Don't Go Back to School

Sharing highlights from Kio Stark's, Don't Go Back To School: A Handbook for Learning Anything. Don’t Go Back to School tells you how to learn what you need to learn in order to do what you need to do, without having to bend your life or your finances to fit into traditional schooling. This  guide provides concrete strategies and resources for getting started as an independent learner. 

My research revealed four facts shared by almost every successful form of learning outside of school: It isn’t done alone. For many professions, credentials aren’t necessary, and the processes for getting credentials are changing. The most effective, satisfying learning is learning that which is more likely to happen outside of school. People who are happiest with their learning process and at learning new things—in any educational environment—are people who are learning for the right reasons and who reflect on their own way of learning to figure out which processes and methods work best for

Learning your own way means finding the methods that work best for you and creating conditions that support sustained motivation. Perseverance, pleasure, and the ability to retain what you learn are among the wonderful byproducts of getting to learn using methods that suit you best and in contexts that keep you going 

Many people I interviewed described jumping in at the point of fascination and working their way in every direction to find what they needed to understand their subject. People who learn this about the value of connections they stumble into along the way—the purposeful feeling they bits and pieces in the context of an immediate need to understand something they are strongly motivated to understand, rather than because it’s the next chapter in the textbook

These are things such as grades, arbitrary deadlines, and test-based evaluation, with its “correct” answers. There’s artificially scarce rewards such as praise, attention, curve-based and diplomas—and for genuinely scarce resources such as scholarships. Often, this all has exactly the opposite effect that’s intended. To the people I spoke with who found school to be a poor learning environment, these motivational structures felt contrived, and pushed inherently smart, curious people to drop 

First, autonomy means that you follow your own path. You learn what you want to learn, when and how you want to learn it, for your own reasons. Your impetus to learn comes from within because you control the conditions of your learning rather than working within a structure that’s pre-made and inflexible

It’s about triangulating information. You have to go through a lot of different sources, trying to see what makes sense, asking people who might know, and compare what you find. See who agrees with whom and figure out why. It’s both the source and the voice of what you’re reading that tell you how to interpret it. You have to learn this by doing it. There’s no substitution for practice

It embodied everything about DIY ethics that I love: Nobody checking credentials, nobody asking if you have any real skills to do the things that you say you’re going to do, and instead really empowering people to do those things

You have these happy accidents where you do something the wrong way, but your work ends up having a different style or flavor by happenstance because you haven’t gone through the normal route of learning how to do it

LAUNCH...

Sharing a few highlights from LAUNCH: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring Out The Maker In Every Student by John Spencer and A.J. Juliana.

We are now seeing a new divide emerge — a Creative Chasm between those who passively consume and those who actively create.

In our experience, when students are thinking creatively, they are fully engaged in their learning. This increased student engagement often leads to more buy-in from students and ultimately deeper learning.

There is no guarantee that creative thinking will increase test scores, but who would you rather have take a test: a disengaged trained test-taker or a fully engaged creative thinker?

Design thinking provides a way to think about creative work. It starts with empathy, working to really understand the problems people are facing before attempting to create solutions.

Launching our work into the real world and in front of an actual audience is what makes creative work so scary, but also so rewarding.

Every time your students get the chance to be authors, filmmakers, scientists, artists, and engineers, you are planting the seeds for a future you could have never imagined on your own.

how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.”

the Hacker is a little more subversive, actively working to tear down a broken system in order to create something better. In this sense, the Hacker is inherently destructive.

Hackers don’t always destroy systems. Often, they find new ways to use a system, idea, or resource. Think less “computer hacker” and more “life hacks.”

Everyone possesses important skills and talents, but it’s only when we honor and tap into those skills and talents that we, together, can do exceptional creative work.

Children are naturally fascinated by the wonder of their world. Hang out with a four-year-old and take a tally of all the questions they ask. Unfortunately, schools are more often designed to help students answer questions rather than question answers. Students rarely have the chance to ask whatever question they have and go off on a rabbit trail to find the answers.

A Few Highlights

Sharing a few highlights from The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right by Atul Gawande.

Faulty memory and distraction are a particular danger in what engineers call all-or-none processes: whether running to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, preparing an airplane for takeoff, or evaluating a sick person in the hospital, if you miss just one key thing, you might as well not have made the effort at all

checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities

And this brings up another feature of complex problems: their outcomes remain highly uncertain. Yet we all know that it is possible to raise a child well. It’s complex, that’s all

In the face of the unknown—the always nagging uncertainty about whether, under complex circumstances, things will really be okay—the builders trusted in the power of communication. They didn’t believe in the wisdom of the single individual, of even an experienced engineer. They believed in the wisdom of the group

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.

No, the real lesson is that under conditions of true complexity—where the knowledge required exceeds that of any individual and unpredictability reigns—efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail.

People need room to act and adapt. Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals, either—that is anarchy. Instead, they require a seemingly contradictory mix of freedom and expectation

Worth Reading...

Sharing highlights from the past few weeks.

1. Johannes Haushofer CV- professor at Princeton University publishes a CV of his failures in an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective.

I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me.  As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days.

2. Is Your School Literate? (Richardson)- the author revisits a question presented six years ago and wonders whether schools are addressing the evolving notion of what it means to be literate in the 21st century.

While I think the “Are our kids literate?” question is certainly an important one, an even more significant one may be “Are our schools literate?” Is modern literacy something that is a part of our DNA, or is it something we try to “teach” as a separate entity using some off the web curriculum to pace us through it? I think you know that the answer, by and large, is that we’re not practicing literacy in schools in ways that either model or teach our students the skills they need to become truly literate in today’s world. Obviously, we’re not talking about a three week unit in the second half of seventh grade. And we’re also not helping our kids in this regard when we bring digital tools into classrooms and then employ them for traditional purposes. (The “digital worksheets” thing again.)

3. The World Must Invest in Technology Education (Knowles)- Andreas Schleicher, a Director at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), states how education technology will not only impact our children as individuals but future industry, business, and trade.  Schleicher states those unable to navigate the digital landscape will struggle to fully participate in the life around them.  Whether this bold statement is true can be debated.  However, it's critical that students are able to make thoughtful decisions regarding the use of technology. As opposed to the teacher dictating the use of technology, individual learners should assume ownership the selection of digital tools and resources.

Technology should allow for deeper learning, and flexibility for more individual choices to accelerate learning, and to use out-of-school learning in effective and innovative ways.

4.  Don't Send Your Kids to College.  At Least Not Yet (Falik)- An interesting piece about whether it's best for students to take a gap year before entering college.  The article points out that taking a gap year offers the chance for students to gain experience through personal exploration.  Additionally, students potentially enter college more mature through a bridge year.

A growing number of colleges have begun to embrace a novel solution: change the outcomes of college by changing the inputs. What if college freshmen arrived on campus not burnt out from having been “excellent sheep” in high school, but instead refreshed, focused and prepared to take full advantage of the rich resources and opportunities colleges have to offer?

5. The Power of Audience (Cofino)- The post discusses the power behind creating for a public audience.  This has been a recurring theme posted on this blog.  Students need to compose for an authentic audience and preferably one that can offer helpful feedback.  Also, check out the following video, the girl in the video describes her learning process and specifically, how she was able to learn from others who, publicly, shared their work.





6. The EdCollabGathering: Future Ready Elementary Classrooms- elementary school teachers share how they broke away from traditional models (instruction, environment, management) to create a transdisciplinary environment in two 4th grade classrooms.

A Few Highlights

Sharing a few highlights from OPEN: How we'll work, live and learn in the future by David Price.  A worthwhile read as Price discusses how going 'open' has the potential to change the professional world and education.  Even though examples of successful businesses and schools are presented, a key point is that certain changes are beneficial regardless of the type of organization.  The latter point is important to serve as a reminder that schools need to reflect larger societal changes and that the work students do needs to resemble the manner in which the global community interacts, creates and makes meaning.

Gee and Shaffer argue that the US education system is still preparing students for commodity jobs, and thus facing overwhelming competition from developing countries, when it should be educating and training for ‘innovation jobs’, which are less easily outsourced

In almost every form of transaction we make, social and cultural as well as financial, we’re removing the ‘middle-men’ who historically have connected producer to customers, experts to novices

We need asset-based approaches to education – what do you already know, what have you got to share, what can we build on?

The opening of learning is transforming every aspect of our lives. It offers the promise of a more equal distribution of wealth, opportunity and power. It can close the gap between rich and poor, sick and healthy, strong and weak, and it accelerates the speed at which we solve intractable problems.

‘Open’ is shifting the focus of attention from how we should teach, to the best ways to learn. It’s no longer about traditional vs progressive, didactic vs experiential. Instead, it’s about what we can do for ourselves, how we can tap into the knowledge and expertise that is within all of us, but rarely mined. In short, it’s about the rise of informal learning

Polyani, however, argued that when it comes to learning, true objectivity is impossible, since all acts of discovery are personal and fuelled by strong motivations and commitments

The wisest course of action is to create the right learning environment, culture and context, which brings people together to learn from each other. The old joke that ‘collaboration is an unnatural act between non-consenting adults’ may have had its roots in corporations trying to break down silo mentalities. But if ‘open’ tells us anything, it points to a realisation that we have to understand how people learn when they have a choice (in what to learn, and who to learn with) and bring that into the places where they are required to learn

“If you have a work culture where bringing your mistakes to the table every week is a normal thing to do, it feels less like failing and more like learning”

Great learning environments aren’t afraid of passion, because of its key role in motivation. Being passionate in formal learning situations is so unexpected that it’s frequently confused with eccentricity

Vimeo, YouTube and Twitter are filled with examples of extraordinary student work, where the public assessment means far more to these young people than whether they got a B+ from their teacher

‘when people are intrinsically motivated, they engage in the work for the challenge and enjoyment of it… Managers in successful, creative organisations rarely (need to) offer specific extrinsic rewards for particular outcomes… The work itself is motivating… the most common extrinsic motivator managers use is money, which doesn’t necessarily stop people from being creative. But, in many cases, it doesn’t help either

Most of the powerful learning experiences happened outside school or college (e.g. learning to swim, ride a bike, process life-changing events). They involve some kind of mentoring, backed up by some form of study group. They arise from some form of project – putting on a play, realising an ambition – that blends thinking and doing. They involve challenge, risk, and learning from failure. They force us to put ourselves outside our comfort zone, working through our doubts and fears, often by trial-and-error. There’s invariably that light-bulb moment, followed by a gain in confidence and pride. People frequently recall some form of public presentation helping to cement the experience in our memories

Future Wise

Sharing a few highlights from Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World by David Perkins.

Likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live: that’s a very useful phrase, but it’s also a bit of a mouthful. So let’s attach a single word to it: lifeworthy, that is, likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live

The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else. Overwhelmingly knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone. Whatever its intrinsic value might be, it can’t be lifeworthy unless it’s there

Opportunity cost makes a fundamental point about decision making: when we decide in favor of one course of action, we forgo others that might have generated certain benefits. A cost of the path we choose is loss of benefits from the abandoned paths. With quadratic equations as with anything else, we have to ask not just whether they are nice to understand in themselves but what might have been learned instead

Meanwhile, biological research into the fundamental dynamics of life holds strong prospects of extending the human life span considerably in the course of the next fifty years. What sense would a K–12 or K–16 education make in a world where people live to be, say, 150 years old? Today we speak casually of lifelong learning, but in a few decades, it will likely be so much the norm as hardly to require its own label. Cycles of formal learning as well as enriched processes of on-the-job learning seem destined to become routine

To generalize, multiyear curricula tend to be constructed as journeys toward expertise, with little effort to ask what topics within the discipline speak most powerfully and directly to the lives learners are likely to live.

The bottom line is hardly subtle: the traditional hierarchical structure of education is a rather clumsy vehicle for engaging the rich information and communication affordances of the contemporary world and preparing today’s learners to thrive in that world. In contrast, a flexible network structure embraces the opportunities in a much more expansive and generative manner

We need to ask, for everything from democracy to quadratic equations and for many themes not typically taught at all, “Is this knowledge likely to go somewhere in learners’ lives?” We need to ask, when this topic comes up, “Does it offer insight, does it inform action, and does it inspire ethics?” And as to opportunity, “Is this topic likely to come up often and importantly rather than rarely and trivially

Thus, wondering at provides us with an inspiration and a compass for wondering about the unknown. After all, the unknown has no top and no bottom, no border to the North, South, West, or East

Understanding something means being able to think with what you know about it, not just to know standard answers or do routine procedures accurately and fluently

Second Machine Age Highlights

Sharing a few highlights from The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

Now comes the second machine age. Computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power—the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments—what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power

We’re heading into an era that won’t just be different; it will be better, because we’ll be able to increase both the variety and the volume of our consumption. When we phrase it that way—in the dry vocabulary of economics—it almost sounds unappealing. Who wants to consume more and more all the time? But we don’t just consume calories and gasoline. We also consume information from books and friends, entertainment from superstars and amateurs, expertise from teachers and doctors, and countless other things that are not made of atoms.

Progress on some of the oldest and toughest challenges associated with computers, robots, and other digital gear was gradual for a long time. Then in the past few years it became sudden; digital gear started racing ahead, accomplishing tasks it had always been lousy at and displaying skills it was not supposed to acquire anytime soon.

As Moore’s Law works over time on processors, memory, sensors, and many other elements of computer hardware (a notable exception is batteries, which haven’t improved their performance at an exponential rate because they’re essentially chemical devices, not digital ones), it does more than just make computing devices faster, cheaper, smaller, and lighter. It also allows them to do things that previously seemed out of reach.

The old business saying is that “time is money,” but what’s amazing about the modern Internet is how many people are willing to devote their time to producing online content without seeking any money in return

Another school of thought, though, holds that the true work of innovation is not coming up with something big and new, but instead recombining things that already exist. And the more closely we look at how major steps forward in our knowledge and ability to accomplish things have actually occurred, the more this recombinant view makes sense.

Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas—ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas.

The theory of recombinant innovation stresses how important it is to have more eyeballs looking at challenges and more brains thinking about how existing building blocks can be rearranged to meet them

Advances in technology, especially digital technologies, are driving an unprecedented reallocation of wealth and income. Digital technologies can replicate valuable ideas, insights, and innovations at very low cost. This creates bounty for society and wealth for innovators, but diminishes the demand for previously important types of labor, which can leave many people with reduced incomes

Most Likely to Succeed

Sharing a few highlights from Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids For the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith.  

It’s quite striking that, almost without exception, the great contributors to civilization were educated as apprentices, not as note-takers

In short, the United States picked the wrong goal and failed at it. We opted to chase South Korea and Singapore on standardized test performance (a race we never had a chance of winning against children who spend every waking hour cramming for the tests) instead of educating our youth for a world of innovation and opportunity (a race that plays to our strengths)

Albert Einstein, who had his share of struggles with school, said, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.” As administrators, faculty, boards, and parents debate strategic goals,In short, the United States picked the wrong goal and failed at it. We opted to chase South Korea and Singapore on standardized test performance (a race we never had a chance of winning against children who spend every waking hour cramming for the tests) instead of educating our youth for a world of innovation and opportunity (a race that plays to our strengths) they generally dive into issues around the importance of the goals listed in Question 1 above and the precise wording of their mission statement. In so doing, they skip over a more fundamental step in the process: Is our teaching approach one that actually helps our students to learn

Even better, imagine if the school looked for skills where a student could achieve excellence, and then set out on a path to create definitive life advantages for that student applicable across a broad range of careers

two of the most important skills in the innovation economy are in thinking critically (about problems, situations, markets, ideas) and then the ability to communicate (an idea, a recommendation, a plan forward) in a way that is not only thoughtful and compelling but also in a way that influences others to take action

Today, when kids have ready access to an enormous range of written material, we should encourage them to become great readers by devouring everything they can that’s aligned with their passion—whether it’s nature, sports, or Harry Potter. But if you’re designing tests, there’s no way to standardize based on students reading mostly what interests them. Once again, the education model revolves around what makes life easy for test designers, not what’s best for kids

“The key to our philosophy is to speak, and speak, and speak some more. Programs and curricula that emphasize speaking and ‘living’ the culture from the get go can create a genuine learning atmosphere (using a variety of techniques) that will acclimate students and generate a feeling of ‘being there.

Annmarie Neal is the former chief talent officer at Cisco Systems and author of Leading From the Edge. She continues to consult to senior leadership in Fortune 100 companies all over the world, and here’s what she told us in a recent conversation: Even the most elite schools do not prepare students for the reality of work as it is today, let alone what it will become in the future. Most large organizations are undergoing massive transformations as they move from industrial to innovation-economy business models. The students that thrive within today’s education systems are achievement driven, rule-oriented, compliant, linear, singular in focus (i.e., a business or engineering major). The world of work today requires future leaders to be relationship or collaboration driven, rule-defining, creative and innovative, lateral and polymathic in focus

We need to reimagine education. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the Committee of Ten who, back in 1893, said, “Gee, we need to train millions of kids for a growing number of rote jobs in our burgeoning industrial economy.” The Committee of Ten came up with a good solution for their era. Today, we need to educate millions of kids (and adults) for the innovation era. How do we do that?

How We Got Here

Sharing a few highlights from How We Got Here: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson. 

Unwittingly, the Venetian doges had created an innovation hub: by concentrating the glassmakers on a single island the size of a small city neighborhood, they triggered a surge of creativity, giving birth to an environment that possessed what economists call “information spillover.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary cases of the hummingbird effect in modern history. Gutenberg made printed books relatively cheap and portable, which triggered a rise in literacy, which exposed a flaw in the visual acuity of a sizable part of the population, which then created a new market for the manufacture of spectacles

Hummingbird effects sometimes happen when an innovation in one field exposes a flaw in some other technology (or in the case of the printed book, in our own anatomy) that can be corrected only by another discipline altogether. But sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to measure something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring.

New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

This is what the robot historian’s perspective allows us to see: the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate

The art of human invention has more than one muse

Those patents rippling across the planet are an example of one of the great curiosities in the history of innovation: what scholars now call “multiple invention.” Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters, where a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same discovery

Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together

may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture—of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility

Thanks to the antitrust resolution, Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrids in the history of capitalism: a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized

The next time you glance down at your phone to check what time it is or where you are, the way you might have glanced at a watch or a map just two decades ago, think about the immense, layered network of human ingenuity that has been put in place to make that gesture possible. Embedded in your ability to tell the time is the understanding of how electrons circulate within cesium atoms; the knowledge of how to send microwave signals from satellites and how to measure the exact speed with which they travel; the ability to position satellites in reliable orbits above the earth, and of course the actual rocket science needed to get them off the ground; the ability to trigger steady vibrations in a block of silicon dioxide—not to mention all the advances in computation and microelectronics and network science necessary to process and represent that information on your phone.

One of the reasons garages have become such an emblem of the innovator’s workspace is precisely because they exist outside the traditional spaces of work or research. They are not office cubicles or university labs; they’re places away from work and school, places where our peripheral interests have the room to grow and evolve.

The Talent Code

Sharing a few personal highlights from The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown.  Here's How by Daniel Coyle.

The surprising answer is that Brazil produces great players because since the 1950s Brazilian players have trained in a particular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skill faster than anywhere else in the world... call this kind of training deep practice, and as we'll see, it applies more than soccer

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter

Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it

You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does

Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit

Apprentices learned the craft from the bottom up, not through lecture or theory but through action: mixing paint, preparing canvases, sharpening chisels...  In short, apprentices spent thousands of hours solving problems, trying and failing and trying again, within the confines of a world built on the systematic production of excellence

Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits

“We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It's all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill