Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future

by David Price

Dan also introduced a range of social media tools. Habitat Social is Telus’s own collection of tools that emulate YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare, Blogging, Wikis, Flickr and News aggregators. Repairmen and engineers in the field are able to upload videos of the problem facing them, and get a range of potential solutions in seconds.

There’s no doubt that social media is having a huge impact on sharing and collaboration. But I still maintain that it isn’t driving it. What continues to drive it is the desire to meet with like-minded people, to connect ideas, and to take collaborative action, to achieve something that we couldn’t achieve alone, and to feel good about it. Social media is actually facilitating more face-to-face sharing than ever before. It’s not about the media, it’s about the social.

What we’ve seen, from Menlo Park to Mountain View, is that the most innovative companies in the world regard work as learning. And what we’re about to see is that the world’s most innovative schools present learning as work.

Although this upheaval is currently taking place in tertiary education, schools are far from safe. As we find ourselves increasingly able to ‘hack’ our own education, I would expect, for instance, the homeschool market to expand rapidly. Once the possibility exists for students to study informally, at online (and offline) schools, compiling their own learning playlist, putting together units of study that appeal to their passions, the one-size-fits-all model of high school will appear alarmingly anachronistic. So, if educators want to keep their students engaged and inside their buildings, they have to look at the way they learn outside, and bring those characteristics inside.

Both Heng Swee Keat and Byong Man Ahn were, effectively, repeating the advice given to me by that Irish farmer. Their respective countries had travelled a long way, but they’d realised that their car was pointing the wrong way.

We in the West want to be more like those in the East, who, in turn, want to be more like we in the West. We call for learning fit to meet the challenges of the 21st century, while recommending teaching methods belonging to the 19th century. We have no clearly agreed purpose for education, but agree that spurious international comparisons should inform future educational policy. In short, we’re really, really confused.

1. Ethical Educator – a role model to students demonstrating integrity and moral courage. 2. Competent professional – continually developing new knowledge, skills and dispositions to lead. 3. Collaborative learner – engaging in professional conversations, enhancing the teaching fraternity. 4. Transformational leader – inspires colleagues to reflect and innovate, builds trust, manages change. 5. Community builder – understands local and global issues, developing students’ sense of social responsibility.

If you don’t spend much time in schools, these traits might not seem particularly radical. Trust me on this one – they are. Most teachers in an average high school would struggle to see themselves in those capacities – not because they don’t want to be that kind of teacher, but because the system neither values nor cares about those traits.

Students are expected to work on about 50 briefs during their course of study. These, according to Marc, fall into three categories: "Live (competitive and remunerated) briefs are about learning how to sell your work to a client, and earning some reputation; portfolio briefs are about showing how revolutionary your thinking is.” The other briefs are akin to Facebook ‘hackathons’: 24-hr intensive challenges, that enable students to experience working under pressure. The quality, and ingenuity, of student responses to the briefs is astonishing. If you need proof, visit the school’s homepage: it’s impossible to tell which campaigns are real and which are simulations.

Management consultant Peter Drucker famously said that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and school cultures can be notoriously resistant to change, so getting teachers at NBCS to abandon their desks and behind-closed-door practices could not have been easy. By encouraging teachers to work in teams, in classes with mixed-age groups, with a greater emphasis on students following group inquiries, rather than filling in worksheets, Stephen claims that cultural shift became inevitable:

In today’s culture of high-stakes accountability, freedom to innovate is only tolerated if student outcomes improve. NBCS can point to improved results, year-upon-year, at all levels throughout the school since the transformation began. But how were parents persuaded to be part of the change process? And how did new students take to a school with significantly greater freedom given to students, but significantly greater responsibility expected of them?

“Ultimately the parents are trusting what we're doing, and we've got to respect that trust. From a teacher perspective, those first few weeks are terrible, just helping kids to get into that different way of thinking and behaving. Then the kids get it, and they settle. But sometimes people try to change, get frightened, and then they stop too soon."

Stephen’s visionary leadership has created the context and culture for innovation to flourish. After that, he simply trusts teachers to use their professional judgments in order to realise what he calls ‘multimodal’ learning:

SCIL offers a provocation to the concept of the compliant teacher, passively implementing learning designs created by others. Through SCIL, a profound culture shift has taken place in NBCS. Teachers have become designers of learning, and of the spaces in which learning happens. Innovation now drives the learning. It has taken a nascent learning commons culture and made it global:

And work is the operative word here. There are few conventional classrooms, rather they have workshops or studios. Student work is on display everywhere you look, largely because High Tech High’s main vehicle for learning is ‘the project’. High Tech High is probably one of the world’s leading exponents of project-based learning (PBL). If you’re unfamiliar with PBL, it’s frequently (and usually wrongly) associated with a generalised approach to learning by ‘topics’, which was popularised in the 1970s and vilified thereafter for its laissez-faire, anything-goes, laxity. In the hands of expert practitioners, like those at High Tech High, PBL is what most of us do for a living: we have a need, a client, some complex questions to answer, and we come up with a collaborative solution – all within a timeframe.

Consequently, no bells signal the ends of lessons; no staff-student-segregated bathrooms and no need to ask if you need to use it:

“What tends to happen in schools is that rules get added, but they don't get taken away. So, there's less and less oxygen. And a lot of the rules are really not necessary. The more rules you have, the more rules you can get around. We only have really have one rule here: do unto others as you’d have them do to you.”

We’re frequently told that schools, like many businesses, are complex places. But it’s only because we’ve allowed them to be. We created the silos, we created the faculties, we created the organisational manual. Over time, we just accept that it’s the way things get done.

The beauty of having such simple structures is that the relationship between learners and teachers deepens. Most projects are team taught, so two teachers, working exclusively with 50 students over weeks, rather than hours, leads to work of the highest quality. It also means that students feel ‘known’, and no-one slips through the cracks. And when the project reaches its conclusion there is always a public ‘exhibition of learning’.

“That's one way in which we're not going to allow them to slip back into being autonomous high school teachers. Here, we see teaching as a team sport. If you want to do great work, teachers need to meet. When we built High Tech High we said 'we're going to have teachers meet with each other every day of every year, in different teams’. So, on Friday, everyone in the whole school meets, on Wednesday they look at student work… we have different configurations of common planning time which allows people to feel like, and behave like they're treated professionally.”

SCA 2.0, SCIL, and High Tech High have all created vibrant, innovative and outstandingly successful learning environments. Is it purely coincidental that they have done so by putting the four values/actions that drive ‘open’ (share, open, free, trust) at their core?

Here are their common success strategies: - By insisting that their teachers and mentors share their learning, all three have de-privatised teaching and learning. - By opening up the commons, and by designing workspaces without walls, they have brought Edison’s ‘machine-shop culture’ into education. - By bringing into the commons, experts, parents and investors, they have given an authenticity to the work of their students that is impossible to simulate in an enclosed classroom. - By modelling collaborative working to their students they have fostered the peer learning which is at the heart of ‘open’. - By emphasising adult and real-world connections, they ensure that students are preparing for the world beyond school by being in that world. - By making their expertise and intellectual property freely available, they have created high demand from their peers and ensured that knowledge travels fast. - By seeing technology not simply as an aide to learning but as the imperative for change, they ensure that their programmes are relevant to societal needs and societal shifts. - By trusting in their staff and students, and by giving them freedom and responsibility in equal measure, they have fostered a culture of learning that rewards respectful challenge, shuns unnecessary deference, and therefore constantly stays in motion.

Above all, these three case studies in creating a Global Learning Commons are inspiring examples of what happens when leaders of vision and passion are given the opportunity to defy convention. Their achievements, however, are all the more remarkable when one considers that they have been swimming against the tide of national policies in the UK, US and Australia.

All three countries, to a greater or lesser extent, have seen the route to educational transformation through varying combinations of high-stakes testing, bringing market forces into education, narrowing the range of what should be taught, and introducing payment by results. I regularly work in all three countries and to see, and hear, the effect such policies have on the morale of the teaching profession is distressing.

They would also, I suspect, feel comfortable being described as mavericks, but it’s only because education has such a deep-seated resistance to change, that what to them seems logical appears radical to others.

The scale of innovation that we see in these three case studies represents the exception, rather than the rule. The vast majority of schools innovate incrementally. To a certain extent, this is not their fault. It takes a brave school leader to resist the pressure of government to conform. Governments generally don’t do radical – at least not when it comes to how kids learn. Innovation, therefore, needs to come from schools themselves, and unless innovative new approaches become more disruptive, the reality is that they will fall further behind the pace of change of ‘open’.

Though the conceptual base behind Learning Futures was sound, and its impact on student learning well evidenced, its spread has been hampered by one simple reality: at an organisational level, you can’t change how people learn, without also changing the culture that supports innovation. The conceptual model behind Learning Futures had four essential elements: 1. Project-based Learning as the prime – but not sole – method of learning, so as to maximise student engagement. 2. Extend Learning Relationships – learning is intensely relational, so we should widen the range of mentors and experts with whom the learner has contact. 3. School as Basecamp – learning becomes authentic when it is for a purpose, has impact beyond the school and supports students’ communities. 4. School as Learning Commons – as seen in Chapter Four (and below).

Most of the school leaders we worked with could cope with the first three of those elements, but felt unable, unwilling, or unlicensed to commit to the fourth. That said, an increasing number of start-up schools in the UK are working with the Innovation Unit to turn their schools into learning commons, because they can see that, if schools want to see engaged students, they need to be attending an engaging school.

An ‘engaging school’ is one that sees the school as an integral part of its community; that welcomes mentors, experts and families into its learning spaces; is radically transparent and freely shares its expertise with others; and stimulates conversation about learning – which isn’t framed ...

But you can’t build innovative minds through increasing standardisation, and high stakes tests that measure little more than students’ power of recall.

Paul Fisher, Head of Oakridge Primary School in Stafford, England, saw his standardised test scores among the best in the country in 2012. Dismissing the showering of praise, Paul instead argued for the removal of formal testing, claiming that their students’ successes owed more to the 90 field trips they’d undertaken rather than relentless test preparation. “It is a shame in this country that we’ve got a Government that’s trying to take us back to the Edwardian period with a focus on feeding children facts. Do we want a society that’s great at pub quizzes or one that’s great at thinking and problem solving?”

You may not agree with my arguments here, but there is surely little doubt that we need to try something new. Because what we’ve been doing in recent years in most developed countries is to reheat 19th and 20th-century thinking and serve it up as a forward-looking approach. The world, however, no longer conforms to 19th and 20th-century models of development. Why then, do we think that we’ll find the answers by looking backwards? As the great educational philosopher, John Dewey, once said, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”

Traditional, instructional pedagogy involves the transference of knowledge or facts from expert to novice. For centuries we had no alternative but to have that transference take place in a classroom. But now that we can instantaneously get facts from a Google search, do we need to place such dependence upon our powers of recall? Could this lead to liberation of the teacher’s role, in helping us connect data, guiding us to make sense of facts, and create new ideas? Apparently not.

In January 2011, the new English Secretary of State for Education advocated a return to the teaching of facts to students. If you ever needed a reason to keep politics out of learning, here it was.

It seems ridiculous that an education minister should call for a return to 19th-century, fact-based learning methods, while employers are looking for people who can critically analyse, ask important questions, and make connections between facts, rather than regurgitate them.

Exemplified by a myriad of civic movements, self-help groups and social enterprises, and powered through ‘open’ principles, we have rediscovered the spirit of the commons. It turns out that participating and learning in the commons is borderless, immediate, purposeful, informal, playful, transparent, and authentic. In fact, we like it so much that we wonder why the companies we work for, the schools we attend, and the public and private sector institutions we deal with, seem so restrictive by comparison.

Welcome failure – simply having different sets of eyeballs wasn’t enough to make 3M’s post-it notes happen. It also needed a freedom to fail culture. We can only be creative when we’re not afraid to make mistakes.

My advice to school leaders who are serious about engaging their students is this: you won’t have to worry about their engagement if you get yours right. Make school an engaging place to learn, not the exam factories we so frequently observe these days. Your learners will be passionate about collaborating, making and doing things, just like they do in the world outside school/college; though it seems obvious that the surest way to prepare students for life beyond formal education is to make education as much like that life as possible. It takes a brave education leader, however, to defy the current obsession with testing.

The great educator, John Holt, once likened over-testing to a gardener pulling up a plant by its roots so that he could see how well it was growing. If a love of learning were a human right (and I contend that it should be) our courts would be overflowing with abuse of rights claims from our young.

How could we not become knowledgeable about things we are passionate about, and absorbed in? But the safest course of action is to aim for ‘coverage’ of the curriculum, and the filling of endless worksheets, which do little other than document students’ increasing disenchantment with learning.

Physical – don’t allow any educator to organise rows of desks - nothing reminds students of their relative anonymity, and their place in the hierarchy, than serried ranks. Don’t allow any teacher to have a closed-door policy – make learning a public activity. Where possible, eliminate dividing walls between classes to build a collaborative culture – instead, think machine-shop and studios, with discrete spaces for experimenting,

Organisational – perhaps the biggest enclosure of all is the schedule (timetable) that governs learning. Moving kids around each time a bell rings every 50 minutes, only reminds them that they are cogs in an industrial machine, and destroys any attempt to deepen learning, so get rid of the atomised schedule. While you’re at it, get rid of the bell too. And the tannoy announcements. This is a learning commons, not a prison. Commit to giving students the freedom and responsibilities of adults, and they’ll behave like them.

Cultural – because of the workloads and isolation forced upon most teachers, schools have a hard time with collaboration. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Schools are generally free to organise themselves as they see fit. So strive for collegiality. Don’t allow teachers to simply ‘deliver’ learning. They need to be designers and researchers of learning.

Make time for collaborative planning. Don’t allow staff to design learning at the end of the day – that’s when they’re tired, cranky and wondering why they got into teaching. Instead, start the day when they’re fresh and feeling good about themselves, with professional development. The great schools and colleges

They constantly innovate and they’re not afraid of getting it wrong. No student ever had his entire education ruined because of a learning innovation that didn’t come off.

All this may seem like I’m asking teachers to work a lot harder. In fact, most of the above suggestions are about stripping things back. For example, too often teachers feel they have to ‘perform’ in class. They spend countless hours preparing, fretting about how to make their lessons more engaging. In reality, most of the time they’re doing all the work, and their kids are hardly doing any.

Does this mean teachers will soon become redundant? Absolutely not. It just means that they will have to accommodate the social desire to shift from pedagogy to heutagogy, and support learners to become more independent, and self-determined.

The terms ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ were first coined by Marc Prensky. The former applies to anyone born after the invention of the iPod. The latter applies to the rest of us. Younger users are deemed to be completely fluent in speaking digital, while the rest of us speak haltingly, and with a heavy accent. While these stereotypes have become fixed in our collective consciousness and offer an easy way out when over-50s can’t be bothered learning how to programme the video recorder, they have no basis in fact.

If you’re choosing a school by its examination results alone, is that really going to be in your child’s best interests? There’s no great secret to improving a school’s test scores. But is repeatedly drilling your kids to pass a test what they actually need for an entrepreneurial future? Might it not be better to find a school that will allow them to find their passion and build the communicative, collaborative, and imaginative skills that are already key to our collective futures? Over the

Prescriptive educational policies, like ‘No Child Left Behind’ and ‘Common Core Standards’ in the US, the school league tables in the UK, and the introduction of standardised tests and a national curriculum in Australia, may have given the impressions that politicians are doing something about education. But along the way they are closing down conversations with parents about how their children should learn, because of the obsession with numbers. That refocusing of language and priorities will not come about through politicians admitting the error of their ways. Parents will have to regain the initiative, and find their voices.