The Empowered World: Fixing What's Broken In Our Own Ways

Steven Zuckerman contacted me months ago about participating in a large, online event to promote social change at the grassroots level and it is now happening. Homeschooling is one way that Steve sees grassroots social change occuring in the field of education, and I was pleased to be asked to be interviewed as part of this program. As you can see from viewing the speakers and interviews for this four-day event, there is a lot of cool stuff happening outside the walls of university, school, and government institutions that isn't getting much international attention, but which is affecting lots of people nonetheless. This event is FREE and will put you in direct touch with such people and their ideas. Here are the details:

As millions of people around the world are looking for progressive improvements in systems that have broken down, Shaping the Future Global is committed to showcasing ideas and how-to-enable actionable events through a global platform. Thousands of people will be experiencing this event. We hope you will be one of them!

We have an incredible event that will start live with presentations in Melbourne, Australia on Saturday, December 1 at 9 a.m.  Holding an event with multiple time zones is never easy, and therefore the events have been aligned with our home base in Melbourne, Australia in mind. 

With all due respect to all listeners and participants, please be advised that all sessions are archiveable and can be listened at your leisure after the events are over.   Some of the events are live, some are pre-recorded.

All events will be made available at the time of broadcast/webcast found at the schedule of events page:

Schedule: Eastern Time USA http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/nyc-eastern-time-zone

Schedule: Melbourne Australia time   http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/australia-time-zone

 Please note that the start times in other time zones are as follows:

USA Eastern Time (New York, Miami)    Friday, November 30, 5 p.m.

USA Central Time (Chicago) Friday, November 30, 4 p.m.

USA Mountain Time (Denver)  Friday, November 30, 3 p.m.

USA Pacific Time (Los Angeles) Friday, November 30, 2 p.m.

London: Friday, November 30, 10 pm

Geneva/Paris/Munich  Friday, November 30, 11 p.m.

Jerusalem: Saturday, December 1, 12 a.m. Midnight

For all other time zones, please adjust your clock accordingly.

All events are immediately archived for playback after each event is over.

Home page: www.shapingthefutureglobal.com  and www.theempoweredworld.com

Presenters Bios: http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/presenter-biographies

The Global Peace Centre: http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/the-global-peace-centre

Schedule: Eastern Time USA http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/nyc-eastern-time-zone

Schedule: Melbourne Australia time   http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/australia-time-zone

We anticipate an amazing, empowering and wonderful event dedicated to enabling progressive change at a time of globalization.

Is Kahn Academy Really a Breakthrough Moment for Education?

Marion Brady has written a very good critique about the flipped-classroom, Kahn-Academy model for broadcasting instruction to students in a recent Washington Post blog. He doesn’t dismiss this development but Brady is a clear-eyed and experienced teacher who understands that learning is more than just having a well-prepared teacher talk to you on a predetermined schedule. Brady writes:

Intractable educational problems will begin to disappear when learners’ rear ends are gotten off school furniture and allowed out where life is being lived, when learners’ eyes are lifted from reference works passed off as textbooks and directed to the real world, when learners’ minds are respected too much to treat them as mere storage units for secondhand, bureaucratically selected information.

Intractable problems in education will begin to disappear when kids are not just allowed to chart their own course, but are encouraged to do so, and given means to that end. Too bad there are no policymakers willing to promote that idea, and no rich philanthropists willing to put up encouragement money.

Marion Brady has worked for decades in curriculum development and school reform and he wants to share his work and see his ideas and programs put to use in many places, not just conventional schools. For high-school-age homeschoolers and unschoolers seeking some educational language and rationales to use for their reports about their children’s different learning scopes and sequences, reviewing this free download of his curriculum can be useful.

Connections: Investigating Reality

A comprehensive general education course of study based on general systems theory

For adolescents and older learners

Learning Without Us

A new article in Educational Leadership was brought to my attention: Preparing Students to Learn Without Us by Will Richardson. As I read it I thought, once again, here is an educator willing to entertain this thought as long as the teacher remains in charge of how the learning occurs, in this case by linking a student’s personal interest in something to the core curriculum in whatever convoluted way necessary to achieve the goal.  The main point that John Holt, Ivan Illich, and others make so often—learning is the result of the activity of learners, not necessarily a result of teaching—always seems to get quickly lost in all school reform discussions. Instead, how teachers and schools are altered by technology that can personalize learning becomes the issue, and we ignore the human disruptive innovation—people learning from situations and other people outside of conventional schooling—and focus on the machinery: how technology will make existing schools continue as they are, only better. The important insight provided by Jacques Ellul and later Illich, that schooling itself is a technology used to control a population, is glossed over or not even considered in the rush to claim the latest technology that will change schooling.

However, unschoolers and some alternative schools have, for decades, supported independent learning for children, without using any of the latest educational technology as their justification for doing so. They use people in their families and communities, classes, projects, volunteering, and other opportunities to live and learn; they aren’t being tracked and assessed dynamically through cookies and cameras, but rather engage and discuss their situation with those working with them in order to know how they are doing. Many homeschoolers do use online courses, but I think not nearly as much as they use offline courses and learning opportunities (I wish there were more research about homeschoolers and their use of distance learning compared to how school uses it now and proposes to use it in the future. Does anyone know of such studies?). It is interesting to me that trusting people to decide what, when, how, and from whom they will learn is palatable to most educators only when they can use technology to control and predict what learners are doing. Technology is truly, in this instance, a double-edge sword.

The few dissenters cited at the end of the article give me hope that some in the teaching profession feel they should not be in the people-shaping business—trying to mold individual students to fit into job slots determined by their performance in school—and have not lost sight of a student’s humanity, dignity, and unique powers to learn.

The article starts off, as many do today, by paying lip service to the idea that we are learning all the time and that school interrupts that process. Unschoolers, in particular, can use or take heart from the arguments being made in support of letting learners control more of their learning and, who knows? Perhaps among teachers who think as the dissenters in this article do, we have allies who want to help create a learning society built around democracy and free will rather than a regime of mandatory continuing education, built around the plans of others and controlled through technology. Here are some excerpts to give you the gist of what I’m trying to convey about this article, which can be read in its entirety: Preparing students to learn without us.

The ability to learn what we want, when we want, with whomever we want as long as we have access creates a huge push against a system of education steeped in time-and-place learning. Notes McLeod,

Between adaptive software that can present and assess mastery of content, video games and simulations that can engage kids on a different level, and mobile technologies and online environments that allow learning to happen on demand, we need to fundamentally rethink what we do in the classroom with kids. (personal communication, October 1, 2011)

That rethinking revolves around a fundamental question: When we have an easy connection to the people and resources we need to learn whatever and whenever we want, what fundamental changes need to happen in schools to provide students with the skills and experiences they need to do this type of learning well? Or, to put it more succinctly, are we preparing students to learn without us? How can we shift curriculum and pedagogy to more effectively help students form and answer their own questions, develop patience with uncertainty and ambiguity, appreciate and learn from failure, and develop the ability to go deeply into the subjects about which they have a passion to learn?

. . . ."It requires a totally different skill set on the teacher's part," Stutzman says. "We have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, because we don't know the exact direction that a class will go when we walk in. Depending on student questions, reflections, or activities, our plans could quickly morph into something we never dreamed would happen at the outset."

In other words, it's risk and reward. "It's scary not to know exactly where your students will go if their curriculums are potentially different, and it requires a lot of adjusting," Stutzman explains. "But the benefit is that students get to see our genuine reactions to new discoveries as well as to challenges, and they see us model the learning process together." Students understand that there is no one "right" answer that the teacher expects, that there are many answers, and that the teacher and students will likely discover many of these together.

. . . Assessment changes as well. Donhauser says that the emphasis moves to assessing in the moment rather than at the end of a book or unit. "Rather than having a defined product that I receive from 25 students," she says, "I receive 25 individual assignments with their own unique content, insights, and styles." Using Google Docs, students continually update their progress, and she provides regular feedback. Students also give one another feedback on their plans as they go. Everyone follows a rubric that covers such areas as standards, learning outcomes, artifact explanation, blog posts, learning activities, work ethic, and research.

. . . Despite the promise of personalizing learning and some teachers' best efforts to give their students more agency in the education process, many educators wonder whether the concept goes far enough in preparing students for the wide array of learning opportunities outside the classroom.

Many educators cite an important difference between "personalized" learning and "personal" learning—the latter connotes a deeper degree of autonomy for the learner. Some, like Stephen Downes, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and a longtime education blogger, see that as an important distinction. "Autonomy is what distinguishes between personal learning, which we do for ourselves, and personalized learning, which is done for us," Downes (2011) tweeted last fall.

. . . It's a potential summed up nicely in the white paper The Right to Learn (Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation, 2011). The authors write,

We need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something—a primary education—to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right—whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others—rather than supplying or rearranging resources. (p. 6)

Knowing What Can and Can’t be Taught

“It is good books, not good reading methods, that make good readers,” John Holt told me, and I have certainly seen the wisdom of this comment with our three girls. They all learned to read using different methods and at different ages, but they all wanted to read because books are viewed by them as pleasure and information tools, not school assessment tools. The wisdom of this approach is bolstered by research, such as that done by Dr. Alan Thomas, the success of many children who learn to read later than is preferred in school and often with little, or no, adult help (there are many homeschooling and unschooling stories about this), and educational concepts such as delayed academics (Ray and Dorothy Moore’s work; Waldorf schools) and Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud initiative.

However, since this is a low-cost, learner-centered approach to reading it requires patience, hope, and trust—three key elements for learning that are severely lacking in education—and so it is ignored in favor of structured reading programs aimed at decoding essays on standardized tests. Educationists reduce the world to a classroom and take the motto of the alchemist and father of education, John Amos Comenius, as their reason to be: To teach everybody, everything, perfectly. From this medieval perspective, modern education feels it has the right and the mission to teach children everything—to turn the lead minds of children into the gold minds of graduates—so they will become well-rounded individuals, good citizens, and assets to the national economy. Though this process is expensive, doesn't work universally, is often counter-productive, and flies in the face of what we know about how people learn best, we have embedded it in our lives so much that most people refuse to consider other ways of learning. However, it is just as important to know what can’t be taught as well as what can be, and this is something that educationists refuse to accept. For instance, a love of reading cannot be taught to a class, it must be caught individually.

Not Teaching

Though Holt had this insight in the early sixties and wrote about it often (for instance, in The Underachieving School, the chapter titled “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading”), and other teachers have noted similar findings before and since Holt, these indirect, inexpensive, social capital approaches to improving education are totally ignored by policy-makers as a serious tool. Nonetheless, teachers who are serious about their work and explore every way they can help their students, including NOT teaching them but rather giving the student things, time, and space to explore and think on their own, continue to discover how they can facilitate learning without having to script and instruct every step of it.

Further, I hope this article gives support and options to homeschoolers who find their children aren’t enjoying their reading program and to unschoolers who are criticized for letting their children read (or not read) at their own pace. One good argument homeschoolers can use to justify not forcing their children to read just because they are a certain age, is that if schools can use intrinsic motivation and access to books at home to improve reading, so can homeschoolers.

Here is a story from Education Week—The Home Library Effect: Transforming At-Risk Readers—about a classroom teacher who now supports this important, but underappreciated and underused, aspect of helping children learn. Also, I can’t help but note how this teacher used his own funds to get this project going, another element homeschoolers share with teachers who want to break the mold of conventional schooling.

We called our classroom adventure "The 1,000 Books Project." Each of the 25 children in my class received 40 books over the course of 2nd and 3rd grade, for a total of 1,000 new books in their homes.

The project was simple to launch. Scholastic donated 20 books per child, and I purchased the other 20 through a combination of my own funds, support from individuals and local organizations, and bonus points. The kids received three types of books each month: copies of class read-alouds, guided reading books, and individual choices selected from Scholastic’s website.

. . . The total cost for each student's home library was less than $50 each year, a small investment to move a struggling reader from frustration to confidence.

Growing Readers

These 25 students made more progress in their reading than I have experienced with any other class. By the end of the project's second year, they had exceeded the district expectation for growth by an average of nine levels on the DRA and five points on the computerized Measures of Academic Progress reading test. And they made this growth despite formidable obstacles to academic success—20 of the 25 are English language learners, and all but one live in poverty. . .

. . . While the numerical data on my students' achievement is encouraging, it is their stories that will stick with me . . . I watched child after child become a different kind of writer, thinker, and human being because of his or her growth as a reader . . .

. . . .A 2001 study by Susan Neuman and Donna Celano found that the ratio of books to children in middle-income neighborhoods is 13 books to one child, while in low-income neighborhoods the ratio is one book to 300 children.

This "book gap" is easier to erase than the more complex barriers involved in poverty. Richard Allington found that giving children 12 books to take home over the summer resulted in gains equal to summer school for lower-income children, and had twice the impact of summer school for the poorest of those children.

All this without worksheets, extrinsic rewards, or sitting in a stifling classroom in the middle of July.

Home reading surveys showed that at the beginning of 2nd grade, my students had access to an average of three books at home. Increasing this number to 40 or more books had far-reaching effects. Students' fluency improved because the children could engage in repeated readings of favorite "just right" books, and parents reported increased time spent reading at home during weekends, holidays, and summer break.

The only incentive for this increase in reading time was intrinsic: the pleasure each child felt in reading his or her own book, beloved as a favorite stuffed animal.

. . . The home libraries have also had a tremendous impact on each child's love of reading, which has ignited that same love of books in their parents, siblings, cousins, and friends . . .

Studies show that most homeschooling families use libraries a lot and typically have lots of books in their homes, but the benefits of family literacy are leveraged by homeschoolers in many other ways, not just as a love of books. Conversations, inventions, plays, movies, games and all sorts of adventures often evolve from children reading books they enjoy. It is the unexpected turns and surprises of learning that flow from what one reads that makes reading so much more than a lesson to move through. It is a shame that so many well-meaning parents and teachers turn reading into a chore to be done with as quickly as possible for many children, especially since, as Justin Minkel and other teachers have written, the answer is so much easier than education theory makes it out to be.

The Benefits of Homeschooling Teenagers

Ken Danford, one of the founders of North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, has written an excellent essay for Huffington Post about taking teens off the college production line and focusing on their passions and interests as a way to nurture self-awareness, expertise, and confidence. He ends his essay with this observation:

When teens experience schooling as more stressful than helpful, we can do better than simply telling them, "Make the best of it until you graduate." We can offer information and support for a different way to grow up. Instead of forcing teens to remain in the "race" to win college admissions, scholarships, and a place for oneself in the world, we might provide teens with a coherent perspective that encourages them to set their own pace toward these same goals. Many families are already doing so. What we need now is a social commitment to make this option widely available.