From Master Teacher to Master Learner by Solution Tree

S olut i ons f or D i g i ta l L ea r ne r–C ente r ed C la ssr ooms

to Master Learner

From Master Teacher to Master Learner by Will Richardson explores the fact that, although the world has seen great technological transformations, very little real school change has taken place. Creating true digital classrooms requires schools to desert their traditional practices in order to make better use of 21st century structures and technologies. This practical guide shows educators how to promote learning over knowing, and invites them to rethink the ways school can best prepare today’s students for the future.

Educators will: • Contemplate antiquated education premises that educators need to abandon and unlearn to fit the modern world • Explore the differences between a culture of teaching and a culture of learning and how learning cultures diverge

FROM MASTER TEACHER TO MASTER LEARNER

From Master Teacher

to Master Learner

• Gain key starting points for creating atmospheres that encourage powerful learning • Reflect on the web literacies that teachers may have trouble developing • Review how students and educators can best use web tools, such as social media and blogs, and in which areas these applications are the most helpful for educational purposes

Visit go.solution-tree.com/technology to access materials related to this book.

solution-tree.com

WILL RICHARDSON

Solutions Series: Solutions for Digital Learner–Centered Classrooms offers K–12 educators easy-to-implement recommendations on digital classrooms. In a short, reader-friendly format, these how-to guides equip practitioners with the digital tools they need to engage students and transport their district, school, or classroom into the 21st century.

Will Richardson

Copyright ÂŠ 2015 by Solution Tree Press All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction of this book in whole or in part in any form. 555 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404 800.733.6786 (toll free) / 812.336.7700 FAX: 812.336.7790 email: info@solution-tree.com solution-tree.com Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richardson, Will. From master teacher to master learner / By Will Richardson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-942496-07-6 (perfect bound) 1. Education--Effect of technological innovations on. 2. Educational technology. 3. Educational change. I. Title. LB1028.3.R542 2015 371.33--dc23 2015009789 Solution Tree Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO Edmund M. Ackerman, President Solution Tree Press President: Douglas M. Rife Associate Acquisitions Editor: Kari Gillesse Editorial Director: Lesley Bolton Managing Production Editor: Caroline Weiss Copy Editor: Miranda Addonizio Proofreader: Jessi Finn Text and Cover Designer: Rian Anderson Compositor: Rachel Smith

Table of Contents About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 1: Teachers as Learners First . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Freedom to Learn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Learning Differently . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Different Schools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Chapter 2: Qualities of Modern Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Conditions for Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Transformation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Changing Cultures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Chapter 3: Qualities of Modern Teacher-Learners . . . . . . . . 33 Teachers as Master Learners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Teachers as Unlearners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Teachers as Co-Learners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Teachers as Curators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Teachers as Transparent Sharers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Teachers as Networkers and Connectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Teachers as Makers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

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Teachers as Literate Learners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Teachers as Champions and Models of Diversity. . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Chapter 4: The Toolkit for Teachers as Modern Learners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Twitter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Blogging. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Feedly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Evernote. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Pinboard (or Delicious or Diigo) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Chapter 5: The Future of Teaching and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Appendix: Reading List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

About the Author A parent of two teenagers, Will Richardson has spent the last dozen years developing an international reputation as a leading thinker and writer about the intersection of social online learning networks and education. He was one of a handful of original education bloggers (http://willrichardson .com), and his work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and magazines, such as Educational Leadership, District Administration, Education Week, the New York Times, and English Journal. He is an outspoken advocate for change in schools and classrooms in the context of the diverse, new learning opportunities that the web and other technologies now offer. Will has authored four books, most recently Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere, published by TED Books and based on his most recent TEDx talk in Melbourne, Australia. Why School? is now the number-one bestselling TED book ever. In total, his books have sold more than two hundred thousand copies worldwide. A former public school educator of twenty-two years, Will is a cofounder of Modern Learner Media and copublisher of Educating Modern Learners (http://modernlearners.com), which is a site dedicated to helping educational leaders and policy makers develop new contexts for conversations around education. Over the past eight v

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years, he has spoken to tens of thousands of educators in more than a dozen countries about the merits of online learning networks for personal and professional growth. Will lives in rural New Jersey with his wife, Wendy, and his children, Tess and Tucker. To book Will Richardson for professional development, contact pd@solution-tree.com.

Introduction The 1980s saw the advent of a “digital revolution,” the moment when personal computers and online networks merged to allow individuals to “create, disseminate, and access information anywhere” (Isaacson, 2014, p. 3). Since then, the revolution has progressed full steam, with digital services and tools becoming more powerful, more mobile, and more ubiquitous. Many of us now carry powerful computers and devices in our pockets and backpacks, and we are no doubt becoming more and more dependent on them for organizing and capturing our daily lives. Even those of us old enough to know a time before this revolution may find it hard to recall a life without the creative, connected, curated, networked world at our fingertips. It’s somewhat ironic (and frustrating), then, that well into what is arguably one of the biggest, most transformative periods in history we still feel the need to point to a digital classroom in schools. Surely the modifier is unnecessary and classrooms are naturally digital. Surely a current of learning pulses through the technologies and networks inside schools just as much as the current of information pulses outside school walls. Modern students use technologies of all types in school as easily and as widely as the paper and pencil used by students before the revolution, right? Not so. As author Larry Cuban (2001) and many others point out, schools have spent billions of dollars over the years on technologies that have, in fact, changed very little of how we think about or mete out

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an “education” in the developed world. More often than not, we strip the agency and freedoms that digital tools give to learners and creators outside of school when they bring those same tools into the building. The system of schooling that most of us are products of is based on a series of structures and efficiencies that do not work well with the messier, less linear, more self-organized ways we can learn, create, and connect on the Internet. In fact, the system almost unwittingly marginalizes digital technologies in schools. We relegate them to labs or libraries, or if we place them in students’ hands, they’re used only for discrete, narrow purposes like reading textbooks, creating documents, or taking assessments. Few would argue that in schools today, we see technology primarily as an institutional teaching tool, not a personal learning tool. A disinterested observer might quickly conclude, then, that schools must change, that they cannot and should not be a holdout in a society that has by and large accepted the revolution, however grudgingly. There is no question that many institutions are suffering; for a taste of the complexities and challenges afoot, ask any journalist or musician if the digital transition has been an easy adjustment. Ask the lawyers, publishers, or almost any other professionals who now face a connected, global slate of competitors if the last decade has been business as usual. It hasn’t, and odds are that despite the seeming intractability of schools, they are about to embark on a similarly difficult period of truly transformative change. As the bulwarks that hold back real transformation in schools begin to weaken, we may finally be at a point where we’ll begin to embrace, rather than resist, the fundamental shifts that are unquestionably coming at us. That’s a good thing, because while there is still much to debate about the merits and applications of technology in schools, at the center of this revolution is a profound, positive shift in the way we can learn and interact with the world. And that is the premise of this series: digital classrooms are not those where technology is layered over the traditional practices and pedagogies in service of

In troduc tion

age-old outcomes. Instead, in a world where information, knowledge, and teachers are everywhere, digital classrooms are those where learning is valued over knowing, where making and doing are more important than consuming and memorizing, and where our students are empowered to learn deeply, richly, and authentically using the modern tools and technologies that are so common in their lives. As you read the books in this series, know that they represent a mix of philosophy and pedagogy intended to stretch your brain as well as your practice. These are discussions about context first and foremost, building new lenses through which you can focus on and discuss your role as an educator, and framing backdrops for the new roles that each of us must embrace sooner rather than later. And finally, these books comprise a roadmap for all educators to reach the place where one word, classroom, is enough to describe the space where teachers and students learn, create, and collaborate while making use of tools and technologies of the modern world.

Teachers as Learners First Just so we’re clear from the outset, here’s the thesis of this book in tweet-ready form: The world has changed. Knowledge is everywhere. Teachers must become master learners instead of master knowers. We educators can and should engage in a healthy, ongoing conversation around the ramifications (good and bad) of the web and other technologies that have emerged on the scene since the 1990s, especially as they pertain to learning. But one part of the debate is over: the potential ways in which we and our students can learn have changed forever, and we can no longer frame the education and schooling experiences we offer to our students through the lens of the education and schooling experiences that we ourselves had. The reality is that today, because of our ability (at least in the developed world) to use technology to connect, create, and share as individuals on a global scale, many (if not most) of the basic assumptions upon which the concept of school was based are growing increasingly irrelevant.

Chapter 1

That’s a bold statement, I know. But the premise that students should be in a particular place with a particular teacher and a room full of peers using the same texts and resources in the same ways 5

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The Freedom to Learn Although the concept of school may be changing, that’s not to say that the teacher’s role in children’s lives is any less important than before. Please read that again, because I’m in no way suggesting (as some are) that technology can take the place of a smart, caring teacher who can inspire and support a child to do great, meaningful, important work in the world. In fact, as we move away from knowledge acquisition and retention and focus on the development of skills and dispositions for learning, the teacher becomes more important than ever. I have become convinced, however, that the teacher’s role must and will change and that schools themselves must embrace different cultures and outcomes to effectively prepare students for what the future holds. These shifts will not be easy. Real change in schools is exceedingly difficult; the traditional narrative is deep-seated. In addition, though studies show more than 95 percent of teens in the United States are online (Madden, Lenhart, Duggan, Cortesi, & Gasser 2013), not every child has regular access to the web, and not every child who is online has the literacies and mindsets to use their access to learn in powerful ways. Not every teacher feels comfortable or even competent when it comes to the practices of modern, connected, networked learning. Regardless, given the near certainty that all our students will have ubiquitous access to both a variety of devices and the Internet, we can no longer operate as if we lived in a world before the web and mobile technology any longer. Here are five old premises that show why.

to learn chemistry or French or Shakespeare is quickly becoming passé. We may want that in certain instances, but we no longer need that. (Homeschoolers will tell you we’ve never needed that.) In fact, that premise may be detrimental to children’s overall ability to learn given the freedoms and affordances for learning that technologies provide today.

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2. Teachers are scarce, and we need to bring the students to the teacher: The following statement may unsettle us, but it’s hard to argue that teachers are virtually everywhere. Five billion people will be online by 2020 (Marsan, 2010), and in their midst are people who have more knowledge and experience about any particular subject than most face-to-face teachers in our classrooms. I’m in no way throwing teachers under the bus here; the vast majority of teachers whom I’ve encountered in my career are bright, are engaged, and care deeply about kids. They are people who I’d want in my own kids’ classrooms, and I don’t underestimate their ability to provoke and push my kids to greatness. I’ll say it again: I want teachers in classrooms with kids in the future. But at least from a knowledge standpoint, the reality is that individual adults are

1. Knowledge is scarce, and we need to bring students to the knowledge: Today, pretty much the sum of human knowledge is stored online and, assuming we have some basic modern literacies (a big assumption, as you’ll see), that knowledge is accessible and usable. That’s not to say that this sea of knowledge and information that we find ourselves in doesn’t contain a fair amount of effluent. Individuals and organizations create and publish online with ease, and it seems to get increasingly difficult to find the thoughtful, accurate, and meaningful content that best serves education and learning. Regardless, almost 100 percent of the curriculum that we have chosen to teach no longer exists just in the classroom and is a few clicks away on our computers or smartphones. That fact fundamentally challenges the way we think about subjects and the scope and sequence of the curriculum.

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no longer the smartest people in the room when it’s possible to connect to so many experts and other teachers online.

4. Schools are where the tools for learning are: Whether the tools were chalkboards, overheads, textbooks, or even desktop computers, the traditional narrative holds that we provide students with the tools and technologies they need to learn. Today, by and large, students themselves own the tools and technologies they need to learn, and they carry many of them around in their backpacks and pockets. In fact, schools are increasingly where the tools for deep, powerful learning aren’t because curriculum and regulation constrain whatever tools and technologies we give out or those tools our students bring in.

3. An education needs to be organized, standardized, and controlled by the institution: School as it was originally conceived requires a number of efficiencies to operate. At a time when content, knowledge, and expertise were relatively scarce, the only way to methodically educate every child was for the institution to decide what students should learn, when they should learn it, and how they should learn it. And so they turned to age groupings, separate subjects, and standardized assessments because it was more efficient, not because it was necessarily better for kids’ learning. In the modern world, however, we learn on demand about whatever our individual passions may be, and learners require the agency to organize much of their own learning experiences and education. Furthermore, the consumption, creation, and sharing of content is uncontrollable. Our focus now must be on helping students consume, create, and share well.

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Despite these new realities, they are effectively ignored in the larger, ongoing education reform debates in the United States and elsewhere. Most policy and decision makers as well as most parents and educators themselves focus only on making the traditional school experience better primarily as measured by all things easy to measure: state test scores, graduation rates, SAT and AP results, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test results, and so on. For efficiencyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake, assessments emphasize what students know, not whether they can actually do anything with what they

5. Schools are for preparing students for college and careers: While this is arguably still the case, the problem is that the worlds of work and higher education are changing constantly, and more and more, schools are preparing students for neither. Out of about four million students in the United States who enter high school each year, only about eight hundred thousand will have completed a two- or four-year college degree eight years later (Halpern, Heckman, & Larson, 2013). And in 2012, only about half of those college graduates were working in jobs that required a four-year degree (Mandel, 2014). Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about a 10 percent success rate. While we can attribute some of that to the downturn of the economy in the late 2000s, many argue that fluctuations in the job market are not as cyclical as in the past, that we are seeing fundamental shifts in the workforce and in the preparation needed to be a part of it. Even more problematic, however, is that in a recent Gallup poll, only 11 percent of business leaders strongly agreed that graduates have the necessary skills and competencies to succeed in the workplace (Grasgreen, 2014). Increasingly, traditional systems are out of step with the realities of the modern world.

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Regardless, as author Liz Wiseman (2014) notes, the new reality is that our kids will be “living and working perpetually on a learning curve” as the shelf life of knowledge continues to decrease (p. 183). The coin of the realm is no longer to know more; it’s the ability to learn more. Wiseman (2014) adds, “The vast majority of us now work in environments where the ability to learn is more critical than what we know and where the most valuable currency is influence, not power” (p. 12). Or, as Canadian author and consultant Harold Jarche (2012) notes, “Work is learning, and learning is the work.” For our purposes, we might tweak that a bit and say, “Teaching is learning, and learning is the teaching.” That’s pretty much the premise of this book: as the world continues to move toward ubiquitous access to information, knowledge, tools, and people, our kids must be powerful, persistent, passionate learners to succeed in their lives, regardless of their pursuits. For our kids to become those types of learners, the focus of our work as teachers must move away from knowledge and content expertise to learning instead.

Learning Differently Teachers must be learners first in the classroom, able to model clearly what it means to work “perpetually on a learning curve” (Wiseman, 2014, p. 183). Even more, teachers must be learners first with the modern-day technologies and tools that are quickly enveloping us. This is understandably difficult for many of us. Part of

know. We do not focus at all on how the structures and roles of schools must be fundamentally different given the powerful learning affordances of the web and other technologies that have developed since the mid-1990s. Frankly, it’s almost impossible to discuss change on that scale given the deep nostalgia we hold for our own school experiences and the deep financial investment that huge content and technology supplying companies have in the traditional way of doing things.

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If we’re honest about it, we know that our relative lack of understanding of technology’s greater potentials either in or out of the classroom is untenable. We need only look to our students and their immersion in devices and social networks to understand the necessity of bringing those devices and networks into our own lives. Yet our track record in doing so since 1990 has been, in a word, dismal. This isn’t so much the fault of individual teachers as it is the systems they work in, most of which are loath to innovate in transformative ways. Gary Stager (2015), who is one of the smartest (and most outspoken) educators there is on this topic, brilliantly summed up the state of affairs in an essay for the National Association of Independent Schools. Here’s what he observes in schools in 2015. • Despite ubiquitous access, too many students possess low levels of technological fluency and too few teachers know how to perform simple tasks using computational technology. • A quarter century after schools first embraced 1:1 computing (a laptop for every student), such efforts at student empowerment remain controversial. In too many schools, computers have yet to become personal.

that is because we adults have difficulty contextualizing these technologies as learning tools to begin with. As an informal estimate, at least 80 percent of teachers didn’t use technology in transformative ways for learning when they were pursuing their own educations. Using technology was all about creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as doing research. Few in the profession today look at the web and computers as problem-solving tools or environments where we can make beautiful, meaningful work to be shared with the world. And the other reason this transition is difficult is that, for the most part, schools don’t have cultures of learning with technology as much as they have cultures of teaching with technology. Much more about that later.

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• Schools teach only an infinitesimal percentage of young people any computer science despite the intellectual rigor, creative potential, and vocational opportunities afforded by programming. • Hysterical policies and cumbersome network obstacles make teachers less inclined to use computers. • Schools increasingly invest in devices with less and less computing power. Tablets and other consumption or consumer technologies are outpacing computer sales. • Schools equate educational computing with the lowhanging fruit of information access, note taking, and purposes of even less value. As Stager (2015) says, “We can do better.” In fact, we have to do better. Not to sound hyperbolic, but if we don’t begin to fundamentally rethink the value and purpose of school, we may actually lose the promise of school altogether. Experts support this assertion. Harvard professor and author Richard Elmore describes his work with schools as “palliative care for a dying institution” (Houchens, 2012). His colleague at Harvard David Edwards (2014) notes, “Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist.” And in a recent report to his school community, D. Scott Looney (2014), headmaster of the Hawken School outside of Cleveland, writes, “Education in America is fundamentally broken. Some of the basic educational practices and assumptions in the United States are simply wrong,

• Thirty-five years after schools began purchasing microcomputers, they must still bribe, trick, coerce, cajole, or threaten teachers to use them. Nearly two generations of students have missed powerful learning opportunities due to the inaction of adults.

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and, as a result, signs of stress have been evident throughout our educational system for decades” (p. 3).

Different Schools We not only have to do better, we have to do different. We have to start rethinking school, the reasons for our existence, and the purposes for bringing students and adults together in the same space for a certain amount of time to learn. It’s hard to do, but if we can step back from the deeply embedded story of school and look at it as disinterested observers, we might conclude that schools are really just an ongoing experiment, one that was initiated in the late 19th century, and one with no guarantee of ultimate success, especially given today’s technological advances and the larger changes that are happening in the world. What’s the good news here? For starters, we know what different means. Different is really more common sense than anything else. Different means getting back to what we know in our minds and hearts about learning, about what deep, powerful learning looks and feels like, and we are pondering how we can bring more of that back into the classroom. Looney (2014) suggests that what ails schools is that they’ve forgotten the basic requirements of meaningful learning: The progressive educators of the early 20th century, like John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and James A. Hawken, rejected the industrial model of education. Although the ideals of the progressive educators were radical in their day, they seem like common sense when viewed with a 21st century lens. Among

Whether or not the assumptions we based the idea of schooling on were ever “right” is debatable. But given the modern context through which we must see our work, it’s hard to argue that we’re working within and, in many cases, trying to preserve a system that becomes more irrelevant each day.

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the most common progressive educational ideals are these: • Every child can learn and has greatness within (“That the better self shall prevail”)

• Learning should be active (learning by doing) • Teachers should know each child’s unique interests • Intrinsic motivation (sense of accomplishment, community, curiosity, etc.) is more effective and lasting than extrinsic motivation (grades, scores, awards, etc.). (p. 5)

Whether or not we have computers, the web, and mobile phones, these points have always been common sense about kids and learning, right? One can’t really argue with any of them. But having computers, the web, mobile phones, and more makes it even more common sense to put learning, not knowing, front and center in our conversations about how to change our practice in schools and classrooms. That must also be the starting point for our discussions about the changing roles of teachers. As Stager (2013) is fond of saying, “You can’t teach 21st century learners if you haven’t learned this century.” Our job as educators is to understand deeply what it means to be a modern learner more so than a modern teacher. Our goal should not be to learn new technologies in order to become better teachers in the traditional sense. Our goal is to develop expertise in powerful new technologies to become better learners for ourselves and for our students, who may lack other learning models.

• Every child learns differently (Therefore, teachers must be able to teach in multiple styles)

S olut i ons f or D i g i ta l L ea r ne r–C ente r ed C la ssr ooms

to Master Learner

FROM MASTER TEACHER TO MASTER LEARNER

From Master Teacher

to Master Learner

Visit go.solution-tree.com/technology to access materials related to this book.

solution-tree.com

WILL RICHARDSON

Will Richardson