It Takes a Village

Anyone who's met me, will confirm I'm a Chatty Kathy.  I'm an extrovert in the truest sense: a loud-talker (at times crossing the threshold into obnoxious), animated, often oblivious to the conversational queues of others, and verbose.  My writing is an extension of that.  I tend to yammer.  Sorry?

As a service to my readers (however few you may be), I shall endeavor to add a tl;dr rider at the end of every post.  For the not-so-interwebs-savvy, that means "Too Long; Didn't Read."  Can't be bothered to digest all 1,100+ words on my last post?  Just zip down to the bottom for the short version that pretty much says it all, now retroactively added to past posts.

Today I attended a conference on High School Redesign and had the good fortune, along with my Future Building Compatriot-in-Arms, Glen, to present in a breakout session the work we've been doing in Building Futures.  I also got to hear about great things happening in jurisdictions around the province, further convincing me that I am but one small component in a growing revolution of educational reform.

There were plenty of takeaways from today that I think are worth sharing:

• Teamwork wins.  My last post on the importance of teamwork in schools and classrooms was echoed time and again by administrators and colleagues.  Teachers who teach together, learn together, and thus teach better together.  I got to hear that meaningful data is emerging, and I was excited to talk to an area manager about getting my hands on some of that data to help make a case for more change in that direction.

• Progressive ideologies are prevalent, popular, and pervasive.  Granted the particular slice of the teacher demographic that was at the conference is all drinking from the same punch bowl so to speak, but by all accounts change is good and doing good things.  There was, to be fair, a measure of anti-testing, anti-memorization rhetoric too.  I too, am drinking from the punch bowl, but am perhaps not quite so ready to throw tests and memorizing facts and algorithms out with the bathwater just yet.  Regardless, transformation towards progressive pedagogy is alive and well.

• There are a great many teachers and administrators really trying to wrap their heads around some very real organizational challenges surrounding reform, and coming up with some outstanding and creative solutions.  In every case, doing more for kids and serving our learners in more meaningful ways is at the heart of these decisions -- I approve mightily.

• Even with the freedom and flexibility of a provincially supported Redesign mandate, and the best of intentions from teachers, administrators, and jurisdictional staff, we seem to still be living inside a bubble.  The world of teaching kids, even the subsection of that world that routinely uses words like "authentic," "real-world," and "relevant" seems to be having a hard time making meaningful connections with that real world.

We keep telling ourselves that we need to "prepare kids for the 21st Century," but I'm having a hard time seeing good connections between what we're doing inside our walls and what's happening in the 21st Century that's under way right now outside of them.  "It takes a village to raise a child" goes the proverb (which may or may not be of African origin).  So where is the rest of the village?

This is a MUCH bigger question than I can fully articulate right now, and I suspect it will be the subject of many a blog post.  At the moment, all I wish to offer is that I believe any systemic reform that involves little to no interaction with partners outside the walls of education will fall short of its full potential.  What evidence do I have for this?  Sadly, not nearly enough "hard" data, but an absolute cavalcade of opinion, editorial, anecdotes, and industry chatter that suggests a hard and pervasive disconnect between school and life, as though these two things are ostensibly distinct.  If we really want to maximize our societal potential, we have to raise the curtain we're working behind and invite the rest of the village in.

Will that be easy?  I don't know.  Maybe!  Have we really tried?  My Airdrie colleagues floated an idea out to a house builder and within a year, they had completely transformed what school could look like for 32 kids.  3 years later that idea has connected over 150 kids in two towns to more than two dozen individual businesses and institutions, and is inspiring other kinds of projects and other kinds of "houses."  In Iowa, this kind of thinking is leading to educational models that are being described as "Productive Creativity on Steroids."


Today I met a young man who, at the ripe old age of 16, has started a Non-Profit dedicated to connecting learners to the world they already live in.  He compellingly described both the need for and the power of socially relevant practices in school, both as a benefit to learning and as a benefit to society.  Paraphrasing Cole Webber's words: "if 7 minutes of every student's day in just one large high school was spent improving the world we live in, the total human-hours investment would exceed that of the time investment it took to put a man on the Moon in the Apollo Program."  Looking at it from that angle, the argument for having kids produce work that impacts the world outside our walls is profoundly compelling.  I look forward to getting to know Mr. Webber more in the not-too-distant future.

TL;DR: I talk too much. Went to a conference. Liked it. We need to find better ways to connect our practices and our kids to the "real" world.  Met an awesome guy named Cole Webber who's helping to make the world and education better.

Vive la revolution!