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TEDx Talks
Title: What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills: Grant Lichtman at TEDxDenverTeachers
Published: 2013-03-21
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZEZTyxSl3g
thank you very much and for all coming out to hear this morning I imagine that all the presenters here today share a common journey and that sure journey is one to disrupt %HESITATION the industrial age model in mind set that is defined American education for most of the last century I took my first steps on that journey about thirty years ago when the buzz words in
education were first critical thinking and problem solving and I had the temerity to ask myself what we do in the classroom to actually get to the point we're better at teaching things like critical thinking and problem solving and I am a small group of other educators came up with a model that said we are still you should be asking questions more than giving answers and we
should be thinking about systems instead of being compartmentalized into subjects %HESITATION we should be finding problems instead of solving problems and we took that model to the dean of a very famous at school university California and he very politely said no no no you know what you can't teach that stuff disk students they won't get it even high school students so flashforward thirty years now %HESITATION
and after a career in the private sector in about fifteen years working at a large independent school in San Diego %HESITATION if I feel like the world is finally may be caught up with where we were back in the eighties we said yes we should and can be teaching these things and so this last fall try a big my wife forgiveness in advance packed up my
previous %HESITATION and took off round the country on a journey of eighty nine straight days I visited sixty four different schools of public schools private schools %HESITATION drove about ten thousand miles of probing interviews six or seven hundred different educators got forty eight point three miles per gallon in the total trip and %HESITATION it wasn't of course is a really incredible informal experience for me and
I want it's were synthesized some of that for you today first the bad news and I don't think this is a real surprise anybody here of the bad news is schools are not for a good innovation but we are a large bureaucratic a bulky organizations %HESITATION we did it our buffeted by political winds are driven by that more than by educational ideology quite frequently %HESITATION we
have a lot of competing interests that we serve and perhaps most importantly of schools are risk averse the downside of taking a risk at schools all's been far greater than the upside of taking a risk %HESITATION that that big red half that you got on your math quiz when you're in fourth grade probably exemplifies as much as anything %HESITATION and so that's probably one of the
biggest issues are ran into at all the schools that would be really struggle with change and innovation the good news is the for every problem that I encountered not logged hundreds of them on this interviews in this trip there was a school right down the road that RT solve that problem I go to one school big prob we can't do this yes but I go the
next coolest area we solve that problem but we cancel the other one so the schools are out there the analogs are out there the models are there we just need to connect in events like this reach out and take advantage of those the other bit of good news is this and this is really important it's sort of blue water law in innovation and change management the
changes really hard institutional change is really hard and I think we I have served allowed ourselves to take that on %HESITATION there was a a day %HESITATION in South Carolina I visited a school in Charleston this two thirds of the way into the trip and for many many schools every school I visit we talk about a hard change was in the stages of grief etcetera etcetera
visit the school in Charleston and there was a senior administrator header literally hit in her hand %HESITATION hidden hands like this and she just don't know why it should be this hard we talked about that that afternoon I was driving west up through the Piney woods a South Carolina I think it was because I've been reading a book about the Berlin airlift it suddenly came to
me and said you know what no the Berlin airlift was hard homesteading the Kansas plains in the eighth in the nineteen century was hard raising children in poverty if you're a single mom that's hard you going to the moon was hard these are what we do we're Americans we do hard things a young person going to stand there post in the dust of canned a hard
eastern Afghanistan for your that's hard and say goodbye to that child is their parents for that year that's hard change of most of our schools is uncomfortable it's complicated it's messy but I ask people to really look deeply inside themselves and think about what's the difference between hard and uncomfortable and let's get beyond that and so I had this wonderful experience in a in and visited
this mosaic of schools whatever school I visited there were brush fires and bright lights of innovation and from China put that mosaic together into some sort of synthesis schools are becoming so dynamic %HESITATION they're messy their noisy their chaotic that's the vision that's what student ownership of warning looks like I was in a %HESITATION of school and I had a a six grade boy in a
small school in Virginia told me you know what bloom's taxonomy is not a triangle arced our teachers asked us to think about boobs taxonomy in design it I said I drew a circle then I realize that was wrong too and Ajuda Sparling I looked in my city how do you even know what bloom's taxonomy is your sixth grader he said all in our school since kindergarten
or teachers have been talking to us about that about how we weren't schools becoming permeable they're not about being on campus and four walls were getting online off campus in our communities around the world we're becoming adaptive we're taking courses in were melding them were crossing subject boundaries I've I had another student a tenth grader tell me you don't my school we don't have to switch
off from math brain into science brain into Spanish brain in the dates are more brains run all time because that's our courses are constructed our school becoming relevant they're crossing those boundaries of subject allowing schools to connect the dots and so much more authentic ways that engages them we're becoming self correcting we're taking time students and teachers taking time for authentic reflection during the day %HESITATION
to to think about what they're doing the word empathy is is embedded in our goals now and we're taking the time to think about that balance between constant innovation and yet the string some course of tradition that make us strong and maybe more than anything else schools are becoming creative spaces are gonna hear about that %HESITATION from some of the speakers today students getting up out
of their chairs writing on the walls thinking designing building I had a second grader at a small set at a school in Atlanta a second grader sit there and tell me I'm a little bitty chairs as I'm sitting in a little bitty chair with him %HESITATION you know in our school we we design and build and prototype an ID eight and fail forward and fill up
toward a severe a second grader that kid is never going back in the box of the industrial age model and so we take those buckets of synthesis about what schools are looking like and you see this list on the the that the screen now maybe it's because I was trained as a geologist an environmental scientist but I look at that list and those are the characteristics
and drivers of a natural ecosystem the same characteristics and drivers to determine the success or failure coral reef rainforest or grassland or upon and there are fundamentally different then the drivers and characteristics of our current and past industrial age model and I think one of the real frustrations we all have is we keep trying to put that square peg of the industrial age engineer designed model
into the round circle of the eco system that we know represents great learning these two systems are fundamentally incompatible and it means we have to change it a foundational level not just at the margin this ecosystem that we now org R. or weaving in education is not defined just our school level this in fact I believe is a global ecosystem for a half billion years in
this is geologists me coming out for for a half billion years have been exactly for global systems on this earth the with a sphere that's the rock the hydrosphere which is the water the atmosphere which of the gases and the biosphere which are all living things and yet right now we're living through the explosive evolution of the fifth sphere it didn't exist ten years ago it's
just evolving now I've given it a name the Latin is a little sketchy but I called the cockney the sphere this is the system of knowledge creation and management that was not possible until we have essentially universal access to knowledge two weeks ago three weeks ago now is in the Philippines with a group of students and we're in weaving in villages in the rural Philippines where
people are living off of two dollars a day or less which represents about three billion people in the world and many of those people now have access to the communists fear through a cell phone and so this is the substrate the neural network that arced schools our teachers our students have to participate in and be active in because this is how we're going to connect in
the world going for we're knowledge based industry in this is fundamental to that knowledge based industry the car needs fears the substrate of education going forward so where do we really want to be announced try to synthesize six hundred interviews and ten thousand miles on the road and in one long a drive I had a concept and then I distilled it down to three sentences and
then I distilled it down to a phrase and then down to three words and I finally said you know what now this all comes down to I think one single word where we want to be as educators what is great learning look like and you all know that that's what great morning looks like in all those schools I visited in all those bright whites that ice
was was privileged to see all that sharing it with all this to not a single one of them with John do we have been unhappy with we know what great learning looks like do we in Montessori and Parker a hundred a hundred twenty five years ago told us what that looked like so why is it so hard for us to get back to that why we
yield without high ground of the progress of your of education to the industrial age model that that's been the implant anonymous I think there are three things to keep us from getting back to do it the first one is that we the adults have constructed a series of anchors in these anchors are based on on on on on ego and our control of our our intent
to control education rather than that being controlled by the students and those acres are three there that egotistical attraction to time space and subject this is my classroom my subject my time the second one or dams that we've built is is is you look at schools I visit a lot of schools were Kate's walls in case sixes and all these different grade levels you see these
marvellously metacognitive kids and as others have said that innovation is marvelous creativity is marvelous and then we just sort of beat it out of them as we cram them into these quantum packets of time space and subject by the time we get to the high schools and upper schools the two biggest dams or mention to me the College Board the college admissions offices that want us
to shove those kids into packets of Clark content rather than contacts and the third of the silos that we've constructed around ourselves %HESITATION that prohibit us that to keep us the structures that were mentioned earlier that they keep us from communicating for collaborating from networking all the things that we know over five hundred years of innovation best practices in the renaissance are key to innovation and
change we built ourselves into these silos of classroom apartment division school were very in really focused and we don't really get out see what's possible out there in the world schools have started trim these anchors to cut them to break down the dams to breach the silos are those where innovation is exploding and it's a marvelous beautiful thing to see so in a time of rapid
change what we really have to do what we reduce this down to the singular goals we need to teach into the unknown by definition in a time of rapid change and a rapid change in the world we don't know what the future looks like and therefore we have to teach into the unknown and that's difficult uncomfortable messy in unfamiliar to us and we need to learn
a different set of skills for that also by definition if the world is changing rapidly like this we don't know that the skills that we're talking about today we call the twenty first century skills I hate that term I think their time with skills that have defined success and happiness throughout human history we don't know necessarily that those are the skills that our students are going
to need %HESITATION in their future so we need to teach them to be self evolving learners so they can meet whatever challenges a crop up in the world in in the next thirty or forty fifty years of their lifetime in order for us to teach students to be self evolving learners we need to become self evolving organizations we're not good at that we have a good
without the past but we really really need to do that we need to embrace constant change in the methodology of constant change so I so I I at the end of this trip I wrote down what is it education innovation to me I think it's about preparing our students for their future not for our own past and if we can keep our eye on that I
think we don't go too far afield what was interesting was %HESITATION of course as we as I was looking out the front window of my car on this long trip I could just as easily have been looking into my rear view mirror because that's exactly what do we told us almost word for word over a hundred years ago and so here's the challenge that I would
really issue to us and and this is a challenge that I think I've become a little more vocal on a little more proactive and maybe even some would say aggressive about it recently of we've been talking about this we've been talking about what great learning in what grade education looks like for a long time some of us for years some of us for decades some of
us for over a century I think it's time we stop talking as much about it and we just start doing it and that's what I urge all the challenge I urge all of us to take on to go back to our schools and aggressively start to implement sort of fan those brush fires of innovation that are out there in every single school and not wait for
