drafting bold dreams

as narrative
A slide deck, as narrative of sorts, inspired by John Hagel’s break down of content (story) vs context (narrative) here.
The last two years of student research in Loveland, Colorado. We have been experimenting specifically with ways to redefine how we spend the 7 hours a day we currently call school.
We’re viewing everything as experiment. We crave feedback. In embracing ongoing failures, we’re learning much about a better way to spend our days, to use our resources, …to make the world a better place.
In fact, we believe we know too much (and too little) to not be bold.
This is not longer an opportunity, but a responsibility.
The why: nothing is for everyone
The what: awakening indispensable people
The how: to a person, be you - to a people, help clear spaces to be
Thinking that nothing is for everyone - we’ve attempted to accommodate different audiences with some suggestions on the following slide. ..

as story
4-39: mindset - the skinny
40-79: redefining success: school as a business … community as a school
43-49: the dandelion effect
50-53: is respect for every voice a part of your soul
54-63: we don’t need more resources, we just need to be more resourceful
: on health & wealth
64-72: Joi Ito as an exemplar – nothing is for everyone
73-79: declaration of interdependence - as glue
80-89: findings in failings
: history (deliberately not teaching, homeless analogy)
: detox (process/what, unpacking/why, doing/how)
90-95: vision/floorplan
96-97: connected adjacency
98: suggested book reads
99: faq
100-111: mindset
Suggestion per parents, if you were only going to look at 2 things:
slide 69 and detox.
just out:
awakening indispensable people via videos
warning – poor quality – ieslidedeck with voice

as preface
click to play

how can you change
a room?

notice the unlikely.

listen deeply.

notice people.

assume less.

question more.

wonder.

wander.

ponder.

what does bigger than mean?

better than?

greater than?

richer than?

bigger can be littler.

better can look worse.

greater can come from less.

richer can mean poorer.

Focus on outcomes can encourage mindlessness.
- Ellen Langer, Mindfulness

Be mindful.

how can you change a room..

what is success?

who decides?

to story deck

To school as a business:
More people choosing us, more funding, more options.
To communityas a school:
More people hungry to learn/share/live.
This is a people agenda.

School as a business:
We could be educating the world but policy keeps getting in the way.
-David Wiley, Open High School of Utah (model for Thompson Online)
Community as a school:
In the US, when you say real life people tend to define it as: outside of school.
- Michael Wesch, K-State,

to story deck

We’re losing people as a business.
We’re losing heart as a community.

People are seeking choice.

why choice?

On listening to kids
Focus of research:
How to redefine school via student voice.
We got almost as many different answers as different kids.
Almost every answer had an opposite.
One common answer – community service in every course.
Focus of findings:
Nothing is for everyone. How do we facilitate that?
4 year plan of disruption
Facilitating chaos freaks most people out. But one thing kids
have mastered is networking/connecting. These turn out to
be the very glue that will not only help us ride the shift wave,
but wholeheartedly and blissfully, swim in the ocean.
-rings of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus

YOUth have different ideas…

What’s coming could blow us away.
We get to decide which Dandelion Effect we prefer.

to story deck

…in ed
We think we have bang up lessons...
but have we asked the kids?
Do they carry ideas
outside the class?
Past the tests?
Do we hear global voices
in our classrooms?
Do we speak their
language,
are we too busy
insisting that they
speak ours?
Are we too busy
getting things done
to notice.
notice
Mad World – chosen as the Lab theme song.

On AP classes… US study asked students as they left class what just went on.
Most couldn’t say. How were they able to do well on the test?
They gathered after hours in student organized study groups.
notice
Gut feeling from kids about end of a highschool course:
15% get it per teacher goals, 75% non-legit grades, 10% fail

slides: green about people
video: digital equity.
Prejudice decreases when discrimination is increased.
Every actor has a reason.
Ellen Langer, Mindfulness
If there is no match, there’s no way to pigeon-hole.

to story deck

650 bill on national ed – and by our own measure (testing) we aren’t successful
400 local charitable organizations – CO is 9th in suicide rate, in Larimer Cty – on average every 9 days someone takes their life
We are big on saving the whales, cleaner air, more trees,
…what about the human spirit.
What if we were green about people?
We don’t need more resources, we just need to be more resourceful.
Alan Webber
teachpaperless: reduce $ for pd, platform, paper, etc
Budget savings idea– guaranteed same budget every year + ½ of how much below budget you ended.

In the US, when you say real life people tend to define it as: outside of school.
- Michael Wesch, K-State,
What if school involved everyone, the entire town?
Wouldn’t we all be better off?
Health - people being known by people
Budget – the more we know each other, the more we share
Environmental – the more we share, the less we need
Sir Ken writes in The Element of Grange Primary of Long Eaton, England, creating Grangeton, with its own
mayor, council, newspaper, etc
and
Dennis Littky,’s The Met - where the community is the school’s floor plan.

Are you better off?
Isn’t this its own reward?
The measures we came up with:
Is it awesome? Does it matter?
Both beg – to whom.

Maybe fishing with your family is success. To you. To your community.
Cristian talking passion with his brother.
Are we Schooling the World by our definition of success?
Is respect for every voice a part of our soul?
Film by Carol Black – high recommend.
Book by Jacqueline Novogratz – high recommend.
Film by Tom Shadyac – high recommend.
There are many, but along with Jacqueline’s Acumen Fund, are Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture for Humanity, and Scott Harrison’s charity: water - incredible models of listening to culture, to soul..

YOUth ideas on how to go about doing what matters.
Notice the comments on how hard this is, how they need help.
Kids are craving work that matters.
click to play

Most people aren’t lazy.
Yet by all appearances one might assume so.
Most people are craving work that matters.
Work they know they
can’t
do
by
themselves.

Gus on something bigger than, something beyond. Hard work.
It’s more than an opportunity, it’s a responsibility.
The exhaustion from overextending yourself creatively is some of the best exhaustion you will ever feel. An organization that provides a platform for people to push into their fear will produce both better work and a better workforce.
- Seth Godin, Underextended

What a boost to global net happiness it would be if we could positively activate the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of people by offering them
better hard work.
-Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

What if school’s setting were life,
and kids were working
on health,
budget,
environmental,
etc, …
problems?
From Edutopia: For college ready use PBL
school as life
..three factors that support the success of a young person:
A solid relationship with an adult mentor, such as a parent, priest, teacher, or coach;
A sense of mastery that develops
An internal sense of meaning and purpose
Perhaps better to say:For life ready use 1-1, PBL as we know it, …on steroids.
Interdependency
and beyond

to story deck

click to playanother brilliant piece from Nic Askew
The interesting and fascinating thing of having no clue, is then you fall in love with the questions..
not questions to be answered, questions that are a guidance.
The mystery is so huge…

New director of the MIT
Media Lab
Ito holds no college degrees.
click here to read full article

I’m always trying to push the edge of my understanding,
and my value is in providing connections and context.
click here for entire interview
And I thought, here I’ve been stitching this thing together and being called this crazy scatterbrained ADD guy when in fact, what I’ve been trying to do already exists at the Media Lab, and sponsors pay for it!

This changes the game.
Not that something like this hasn’t happened before. But that it hasn’t happened today. At just this right time.

Doing what has been considered standard
doesn’t equate with success anymore.
We need to be freeing kids up to
be themselves. Giving them space
to fail. Showing them we trust
learning. That it is that fascinating
and alluring.
Lucas with a CSU student talking about space and permission to be.

Could we make this a place that would accept me, and more importantly, be able to keep people like me?
On the West Coast, you’ve got Peter Thiel, paying people to drop out of college. And I thought: let’s flip this around. Aren’t there a bunch of those people who dropped out who should be here at the Media Lab and how can we figure that out? That’s one of my missions.
click here for entire interview
Lab goal: building/supporting spaces for all options (all people) within public ed. [homeschoolers/unschoolers, dropouts, rebels, 4.0’s, homeless -any that are disengaged.]
When we exclude, we miss incredible adjacent possibilities. Nothing is for everyone.
Let’s use that for good.

What wakes kids up?
What would wake the community up?
Outcomes, labels, etc, all affect mindfulness and so affect health.
- Ellen Langer, Mindfulness

what
wakes
you
up?
What would make you jump out of bed every morning?

Let’s facilitate that.

to deck

So what exactly are we facilitating?
What matters most – to an individual/community
And how do we facilitate that?
Redefining NCLB – to create an ideal family situation for each student.
Declaration of Interdependence (1-1), and beyond
.

1-to-1
Not so much about laptops, rather, people. Learner to expert individual mentor.
Interdependency
And beyond

It can be as simple as talking or as complicated as the web.
our choice.
every moment.
All we need to do is…

1-to-1
At the very least, good mentoring raises self-esteem and sense of purpose. But mentoring takes an elevated role for people when it involves directing or inspiring their search for *the Element.
- Sir Ken Robinson, The Element
*the Element: meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion. Doing the thing you love, and in doing it you feel like your most authentic self.

…in health care
What if the simple act of listening could diminish health problems?
What if many of the health care problems can be solved simply by increased authentic relationships?
notice

What if most of what we do on a daily basis, is actually getting in the way?
What if we took more time to know someone?
What if the best medicine is to be known by someone?
Ellen Langer, along with others I’m sure, has done extensive research on mindfulness, and how it plays out in every area of our lives.
The simple act of noticing could change the room,
the world,
… even you.
notice

to story deck
who decides?

There are more resources in an institutional setting..
people and things. Let’s focus on that.
What if we provide resources..
and let people design their own school?

So how do they learn?.. what do they need?
click to play
Common statements in the Lab, I can’t stop learning, I want to learn everything.

When teenage girls can help organize events that unnerve national governments, without needing professional organization or organizers to get the ball rolling, we are in new territory. As Mimi Ito describes the protesters,
Their participation in the protests was grounded less in the concrete conditions of their everyday lives, and more in their solidarity with a shared media fandom… Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately, to mobilize.
.. What’s distinctive about this historical moment and today’s rising generation is not only a distinct form of media expression, but how this expression is tied to social action.
- via Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Successful people are successful for one reason…
they think about
failure
differently.
You become a winner because you’re good at losing.
-Linchpin
click to play
Focus on a growth mindset embraces, even craves, failure.

What our failures produced this year 2010-2011:
The Lab vision (Lab site – request from parents, updates/etc )
CONNECTed – district vision
Options– empowering choice
a bold dream – history & floorplan

A free form curriculum..
1
click to learn more

A community of choice..
2
click to go to doc

3
A collection of options..
Students are making career based decisions on too little information.
–Anya Kamenetz
share/find/create more options…

4
And
a bold dream.

to story deck

Thinking on space (physical, emotional, mental) ..
The making of a dream.
A bit of history – (cont)
The crazy notion that each kid could essentially have their own self-made plan, allowed us to envision the entire community as one school.
Visions from the previous year of the library being the hubof the school ….
… morphed into the idea of the
highschool buildings becoming
the hubs, or the resource centers,
for the entire town. The town as
one big school. Like a uni campus.
Resources,
lectures halls,
science labs,
art hall,
engineering hall,
everything/everyone is available – per choice.

over the next year.
This is a rough sketch of the buildings in our town, the colored ones part of our vision...

Existing buildings morph into resource centers, meeting spaces, with specialty buildings shared by the community..
over the next 3 years.

Pre-k through 8th – exposure - design via i&p , be you web, and Patchwork
9-12 – quasi college – design via the Met, your school design it
12+ - quasi career - design via John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke
By our 4th year… 2010-2011 having been year one…

nothing is for everyone.
We’re thinking the glue is:
Some process for learning how to learn, such as detox.
So that everyone is left hungry for more, and knowing how to feed that hunger in the future. The process of knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do, being usefully ignorant, as second nature.
Some means to facilitate the craziness of differentiating to infinity.
Declaration of interdependence with 1-1 mentors and beyond. School/prof/project per choice with a type of rateyourprof local match ups.

via The Lab in Loveland, CO
because of the space, permission and trust given to us by
Thompson School District
SPACE
to experiment on the edge.Connected adjacency
with the district.
docboard for this slideshare
ideas from year

It’s more about a mindset than anything…
High recommends for this
slideshare’s ideas:
Ellen Langer, Mindfulness
(how to live)
Lisa Gansky, The Mesh
(how to find resources in unlikely places)
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
(how to fight the Resistance)
Dennis Littky’s, The Big Picture,
Ed is Everyone’s Business
(modeling the 1-1 mentor, the transcript/expository/portfolio at end of yr)
So many others.. Reality is Broken, The Element, DIY U, Rework, Linchpin, Talent Code, Mindset, Cognitive Surplus, Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, The Power of Pull, A New Culture of Learning, The Design of Business, The War of Art, Do the Work, What Technology Wants, Tribes, Blogs Wikis Podcasts, The New Brain, The Human Project, The Blue Sweater, Drive, Greater Than Yourself, Wounded by School, Teaching Unmasked, ….
click to see suggested book reads

FAQ :
What about those that don’t want to learn when given the choice?
- Academy kids were most excited
- 1-1 mentors will be our safety net, homeless, literal/figurative - interdependency
What if I like class?
- refer to CONNECTed – there will be classes
– it will just be the ones that choose to be there..
- maybe 5-10 who get together for a city project - and they hire out a teacher, etc
How did this all start?
- lot’s of things but this in particular
What about the basics?
- our best, most concise answer we give up to the Brooklyn Free School
- current thoughts on basics:
web access, esp to wikipedia, more so the more we share there
a culture of trust
embedded in a community both local and virtual
simple. certainly not cake. we can’t not.

how can you change
a room?

how can you change
the world?

YOUth have different ideas…

dream boldly.

connect.

do what matters most.

be you.

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drafting bold dreams

by monika hardy on May 12, 2011

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