8 ways to solve the problems of the past with thinking from the future

 
From the The Obama-Biden Plan -

Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that our kids and our country can’t afford four more years of neglect and indifference. At this defining moment in our history, America faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy. The decisions our leaders make about education in the coming years will shape our future for generations to come.”  (http://change.gov/agenda/education_agenda/)

Having read through the Obama-Biden Educational Agenda, we should be encouraged by the breadth of initiatives presented – structural, financial, pedagogical and more.  What hasn’t been fully revealed yet are the implementation details for successfully transforming education in America, often the bane of most great plans. Addressing the underlying causes of the symptoms that leading to these educational challenges and moving those to the top of the list should be next on the Obama agenda.

Yet, if Einstein was right – that the problems of today, cannot be solved with the thinking of the past – then perhaps it is time we started reconsidering, in ernest, the way WE THINK about education.  With educational change a national priority, and high on the Obama-Biden administration’s agenda, perhaps now is the time to re-frame the discussion to include a new structure, language, and criteria for delivering educational and learning programs from a modern perspective.

1) Include every student and parent in the creation of their own learning plan - not only those in specialized programs and not a re-packaging of the existing model to students and families.  The old mantra of ‘you have can have any colour Model ‘A’ you want, as long as it is black’ kind of service can be replaced with a personal learning plan & learning portfolio for every child.  If children in special education are provided opportunities for personalizing their own learning plans, let’s give each that same opportunity.

And while we are at it, why should parents be excluded from the fun of designing and creating a learning plan and learning portfolio with their child. Encouraging parents to participate more in their child’s education through more one-on-one time, help with ‘homework’ and discussions about their interests and challenges is, well, almost self-evident in terms of its potential impact.  Supporting parents to feel more comfortable with how to engage their children should be part of the role of every teacher.

2) Maximize enthusiasm and self-confidence - seek from every child a personalized learning plan based on their personal interests and abilities, not one limited to the existing jar of learning outcomes.  Understanding that each learners’ developmental stage is different and at any given time they may not be 100% in-line with the prescribed learning outcomes for that age.  Re-enforcing that 50% of every student thinks they are below average (what we inadvertently create through intense testing) is probably NOT the ideal way to engage and inspire all children at the most critical learning time in their lives.

Offering testing as a personal choice generates meaning around testing and engages learners to view exams and quizes as an opportunity for self-evaluation and improvement, instead of criticism and punishment.  Let’s allow children to move ahead at their own developmental pace, continue to encourage group activities, allow advanced students to mentor less-advanced and develop their own mentoring experience, and engage students in self and group evaluations.

3) Apply more learning resources to artistic subjects and creative projects - Brent Cameron, Founder of SelfDesign maintains that all children are geniuses when given enough room to find out what they are interested in and supported in that learning.  Instead of increasing learning time, increase the value and effectiveness of their learning time by providing relevant tools, inspired mentoring and freedom to learn at their own pace.  When their natural insatiable appetites and abilities to learn are unleashed, excellence in every subject they engage in WILL develop.

Ask corporate headhunters why so many MFAs (Masters in Fine Arts) in contrast to MBAs are being hired into senior management positions.  Research into the value of the arts and creative play is beyond dispute, as Sir Ken Robinson so eloquently communicates (www.ted.com). If entrepreneurs are driving new job growth – the monetization of creative ideas - then let’s help learners master those skills if they so choose.

If artists and design students are being recognized for creative, out of the box thinking, and if corporate powerhouses like Google and 3M place enough value on creativity, that they insist employees focus at least one day per week on creative play, imagination and thinking time, surely we can provide equal space in the current learning week for our children to engage in similar activities.

4) Transform teaching into mentoring, coaching, personal development counselling & learning consulting relationships - There is little dispute regarding the value quality teachers bring to a child’s life.  Yet, teaching does not need to be a one-way relationship, sage on the stage model, especially in a world where learners have equal access to information and often superior knowledge of specific subject areas than their teachers.

If relationships built on respect, equality, human rights, open communication and sharing of ideas are cornerstones of optimal learning and working models, can we not make this part of each child’s learning experience throughout their lives – and not wait until they have graduated from university and expect them to have mastered these critical skills?  They are the learning market of the future, so modelling how we interact with each other, not just the ‘customer’ with a dollar to spend, should be woven into our educational mission.

5) Use technology to significantly improve the delivery of learning media and increase collaboration opportunities - Reform educational delivery to meet learner media channel expectations, and use and support the technology already available and often in the hands of learners.  The new generation sees the laptop as the we see the desktop – certainly not as a portable device (have you ever tried to carry one in your coat pocket?). Let us think of technology, NOT as an elimination of the traditional learning structure as it is so often criticized for, but as a tool for enhancing and extending learning far beyond the time-and-place specific context of the classroom.

Access to books and knowledge are no longer restricted to the single ancient tombs of venerated university libraries and lecture halls, so it is time we unshackled our collective minds from the old paradigm and began to fully embrace the ‘printing presses’ of the future: hardware, software, content interactivity and design.  Where we once used command line code to work with computers, we now have user-friendly graphic interfaces and yet we have only opened the door to the potential of the computer- human interface.

6) Make access to outstanding coaching in soft skills like personal development, emotional intelligence, NLP techniques, communication, presentation, negotiation, entrepreneurial and leadership skills - what sets apart the most successful people in the world from the rest? Rarely has this success been tied to how intelligent they are, yet we still continue to develop curriculum and testing largely centred around rote learning and a narrow band of intelligence metrics, ignoring the the value of most of the other learning modalities.

If our individual learning goals encourage each of us to find our personal strengths and passions and make them our vocation, let us expand our understanding of learning, and support and LEGITIMIZE ALL learners who have different learning needs and abilities – instead of finding increasingly effective ways to filter them out of the system!

7) Embrace learning disabilities and fund up-to-date diagnosis and treatment - Our need to support learning disabilities is equal to our need to solve social inequality. We support physical disabilities in sport through the Para-Olympics and provide medical funding for physical disease.  Let us no longer continue to accept inequality in our support for people with learning disabilities and let us provide world-class assistance for those learners to understand and surpass their learning challenges so they are not limited by the narrow filter we currently apply to academic and employment access.

Research into the impact of early learning disability interventions and improvements in the diagnostic and treatment methods for learners of all abilities, can lead to significant improvements in emotional and academic success.  Funding for applied treatments like Floortime for autism, SOI (structure of intelligence) and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and dozens of others for all learners if made accessible, could greatly reduce long-term social costs and greatly enhance the lives of millions.

8) Facilitate Group Projects and Design Learning Communities - working together in groups, on group projects and for community benefit is critical to the development of skills in a knowledge-based economy, so let’s allow children to develop responsibility and accountability for both the projects they are excited about and to their community as early as can be facilitated. Our communities need our help, the world needs volunteers, and Mr. Obama is asking for them, so let’s give our children access to the wiser generations, apprenticeship opportunities and community connections they need by engaging them in real world projects, while providing relevant learning opportunities through volunteer programs with learners of all ages.

With an entire generation of baby-boomers on the verge of retirement, and senior-citizens often undervalued and under-engaged in terms of their potential contribution to community projects and mentoring opportunities with children, we could be well-served providing children with a greater level of connection with the grandparents generation.

If we ask ourselves why K-12 education appears to be so focused on producing university professors and highly trained academics (some of my best friends , while often under-valuing the contribution of other areas of learning, we come up with a variety of responses usually in its defense. My mother was a high-school English & French teacher and I work in a very progressive learning environment, so I am no stranger to discussion on pedagogy, yet the current discussion on educational change could be well served by applying and implementing some modern ideas and already proven research.

The time has come …

… to value each child’s right to design his or her own learning plan.

… to transform teaching into mentoring relationships & learning consulting.

… to provide every child with technology tools, access and support.

… to leave behind the limitations of ‘No child left behind’.

… to increase our commitment to the arts and creative learning projects.

… to begin modelling communication skills from the age of 5 not 25.

… to stop asking what your child’s school can do for you, and start asking what you can do for your child’s school.

… to embrace the wisdom of our grandparents through learning communities.

… to stop ‘delivering’ education and start ‘inspiring’ learning.

 
If we do, great things will emerge from our children and each other!

Our time has come …
 

Parker Cook
Executive Director
SelfDesign Global

“One learning consultant per child”
www.selfdesign.com

With a 25 year award-winning history, a thriving learning community 1000 learners in British Columbia, Canada, a scaleable implementation model, and learners on several continents, SelfDesign is becoming a catalyst for change in the world.  Parker Cook is a SelfDesign father of two and a 15 year member of the SelfDesign / Wondertree Community.

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Looking back 15 years I remember meeting Brent Cameron, the founder of  a small, innovative educational learning community called Wondertree, around the green felt of a free billiard table in a friendly ‘Cheers’-like bar in Vancouver, BC – The Press Club.  It was a place where journalists and media folk would gather after the days work to share stories and discuss the news of the day, and helped open my mind up to many new ideas and the inner workings of the press.  Brent was a good pool player and after months of practice, I was almost able to match his skill and play competitively with him (my reference point for many things at that time).  It was that encounter that would influence much of my thinking about business and how I conducted my life.

He spoke to me of a different kind of high school he and Michael Maser, a Vancouver-based journalist, geologist, musician and teacher, had initiated nearby in a 4 story mansion house in the venerated Shaugnessey area of the West Side of Vancouver, British Columbia.  In fact, he did not refer to it as a high school at all.  Instead, Brent referred to this new kind of school as a learning centre with learning consultants, instead of teachers, where learners were initially engaged in the process of exploring the more important questions we as children and adults alike are rarely asked to consider – questions about what we are inspired by and how we could optimize how we learn through the latest learning technologies like NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and the different modalities of learning we now more commonly understand as the multiple intelligences.

With my interest peaked, I visited and volunteered at Virtual High  (the brick and mortar high school age version of SelfDesign), where Brent’s daughter and 35 other students gathered everyday to design their own learning plans, manage budgets, hire learning consultants and mentors to provide coaching and expertise in group topics of interest. They organized cooking for lunch, cleaning and facility upkeep, outreach projects into the community, were hired by public and private corporations to develop software projects, designed sustainable village architectural models for what is now the current site of the Olympic Village for Vancouver 2010. They won several national and local awards for their innovative use and development of software, yet at the heart of it all was an ethic for learning with each other which kept all of them captivated.

Despite the students’ excellence in the use of computers and software development, technology, I discovered, was little more than one of many tools for facilitating what was underlying the pent up enthusiasm for life which each teen brought to Virtual High each day.  And why were these students were so jazzed about ’school’ that Brent and  Michael were asked by the parents to make agreements with the learners to spend more time at home with their families throughout the week!

The answer, in its shortest form, was about trust and freedom and choice – the trust parents had of their children to be free to choose their own life and learning paths based on their blossoming energy for everything, and then the realization by each student that they could really learn and do anything after being supported to do so and coached in how they might learn faster, more effectively and more creatively than ever before. And they most often did! Through their personal discovery of their own limitless energy and abilities, these students immersed themselves in everything they found an interest in.

In addition, these SelfDesign students also learned about a different  way of communicating with each other and how collaborative models of school and business were incredibly effective in creating superior results when practised. Brent mentored and modelled negotiation skills, personal development strategies, interpersonal communication skills techniques for perfecting spelling, opened doorways to inner passions and helped connect all of these into the development a lifelong journey of purpose.

From this sense of purpose, my competitive edge was transformed into an effortless journey toward a mastery of everything I loved doing, hindered only only by my next self-imposed boundary. It is a place where my life became a match between my leisure and my labor, with a congruency in which achieving excellence, appeared not much different than a child’s elegant mastery of rapport with her mother or how all children learn to walk without an instruction guide.  I had taken the first steps on my own path back to childhood, to that place we all know, and returned to know it for the very first time.

I had become a SelfDesigner.

Parker Cook
SelfDesign Dad and
Executive Director

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