Reflection on Malcolm Gladwell keynote at NECC 2009

one of the key ideas that Gladwell explored in his keynote was the significant evidence that both supports the idea of perseverance over talent and its implications for education. There is a very nice summary of his keynote here:
http://www.isteconnects.org/2009/06/28/face-to-face-with-malcolm-gladwell-at-necc-2009/

at one point, he talks about the success of KIPP schools (http://kipp.org) and their formula for success being more contact time, therefore more “time in the trenches”. If you look at the MET school, their idea of rigour comes not from curriculum that is hammered into kids, but from rich authentic projects that develop rigour.

In particular, Dennis Littky quotes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi … rigour is “the opportunity for young people to experience intense concentration in any activity that requires skill and discipline, regardless of content”

the key idea here, is that two very different schools accomplish the same goal by lengthy hands-on hard cognitive work on the part of learners. In one school that is driven by the teachers, and the other is driven by the direction of a student who is passionate about a topic they have chosen. For our HAIS/HCF schools of the future initiative, we have left the approach that each school takes to themselves. Transformation for each institution will be different, and the good news is that Gladwell’s tenet would seem to imply (and I agree) that the paths that each school takes can be different as long as rigour is a significant part of student work on a day-to-day basis.
He said himself during his keynote that it is probably not so much what schools do as it is how they do it.

interesting stuff…