Tag Archives: future

Uncertainty as the new norm

When people make goals, they often ask themselves or are asked by others coaching them, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” I can pretty much guarantee that anyone asked where they saw themselves in five years, back in 2015, was pretty much wrong. Every. Single. One. I made light of this idea with a fun post ‘Truth is Stranger than Fiction‘, back in April.

Now I’m looking at the same thing in a different light. It’s one thing to understand how hard it is to visualize where we will be in 5 years, yet another when we don’t have any idea where we will be in the next couple months? Schools ‘re-open’ in September and our province has said that we won’t know what ‘open’ means until the middle of August. We could be completely open, mostly open, partially open, or fully teaching from a distance. My guess is that learning will be blended, but by how much, I honestly don’t have a clue? Are students only coming in once a week or twice a week? Will students have an option to stay home and still expect teachers to work with them? Will teachers report to school every day? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Will there be a second wave of Covid-19 in Canada? Will the virus mutate significantly? Has it already done so? Will the virus be an issue right into 2022? Will there be a vaccine, or will we manage/mitigate the spread or impact in some other way? Will the borders to the US re-open soon? Will there be a major recession? Will Covid-19 be with us for years to come like flus that return every winter? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I’m used to people asking me questions and giving them answers. I am usually someone that is ‘in the know’, but this virus has humbled me. It has made me far less certain about where things are going next. Ambiguity is the norm now. So is uncertainty.

Within every crisis lies an opportunity. Our perspective has a huge role to play in this. When we are stuck thinking ‘woe is me‘, well then a crisis is a crises. When we recognize that ‘stuff happens‘ and that stuff is separate from how we respond to it, then we can start to see the opportunities.

How can we support local businesses? How can we help the needy in our communities?

What can we do to meaningfully engage students in classes from a distance? How can we leverage the right tools so that when ‘learning from home’  students get more voice and choice in the work that they are doing? How can we make the student experience seamless as we bounce between varying amounts of time students spend at school vs home? How do we meaningfully build community without having our students spend much, if any, time together? …At least for these questions I have a few ideas.

The new school year will bring many challenges, and with those challenges we will also have opportunities. Opportunities to challenge the status quo, and to do things differently. I won’t pretend that I know what’s in store. I understand that there is a lot of uncertainty ahead. Uncertainty is the new norm, and we’ll just have to get used to this.

The death of the business card

I recently updated my business card and I ended up recycling a few hundred of the old, out-dated ones. This isn’t the first time my responsibilities or title has changed prompting me to do this, but maybe it’s the last? In a post COVID-19 world are we going to routinely take a small card out of our wallets and hand it to someone else? Are we going to sanitize our hands first? Or are we going to send a digital version via our phones, instantly and without making physical contact of a common object?

Frankly, I think it’s about time! When I get a card, I usually take a photo with it in Evernote and then either hand the card back or put the card in a small business card holder on my desk, seldom ever to be looked at again. One thing I’ve hated about the Evernote process is that when I first started using this feature (I think it’s only on the paid version), the card reader would pick up all the different parts like name, company name, title, and phone numbers, and put them in the right category, and then ask me if I wanted to connect with them on LinkedIn. But now people are so creative with their card design, I find Evernote often has trouble picking up the different categories and something as simple as the company name is wrong, or missing or miss-categorized, because the company name is embedded in a logo or uses a different font for the first letter, or is placed in an unusual place compared to the rest of the information, etc.

What we need are simple contact cards that we can digitally ‘bump’ to each other. One nice feature of this would be that the card could have several versions, appropriate for the person you are sharing it with. For example, I run two schools and sometimes it’s nice to have a simple card with just one of the schools on there. Also, my card has my cell phone on it, but I’d rather a vendor call my office line, and leave a message with secretaries, rather than interrupt me with a vibrating phone when I’m with staff or students.

Having a business card digitally sent and entered directly into our contacts makes sense. It shouldn’t need to done by a proprietary company that requires everyone to have the same app to do, it should be a feature of our phones. It should be sent via Bluetooth or via a tool like airdrop, except not limited to Apple devices. It would need to be initiated with a request, rather than just open for anyone to take/steal your information.

For example, I click an invite and it says, ‘David Truss is asking for your business card’, the other person sees this, picks a card to share and sends it. Upon receipt, I see something like ‘Peter Parker shared his contact information with you. Share back?’ The tool could also ask if you want to connect on different social media sites that were shared, like Twitter and LinkedIn, and even scrape a profile photo from one of these as your contact image. It could also set a reminder to contact the person, or ask for additional details or tags/categories to help you remember the person.

Some people will be sad to see the card stock business card go away, but I’m looking forward to having the information shared digitally, on the tool that I’ll actually use to contact the person. We don’t need the waste of hundreds of our-dated cards being recycled or put in landfills, when a digital card is superior and provides far more choice than a static card that is seldom kept or looked at again.

Ten Million

According to Worldometers.info as of today over 10,000,000 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Of those, over 5% or 500,000 (read half a million) people have died.

I don’t want to share commentary, I just want that to sink in.

This is a global issue. It has and will further impact the world. As we head into summer, be smart, be safe, stay healthy.

Life interrupted

A travel app I use just reminded me that tomorrow night I was supposed to be on a flight to California for the ISTE conference. Cancelled. The next trip on the app was to be 3 weeks from now, heading to Barcelona, where I was to get on my first ever cruise ship with two stops in Spain and three stops in Italy, then spend a week in Portugal. Cancelled.

Will anyone be planning a trip on a cruise ship any time soon? Is my trip to Europe delayed a year or altogether cancelled? ‘The best-laid plans of mice and men… often go awry.’ It is easy to wallow a bit in the shadow of what could have been, but I suddenly find myself making new plans to visit family. Unexpected, and pressing, the plans are thrust upon me, yet something I’m looking forward to. I very well might have been cancelling my ISTE trip anyways.

We tend to plan things like we can somehow control the future. We can’t. So many things can disrupt what we hope to do in the coming days and weeks. There’s nothing like a pandemic to wake us up to that reality! How many jobs have been lost? How many travel plans cancelled? How many concerts, shows, and sporting events put on hold?

Life often gets interrupted. Sometimes it surprises us with unexpected delights, and sometimes with disappointing or devastating news. We can be saddened by upsetting news and plans gone awry, or we can recognize that circumstances beyond our control will often dictate that our best-laid plans are just that, plans… and plans change.

In the history books

We are only half way through 2020 and already we know that this year will be prominent in history books like no year in the 2000’s before it. It is the beginning of a new era, one that will keep us socially distancing from one another for a while; One that will make the wearing of masks and hiding our faces ‘normal’; One where handshakes and hugs are greeted with hesitation rather than warmth.

But it will also be a year remembered for bringing about social change. It will be remembered not just for changing our social interactions as they relate to salutations, but also for bringing about equity and making the world a more just place for those that have been disenfranchised and unfairly treated. Perhaps this year will be remembered as year a pandemic brought us together exactly when it was trying to pull us apart.

There is still half a year left, and many hints that economies and therefore people will struggle. The second half of 2020 will hold inequalities, political strife, and a death toll that will include those fighting against a virus, and those fighting against injustice. While the pandemic will surely be the lead story in the history book chapter on 2020, I hope that social change, and the battle against injustice is the focus of the chapter.

That is my hope, but if there is one thing the first half of this year has taught me, it is that this is not a time when it is easy to predict the future. If you don’t believe me, go back in your memory to the end of December 2019 and tell me that you could have predicted anything about the world we are living in today.

The year is only half over and it is already one for the history books.

Questions about September 2020

I was speaking to a friend that teaches at a university and she said about 30% of students that would normally come to her university next year are requesting a one year deferral, and taking a gap year. If that’s happening at universities across the province, and the country, that’s going to have a devastating impact on universities. Also, what are these students going to do next year? The two most productive things that students do in a gap year are work to save money, and travel (get some life experience). The job market is not going to bounce back quick enough, with unemployment at some of the highest levels in years, and most countries aren’t going to lift travel bans any time soon.

So what are all these gap year students going to do?

I wonder about the mental well-being of students who are not going to school, can’t get a job or travel, and are home and idle?

What can we do to support these students?

I also wonder if all of our colleges and universities will survive financially with such a decrease in students and revenue?

Will a percentage of high school students also stay home? Will there be a spike in high school students wanting to take online courses rather than try blended courses with teachers unfamiliar with this form of delivery?

Will private school students and their families decide that they should just go to public school rather than pay expensive tuition for an online experience?

We are headed into some very unknown territory and the impacts to what schooling might look like for September 2020 and beyond may not unfold in ways that we are expecting.

Education focussed mind dump

I’m going to do a little mind dump of things on my mind about school, education, life, and learning, in point form – bullet format. Many of these could be entire posts on their own, and I want to share these as placeholders for future development:

  • Teaching is going to be more challenging in the future, but also more rewarding. Yes, technology will replace some teaching… an AI (Artificial Intelligence) based program can teach students who are learning to use algorithms better than a teacher in front of 30 students, when students could use just-in-time feedback and an adjusted curriculum based on their answers being right or wrong. However we are decades away from AI being able to teach problem solving, or critical thinking, or moderate a philosophical discussion. Teaching these things is exciting and can be very engaging for students, but also challenging to do well… this is the true art of teaching.
  • I’m tired of seeing ‘Remote Learning didn’t work’ articles. It is not ideal for every student and it magnifies the issue of privilege, and access to required technology. It especially won’t work when educators need to make the switch with no forward planning. That said, it has made us question a few things we needed to question, like traditional assessment practices for example.
  • Assessment practices needs to change. We can’t rely on information-based content as a means of measuring student success. ie. 1. We still need to know that students can use mathematical algorithms, but we also need to know that they are numerate and understand the concepts behind those algorithms. ie. 2. The so called soft skills that we want to see like critical thinking and collaboration don’t work well being marked in a traditional way. What does a mark of 77% in Creativity mean?
  • Blended learning is the future of learning in schools, and so two things need to change: 1. Block schedules/timetables where the structure is exclusively around a teacher at the front of a room teaching for a set time. 2. “Teach them while I’ve got them in front of me” mentality, where the face-to-face component of the blending is all about teaching as it used to be… Blended learning should be centred around creating ‘learning experiences’.
  • Student voice and choice needs to be the forefront of course and lesson design. Cookie-cutter assignments are not enough. That said, there can be considerable teacher influence and high expectations. A teacher-led inquiry with embedded opportunities for students choice can be much better than not giving students creative constraints (that they might flounder without).
  • We need to leverage blended learning, in order to create collaboration and professional development time inside of a teacher’s workday. The idea of a teacher working in isolation for over 85% of the school day is counter productive to creating a culture of learning at institutions (schools) that should be modelling a learning culture.
  • A well funded, free, and public education is an essential public service. It also has to foster the values we want to see in our world. Diversity, acceptance (not just tolerance), civics, kindness, and charity need to be celebrated and highlighted. Yes, we need to prepare students to function in society, and even be employable, but the most important thing we do in schools is make all students feel like they belong, and we help them become decent human beings.
  • We need to help students be tolerant of others with opposing points of view. We have to show them that despite the desire of attention-seeking news media to polarize ideas into different camps, ideas sit on a spectrum, they are not all dichotomous. And we do not have to agree with different ideas to be respectful of the people who hold them… That said, while “we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views“, we must also be, “unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference“.
  • We need to find a balance between ‘open’ classrooms and ‘private’ learning spaces. Students need a space where they can fumble and be less than perfect, having a private space to work out the rough edges of their work. They also need to be able to share what they want out in the open, and with the world. Everything doesn’t have to be on display, and we need to help students discern what is important to share, and what we keep to ourselves.
  • Mistakes need to be legitimately celebrated as part of learning. Failure is part of most challenging journeys, and while we talk about the importance of this, we freak out when students fail in a public setting. Mistakes are ok when we can fix them quickly, but we still admonish bigger public mistakes in ways that do not foster learning. This is an issue beyond schools, we seem to live in a world where everyone is judged (harshly) by their worst public mistake, and sincere apologies are not enough. This has two important, negative ramifications: 1. Public mistakes become something we can’t recover or learn from; 2. We can not be truly innovative when we can’t risk looking bad for our efforts. So many schools, school districts, and even companies, brag about being innovative, but when it is ‘innovative as long as it looks good’, well then all the risk is gone and so is the opportunity to do something daring.
  • Everyone has a right to their opinion, and everyone can share those opinions, but not all opinions are good, and not all opinions deserve an equal footing. Bad ideas can spread very easily these days. People need to be brave enough to speak out against bad ideas… in non-violent ways. We must celebrate the power of dialogue and use our words instead of our fists, if we truly want our society to be better. We have to challenge ourselves to take higher ground and not fight the fight that the spreaders of bad ideas want us to fight. There is a saying, “Never wrestle a pig, you both get dirty but the big likes it.” Bad ideas get unwarranted publicity when the battles get messy… and the weak-minded get fuel to oppose good ideas when those with the good ideas act in bad faith. You do not have to ‘turn the other cheek’ but you do have to act in a way that is decent and good, if you want to fight for things that are decent and good.

… Ideas To be expanded on at a future date.

School 2020

I used to think I had a good handle on where things were going. What does the end of the school year look like? What will September start-up look like? All this is out the window.

An online grad/annual celebration in June? Never would have guessed that was coming, I had a theatre booked for the occasion.

Students sitting socially distant from each other? I don’t have more than 4 single desks in the whole school.

There is a lot to think about with respect to the coming school year. How will the year start? How often in a week will students attend? How much will be taught from a distance? Who will struggle and who will thrive in this new environment?

We will adapt. We will make it work. But making it work isn’t enough over a sustained period. It’s one thing to ‘make it work’ for the last 3 months of a school year, and yet another for that to be your plan for a full year.

As busy as June is, it’s also a time to be creative. September 2020 will be here sooner than we think, and school will not be what it has been in the past. We need to create opportunities for students not just to survive the year, but for them to thrive.

One December 31st, 2019 I picked my #OneWord2020 to be Resilience… I don’t think I could have picked a better word!

If I were to start a school…

This is a ‘10,000 foot view’ of something I’ve thought about for a while. It should be an essay, not a handful of bullet points, but I’ll put a few ideas down now and come back to this at a later date.

If I were to start a school…

  • It would be K-12, with under 1,200 kids. Three classes per grade.
  • Kindergarten to grade 5 would be Reggio based, and resource and support rich. There would be a lot of intervention at these grades to ensure students who struggle are given proven strategies and structures of support.
  • Grade 6 to 9 would not be IB, but would run with a similar model to Middle IB. There would be significant focus on cross-curricular, big thematic projects, a lot of opportunity to mentor and lead younger students, and a focus on doing projects that matter in the community.
  • Grades 10-12 would be inquiry and passion based. Some students would reach out into the community to explore trades and careers, others would focus on academics and the pursuit of Arts and/or Sciences. All would have passion projects, time to pursue them, and mentors to inspire them.
  • Teachers would teach for 60-70% of the day, have 10% prep time, and the rest of the time would be to collaborate, and/or to support students working on projects that go beyond the scope of anything teachers teach in class.
  • The school would be broken into separate pods, divided by the grade groupings suggested above. Students at those different levels would be separated except for planned events… but these would happen regularly, with many student leadership opportunities.
  • Teachers would be expected to connect with teachers and/or students in at least one other level.

That’s not earth-shatteringly different than what can exist, but it is cost prohibitive with class sizes and staffing needs. The driving forces are:

1. Students having autonomy, choice, and support to do big projects and follow their passions.

2. Educators having time to collaborate and work with students beyond course content and a fully ‘blocked’ and timetabled schedule.

3. A sense of community support, student leadership, and a focus on meeting the learning needs of students.

If you were to start a school, what would it look like?

Learning Experiences

Last month I wrote, ‘Just shifting online or shifting the learning?‘. This post looked at how to effectively shift engaging learning online, from a distance, as we moved to remote learning. Now we need to think about what we’ve learned, and what we want to bring back into our schools.

There will be limits that social distancing will challenge us with. But when we final normalize what school looks like, how will this global experiment in teaching remotely change what we do in schools post a Covid-19 vaccination? What lessons will we take from this?

Six years ago, I wrote,’Flexible Learning Opportunities‘

In this post I said,

“Blending won’t be something done to classes or students, rather it will be the modus operandi… the way teaching and learning happens. In fact, even ‘distance learning’ could have synchronous ‘face-to-face’ meetings in virtual worlds. It will be an exception to the norm, in a very short while, to have a class that is strictly face-to-face or solely online/asynchronous.”

I got timing of ‘a very short while’ wrong, and it took a pandemic to make it happen, but now I think we are approaching this. When students return to school are teachers going to just revert to old ways or will they rethink how they spend their time in class?

One of my schools that I’m the principal of is the district online school (Coquitlam Open Learning). For a while now, I’ve been talking to my teachers about the fact that over 95% of our online students are local, and asking how we can leverage this? Here are a couple examples:

1. Math teachers running a Numeracy event, where they brought students from many different classes together to solve numeracy problems and help them prepare for the provincial numeracy assessment.

2. The Biology teacher running fetal pig dissections to teach about the different body systems. Second year university med students taught our online & Inquiry Hub students about the different systems and did rotating demonstrations, then our students taught gifted middle school students in the same format later that day, with the university students assisting.

In both these cases, when the online students came together, it was for an ‘experience’, not just a lesson. How can we think about this as we bring some of the asynchronous learning to our synchronous classrooms? How can we rethink the experience of school when students all have access to resources, digital conversations, and videos and lessons that they don’t need to be together to see and do?

How can we leverage the digital access and connectivity to change what we do when we meet kids face to face?

Can we give them more guided time to work independently, with teachers providing just-in-time support?

Can we focus more on learning experiences, rather than lessons?

Are we just going to shift the learning back into classrooms, or are we going to start thinking more about how we can shift the learning experiences we provide while kids are in our schools?

A concrete example of this is that students at Inquiry Hub Secondary have about 40% of their day when they are not in front of their teachers. During this time, they work on assignments teachers give them (imagine group work where students never need to meet outside of school), they work in digital components of their courses (like video lessons), and they work on some pretty interesting student-designed inquiry projects (that they get credit for). You can learn more about how we make Inquiry Hub work here.

Are we just shifting the learning back into schools or are we also shifting towards different kinds of learning experiences?