Tag Archives: Will Richardson

Reimagining Schools

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Since November I’ve been connecting, every few weeks, with Will Richardson and a group of educational leaders from around BC, Canada in a professional development session run by the BCPVPA (BC Principals and Vice Principals Association) called ‘Reimagining Schools: Confronting Education‘. Right off the bat, Will shared some framings:

• Everything is nature
• We’re not facing “problems” to be solved. We are in a predicament.
• Our predicament stems from the fact that we are out of relationship with each other and all living things on the planet. All of our challenges flow from this disconnect.
• Education is complicit in creating these challenges.
• Collapse is not new. What’s new is that systemic privilege is no longer a buffer.
• Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.

There are a few deep thoughts that have brewed from these sessions, and yet oddly enough the two most impactful things came from outside the sessions.

First a conflict within me. Will shared a post on LinkedIn where he said,

“I think it’s telling that for all of the conferences and presentations and talks and essays and “achievements” that people post and discuss here, only about 2% of them seem to make any note of the fact that they are happening while:

~ecological limits are being breached
~social trust is eroding
~ AI is reshaping cognition
~ politics are destabilizing
~ inequality is deepening
~ biodiversity is declining at alarming rates

I mean, without using those contexts as a lens for our gatherings or our teaching or writing, what is the actual relevance that we can claim, not just around education, but around living life on the planet in general?

It’s either denial or ignorance. Or maybe it’s concern that if we ground our work in those lenses, no one will show up or read or listen…”

I commented:

“I’d push back a bit and ask what is the conference about?

There’s a cognitive dissonance that is invited when the mind has to weigh these things AND also take in information that people are going to a conference to learn about.

I’m seeing your question play out on social media where people are being called out for not being political and sharing their political stance… on a channel where politics is never discussed.

There needs to be a balance, we can’t stick our head in the sand, but we also can’t pretend (and I do intentionally mean pretend) that acknowledging major issues of global concern are equivalent to somehow authentically addressing them… and topically addressing them when our topic isn’t directly affected by them is to me worse than not mentioning them. It can be a distraction without gain to the intended message.”

Will responded:

“Dave Truss So, I’ll push back a bit on the push back. 🤣

I don’t think it’s a “calling out” as much as it is a reminder. And I don’t disagree that just naming them authentically “addresses” them, but it does provide a different lens for whatever question is in front of us at that moment. Every topic is affected by them. Every one.

Modernity wants to separate everything out into pieces and ignore the interconnectedness of the whole. This is the world we live in right now. It’s all entangled.”

The comment conversation continued, and is worth reading, but doesn’t add to my conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I completely agree with Will, if we aren’t bringing a contextual lens to what we are sharing, we are somehow missing the interconnectedness of some of the things we should most value and care about. But on the other hand, I’m sitting in a place right now where just two days ago I wrote about being ‘Intentionally disconnected‘ because paying attention to the rather disturbing world events right now feels like too much. I ended the post saying, “for now I lack the capacity to engage. It seems like a futile activity that will anger and upset me, with no gain. It is rare for me to actively choose to be uninformed, but right now is one of those times.”

Therein lies the conflict. I agree with Will, yet I don’t think I’m the only one who isn’t ready to face the harsh realities of the predicaments we are in… especially when I’m trying to learn something new. I think for our students it’s the same. The last of the framings above is, ‘Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.”

I get it, I really do. But when I’m at a conference or when a student sits in a class, do we really need to ‘sit in it’? Do we need to connect everything we do to the predicaments we live in? Do we need this lens to permeate what we are learning? If I channel my inner Will Richardson I think I’d ask myself, ‘But what value is the learning if it isn’t addressing the predicaments we are in?’ … Again, I’m left conflicted.

For example, can I teach students about using AI in an ethical way and not mention the cost of the energy drain? Is mentioning this once enough or should that be the bigger lesson? Do I need to bring the dire state of the world into every lesson, predicament after predicament? Is this even healthy? Maybe I’m just too stuck in the current educational context to see the bigger picture? I really don’t think that these sessions answered this for me, and yet I feel I have a deeper understanding of the need to confront hard truths… and ensure that what we choose to teach be taught with a lens of a world in environmental, political, and social challenges. Will shared the following quote in one of our sessions:

“If we fully accept the world as it is—in all its harsh realities— then we can develop the very qualities we need to be in that world and not succumb to that harshness. We find our courage, morality, and gentle, nonaggressive actions by clear seeing and acceptance. As we accept what is, we become people who stand in contrast to what is, freed from the aggression, grasping and confusion of this time. With that clarity, we can contribute things of eternal importance no matter what’s going on around us—how to live exercising our best human qualities, and how to support others to discover these qualities in themselves.”
~ Margaret Wheatley “So Far From Home”

The second insight I’d like to share came after our first session. Will invited any of us who could stay on to do so. During that after-session conversation I mentioned that I was retiring. The topic of my school, Inquiry Hub, came up and I mentioned that I was proud of what our team has been able to do, transforming the learning outside of the traditional high school box. And yet, I was disappointed that our little school has not had a greater impact on the rest of the district. Will responded saying something like, ‘Dave, if you were able to do that, you would be a unicorn because I haven’t seen that happen yet.’

That simple statement had an unburdening effect on me. It is sad, yet it comforted me. For the past 13 years my small team of teachers and I have created a very special place for self-directed learners to have some true agency over what they are learning, while still providing an opportunity for them to meet all the requirements they need for their post high school ambitions. It has been an amazing ride, and the fact that it didn’t really spread beyond our walls isn’t something that should weigh on me as I head into retirement. The test of my leadership will show if the school thrives after I’m gone.

Overall, I really enjoyed the sessions with Will, and with the other educational leaders from across BC. I appreciated the experience of sitting in the discomfort of knowing things must change in education and sitting in the predicament rather than cherrypicking shallow solutions and discussing them like we were solving all the world’s problems. I encourage educators to follow Will on his journey to confront education and reimagine schools and join one of his cohorts of educators on similar journeys of discovery.

Thinking Requires Effort

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I recently read a great article by Alec Couros, The Radical Act of Thinking. In it he said, “The challenge isn’t finding the tool anymore. The challenge is avoiding it. We’ve reached the point where AI is the path of least resistance for almost every task.”

And then he concluded with this:

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

Here are a few ways that I see teachers doing this at Inquiry Hub:

  1. Community video or podcast challenges. Part of the challenge might include creating the video in a specific genre, or a meta part of the presentation where students explicitly describe what they have learned.
  2. Personalized inquiry projects. This is offered through a course designed around the process of learning, not content. So it doesn’t matter if a student is learning to code, designing a website, publishing a book, learning a specific skill in art, composing a song, starting a business, or even learning to crochet… the inquiry is designed around students learning skills they want to learn.
  3. Solving problems in class. I’ve questioned the value of homework for over 15 years now. Watching our senior math teacher teach Math & Physics, I see him focusing on the why of questions. I see his students working in pairs and groups to solve problems together on white boards. I see students actively struggling and learning in class, where they have access to support, and the focus is on the struggle and understanding the problem.

Something else that we do is to be careful not to add things to students loads unnecessarily. I can’t tell you the countless times I hear well-intentioned educators say, “You know what would be a good project for your students to do?” Followed by a legitimately good idea. But we are not an alternate school, we are a regular school with an alternative approach. Our students still need to fulfill the entire regular curriculum on top of the inquiries they do for credit. As good as other ideas may be, they become make-work activities that not all students are interested in, and this just invites students to use AI or to feel like the work is just busywork.

Will Richardson asks, “Every time you’re about to implement a new program or pedagogy or technology or initiative or building project or anything else, ask and answer this simple question: “In service of what?””

When we add anything to our schedule, it’s to serve one of two purposes:

1. Integrate curriculum or make the curriculum more engaging. Our students go on to universities, colleges, and technical institutes, and they need the required courses to get there and do well. But the required curriculum doesn’t need to be taught in a linear, boring fashion. When a project is added in class, the intent is to meaningfully cover more curriculum in less time.

2. We add things in service of students. A recent example: For the last 10 years our PAC has fundraised to provide students with FoodSafe every 2nd year. So all our students learn life skills around preparing and serving food. This year our PAC is also providing our seniors with first aid training. The plan is that they will alternate years between FoodSafe and first aid so that every student who goes through Inquiry Hub will have these life skills when they leave the school. Carving out 8 hours of training time over 2 days involves our senior teachers reworking their schedule… in the service of giving our students a life skill.

I won’t pretend that everything we do is AI proof, and that there aren’t lessons and activities where students could avoid thinking using a tool that does the work for them. I also won’t pretend that every assignment and project is ‘in service’ of authentic learning for students. But I will say that we’ve worked hard to make the learning meaningful for students. We provide them with opportunities to work in our community towards common goals, and we provide them with opportunities to pursue projects meaningful to them, focusing on the process of learning… on the struggle, with a perspective that failure and struggle are a path to real learning, not a barrier.

I’ve said before,

“We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.”

This fits with what Alec said above,

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

The secret sauce is in providing the space and time for students to struggle out in the open, facing challenges or learning life skills that they will use. However, you don’t create these opportunities by continually adding things to a student’s plate. Adding more to their plates only invites them to find tools to do the work for them.

Thinking requires effort, and providing students with opportunities to demonstrate that effort in meaningful ways is, in my mind, the project of schools. Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.

Dead links

I started my Daily-Ink blog in China in September 2010, but this name and site came a little later than the original blog. Originally it was created using a blogging platform called Posterous, which you could use via mail. Simply send an email to your personal blog address and it automatically added any pictures, links to videos, and your writing to a post with the email Subject as the title of the blog. Living in a country with a very challenging filter wall, this was a simple way to get a small blog post out without actually having to access a blog or having to upload pictures etc. It was a great tool. But then it died and I just started using WordPress, like I do now. However, I guess I didn’t follow the process to preserve my data and now all the links for images and videos are dead. So this is what my May 2010 archive page looks like.

But it’s not just my blog that’s the issue, it’s the blogs of others as well. The first post seen above, ‘Memorize This’ has links to two other bloggers, Joe Bower and Will Richardson. The link to Joe’s blog just goes to a “HTTP Status: 404 (not found)” page. However the link to Will’s page goes to this:

That is NOT the Will Richardson post I was looking for! I did a search on his updated blog location and found the post, “Is it Really Learning?“. I also went to my post and changed it there so I no longer link to this web-address stealing essay site, instead I link to the correct and intended post.

But realistically, I’m not going to go through my entire blog to do this. Even if I did, I’d probably spend more time trying to replace my own work, and not links to other sites. Because as I shared in my “Goodbye Posterous” post 11 years ago, “I decided to move my little-used Posterous site to this [‘Daily-Ink’] address, as a place to easily upload photos of what I thought would be a daily hand-written journal“, and the only record I seem to have of any of my journal writing is the screen shot I took of my first hand-written daily-ink for that post.

And while I’d love to recover all of these hand-written posts and the videos and pictures that I shared of ‘TIC’ – This is China moments, the reality is that most of them are gone forever.

And that makes me wonder, where will all this go in 20 years? In 50 years? I know I can find my original Pair-a-Dimes blog on the Internet Archive… is that where this blog and my current Pair-a-Dimes blog are destined to go? I guess so. I’ve paid for DavidTruss.com for another decade, but I haven’t paid the web host for that long. How long until this is just a series of dead links? I really haven’t given it too much thought, I just know that for now I plan to keep writing, keep sharing, and keep my links alive a little longer.

BIG Question Institute Webinar on Inquiry Hub

Here is the video from the BIG Question Institute Webinar teachers John Sarte, Al Soiseth, and I did on our school, Inquiry Hub Secondary. (On Vimeo)

Here is the comment I wrote on the webinar recording page on the BIG Questions Institute site.

Thanks for the opportunity to share Will, it was great to connect.
Here are a few links that we were going to share that we didn’t get to on the final slide:
http://Educators.inquiryhub.org – Created for the Cmolik award, which we lost out to Peter Liljedahl, mentioned in the webinar.

And our school YouTube page, which includes the ‘How far will you go’ student created video I mentioned.

And a couple posts I’d like to share… the ‘Teacher as Compass’ post that it turns out you prompted with a Tweet… and my ‘Learning and Failure’ post. We didn’t really get to this in the presentation, but one of the things I’m most proud about at our school is how we teach students to embrace would be failures as learning opportunities from which to grow and improve.

Thanks also to all who attended. Happy to share other resources such as our Inquiry courses.
Dave

As always, feedback appreciated, either here or on the BIG QI page.

Join our webinar this coming Wednesday

This Wednesday, Jan 17 at 4pm PST, please join us to learn about Inquiry Hub Secondary School.  I’m looking forward to connecting with Will Richardson again, I’ve followed him and been influenced by his thinking since I started blogging in 2006. When he suggested connecting for a webinar I knew that I wanted a teacher with me, and who better then my colleague John Sarte. John is a founding teacher at Inquiry Hub, and he has been truly instrumental in developing the vision of our school, and helping us create our unique learning environment. Here are the webinar details, I hope that you can join us!

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FREE WEBINAR: “Inquiry Hub: The Dream, Create, Learn School” with Dave Truss and Dr. John Sarte – Hosted by Will Richardson

Details

Join us for this important overview of a compelling school model that highlights the power of project-based learning.

Inquiry Hub is a small Coquitlam School District (BC) high school that is unique in its approach and delivery. Known as the Dream – Create – Learn school, Inquiry Hub was born out of the idea that students don’t need to spend every minute of their day siloed into individual courses, without any unstructured time. It has evolved into a community of students who work both together and individually to complete the required curriculum while also designing some of their courses and their day around inquiries and passion projects that they want to pursue.

Grade 9’s and 10’s do cross-curricular projects using SCRUM project management, collaborating to get work done efficiently and effectively, and they also take an Inquiry Course designed around developing strong presentation skills and documenting their learning journeys, doing passion projects that they design. Grade 11’s and 12’s construct year-long IDS – Independent Directed Studies courses where they delve deep into their interests.

A key component of the program is DCL time, coined after the Dream – Create – Learn motto, where students are not in a structured class, but rather have unstructured time to work on their class projects, homework and assignments, and/or on their passion projects. Central to this is creating a community of learners who are eager to help each other and who have learned that failure is part of learning. Projects can be too big, too challenging, too overwhelming, but still result in a final product or presentation that exceeds expectations.

Wednesday, Jan 17 – 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST

RSVP now to join us for this important session with principal Dave Truss and teacher Dr. John Sarte.  (You’ll need a free membership to Will Richardson’s Big Questions Institute Community to RSVP and join us.)

Teacher as compass

I love the metaphor of ‘Teacher as compass’; helping students navigate their own learning journey.

Last night I read this tweet from Will Richardson:

I quoted his tweet and responded:

This made me think about the first time I used this metaphor? I went looking on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and it turned out to be 13 years ago: David Warlick’s K12 Online Conference Keynote 2006. David used a metaphor about trains and ‘riding the rails’, and I decided to create a different metaphor:

“A great metaphor here, on the theme of learners navigating on their own, is the teacher as the compass. We point in a direction, (not necessarily the direction that the student is going), and we are a reference point or guide to the learning. As students sail (rather than ride the rails) they must choose their destination, (what they want to learn), and tack and adjust their path as they go… using the teacher as a compass that keeps them on their ‘learning’ course.

Challenges

  • Students and teachers need to know how to sail- they need to be literate in these new ways of learning and communicating. They must be adaptable, willing to course-correct as they go.
  • Students and teachers need to seek out other sailors- communities of learners, online this too could be considered a literacy issue .
  • Students must bring their own sails- and not all sails are created equally, the metaphor can work with sails being competency (skills), motivation, handicaps (the ability to function physically, emotionally, intellectually (not everyone has the same sized sail), and technically (the ‘new’ literacy issue again)).
  • Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.
  • Teachers need to be ‘useful’ compasses- “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the Moon” comes to mind here… also think of using technology for learning rather than using technology to teach. If students steer themselves, they will take us into uncharted water, and we need to be able to point the way even when we may not know the best course of action. (It isn’t about ‘right’ answers, it is about the journey- this goes back to Warlick’s [or rather Toffler’s] idea that learners (students and teachers) need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time.”

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If teachers are focussed on providing content, they don’t need this metaphor because they are essentially taking all their students on the same journey. The teachers are captains with their students on the same boat. However, ‘Teacher as compass’ works very well with inquiry-based learning. Students will do projects where they become more knowledgeable than the teacher in a specific area of content. If teachers are trying to be the content providers for students who are all on different learning voyages, the teachers will fail. However, if teachers are guiding their students, helping them seek out information, and expertise, and supporting them in creating a learning plan… if they are the compass… then they can support students on their individual learning journeys.

Teacher as compass: Teachers provide the true north, and help students find a worthy course… one that will challenge their skills on the open learning seas.

__________

Also posted on Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts 
Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

Give a man a fish…

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll overfish for profit and diminish supply at an alarming rate, teach a man to learn and to critically access a network of all human knowledge and he just might contribute to a solution to over-fishing or to feeding the 7 billion people on this planet.

I came up with this fun little adaptation of an old metaphor in a comment on Will Richardson’s blog post: ‘A new culture of learning‘… thought I’d share it here too:-)

Balance and a river of information

Almost 2 years ago now, I had to seriously shift my attitude around online information. I was gullibly trying to read every tweet in my ’stream’ and diligently trying to keep my unread items on Google Reader at a handful. I saw these as pools of information and I wanted to hold on to the information that came into the pool. It was too much. The shift for me was seeing information as a river. Now, I’ll paddle along the stream, but when I get out, I don’t feel the need to pay attention to the stream of information that goes by. It has been liberating.

The key is finding balance rather than being inefficient as I tried to demonstrate in this 4 slide presentation I did for a Connectivism course:


That was the first assignment for the course and it helped me decide to drop out of the course as I tried to seek balance.

I think I’ve made a few points, but if I could make one more it would be that my life still lacks balance and I still spend too much time online… but 3 years ago I would have ‘wasted’ that same amount of time, or more, watching TV. In the wise words of the Comedy Network’s tag-line… to me my online life is ‘Time well wasted’.

via a comment I made on weblogg-ed.com – ‘The Choices We Make’

~ The idea behind a post I’ve written in my head about 50 times… some day I’ll really expand on this idea on my Pairadimes blog.

The original post for the slide presentation is here: Connectivism, Relationships and Balance. But it is in the comments that the ideas behind the presentation really came out. 

Will Richardson ‘Almost Live’

So it didn’t quite work as planned, but then things seldom do.

I started to watch a recorded Will Richardson presentation and he had a backchannel going. I went to the link, but it had expired. I thought to myself, ‘wouldn’t it be great to start a new chat with some people and have our own backchannel conversation while we watched!’

 I decided to go on Twitter and invite others to join in and watch Will ‘Almost Live’ (#WillAlmostLive) with me. Patrick Larkin in Burlington, MA, USA joined me, Beth RG popped in, and Shannon Smith from Ottawa tried to join us. It was bad timing since although it was 8:30pm here in China, it was the start of a work day back in North/South America, and 11:30pm in Australia, where I seem to have most of my connections. 

Will Richardson said on Twitter: “@bhsprincipal @datruss Let me know what I say. ;)” – It would have been great to actually have him join the back-channel though I’m not sure I’d want to relive my own presentations in that way. 

Problems arose: Although I pre-loaded the video, (my connection here is painfully slow), it still stopped at about the 11 minute mark with over an hour to go. I couldn’t get the video to reload, and Patrick couldn’t get the slide show on Google documents. 

Solutions: Patrick Skyped me in and I copy-pasted quotes and points into the backchannel chat. I listened to Will Richardson’s Minnesota presentation from China, via a Skype call from Massachusetts, while Patrick in Massachusetts was getting the content of the presentation from China. 

We typed rather than talked so that we could listen to Will. We still had a good backchannel conversation. Although it wasn’t quite as planned, it was enjoyable to share in the learning. 

I still think this is a good idea. Why not run a conference session after the conference session? It’s far more engaging to have the backchannel running and sharing thoughts and ideas with digital colleagues. 

Asynchronous to the actual event, but synchronized to other learners. An ‘Almost Live’ presentation.