We're All Wrong and Its OK!

We have all had that one class where we simply cannot figure out the material.  It is as if the professor or teacher is simply speaking another language.  We study as best we can for the test or write what we think to be our most prolific term paper and it comes back looking like this: 

From that moment on we have labeled ourselves as a failure!  Our teachers and classmates begin to view us as the troublemaker or lazy student because for some reason or another we cannot produce passing results.  This paradigm, simply put, is an absolute tragedy!  The system has created a student who now believes that they are a failure and do not understand that it is actually a wonderful opportunity.  Education has also created a system where students care more about the grade and less about the process of learning.  What we have forgotten is that failure is absolutely 100% OK!  In fact, there is a saying among the acting community that states fail and FAIL BIG!

Why is it so important that we must feel as if we are always right?  It seems as if everyone is clamoring with the right idea for how to reform education.  What if the right idea is to create an environment where students can be free to fail without feeling like they are less than?  Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said, "I have not failed. I have just found 1000 ways that won't work."  The irony is that we have created an educational culture that has to be always right!

It is time for educational leaders to look into what students can learn from being wrong.  Real learning happens when we allow students to boldly fail and be OK in the failure.  Once students are comfortable with failure true growth will happen.  What is being wrong?  It is knowing that we live in a world of ever-changing uncertainties and that it is better to know that growth will occur when we allow ourselves and our students to be wrong instead of living in the fear of always having to be right!

DomainDouglas: Summer Geekdom

DomainDouglas: Summer Geekdom: The students and faculty have left the hallways silent and still.  Occasionally the phone rings, but I am not even in my office to hear it.

Education Then and Now...Changing Paradigms.

Factory Work

American education has been based on the factory model.  Students would enter school around the age of 5 and would be grouped together simply by age.  Throughout their educational journey, these students would learn basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills that would best suit them to work along a factory line.  The raising of standards in public education has seen an increase in standardized testing.  Simply put, standardized testing is creating a module that evaluates all students on the same level.  This assists students in the Henry Ford model of education because they learn how to properly bubble in the "best answer" to a basic question.  Let me be very clear before continuing with this line of thought, in no way shape, shape or form am I stating that there is not a need for factories or the men and women that work within them.  I am simply stating that in today's fast paced world students need to be able to think more individually within the collective versus thinking only as a collective.

Factory Prep

Enter 21st Century Education

The 21st education movement has been touted since the late 1990's and now it is 2012 and we are still trying to grasp what 21st education looks like.  One constant all the research agrees on is that it must focus on ingenuity, collaboration and critical thinking.  Dr. Tony Wagner a professor in education at Harvard University recently wrote about the gap between America and the rest of the world when it came to education.  His book is entitled The Global Achievement Gap.  Dr. Wagner has 7 skills that he has developed through extensive research and discussions with cooperate CEOs. 

Wagner discovered that student do need a base of knowledge, but CEOs are looking for his "7 Survival Skills".

The 7 Survival Skills

• Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
• Collaboration across networks and Leading by Influence
• Agility and Adaptability
• Initiative and Ingenuity 
• Effective Oral and Written Communication
• Accessing and Analyzing Information
• Curiosity and Imagination

The challenge to educators is how will we move from teaching in a standardized model towards a collaborative, creative model.  Today's world has not become "how much do you know?" but rather "what can you do with the information you find?".  There are several new modules and modalities being created in the classroom that are attempting to tackle the challenges of the 21st Century student and workforce, they work towards helping students better utilize the 7 Survival Skills, but currently education is play catch up with the ever changing world.

Against All Odds

The reform movement that has swept the nation has left many educators in the classroom grasping for straws.  The nation has been digging itself out of the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression and there just seems to be no money left.  State budgets have been balanced on the backs of public education for the past several years.  Educators have been asked to do more with less each year.  The federal government provided one time relief in 2010 with the EduJobs Act.  Many state governments and local education agencies took this money and spread it out over the past two years.  Now the EduJobs well has run dry and once again state governments are forced to make drastic cuts in order to balance their budgets.  

In North Carolina, and across the country, partisan politics have left all children behind.  Currently, North Carolina ranks in the low 40s in per pupil spending; it is now behind Mississppi!  Last year, Governor Perdue wanted to extended the penny sales tax in order to restore the cuts to education, but the newly elected GOP General Assembly stated that no taxes would be extended.  This year Gov. Perdue proposed a 3/4 of a penny sales tax to restore the cuts, but again partisan politics won over education.


Year after year, educators have been asked to do more with less.  As the years pass it seems as if educators have been blamed for the financial crisis that has crippled the economy.  Year after year, students still enter schoolhouses believing that someone will be there to steward their futures. 


Over the past several weeks, high schools across the country have celebrated their graduation ceremonies.  Students have been paraded in front of friends and families celebrating thirteen years of a system that hopefully prepared them for the coming obstacles.  These newly minted graduates looked to their haggard educators to consistently hit home-runs for them.  They counted on their teachers to prepare them for the Flat World they are now entering.  State governments have let them down pandering to special interests, but their teachers daily struggled to prepare them for success.  As the class of 2012 exits and the class of 2013 begins their march towards the future educators are now in the bottom of the ninth with two strikes and can barely hold onto their bats, but know that they must continue to produce magic because the each student is counting on them despite the lack of funding provided.  Will they once again hit one out of the park?

The Educational Reformation

There are periods throughout history where we as a people know that what we are doing and what we have done is no longer in alignment with our core values and beliefs.  This was true during the mid to late 1500's when priests and theologians broke away from the Roman Catholic Church.  The Roman Catholic Church during this time was not only an entity where people chose to worship and celebrate their faith, but it was a larger political body that enforced what some believed were unjust laws in order to keep people continually indebted to the church.  Bishops, Cardinals and the Pope himself all possessed great amounts of political clout and would force the commoner to release their earnings so that he might gain favor in the eyes of God.  Certain members of the church saw threw the corruption and political pandering and chose to break away.  Perhaps the most popular member of the reformation is monk Martin Luther who nailed his tenants of faith to the door of the monastery after denouncing the Roman Catholic Church.  As a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am more inclined to follow the teachings, or pillars of Calvinism.  We, as Presbyterians, hold at the very core of our belief structure, as Calvin did, that we are the church always reforming and never stagnant.  It is our mission to constantly grow and challenge what we believe and how our faith will continue to grow.


Jumping ahead nearly 500 years later we find ourselves at the beginnings of another politically charged reformation: "The Educational Reformation".  For nearly a decade education has be inundated with the reform to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that is now known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  ESEA was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson because he fully believed that every American citizen should have the right to an education.  ESEA gave state governments autonomy over the school's in their states.  During the late 1970's and early 1980's a decline in student achievement and graduation had been occurring.  The Department of Education began a task force that published A Nation at Risk that clearly stated what measures where needed to raise the achievement of students.  Many educational leaders today continue to reference this report as the template for true educational reform.  

Enter: No Child Left Behind, or Every Test Dumbed Down.  Thus began the standards movement in America.  Students would take a standardized "High Stakes" test in order to show achievement and schools would be rated by these tests.  The kicker is that these tests are cheap to produce and students have to learn a narrow curriculum and merely be able to bubble in the correct answer.  This has passed for critical thinking.  


The system has subsisted off of this mockery for over a decade and we not seeing gains in achievement, but schools that have been labeled as failing.  When a school is labeled failing for more than three years it is put on a turnaround plan.  Essentially the administration is fired along with about 50% of the staff.  The staff can reapply for their jobs, but most do not and seek out other schools or even systems to work.  The irony is that this is considered reform; but in truth it is... well corporate reform.  This model is similar to the model used by the once giant in electronics Circuit City and we all know how successful that plan worked.


The old statement, "It is too big to fail" blindsided Circuit City and it currently laughing in the face of the educational system.  Once again the answer does lie how much money is the nation willing to spend?  Is the nation ready to do the real work and focus on a system that is constantly in need of reformation? Is education system in American truly in a state of disrepair?  


Contrary to what certain news outlets have been clamoring, I do not think the system is beyond repair.   As stated in the picture of John Calvin, "Unconditional Change".  I do believe it is going to force us all to change our educational paradigms that we have developed over nearly a hundred years and it will take a great deal of collaboration on all sides to reform an ever reforming system. There are reformers who are beginning to unlock the key to what education has been and what it will be.  They are not afraid to trample on the sacred cow of standardized tests.  One of my personal favorites is Sir Ken Robinson and his belief structure on education greatly matches my own core values during this educational reformation.




(http://www.youtube.com, 2012)