A post I recently added to our ETEC Ning on the topic of Christensen/Horn’s “Disrupting Class” and our upcoming book club on it:

As some of you know, I have been working the past year and a half with a grant through the Hawaii community foundation titled “schools of the future”. As a part of that, we have been sharing books that we felt were provocative and discussing the need for education to transform. The foundational book for us was Tony Wagner’s “the global achievement gap). Shortly after reading that, we found disrupting class and found a great source for explaining how and why incremental change for schools was not going to be enough. Since then, I’ve had a chance to both hear and talk a bit with Michael Horn about the book, seen him in a public forum on the debate about bricks and mortar at this year’s NECC and seeing the ideas percolate through at least some of the conversations in forums like the future of education.
Scott McLeod (Dangerously Irrelevant) gave a great updated view of this at NECC here

so where do I sit on this? I have come to believe that Christensen is really correct about the forces that are going to shape the relevance of education. For those of you that are not familiar with what has happened with Florida virtual school’s, with the national movement from K12.org, and others, they are providing a new model for education that is beginning to be felt by schools. Locally, Hawaii technology Academy (HTA) is showing this disruptive potential already. I really believe schools aren’t ready and struggle with students who wish to be in a different environment than traditional school.
One of the goals we set for the schools of the future grant (kudos Elizabeth Park, Mike Travis, Lisa Waters for leading their schools to successful grant proposals) was for schools that were looking at substantive change, not just dressing up traditional school. The big debate at NECC this year was whether the bricks and mortar of schools were still viable, or needed a complete reworking.
Day 2 had a public forum debate — was provocative, passionate and showed some insight into the promise and peril schools face (Michael Horn was on the panel as was Gary Stager and Cheryl Lemke). Tape video archive here.
So I do believe traditional K-12 education is in peril — both because of its inability to adapt to a new world, and because there are forces in learning that it has not been able to address. I believe to survive school must become a learning environment that utilizes what we know about learning and technology. Homeschoolers have known this for a long time — if you start by understanding the child, build rich powerful learning around their interests, use the community, mentors and experts to support their learning goals, then you end up with a powerful experience. For most of our students today, school is still just “one thing after another” 5, 6 or seven classes a day of disconnected information with little opportunity for students to explore their own interests, or event input. Recent study of classroom interaction in schools showed that in a typical day student has rare few minutes of opportunity to express their own thinking — how can that still be happening with what we know about how the brain works, and how knowledge is constructed?
so what will education be like, or more to the point what should it be like? Using the best that technology can offer to individualize and diversified learning, in using the bricks and mortar as a learning center where learners of all ages come together to work in a community under the guidance of learning experts has promise and has already been implemented in charter reform efforts with great success.
Caveat — if you didn’t see the recent article about the Microsoft school of the future failure, it is worth looking at as an example of putting the wrong things in place in the wrong order. ESchool news had an article on this recently here.

NECC Summary

This document is the summary report for this year’s conference. Thinking about what’s most readable, I decided to do a little differently. I’ll summarize all five days in a paragraph or two here, and then if you wish you can look for the detailed notes, which are more “bullet style” but have specific tools and links as well as as many comments as I could cram in while I was typing with my laptop and tweeting. Caveat emptor!
After note — for the sake of readability, I broken down each post by day — that way the documents won’t be too far apart from the information that refers to them.

Saturday June 27

The morning was a session with Robert Craven from Orange County Florida with the title “Construction Paper for the 21st Century: Google and Free Tools”. great session with really good planning and resources listed. We spent a good part of the time using tools in Google — particular Google docs. For example we made a survey, and then were able to take it and collect data — including on mobile devices like my iPhone.
We spend time using the collaborative features, and talked about the way these can be used in the classroom.
We spent the second half of the session talking about other free and open tools he has a wonderful list of these on his website but a few of the ones in particular that he drew attention to were thinkature, Voicethread (probably the cool thing here that I learned was how easy it was to post a voice comment using a cell phone — this was very cool!), and more.
http://sites.google.com/site/digitalroberto/Home
One of the things you’ll find on his site, are screen cast videos of many of the tasks needed to accomplish the activities. This resource is a great one and I appreciate the work Robert took the This time to build a useful library for interested teachers.

The afternoon session was with Vicki Davis with the title “cell phones for classrooms, calendars, and life management”.
The best part of the session was our first hour or so was spent talking more about philosophy and policy — everything from legal precedent for students that do inappropriate things, to a conversation with the group attending about their current school philosophy and where we need to go. She showed us a video that the George Lucas foundation made about her and her students here:
http://www.edutopia.org/digital-generation-teachers-vicki-davis

nice idea — she had us role-play a few true court cases (student pulls down teachers pants, films and posts on you tube) it gave us a chance to get to know each other, weigh in on our thinking, and be active about this material. Nice modeling of her work.

great resource to help with policy — book by lisa guerin “smart policies for workplace technologies” definitely worth giving to help consider some of these devices and how we can correctly articulate expectations to staff students and parents.

She then spent time developing a theoretical model for the types of activities that cell phones can support, and the point at which they become viable either because enough students have them, the cost is no longer prohibitive, and they take the place of another device more powerfully.

one of the cool things that we did at the end was take a list of cell phone technologies and use their mobile devices in small groups, then show them to the rest of the participants. For instance, myself and my partner Adam took pictures on our mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry) and e-mailed it to our Ning site. this works as well with video! The power of this can’t be missed stated — students in the fields, could be taking pictures and posting directly from their phones to a community learning site to build a database of images, documentation.

in the “you heard it here first” category, she mentioned that one of the new trends we’ll should be looking at is QR codes. These have the ability to embed information that mobile devices can scan and playback. She feels (correctly so I believe) that we are going to see these become embedded in many objects soon.

She keeps an excellent set of resources here:
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/

Her website for the presentation is:
http://celled.wikispaces.com/

I did grab the text version of the back channel and posted with this blog as well.

all the notes are located
http://sites.google.com/site/necc2009test/documents-from-necc2009
or here

At the Honolulu Board of realtors meeting on June 5, we had the chance to hear Payton Dobbs, who leads Googles effort in e-commerce. he shared seven key ideas emerging for anyone involved in thinking about technology overlays with their development. There is nothing here that is terribly groundbreaking, but what is significant is someone as high up in Google really identifying the importance of these things — they are all relevant to our mission education and are worth taking to heart:

mobile Internet will explode — gave lots of relevant examples of how cell phones and smart phones are becoming the primary way by which people use and learn with the Internet. Good example — Apple iPhone 60% of the phone use is for not making phone calls. Lots of other examples of 3G growth, preponderance of mobile phones in populated areas like India, China, Japan, etc. Japanese teens spend two hours a day on their mobile phones — not talking. Examples of people authoring books entirely in the cell phone.

Maps are a key interface — again, give examples of how tools like Google Earth have changed the way people view the world. This is not a huge surprise to me (Mark) since my interest in tools like GIS have been around for a decade. What is interesting to me, is that we’ve skipped over GIFs as a tool and gone straight to rich intuitive tools like maps on the iPhone, Google Earth on the Internet to understand the world. A good example of this is the number of students we see in the Weinberg Tech Plaza that spend part of the day using Google Earth to look for surf spots, find their friends, and take tours of places they have not been. The new features in iPhoto for geo-tagging are another example of this becoming more prevalent.
The divide between the web and desktops will this appear. This is essentially the argument for cloud computing and there is no doubt that we are seeing the emergence of tools like smart phones and networks. He made the case that within a few years most people will ask that their data to be in the cloud, so they have access to contacts, documents, information matter where they are. Is the fact that our teachers cannot access their files from home another example of how we are disconnected from this movement?
Everything will connect — previously inanimate objects will now be connected. He gave us his example the significance of RFID as a technology. The fact that devices will become smart enough to know what they are how they are connected to other objects around them is an example of the way technology drives innovation. If our refrigerator knows that milk is spoiling, if our car knows conditions are unsafe, if objects in the supermarket know our likes and dislikes, it will greatly change the way you interact with the objects around us — and how they will interact with us!
The web will be more personal and social — his observation was that people were less and less distinguishing between online and face-to-face interaction. We are already seeing this with the school age generation who see talking to and using tools like text, avatars, as real conversation and relationship. Another example of this is using online interfaces for medical advice — something which used to be the purview of the doctor’s office has become a much more online experience and moving more that way. He advocated for all businesses (and schools?) To have a social area of this site to build a community that will bring conversation, creation, and commitment to those focused around that organization.
Internet will be the primary platform for media — we see lots of examples of this recently with releases of Hulu, YouTube, and Flickr, Picasa, etc. For me, personally, this begs the question of platform independence — when we are reaching the point that media including tools like Voicethread now, and potential video editing sites are just n the horizon, is the fact that right now the Macintosh is the weapon of choice for media development for most schools, a long-term reality for a short-term phenomena?
Going green is here to stay — he gave lots of examples of Google’s own efforts to be green — solar generation test projects that are fully online, electric car hybrids being developed, and just the nature of the need for us to all live within their means that the earth gives us. I think the example of Hawaii preparatory Academy’s new energy lab as a model in this venue — I am excited for what it will mean when it will become a model for schools to consider how to best utilize the resources around them.

he finished with the quote below — recognizing that for many in businesses and schools that these changes will not be easy or comfortable. They are however, the reality we are looking into and we disregard any of these to our own peril.
. Catherine the great –
“there is a great wind blowing and will either cause imagination or a headache “

discuss…

Summary of my visit to Francis Parker Essential school in Devins, Mass
April 7, 2009

My point of contact was Rebecca Kane
when we first met, she explained some of the general philosophy of the school:
juniors and seniors spend 60 hours getting back to school (school service project work)
they also are required to do senior seminar at Spanish is their fifth class
they spend time in the community
their schedule has three divisions: 7-8, 9-10, 11-12. These are called division one, two, three
there is an academic Dean who works on the schedule for the kids — the academic Dean works extensively with Division III students this is where they have their senior project
students need a portfolio for graduation and need to fill this.
For their transcripts for college, they still don’t put grade point averages or grades — it is all narrative
their experience has been that colleges now have “traditional” and “nontraditional” piles
for the Division III class the students spend an hour six times a day
for the Division I and II classes, students spend two hours in interdisciplinary classes three times per day
it talked about gateways into division two research projects
learning habits and learning how to learn and creating independent work is if the goal here
not a focus on facts, but knowing how to apply knowledge is a universal conversation on campus
I observed a Division III class on Shakespeare with Josie
why do they allow this? It allows students to fill up their portfolios with more individualized/teacher choice courses, and also to get exposure to a more college like disciplinary experience.
The students were talking in the class about abject jealousy (MacBeth)
Josie’s class felt more like a seminar — 13 students in a roundtable format with heavily dogeared and annotated text of Shakespeare talking about themes within the text and the readings.
Marks note-what are teacher and student roles here? students are the ones who are requested to create, express, interpret the work
student makes a comment about a blog when students mentioned that weapon is a broadsword and not a dagger — it is clear the students have spent much outside of time working on building their knowledge for this conversation
students asking questions appears about rationale choices they’ve made in their descriptions
interesting point: for the hour that I observed percent of student talking 85% percent the teacher talking 15% in the process of 20 minutes each student has at least a few minutes to share and demonstrate their understanding in their ideas about the current reading – all students are engaged and involved – leaning forward
interesting: sign on the board — post your ideas on the blog!
yet still, paper here (text, original media, readers, etc.)

next I visited a division to math/science class
this class was a little more traditional, and the teacher mentioned that they do something called in class content assessment (ICCA). in other words they do in class testing — although they do not post grades for the work students do externally. In this particular class that I observed, the science part were talking about simple machines, and the math were measuring heights using tools that they would later develop in the semester to look at scale
today’s lesson was really the “hook”-the teachers were
the activity was to find how tall objects were given some simple guidelines about measurement (cannot directly measure, must come up with a strategy, must be able to explain your method to class reasonably)
a few things I saw — students were allowed to bring in food and gum into the class and seemed respectful of this — clean up after themselves, etc.
it did seem that in the math and science integrated class the activities were much more teacher led, not student driven. There was on the other hand, a built-in expectation that students were going to try things potentially fail and compare what methods worked and what didn’t. The teacher did not give specific instructions on how to do the activities at hand.
The two advisers go between the groups discussing the methods to see what they did.
Students were given a challenge I asked a student as we are walking down the hall what do you think of this process of learning? His answer: “hard as hell!”
Talked to Nathan (teacher) about the school planning conditions for this I talked to both teachers about planning time and how they hand off curricula etc. They stressed how important the long planning time was to develop coherence in their curricula
class conversations on the differing ways they measured interesting process to draw how the students what they know and what they need to know to solve the problem better
Later, I was allowed to talk to a student — Paul I had met him earlier in the Shakespeare class
I found him confident, he was an artist who would’ve looked ordinary in our campus in the theater department.
The senior project he chose was on tribal mystics
some of the things that he observed he feels ready to learn anywhere and anyhow — not worried about what he might’ve missed in a universal curriculum, as he feels prepared to move forward
wishes they’d spent more money on arts, as that is not one of the main focuses of the school
he said from his experience 50% of the work they do on campus’s revision and reflection that this is part of their process and everything they do
he felt the feedback is part of their process that is significant — he has friends in college and in other schools and are frustrated by work that they submit and then they never get an opportunity to receive feedback on the status — a frustrating thought
College for the students at his school he feels that they don’t have problems because being an independent learner is something that they’ve been asked to do since they came to the school
I had lunch with one of the teachers-Laura she was a Division I well-being teacher and Nathan who I observed in the division to math class we talked a bit about the advisories, and how they are so powerful. It is often like our homeroom structure at mid-Pacific, where the students are with the teacher for the four years at the school meet with them every day at the beginning for 10 minutes and at the end for 10 minutes and once a week for an hour to do an extended activity. It was noticeable, that their culture for their homeroom students was much more involved than ours — they related stories of taking their students out to field trips, planning home visits where the cost or did arts and crafts, much more of a family feeling that I found most of our homes. Not sure if this is cultural and they just managed to convert what can be a mundane process into something much more social, but it was powerful to see that this really works for them
the essential structure of their school is in the documents that I have PDF, but in a nutshell:
grade 7 and eight — students attend a two-hour math science integrated lesson (22 students to team teachers), students then attended a two-hour social studies and language arts integrated lesson (the same structure), there is lunch, and then they have a two-hour Spanish and health and well-being integrated class
notice here, there is no differentiated groupings — all students take the exact same classes it is homogeneous — and purposely so
Grades nine and 10 — same as above
grades 11 and 12 – students now have six one-hour blocks in the same schedule, or they can take a more “elective” experience — Shakespeare, AP biology, etc.
moving from division to division is based on presentation of work — an exhibition
these are called gateways and they literally are what allow students to move from one to the other
one of the lines about their assessment — “students can gateway from one division to the next through successful completion of a Gateway portfolio. Students Gateway one domain at a time. It is entirely possible for students to be in different divisions for different domains.”
So what’s my general impressions of the school?
Still an amazing environment that is student centered, as easily identifiable rigor, relevance, and relationship. This is a school that most teachers would feel more comfortable in, as they still saw a traditional relationship and schedule, content, and day. What is very different are some notable things:
a teacher’s typical day is a two-hour block of team teaching 24 kids, another two hour block team teaching 24 kids, and a two-hour block for planning and curriculum development. This is a tremendous difference from our current way of working with teachers, students, and scheduled
the catch is what you need to give up in order to accomplish this — all students take the same contents for the first four years, there is only one language, there are no “specials” — art, theater, religion, technology…these things are all embedded in the 3 domains vast are defined in division one and two.
Highly recommend you take a look at the school documents in PDF format – they are posted on the following link
http://mpifuturefacing.wetpaint.com/page/Francis+Parker+Essential+School