Mission and The Builders Manifesto

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There’s  good provocative thinking from Umair Haque on the Harvard Business Review blog: The Builders’ Manifesto:  20th century leadership is what’s stopping 21st century prosperity.

With everyone on the leadership bandwagon proclaiming the need for leaders and leadership, it may be time for a fresh perspective. Because – whatever is needed – from health care reform to education to action on climate change – we don’t seem to have it. Haque writes:

Dear World Leaders,

This relationship isn’t working out…. We’ve tried to make it work. But it’s not us — it’s you (really).

Haque’s  hypothesis is that the word “leader” feels like a relic of the 20th century and that rather than try to train better leaders we need to reboot the concept.

He contends  that it’s a myth that leadership is a set of timeless skills and points out that leadership can be both powerful -  and bad. And it is certainly true that the graveyards of the 20^th century are littered with the consequences of effective leadership.

Institutions  are broken, he says,  and their dysfunction means the old model of leadership cannot work. The answer he says not leadership but  “about ‘buildership’, or what I often refer to as Constructivism.”

Haque includes some interesting contrasts between leaders and builders: Sarah Palin v. Nelson Mandela; Ben Bernanke v. Mohammed Yunus. He has others from a variety of fields, and his commentary provokes thought.

In education, constructivism challenges the default mode of sage-on-the-stage, all-knowing leader-teacher whose job it is to transmit knowledge.

It’s a meaning-making theory of learning that maintains that individuals create or construct their own new understandings or knowledge through the interaction with what they already know and believe and the ideas, events, and activities with which they come in contact.

Knowledge is acquired through active engagement rather than imitation or repetition.  A constructivist classroom is characterized by active engagement, inquiry, problem solving, and collaboration. Constructivist teachers help students by encouraging active questioning and challenging learners to form, reform, and refine their ideas and understandings in an active and social context.  Multiple perspectives, intellectual diversity and engagement with the real world are taken as a given. Knowledge is not out there to be taken in, but derives from interaction and engagement as the learner builds a personal world of understanding. It’s a social process, and it means that you have to do something – intellectually and/or physically – to learn. And caring – i.e. motivation – matters.

So back to the Builders.

Haque concludes with a list of ten principles that contrast bossism/ leadership with buildership. My summary is that builders (constructivists):

• believe in community
• are motivated by the desire to change things for the better
• are inspired by what could be
• work to show why the destination matters
• draw passion for the enterprise, and
• are there every step of the way.

And to distill it further: Builders believe in, and work for, a mission and a vision founded on values.

Do these ideas apply to institutions like schools and to school leadership?

Sir Ken Robinson 2009

“Our children, every day, come to school and spread their dreams at our feet. We should tread softly.” Sir Ken Robinson.

Sir Ken Robinson from NYSCATE on Vimeo.

Higher standards. Please.

School of the past, school of the future

This summer I  the quite wonderful Hancock Shaker Village. It’s where in craft and design, form meets function with simplicity and beauty.  So many interesting things to see and pay attention to.

Of course – I had to visit the schoolhouse, now separated from the main buildings by a busy highway.

The school room was bright and well lit and seemed both familiar and welcoming. The shelves held books, quills and slates. There was a stove with a long pipe, and a teacher’s desk at the front and on it a handbell. Student desks were in rows and tall windows framed pleasant vistas in spite of the road.

The date on the blackboard was 1898.

At around the same, a French postcard presented a view of the school of the future – the year 2000. The same room, students still in those desks and rows. But now knowledge has been mechanized. Knowledge as represented by books  is  fed into a hand cranked mincing machine (at least there’s one active learner!) and directed to the heads of passive students via electrical circuits dropped from the ceiling.

It all looks like the nightmare of an isolation chamber/  computerized/ learning laboratory devoted to mind control.

Future past imperfect

Enjoy the drawing. But but then read this: Shifting Ground from Chris Lehmann.

From the Chicago Tribune 1958. (But only one child distracted by the flying machine outside the classroom?)

What’s changed?

What’s changed? Pretty much everything.

A question to get going with:
Shopping and information then and now: If you want the best dishwasher or digital camera or know how to remove turmeric stains from linen or why there’s a sudden infestation of ladybugs – where would you go to figure it out?

And for most people the answer would be: online.

What did not change in that equation was the desire for the product and information. And wanting to be informed.

But let’s not confuse the map with the territory and destination.

In school technology changes everything. And nothing. Children are the same. But they experience the world differently than a generation ago. Fortunately we have some amazing and empowering tools to help us to fulfill our mission to develop educated citizens with a passion for learning and living. And the tools are all around us, and them. The question is – are the tools in use? Or in digital detention?

It’s not about the tools – just as it never was – but the learning, the meaning, and the purpose. And it’s not just about doing things more efficiently or faster – it’s about agency and access, empowerment and transformation.

And for a reminder of just how much has changed in the way we conduct our, here is a quick slide show memory jolt from Dangerously Irrelevant on the pace and breadth of technological impact on (almost) every aspect of life, work, and leisure

Digital Technology Impact Slides

View more presentations from mcleod.

Whatever it takes….

Oldie but goodie. An irresistible cartoon from the Syracuse-Herald Journal 1991
From another era…or…?

Locked out of learning

When I’m in the car I listen to WAMC, and yesterday I heard Roland Fryer’s Dowmel lecture. His specialty is race-based economic issues, and his research projects seek to answer the question of why African-Americans are harder hit by poverty than other demographic groups in America

The focus was education and the data dismal.

Fryer is a brilliant economist, an engaging speaker and he told a compelling personal story – from the streets to Harvard via football, an aptitude for mathematics and the support of his grandmother, a teacher

He says we have to do “Whatever it takes” and “Whatever works” when it comes to lifting achievement of poor performing groups. For Fryer this includes financial incentives and he is one of the voices behind NYC’s scheme to pay students for performance in school.

Data is big in the education world right now. Nothing wrong with that. But what is it data about? There’s the rub.
Data is good. Good data is even.

One of the key tenets of a progressive approach to education is the attention to the whole child. Education is not about academics only and intellectual growth is not limited to verbal proficiency and mathematical achievement alone. (Beyond that of course – the evidence clearly shows that the arts, physical activity and creative play all boost test scores.) The focus on testing narrows the path and locks the gate for so many children

Fryer spoke of the gold standard of data versus the heart standard of the anecdotal “I know it’s working because I feel it in my heart.” I am all for the gold standard. But – for me that means looking at what we are measuring. Some things are still bigger than the constituent parts and the punishments and rewards built into the current school testing system ignores the realities of what matters most. Test scores often reflect children’s backgrounds more than the quality of a given teacher or school.

The data shows that poor children fail in school and drop out in large numbers. It does not show that they lacked a desire to learn and succeed when they entered. Maybe the issue is not the lack of motivation but something else: The support, encouragement, resources and achievement that accompany active and joyful learning perhaps.

So here’s a thought: If the data shows that students aren’t learning effectively, could it be because of the prevalence and persistence of traditional beliefs and practices in our schools?

And a second thought: Let’s work on finding ways to test what actually matters most.

State of play

So the debate on the purpose of play in early childhood simmers on. It popped up on my Facebook page yesterday with this from the ASCD: Play is problem solving

That then led me to the The Playtime’s the Thing from the Washington Post.

The pressure is on to raise achievement scores and this puts the squeeze on time for play.

“If we are to prevent the achievement gap and develop a cradle-to-career educational pipeline, early learning programs are going to have to be better integrated with the K-12 system,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday at a convention of the nation’s largest early childhood organization, the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

With school districts targeting student achievement the focus has been on literacy – especially reading and math skills for children at ever-younger ages.  No Child Left Behind requires schools to ensure that all children are proficient in math, reading and writing by 2014. What could be wrong with that? Well – quite a lot as it happens. With a society that actually needs a wide range of aptitudes and abilities – with the route to actual success in school being more than the narrow gateway of test scores – we are in danger of leaving many children behind.

Furthermore – it appears that while certain measures of proficiency show up in test results the far reaching effects of lack of play do not.  According to the article lost playtime shows up in life.  And with devastating, costly consequences – delinquency, school failure, emotional disturbance and delayed social development.

It’s with dismay, then, that I read the statistic of the amount of play allowed quote story:

“… in kindergarten, children are playing for fewer than 30 minutes a day, according to a study of full-day kindergartens in New York City and Los Angeles published in the spring by the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group based in College Park. They spend four to six times more time on literacy, math and test-taking than they do on play.

What it signals to me is a false dichotomy of play and work. Perhaps adults can distinguish between the two – although meaningful work often has a playful aspect. But for small children the two are one and the same.

If play is the work of the child then why are we keeping these children from their essential work for a short-term bump in test scores? And at what price?  Evidence seems to suggest that this educational dead end short circuits the very activity – the industry and intellectual activity of active play – that children need to grow academically and socially.

I’m with Friedrich Froebel on this one:

Play is the highest level of child development…It gives…joy, freedom, contentment, inner and outer rest, peace with the world…The plays of childhood are the germinal leaves of all later life.

Publish! And democratize learning

Interesting post from The Innovative Educator: 21st Century Educators Don’t Say, “Hand It In.” They say, “Publish It!

Read the post to hear what happened when she put out the word via Twitter and also to see her suggestions for making it happen in the classroom.

Meanwhile – here is one of the slides from a presentation by C.K. Prahalad* at the recent TEDIndia in Mysore. It’s about democratizing learning. Are these the key points? What do you think?

 

*C.K. Prahalad studies business and innovation around the globe — from the top to the bottom of the economic pyramid. He asks, “How do you convert information into insight, and then into action?” Learning, he says, is about inference; two people will infer different things from the same information. We can improve learning by understanding the processes that alter the way different people make inferences. …. We’re at a unique point in history — more people than ever have access to information through technology, but we must democratize learning, too. Books
http://blog.ted.com/tedindia