SpeEdChange

17 January 2012

Changing Gears 2012: social networking beyond Zuckerbergism

Facebook began in the toxic social environment of the Ivy League...
The Social Network as a ranking system, if I win, you lose

Mark Zuckerberg isn't really an evil guy, as I think the film The Social Network made quite clear. He is simply a guy without the social skills which would allow him to understand the impact of his work. I don't just say that because I watched the film, I know people who know Mark, surely who knew Mark growing up. He is a great success in many things, but has always been a total failure with humanity, which makes it unfortunate that he created a tool with so much impact on humanity. Ah well, that is simply not a rare thing. Mitt Romney, who seems about to be chosen by the Republican Party to run for president of the United States seems completely unaware of what a human is, despite growing up with a remarkably humane father. Our leaders, whether from the privileged economic background of David Cameron or the privileged intellectual background of Barack Obama, all seem to struggle with this. We know this, the exceptions who can actually communicate in two directions with other humans, whether Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or Tony Blair, stand out in shocking contrast against their "peers."

One of the things which comes with this lack of humanity in our leadership is a belief in human competition which is wholly at odds with actual human experience - when that competition has not been aggressively trained in to people. Most humans do not really compete in their family groups, their "tribes," their "clans," or even their workplaces. Most people try to cooperate, to build things together, to move forward together. "[T]here are theoretical reasons to suppose that mentalizing demands of cooperation and competition differ in some aspects," says an fMRI study from 2004, "In case of competition, the opponent’s upcoming behavior is less predictable than in the case of cooperation in which there is a clear expectation for the behavior of the other agent. Research ... demonstrated that one’s own actions are facilitated when actions of the other are at the disposal of the self. This is the case in the cooperation trials, but exactly the opposite during the competition trials."

In other words, though both competition and cooperation are "natural," cooperation is not just more efficient for humans - "In accordance with evidence from evolutionary psychology as well as from developmental psychology, we argue that cooperation is a socially rewarding process ... these arguments are consistent with the hypothesis that executive functions evolved to serve social planning in primates and, in humans, are applied to both physical world and the social realm" - but that we see with less prediction - we see more clearly and innovatively - in cooperative mode than in competitive mode.

Cooperation is not something foreign to the human race.

I'm certain that Mitt Romney once knew
why Mormons chose the beehive
as Utah's symbol, but life in the
culture of Harvard and Bain Capital
stripped that knowledge away.

Richerson, Boyd and Henrich (2002) call this the "tribal social instincts hypothesis," "Humans are prone to cooperate," they say, "even with strangers," yet, the enculturalization is key to these behaviors, "The elegant studies by Richard Nisbett’s group show how people’s affective and cognitive styles become intimately entwined with their social institutions. Because such complex traditions are so deeply ingrained, they are slow both to emerge and to decay. ... The slow rate of institutional change means that different populations experiencing the same environment and using the same technology often have quite different institutions."

Mark Zuckerberg, like most of our leadership, grew up in the rather anti-human confines of the wealthy, Wall Street obsessed, suburb. In these places where the institutions of the culture have embraced selfishness and competition in all things as a "good." Though, yes, "Human societies represent a spectacular outlier with respect to all other animal species because they are based on large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals" (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004), the social norming those authors describe seem to overwhelm the natural, creating places in which competition, in every single thing, is trained in from birth. My kid's Apgar score is higher than your kids, and onward and upward to 5,000 square foot homes for four people and Mercedes-Benz station wagons in the driveway, and $5,000 commercial ranges in kitchens that are turned on twice a year, and SAT test tutors and paid preparers for those Harvard applications.

In that world, as the Zuckerberg character in Aaron Sorkin's film makes clear in the first scene, being in one of the most prestigious fraternities of the most prestigious university in the nation is simply not enough, because it is not the "most of the most." Now Zuckerberg has neurological issues (I'm pretty sure) which make this especially difficult for him, but no matter the brain wiring, the world of Harvard and Harvard-like places is built on this essential set of what might be called personality disorders. A "zero-sum" world in which your success is only possible through the (relative) failure of those around you.

Able to not just speak to those different
from himself, but to hear them as well,
Robert Kennedy was a remarkably
rare type of political leader.

"It is a revolutionary world we live in. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments. For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked for us. The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American society." - Robert Francis Kennedy, 1968

We need a different kind of leadership in education. "The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike." We need a believe in our shared capabilities as people. And it has to begin with a radically different conception of our educational social networks. We need a concept of social networking where we are not comparing schools, teachers, and students in ways little different than Mark Zuckerberg's FaceMash.

Because I simply do not want schools to compete (the goal of the profiteers of "ed reform"), teachers to compete (the goal of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Michael Gove, and many of America's Governors), or students to compete (the goal of way, way too many adults in schools and around children), I want them to succeed in their own ways, in their own time, and mostly, cooperatively. I want them all working together, helping each other...
• Might this student do better in your school? This student with that teacher? These three students if working together?
• What can this school learn from that school? How can this teacher help that teacher? What can this student learn from that student?

FaceMash: Which school is hotter?

Not competing, not ranking, not rating, but doing something much more directly human... helping each other.

We don't really want schools fighting over the "easy to educate" students, or teachers refusing to help other teachers escape that "bottom 5%," or students refusing to help each other do better, do we? And if we do, what are we suggesting? About ourselves, about society, even about our businesses?

Now comes the hard part, rethinking our own positions. Because if step eleven of Changing Gears 2012 is going to be "un-competing" in our social networking, we need to begin with our own behaviors. We do a lot of things which, often unintentionally, send the wrong messages, and those messages not only impact our students, they impact ourselves.

I've had my fights with online colleagues/friends I respect over stuff like the EduBlog Awards, and I know they "recognize" many people, but determining quality by letting people organize "vote for me" campaigns is the essence of building competition into something in which competition serves no positive purpose. And I'm troubled when people beg for more followers on Twitter (or friends on Facebook, or...). That's competition based in the most meaningless count, quantity where you don't even know what you are counting (bots, multiple accounts from one person). (I tend the other direction, I remember blocking new followers when I approached 500 followers, for whatever reason "500" seemed like a lot, and I wondered if "a lot" of followers would change the way I was communicating.) I'm troubled when people quote stats about number of readers of blogs too often. And I know I don't want to be that person people ask for help most often.

Obviously, our "official" rankings are problems - those "Honor Rolls" (I mumble, being one of the perpetually unhonored), class rankings, the whole idea - I'm always stunned by this - that the instructor is doing something wrong if everyone does well in the course, concern about "grade inflation," or the dreaded "awards ceremony."

Perhaps I'm strange, but I always think that being at the top - in this (especially American) work - encourages you to worry about staying at the top instead of encouraging you to do what you need to do. One issue. The second - and far more important issue is this - when you rank you are turning to artificial and external motivators to replace your own heart and soul. You are no longer trying to be the best you can be, you have given away your own internal measures for some flimsy badge which represents someone else's ideas.

A top retailer, 1972. Fighting to be on top
doesn't always work.

But perhaps I'm not alone. Toyota is still trying to recover from the disastrous quality control lapses they accepted because their goal was to sell more cars than General Motors. I've seen many businesses over-expand themselves out of business. The jury is still out on what Volkwagen's desire to be number one in sales will do to their long term reputation. Sometimes, a decent slice of the pie is better than either none of it or even all of it, because "number one" can be a tough thing: If I go back forty years to 1972, the top American retailers were: Sears, A&P, Safeway, J.C. Penney, and Kroger. The top airlines were United (yes, still up there), TWA, Pan Am, American, and Eastern - with only two of those five still even existing. I couldn't find my way back to 1972, but in 1976 the top selling cars in the United States were: the Oldsmobile Cutlass, Chevrolet Caprice, Chevrolet Monte Carlo, Ford LTD, and Chevrolet Malibu. No real need to point out that the basic design of our schools, the functional engineering of our schools, is a lot older than 40 years, as is our systems management, as are our grading systems, subject structures, and most of our course materials designs.

The change, among smart businesspeople, was apparent in late 2008-early 2009 when Ford joined the rush to Washington to get help for, yes, General Motors and Chrysler. Ford put considerable muscle, and took a lot of absurd abuse from Republicans, behind efforts to not just keep their competitors in business, but to reduce their debts far below those of Ford's. Why? Ford knew that their supplier chain needed healthy customers beyond themselves. Ford also knew that a health industry would be good for the country, and Ford knew that a full-scale depression spinning out from the nation's center wouldn't do much for its sales. Plus Ford knows that a healthy multiplayer industry is good for everyone. The Big Three in the US, Volkwagen, BMW, Daimler in Germany, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi in Japan.

It was also apparent in Google's recent conversations about Mozilla: "So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well. Mozilla's commitment to advancing the web is why I was hired at Google explicitly to work on Firefox before we built Chrome: Google was interested enough in seeing Firefox succeed to commit engineering resources to it, and we only shifted to building Chrome when we thought we might be able to cause even greater increases in the rate at which the web advanced. It's not hard to understand the roots of this strategy. Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do. Because of this Chrome doesn't need to be a Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker, nor does it even need to directly feed users to Google. Just making the web more capable is enough."

So, the world's biggest companies know something educational reformers, and our political leaders, can't quite figure out. I know Ford would like to sell more cars in the US than General Motors, but that kind of win is not their goal. And Google, which could dominate many things, chooses not to.

The Nash Equilibrium: It is not all about competition
"Adam Smith, is wrong"

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand that, which is why Facebook will always be about rankings and superiorities. More friends, more messages, more writings on the wall. Even Barack Obama, doesn't fully understand this, he wants America to be triumphant - whatever that may mean - in education. But we look around our schools and we see so many differing talents, so many differing personalities, so many differing skillsets, and we know that we'll always be better together.

I don't want FaceMash or SchoolMash or Students-in-MathMash. I sure do not want algorithms which will artificially rate people. I don't want counts of followers or popularity contest awards, and I don't want kids accorded an "honor" because they got one more answer right on some multiple choice test than another. I don't want teachers rated on test scores or graduation rates, and I don't want schools rated those ways either. We've tried that for generations. It sucks for just about everybody.

So let's try something different. Let's join together, in all of our learning spaces, with as little hierarchy as we overtrained animals can muster. Maybe we'll discover something.

- Ira Socol
next: knowing less about students, seeing more

16 January 2012

Changing Gears 2012: undoing academic time

School schedules frame the world, creating limits on every kind of learning.

Let me begin with a Chris Lehmann quote:
"As long as high school students have to travel to eight different classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards / learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail. If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.

"As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity, too many students will feel that school is something that is done to them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster, and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human -- and more humane - for all who inhabit them."

Chris, the Principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy and someone I love to both agree with and disagree with because either way I learn, was responding to a column by New York Times writer Nick Kristoff on - well basically - poverty not being important in education (Like many at The New York Times Kristoff is a great reporter outside the United States, but often a lazy, sloppy front man for the power structure inside the United States), an article retweeted so many times by Arne Duncan's flak boy Justin Hamilton, that my Twitter-stream was literally spinning.

Anyway, Chris is, of course, right. Its one of the things he and I have talked about over the past year, that is, the need to break through the structures that confine us to failure.

And one of those key structures is time, or more specifically, the way we use clocks.

The clock is not always on our side: Harold Lloyd, Safety Last
Scene re-scored by a music composition student.

When I began writing about space in school, I said, "The "first technology" of school is time. That division of "educational time" from other time, and the subsequent divisions therein. School Days and weeks, and semesters, and years. Periods of time which are separated out for this and that. "It's time for reading but not science, science but not physical education, history but not literature."'

Time is the "first technology" because it is the most controlling of all the structures which define "school." Learning is, of course, timeless. It exists in its own temporal zone, unique to each individual, and different for each thing "learned." But school is all about the clock. In Peter Høeg’s Borderliners the main character creates complete panic among a school's adults simply by messing with the bell schedule. So trained are the faculty to the clock that be creating just an extra ten minutes at one point in the day, he can destroy the school's operation.

It's more than a great story, it makes perfect sense.

Studebaker was endlessly rushing new models
out for September "model year" starts,
too often, the parts didn't fit together

All my life I have clashed with schools over "deadlines." These are deadlines unlike almost any I've run across outside of school, because they are completely arbitrary. OK, in the bad old days of American car companies and the "good old days" of American TV networks, they rushed products, mostly incredibly lousy products, to market for pre-ordained moments in time, but wisely, the rest of the world sort of ignored that system, and now, cars come to market when they are ready.

American TV series had to be these things which would run and run and run. That could happen in Britain, but the BBC was also willing to call eight episodes a season, if it seemed appropriate.

But schools, from Kindergarten up through Graduate Schools, persist in the same nonsensical calendar system in which the clock overrules the idea of doing what you do well. Stop paying attention to American History kids, we're done with that. I'm sorry you got deeply interested in cognitive theories, the semester is over. And of course, a mediocre work turned in "on time" trumps a great work that's "late."

Then, within each day, we make it far more ridiculous, as Chris Lehmann says up top. Fascinating math concept? Ding! Sorry, the bell says its time for Charles Dickens. Great discussion of Dickens? Ding! Sorry, the bell says its time for gym! We defeat virtually every potential student interest, and short circuit learning moment after learning moment, because we think that the most important thing to respond to is, a clock.

And if we back off further, we are so intent on dividing "learning time" ("school") from "non-learning time" ("home") from "homework time" (school directed but not supported), that those who want to use "homework time" differently think they've discovered the equivalent of gravity.

Sad, because before children are introduced to our schools, they are learning every minute they are awake.

Step ten of Changing Gears 2012 is to do everything we can to break apart every notion of academic time. Admitting, that since the clock and calendar are the foundational technologies of what we call "school," that this is the most difficult thing of all. But only by attacking these rigid foundations can we begin to liberate learning from the industrial straitjacket of the past century and a half.

Summerhill physics?

We must do what we can to stop processing children as if they were products with "value to be added" at key moments. And let us use the absurdities of today's political class as our leverage. If poorly educated governors in Iowa, Florida, Virginia and elsewhere want to set rules about social promotion - and nothing is more ridiculous than attacking "social promotion" in a system entirely based on student age - then you have every reason to make all of your schools multi-age, so promotion is no longer an issue. That breaks calendar foundation number one, the absurd NCLB notion that age determines learning.

"To allow children to be completely free to play as much as they like. Creative and imaginative play is an essential part of childhood and development. Spontaneous, natural play should not be undermined or redirected by adults into learning experiences. Play belongs to the child." - Summerhill Policy Statement

Then, within schools, we must stop dividing time between "play" and "learning" as if these are somehow mutually exclusive. Or between "learning" in an active mode, and "learning" by reflecting. Kids need to learn to manage time, and they need to discover. It is fine if three are playing, six are reading, two are staring out the window, etc. It is fine. This is natural. This is what humans do.

"The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, not a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows best." - A.S. Neill

Assignments need to stop having dates on them. Assignments - such as they may be - need to have goals instead. What are you hoping to accomplish? to learn? to create? to build? to know? to demonstrate? to provoke? How do you think you'll get from "here" to "there." What in the world does a date or a time have to do with that? Why would you even begin to interfere with the learning process by limiting the time? I'll explain, because in the industrial process of schooling 70% of a subject "learned" by a specific moment trumps mastery at some other time. Do I really need to explain how ridiculous that is?

Is late worse than best? The Boeing 787 Dreamliner

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.

We all need caves, campfires, and watering
holes, and the right to choose which when (Summerhill)

"In other words, we are assuming (1) that learning takes places best not when conceived as a preparation for life but when it occurs in the context of actually living, (2) that each learner ultimately must organize his own learning in his own way, (3) that "problems" and personal interests rather than "subjects" are a more realistic structure by which to organize learning experiences, (4) that students are capable of directly and authentically participating in the intellectual and social life of their community, (5) that they should do so, and (6) that the community badly needs them." - Neil Postman and Alan Shapiro

"Our schools imagine that students learn best in a special building separated from the larger community. Teachers and administrators are included in the group of educators; parents, employers, businessmen, ministers are excluded. The year-around Parkway Program sets up new boundaries and provides a new framework in which the energy of all of us can be used in learning, not in maintaining an obsolete, inefficient system. ... There is no schoolhouse, there is no separate building; school is not a place but an activity, a process. We are indeed a school without walls. Where do students learn? In the city. Where in the city? Anywhere and everywhere." - Greenberg and Roush. A Visit to the 'School without Walls': Two Impressions

"School work" needs to stop being separated from life by the hard line of "school time" and "non-school time," which is one of the reasons why - earlier in this collection - I find the "Flipped Classroom" so lacking. Learning needs to occur within and around the world as a whole, and "school" should be the place where we help students make sense of their global learning and get them ready to go solve the issues - personal, family, community, nation, world - which they encounter elsewhere. But to do this we must stop pretending that "school time" is something absolute. Remember, before Henry Barnard and the industrial model of schooling, students came to school when their chores were done, and left school when they were "done" there. They took breaks from school when other things intervened. As far back as the 1850s the "Land Grant College" movement hoped to bring the life of the nation into the school experience, and the value of education to the society (a concept often still dimly, if at all, understood, even by Land Grant University faculty).

This is part of the reason for Passion-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, and the entire School-Without-Walls concept. Breaking down the walls, starting with the walls of time.

"To allow children to experience the full range of feelings, free from the judgment and intervention of an adult. Freedom to make decisions always involves risk and requires the possibility of negative outcomes. Apparently negative consequences such as boredom, stress, anger, disappointment and failure are a necessary part of individual development." - Summerhill policy statement.

How does your "school time" help your kids prepare to work here?
(Virgin Atlantic headquarters)

The thing we have become worst at in our schools is helping students get ready for anything except more secondary schooling. We usually do nothing to even prepare students for universities, much less anything else, and here, time is the key factor. How do you choose to "study?" Where do you choose to "study"? and of course, When do you choose to "study"? Those key questions which determine university success in many ways are completely blocked from the primary and secondary experience because we insist on running our students as if they were a (French, not American) train system, with every moment accounted for. How, with your clock training, will your students even know what to do with themselves if they get a job where some of the time-use decisions are theirs?

So stop it. If a student comes to class "late" or leaves early the question is not one of "bell compliance" but of how to do that politely and without disrupting others. If a student falls asleep in class, assuming the snoring is muted, that's only your concern insofar as it may be a review of your performance (more often its a review of our absurd secondary school scheduling ideas). If a student chooses an extended lunch (usually "extended" from something obscenely short) over class attendance, this needs to be viewed as a micro-economic decision, and not a behavior issue.

"Class-oriented? Who or what has ever made anyone in the 3Is take more classes than he/she wants to take? First year student Richard Hobbs during his two years in the 3Is probably didn't take more than one or two and, if I remember correctly, didn't even get credit for them. He graduated. (See Ira Socol and Tom Murphy on the art of not taking classes; on the other hand, for the art of taking classes, see Kim Jones, who amassed something like 12 credits and graduated after her sophomore year.)" - Alan Shapiro

Why can't students control their own academic time? Why can't every school allow students the freedom to go at their own speed? If you really believe that your school is not an industrial processing plant, or not a holding tank for adolescents (to keep them off the streets/out of the job market) than I challenge you, in 2012, to start to prove that.

Academic time is wrong. It is wrong in every way and at every level of education. And we need to start working to destroy it.

- Ira Socol
next: social networks beyond Zuckerbergism

14 January 2012

Changing Gears 2012: changing rooms

Spaces matter. And I have come to understand that spaces matter much more than places.

"Place" is a physical construct, "space" a conceptual one, and somehow we need to begin to carve out a series of effective "learning spaces" in the "places" we call "school."

Yes, there is power in both, memory in both, opportunity in both. But "place" is both more tribal in nature, and even when sublimely lovely, much more constrictive by nature than "space," which is an ever-changing idea.

In one of those many "previous lives" I have had, I once was part of a production of David Storey's The Changing Room. Storey's play was about space, and the power of space. There is no actual plot, and the place hardly matters (no matter how apparent in expected accent and character descriptions), but Storey writes about how this conceptual space between a cruel society and a cruel game offers those within it something unparalleled elsewhere in their lives. The physical "changing room/locker room" is one thing, and it might look like anything and be anywhere, but here we are diving into something entirely different from the architectural.

Yet, the architectural always matters. Buildings matter. Landscapes matter. Views matter. Acoustics matter.

"The purpose of Why Architecture Mattersis to “come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually”—to show us how architecture affects our lives and to teach us how to understand the architecture that surrounds us every day. “Architecture begins to matter,” Paul Goldberger writes, “when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.” He shows us how that works in examples ranging from a small Cape Cod cottage to the “vast, flowing” Prairie style houses of Frank Lloyd Wright, from the Lincoln Memorial to the highly sculptural Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Church of Sant’Ivo in Rome, where “simple geometries…create a work of architecture that embraces the deepest complexities of human imagination.”'

Of course architecture also matters when it does something opposite "bring[ing] delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads," whether that be the classic leaking roof in a rain storm or rectangular boxes which separate students into production cells.

Entering Trinity in Dublin, welcoming but safe,
many ways to gather, or not.

"Your architecture should ennoble all who pass through your design," a Pratt Institute professor once told a studio I was part of. I think it must ennoble and empower, engage and comfort, and the best designs I know, do that. Great learning spaces make things possible, this is true of Prospect Park, or the Temple of Dendur wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or Trafalger Square, or Orestad College in Denmark, or the Bois de Boulogne, or the lawn at the University of Virginia, or Millennium Park in Chicago, or the Seattle Central Library, or many a great cathedral or city square ... theses spaces allow gathering and solitude, inspiration and reflection, communication and study, performance and observance, communion and acceptance.

This is true online as well. The QR Code Advent Calendar created by #ccGlobal kids last month allowed, inspired, and introduced so much. Twitter, and on a smaller level, TodaysMeet, are blank canvases which offer those opportunities, perfect spelling, grammar, complexity in language not required - but it's open to anyone and anyone can link to anything. Hybrid online spaces, say, Skype + TodaysMeet + Google Docs offer another "big opening" kind of space, as, I suspect, do Google + Hangouts with the ability to combine many tools.

Honestly, I looked for great classrooms, but... well, these are rarer, of course. Yet, not impossible to find. Not impossible at all...

Without removing walls, without big money, we can go from teaching places
to learning spaces

Ewan Mcintosh has one great framework, his "Seven Spaces" which exist both in "reality" and "virtually" ...

In Mcintosh's beginning thoughts for those designing, planning, or furnishing "schools," he puts it simply, "There's a difference between: "What kind of building would help you teach and learn better?" and "What kind of teaching and learning would you like to do, and what things could we help with in making that happen?"

Which is the opposite of what we see in the TEDtalk below, where the goals are established from the top, and thus, no matter how "cute" the walls get, the computers and their student users still sit alone facing walls, and though drill and kill has moved outside, it has not changed.

Failed Space... the TED space, sage-on-stage + passive audience, rehearsed lecture + PowerPoint,
is - by design - a "limited to the elite" structure in which alternate expression is blocked.
(Admission: as with every TEDtalk I've tried to watch, it took me four sittings to get through this)

Step nine of Changing Gears 2012 is creating Learning Spaces which have choices, create opportunities, allow comforts, provide safety. We build these differently wherever we do them, but we craft these environments in a way which allows the maximum possibility for flexibility and continuous adaptability. Learning Spaces cannot be places which create continuous irrelevant discomfort: "'Who wants to be locked into a room with 30 people dressed just like them, to be startled by a bell every 35 minutes, to queue for lunch for 40 minutes and be made to stand outside in the cold twice a day?' says Jenn Ashworth in a Guardian piece on truancy titled "Why I refused to go to school." I have been in classrooms so visually chaotic - in every direction - that I could not last 5 minutes in them. I have been in classrooms so coldly sterile that I imagined someone was about to perform surgery on someone, which creates more tension than anyone should have to handle.

Learning Spaces must offer options which support every child. This is true whether learning is happening dominantly in-room or online. You can't just send kids off to their computers from their homes and call yourself an educator (you can, however, do this and call yourself a Republican governor).

Choice is one of the things which create learning spaces.

There is plenty of science here, although education invests less in research regarding space than almost any other industry (think restaurants, or retailing). "A common complaint in the classroom is eye fatigue and in order to relieve it, Engelbrecht suggests that the end wall of the classroom behind the teacher should be a different colour from the other walls," says one design study which also notes, "there are some suggestions that the colour of surroundings might have a distinct impact on mood and behaviour, perhaps sometimes, Sundstrom (1987) suggests, through changing perceptions of room temperature or size. Read et al (1999) consider that both colour and ceiling height affects children’s cooperative behaviour. Engelbrecht argues that the colour of walls in the classroom affects productivity and accuracy while Brubaker (1998) argues that cool colours permit concentration," but, indicates something a look at schools might make obvious, "that children thought colour was important and that they thought the colour of the walls in their school was uninviting and boring. However, in this study Maxwell also found that teachers and parents were not concerned by the colour of the walls."

Color is just one little part, to quote a student from one class where a teacher embraced a radical reshaping - of both room and assignments - based in choice and comfort, "we have freedom of choice in here-we are more creative-not having choice takes fun out of writing." In the same space another simply said, "I think better and work harder when I am comfortable."

Comfort, choice, pleasure, the ability to see outside and find momentary escapes, varieties of light, transparency which allows learners to see the work of other learners (contagious creativity, contagious inquiry), multiple "entry points" for beginning an effort, and, of course, tool choice... Yu know I've written a lot about all of this:

old furniture, new uses.
learn to "alert" on discomfort
instead of movement

And I have because it matters. We need to get past that old Calvinist notion (more American Calvinist than Calvin, for those religious historians playing along at home) that misery and discomfort are important to learning. In fact, as Maslow suggests, the uncomfortable student cannot possibly focus on the higher-level learning skills, the brain simply doesn't allow that. Discomfort, a feeling of being unsafe, will always trump the more complex. Let me say it this way again: "In order to learn you must be cognitively uncomfortable, but you can't be cognitively uncomfortable if you are physically or psychologically uncomfortable."

Which brings us back to one of my other key arguments about educational spaces. While safety and comfort are vital, so is change, and these elements must co-exist. I am always stunned that so many educators seem to believe that the "school day" or a "learning experience" should begin with automaticity of operation - that is, without consciousness, without thought. Why would learning begin in an unconscious state? So, you need not shock your students - there's that safety thing - but you do need surprise and difference which gets the human brain operating, and, if your students get off a bus, go through the door, go down the corridor, and arrive at an assigned seat each morning, or follow completely predictable paths to an online experience, you have begun your interaction with your students by turning off their brains... Why do you think the world's simplest, and most successful, website loves to surprise its visitors?

Willing to completely distract our students on the way to their tasks?
Google's legendary Pac-Man doodle

Take the idea of "Learning Spaces" seriously this year, because they matter.

- Ira Socol
next: undoing academic time

12 January 2012

Changing Gears 2012: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (7) reconsidering what literature means (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

"In Essays in Humanistic Mathematics, Philip Davis likens mathematics to literature. Like literature, mathematics has metaphor, ambiguity, paradox, and mystery. It has history. Mathematics has contributed mightily to philosophy. It has a sense of outcome, a feeling of rightness, a sense of catharsis... Like music, mathematics has harmony and dissonance." from Cut the Knot by Alex Bogomolny

I am really tired of schools chasing students away from mathematics. And I am really tired of schools confusing arithmetic - a mechanical grammar of numbers - with the field of mathematics. We need kids to get interested in maths. Mathematics is something essential in our society, and in our future, and we just cannot afford to continue to chase the bulk of kids away from the possibilities which come with math skills, interests, and capabilities. We cannot continue to either allow the assumption that there are "math kids" and "non-math kids" (as if math is a magical gift), or to separate students into "creative types" and "math types."

Because the "next world" - the jobs of the future which are, as we speak, constructing the world we will live in tomorrow - is being built by the creative mathematicians of the world, and our students will either be part of that, or they won't. They will be able to develop their own solutions and have power over their world or they will be helpless consumers locked into their "App Store Education" (Will Richardson must read) and "App Store Existence." They will be participants or bystanders. And largely, that is for us, as educators, to decide.

"Why is this exciting? Why do I want to tell you this story?"
"Mathematics is not about 3+3..."

Let's begin here, with a quote from the end of the clip above, "Adding in clock notation, all of computer science begins when you say 1+1 = 0. It's not that you were wrong when you said 1+1 = 2, its just a different way of seeing it."

If this is over your head in some way, and you teach math in school, we need to talk. We need to talk now, because step eight of Changing Gears 2012 is re-understanding what mathematics are, and how we bring kids and mathematics together.

Two primary issues which lead to the bigger ones, no matter what age kids you teach. First, maths are creative, they are imaginative, they are powerful, and they are fascinating. Second, arithmetic cannot continue to be your gateway, your filter, blocking children from mathematics.

For the first, what have you done with Fibonacci lately, just as a first question? How does a maths idea shape how students perceive the spaces they are in? For the second, well, lets go back a month to a post I wrote, "In a math lesson a day later I watched a seventh grader, a kid who really struggled to divide 64 by 2 in his head, or 32 by 2, or, for that matter, 16 by 2, work diligently to explain to his disbelieving teacher how he knew - and he knew instantly - how many games are in the NCAA basketball tournament. He knew, because math is about rules and logic, and his logic was perfect and his understanding of the rules I had described was perfect, and because math is not arithmetic, no matter how much our poorly educated national and state leaders think it is. He and his classmates also understood, almost instantly, that the question - no calculators or paper or Google allowed - "If the temperature in Detroit, Michigan is 50 degrees what is the temperature likely to be in Windsor, Ontario? was about (a) culture, and then (b) understanding comparable scales, and then (c) order of operations."

If we get past these two ideas, we can begin to bring students into what mathematics is...

Pulling two quotes from a mathematics discussion board begins to get at the issues, the question being that old classic, does two plus two always equal four...
"I think this discussion goes right back to Aristotle (or another Greek of similar vintage). The question is pretty much: Three clouds; three pebbles; three goats; three thoughts; three olives; when you take away clouds, pebbles, goats, thoughts, olives, then what do you have left? The concept of threeness! Each such ....ness is an integer, and there is a reasonably obvious rule to move between such concepts. This rule permits of repetition, and thus establishes the countable numbers."

however...

"For a cook, 2 apples + 2 apples might well accurately equal 5 apples if those 4 apples are larger than normal. The mathematician would argue that 2 large apples + 2 large apples must equal 4 large apples. Correct. That’s the mathematical axiom Jon Richfield is talking about. The trouble is, in reality no apple is the same size as another, so the mathematician’s axiom is limited somewhat to arithmetic theory. So why should mathematicians get the final say? The cook’s application is commonsensical and thus more accurate and fair, so in real life 2 + 2 doesn’t always equal 4. Using the equation 2 + 2 = 5, the apple pie turns out normally, as intended. Nothing meaningless about that."

10 candies? Can these be evenly divided in half?
Or are these all completely different things?

And here we have established the arithmetic conundrum which pulls kids away from mathematics. It should never be taught in a reductionist form which removes the possibility of creativity.

Every child knows that not every apple, every piece of cake (even if the same size you have those differences in frostings), every student, is the same (a fact those who work in quantitative educational statistics have been trained to forget). Thus, the question about two apples plus two apples, as suggested above, becomes one we can argue and debate, even with five-year-olds.

That is not a path to nowhere, it is, rather, the path to understanding, and to bringing students into mathematics. We have to help them learn that mathematics is a set of systems which we can apply when helpful, or rethink and re-imagine if not helpful. A long time ago I wrote a piece called "Real World Math" and one of the things I talked about was why I loved sport statistics in school maths. You cannot compute a batting average in baseball without knowing the rules about what an "At Bat" is and how that differs from a "Plate Appearance." You need to know the difference, in football, between a "Shot" and a "Shot on Goal." You need to know, in American football, how a quarterback "sack" is counted in "run yards" even if that quarterback was tackled while running forward. So these statistics do not just connect maths to a kid's interests, they explain how mathematical systems work, and how a slight change in the rules which govern that system, would change the answer.

At the grocery, sometimes 2+2=4,
sometimes not...

Here we go...

"A particularly vexing problem is comparing players from different eras. One complicating factor is that the baseball rule book has changed every year since the first rule book for the National League was issued in 1877.

For example, did you know that prior to the 1930 American League season, and prior to the 1931 National League season, fly balls that bounced over or through the outfield fence were home runs! All batted balls that cleared or went through the fence on the fly or that were hit more than 250 feet in the air and cleared or went through the fence after a bounce in fair territory were counted as home runs. After the rule change the batter was awarded second base and these were called "automatic doubles" (ground-rule doubles are ballpark-specific rules) and are covered by rule 6.09(d)-(h) in the MLB Rule Book."

Change the rules, change the results. Could you add fruits as 2+2? Or just the same kind of fruit? Three clouds; three pebbles; three goats; three thoughts; three olives; when you take away clouds, pebbles, goats, thoughts, olives, then what do you have left? The concept of threeness! Each such ....ness is an integer..." But an "integer" is an idea, it is a "construct," which students should learn to decide is either useful or not useful. Do we count "the number of people on the earth" (US Census is at odds with other counters) or measure the cumulative carbon footprint? (and what system of maths do we use to do that?).

Toss this into the mix... "three clouds"? the sky is full of water vapor, where does one cloud start and another stop? Is a three day old pygmy goat the same as an adult mountain goat? This "integer" idea, "threeness," what does it mean and how can we use it?

New York's Polo Grounds,
an interesting field made for
interesting stats.

Now, how many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? How many home runs did Lou Gehrig hit? But wait,

"With the exception of a couple of months at the start of the 1920 season, from 1906 to 1930 the foul lines were "infinitely long": A fly ball over the fence had to land in fair territory (as determined by the infinitely long foul lines), or be fair when last seen by the umpire, in order to be a home run. In other words, a fly ball that went over the fence in fair territory but "hooked" around the foul pole (if there was a foul pole) was ruled a foul ball." How many home runs did Babe Ruth hit? How many home runs did Lou Gehrig hit?

So, the rules matter, and the rules are changeable - assuming you can make the right argument. And this is creative magic which infiltrates everything, from the music you listen to to how that classroom window frames the world beyond. Years ago I taught an Intro to Architecture course at Pratt Institute. I'd take my students to the corner of 53rd Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, and we'd look. To the southwest was Charles McKim's 1916 Racquet and Tennis Club, to the northwest the 1952 Gordon Bunshaft Lever House, to the southeast Mies van der Rohe's incredible 1958 Seagram's Building - three absolute architectural masterpieces. The fourth corner, the northwest, is occupied by "399 Park Avenue," a 1961 structure by Carson Lundin, Kahn and Jacobs. It is an awful building, by just about anyone's standards.

We'd spend a long time standing on that corner trying to figure this out, and eventually, we'd get to maths and ratios and Fibonacci and the Golden Mean. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... Because it is that concept of ratio - embraced in three of those structures, ignored in the fourth - that so much of human comfort with proportion occurs. Europeans called it, "the divine proportion." Why? well, here you would seem to have a year long project which might carry your students anywhere and everywhere in mathematics.

Architects, artists, Wall Street traders, even, yeah, that student ID card or credit card
in your pocket... What makes this "the divine proportion"?

OK, that's one route. Another, hinted at near the top, is Coding. Coding is not just that mix of logic and creativity which is essential to maths, but it has a "real" feel. You don't get things "right" or "wrong," they work or they don't work.

Bring coding into your classrooms. Here's one simple free tool called Notepad++ which we have on our MITS Freedom Sticks. But better, take a look at student coding efforts around the world, from Mozilla's Hackasaurus to Ireland's CoderDojo and Scratch for Kinect which are all bringing kids into this in a big way.

As Stephen Howell (above) says, this is very different than working in that Steve Jobs iOS world where you buy the solutions you need in life. This is using the heart of mathematics to build your own world. Starting simply, kids get interested, they gain competence, they dig behind the curtains - something Jobs and Apple have never permitted - and they move deeper and deeper into what, eventually, begins to look like a much more engaging version of our curriculum. Eventually those Scratch programming kids will be building their own Lego blocks, teaching each other how to do it, challenging each other, and, yes, becoming the builders of that "next world."

So please, take the way you currently teach mathematics apart. Become a mathematics educator instead of a curriculum teacher. It might make all the difference in the future of your students.

- Ira Socol

next: changing rooms

11 January 2012

Changing Gears 2012: reconsidering what "literature" means

(1) ending required sameness (2) rejecting the flipped classroom (3) re-thinking rigor (4) its not about 1:1 (5) start to dream again (6) learning to be a society (again) (8) maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic (9) changing rooms (10) undoing academic time (11) social networks beyond Zuckerbergism (12) knowing less about students, seeing more (13) why we fight

What's in your Canon? What works of "literature" represent our society, its history, its values, its breadth, its ways of communicating? And, how do you define "literature" anyway?

Not many more classic bits of dialogue in the English language,On the Waterfront, 1954, Budd Shulberg (Elia Kazan, director), Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando

For me, and I think most of us who have grown up since the Second World War ended (which is almost 70 years ago now), our "literature" includes many things, and our "canon" is composed of many types of things. There is music which might, "define a generation," or "speak to great ideas," or express "ultimate frustrations," or "great hopes." There are films which have re-set a society's vision of itself, or which might make clear an essential moment in time, or perhaps would encompass all of our doubts, or, again, all of our hopes.

There are television shows which have helped us define ourselves, or understand ourselves, or doubt ourselves, or re-think our history, or speculate on gains and losses as times have gone on.

Challenging our sense of reality, our sense of time, and our reverential sense of literature,
Life on Mars, the BBC television show written by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan,
Ashley Pharoah, Chris Chibnall and starring John Simm.

Not, of course, to discount novels and poetry and theatre, which have re-defined our world, our language, even our way of getting news. Taken us on incredible journeys, and brought us into incredible bodies. Or has turned our darkest moments into reflection.

Seamus Heaney

This is the power of "literature," it is the power of the story, the power of human-to-human transmission. As Seamus Heaney said in his Nobel Prize "Lecture" "I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot." ... "Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Or, as I said to a group of seventh graders last week, troubled - and maybe even troubling seventh graders, "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

We, as a community, grow smarter the more voices we hear, the more voices we embrace. It could be the students of a Middle School...

...or it could be a "badly" danced interaction with the globe...

...but whatever it is, it expands us, it improves us, it opens us.

The Window, 1952, an amazing short story by, Frank De Felitta (teleplay), Enid Maud Dinnis (story),
now even more interesting because of its view of early television. Series, Tales of Tomorrow

So my seventh step in Changing Gears 2012 is to look as widely as you can for the literature which will touch your students, for the canon which will help them know themselves and our world. This matters. When we prescribe a Common Core we proscribe all that lies beyond that, and what lies beyond is truly the 99 percent.

Literature, that transmission of culture, of who we are, is a huge thing, and it involves every one of us. I was lucky enough, as a young kid, to watch one of my friend's mothers - Jean Fagan Yellin - unearth the story of Harriet Jacobs, and bring truth to light. This taught me something important about who an "author" might be. At the same age I was also lucky to be near enough to Manhattan to sneak away and watch Alvin Ailey tell stories, and near enough to Brooklyn to see the Assyrians describe their lives almost 3,000 years ago. I got to see Pablo Picasso describe war, which was different than John Wayne describing war. I even had the chance to see Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux describe calm, and Philippe Petit describe tension. It was an education in the art of communication for which I will always be grateful.

But it it is also an education in the art of communication which I think we owe all of our students. "People need to hear the things you think about, dream about, and worry about. They have to hear it in your voice which isn't the same as anyone else's voice." Because this is how we learn to become more human, by learning to share our voices, no matter how those voices are expressed."

- Ira Socol
next: maths are creative, maths are not arithmetic