Timeless Learning

How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Ira Socol, Pam Moran, Chad Ratliff

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119461685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Reinvent public schools with proven, innovative practices

Our homes, communities, and the world itself need the natural assets our children bring with them as learners, and which they often lose over time on the assembly line that pervades most of the public education system today. We see no actions as more important in school than developing, supporting, and reinforcing children's sense of agency, the value of their voices, and their potential to influence their own communities.

In Timeless Learning, an award-winning team of leaders, Chief Technology Officer Ira Socol, Superintendent Pam Moran, and Lab Schools Principal Chad Ratliff demonstrate how you can implement innovative practices that have shown remarkable success. The authors use progressive design principles to inform pathways to disrupt traditions of education today and show you how to make innovations real that will have a timeless and meaningful impact on students, keeping alive the natural curiosity and passion for learning with which children enter school.

• Discover the power of project-based and student-designed learning
• Find out what "maker learning" entails
• Launch connected and interactive digital learning
• Benefit from the authors' "opening up learning" space and time

Using examples from their own successful district as well as others around the country, the authors create a deep map of the processes necessary to move from schools in which content-driven, adult-determined teaching has been the traditional norm to new learning spaces and communities in which context-driven, child-determined learning is the progressive norm.

1
All Means All: Cherishing Children

There are so many chances to intervene. To stand up and protect, or to look into the shadows which surround your school's grounds and corridors, and find the child, teen, young adult, who needs to know his or her value …

– Ira Socol (2010)

PAM:	Every day educators make a thousand decisions. I think about what drives decisions all the time and I have a short checklist of one question: “How will this decision benefit all children?”
IRA:	Every school system in our nation, and most in the world, was developed as segregated, and not just racially. Consider “gifted” classrooms, “honors” courses, even robotics clubs. Then look at in‐school suspension, at the classrooms with the most rote learning, the most worksheets. You will see they are divided by race, by class, and by disability.
CHAD:	And that's why we have to make the case that everybody needs enriched, engaging experiences; and it can't be about competition for such experiences. It's got to be about finding the exceptional talents, virtues, and interests of every kid. When we create an environment in which kids find some sort of passion that ignites a greater interest in coming to school, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be in direct competition. They might. But, we need to get out of this notion that for my kid to be successful, your kid must fail, or be held down in a compliant way. That's a bigger problem to solve really. I think that maker education, as simple as it may sound, could be just the key pathway to that.

Paths to Equity and Access: The Grand Challenge

Educators respond to all kinds of forces that lead them to make decisions that don't benefit all children. If you're the parent of one of the 10% of the kids who are in experiences that will get them, by today's standards, ahead in high school, accepted at Harvard, and then into a professional job, then you do not want school to change. That alone puts enormous pressure on educators to maintain the status quo.

Homework, grades, schedules, leveled courses, ability grouping – all are strategies that teachers today inherited from their parents' teachers. We know from experience, data, and research that these practices work against all children getting access to full and rich curricula, engaging experiences, challenging work, and even relationships with adults who matter. School reforms of the twentieth century created different educational experiences for what our parents' generation referred to as the “haves and have nots.” Over time, parents, educators, and community members have become comfortable with that model.

The cultural biases of those in power, and yes, the desire to preserve privilege, have filtered out both an interest in change and reasons to change, so the structural consequences of schools created by past generations are seldom challenged, even today. Neither are the implicit biases that impact the way we see kids. These biases have played out in schools so that those identified as high performing or gifted have been entitled to special and more interesting learning experiences than those identified as needing extra assistance. And, extra assistance often translates into the mind‐numbing work of drill and practice.

Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America. We can name all the problems and we can generate an endless list of solutions. We also know that educators can do little to nothing about home and community poverty. What we can control is what we choose to do more of, or less, in our learning spaces to give us the chance to notice children, to see their faces, hear their voices, find their strengths, and help them know their own value. This doesn't happen by chance. Rather, these are outcomes of school communities that focus on leveraging resources to authentically engage learners, not just to provide rich opportunities but also to insist on children getting access to opportunities that challenge their curiosity, stimulate their urgency to seek knowledge, and encourage their interests, questions, and passion to learn more. This is our life's work.

It's my time to git it, and I won’t be late

I said it's my time to git it

So I stepped up to the plate

Let's make the world a better place

With no mistakes

Where every race can come together

At a growin' rate

Let's celebrate

Let's jus' show and elevate

So one day I can make it to Heaven's gate

I got a lot of questions for God

I can barely wait

Ever since I was born I knew I would be great

Cuz

I have a dream . ..

– Kolion Troche, 2016 high school graduate and rapper (Moran et al. n.d.)

The decision in our district a few years ago to support two librarians in creating a very inexpensive sound studio in their library (at first just old desktop computers and a basic sound board) created a new pathway for teens to write, perform, record, and produce their own music. Teens from all walks of life found their way into the studio. Kolion was one such teen. When he enrolled in one of our high schools, Kolion, a Brooklyn native, was fresh out of the juvenile justice system, and headed to a high school placement. Most people would have bet against this 17‐year‐old's odds of staying out of trouble. However, when he walked by a newly constructed space in his new high school, a music studio connected to the school library, he made perhaps one of the most important decisions of his life. He wandered in and asked, “What's this space?” The teacher – young, a minority, and wise beyond his years – connected with Kolion and invited him to join in the work of nascent studio musicians.

Kolion wasn't on a path to graduation at that point but he did have a love for rap music, and inside was a poet ready to be unleashed. In November, the principal indicated that he was working hard, but the barriers of state tests and verified academic credits seemed insurmountable. Pam crossed her fingers, hoping he would make it to the winter holidays. He did. Days became weeks and learning seemed to become timeless for him. He came to school early. He stayed late. He wrote rap lyrics for himself, for friends, for his biology class. By May, he had one state test left, earth science which was a ninth‐grade course. On a sunny day driving in her car to and from schools, Pam got a call from the principal's office. She listened, then pulled off on the side of the road, palpable joy coming into her car from the other end of the line. Kolion's voice. The principal's voice. He'd made it. He would walk in June. He had found his voice, and in doing so, changed his trajectory from being on the verge of dropping out to graduating from high school. Pam says now that she knew whatever the investment that had been made in creating the music studio – and it was small even in our advanced versions – was worth every dime when she saw Kolion poised on stage, waiting to hear his name called to come forward and receive his diploma.

Equity provides resources so that educators can see all our children's strengths. Access provides our children with the chance to show us who they are and what they can do. Empathy allows us to see children as children, even teens who may face all the challenges that poverty and other risk factors create. Inclusivity creates a welcoming culture of care so that no one feels outside the community. We've all seen that children are not impossible challenges, but their needs can challenge a teacher's capacity to serve them well. And we've learned, along with other progressive educators, that we must willingly search our values and make decisions differently if we believe that every child matters. In doing so, we come to cherish all our children.

The “Insurgent Mission” to Create “Habitable Worlds” of Learning

Kolion was no magic student. No magic intervention or remediation programs existed to pull him through. He made it to graduation because he found a mentor with an “insurgent mission,” a teacher who chose to “upend the status quo” as he connected with kids to change what learning opportunities in high school could become (Zook 2016). In discovering his passion for writing and performing rap music in a school that made that not just okay but promoted it, Kolion found a reason to keep coming back to school every day to connect with peers, diverse teens united through their voices, agency, and influence in their school community. Indeed he found his way as a learner. We are fortunate because we have Kolion's and many other learners' stories to share. Their stories give us hope for a different future, a progressive future, where school is much different than it has been for more than a century.

What I've seen the most change in was that students were encouraged in their participation in the studio to understand the person across the table from them. If you have that student who wears the pants with the holes in them and the earrings and the tattoos and he may be an outsider to someone who wears a fitted cap and baggy pants and a hoodie. They share so much in common but yet through appearances they seem so distant. What a program like this does, from what I've observed, is that it puts them in the same room and it allows them to speak a common language because their language is not their fashion or their group of friends or their family background; their language is music, it's words, it's writing, and – it's sound and it's fluent. What it does is create a connectivity between them. And, literally I've seen it demolish barriers between individual students, between teachers and students, between teachers and teachers. I've witnessed that and I think Kolion can attest to that same thing. He's experienced that and he's become a role model on his own just because he's become an example of not succumbing to the stereotypes that are so relevant and strong in our society right now. (Moran et al. n.d.)

We share stories of children, adolescents, and teens all the time, for it is through their voices that we challenge educators with whom we interact in our district, state, nation, and around the world. We challenge them to consider their own beliefs and values about the young people who are required to occupy our learning spaces for up to 13 years – 180 days a year, five days a week, about seven hours a day in school, and into the night and weekends as they take work home. And many of the educators we work with can tout fantastic tales of bootstrap successes among graduates not unlike Kolion.

Sadly though, the social, political, and economic narrative of schooling in the past has been grounded in a “soft eugenics” belief that while some children have the capacity to become whatever they choose to be in life, others do not. This plays out in the decisions that educators make, often based on decontextualized data and confirmation biases that stem from immersion in traditions of education that did the same to us. Even if lip service is given to words such as equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships, schooling today is still far more likely to support practices from the past that have created school cultures in which none of those words define who educators really are, no matter what they aspire to be.

Consider how the “habitable world” concept developed by Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson, Emory University researcher and professor, sits at the core of the philosophy of educators who developed and now sustain the structures and processes of schooling that impact young people such as Kolion (Garland‐Thomson 2017b). Garland‐Thomson views public, political, and organizational philosophy as representative of one of “two forms of world‐buildi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: How We Came to See Learning and School
• 1 All Means All: Cherishing Children
• 2 A Little History: Why We Are Here
• 3 Change: Liberating Learners and Learning
• 4 The Education World Learners Want
• 5 Envision All Things Future
• 6 Learning Ready for Today's Real World
• 7 Break Down Walls: Opening Spaces for Learning
• 8 Timeless
• 9 Where Design Begins
• 10 Zero‐Based Design: Engineering Biodiversity of Learning
• Afterword: The Next Generation
• Index
• End User License Agreement