student. They are looking for kids who actually know who they are, that have demonstrated that through their activities, that are creative and open and thinkers, not just rule followers. That’s what universities actually want.”

And if you are still holding out hope for that part of universities which IS looking for top grades, consider the extent to which a future boss is going to worry about top grades versus creative problem solving, ability to collaborate, and seeing another’s viewpoint. 

The host, Batsheva Frankel, ends the podcast by reminding Barnes about one of his own quotes. “Why normal is broken and you want to be weird.” Barnes restates the quote as “Normal is broken in schools; from now on weird wins.” Barnes defines weird kids as those “who don’t need an adult to hold their hand or look over their shoulder. Weird is about creating kids who fit [today’s world], not fit in schools from previous generations.”

“If your child’s school looks, feels, tastes, or smells like the school you attended when you were a child, then you have a big problem.”

Consider your child’s school – or your own, if you are a teacher – with this last nugget of wisdom in mind: “You never ever ever do for others that which they can do for themselves. Because the minute you do that you are creating a dependency.”

If you’d like to hear more from Matt Barnes, check out his interview with Tim Logan on Future Learning Design.

I listened with interest to students who spoke at the beginning of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges annual conference on December 8, 2021.

The moderator asked a simple question, one that NEASC had undoubtedly shared with the student panelists ahead of time:

If you could redesign your education, what would it look like?

The answers come from half a dozen students, paraphrased here. The few quoted remarks are direct quotes.

Well, I think someone has to deal with the “cut throat culture” and the “toxicity that comes with that.” I’d like to see a greater sense of collaboration, with more small group time in the classroom and a way to get unengaged students engaged.

I’d like to work on personal organization in order to handle everything I’m supposed to do. It might help to have more “student paced learning” and for students to have a voice in how they learn and how they demonstrate their learning.

I agree that self-paced and personalized learning is important. Learning should not be “one size fits all.” Students need to be able to learn at their own pace in class.

Students of color also need to see teachers of color in their schools. It matters. 

Maybe teachers could focus on having us solve a problem instead of answering questions and trying to get a better grade. And we should focus more on abilities that you can use every day, like learning to communicate. 

If students had more of a say in what classes they took it would be good. I’d like to take more classes I want to, not just those that I have to take because of my age. It would be nice to have “a more individualized plan” for each student.

After the first round of comments, an assistant superintendent from Boston followed up, asking for suggestions about approaches to teaching and learning.

Teaching should be creative, I don’t want to just listen and take notes. Like one time a science teacher made a classroom into a living cell and I still remember the parts of the cell really well. It was creative. We should be able to “get our hands dirty” with project based learning.

And the creativity seems to go away as students get older. I think education should stay creative, even in high school. Field trips and seeing “actual things” is better. I want to experience things, not just see them in a book.

I really think schools need to address stress and anxiety. More work needs to be self-paced and “customizable.” 

Yes, I have a math teacher that gives different levels of work to students in the same class, so that you are working at the right level. Sometimes students can help each other. In fact, students can do a lot on their own, maybe “studying oneself” and then getting help from the teacher when you need it.

Here is my challenge to NEASC and all their member schools. Students are very clearly stating that they would like to have the space to develop greater agency. They would like to have more choice and more control. 

How are you going to answer them?