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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Advance Praise for Moving the Rock "The future comes at us fast -- which means school reformers don't have time to wait. They need real tools in real time. That's why Moving the Rock is so important. Grant Lichtman has guidance for anyone -- teachers, parents, administrators, government officials -- intent on helping young people succeed not 'someday,' but today." -- Daniel H. Pink, best-selling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind "Grant Lichtman's book is a clear and comprehensive guide to the "what" and the "how" of educational transformation. Organized around essential levers for change, it is a must-read for anyone who wants to make a difference in our schools." --Tony Wagner, Harvard Ilab Expert in Residence, and best-selling author of The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators" "This book gives me hope for a brighter future in education. Despite the dark clouds imposed by misguided policies, Grant Lichtman diligently tells stories of grass-roots innovations in the classrooms and schools all over the world. Moving the Rock is an inspiring call to action for all educators." --Yong Zhao, Ph.D., Foundation Distinguished Professor, School of Education, University of Kansas "If you have children, or teach children, or want our children to succeed, this is a must-read book. Grant Lichtman throws down the challenge for all of us; that WE can change education, and he shows us just how successful schools everywhere are overcoming change-killing inertia in our schools." --Todd Rose, best-selling author of The End of Average; Harvard University Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Educationgives educators, parents, administrators, students, and other stakeholders a clear paradigm for transforming our outmoded schools into schools that will help our children to meet the challenges of tomorrow. It's no secret that our educational system is stuck. Moving the Rock shows the important roles all of us can play in un-sticking it by moving seven specific levers that will change the focus of education from what we teach to how we learn. Importantly, moving the levers is completely possible today, and in fact is already happening now in many schools. Drawing on research and extensive experience in the education community, Grant Lichtman outlines the seven essential levers that can profoundly change our schools so that we are teaching all our children how to learn, including * Creating the Demand for Better Schools * Building School-Community Learning Laboratories * Encouraging Open Access to Knowledge * Fixing How We Measure Student Success * Teaching the Teachers what They Really Need to Know * and more At the end of each of each chapter there are one or more challenges, ways that all of us can collectively turn the pioneering work of others into transformation for all our schools.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Why, What, and How of Educational Change
Overcoming Inertia
Where This Book Takes Us
Resources for This Book
What We Will Not Cover
The Goal Is Deeper Learning
A Couple of Other Points
Let's Roll
CHAPTER ONE: The Future of “School”
Redesigning the School “Operating System”
Where the Rock Is Going to Roll
How Will the Learning Experience Change?
How Will Schools Function Differently?
How Will Our Mission Shift?
Why Is This Future Inevitable?
CHAPTER TWO: Lever #1 Create the Demand for Better Schools
Creating Demand at the National Level
Creating Demand at the School Level
Creating Demand in the Community
How We Will Press This Lever
CHAPTER THREE: Lever #2 Build School‐Community Learning Laboratories
Designing for the Real World
Spreading Student Confidence in the Thinkabit Lab
Partnering with a Giant
Going to Scale
How We Will Press This Lever
CHAPTER FOUR: Lever #3 Encourage Open Access to Knowledge
The Rise of Open Educational Resources
The Problems of OER
The Huge Benefits of OER
Back to Wolfram Alpha: The (Kind of Scary?) Future of Open Knowledge
How We Will Press This Lever
CHAPTER FIVE: Lever #4 Fix How We Measure Student Success and Admit Students to College
We Don't Measure What We Value
The Health of Our Children
The Wrong Results
Cracks in the Dam
Reframing the High School Transcript
How We Will Press This Lever
CHAPTER SIX: Lever #5 Teach the Teachers What They Really Need to Know
The Legacy Problem
New Models That Work
How We Will Press This Lever
CHAPTER SEVEN: Lever #6 Connect, Flow, and Rethink “School”
Change
Requires
Connectivity
The Nurture of Networks
Crossing Curves
Welcome to the Cognitosphere: A System of Structured Flow
Great Learning Is Relational
The Stepping Stone: Augmented Reality
The Game Changer: Virtual Reality
How We Will Press This Lever
Final Thought
CHAPTER EIGHT: Lever #7 Lead Change from Where You Are
What Is Missing
Sharing the Leadership Experience
Formal Training in Leadership
Scaling Up
How We Will Press This Lever
CHAPTER NINE: How
You
Will Transform Education
Teachers
School Site and District Administrators
Parents
Students
Business and Community Leaders
Philanthropists and Foundations
College and University Presidents, Admissions Officers, and Education and Business School Deans and Faculty Members
The Fourth Estate
CHAPTER TEN: Let's Roll
What Is Your Extra Chunky?
Springtime in the Desert
The Bad, Good, and Great News
Finally, Trajectory
VALUABLE AND CITED WEBSITES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Moving the Rock
Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education
Grant Lichtman
Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Lichtman, Grant, 1956– author.
Title: Moving the rock : seven levers WE can press to transform education / Grant Lichtman.
Description: San Francisco, CA : Jossey‐Bass ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026112 (print) | LCCN 2017010696 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119404460 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119404422 (epub) | ISBN 9781119404415 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Educational change. | Educational leadership.
Classification: LCC LB2806 (print) | LCC LB2806 .L46 2017 (ebook) | DDC 370—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026112
Cover design: Wiley
Cover image: © Martin Barraud/Getty Images‐Seesaw, © Jupiterimages/Getty Images‐Schoolhouse
FIRST EDITION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grant Lichtman is a globally recognized thought leader in the drive to transform K–12 education. He keynotes conferences and works with school and community teams, helping them to develop their imagination of schools of the future and a comfort and capacity for change. He is the author of two previous books: #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education and The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School. Grant shares resources, articles, connections with other schools and innovative programs, and his blog at www.grantlichtman.com.
For 15 years Grant was a senior administrator at one of the largest and oldest K–12 independent schools in California with responsibilities that included business, finance, operations, technology, development, campus construction, and global studies. Before working in education, he directed business ventures in the oil and gas industry in the former Soviet Union, South America, and the US Gulf Coast.
Grant graduated from Stanford University with a BS and MS in geology in 1980 and studied the deep ocean basins of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Bering Sea. Grant and his wife, Julie, live in Poway, about 20 miles north of San Diego.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am sincerely indebted to the many people whose stories, voices, ideas, and passions formed the basis of this book. I have met, worked with, and gathered knowledge from well over 10,000 educators, students, and community stakeholders in the last four years, and each bit of that work is a small piece of the puzzle I have tried to form. This is their story and vision, not mine.
Having said that, there are smaller groups of people who have given much more deeply of their time and ideas, for which I am truly grateful. Many of them you will meet in the book, so I won't rename them here. I interviewed more than 80 educators and education thought leaders for this book, and most of them are quoted in their own words.
Neil Hokanson, Brad Lichtman, Kami Thordarson, Julie Wilson, and Kelly Young were kind enough to read the manuscript and provide extremely insightful input and advice. And of course, my wonderful editor, Kate Bradford, at Jossey‐Bass provided invaluable guidance throughout the process.
There is a group of remarkable, courageous, leading educators in New Zealand with whom I have had the privilege to interact with virtually and in person. There are way too many to name, and I know I will slight some, but Kiwis are so warm and wonderful, they will all forgive me. Among those with whom I have most frequently collaborated are Maurie Abraham, Claire Amos, Becky Hare, Steve Mouldey, and Danielle Myburgh.
A small group of educators and non‐educators contributed to the development of my ideas on how virtual reality–based collaborative learning can become radically more accessible to teachers and students right now, not 5 or 10 years down the road. For that work I want to sincerely thank Natalie Bell, Dee Colcord, Kevin Colcord, Andrew Ezokoye, Jill Gough, Maria Guidice, Laura Hazlett, Ann Koufman Frederick, Walter Krumshyn, Michelle Magallenez, Deena Minwalla, David Monaco, Michelle Mullen, Nuket Nolan, Julie Wilson, and Meg Wittman.
Others who are not mentioned in the book with whom I have shared ideas, who helped form the synthesis of the inevitable future of education and the levers that will help make that future a reality include Sara Allan, Pat Bassett, Sara Bird, Kevin Costa, Mark Crotty, Mark Desjardins, Joe Erpelding, Kelly Eveleth, David Farace, Tim Fish, Jordan Greenhall, Megan Henry, Tyler Hodges, Doris Korda, Kawai Lai, Bryan Lakatos, David Leach, Lewis Leiboh, Caryn Lewis, Cassidy Lichtman, Lynn Lillian, Jason Palmer, Stephen Piltch, Megan Powers, Peter Saliba and the entire Tilton School team, Kate Saunders, Jay Scheurle, Kami Thordarson, John Warren, Elliot Washor, Glenn Whitman, and Michael Wirtz.
INTRODUCTION
Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
Muhammad Ali
The future is here—it's just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson
For four decades I have crisscrossed my own country and visited nearly 50 more. I have shared bottles of bad whiskey with cowboys in smoky Wyoming bars, fine wines with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and dirty glasses of bathtub vodka with Siberian oilmen in freezing Gulag‐era shacks. I have cast for marlin on a millionaire's yacht and pulled in fishing nets with Filipino fisher folk who just hope for dinner when those nets are set each day. I have broken bread with Hindus in ornate Indian temples, shared seared lamb with Uzbek Muslims, sung hymns in towering Gothic Catholic cathedrals, and held hands in New Age prayer circles. I have friends and colleagues who are rock‐ribbed conservatives, wild‐eyed liberals, and card‐carrying Communists. I have researched alongside leading scientists and parsed biblical cannon with creationist fundamentalists.
There is only one shared dream that I have heard from all of these people across all of these seeming divides: that our children be happy, successful, and lead lives better than those of our own. And nearly everyone in every country and every station in life agrees that education is key to the fulfillment of that dream. The value of education is where, despite all that divides us, we mostly come together.
The problem is that education is stuck in a past that no longer exists for our children. This book is about how we unstick it, and the roles each of us—teacher, parent, student, administrator, business leader, foundation director, college professor, president and admissions officer, every member of the community who knows how critical education is to our collective future—can play. Some professional educators, and many others who have grown weary, perhaps even callous, to the seemingly unmovable rock of education, will think the future I describe is wildly improbable, that the calls to action I suggest are scary, unlikely, or a bit crazy. Fortunately, there is a rapidly rising tide of others who know that this future is inevitable and that all we have to do is climb over our fears, find the big points of leverage that are already working in schools and communities around the country and around the world, and just do it. We need to stop arguing about the nature of the problem and start building a tsunami of momentum around big, audacious solutions.
We need to stop arguing about the nature of the problem and start building a tsunami of momentum around big, audacious solutions.
Unlike others who have tackled the problems, inequities, and inadequacies of traditional K–12 education, in this book I propose that we stop fighting the forces that have kept education stuck. There is another way. I propose we use leverage where we—the large and growing minority of educators, students, parents, community business groups, researchers, philanthropists, journalists, and social media actors—have nearly total control. I hope the levers I propose are a bit crazy, because, friends, coloring inside the lines is not working and our kids are the ones suffering for it. We live in a time when we have proven that disruptive innovations can lead to dramatic, positive change; it is time we stop tweaking at the margins of K–12 education because we know audacity works. It is up to us. It is up to you.
Virtually every human institution—economic, social, political, religious—is in a state of fundamental reconfiguration, except education, which structurally is largely unchanged from the highly successful system that evolved during the mid‐19th century demand for a population literate enough to fuel the rise of industry, democracy, and imperialism. The current system of education was never designed to deliver equitable outcomes to all learners, nor was it designed to meet the challenges our students will face in a world that is very different from that of the 19th and 20th centuries. Radical change to this outdated system of education over the next generation is inevitable because the needs of our students have changed. Our current model of “school”—students constrained by the industrial model of time in a classroom, knowledge bound up in textbooks, teachers shoveling lessons at students like coal into a furnace, learning parsed into seven prepackaged subjects, students graded and advanced according to meaningless averages—cannot possibly withstand the dissonance between what we have today and what our students and our society need to embrace the future.
The march of human history has never withstood such dissonance over time. The transformation of education will not be even, smooth, or equal. But it is inevitable, it is already happening, and 20 or 30 years is just not a lot of time relative to the increased pace at which human systems have changed in the past. The agrarian revolution took 10,000 years to fully change the path of human history; the industrial revolution 200 years; the information revolution less than two generations. Many thoughtful scientists and behaviorists predict that the “singularity,” the point at which powerful artificial intelligence is capable of self‐evolution, is less than a generation away. The gap between where education is and where it needs to be to fulfill the basic mission of preparing young people to meet the challenge of their future is on us today, and we have a very short period of time to either meet that challenge or watch as our education system, in which we all have so much invested, is pitched into irrelevance.
The Why, What, and How of Educational Change
My head hurts every time I see another article, vodcast, or TED Talk preaching that education must change. That train has already left the station! All of the arguments about why education must change can be summarized in less than a sentence, a simple paraphrase of the godfather of modern education, John Dewey, more than a century ago: The world is changing at an ever‐increasing rate and we have to prepare our students for that future, not for the past. We desperately need to move beyond the discussion of why education must change.
Similarly, the question of what education must look like in the future, although not wholly formed, is increasingly coming into focus. In this book we will touch briefly on what great education looks like now and in the future, but many others have covered those topics with insight, examples, depth, and clarity. I have asked thousands of Americans—parents, students, teachers, and interested community members—what they think great learning looks like, what skills and abilities young people will need to lead happy and successful lives in a less knowable future, and the answers are in remarkable agreement: Deeper learning is better than shallow, student‐centric learning is better than teacher‐centric classrooms, questions and curiosity are more important than rote answers, understanding and wisdom are more important than mere knowledge.
The great transformation in which education is engaged in the first quarter of this 21st century is simply this: We are changing our focus from what we teach to how we learn. Forward‐leaning schools are shifting, in the words of Bo Adams, from teaching organizations to learning organizations. Perhaps most of all, we are remembering that great learning is not the mere transaction of knowledge. Although that transaction is important, truly great learning centers on the relationship between learner and teacher, learner and co‐learners, learner and self, and learner and the experience of learning.
That leaves us with the critical and unanswered question of how education will make this enormous leap in such a short period of time, when we have been dramatically unsuccessful at making even a fraction of the leap over the last several decades. So far, well‐intentioned solutions to pay teachers more, or fire teachers who are not good at their jobs, or build more schools, or lengthen the school day, or change the learning standards, or add more testing, or decrease testing have failed to move the needle very much. These solutions have failed because they are tweaks to a system that is in need of change, not by pruning, but at the roots.
Every discussion about how to change education, based soundly on history and experience, grinds up against an enormous rock of systemic inertia.
How we transform education from the ground up, not a tweak or a reform, not for a few schools and a few students, but at scale, is the subject of this book. The problem is not that we lack the knowledge; we have examples all over the country and around the world of learning environments that offer a profoundly deeper, richer, better learning experience to their students. The problem is that we have failed to bring those solutions to scale. Every discussion about how to change education, based soundly on history and experience, grinds up against an enormous rock of systemic inertia. This rock is very real, very large, and has proven impossible to move very far from where it took root more than 100 years ago, despite the pull of necessity and the push of smart and well‐meaning people.
Overcoming Inertia
Many, if not most, educators, parents, students, elected officials, and community stakeholders have given up, their heads sore or bloody from banging time and time again against this seemingly immovable rock. A growing number of families have found their way around the rock, or they are among the lucky who, because of personal or local economic and political conditions, have never been trapped by the rock. But moving the rock at scale, in a way that benefits the vast majority of students across widely diverse social and economic chasms, has been a Sisyphean myth. And yet, similar to the revolutions of farming, industry, and computing, it is utterly inevitable that the rock will move and that dramatic movement will take place in the very near future.
Simple physics tells us that a body at rest stays at rest until a force moves it. The big rock of K–12 education has tremendous mass, which means it sits firmly rooted with equally tremendous inertia. It will move only with the application of forces that are greater than the inertia that holds it in place. For decades, people of goodwill and sincere intent have prodded the system, looking for that adjustment in the design of school styles that would improve student outcomes. For decades, contrarian forces with which we are all familiar—the political left and right, government state houses, corporate and labor interests and those who savagely oppose those interests, funding and budgets that move from here to there and back again, research and studies that first say this program and then that one is the answer—have pushed on the rock in opposing directions with little net effect. The result is that education has grown more deeply resistant to real change than almost any social institution in the last century.
And yet, the rock has started to move, and unlike the familiar pendulum swings of education in the past, the new vector is irreversible. We have arrived at a major inflection point where the curve of global economic, social, environmental, and technological change is rising so steeply that fundamental alterations in our education system are inevitable. But that movement is still too slow and it is terribly uneven. Students with fewer societal supports and access to resources continue to be far less likely to participate in the leading edge of these changes, which means they are left farther behind as the leading edge accelerates.
Most important, what if those levers needed absolutely no resources or permission from the opposing political, economic, and social interests that have so successfully battled to keep the rock right where it sits for so long?
What if we could move the static rock of education much more quickly? What if we found that we had a relatively small number of really huge “levers” that, if pressed firmly and synergistically, would actually move the rock in a dramatic fashion? Most important, what if those levers needed absolutely no resources or permission from the opposing political, economic, and social interests that have so successfully battled to keep the rock right where it sits for so long? And what if those levers already exist today, needing nothing more than our collective will to firmly grab hold and press hard?
This book is about those levers. Over the last several years I have visited more than 125 schools and districts around the country and interacted with well over 10,000 educators. I am the lucky guy without a job that keeps me tied to one school all day, so I get to read, observe, listen, imagine, synthesize, and dream. I put together input from that work, and then I reached out to about 80 other educational stakeholders: thought leaders, teachers, district administrators, researchers, and students. Most of the adults I have interviewed for this book share two other very important attributes: They all attended school themselves in the past, and many are parents or grandparents of children who will either thrive in a system tuned to their needs . . . or just muddle along with what many schools provide today.
I distilled what I heard from all of these stakeholders, and each major theme comprises a chapter of this book. Some of these levers have been lying nearly dormant for years or decades, ready for an explosive resurrection when the time was right. Some have been percolating at schools around the country and around the world, needing only the right conditions to move from isolated brushfires of innovation to successful use on a massive scale. Still others were born in just the last few years as new technologies intersect with this singular moment of enormous need and dramatic opportunity.
In addition to the key thesis that these levers must not require permission or empowerment from the forces that create systemic inertia, I set the following boundary conditions when deciding what levers to focus on:
They align with the best interests of our students, even when those interests conflict with the interests of other powerful stakeholders.
Many educators, parents, and students
want
these levers to be pressed.
Each addresses a specific obstacle that has frustrated education reformers for years or decades and either breaks that obstacle or allows us to go around it in the very near future, with little or no increase in expense.
All are completely possible today; in fact, they are already happening today in many schools. The only missing ingredient to bring them to scale is our collective will.
Where This Book Takes Us
In Chapter One I describe, based on the interviews I conducted for this book, a consensus view of what K–12 education will look like in 20 to 25 years. When taken together, it is a dramatically different picture than the institution we call “school” today and far beyond anything that most of us are thinking about. The consensus is that these dramatic changes to an institution that has remained largely unchanged for well over a century are inevitable. This is the future we have to plan for, and the trajectory we must initiate by pressing on big, audacious, nontraditional levers.
In Chapters Two through Eight I describe each of the seven levers that I have distilled from these interviews and work with schools since 2013:
Lever 1:
Create the Demand for Better Schools.
Unlike just a decade ago, education is now subject to the market forces of supply and demand. All over the country, parents and families are voting with their feet and money. They are demanding a different approach to learning and seeking out nontraditional learning opportunities that meet those demands. Everyone in the community now has a direct pathway to influence schools toward a deeper learning experience.
Lever 2:
Build School‐Community Learning Laboratories.
Traditional schools are disconnected from their own communities and the powerful learning resources those communities can provide. We need to massively reconnect
school
and
world
in ways that deepen learning, better prepare students for life after school in the real world, and get broader community skin in the game. We need our students and teachers to “see the possible” in action in our own communities and with peers who can share their challenges and triumphs.
Lever 3:
Encourage Open Access to Knowledge.
The rapid growth in the quality and availability of free, fully vetted curriculum, learning materials, and remarkable web‐based knowledge sources will lead to the demise of expensive textbooks and other canned, outdated content delivery mechanisms. Schools can realize massive savings and redirect those scarce resources to much more critical needs while also providing learning materials that are better for our students and teachers.
Lever 4:
Fix How We Measure Student Success and Admit Students to College.
Schools are afraid to adopt changes that might jeopardize their students' chances at college admissions. This fear among parents and students is one of the most powerful obstructions to school change. We are starting to see major cracks in this dam as colleges and high schools have begun to rethink what they value most, how to measure those values in individual students, and how to kill off the curse of test‐driven education.
Lever 5:
Teach the Teachers What They Really Need to Know.
Most postsecondary education schools are still preparing young teachers for an industrial age learning model that is on the wane, not the rise. We need a rapid, widespread, collaborative national overhaul of the teacher education program, led by courageous future‐focused educators from research universities, teaching colleges, and the end users in K–12 schools.
Lever 6:
Connect, Flow, and Rethink “School.
” One set of levers for school change is being forged right now: a new universal set of pathways for creating and sharing information in the age of true digital transformation. Rapidly evolving virtual technologies will allow and force us to restructure learning . . . if educators help lead the way through our knowledge of how great learning actually occurs.
Lever 7:
Lead Change from Where You Are.
Few educators have ever received training in the skills of management and organizational leadership that promote dynamic innovation in many of our leading companies . . . but are nearly absent in schools. Teachers and administrators need universal access to modern leadership skills that embrace, rather than stymie, change and innovation.
At the end of each of these chapters I suggest ways that each of us—parents, students, teachers, administrators, philanthropists, members of the university and business communities—can collectively turn the pioneering work of others into school transformation at scale. Some of the suggestions are for people and schools that are just starting to imagine such a transformation; others are for those who are more advanced. Some of these “challenges” may sound outlandish, impossible, or just plain dreamy . . . which is exactly what we need. But the fact is that almost all of these suggestions are based on what is already working today in schools and communities just like yours.
In Chapter Nine I lay out additional concrete, achievable actions that each of us can take to lend our weight to these levers, sorted by the hat you wear: teacher, student, administrator, parent, businessperson, and more. Now, I am not naive in thinking that these changes will explode across the system of K–12 education all at once; ecosystems do not adjust overnight. New species don't just pop up with all the right parts in all the right places; they evolve. What you do, the pieces that you tackle, the problems you solve, and the levers you press on will cumulatively change the system at scale. By each pressing somewhere, we collectively apply forces that actually move the rock. Not to completely give away my age and influences, but I believe it was the not‐so‐famous Wavy Gravy, who on the morning of the second day of the Woodstock Festival, looked out from the stage and shouted to the cold sea of people, grass, and mud: “It's about all of us, man; we're all helping each other!”
What you do, the pieces that you tackle, the problems you solve, and the levers you press on will cumulatively change the system at scale.
Finally, in a short Chapter Ten, I conclude with some big‐picture takeaways and thoughts on the trajectory of schools that hope to intersect the inevitable future of education. And, at the end, I list organizations and resources cited by chapter (with hot links in the e‐version of the book) so you have a great list to start connecting with others who have already pioneered pathways on all seven of the big levers of school transformation.
Resources for This Book
In addition to formal interviews and the distillation of hundreds or thousands of informal conversations with educators, I also had access to several other rich veins of unpublished collective thinking about these levers. John Gulla is the executive director of the EE Ford Foundation, a family philanthropic organization that supports independent high schools. John has freely shared with me his thoughts from visiting more than 200 schools around the country that are trying, in myriad ways, to reinvent elements of learning. I also was granted access to a study commissioned by The Peddie School, a day‐boarding school in New Jersey that gathered insight from about 30 national thought leaders from inside and outside of education on the challenges that public and private schools face in the next two decades.
A rich resource that stretched my own ability to map the ground of education today and in the future was the research done in 2014–2015 by my colleague Julie Wilson, founder and executive director of the Institute for the Future of Learning. Julie was contracted by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to gather insight into major trends, obstacles, and opportunities in K–12 education. She conducted phone and lengthy written‐response interviews with more than a dozen well‐known education thought and action leaders. Julie and the foundation made the results of her work available to me, and you will see citations from her report in several of the succeeding chapters.
What We Will Not Cover
No book can cover the entire map of the challenges of K–12 education, and I won't try here. Many of these key elements of the education revolution are being addressed by other researchers and authors: testing, standards‐based instruction, project‐based learning, the history and evolution of what we now recognize as a rigid, “industrial” model of education, changes in technology, and more. I have cited a number of these people and authoritative sources throughout the book and encourage you to add them to your libraries and learning communities.
There is one enormous subject I am intentionally not going to address, but which is, without a shred of doubt, the biggest obstacle to real education transformation: poverty. I want to forcefully emphasize that none of the levers I propose in this book will magically solve the problems of poverty and the special needs of students and families who are underserved by our society as a whole. There is a pervasive, entrenched, and in fact deepening and widening gap between those who have the realistic potential to take advantage of the value of a great education and those for whom the deck is overwhelmingly and unfavorably stacked. This trend is particularly pervasive in the United States but is certainly present in many developed and developing countries. Paul Tough, in his book Helping Children Succeed, sums up the depth of the problem: “In 2013, the United States reached an educational milestone. For the first time, a majority of the country's public school students—51 percent of them, to be precise—fell below the federal government's threshold for being ‘low income,’” writes Paul. “Helping poor kids succeed is now, by definition, the central mission of American public schools and, by extension, a central responsibility of the American public. It is a responsibility we are failing to meet.”
Students, families, teachers, and entire communities of poverty face daily obstacles beyond the imagination of the rest of us: crime, hunger, shelter, social disconnection, and as Robert Putnam so thoroughly demonstrates in his must‐read book Our Kids, radically diminished access to many of the most basic support networks that the rest of us take for granted. Families of students with profound special needs face equally daunting obstacles for which I can't promise any solution because that is not my area of understanding. Education under these conditions of inadequate basic supports is an enormous strain on students, families, and teachers, and additional strain caused by leading the charge of large‐scale change is probably unrealistic for some of these communities, at least for now.
That does not mean that poor communities and disadvantaged students will all be left behind, that poor schools and students cannot take on these challenges along with those more well served. To the contrary, there are examples in every community, every day, of these remarkable successes, of the richness of learning that takes place through and with the people, pride, and depth that all communities possess. A number of stories in this book reflect schools and individuals that are making this leap despite overwhelming odds. In fact, as we will see in the next chapter, as we look to what is inevitable about the transformation of schools in the next 20 to 25 years, many of the localized physical, social, and economic constraints experienced by underserved students and families will begin to erode with the growth of a vastly more networked, connected universe of learners and learning supporters. But I believe that poverty, similar to climate change and social justice, is one of those profound challenges to be tackled and solved by a well‐educated populace, not one that must be solved before we can enact a new vision of education. I wish it were not so.
The Goal Is Deeper Learning
If we are going to transform education away from an assembly line model that worked well for the industrial age, we have to decide what we are transforming toward—the what of great learning that I mentioned. Among teachers, parents, students, and members of the university and business communities—who all have enormous stakes in how our students are being prepared for the future—there is vastly more agreement than disagreement about what great learning looks like. Yet although teachers and students may be aligned with what great learning outcomes are, they have a much harder time picturing a process of learning that is not a mirror of the past. Too many schools are still based on “doing learning to learners,” when what we need is a system in which the learning is done “by and with the learner.”
I am going to use a simple phrase—deeper learning—to capture these attributes and goals. In describing how education must evolve, others use terms such as 21st century learning or transformational learning, and the educational community has gradually learned what these terms, in general, mean. Over the last several years, it seems that we are increasingly coalescing around the term deeper learning to describe a post‐traditional, postindustrial, post–assembly line system of education that captures the essence of how schools are changing. I want to at least minimally define that term, which will show up many times in this book.
Over the last several years, it seems that we are increasingly coalescing around the term deeper learning to describe a post-traditional, postindustrial, post–assembly line system of education that captures the essence of how schools are changing.
In 2013 the Hewlett Foundation defined deeper learning as “an umbrella term for the skills and knowledge that students must possess to succeed in 21st century jobs and civic life. At its heart it is a set of competencies students must master in order to develop a keen understanding of academic content and apply their knowledge to problems in the classroom and on the job.” The six core competencies (about which readers may find a much more detailed articulation by simple web searches of deeper learning) are
Mastering core academic content
Thinking critically and solving complex problems
Working collaboratively
Communicating effectively
Learning how to learn
Developing academic mind‐sets
