cfee | TRANSFORMING ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

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Backstage Passes to Foo Fighters at WembleyBy way of introduction to Sir Ken Robinson and to tonight’s program, I wanted to say a few words about their origins. For it was Sir Ken Robinson who inspired the work that the Center for the Future of Elementary Education hopes to do in the coming years, and when it came time for our first event, we knew there was no more perfectly inspiring figure to set the tone than Sir Ken Robinson. But first, I want to thank . . .[THANKS FOR SPREADING, THANKS TO SPONSORS, and FACILITY REMINDERS]

THIS FIRST SLIDE has a rather Stephen King feel to it, doesn’t it. The children expect real change, or else. How about the young lady in the lower right hand corner. Don’t disappoint her. Or she’ll send you to the cornfields.Anyway . . . I wanted to say a few words tonight to explain the origins of the Center for the Future of Elementary Education, and the origins of this event, because I think they’re important as a starting point—not just for tonight, but in the months and years to come. Let’s take as an assumption that we wouldn’t be here tonight if we weren’t invested in thoughtful but transformative change in our schools.

You didn’t come here on a Friday night because you wanted to argue. Are you feeling me? So let’s not worry about trying to sell any philosophical platitudes about its importance. Agreed? How about some feedback in the vernacular of the day (Hands)STARTING POINT:WE KNOW . . . ResearchWE KNOW . . . ModelsWE KNOW . . . Pub School, drubbingWE KNOW . . . No shortage inspiration in our ranks to DO something

The Center for the Future of Elementary Education, and this first event, trace their origins back to when I saw Sir Ken Robinson at a conference a few years ago and was myself transformed, as so many of us have been by his writing and by his presentations.When I saw Sir Ken at that conference a few years back, I was debating whether to remain in education, or maybe choose something that might make me feel like I was making a difference. More than anything else, I was frustrated by the pace of incremental change as I saw it happening in schools – in my case, particularly in independent schools like mine, which felt impossibly burdened by the weight of decades and decades of tradition, reputation, expectations, and assumptions. All of which are based, in my opinion, on an absolutely irrelevant definition of academic success. When I saw his TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity,” it was evident to me that the answer was implicit in the question.

Recently I was rereading Out of Our Minds, and took a cue from his history of grammar schools to surf the web. . . .

And I nearly fell out of my chair. Founded 597 AD and continually operating."We've been educating the whole child for one thousand, four hundred and fourteen years. But we've only been using the technology of portable books for the last four hundred and twenty, so we're still learning how best to integrate them.”SERIOUSLY: But at this conference, and hearing Sir Ken, I realized I was involved, that we are involved in education at the beginning of what may become its most exciting age. That these are truly revolutionary times that require not incremental, but revolutionary change to our schools, to our programs, and to our understanding of our professional identities themselves.

I should note that I have another horse in this race: I am a parent of a now 13 year old boy in an independent school. And shortly after I saw Sir Ken and had been driven to reinvest myself in the profession, I had a simple but amazing experience at home. On a Wednesday or a Thursday evening, my son was slogging through workbook pages from his math class and began to cry. He’s not a sad kid. He had been sitting doing drill, after drill; workbook page, after workbook page, after workbook page, and he was tired and bored very nearly out of his mind. And I didn’t know how to help him.

That same week, he came home wearing the blazer and tie he has to wear every several days for a formal assembly at school. I was sitting on the couch when he came in, reading something, and when I saw him I thought for no particularly good reason of Angus Young

In Out of Our Minds, Sir Ken cites the philosopher Susanne Langer when he makes the point that “theories develop in response to questions. And a question, as Susanne Langer notes, can only be answered in a certain number of ways. For this reason the most important characteristic of an intellectual age is the questions it asks – the problem it identifies.” We see this science, where work progresses dutifully in the research lab up until the moment that there’s no shortage of answers to vexing questions, it’s just that the discoveries suggest limitations to the questions themselves. Thus quantum physics. Fibonacci sees traders in north Africa in the 13th century using arithmetic, and asks “goodness, what if I could package this artihmetic thing in such a way that anybody could understand how to apply it?” And thus, arguably, not just the dominance of Italy in international affairs, but the foundations of the modern economy begin when Eurpeans stop counting on their fingers and writing it down in Roman numerals. Copernicus says yes, I know it looks like the sun and the planets are literally circling around the earth, but our observations show that they’re not quite behaving. You’re gonna think this is crazy, but let me just ask . .. What if the earth and the planets are revolving around the sun? Kepler, Newton, Galileo . . .This is a picture of a Curtis School classroom from more than 50 years ago. I enjoy using this picture at parent functions to speak about where we have been and where, hopefully, we are headed, because certainly this classroom looks like the classroom most of them, and we, remember from our childhoods. The rows and columns, the students together only in their isolation, the teacher as central figure . . . You know the drill . . if we are in fact in the transition between one age of education and another, what are the questions we are meant to be asking? The first, I think, is whether – if we add up the sum total of all of the incremental changes in our schools in recent decades – whether our schools, our classrooms, and our teachers have really, on the whole, changed all that much from this model. In the last decade, has the glacier slipped more than a few inches, or maybe a few feet?

We all have a sense of the burden of the past and the expectations to which we are mercy, and some of us have a sense of the absurdity of it. Nobody here is working at King’s School in Canterbury, wrestling with who’ll they’ll become in their fifteenth century, and yet know we are limited. All of us have a story about what really inflames a child’s imagination and engages his or her interest, but few of us get to bring that into a classroom on a daily basis. And we want to know what to do.

Because we know that the oft-repeated sentiment, first framed as I can tell by David Thornburg, is true: we must transform all formal institutions of learning, to ensure that we are preparing students for their future, no for our past. And we believe it. Or as Pat Basset, the President of NAIS said a few years ago, “schools that aren’t schools of the future, won’t be schools in the future.” And we know it. But we’re still struggling to figure out what that means.So the second question I think we are asking is just exactly what DO we do to ensure that we are preparing our students for their future. We have all been reading about it, thinking about it, and hearing about it for some time, and we all believe it. But what do we _do_ about it.---Though David Thornburg, a senior fellow at the Congressional Institute of the Future, wrote that in 1997, I thought it was kind of funny, back in 2008, that the phrase ‘21st century learning’ was all the rage in writing about education. It just seemed strange that several years of the 21st century had already passed, before we began to discuss it. So as a perfectly harmless joke, I designed a logo for a think tank . .

(Read it)I wanted to make the point that we could _really_ have the corner on the market if we got ahead of the game, and started talking about the 22nd century well before it got off to start.----- ------ -----I didn’t really mean anything by it, but not long after that, it occurred to me that there might actually be something to this.

From the shaping of a new strategic vision, like this mission statement from the amazing public schools in Upper Arlington, Ohio

From the attention to particular and concrete initiatives like the New Tech network;s assessment system…

In Our of Our Minds, Sir Ken writes that “the transtion from one intellectual age to another can be traumatic and protracted. New ways of thinking do not simply replace the old at clear points in history. They often overlap and coexist with established ways of thinking for long periods of time. This complex and convoluted process of change can create many tensions and unresolved problems along the way. But eventually the new paradigm provides the framework for a new period . . .

Wikipedia says it’s Sir William Curtis who came up with that in 1825We tried to get Sir William, but we settled for Sir Ken.