Best Tool... EVER!

Here's a simple question.  What is the greatest tool we will ever own in our lifetime?  Let’s first define what we mean by “tool”.  For this question, tool means anything we may use to benefit our life experience, improve our competitive advantages in life, or simply make anything we are doing easier.  Owning it means we have all rights and permissions to control, change, keep, or destroy it.  So, which one is the greatest?

A car is a tool.  A computer is a tool.  A smart phone is a tool.  A pan for cooking?  A refrigerator?  Hammers, drills, rakes, shovels, pens, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, lightbulbs, faucets, air conditioners, shoes, and on and on we could go, right?  These are all good tools that benefit us.  But which one is the greatest?  A smart phone can do an incredible amount of work for us – informing, entertaining, storing, tracking, reminding, and connecting.  Our PC and Mac computers drive a ton of global interaction, creative problem solving, thought capturing, and work station activity.  Our cars and trucks move us and others… and our stuff, around the regions we live in.  And ships and planes cover our global transportation needs so we can have our phones, computers, and cars.  Hmmm.  That seems important.  But which of these tools is the greatest?

Once we have figured out and agreed upon which one is the greatest I have another question, “Are our schools teaching children how to master that tool?”  If it is a smart phone, are schools teaching kids how to master their devices, to analyze and evaluate apps, be aware of threats and dangers, or even to care for and maintain them?  Are they teaching kids to understand PCs from the motherboard to each line of code? Or are they barely teaching them the basics – from the Start button to the usefulness of every toolbar, function, and command in every program?  Do the teachers even know this stuff themselves?

I say, the greatest tool we will ever own is our mind.  It is a vast and powerful device and I can think of nothing more important to teach our children than how to master their understanding of how their own minds work.  I’m talking basic stuff like observation, contemplation, recollection, calculation, communication.  Stuff like intake, processing, and output.  How language works.  How we end up with feelings.  How individualized we all are.  How creativity works.  How a mind is strengthened through practice and mental exercises.  How we can be paid for using our minds.  How it keeps us safe.  How it dares and intrigues us into new challenges.

PCs, mobile devices, cars, air conditioners, and power saws, all come with a manual to help us learn about the basics.  If schools are supposed to be preparing children for life, why do they not get a Mind Manual?

Look at any school system and you will see that it is focused on teaching, not learning.  The greatest thing our minds do is learn, but do we teach children how it does that?  Do we ask them to try different ways of learning as the owners of the tool?  Not very well. 

STEAM pedagogy is just starting to open new avenues of “teaching to the mind”, but, by far and away, the progress is badly lagging behind our global needs and the global competition.  This is where the inertia of ignorance hinders our speed of acceleration, our pace of improvement, and our ability to win jobs, win contracts, create better products, and sell to an intelligent global market.  Why aren’t teacher colleges racing ahead to create the best mental development processes?  Why aren’t teachers “learning centric” instead of delivery centric?  It's called ignorance.  They don't know how learning works and they don't know how to teach to it.

Teacher colleges get better and better at teaching teachers how to teach, but the end user is a learner, and without focusing on that, they miss the boat.  Think about a baker.  If a baker goes to baking school and becomes a great baker they can become a baking teacher.  Better and better baking may be good, but if the breads and cupcakes don't taste good, they won't be eaten.  The end user rules the results.  You may have a wonderfully tall and ornate wedding cake, but if it tastes like paste, what good is it?  Learner centric strategies focus on facilitating the learner's process, their issues, their individual ways and needs, and their individual progress.  Honestly, what matters more than that?

The human mind is the most versatile, complex, capable, instantaneous, and enormous tool we will ever own.  So, why don’t schools teach to it directly?  Sure, math develops many cognitive skills.  Language helps to increase our ability to express mental output.  History gives us contextual relevance and “lessons learned by others”, and science teaches us what others have discovered.  Music class teaches us the language of the G and Treble clef notes.  Art class teaches us paint and drawing skills.  And computer class teaches us which buttons to push.  But, do we teach students to engineer their own mental path?  Do we teach them to think like a scientist, asking, "How do we know this?" Do we teach them to study their own history for "lessons learned"?  Or how to write their own songs, how to decide which brush and color best represents their thought, and how to build a new computer program that fits their personal way of thinking?

From birth, children are very good at knowing what they want.  They have a mind and they use it at a very high rate of speed, and improve its functional ability at a very high rate of adaptation, emulation, and improvisation. By age two they can tell you what they want and why.  By age three, students on pre-school learning programs are already learning basic math and language skills, reading, drawing, memorizing, and much more.  So, why don’t our schools deepen this level of understanding, lengthen these skills and teach the students how this tool works?   Why don't teaching colleges race to understand this and alter what they do because of what they just learned?  Because they are not "learning centric".  Why don't schools teach children how their memory works?  Or teach them about imagination?  They could easily teach them about comparative analysis.  Teach them how to construct their own pedagogical scaffolding.  Teach them to crave meta-cognitive data from assessments.  Not possible?  Wrong.

Ask four students to memorize a series of numbers, let’s say the value of Pi.  Tell them they are practicing a mental function called memory.  Tell them they are not assessed against each other, but only against their own previous efforts.  They will work at their own pace.  They will memorize whatever they do.  3.14 at first.  But, the next time, when they memorize 3.1415926 they will want to know how well they did.   The third time, when they have memorized 3.14159265358979323 they will be able to see their mind doing the work and care about ways of improving their memory skills when such lessons are taught to them.  They will use these lessons to improve their next efforts and their next assessments.  This is a meta-cognitive decision to gain assessment data to evaluate their deliberate efforts to improve how their mind works.  They will be able to own their control of the device and feel responsible for its growth.  If we are teaching people how to drive a car, isn't it worth teaching them how the car works?  Doesn't this enable them better?  Doesn't this allow them to more fully understand how to use the vehicle?

If a student wants to enter the clothing industry, and knows this at age ten, why can’t the schools teach them about the history of clothing, the science of textiles, the engineering of garment manufacturing, the economy of seasonal markets, and the art work of drawing and coloring unique designs?  You've got eight years until they graduate.  Why can’t this student learn these specifics? 

Schools could directly teach students how to manage their own learning, how to strengthen their mental capabilities, how to take responsibility for their tool’s use and worth, and how to use these abilities to take them where they want to go in life.

But, that’s not what school is… is it?

But, it could be.

Of Legacy, Learning, and Cartography

Since the beginning of maritime history, ships’ captains made note of dangerous rocks, shoals, and reefs that lurked just below the surface.  They would record the place and provide bearing references so they could avoid the peril on future voyages.  As sons grew up in captains’ families they were told about the dangers and eventually someone started drawing maps.

It is easy to imagine captains sitting around a rugged table exchanging stories, drinking ale, and looking over a map laid out in front of them.  They would redraw the shoreline, talk of something new that was discovered, and make a mark on the map of a danger or some other importance.  Then someone would take the updated map to the cartographer who would draw a new map including the changes.

This is legacy.  The captains knew they had a responsibility to those who would sail those waters in the years to come.  They knew that someone had helped them to be safer and still alive from what was learned years before, and they knew it was the only honorable thing to do to share what they’ve learned; providing for the future safe passage of people they will never meet. 

As shoals shift with currents, as reefs grow and are destroyed by storms, as ships sink in some distant bay, there has always been a need to record what was discovered and share it for the sake of those who’ll travel the same way years later.  The cartographer is the clearinghouse, the repository, the librarian of such lexicons.  A cartographer will work with the new knowledge and make sure it is accurately represented on the map.  They will combine two or more reports of the same dangerous obstruction and get it as accurate as they can.  As years go by and more and more details come in, the cartographer – having never sailed those waters – keeps updating, editing, and fine tuning the map’s representation and usefulness; for the sake of countless souls who will sail those channels, rivers, and seas while relying on his map.

We are living in a glorious time of legacy building.  Our school systems have proven their obsolescence, their obvious need for updating, and the less obvious dangers of what may befall our students when they reach their adulthood unprepared to be worthy of a job.  We live in a time of huge opportunity.  We are charting new waters of learning.  We are venturing into seas of community involvement, parent groups that have researched the issues and options, and teachers who want to do great things despite the union that drags like an anchor.  We have many new and exciting opportunities to consider.  Like Henry Hudson sailing up river, or Balboa and Cabrillo sailing up the eastern Pacific Coast, we are discovering things that will affect millions who will follow us. 

Whether you are a teacher, a principal, an informed parent, an uninformed parent, a community volunteer, or even a student, you have the responsibility of sharing what you are learning about these waters with a cartographer.  Make notes of what you have seen.  Draw pictures of perils to avoid.  Keep a captain’s log with notes on the good and the bad of your voyages.  And, when you return to port, find a cartographer and share what you have learned about the best and worst ways of education.  Speak to a reporter.  Email a writer.  Create your own blog.  Write an article and share it in your parent group.  Ask teachers and experts to help make it stronger and more accurate.  Write a letter to Congress, state officials, county and district superintendents.  Debate board members seeking your vote.  Get your learning on the map!!

Do not leave some rock, poised like a glass shard on the beach, waiting under the water’s surface for someone who will sail the same way in the years after you did, and have done nothing to warn them.  Did you learn about digital learning? About STEAM education? How to build a parent group into a powerful voice? How to fight bullying in schools?  How to petition the decision makers so they feel included instead of embattled?  Did you speak to someone of vision who changed how you think?  Did you notice the shoal of negativity that drags on the hull and brings things to a halt?  Did you notice the Pirates of Selfishness who steal every good thing for their own sake and leave little or nothing behind for others? 

Who did you tell of what you found?  Whose future voyage did you aid?  What captains did you sit with over ales, or Caramel Machia Lattes, to discuss ventures, perils, and the wonders of discovery?  

What will be your legacy?  Will others have to find their own way, or will you have made it safer for them?  Will you have told someone what you learned for the purpose of aiding others so they can chart new courses to new shores, allowing new lands to be explored, developed and made fruitful?  

The Mountain Peak is At The Bottom of The Pile

Education experts seem to know too much.  I know, this doesn’t seem to make much sense, but bear with me a minute and I think you will agree. 

When people have sought answers they realize how little they know.  Their first question gives an answer, but it also includes many more questions.  In the field of education we have gone from chalkboards with pencil and paper, to Smart Boards and digital tablets.  In order to get from the old way to the new way we went through a million options, questions, and ideas.  But, what do we really know about what works best and what else is possible?  How did we get here?  Was it politics?  Was it budgetary?  Was it provable science?

If we move from paper bound text books to digital text books, how does this change the homework?  What is the cost differential for the publisher?  Can they make profit by killing less trees?  Are editorial versions easier to update and distribute?  Can the text be used in course authorware?  Are tests easier to develop, distribute and grade if done through a web-based database?  Do these databases allow for interstate comparisons?  Can we compare various teachers, teaching styles, teaching experience, teaching colleges, and the impact of district training (professional development) programs? 

As soon as we improve one aspect of education we must automatically wonder – what else is possible, how do we know what’s best, and how can we prove it to others.  Science methods teach us to look for answers and to use methodologies that allow us to document and prove what we’ve learned.  When experts of science state what they have learned we know that they can prove it.  Scientifically proven results become added to the foundations of human knowledge and eventually somebody else will come along and build on it.  This is true progress.

 

In the world of education there is no science to the changes being made, and therefore there is no way to compare what is being done one way against what someone else does.  Science is a deliberate and managed way of learning.  Yet, it seems education experts would rather argue and stand on rhetorical analysis than deliberately manage a comparative study.  As a result, these education experts become easily satisfied that their latest revelation is an improvement without any real proof.  Perhaps it is simply some confidence and a whim that is required.  With these rules in place anyone can be an expert simply by saying so. 

The people who have worked their way up in the industry should be congratulated for surviving a journey of huge attrition, low morale, and a starvation of passion, but they are not really experts on what’s best or possible.  They are merely experts on how to work within the very machine they are charged with maintaining.  To change the machine they would actually be endangering their own future careers because no one would be able to predict what else might change, what will grow in importance, what will become irrelevant and disposable, and what change is worth the money of today’s competitive choices and the needs tomorrow will demand of it.  Without clear answers there is little room for certainty and too high a risk for guessing wisely.

So, education experts, without relying upon science, conjure their ideas creatively, surmise some sort of theory, and add pragmatic functions to make it work.  It seems ingenious when we compare it to yesterday’s ideas, but are we really improving education?  What proof do we have?

In the business world where everything is measured against competitive profitability, there is a constant call for proof.  Every department head must justify their decisions against the bottom line.  As a result their approach to learning – as a necessary and important function of success – is a combination of effectiveness, efficiency, and leveraged outcome.  Did their people learn it?  Was the knowledge transfer done quickly and cheaply?  Are they using it to improve the company’s competitive ability?

The driving force of profits is just an alternative measurement for comparison and whether or not success is being attained.  In sports we have scores.  In medicine we have survival rates.  In politics we have votes.  In education we have standardized tests that measure student ability, but no measure of specific methods. Is this teacher’s college bringing better results to students in life than that teacher’s college?   Who’s measuring these things?  Why aren’t specific instruction methods, theories, and forms of technology integration the object of exploration, measurement, and comparison?  Why don’t education experts dig into the pile of possible choices and perform scientific comparisons? 

We all seek the mountain top; the place supreme where we know we have scaled the cliffs of change, strained against the gravity of institutionalized bureaucracies, and arrived at a place where we can both – see the horizon better than anyone else – and be “looked up to” by others who want what we have found.  To reach the mountain top one must dig.  We must look under every stone.  We must dig into the work of establishing scientific protocols, improving those protocols over time, and sweat our way through the analysis of data.  Learning is about digging into the body of knowledge and exploring what is found.  Only when the pile of options has been thoroughly dug through and sorted can we know that we know.  Only when what we found is proven to be the top choice can we rest at the mountain top and enjoy the view for a few moments before we begin again. 

Only those who think they know enough will refuse to dig.  This is because being an expert without proof allows one to lean on his or her shovel, happily not digging anymore; happily feeling the contentment of their ignorance.  How can that person really be a leader of learning? 

Learners dig. 

Grab a shovel.