Education Nation

Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools

Milton Chen

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470875452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

An educational innovator who worked at Sesame Workshop and The George Lucas Educational Foundation offers a new vision for learning

As a result of constant innovation, learning is no longer limited by traditional confines and we're moving beyond students tied to their chairs, desks, and textbooks-and teachers locked away in classrooms. In Education Nation author Milton Chen draws from extensive experience in media-from his work on Sesame Street in its nascent years to his role as executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation-to support a vision for a new world of learning.

This book, in six chapters, explores the "edges" in education—the places where K-12 learning has already seen revolutionary changes through innovative reform and the use of technology.

• Examines ways in which learning can be revolutionized through innovative reform and the use of technology
• Explores the ever-expanding world of technology for breakthroughs in teaching and learning
• Includes many wonderful resources to support innovation in schools across the nation

This important book offers a clear vision for tomorrow's classrooms that will enhance learning opportunities for all children.

Edge 1

The Thinking Edge

Getting Smarter About Learning

From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at school.

John Dewey, “Waste in Education,” The School and Society, 1899

The first edge, the Thinking Edge, is the most fundamental: modernizing our thinking about education. The most basic prerequisite to creating an Education Nation is changing our thinking about the enterprise itself—the learning process, the role of students, teachers, and parents, and what is possible today given the opportunities afforded by technology. As we know from efforts to change politics, religion, and even our personal relationships, changing our thinking can be the most difficult thing we human beings can do, especially when our opinions are firmly rooted in personal experience. As my colleague, Dr. Allen Glenn, professor and dean emeritus of education at the University of Washington, puts it, “The biggest obstacle to school change is our memories.” We all think we know what a school is and how a classroom is organized, since we spent eighteen years in them during our formative years. It's hard to imagine anything else.

Unfortunately, we're not very smart about learning. For a field devoted to improving the teaching and learning of children, we grownups aren't getting smarter fast enough about how to do this.

In this chapter, I discuss how updating our thinking can build on some well-known and articulated philosophies about how children learn best, such as the child-centered approach of John Dewey. While his beliefs are popular with progressive educators, they are still not widely shared, especially among policymakers who don't have much time or appetite for readings from the history of education. Dewey's views stand in marked contrast to a top-down system of education, in which policymakers prescribe what, when, and how information is to be transmitted to young minds. If futurist and computer scientist Alan Kay is right, that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points” is true, we need to “regrind our lenses” to adopt some new points of view to boost our educational IQ. We need to know where to look.

I also discuss moving beyond ten simplistic “either/or” ways of thinking toward “both-and” syntheses and recent research by Carol Dweck at Stanford on imbuing children with mental models of their own learning: “mindsets,” as described in Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Maybe it shouldn't be so hard. We instinctively use the correct mindset when we think about sports and the arts. We just need to apply those views to education.

From Dewey to Duncan

Chicago, Illinois

John Dewey is often referred to as the father of the progressive education movement for his advocacy of child-centered teaching and connecting “school life” to real life. John Mergendoller of the Buck Institute for Education calls him “St. John.” I like to connect Dewey to the history of his time and his arrival in the 1890s as a young professor of philosophy and psychology from New York at a newly created University of Chicago. The university had been founded by John D. Rockefeller, whose oil fortune had grown rapidly, as a Baptist institution of higher learning for that burgeoning city on what was then the “western” edge of the American frontier. Dewey started an elementary school called the University Elementary School, which he later renamed the Laboratory School, known for many decades for its quality education for children of university faculty and other residents of the Hyde Park neighborhood. Dewey intentionally used the word laboratory for his school, intending it to resemble other university labs where the most promising theoretical ideas could be developed into classroom practices.

In 1899, John Dewey articulated his ideas on schooling in a series of three lectures called “The School and Society” to parents of the Lab School.1 Since he was speaking to parents rather than to a more academic audience, his points are especially clear and concise. In my own talks, I recommend these speeches, republished in 1990 by the University of Chicago Press, to parents and education students. The modernity of Dewey's writings is striking, expressing the sentiments of many education leaders, especially teachers, today. Dewey spoke to two key themes that resonate powerfully with the role of school in this twenty-first century.

The first is the critical importance of schools to larger societal goals and especially the success of the American democracy. Only thirty years after the Civil War, Dewey described the importance of equal educational opportunity for all children and how the success of our still-fledgling democracy would hinge upon it: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members.”2

He connected individual growth to societal growth: “Here individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.… Nothing counts as much as the school, for, as Horace Mann said, ‘Where anything is growing, one former is worth a thousand re-formers.’”3

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has a little-known personal connection to John Dewey. His mother ran an after-school tutoring program in a church, serving African American families. In an article in Parade magazine, Secretary Duncan described his own family's preparation for that day: “No day of the year held more anticipation for my sister, brother, and me than the first day of school—and our mom and dad made sure we never took it for granted. Every year, we had to neatly lay out our new pencils and notebooks the day before school. On my first day of kindergarten, my dad strapped me into a child seat on the back of his bicycle and pedaled to the schoolhouse door to guide my first step into the brave new world of teachers, principals, and classmates.”4

That schoolhouse was, in fact, John Dewey's Lab School at the University of Chicago, where Duncan's father was a professor of psychology. As a boy, Arne Duncan literally walked in Dewey's footsteps. More than a century after Dewey's lectures to parents, as secretary of education, Duncan went on to closely echo Dewey's words: “While much has changed since then, the singular impact of education has not. Education still holds the unique power to open doors in American society—and parents today, as in earlier generations, have the ability to help make those dreams of opportunity a reality. Education remains ‘the great equalizer’ in America. No matter what your zip code, race, or national origin, every child is entitled to a quality education.”5

A second major theme urged by Dewey was to connect school learning to children's lives, a theme that underlies each of the six edges of this book. As early as the 1890s, the institution of school was already isolating the classroom from the rest of society and undermining the natural curiosity of children, leading to a long century of censoring student interest that continues today. In a section called “Waste in Education,” Dewey wrote:

While I was visiting in the city of Moline a few years ago, the superintendent told me that they found many children every year who were surprised to learn that the Mississippi River in the textbook had anything to do with the stream of water flowing past their homes.… It is more or less an awakening to many children to find that the whole thing is nothing but a more formal and definite statement of the facts which they see, feel, and touch every day. When we think that we all live on the earth, that we live in an atmosphere, that our lives are touched at every point by the influences of the soil, flora, and fauna, by considerations of light and heat, and then think of what the school study of geography has been, we have a typical idea of the gap existing between the everyday experiences of the child and the isolated material supplied in such large measure in the school.6

Dewey knew what so many educators know today: if we just allowed children to ask and seek answers to questions they naturally ask, they would lead their own learning into many domains. Back in 1977, I was research director for a major new project that would become the PBS children's science series, 3–2–1 Contact. In the early stages, we thought of it as “the curiosity show” and sought to build the series around children's questions. We went out to local schools in New York City and gathered questions from eight- to twelve-year-olds. Here is a sampling of them:

Why do people get sick?

How does your body know when it's time to grow?

How do we talk?

How is a chimpanzee smarter than a porpoise?

How does a kangaroo jump?

Who is the tallest man or woman in the world?

How hot is a volcano?

How do you make: paper, chalk, glass, cartoon characters, telephones, buildings?

How does it work: calculator, camera, light bulb, magnet, clock, TV?

It is amazing how an obvious question children naturally ask can lead to many threads of investigation and increasingly sophisticated answers. One more question a child asked us, “What makes spring and summer?,” was posed in a film to Harvard seniors, on the day of their commencement, phrased as, Why is it hotter in the summer and colder in the winter?

This innocent question, which we experience every year for as long as we've been on the planet, stumps many adults and even our supposedly best and brightest college graduates. In the film, A Private Universe, produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, the Harvard seniors clearly had no idea, although some were quite glib in giving wrong answers. Having been in their position, wearing my graduation robe in Harvard Yard on a sunny June day in 1974, I guarantee I would have stumbled through an uncertain reply, as well.

I won't divulge the answer but encourage you to take this chance to investigate it. Before you race to Google it, see if this question doesn't take you back to a sense of being a human being living on this Earth and how far our educations have taken us from Dewey's admonition that children should investigate “the facts which they see, feel, and touch every day.”

Try mulling it over with some friends. Comparing ideas with other people and seeing how they think energizes the learning process. Group wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• The George Lucas Educational Foundation
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Edge 1: The Thinking Edge: Getting Smarter About Learning
• Edge 2: The Curriculum Edge: Real Learning and Authentic Assessment
• Edge 3: The Technology Edge: Putting Modern Tools in Young Hands
• Edge 4: The Time/Place Edge: Learning Anytime, Anywhere
• Edge 5: The Co-Teaching Edge: Teachers, Experts, and Parents as Coeducators
• Edge 6: The Youth Edge: Digital Learners Carrying Change in Their Pockets
• Afterword
• Selected Web Sites
• About the Author
• Index