Please Mayor DeBlasio... Please Governor Malloy... Please Governor McAuliffe... Please...

It is time to stop the abuse of children for profit. I cannot say it any more clearly than that.

It is time to stop the abuse of children for profit.

Perhaps, if you are an American political leader, say a President or something, you personally have not walked through enough schools and watched enough children...

...though I suspect that Mayor-in-a-month DeBlasio and Governor Malloy and Governor-in-a-month McAuliffe all have in recent years. And so, if you walk through those halls, you know what we've been doing to children, you know the harm we have been doing to children, over the past 30 years, and especially the last 15, and especially the last five.

We haven't just been making children cry. We haven't just been scaring them. We haven't just been stealing their resources to enrich a few adults. We have been limiting their educations, and thus, their opportunities.

What is the definition of child abuse? I'm not going overboard here to suggest that the policies promoted by ALEC, Pearson, the Gates Foundation, and implemented by Arne Duncan, Mike Bloomber, Jeb Bush, and others do indeed constitute emotional and psychological abuse and denial of equal opportunity.

The testing which has destroyed our schools, and which has crushed the spirit of our children, and which has wrecked, in many cases, our children's love of learning, has no actual validity... it measures nothing of consequence. The imposed, even scripted (in New York City's case), curricula of the Common Core and its relatives, does nothing to build an educated society, but rather, limits the engagement and interest and intellectual diversity of our children. The attacks on those of us who are "different" - especially those of us who are dyslexic and ADHD (I'm looking at you, Common Core advocates and Virginia leaders) - are cruel and in my mind, constitutionally unfair.

Now what should school look like? This isn't rocket science Mr. Mayor, Governors. We know that first, we need to engage learners. Unengaged learners are, definably, not learners. Second, we need to toss our "grade level standards," and every test which goes with them, out the window. Grade level standards are designed - from the very start - to fail children, not help them succeed. They are based in the absurd fiction that all humans learn all things at the same rate. And that fiction is why those who created grade level standards and age-based grades at the start, did so in order to flunk out 80% of children before ninth grade began (five part series).

Ninth Grade English learning plot development

Then we need to Universally Design our schools, so we are assessing - and yes, we are smart enough to assess without bad tests - abilities and capabilities, not disabilities and human differences.

Through contemporary technologies and loads of free software choices (consider just the Freedom Stick Suite, it's free), with One-To-One computer initiatives based in student choice, with contemporary learning space design, and with teacher professional learning aimed at the creation of creative, informed, empathetic professionals. we can - we have proven that we can - develop schools which maximize the potential of every child, and that we can do that without breaking any banks (the savings on Pearson et al will get us half way there, the stopping of worksheet printing will generate the other half of the money we need).

Third Grade Writers

So this is a desperate plea to our leaders. New leaders and continuing leaders. Let's put a stop to more than a century of Industrial Education. Let's stop treating our children as the raw materials ready for the "value added" assembly line which will turn them into identical widgets for jobs which no longer exist. Let's stop assaulting our children with tests which do not help them learn and which do not help us help them learn.

Let us remake education as something humane and holistic. As something inspiring and committed to real human development.

You are leaders, please, lead. Starting right now.

Sixth Grade Writers

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - Elwood Cubberley's dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." - Woodrow Wilson at the University of Virginia, 1905, and in various other addresses

"Richard Allington, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee and one of the country's most recognized experts on early literacy, calls the accommodation [use of Text-To-Speech technology for dyslexic students] "cheating." - EducationWeek

 - Ira Socol

Making Learning Spaces: The Secondary Library

If our schools are filled with "teaching places" instead of "learning spaces," what are we doing to change that?

All of us. What are we doing? Because whether you are in a national government, or you're a school superintendent, or principal, or teacher, you can be changing things, if that's what you want to do.

I had to write about this because of what happened with a Tweet from my friend William Chamberlain:

Choices in seating, in seating height, in gathering or hiding, and yes, fireplaces,
all make the typical recent McDonald's interior a far better learning space than most classrooms.

"McDonald's has better learning spaces than most schools," Chamberlain wrote, and, of course, he is right. Dozens of teachers joined in and retweeted this which is good, except.. when we tried to shift the conversation to what teachers might do, there was far less uptake. Now, I'm all for complaining, I do plenty of it myself, but honestly, if your classroom sucks as a learning space... fix it.

Fixing it... third grade teacher Derk Oosting doesn't wait, he acts

"Fixing it" doesn't always require money or getting new things, it often requires more subtraction than addition, getting rid of desks and miserably uncomfortable classroom chairs. Kids prefer floors anyway, whether its kindergarten or university. "Fixing it" mostly requires a mindset built around the ideas of "Choice and Comfort" and "Instructional Tolerance" and "Universal Design."

We remove the cultural expectations which have nothing to do with how humans learn. We remove the cultural and religious expectations of discomfort as some sort of positive. We remove ourselves as arbiters of some sort of schoolhouse propriety. And in doing so, we enable our children to find their own paths to success in school and in life.

Interlude: the eyes of a designer

Click 53rd and Park, New York City to get to this intersection in Google Earth.

There is a problem here, of course, which lies with the way educators are educated. They are not, unless their career paths have taken them far from "education," trained in design vision or design thinking. Years ago I taught Intro to Architecture at the Pratt Manhattan Center in New York. By the third class session we'd go on a walking tour, and early in that tour we'd end up at the corner of East 53rd Street and Park Avenue. At that intersection stand three landmarked structures, Mies van der Rohe's Seagrams' Building, Gordon Bunshaft's Lever House, and Charles McKim's Racquet Club. On the fourth corner is 399 Park Ave, a building completed in 1961 for Citibank - or as it was then called - The First National City Bank of New York. This building is on no one's landmark list. Why?

The why? requires learning to use Design Vision and Design Thinking, and also requires that observers step away from "I" statements. What makes three of these buildings great and the fourth a mediocre pile of steel and glass is really not a question of personal preference, it is instead an understanding of humanity and how humans see and understand. There are lots of clues to the failures of 399 Park when it is compared to its neighbors, from window shapes which violate the Golden Mean to an entry that's somewhat unfindable to massing which fails to meet the ground - and pedestrians - with grace, but the untrained observer will not see them - or will not understand what is wrong - without help.

Who helps educators do this? When an educator looks at a classroom, or a corridor, or a library, or a playground, or the school's entry... what do they see? How do they understand what they see?

Libraries - the Learning Commons

Middle School Library gathering space, connectivity everywhere

In the school system in which I work we invest very heavily in libraries. This counters a US national trend towards abandoning libraries and laying off librarians, but we see our school libraries as the center of our transformation from a collection of "teaching places" to a community of "learning spaces."

In New York, as in districts across the country, many school officials said they had little choice but to eliminate librarians, having already reduced administrative staff, frozen wages, shed extracurricular activities and trimmed spending on supplies. Technological advances are also changing some officials’ view of librarians: as more classrooms are equipped with laptops, tablets or e-readers, [New York City Schools' city’s chief academic officer] Mr. Polakow-Suransky noted, students can often do research from their desks that previously might have required a library visit. 

Now, I think we're smarter than Mr. Polakow-Suransky, and we've alway assumed that our libraries are more than a place for students to use the World Book, but we also know that if libraries are to be the Learning Commons at the center of our schools they must be re-thought, re-imagined, and re-designed in ways are far beyond "tinkering." In a century where all the world's libraries are linked to our phones, where information and books are no longer scarce but somewhat overwhelming, and where curation has become a mass participation exercise, the function of libraries as learning spaces requires radical change, and we expect our school librarians to not just change and adapt, but to be the leaders in our school buildings.

HackerSpace in one of our high school libraries
seating choices from bean bags to pub-height bar, technologies, tools

What do we look for? We look for flexible, adaptive, multiple media learning and creation environments. We look for student comfort, student choice, student-centric spaces. We look for students dropping in - all day long, whether elementary or secondary - so we know this is not "just" a scheduled space. We look for flexibility of design and the ability of students to alter that design as they need to - what we call "Student-Crafted Learning Environments."

"Student-Crafted
Learning Environment"

We expect our libraries to be MakerSpaces. Our libraries have legos, music studios, construction areas, one has a Makerbot 2 replicator, which students - quite "casually" - come and use to prototype things they've designed.

Students come with lunch and snacks and drinks, move the furniture, grab technology or bring their own, settle in, and work in contemporary environments.

Our libraries are far more kitchens than supermarkets these days, which makes sense. Our information supermarkets now reside in our hands, our quiet study places now reside in our earbuds and headphones, but our gathering places, our "Learning Commons," the places where we come together, for communion and contagious creativity, those are often what we are missing.

We've done this with money - creating a "Glass Room" quieter space at one high school, buying shelves which roll in many elementary libraries - and we've done it without money - dumping old VHS tapes and magazines and other stored items, and eliminating librarian offices to create quieter spaces, music studios, and maker spaces in others.

We've done it buying new soft seating and we've done it with kids and volunteers padding windowside shelves and turning them into window seats. We've done it with commercial furniture from Bretford and Turnstone and we've done it with stuff from the seasonal clearance piles at Walmart and Target.

A hand-me-down created "quieter space" created from what was,
for ten or more years, storage.

We've cut down or eliminated space-hogging circulation desks and bought boxes of wet wipes to clean up food and drink spills. We've created open computer networks which let kids connect their own devices and we've built "tool cribs" of differing devices for our students to use.

Changing "Teaching Places" into "Learning Spaces" is
primarily about the attitudes we adopt.

The point is that the time for excuses and complaining is over. Whoever you are, wherever you are, outside of say, a KIPP school or maybe the city school districts of New York and Chicago (thanks to mayors Rahm Emanuel and Mike Bloomberg), you have the power to undo your teaching place and create a learning space in its stead. The trick is to begin.

- Ira Socol

of handball and hurling, archery and inclusion

Team Handball, basketball without the height issues, equipment cost? near zero

Like many in the world, I've been watching lots of sport(s) this month. And as I do most Olympic years, I wonder why American schools spend so much money on so few sports for so few students.

Archery... why not? It might allow boys and girls to compete together,
it would surely allow kids who might use wheelchairs to play team sports with other kids.

This isn't an issue for schools elsewhere in the world who can rely on intact communities to support youth (and adult) sport(s), but in the United States it is a huge issue. In most communities I visit certain sport-activities receive massive funding from the schools, while most students miss out entirely on the benefits of this kind of physical activity joined to social learning.

As I used to say, often, when I was fighting for soccer programs for boys and girls at North Muskegon High School in Michigan - if varsity athletics have educational value they need to be available to every student who wishes to participate, if varsity athletics don't have that kind of educational value schools surely should stop including them in their programs and budgets.

Hurling, another relatively low-cost sport with high participation potential
(much cheaper in equipment costs than lacrosse, and without the negative role modelling)

My thought has always been this... the purpose of varsity athletics is participation, pursuit of the personal best, and teamwork. It is not - it cannot be - about American public schools needing to entertain an overweight population snacking on hot dogs after tailgating. It infuriated me that when I suggested that Penn State play football without fans, many said this was "unfair to the players." As someone who played sports few, if any, watched, I wondered, how sick is our academic athletics environment if the only purpose is externally-provided gratification?

Croquet... why not?

With this in mind I am always on the lookout for athletic opportunities which could involve a bunch of kids, especially kids usually left out, while using shared - not new - facilities (even if that cuts down some practice time for some other sports, which is a side benefit for everyone). If you have a pool, do you offer boys and girls water polo? If you have a field do you offer boys and girls lacrosse, hurling, field hockey, rugby (you might do both Rugby Union and Rugby Sevens)? If you have a gym do you offer boys and girls team handball, and team volleyball? If you have some space outside do you offer boys and girls archery, and croquet?

Women's Rugby Sevens. The equipment will not break your budget.

None of this will cost much, beyond a certain diversion of resources (including assistant coaching positions from some sports being shifted to head coaching positions for these new activities), except for lacrosse (and perhaps archery), equipment is cheap, and lack of many opponents is not a problem - a multi-high school or middle school district or division could form its own league, or just a couple of nearby towns could do this together. Remember, the National Hockey League played for 25 years with just six teams. It is still remembered as the glory days.

And most importantly, opportunities to redefine the school culture and climate will be created. There will be less of the elitism which inevitably surrounds the few "important" activities.

So dive into the list of Olympic sports, past and present, and see what opportunities your school can add.

- Ira Socol

The Freedom Stick - be ready for Universal Design next academic year

Special thanks to the Special Education Advisor web site (a fantastic resource) where this post originally appeared, and where you can download the newest version of the MITS Freedom Stick - the freely available, go anywhere, use anywhere Universal Design software suite.

It is time for Universal Design for Learning to be put in the hands of every student. It is time for every student to be given the opportunity to discover and experiment with a range of tools which can support their own individual differing communication needs – not just in school, but throughout their lives. 

Schools, traditionally, have provided students one way to do things. If the class was supposed to read something, everyone had the same technology – paper with alphabetical symbols printed on it which students needed to “decode.” If the class was supposed to write, everyone had the same technology – usually a pencil or a pen used to create alphabetical symbols on paper. If the class was supposed to get “organized,” everyone had the same technology – an “assignment book” or perhaps the infamous “middle school planner.” 

If students could not function well with that “one way” they either failed, or were diagnosed as being “disabled” and were prescribed a different “one way” to work – a way which would set them apart from their peers forever.

Though in schools around the world we still see this pattern, it is now deep into the second decade of the 21st Century and the technologies and realities of the world have changed. All around the planet people carry with them – often in their pockets – highly individualizable devices which can support all the different ways humans learn and communicate. And it is time for schools to catch up with this reality. 

The new and improved “Freedom Stick” (v.2.3.2) offers students and schools the ability to arrive at this ‘technological present’ at essentially zero cost. 

One free downloadable package of software allows students the ability to make almost any computer a fully accessible device. Students can convert text to audio, get their ideas down by speaking, They can draw, manipulate photography, create visual or audio-visual presentations, calculate mathematics a variety of ways, organize themselves, try a different keyboard, support their spelling and writing… and most importantly, learn the power of “Toolbelt Theory” - the power of learning to choose and use tools well. 

The Freedom Stick is a system, it can be downloaded and installed on a 4gb Flash Drive and carried everywhere by the student, plugged into and used on school computers or public library computers, or even employer computers – anywhere any version of Microsoft Windows is installed (including on Apple Macintosh computers which can have Windows installed as a second operating system). Or it can be installed directly onto your own computer. It is safe in all computing environments, tested globally since development began in Scotland with EduApps. This version was developed with US Department of Education and Michigan Department of Education grants through Michigan’s Integrated Technology Supports (MITS) in order to bring Universal Design Technology to American schools. The Freedom Stick is a collection of free, open-source programs which provide the widest range of supports for differing student needs. It is also a system supported by a range of learning tools – including a full set of “how to use” videos and presentations. It is easy to adapt to the students own needs, and it works with the supports included in Windows to create a true Universal Solution Set. 

The Freedom Stick contains:

• A full version of Open Office (equivalent to Microsoft Office and all documents adapt to both software programs), including Writer (Word), Impress (PowerPoint), Calc (Excel), Base (Access), plus Scribus (similar to Microsoft Publisher).
• The Sunbird Calendar and Thunderbird Email systems.
• Fully accessible versions of the Firefox, Opera, and Chrome web browsers including Text-To-Speech options and translations. Firefox and Chrome both include pre-set bookmark folders, offering access to free Digital and Audio Texts, online calculators (including talking calculators), and a wide range of curriculum supports.
• A full scientific graphing calculator, a digital periodic table with physics and chemistry calculators built in, Converber – a remarkable unit converter, and X-mind – similar to Inspiration.
• Balabolka, one of the most sophisticated Text-To-Speech systems available which can convert whole digital books to audio files, read anything with word-by-word highlighting, and which allows students to write and hear their own reading read back to them.
• PowerTalk Portable, which will read any PowerPoint presentation, if PowerPoint is installed on your computer.
• Audacity, a digital recorder and player.
• Software for drawing, painting, photo-editing/manipulation, and computer screen recording.
• Kompozer for writing html code (for building websites) and Notepad++ for coding (and testing code) in almost any computer language.
• Screen magnifiers.
• 7-Zip for creating and unpacking Zip Files.
• Simulation software including Robot Programming and Home Design.
• Games including Chess and Sudoku.
• Complete list in text format with links to software sites.

You can begin learning about the Freedom Stick, how to use it and individualize it, with these Presentations:

• Reading and Writing with the Freedom Stick and Windows Speech Recognition.
• Firefox Accessibility on the Freedom Stick.
• Open Office on the Freedom Stick.

 

How to begin... the basics

40 minutes of me talking about reading and writing... My overview, and on Maths and Sciences

or with these videos which include step-by-step instructions for all the Freedom Stick software. It is important to watch the “Getting Started” video to understand how the Freedom Stick interacts with your computers.

 

We all know that students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities struggle in school and in life because of what I call “Transactional Disability,” a mismatch between the information and communication technologies in use and the technology needs of these students. 

The Freedom Stick begins to solve this by offering choices of how to interact with information and communication to any student. Students not only get access, they begin to learn how to make their world accessible, building skills which will carry them through their lifespan. As they learn to choose and adapt the software on the Freedom Stick they will discover how to evaluate and choose the tools they will use on computers and phones no matter how they, their needs, or the technologies, change in the future. 

- Ira Socol

To download the Freedom Stick software suite click here

Notes:

1. The USB Image Tool is an easily downloadable way to quickly duplicate Freedom Sticks on your home or work computer.
2. For information about Education Scotland’s evaluation of these Portable Apps in schools, see the EduApps site or Education Scotland.
3. The Freedom Stick is a project of Michigan’s Integrated Technology Supports. In Michigan pre-K-12 educators may order Freedom Sticks already formatted at a grant supported price.

BADD 2012: Toppliing Transactionalism

"Happy Birthday Vivian?" I ask. "Why would anyone put up a poster like that?"
"Vivian?" the response is somewhat incredulous. "What are you talking about?"
I point through the windshield. She follows my finger and stares. Then, because, well, we've been together a long time, "Oh no," she laughs, "those are candles! not letters, birthday candles!"

Ahh, the entertaining world of dyslexia.

Less entertaining might be a few recent wheelchair experiences. A DoubleTree Hotel (slogan: "cookies instead of service") in Roanoke, Virginia with no curb cuts near entrances, unnavigable ramps which changed slope suddenly, and a stage for me to speak from which prevented any physical interaction with those who had come to hear me speak. Or, sitting at the freezing cold plane ends of jetbridges because Rahm Emanuel's City of Chicago can't be bothered with timely responses to wheelchair requests at O'Hare Airport. Or, whether a restaurant in Roanoke or Michigan State University's campus police station, facilities whose "accessible" doorways feature thresholds so high and steeply cut that wheelchairs become stuck - if you're lucky - or you get tossed to the ground - if you're not.

But equally less entertaining are the millions of classrooms in which student movement is considered a problem. The millions of classrooms without student seating choices. The millions of classrooms without Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text routinely available. The millions of classrooms where cultural diversity in learning is sacrificed to the corporatism of the "Common Core."

And, I suppose, particularly less entertaining are the many places, from schools, to restaurants, to education PhD programs, where people with "disabilities" have to declare themselves pathologically damaged and beg for help in order to be allowed to pretend to function like "normal humans."

I believe in "Transactional Disability," a spin on Tom Shakespeare's great work linking the social and physical models of disability. To me, there is no actual "disability," there is only "able" and "unable," which are sometimes stable, but more often a constantly changing state of affairs - based on age, health, sleep patterns, energy levels, weather, the day of the week. "My ability to walk has been rapidly improving since my last surgery, but last Thursday the pain was really beyond my tolerance." "I thought I was reading pretty well Sunday, but when we got to the restaurant, and the menu was in ALL CAPS, I couldn't read anything."

"Able" equals, I can take care of it myself. "Unable" means I need help or tools. Those are basic human conditions, and no one should ever require a special permit, or a costly medical examination, or distinct permissions, to use the tools, or get the assistance, they, as equal children of God, need to function in their lives.

Whether you choose to take an elevator instead of the stairs, or you need to put on eyeglasses,
or you need to listen to text instead of "reading" (text-decoding) it - or watching
a video, or whatever... is a personal decision, not a societal prescription

The difference between "ability" and "inability" lies in the "transaction space." And "transaction space" is an ever-changing location. My living room is a different "transaction space" today than it was two months ago. The room, of course, is much the same, but where I can go in it, and where I am willing to go, are very different. The same classroom which may be fine for the "average," compliant, calm person, may be a nightmare for me. As I often say, the story of my friend Melissa and her son represents this perfectly: In the daytime, crossing a street, he is "visually impaired," and needs a cane and often assistance. But at night, as they walk around the lake, he is able to navigate perfectly, while she needs a flashlight/torch and often assistance.

A film is the easiest of transaction spaces for me to navigate in terms of literature, a print-on-paper book is the most difficult. A three-story high urban chain-link fence was a fine transaction space for me when my PF Flyers fit easily between the wires, now it would be an impossible barrier. I will never be able to reach the top shelf in the supermarket without some tool or strategy - that transaction space becomes otherwise impossible.

(Above and Below): fence... book... paths or barriers?

Now, Transactionalism arrives when someone, often someone in power, decides that their tools are fine but yours or mine are not. There was the Michigan State professor, wearer of thick eyeglasses, who drove five miles to work each day instead of walking, who often took the elevator between the third and fifth floors, but who thought I needed a $500 psychological assessment, and five dozen forms filled out, if I was going to use  text reader. There are the schools with impossible wheelchair ramps run by principals with reserved parking spaces up front so that they lose less time coming and going. There are politicians who use drivers for "convenience" and efficiency who run airports and transit systems that make life for wheelchair users close to impossible.

I see teachers and principals who use digital mail, messaging, and calendars all day but who operate in schools where students are not allowed to choose the same tools. I see students blocked from using school elevators so that students must declare their "inability" loudly if walking stairs is very hard one day. I see students denied the right to stand through class times by teachers who have the choice to stand or sit.

Which is all so very, very wrong. Without qualifiers. Without excuses.

Transactionalism is an evil. It must be confronted everywhere, every day. Until Transactionalism is toppled, "the disabled" will always live with identities crafted by others, and equality will always in unattainable.

- Ira Socol on Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012

Transition from Secondary School and the Freedom Stick

As the school year in North America and Europe begins to wind toward a close, here are four new "slide presentations" on making the transition from secondary school to university for students "with disabilities" or "differences" - which I might argue, is just about everyone.

My Study Bar tool from RSC Scotland North+East

There is a focus here on using the tools available on the MITS Freedom Stick, the software package you can download and install on a 4gb Flash Drive or simply run from your Windows computer. But the ideas can be adapted in many ways.

Of course the Freedom Stick is an "Americanization" of the fabulous LearnApps Drive created by RSC Scotland North and East, so you can download their version instead if that serves you better (or their AccessApps - more suited for visually impaired students, or the classroom tool building TeachApps). RSC also offers MyStudyBar for desktop or laptop installation.

The goal is to help students fully develop their Toolbelts for success at university, or in any post-secondary environment.

Transition to Post-Secondary- Disability Life

View more presentations from Ira David Socol

Disability Life presentation is also here as a Google Doc

Transition Firefox

View more presentations from Ira David Socol

Accessible Firefox presentation is also here as a Google Doc 

Transition to College- Open Office

View more presentations from Ira David Socol

Open Office presentation is also here as a Google Doc  

Transition to College - Reading and Writing

View more presentations from Ira David Socol

Universal Design for Reading and Writing presentation is also here as a Google Doc  

Remember, we have a full selection of support videos, ranging from hour long webinars to three - to - five minute tool use presentations for all of the Freedom Stick tools. RSC Scotland N+E has their own support videos as well.

Humans are tool users by nature. We succeed when we choose our tools intelligently based on the "TEST" formula - Task - Environment - Skills (at the moment) - and Tool Knowledge. If your tools do not offer you the support choices you need, you are making life unnecessarily difficult.

- Ira Socol

Question Everything

It has been tough to write the past few weeks. Too many medications. So I have 13, yes 13, blog posts started but unfinished. Thus, I needed a simple question - a small idea - to get myself over the hump of my current cognitive fog. It came last evening, somewhere between basketball and the Mad Men season premier...

"Questioning everything is idiotic and a waste of time. Teach them to question wisely." appeared in my Twitter stream. It was a response to my statement, "The future comes from questioning everything."

I'm not backing down from my assertion, the context of which is the argument that, as educators, our job is to help students learn to "question everything." And that exists in the bigger context of the weekend's arguments - that we must develop administrators and teacher preparation faculty who help teachers to be rebellious, so that we have teachers who can help students be rebellious, so that we create a future which begins to solve the intractable problems of the present.

The classic American Classroom Map of the World

Begin with me here. Often, when I talk with educators about Toolbelt Theory, I show them a few different maps of the world. One is the classic Mercator Projection shown above, "presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator, in 1569," and centered on the United States in millions of classroom versions from the 1870s to the 1990s.

The teachers can almost always rattle off what is wrong with this projection, including the innate cultural bias attached - the diminuation of the southern hemisphere (Greenland, 1/14th the size of Africa, appears larger than that continent), the Americentric splitting of Asia, et al - but if I ask why this map is important, where it would be valuable, those same educators often freeze.

but will this map help you get home?

They know what they've "learned" (memorized) about the Mercator Projection, but as generations of U.S. educators never questioned the map which unrolled over the chalkboard, our educators today fail to question the shortcomings of the new maps. "All lines of constant bearing (rhumb lines or loxodromes — those making constant angles with the meridians), are represented by straight segments on a Mercator map. This is precisely the type of route usually employed by ships at sea, where compasses are used to indicate geographical directions and to steer the ships. The two properties, conformality and straight rhumb lines, make this projection uniquely suited to marine navigation: courses and bearings are measured using wind roses or protractors, and the corresponding directions are easily transferred from point to point, on the map, with the help of a parallel ruler or a pair of navigational protractor triangles." (Wikipedia) Add to this nautical navigation issue the concept that this version of the map was created for American sailors, who needed to sail to both Europe and Japan, but did not need to walk from Moscow to Vladivostok, and the purpose, the value, of that old classroom map comes into focus.

What gets onto Yelp? Why? How?

Why did gasoline stations give
away maps? What might have
been on them? not on them?

So, when someone presents a map to a student, they need to, on some level, doubt it, question it. Who made the map? Why?  What are they supposed to do with the map? What information is left off? Why? This is true in the classroom, and it is true when they look at a Yelp map on their phone.

I knew an executive at SPX Corporation back in the last century who created a very odd map from the airport in Muskegon, Michigan to the corporate headquarters. He sent it to all visitors flying in. The map was designed to show off some of the best parts of the community while dodging most signs of the incredibly persistent poverty which enveloped the area. I can also recall drawing directions to my home in Brooklyn, for non-Brooklonians, which were designed to showcase Brooklyn as a place "way cooler" than Manhattan (or "New York" as we called that part of New York City). So, avoid the BQE, take people down Flatbush, past Juniors, through Grand Army Plaza, alongside the park, down Ocean Parkway.

Anyway, if we have to doubt maps, and we do, we probably need to doubt everything.

We doubt everything, we question everything, because this is the way we create a future unlike the past. This is true in the "big" - Einstein doubting Newton, Darwin doubting Bishop Usher, the guys at Xerox PARC doubting the keyboard interface, Tesla doubting Edison, a couple of 20-somethings in Cairo doubting the Egyptian government, and it is true in the "small" - Ray Kroc taking car hops, cigarette machines, and pay phones out of the Southern California hamburger drive-in, a couple of guys at a tech start up opening up their internal 140-character messaging system to the world, or just the billions of times every day that someone figures out a better way to do "that."

One of my personal examples is myself. Faced with an 80-student course to teach in a huge lecture hall, doubting all the traditional ways to both create and observe engagement. That doubt led me to ask my son to create something for me which turned into TodaysMeet. That's tiny - very tiny - of course, but it is what it is. Invention, creation, progress - all begin with doubt, all begin with questions.

The conversation at the top of this post began when I asked if we might eliminate due dates from our schools. I often doubt the idea behind the academic due date, seeing those dates as both arbitrary and usually counter-productive. In my Changing Gears series I wrote, "I, myself, am rather glad that Boeing was quite late with their 787 Dreamliner. Had they been on-time, well, from what I hear, the wings would've fallen off. Which is a classic "school 70%." The 787 is unlike any other plane ever built, imaginative, and quite remarkable. We don't get that with fixed deadlines. Something the "real world" already knows."It is not that I think that there are no actual deadlines in the world, but when I describe myself as a "provocateur," I mean to say that I will question everything, so that I will push "you" to doubt everything, and thus to find out what is truly important in the work we do. 

The difference between "hanging on" in the future, and creating the future lies in this questioning. The New York Times still believes it publishes a newspaper. Everything they do, from their "paywall" to their pre-moderation of blog comments, indicates the shallowness of their doubting. The "paper" which has become their chief competition as the English Language information source, The Guardian, is asking much deeper questions about news and information delivery, as they suggest in the video below...

So whether it is homework or due dates, school bells or school desks, or any of the "facts" we tend to put before students. You, them, we all, should be doubting everything, questioning everything.

That process not only builds a real kind of learning unavailable through memorization, it will create a next generation unwilling to accept the mistakes of the past and present.

And to me, that's what education is about.

- Ira Socol

Re-thinking the Middle School

We tend to do everything wrong for kids between 12 and 15. We pretend they are "adults" in terms of care needs and responsibilities, which they are not. We pretend they are children intellectually and physically, and in terms of rights, which they are not. We dismiss their capabilities and hype their potential as threats. We are cruel to them, and we send every possible message that we don't care about them.

And then we're surprised that they don't like us, or do what we want them to do.

We need to stop denying who these kids are..

I wonder if "we" - that collective we - are looking at these kids at all. Sometimes I wonder if we are interested at all.

I begin by being stunned that every teacher of teens has not read this National Geographic article on the New Science of the Teenage Brain. This was not written in "journal speak," it is not long, and yet, it captures the essence of contemporary brain research regarding teens, and a professional educator not reading it (since it is free to read), smacks of malpractice.

Here is a key passage from that article: "We're so used to seeing adolescence as a problem. But the more we learn about what really makes this period unique, the more adolescence starts to seem like a highly functional, even adaptive period. It's exactly what you'd need to do the things you have to do then." Followed by a critical analysis: "Let's start with the teen's love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected ... Although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful. This upside probably explains why an openness to the new, though it can sometimes kill the cat, remains a highlight of adolescent development. A love of novelty leads directly to useful experience. More broadly, the hunt for sensation provides the inspiration needed to "get you out of the house" and into new terrain, as Jay Giedd, a pioneering researcher in teen brain development at NIH, puts it."

National Geographic photo by Kitra Cahana

That teenage brain is supposed to be both sensation-seeking and dismissive of adult opinion. If, in evolutionary terms, the teenage brain did not do those things, ten-year-olds would remain ten-year-olds - emotionally, socially, cognitively. 

The problem is that, despite claims to the contrary, many, or most of the actions of "middle schools" seem to be designed to keep kids at age ten, and seem designed around only the idea of training compliance. But that is not what our kids need, and it really is not what our society needs.


The Re-Think

What kind of "school" would these early teenagers really need? What could it look like? How would it work?

Middle School often begins with the definite division of learning into so-called "content areas," an idea pushed firmly into law in the past twenty years with the myth of the "highly qualified teacher." Of course being a "highly qualified teacher" is not about subject/content knowledge, as anyone who has attended a university lecture can testify, it is about being a leading learner for a group of kids. But this "qualification" mentality - "subject area" mentality - is exactly the opposite of what kids, especially 12-14-year-olds, need. They need a holistic view of learning which encourages them to build bridges across knowledge areas, and across areas of the brain. 

no comment necessary...

Middle School also introduces an absurdly false concept of "adult responsibility" which tells kids that the adults in the school are clueless.We insist that every middle school kid "act like an adult" when it suits us, but never when it suits them, and if you have any memory at all, you know that every middle school kid knows this. "You're old enough to be responsible for yourself," counts when it comes to being marked "late" for class, but not if you are ever out of direct line of sight for a seated librarian. It counts when you get a grade but not when you ask to do something. It counts when they charge you adult admission to a theatre, but not when you want to see a film about high school. Of course it counts if you commit a crime, not if you want a drink.And Middle School starts with violating all sense of teenage time and space. The adolescent brain struggles with contemporary temporal standards - actually - most humans do, but 13-year-olds haven't yet been fully beaten into submission.

'"Bully," an documentary about the nation's teen-bullying epidemic, would exclude much of its intended school-aged audience if the Motion Picture Association of America refuses to ease its R rating"

So teens are either, depending on need and mood, in a great rush, or moving very slowly. Sometimes they run to things without much forethought, other times they need 15 minutes with a mirror, or staring out a window. Sometimes they're up at dawn, more often they really are not functioning before 10 in the morning. And in space, teens seem - to both my observations and memory - to need equal parts touching each other, and being quite isolated. They, and this seems especially true of today's more global teens, are not likely to tolerate the nonsensical Puritan "American Distance" (always an imposed value, never a natural one for most). They want real physical (not necessarily sexual) contact - perhaps because they do not get much of it from adults these days - and they need distance - "alone time" - for private processing.

Our Middle Schools frown on all of these needs. "We" don't tolerate time flexibility. "We" don't want kids touching. "We" don't want them off on their own.

In all, our Middle Schools are a recipe for disaster. And the recipe works in most places.

Our early adolescents need something completely different. They need schools designed for them, not for us. Schools designed for growth and learning, not compliance and conformity. Schools designed to build the skills teens need, not designed to be the holding cages we have created.

First of all, teens need ownership, they need to believe that spaces and programs are "their's" not "our's." Is that really such a foreign concept?

Well, begin by stopping your references to how your middle schoolers don't respect "your things" or "your room." I'm sorry folks, few prisoners respect their prison - and prison, according to Barack Obama's State of the Union speech and the statements of many other "leaders," is exactly what school is for most adolescents.

School as a learning studio suite... Brussels, Belgium

If your school is not a "prison," if students are in control of their time, space, comfort, academic choices, tools, and methods - like adults - then students will have "ownership" of their environment, and like most of God's creatures, they will respect that environment. And you know what? These kids have nothing to prove to you... it is you who have to prove your trust and value to them. Remember, their brains are already designed to ignore the older generation, so it might be wise to stop giving them reasons to do just that.

Classroom furniture from Herman Miller

Second, teens need comfort. Really. Comfort. Just put that word at the top of your list. Not your comfort, teachers - administrators - legislatures, their comfort. ""We too often consult our own convenience, rather than the comfort, welfare, or accommodation of our children," William Alcott wrote in 1832. This means choices in seating - real choices - including standing or lying down. It means choices in work surfaces, choices in tools, choices in time.

William A. Alcott
"the comfort, welfare, or
accommodation of
our children"

If this was 1832... and it was, in the book which "designed" the American classroom: "Again—no provision has been made for the pupils standing at higher desks a part of the time, because it is believed they may sit without injury for about half an hour at a time, and then, instead of standing, they ought to walk into the garden, or exercise in the play-ground a few moments, either with or without attendants or monitors. Sitting too long, at all events, is extremely pernicious...

"The relative position of each pupil should occasionally be changed from right to left, otherwise the body may acquire a change of shape by constantly turning or twisting so as to accommodate itself to the light, always coming from a particular window, or in the same general direction.

"If a portion of the play-ground is furnished with a roof, the pupils may sometimes be detached by classes, or otherwise, either with or without monitors, to study a short time in the open air, especially in the pleasant season. This is usually as agreeable to them, as it is favorable to health. A few plain seats should be placed there. A flower garden, trees, and shrubs, would furnish many important lessons of instruction. Indeed, I cannot help regarding all these things as indispensable, and as consistent with the strictest economy of space, material, and furniture, as a judicious arrangement of the school-room itself.

"Sensible objects, and every species of visible apparatus, including, of course, maps, charts, and a globe, are also regarded as indispensably necessary in illustrating the sciences. They not only save books, time, and money, as has been abundantly proved by infant schools, but ideas are in this way more firmly fixed, and longer retained. In the use of books, each child must have his own ; but in the use of sensible objects and apparatus, one thing, in the hands of the instructer, will answer the purposes of a large school, and frequently outlast half a dozen books," how have we gotten so stupid in the 180 years since?

Finally, adolescents need a curriculum which engages. If you read that National Geographic article you will learn all about adolescent decision making, and, you'll realize that every kid in that Middle School is making perfectly logical decisions about what you, the teacher and administrator, are offering.

Is there any reason that any adolescent would care about what you are offering?

This is a microeconomic decision. For anything we do, there is an opportunity cost. Even the decision to pay attention to the teacher for five minutes has to be weighed against the other things you might be doing during that five minutes - daydreaming about the boy/girlfriend, wondering who'll get into the NCAA tournament, imagining tonight's soccer game, considering a more interesting subject. If what you are "selling" isn't understood as worth that five minutes, your students would have to be fools to listen to you. And they are not fools.

In a favorite school moment, a math teacher walked up to a school librarian and complained, "This kid drives me crazy, he'd rather go to Saturday School than come to my class." The librarian looked at the teacher and said, "Well, you have to think about that."

Indeed. As I once wrote in a short story, "They all say I "make bad decisions." Everybody says that. But they're wrong about that too. I make decisions they don't like, but they're not bad." Keep in mind, there are two sides to decision-making, and "reasonable alternatives" lead to better decisions.

So if you offer adolescents project-based learning which connects with their passions, you may suddenly find a bunch of kids lined up and ready to work. If you offer them pointless arithmetic, or books no one really wants to read, they will - they should - make other choices.

The time to change is now. Every year, in almost every place, 5th graders doing great work turn into sullen, unhappy 6th graders who fail those high-stakes tests. That's not genetics, and its not hormones, that is "us," with our high-school-styled, classroom-changing, grim-corridoring, bell-ringing, subject-divided, planner-driven, recess-missing Middle Schools.

So before another school year begins, if you are in the business of Middle School, there is probably damn little that you are doing that shouldn't be changed. And there are really no good excuses for not making those changes.

You're the adults, right?

- Ira Socol

If learning is to be constant, Space, Time, Technology, Pedagogy, Curriculum Must be the Variables

Join us, if you can, for a deep dive into these concepts at ICT in Education Conference (Comhdháil ICT san Oideachas) in Thurles, County Tipperary, in the Republic of Ireland - 18/19May 2012

If we insist on teaching Algebra in our schools, not once but twice, the least we can do is to actually use it when we think about education. And here's the equation: If (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) are constant, x will always be the variable. In order to make x the constant, (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) must be variable. In all circumstances where x = student achievement and (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) represent Time, Space, Technology, Pedagogy, and Curriculum.
 
In simpler terms, if all students are to succeed, everything else in and about the school must be flexible.

This is the easy-to-understand, mathematical way Hamilton, Michigan Superintendent Dave Tebo re-worked my thoughts a couple of nights ago on Twitter.

I have written (and talked) a lot about the history of education, and why it "looks" the way it does, but without repeating all of that, let's just say that the linear, time-constructed, subject-divided, age-organized, one method at a time, system of education does not really match with the way most humans learn. It never has, and it certainly does not in this century.

The Guardian demonstrates how learning can happen in this century

Technologies define "the school" and can either separate it from, or connect it to, education. The first technology of "school" is time. We separate "learning time" from "non-learning time." The second technology of "school" is the division of students and subjects. Boxes are created separating eight-year-olds from ten-year-olds, thirteen-year-olds from fifteen-year-olds, and then separating "language" from "history" from "maths" from "arts." The third technology of "school" is the built environment, the walls, furniture, floors, ceilings, lighting, surfaces, et al, of the place. The fourth technology of "school" lies in the information and communication system options in place, from chalkboard and paper and pencils to mobiles and blogs and cameras.

And if we are going to change "teaching places" into "learning spaces" all of these technologies must be re-imagined in wholly new ways, because the only way to make learning available to all is to re-create "school" as a constantly variable space - physical space, temporal space, virtual space, imagined space - which constantly flexes to the needs of the learners and the learning community.

Time, Space, the pedagogy of "Attention," all flex in this sixth grade language classroom

The physical spaces where students spend their time must be comfortable, adaptable, and offer a world of options. Sit in a chair or on the floor, on a pillow or on the windowsill, touching friends or consciously alone, standing at a table or sprawled across the floor, in bright light or dim, with noise surrounding, or headphones creating one's own aural place, or with the rain splashing your window view. The information and communication technology must offer the same, with information flowing via video or audio, print on paper or print on screens, through tablets and mobiles and laptops and larger touchscreens, via pens or pencils, on paper or whiteboards or washable floors or the glass of windows.

The Boeing 787, reconceiving the airliner meant
missing deadlines.

Time must change as well. We need many fewer deadlines and many more commitments to deep learning. My sister could read - and read well (as in both decoding and comprehension) - at age two. I haven't yet caught up in decoding to where she was then. Turns out, it doesn't matter in terms of what we know, or what we can do. Einstein - famously - struggled in school. Steve Wozniak couldn't handle computer science or math courses. Norman Maclean published his first book when he was 73-years-old. People have their own timelines and schedules, and we can either respect that fact, or we can do a great deal of damage. In addition, here are some projects which have arrived long after their deadlines, aircraft from the B-29 to the 787-Dreamliner, spacecraft from Freedom 7 to Apollo 11, vehicles from the Ford Model T to everything from Tesla, and a whole lot of other groundbreaking efforts. If you want your students to copy from Wikipedia set deadlines, if you want original thinking - well, that's a lot less time-predictable.

We also need many fewer "schedules." Can kids work at their desks or at studio tables with a team like adults do? Can kids work on something even when you want to move on? Can kids take breaks when they need them?

Choice in space, inputs, ICT...

Of course subject division must end. Watching that Guardian video (above) we can see how all of the artificial lines we draw are absurd. In every situation, in every analysis, in every bit of learning, the wider the context the more "entry paths" exist, and the deeper the resultant understanding. Can you read Dickens or Fitzgerald without studying capitalism? History? Can you enter either of those realms without knowledge of maths and sciences? Can you even begin to operate arithmetic without knowing culture? You can only separate these things if your goal is the shallow, "testable," understanding so prized by national educational leaders.

If all students are to succeed, everything else in and about the school must be flexible. And perhaps the place to start is with this question... if it's "only in school" you might need to get rid of it. Forty years ago a German educator said, "Only in school would you find thirty people working on the same thing not allowed to speak to each other," a classic observation. Here are some others: Only in school will you find people sitting in traditional school furniture. Only in school will you find people working on computers without food and drink. Only in schools will you find absolute scheduling which consistently interrupts work... Go on, make your own list...

From gum chewing to seating, lighting to time, eating to work schedule, school is the most regimented place in our societies, training people for something which, if it ever existed, lies deep in our past, and failing to either offer all students a chance, or to help our children learn how to manage their own lives.

So the challenge is to recreate - to turn those 19th Century "Teaching Places" into contemporary "Learning Spaces" which cross the entire realm of the educational experience. Our children, our world, need us to do that.

- Ira Socol