Getting started on the blog: a how-to!

What if schools could be communities of vibrant intellectualism? What if they could take seriously our knowledge of what humans really are, and our best understandings of what skills and dispositions the world will need in the future? What if a new kind of school could unveil the fascination of the world to students, help them grow expertise, and construct purposeful lives?

We're a group of educators working to forge this new vision of education. We're making schools that cultivate Renaissance people: men and women who find the world interesting, develop mastery in diverse fields, and build lives of meaning. 

We're proud to report that our first affiliated school, the Island Academy of Hilton Head, has just launched, off the coast of South Carolina!

Whilst we're working with Island Academy, we're also planning to launch our second school — tentatively titled Da Vinci — in the Seattle area in Fall 2017. It will start with grades K–2, and gradually grow to K–12.

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We do things differently.

Our vision is centered on the values of love, mastery, and meaning. You may be interested in watching a quick YouTube video we've made to explain what, precisely, we mean by these — and how they can form the foundation of a new vision of education.

If it's our specific curriculum you're interested in, you'll want to take a look at the following pages. A word of warning: our curriculum strikes some as weird! This is probably a good sign.

Arts

Our arts curriculum attempts to immerse students in wonderful works of artistic genius — and from there helps guide students to create such works themselves. You may be interested in our approach to how we plan to engage kids in paintings and sculpture, film, dance, music. You also may be interested to hear how we'll help them master drawing, music, and film themselves.

Reading

Our reading curriculum is at the center of our school — if we don't help students fall in love with reading, we'll have failed in everything! You may be interested in our post about how to begin to help students love to read. More posts on this are on the way.

Science

We idolize the Romantic Movement's moment in science — the mid-1800s, when "natural philosophers" (the term "scientists" came later) saw their study as an adventure for all people, filled with excitement and beauty. As such, we don't have much of a pre-planned science curriculum, but work hard to help kids get deep into the science all around them. See our practices of cooking lunch, dissecting toasters (and other man-made objects), observing animals,

Math

We believe that math should be made much easier than it is — and also much harder! We use JUMP, a guided math curricula that helps all students gain a profound understanding of K-12 math. We also use a tool that Brandon invented — Deep Practice Books — to guide students into wrestling with math puzzles far beyond their current level of expertise.

Related, we also engage kids in coding!

Social studies

The world is made up of stories. Traditional schooling de-emphasizes this, and presents social studies as a mess of terms and facts to be learned.

Big ideas definitely have their place, but the core of history is stories. We're devising "Big Spiral History" — which began as Brandon's master's project — as a K-12 curriculum that engages the whole of the universe's history, starting with stories — first told by teachers, and then retold by students.

We also think it's helpful for kids to expand their view of the world by meeting people in their neighborhood and regularly drawing maps.

Writing

All students can become wonderful writers. We're working on shaping our writing curriculum right now (feel free to poke us to prod us along in posting about it!), but one of the underpinnings of helping kids become good writers is to give them regular experience in being good speakers.

Thinking

Philosophy for Children informs the way we approach everything — and we're making question-posing and answer-hunting part of the daily curriculum.

Thinking is helped along by deep, interconnected knowledge: something that modern schools don't much help to grow. Like a growing number of schools, we'll be using Learning in Depth.

Knowledge is grounded in feeling — which is why we'll use Leitner boxes to allow kids to treasure the greatest things they've learned.

Physical education

Brains are parts of bodies; we think better when our bodies have been moving. Thus, we get kids to move, a lot!

The opposite is also useful: we often think better when we can slow ourselves down. Thus, we train kids in meditation, and set policies that help them get a sensible amount of sleep.

Autonomy / community

We're not ants — humans need independence (and more than most schools provide) to flourish. Yet students also need group community, and adult guidance.

To encourage autonomy, we use a Montessori-inspired practice of independent work time. We also help kids take on independent (anchor) projects, and Learning in Depth projects.

Physical design

Churchill once quipped, "We shape our buildings; thereafter our buildings shape us." How classrooms are designed matters much — they can help us feel, and even help us be more creative. Our classrooms are covered in useful knowledge, including our walls of talking dead people.

Grades

Letter grades (as they're traditionally used) don't work so well. Here are some of our thoughts on how to make a better feedback system for rich learning.

Foreign language

Nature has equipped us with a few ways to learn foreign languages, but schools don't use them. Here are our plans on how to help all students learn languages.

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And a few other things.

We're lovers of Imaginative Education — the educational approach devised by Kieran Egan (and the good folks at IERG). IE holds that humans are built to learn those things that they find interesting — and that virtually everything in the world is interesting! The secret is breaking through the outer layer of boredom. Human cultures, over the millennia, have devised practices for doing just that — schools can use those practices. Brandon is preparing to explain this in a TEDx talk — for an in-depth version of IE (and how IE can be understood as brain science, or as an application of human nature), take a look at this four-part YouTube video.

We think that the burgeoning academic study of human nature has much to offer a new vision of education. We can move beyond the well-worn Traditionalist/Progressivist wars by understanding that learning can be both natural and unnatural, in complex ways.

Ultimate goals

Look: we're crazy dreamers. We're ultimately in this to help mend the world. If you come away from this blog with the idea that we're making schools for the sake of making schools, well, the blog has failed!

If you're interested in learning more about our new kind of school, please don't hesitate to write us! Shoot me (Brandon, the main writer of this blog) an e-mail at brandon.hendrickson@gmail.com.

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Well, I did it: I finally made a helpful introduction to this blog. The above is from our new about us page — feel free to point people to it, if you're interested in forwarding along word of our little education revolution!

Love before mastery

I've recently realized — or maybe re-realized — how useful it can be to put love before mastery.

You'll remember that the three über-values of our schools are love, mastery, and meaning. The order of those three is important: love (i.e. interest, passion, desire) comes before mastery, and supports it.

Want your child to become really, really good at something? Help them fall in love with it first. At least a little.

Kristin and I had forgotten this, I think, a little while ago, when we signed our five-year-old up for a swimming lesson. It didn't take: he was terrified to put his face in the water, and didn't trust the instructor.

Now, a half-year later, our son is clamoring for lessons. The difference? He's spent more fun time in the water. He's come to love the water, and wants to learn how to do more in it. 

Goodness: now, in baths, he borrows my goggles, and sticks his head in the water.

Love comes before mastery.

Now, it's more complicated than that: mastery builds love, too. As educational psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote:

We become interested in what we become good at.

So we shouldn't become simpletons with this! But a helpful, general rule seems obvious:

When we want kids to become great at something, we need to first help them fall in love with it.

Application video for a school entrepreneurship incubator

Oh, the wonders the 21st century affords! A couple days ago I became aware of blankschools.com: a support program for schooling entrepreneurs. 

From their front page:

Schools as they exist today aren't working for anyone — students, teachers or the world they live in. We need radically different school models — and to get there, we need a radically different approach to school model development.

And:

Designing and running a school focused on questioning the assumptions schooling is currently based on is hard work. You shouldn't have to do it alone. Join a cohort of school entrepreneurs who can help push your thinking and be a support network as you all work to design radically different school models.

I think I like these people.

I'll need to know more about how they work, of course, but their deadline for the 2015–16 cohort is today (!), so I figured I'd apply, and wait to find out whether or not I'm accepted to make my decision.

They asked for a 2-minute video, and what I gave them runs 6 minutes. Alas! To quote Pascal: "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." My apologies, []schools folk!

If you've an interest in how we're making our schools, you'll find this interesting! 

And you might find the website of []schools quite interesting. (I do!)

Click the image to see the short video:

I threw the video together (obviously?) but I do have interest in improving my online speaking style. If you've any advice, do please shoot me a private e-mail with it!

The first School for Humans opens Monday!

Let it be official: the first School for Humans will open on Monday! The Island Academy of Hilton Head will start its classes next week off the coast of South Carolina, under the guidance of Lee Rottweiler, my friend and longtime collaborator. Huzzah! Hazooh! [tears up café napkins to throw confetti into the air]

Actually starting poses a whole bunch of puzzles. Practical puzzles.

I like practical puzzles. 

The ones I'd like to pose right now are about how a community of schools might work. (I'm working to open our second school in the Seattle area in Fall of 2017.)

Among these questions: What sort of regularity between schools should exist in our new kind of school? And how much diversity should we welcome (or even court)?

1. What sort of regularity between schools should exist in our new kind of school?

It's useful, I think, to define a core of shared beliefs, and to sketch out some wonderful disagreements.

One shared belief, I think, is what we see as the ultimate purpose of our schools. Lately, I've been using the phrase "to cultivate Renaissance people" to describe that. I've been adding onto that a rewording of our "big three" values: love, mastery, and meaning. Here's what I put those together in my last post:

a kind of school that cultivates Renaissance people: men and women who find the world interesting, develop mastery in many fields, and seek a meaningful life. 

So the first thing we should agree on are our purpose and values.

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Beyond that, however, I think our kind of schools needs to define itself as consciously seeking a careful understanding of human nature, as it applies to students, and building on that.

All educational approaches have an understanding of human nature, though it's typically unstated, and simplistic. We want to make ours better.

Jonathan Haidt writes:

It is impossible to analyze “the meaning of life” in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life. 

Or, I'd add, a meaningful education.

There is an emerging scientific consensus on what human nature looks like. (This, after a few decades of "human nature" being banned from academic discussion.) This work is fresh and exciting: it's linking disparate disciplines, and is helping us see the big picture of life, the Universe, and everything!

There is, however, a trouble in yoking our schools to the science of human nature: there's as of yet not agreement as to all the details of what human nature is (as it applies to students).

Tom Huntington, a reader of this blog, posted an excellent question a few days ago —

who are the experts on what are the “truths” of “human nature”?

I’d really love to hear a clear statement of your views/knowings about what is “human nature” — at least the most basic, fundamental aspects of “human nature” relevant to your mission for starting your school.

The study of human nature is not yet a mature field. In a decade or two or three it will be, but of course we're not going to wait that long.

In the meantime, we can commit to thinking consciously and carefully through how our schools can leverage the innate psychologies of students, and help them build on their deficiencies.

And we can think best by thinking with other — being part of communities that are chewing through the ways in which understanding human nature can help society, such as The Evolution Institute (founded by David Sloan Wilson, out of SUNY Binghamton).

So the second thing we should agree on is to commit to thinking through the science of human nature — something crucial to education, but which few educationalists are presently talking about.

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Beyond that, I'd say we need to agree on some common curriculum elements. Imaginative Education, for example, and Big Spiral History — and perhaps a number of other things.

We already have a lot of these in place. This will, however, always be a bit looser. Some schools in our community, for example, may decide to go not use JUMP Math (which I'm personally incredibly excited about). Exactly what's central and not will have to be up for some discussion.

So, in sum:

• Schools in our community should agree on a few big things — especially purposes and values. 
• We should also agree to address a Big Thing that not that many others in education are thinking through — the science of human nature.
• Finally, we'll find that schools in our community share much of the same curriculum.

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2. How much diversity should we welcome (or even court)?

I think a good way to approach this question is through what I'll dub the David Geary / Peter Gray spectrum. Both are evolutionary psychologists, and both are very interested by how we can use the insights of evolution to improve schools.

A provocative (and productive!) debate between the two of them was chronicled in chapter 14 of The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time (by David Sloan Wilson).

David Geary (whose face graced this blog a few days ago!) is something of an educational Traditionalist. He often emphasizes that there are things we want children to learn that are not pre-prepared by evolution: math, for example. (Geary is a national expert on math education, and was appointed to the National Board of Directors for the Institute for Education Sciences.)

Peter Gray is something of an educational Progressive. He often emphasizes that the school environment is a bad one for learning — made to imitate a factory, rather than any natural human environment. Let kids return to more natural ways of learning (such as practiced by Sudbury schools, which he's a proponent of), and they'll learn better.

Who's right? Well, they both are — and finding creative syntheses of their insights that work in reality is part of what I see us as doing. This is a wonderful debate to have.

Might I suggest ordering a copy of The Neighborhood Project right now? In the meantime, feel free to read a consensus piece they both contributed to (along with David Sloan Wilson): Learning from Mother Nature about Teaching Our Children: Ten Simple Truths.

A new kind of school, human nature, and a re-cap

Hello, Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society! This blog is the idea-generation machine for a small group o' people who are helping found a new kind of school — a kind of school that cultivates Renaissance people: men and women who find the world interesting, develop mastery in many fields, and seek a meaningful life. 

It's grounded in our understanding that yes, there is such thing as human nature, and most approaches to schooling run roughshod over it. 

We're opening The Island Academy of Hilton Head (off the coast of South Carolina) next week, and are looking to open a second school in the Seattle area in 2017.

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If you've landed here from the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society, might I invite you to peruse this blog? And, actually, why don't I give a "best of the best", at least from an evolutionary perspective?

Near the start of this blog, I thought it possible to ground our conception of schooling in an understanding that humans are powered more by unconscious motives than by conscious (drawing on the work of Daniel Kahneman) and that this means that we're not Vulcans — thus, a serious school needs to pay attention to student emotions (drawing on the work of Jonathan Haidt).

I moved into talking about how to end bullying, exploring how we're each born with particular psychologies, but that how those blossom is in part a factor of our surroundings (here drawing on the work of David Sloan Wilson).

In this post, I propose a metaphor: schools are bridges between our ancient human nature and the needs of the future. A new kind of school, I suggest, needs to (1) look to the deep past to see what kids are like, and then (2) look to (our best guesses about) the near future to see how we need to help kids shape themselves, and finally (3) look to the best approaches that currently exist to connect those.

Perhaps the best approach, I think, to connecting human nature to the needs of the near future is "Imaginative Education". Don't let the froofy name mislead you — this is hard-core education that grounds itself in cultural evolution. Imaginative Education (IE) comes from the work of Kieran Egan (Simon Fraser University). I've developed a nutshell explanation:

1. We're not just abstract thinkers — we're feelers, designed to think about what we find interesting. 
2. Almost everything in the K–12 curriculum is really, really interesting, once you break through the crust.
3. Every human culture has had to create methods to "break through the crust". Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we can use those methods: stories, metaphors, opposites, riddles, songs, theories and counter-theories... and more.

I then turned that nutshell explanation into a YouTube video. (I'm working to turn it into a TEDx talk.)

I'll write more about this soon, but I think that IE is something the evolutionary community has been looking for.

Finally, our schools have a three-part focus. As I said before, we're interested in cultivating Renaissance people, who find the world interesting, develop mastery in multiple subjects, and seek a life of meaning. Or, even briefer: we're all about love, mastery (and this note), and meaning (though initially that was called "wisdom").

Oh — as to what being in the schools will actually entail (aka "WHAT OUR IDEAS ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE"), check out the flurry of short posts in June and July of this year (2015).

Anyhoo, browse! Enjoy! And if you're interested, like us on Facebook, to get updates.

Natural vs. unnatural (and why this is a smidgen too simple)

Is this whole natural/unnatural divide simplistic? Yeah. But it's a helpful place to begin — even if we need to move beyond it.

In my last post, I cited a distinction made by cognitive (and evolutionary) psychologist David C. Geary: humans are biologically prepared to do some things, but not others. Things that we're designed to do (walking, singing, telling stories) he calls primary abilities. Things that we're not designed to do (riding unicycles, juggling, Newtonian physics) he calls secondary activities.

This distinction isn't just academic: it lies at the heart of what our schools (any schools!) see as their purpose. In fact, this distinction neatly encapsulates a major divide between two major philosophies of education.

One type of school thinks that learning is unnatural. These schools (let's call them "teacher-centered" schools) think a school's job is to instruct. If schools don't do a good job of directly instructing students (they think), the students aren't apt to learn much.

The other type of school thinks that learning is natural. These schools (let's call them "child-centered" schools) think a school's job is to provide an environment for learning, and then get out of the way. If schools succeed in doing a good job of directly instructing students (they think), the students aren't apt to learn much — because students learn best on their own!

So what is it: is learning unnatural, or natural?

This is a question of human nature. And in my last post, I suggested that, well, human nature is complex. Some things are natural for us, and other things are unnatural. Success in schooling depends (I suggested) on figuring out which is which.

But that's not so simple.

It's not (for example) that art is a primary ability, and math is a secondary activity. Entire subjects don't fall neatly into one camp or the other.

Rather, each subject demands multiple skills. For example, in an English class, students read, write, discuss, reason, empathize, and so on. Each skill may be primary or secondary. 

In fact, it's more complicated than that. Each skill is made up of sub-skills. Writing, for example, is made up of spelling, handwriting/typing, syntax, idea generation, idea organization, and so on.) Each sub-skill may be primary or secondary. 

And in fact, it's even more complicated than that! Typically, a sub-skill isn't purely natural or unnatural. Human nature doesn't usually work like that. There are a few things that we do wholly naturally: breathing, for example. A person raised on a desert island would breathe just fine.

Wel, obviously, schools don't need to teach breathing.

But other primary skills seem designed to be activated and shaped by cultures: dancing, for example. All cultures dance — but it's not clear that a person raised on a desert island would dance by themselves.

So is dancing primary or secondary? Well, it contains elements of both. The urge to shake and jump and wiggle — all in tandem with other people — may be primary. But specific elements of motion (for example, pliés in ballet, promenades in square dancing, and arials in swing dancing) may be secondary.

Why does this matter? Because we need to tap into students' primary abilities, and be prepared to systematically teach secondary abilities.

In teaching dancing, for example (as will be an important aspect of our schools), we'll need to capitalize on young students' desire to shake and jump and wiggle, and on older students' desire to touch each other. (That schools typically ban touching seems a sure sign that they're evolutionarily off-kilter.)

But we won't assume that undirected wiggling will automatically bloom into beautiful dancing. Rather, we'll be prepared to teach elements of more formal dancing from a host of cultural styles — circle and line and ballet, salsa and swing and waltz, flamenco and mambo and Bollywood.

As I said before, we'll start with abandon, and move into structure.

If we don't tap into students' primary abilities, we'll be passing up our greatest resource. This is the mistake that teacher-centered education makes.

And if we don't systematically teach secondary abilities — if we expect them to just grow up naturally — we'll be denying our students the education they're ready for. This is the mistake that child-centered education makes.

Our job — as a new kind of school that takes human nature seriously — is to draw upon primary abilities, and systematically teach secondary abilities.

Next, I hope to explore how this can look in teaching writing.

(Props to David Geary: his categories of "primary" and "secondary" abilities are designed to reflect this messy reality. They're not "pure" categories. It took an earlier debate on this blog — about whether math instruction is "natural" or "unnatural" — for me to realize that. Props, too, to Catherine Lewis, who helped me see that.)

Natural vs. unnatural (and why many approaches to education fail)

Sometimes, when I describe our model of schooling to people, I get the sense that they're fighting to not roll their eyes: a lot of what we're planning sounds so touchy-feely, so romantic. Stories! Drawing! Emotions! Well, okay. But other elements of what we're doing — like our approach to writing and math — are the precise opposite: systematic and feedback-heavy.

Are we contradicting ourselves? No! What we're doing is recognizing something that should be obvious: human nature is complex.

There are certain skills that evolution has prepared us to develop quite naturally. Spoken language is one; walking is another. (Note that we still have a hard time teaching robots to talk and walk — something most two-year-olds excel at.) Educational psychologist David Geary dubs these "primary abilities".

Other examples of primary abilities include making sense of stories, empathy, role-playing, metaphors, puzzling, telling jokes, and spotting patterns. (Fans of Kieran Egan will note that these are all tools in his early-age tool kits.)

There are other skills that evolution has not prepared us to develop very easily. Writing is one; doing complex math is another. (Note that we've had little trouble teaching computers to kill at chess — something that most adults can't do without extensive, systematic training.) David Geary dubs these "secondary abilities".

A crucial point: we need to figure out which category (primary or secondary ability) each academic skill falls into. 

When we find a skill that evolution has prepared kids to do, schools need to get out of the way. And when we find a skill that evolution has not prepared kids to do, schools need to be prepared to teach them systematically.

One of the major troubles with educational debates, I think, is that various educational philosophies don't acknowledge this split. Some approaches to schooling seem to believe that all learning is natural. Put kids in a nurturing environment, this "child-centered" perspective holds, and they'll spontaneously develop the skills we want them to have. I used to hold to this philosophy, until I had the chance to observe it over a few years. It seems to be wrong.

Other approaches to schooling seem to believe that no learning is natural. Put kids in a nurturing environment, this "traditionalist" perspective holds, and they'll won't learn nuthin'. This philosophy also seems to be wrong.

Some things are natural, and other things ain't. One of our basic jobs is to figure out which is which. 

Continuous feedback

A problem:

Feedback is necessary, but terrifying. 

Feedback is crucial for building skill and understanding. A school that takes "mastery" seriously has to not just endure feedback, but embrace it (teachers and administrators as well as students!).

Yet receiving feedback is famously difficult. Every piece of feedback threatens our sense that I'm just fine, thanksverymuch. And if we build lots of feedback into a school and it doesn't work out, school could become Hell.

We need to proceed cautiously, but forcefully.

Our basic plan:

1. We make a ritual in the school: every assignment and production gets feedback. 
2. The feedback should be specific. Getting a "B" is unspecific feedback; getting a suggestion for precisely what to consider doing differently next time is specific feedback.
3. The feedback should be succinct. Being told five things to do differently next time is too much for most people to focus on; being told just one thing is more helpful.
4. The feedback should be a suggestion. Because no one is innerrant, feedback shouldn't pretend to be authoritative; feedback should (usually) be given as advice — "why don't you try this next time?"
5. The feedback should prompt a response. Students shouldn't be expected to take feedback passively; they should respond to it, perhaps commiting to trying it out next time, or explaining why they'll go in a different direction.
6. The feedback should come from the community. Teachers should be wiser than their students (otherwise, why are we teaching?), but they aren't the only sources of wisdom. Suggestions should come from teachers, from other students, and from the student him or herself.
7. The feedback should accumulate. Advice should be collected, and students should be prompted to see if they're incorporating it into their recent projects. (This can serve as an ego-builder: "I may still be struggling, but not with the same old things!")

Our goals:

We hope to...

• Create a culture of mastery.
• Create a culture of embracing criticism. When we hear a kid say, "Sure, I know that this is good — but tell me how I can improve!", we'll know we've succeeded.
• Create a culture of mutual help. When we hear one kid tell another, "I was really impressed by how you've changed in x," we'll know we've succeeded.
• Build resilience. Kids are not these fragile things; they're strong. They don't need to be fazed by criticism. (But the only way to learn that is by dealing with criticism.)

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

• Students scribbing down brief feedback after another student completes a speech, or a piece of art, or a meal.
• A student and a teacher conversing — and maybe arguing! — over the quality of a recent assignment. (When we get a frank but respectful exchange of views, we'll know we've succeeded.)
• Students spending a few minutes each week reviewing previous feedback about (e.g.) essay writing so they can incorporate it into their new essay.

Some specific questions:

• Should we aim for a specific ratio of positive to negative feedback? There's a danger in getting too much negative feedback. There's a danger, too, in getting too much positive feedback. Perhaps it would be best to allow the student to say how what ratio they'd like to receive. (That might make students feel more in control, and thus make them more likely to embrace the feedback they receive.)
• How should we store this feedback? Should a regular assignment be that students copy in their feedback (or a segment of it) into a year-long Google document?
• Should students give teachers feedback? Doing so could help teachers (and thus everyone) improve more quickly. It could demonstrate our respect of our students.

Kids cleaning the school

A short, hopefully provocative query today: Should we have the whole community — faculty and students — take charge in cleaning the school?

A little background:

I'm a devotee of Quora.com — think of it as a "Yahoo Answers" written by people who aren't entirely idiots. Some time ago, someone asked a question like "Why is Japan so free of litter?"

There were a number of good responses, but one stood out — that Japanese schools teach kids to value cleanliness.

I've lost the original post, but here's a similar explanation of how Japanese schools do it: by having the kids do the cleaning. (Yes, even toilets!)

I'll admit that I'm really drawn to this idea, but can't quite explicate my excitement for it. I'd be curious to poll our small community — what do y'all think about having kids and teachers do the cleaning?

Conference feedback: People in your neighborhood

This continues our regularly-scheduled series of feedback I got when I presented on our coming schools at the annual IERG conference. Here's the original post, if you'd like to reference it!

People in your neighborhood

Ask the students who they want to hear from — brainstorm to get possible questions to ask.

Ah, see, I'm seeing that I constantly need to hear the "let students have partial control over this, too!" I believe in it — I just sometimes forget it. Thanks, anonymous commenter!

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Bring seniors into schools, giving them opportunities to share their wisdom (that they may have even forgotten they have).

and

Utilize elders!

For years I've been wondering how our schools can help bridge the youth–elder divide. And then I developed this curriculum piece, but didn't see that it's a way to fix this problem.

Thank you!

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Cross section of adults, especially in a small community.

Fascinating — a totally different way to think about our goals for bringing in adults. I had been thinking in terms of representing different, say, vocations, or religions, or philosophies — but we'll need to consider whether we want our guests to also represent different socioeconomic classes and ethnicities (even if we never say so aloud).

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Enriching people's visits with stories about their professions... and how these professions have had an impact.

I wish I could ask this commenter to explain this more. Do they mean that visitors can share stories about their work lives? Because that's already part of the plan. Or do they mean that stories can be told (by the teacher, possibly) about the history of the profession? (When a hair stylist visits, can we tell the story of where the red-and-white barber pole comes from? Should we set each job in Big History?)

I sort of like that — especially as it's nice to introduce the speaker. Maybe the teacher (and eventually a student) can prepare a 1-3 minute introduction.

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They must tell a story, not so much about work, but about life!

Yes! Though with a proviso that putting the word "must" in becomes tricky — we can't control visitors.

I think I'd be happy if a baseline was "students ask honest questions, and the visitor gives honest answers", and if we use all our wiles to tease out fuller stories.

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Can the kids return the visit? Choose adults they can have a day with in "their" workplace.

Like a Take Your Daughters or Sons to Work Day? Hmm — possibly! The logistics seem difficult, but there's something compelling in that possibility. (Maybe we could just actively celebrate the fourth Thursday of each April, encouraging parents to let kids come to work, and providing a curriculum for kids to do there — things to watch for, questions to ask.)

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This can be a very powerful way of learning — there would need to be a clear template on how to pick these adults (ones who will be fun, interesting, appropriate, who know your learning journey and would make the learning relevant to the students, etc.)

Absolutely correct! At present, I've no idea on how to set this up. Lee, save me!

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My most amazing learning experience ever was a visit to William Head Penitentiary. They put on dramatic productions — storytelling. They shared the true struggles of life.

If we could ever take our kids to a jail or prison, it would be amazing. Simply amazing. It would be a sign we'd succeeded in doing important things with children.

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Another thing (not responding to a comment, now) —

Last quarter, I tutored a college class about finding one's careers. As one of the assignments, students had to pick three potential professions and research them. What sort of education do they require? How much do they pay (in money, and other benefits)? What are the job prospects like for the next 10–20 years?

Going through this with my student, I thought: my goodness, why did I never do this in school?

I just fell into a career. And I've done fairly well for myself, don't get me wrong — but some advanced scoping out of the possibilities would have been wonderful.

My college student did this in a formal way — better still would be to tie informal stories in with big data.

I'm still not sure exactly how we could do this, but just having students visit the U.S. Labor Department's Occupational Outlook Handbook after each visitor comes in could be a strong start.

We can raise our students to understand the broader world of work.

Kids creating songs

My mulling over our song-a-day curriculum has me thinking: what if we had students regularly create their own songs? I'm inspired by this by the band They Might Be Giants, which...

...long maintained a "Dial-A-Song" phone line. Every week from 1983 to 2006, they'd put up a recording of a new song — anyone could call the number and listen to it.

Sometimes the songs were great; sometimes they were awful! The bad emphasized quantity — and out of that came quality.

Could we do the same with our students?

Writing a song can be scary: perfectionism rears its ugly head. Being required to write many songs fixes that. Throw some notes together! Hum a ditty, slap some lyrics on it, and you're done!

We can set the bar very, very, very low: parodies would be just fine. Can't come up with your own melody? Just take the French national anthem and re-write the lyrics to be about your breakfast.

Why am I in love with this idea? (And, to be clear, I am.) A few reasons.

First, this could be educationally wonderful for the other things the kids are learning: instead of just asking kids to create a song about anything, we could ask them to create songs about something they've been learning about.

Within months, the class could produce dozens of songs about the digestive tract, the chemistry of fire, plate tectonics, and the despotic rule of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (or whatever it is that kids will be learning about — which will always be dozens of things).

This positions kids as teachers: they'll need to distill information, and find what's most wonderful in it. Ahhhhhh this would be wonderful.

(This aspect of the idea comes from Kristin, by the way).

Second, this would cultivate creators. This is something I've been kicking around: ours are schools for creators. (Or makers, if that word is more appealing.)

Third, creating songs gives a direct purpose to listening to songs. Especially songs of various genres. We can expect to see little snippets of classical, jazz, and rap show up in student-created songs.

Fourth, creating songs also gives a direct purpose to music theory — learning notation, and tempos, and keys, and things even more complicated.

Finally, creating songs could be really, really enjoyable. About that, 'nuff said.

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An issue that this brings up: do we want all our students to learn an instrument? I think the answer is yes, but my battery's about to run out, so I'll post about this idea later.

Conference feedback: A song a day

More commentary on the commentary! (We're getting Talmudic, here...) All quotes were given at the IERG conference a week and a half ago. To refresh you memory, you might re-read the original post on a song-a-day — or either of our two posts on dancing!

A song a day

Music is so fundamental to our experience, so I love this idea!

Yeah! Since presenting on this idea, I've been noting how much use I make of music to keep myself engaged, upbeat, serious (or frivolous)...

Music is medication. Perhaps that's why we've developed it, as a species. It's unfortunate most schools make so little of it.

Slowing down a bit. Maybe a song a day is too much too fast.

Maybe! Lee, thoughts?

I like the simplicity of saying that some things are daily, and other things weekly — even if we don't always meet that goal.

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Choreography to song

Love it! The more we could integrate it with the dancing curriculum, the better (I assume).

Though I'll admit that I have no idea how to do that. I have some leads on dance instructors in Seattle — Lee, do you have any connections to dance instructors on Hilton Head?

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Watch Ben Zander TED talk (very IE).

Zander's talk is "The Transformative Power of Classical Music", and it's quite worth watching!

Near the beginning, Zander says, "In the classical music world... there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet."

I have to admit — this is going to be something that makes me sound very snobbish — I keep returning to the question of whether our schools can have some primacy on classical music.

Classical feels so different to me — relaxing, restorative. I recall once refilling at a gas station that was playing classical — it was an ecstatic experience; purifying, almost. No other form of music (and I enjoy many different genres) makes me feel that way. And I think I'm not alone.

And this ability of classic to calm seems to be helpful, in a school.

So I'll ask (though I feel nervous about sounding like a snob) — any thoughts on whether classical music could have an outsized role in schools?

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Listening. Listen to sounds of nature. Listen to the voices of many people. In particular, listen to the voices of trained classical singers!

I'm moving toward (I've mentioned this on this blog, I think) an observation-first model of creativity. If you want to cultivate creativity, cultivate observation. I've grounded our realistic drawing curriculum in this, but that's just visual observation. We should develop a parallel track for auditory observation, through music and otherwise. I've got to think about that.

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Individual experience then public, instead of the reverse?

Interesting. This doesn't seem compelling to me right now, but I'll think about this.

Part of my "meh"-ness, I think, stems from the fact that I imagine public listening to be, in large part, private.

I'm thinking that each new song should ideally be played three times. Familiarity brings affection (something advertisers have long known). Each time, though, the classroom should be otherwise absolutely silent, so everyone (even the most ADHD of us) can feel safe in focusing entirely on the music.

With the song the only thing that anyone can hear, listening corporately seems a lot like listening privately.

(Lee, some notes: if we want to make auditory experience so crucial to our schools, we'll need to invest in sound-dampening technologies. If we can ever design our own buildings, that'll mean soundproofing, and classrooms that aren't just separated by folding walls. In the short-term, however, that might mean white-noise generators, of either the electronic or waterfall-y varieties.)

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Did this with The Outsiders. The students chose characters and developed albums with song lyrics and visuals. Works very well.

Oh, jeez — there are probably loads of great ways to go deeper into the literature or history curriculum through music! How'd I not think of this? Thanks, anonymous commenter! I'll be on the lookout for more of these.

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Oh, by the way!

I've been pondering how we should choose songs. Again, we want to bring in songs that (1) are super-diverse and super-high-quality, and (2) songs that are personally meaningful to teachers. Obviously, there'll be a good amount of overlap between those two categories — but!

I think I have an idea. It turns out there a lot of lists attempting to pick the best music of every genre. The most helpful (for our purposes) list that I've found may be 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, by NPR music reviewer Tom Moon. I haven't yet read it (I'm caravaning around the Midwest at present), but it looks pretty danged good: the cover indicates it includes jazz, reggae, oldies, opera, folk, soul, and more. (A perusal of the table of contents points to traditional Mongolian singing, rap, funkadelic, rock, and, well, take a look! Here's a very positive review on NPR.)

So here's my thinking: we alternate days. One day, a song chosen from the book; the next day, a song chosen by each teacher. Some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic suggests that between kindergarten and twelfth grade, students will be in our school for about 2,000 days.

Again, there are 1,000 songs (well, "musical pieces") in Tom Moon's book. That means it's about to as close to even as we could ask for.

Alternating like this would also allow for school unity (important, as building a culture requires shared music, art, stories, and other experiences) but also class unity (important, for the same reasons).

Lee, your thoughts?

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I've been working on another idea that stems from this, but I'll post it separately. (It's that cool!)

Books, computers, and pancake people

David Brooks has a thoughtful column on the different mental skills that are constructed by online learning and by book learning. I appreciate the column because it avoids the typical frame of this discussion: which is better? Is Google making us stupid? What he points out (quite reasonably, I think) is that books and online browsing are different, and we should be quite clear about how. I highly recommend everyone give it a peek.

At the end of the article, he refers to a quote by the playwright Richard Foreman. He doesn't, however, actually give the quote. It's one of my favorites (I've committed it to memory).

I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense, and cathedral-like structure of the highly educated and articulate human personality — a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally-constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

But today I see within us all the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self — evolving under the pressures of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A self that needs to contain less and less of a repertory of dense cultural inheritance — as we all become "pancake people", spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Though I'd expand "the entire West" into "the entire world", I think this quote really gets at part of what I'm trying to accomplish with our schools — Lee, feel free to demur!

(The photo above is of Foreman, who is not a pancake person.)

Conference feedback: Making lunch together

More feedback (& my commentary) from my presentation at the IERG conference last week! For the original posts on our (crazy fun) practice of making lunch together, see this long initial one, and this pithier one.

Making lunch together

My own young adult children can not cook thanks to my control-freakish nature! My bad. I wish I could remedy that by turning back the clock.

Ha! That makes perfect sense.

Perfect sense, I mean, because teaching kids to cook takes time, and is dangerous. It takes time (not to mention saintly patience) to teach kids to cook. And when you leave them to their own devices in the kitchen, there's always the chance they'll burn the house down.

Our society has seen wisdom in allowing professionals to take on a similar task: teaching our children to drive. It's time-intensive, and boy, is it scary.

My hat's off to parents who choose to teach their own kids to drive. But for the rest of us, there are driving instructors.

The same thing makes sense with cooking, I think. Only better — once the kids learn to cook with some skill, they can cook together with their parents at home.

Hot dang!

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Cultural content: gyoza, dumpling, etc. Could lead into history...

Yes, absolutely! (How fun, too, to not just learn about the culture the food comes from, but the history of the food in that culture.)

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Many kids don't know certain foods.

Y'know, I forget about this. There's more low-hanging fruit than I'm prone to acknowledge: how much fun will it be just to introduce kids to, say, sorbet? Or a scone? Or a wild rice soup?

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Stories about how spices have affected history...

Yes!

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YES! YES! YES!

Yes!

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Food sensitivities, religous restrictions, etc.

Man have I thought a lot about this. The conclusion I've come to is that we'll need to mostly handle this on a case-by-case basis.

(The following thoughts apply to our future school outside Seattle — I won't try to speak for Lee and his school on Hilton Head. Different cultures call for, unsurprisingly, different food norms!)

Since we're taking seriously the ability of food to knit together, community, our reflexive move should be to be as inclusive as possible: if one student can't eat peanuts, then we should avoid peanuts in our meals. I presume there will be exceptions to that — times when we'll make a dish, but serve it on the side, so everyone can participate in the main meal.

As a general rule, I think we should de-emphasize meat. When we prepare it, it should be sourced from a farm that we're happy to have our kids visit. (Whatever the other virtues of industrial meat production, it serves to distance people from their food. We want to war against that.)

Lee, your thoughts?

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Time.

This was a point that participants made repeatedly: how will we ever have time to do all of these fun curricular things, if we're making food every day? Some participants were quite pessimistic on our ability to pull this off; others were quite optimistic. I appreciated hearing both sides of that.

Lee, here are my thoughts as to how we need to approach the "we're trying to squeeze an ocean into a swimming pool" problem.

1. A lot of these fun curricular things are done by individual students, during their independent work time — not as a whole class, together. So students will do some of them daily, but others perhaps weekly — or even less frequently than that.
2. We can have students form teams, and take turns making lunch. One team can make the food, another team can prepare the table, another team can clean up afterwards. This'll limit the time that any one group spends on lunch.
3. We should guide students to get faster, as they gain experience. I'm not thinking about "fast-food" speed — that's too quick to get kids to think about the chemistry and biology of what they're doing — but a faster pace than they otherwise might fall into. Speeding up could be particular help toward guiding students into a flow state. (Imagine this: cooking lunch as a group flow state. Oh happy experiment we're embarking on!)
4. We should make sure that our heavy skills-building periods are intense. I've heard this from many homeschoolers, and as a tutor I can confirm it: when students want to learn, and the teacher is prepared, a lot of learning can happen very quickly. In order to justify these other curriculum aspects that could be maligned as "froofy" (cooking, handwriting, place-study, people in your neighborhood…), we need to guarantee that the academic core is strong. (Measuring student progress will be useful here.)
5. Lee, how long will your school days at Island Academy be? With our Seattle-area school, I'm interested in looking into a longer school day. (Especially if we can abolish/restrict homework.)

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More land-based cooking: take part in a hunt, field dressing, skinning, prep, & cooking/smoking, etc. Bridge traditional methods with modern culinary practices.

Whoa. I'm having a hard time imagining pulling this off. (I can only imagine a mother in our office screaming "WHAT DID YOU TEACH MY SON TO DO TO A SQUIRREL?")

But: I love it. I agree that, at least theoretically, this would be a very good thing to do with kids (at least those who aren't ethical vegetarians).

As I continue to mull over this, I wonder if there are a few halfway-steps that we could definitely do:

• Have kids grow some of their food. (I didn't mention this at the conference, but it should become a very important part of our school.)
• Collect wild mushrooms. (Dangerous if we don't do it right, so we should do research, and then go out with an expert.)

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Can kids choose what they make?

Boy, how did I not think of this before? Yes, they should have a voice in this. It shouldn't be a totally free choice on their part (for one reason, part of our purpose is to take kids outside of their comfort zones), but they should be part of the steering committee for what we're preparing in future weeks and months.

Lee, how can we allow students choice in what foods we'll be eating?

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All right, that's it for now. I'll be going camping for the next few days (for the record, we're bringing along our own industrially-prepared food!), but when I come back, I'll be hashing through the feedback I got on our Song-a-day curriculum, and our People in your neighborhood curriculum.

And then, I'll actually start talking about new things!

Conference feedback — Big Spiral History Stories

Continuing to share and comment on the feedback I received at the delightful IERG 2015 conference! For the original posts I've made on our Big Spiral History (BSH) curriculum see these posts on the scope and sequence of BSH, and these on the actual story-telling.

Big Spiral History Stories

Kids need these, because they long for heroes.

Huh — I actually hadn't brought "heroes" into my thinking of the BSH stories. Which is funny, because I've thought a lot about the need for heroes (and the dangers of heroes) in the curriculum.

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All right, I'll think about this as I actually begin to make these!

History from whose perspective? Perhaps you should do a change in context — e.g. the colonial vs. the aboriginal perspective.

Yes yes yes! Brilliant, beautiful. I had already been thinking of things like this, but hadn't quite landed on this so neatly. I'll generalize this idea:

When we're telling a story of a struggle between peoples, tell the story first from one side, then from the other. 

I've done something like this when teaching American history — I've had my high school classes read a very liberal book (Howard Zinn's People's History) at the same time as a very conservative book (Paul Johnson's History of the American People). For each historical period — slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, etc. — they've gotten both perspectives.

This is good — great, really — but it's not the same thing as what this commenter suggests: I had my classes engage different ideological perspectives, but not different participant perspectives.

I suspect engaging different ideological perspectives may be better done with older kids (though now that I say that I'm not so sure). Engaging different participant perspectives can be done when kids are quite small.

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Why do we teach history?

My usual stump speech:

History isn't a subject, it's the subject. All the subjects are history, to some extent: math and science are the guided re-discovery of ideas that were first mastered by the ancients; art and literature and music are guided encounters with what past people created.

So everything we learn in school in some way comes from history. The difficulty is to understand them all together: to get the big story.

That is: history allows us to understand how all our studies fit together.

Of course, it's not just that we study things that come from the past: we live in a world shaped by the past. Faulkner (I believe) wrote, "The past isn't dead — it's not even past." The things that bedevil us — the craziness of modern parenting, religious conflict, environmental destruction — are just slivers of much bigger story.

That is: history allows us to make sense of everything we encounter.

Also — crucially! — history can be fun. It's fun to enter the heads of other people, especially ones whose minds were shaped in contexts so different than our own.

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Who is telling the story?

Initially, the teacher (with help from me, who'll be crafting a "here's some material to tell this story from" kit for each story). Then, after the story has been told, the students take it on themselves, as an activity in their independent work time.

We are storied into existence, our sense of meaning derives from the narratives our forebearers laid out for us. Consider the ethical dimensions of the stories to tell & re-tell. They are the foundations of reality.

Focus on ethical choices — will do! I love it.

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Whose story is important?

An epic question!

I suppose the answer is something like "everyone's, but some stories are more important than others." That might sound fighty, but I just mean it to state the obvious. To pick an easy example, my story is not as important as, say, Mohandas Gandhi's. (And if you disagree, well, thanks!)

Gandhi's story is more important because it changed so many other people's stories. So there's one metric for how important a story is: how many other stories did it change?

That's helpful, but educationally it's not enough. One goal for our history curriculum is to understand how the world has been shaped, but another is to understand something of the wild diversity of humanity. So another criteria of inclusion will be whether a story gives insight into minds different from our own.

"Diversity" has become a flashpoint in the culture wars, which it's sometimes (tragically) been flattened into "ethnic diversity".

Ethnic diversity is important, but it's not the only important diversity. Our history stories should also include religious diversity (Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and seculars and Zoroastrians…), ideological diversity (conservatives and liberals and socialists and fascists…), personality (extroverts and introverts and sociopaths and altruists…), economic (rich and poor and middle class…), social (rulers and outcasts and serfs…) and a flurry of other considerations. (I wrote up a list of all of these at some point, but I'm not sure I can locate it again!)

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The following are from the same commenter:

Love this idea because I've seen from experience how much more students remember from stories. Things to think about:

• How will you train teachers so they are comfortable doing this?

I don't know. (Great question.) I'm currently looking into curricula that train people to become storytellers. (I assume that virtually anyone can become a great storyteller.) I think this will be a large part of our teacher training.

How wlil you ensure there is enough of a debrief that students know it was more than just a fictional story (historical empathy)?

Wow — hadn't thought of this at all! I'm not sure — Lee, let's be on the lookout for opportunities to talk about the truth value of these stories (which will get complicated).

How will you ensure the "stories" are historically accurate (not embellishing for dramatic effect — which is what students end up remembering)?

Hmm — I know how I do this, but I haven't thought about how to pass along my convictions to other teachers. A very helpful question!

This is all made more complicated by the next question.

Some clarity on history vs. story?

You might expect that, in telling history stories, we'll hew to the facts. No make-believe! We'll only tell things that we have good reason to believe actually happened.

I, too, once assumed we'd do that.

We're not going to.

At present, I'm planning to include a number of mythic stories in Big Spiral History: for example, the Iliad and the Mahabarata.

I'm doing this in part because it's hard to find historically accurate stories from the ancient period: so much of the best stories are fictional.

But a larger reason I'm willing to mix historically accurate and non-historically accurate stories is because it allows us to neatly avoid some impossible-to-navigate choices when teaching religions. Did Abraham exist? Scholars disagree. If we limited ourselves to teaching accurate historical stories, we'd have to have an opinion on the existence of Abraham. No thanks.

Saying "this is a story that people have told for thousands of years, opinions vary" allows us to duck out of a debate that can only hurt us.

And there is, also, a pedagogical reason I'm wiling to mix historically-accurate and non-historically-accurate stories: it gets students wondering what's true, and what's not.

To some important extent, it's not my job as an educator to settle these issues, because that rips a crucial task away from the students.

I'm very open to persuasion the other way on this topic, by the way. What are y'all's thoughts?

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Are we losing contextual recitation and a sense of "time" by swapping characters, etc.?

This refers to my statement that, when students re-tell stories, one of the fun things they can do is swap out characters (for example, Gilgamesh for Pericles).

Short answer: yes! By swapping out characters, students will be losing the sense of how a specific character fits in their historical story.

Long answer: no! Switching characters (I suspect) can call attention to how different characters do fit inside their contexts.

For example, swapping out Aristotle (who asserted that some were naturally born as slaves) for Gandhi (who fought to end the caste system) could — at least I hope — get students to recognize how dependent our beliefs are on history.

Or maybe I'm wrong? Maybe a student wouldn't naturally see this? Hmm — I suspect that's right. There really is a danger to lose the sense of history by doing this.

So I propose that, when we have students do this work, we prompt them to consider exactly this question, and give them lots of guidance in answering it!

Thanks, commenter!

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Some stories can be very brief — just give a hook!

Thanks! Because of this, I won't insist on four-day stories for everyone — I'll be more bold in spending those four days on a sequence of related characters.

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Tomorrow, I'll share the feedback I got on Cooking lunch together.

Conference feedback — public speaking

I'll continue to post about the wonderful feedback I got from participants at the IERG Conference this last week. (Note: If you're interested in our school, you'll want to consider coming to next summer's conference — held in Vancouver, B.C., the first few days of July, 2016.) The following are written comments I got after presenting our ideas about cultivating public speaking superpowers in our kids.

Public speaking

It might be interesting to have another perspective to public speaking… read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain. There's a TED talk, too.

Ah, I've been wanting to read this book for years, and am now one step much closer! Thanks, anonymous wise commenter!

I'll say this for now: I think that getting all students skilled at public speaking would be even more useful for introverts than for extroverts. The typical extrovert can pick up public speaking abilities — and might even be prone to, just in the normal course of her life. The typical introvert, however, might rather be eaten by eels than stand in front of a crowd. And yet (as Susan Cain found out, once she rocked the TED stage) the benefits for being able to do so can be tremendous.

I should still, however do what our commenter suggested: re-think the whole question of public performance from the perspective of an introvert. (By the way, we endeavor to build our school on neurodiversity — extroverts and introverts; calm people and ADHD wall-crawlers; empaths and people on the autism spectrum. And there are a lot of anti-neurodiversity assumptions built even into progressive, "whole-child" education — such as that kids should always be working in teams.) We need to pursue this carefully.)

One-minute speeches on pre-determined topics & working up to impromptu speeches (pick out of a hat).

Yes! Let me re-state that more generally: we should work from a pre-designed speaking curriculum that starts easy (and fun), and only gradually builds in difficulty. Toastmasters has a children's division — Gavel Clubs. They start with games. I've been meaning to snoop around their curriculum — Lee, count on me to report back to you soon on what I find!

(Oh, by the way — it actually can be easier to work up to pre-planned speeches — the opposite of what our wonderful commenter suggested. Planning is stressful, and imagining yourself on the stage, even moreso. That's the way it works for most adults, anyhoo — I'll check to see if the same is true of kids.)

Will it include debate? drama? great speeches of the past? (e.g. Martin Luther King's "I Had a Dream")

See, this is why it was so worthwhile to float these ideas in front of clever people — yes, we should totally design debate and drama into this! And great historical speeches! (In fact, I think savoring great historical/literary speeches could be a good way for us to cultivate a culture of good speaking.)

Right now, I have no idea how to do this, but it's tucked away in the back of my mind. Lee?

Does helping each child become a good public speaker select against 'introvert' qualities (which can be very important) or would there not be any direct conflict… hmm...

Wow — wow. I'll take this question into my reading of Cain's book (and, what the heck, my re-watching of her TED talk, later today.)

How to resist powerful "beautiful" public speakers (e.g. Hitler and his future heirs).

Yeah — I like this! Arming oneself with rhetorical abilities helps us see through others' rhetorical abilities. "Defensive public speaking".

This next one was written in response to the last:

Should the world be run by people who can move a crowd...

Ah! If someone changes the world to make this no longer true, then I vow to consider taking public speaking out of the curriculum!

Dale Carnegie's program on public speaking might be a useful resource. Also Toastmasters for activity ideas?

I've just added Carnegie's book (Stand and Deliver) to my library queue! Thanks! And, as a proud Toastmaster (really, I believe in the power of anyone to become an amazing speaker because I'm in a Toastmasters group who routinely pulls this trick off), I'm excited to bring what we do to kids.

Love the idea of giving students life skills — this will definitely set them up for success.

Agreed! And "success" as defined a whole lotta different ways, way beyond the workplace. (I've become a much more confident person in the last few years, and I suspect that's due in large part to Toastmasters.)

No matter how many times you perform on a stage, there always seems to be a little fear when you step onto that stage...

This commenter is right — for most people, at least. (A few people really do seem to entirely lose their fear, but they're in the minority.) I overspoke when I presented, saying something like "students can lose all their fear". I'll try to stop saying things like that. The general idea, however, really is true, and powerfully so: we can make the horror of speaking (so bad it detracts from the speaking, even when it doesn't debilitate the speaker entirely) extinct, once and for all.

TeachersPayTeachers.com — excellent unit with TED talks on public speaking.

I think the commenter is referring to this unit (I've just e-mailed the person I believe wrote that to make sure). I'll look into it!

In any case, this comment suggests two things to me —

1. We can learn a lot about public speaking from TED talks — both speeches that are about public speaking, and all the other speeches. We can even learn from speeches that are done poorly — in fact, we might be able to learn more from poorly-done speeches! It suddenly strikes me that we should make a plan to bring lots of TED talks into the school week. I do my daily boring 7-minute workout (the link is to a NYTimes article) while watching a TED talk — we might similarly pair up something dull with that.)
2. We should consider encouraging our teachers to make their lesson plans public, as this website allows them to do. Eventually I'd like to publish whole giant sets of what we teach in a special site that we give for free to the world — but in the interim, I wonder if we want to encourage teachers to do this for private money. It'd be a way to (1) get these lessons out to the world, and (2) get our teachers to polish their curriculum. If we do this, we'd need to explicitly work out the weird legal situation having to do with the ownership of the curriculum — it partially belongs to the school (because we'll be developing the broad strokes of it) and partially to the teacher (because they'll be refining and personalizing it). Anyhow, that's something to think about.

Do all students need to become public speakers?

Oh, a powerful question! I think that the limited answer is "no", and that the expansive answer is "yes".

No, not all students need to become public speakers in the professional sense. "Public speaker" is a particular job that one can put on a business card. There's a limited need for that sort of person.

But everyone can benefit from having the skills that being able to speak publicy brings. Public speaking brings confidence (at least to those who were scared of it before). It brings the power to clarify: to prune down a thicket of thoughts into a single message that anyone can follow. (It actually might do this better than writing, which can afford to be more complex than speaking.) It brings presentation skills: how can you shape your body to express certain emotions? How can you shape your voice? How can you connect, or disconnect, with your eyes? It even brings (or supports) one of the most powerful skills: story-telling.

It strikes me, actually, that all the skills in Egan's Mythic toolkit could be aided with students' ability to communicate verbally to a crowd.

Tomorrow, I'll share and respond to comments on our history curriculum!

Wonderful feedback from a wonderful conference! (Question-posing)

I attended the glorious IERG (Imaginative Education Research Group) conference these last few days, where I presented a workshop on some of the curriculum practices that I've been posting to this blog! After presenting our ideas to about a dozen wonderful people, I asked them to scribble their radically honest feedback on some posterboards I scattered around the room. The transriptions of their comments (with some grammar corrections and clarifications) are beneath the jump!

Question-posing / Answer-hunting

Big questions about cosmology bridged with traditional stories & narratives.

I think this commenter is saying "incorporate many cultures' stories about the beginning of the universe into your Big Spiral History curriculum, and use those stories to ask the questions that matter!" If I'm interpreting this rightly, then check! We're doin' it!

Questions are so important, but you can have a question on some "content". So, productive questions are generated in the "quest for some content". So I question making question posing an independent period.

Ah, I love this! Of course we do want kids to be asking questions throughout the school day — in math and history and everything! There's some danger that other people (or even the kids, and future teachers) could interpret a separate question-posing period as meaning that we shouldn't ask questions thoughout the learning experience.

Any thoughts on how we should delineate this?

Philosophy for Children.

Yes — and actually, I attended the semi-annual international Philosophy for Children conference earlier this week! Earlier I had posted that we wouldn't have a special P4C (oh, we educators and our acronyms) period — that we'd rather infuse it through the day — though now I'm wondering if that's wise. Maybe we should have a period a few times a week that just aims at philosophical conversation. Or maybe we should infuse our fiction curriculum (which I've yet to post on) with philosophical pondering.

"What questions did you ask today?": an alternative for parents to ask when their kids come home from school, instead of "What did you do in school today?"

OH MY GOSH YES! This is great way of engaging parents into the educational process!

An interesting question comes from this: should we encourage students to take their commonplace books home, or to not take them home?

At some point Skype an expert... from anywhere! After kids get great questions ready!

Yes! Why didn't I think of this?!

Imagine that kids had gotten interested in what fire is. Though this is a simple question, it's doesn't have a simple answer (or, at least, its simple answer is not at all intuitive, and requires an in-depth understanding of a lot of chemistry).

The kids shouldn't ask an expert when they're just starting to explore the question. First they should debate the question among themselves and parents, then they should look for explanations in books, and maybe finally they should look for online sources (this video may be the best on the web).

Only after they've gone through all that, and continue to discuss the matter, should we bring in an outside expert. And imagine the questions the kids would have at that point: questions about real chemistry, asked with an understanding with what the "book answer" says, and with a understanding that they don't understand what it means.

Our grade schoolers may be able to ask more scientifically-brilliant questions than undergraduates.

Maybe I'm being too optimistic: we'll see. But I think we can use teleconferencing to help our kids attain a level of understanding far, far beyond what most K-12 students are able to even imagine.

If asking an expert turns out to be as powerful as we hope it is, we might want to cultivate a small number of experts with whom we have regular calls — maybe once a month, for 15 minutes or so. (I'm imagining a chemist, a historian, a mathematician, a biologist, an engineer, and so on.) We could award those experts a teaching honorific — something for them to feel pride in, and put on their C.V.

Instructions/Background on how to develop a good question or just go with intrinsic abilities and develop along the way?

Great question — I think the answer is to start with kids' skill in asking questions, and tease out an art and science to asking better questions.

There are a few frameworks I think we'd be wise to consider — The Right Question's framework most of all. (We should probably collect a list of potential frameworks.) There might be wisdom in having a framework ready to bring in shortly, as soon as we can identify the ways in which our students' questions are being stymied.

T'morrow, I'll post on the responses we got from the Public Speaking curriculum.

People in your neighborhood

A problem:

Kids are alienated from their local communities. They spend their time in school, so don't know what it's like to be an adult. Much of what they understand comes filtered through the media.

Schools can be focal points for bringing together a community. They can be places where a judge shows how to judge, and a manager shows how to manage, and a welder shows how to weld, and a barista shows how to bariste, and a congresswoman shows how to congress.

Typically, however, schools don't pull community in so much as shut it out. 

We can solve this.

Our basic plan:

1. On a regular basis, we invite in a community member willing to answer student questions about their job, their religion, their life philosophy, or just their experiences.
2. We help students prepare questions, which they will have the responsibility of asking.
3. We develop traditions to set the guest at ease, and help them have a wonderful time: we're advertising the school to them as much as they're advertising their lives to us!
4. We encourage an "ask me anything" atmosphere of question-asking, but at the same time train kids to be respectful.

Our goals:

We hope to...

• Expand possibilities — in professions, in philosophy, in religion, in life choices.
• Limit possibilities! (If we hear a student say, "Oh, I don't want to be a dentist/lawyer/teacher after all," we'll have done real good in the world.)
• Multiply weak ties — that is, the connections students have with people who are outside their own groups. (It's been demonstrated that students who have few weak ties have more difficulties in moving up in socio-economic status.)
• Have a lot of fun. People are interesting! We're vectors of interest — much more so than the textbooks some schools center on.

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

Our students asking meaningful questions to a guest — say, a bailiff, or a baker, or a banker, or a bartender, or a bassoonist, or a biologist, or a bishop, or a boatmaker, or a bodyguard, or a bookkeeper, or a bouncer, or a bricklayer, or a businesswoman. (Thanks to wikidot for help with that list!)

Some specific questions:

• How do we set guests at ease? We shouldn't, for example, have the guest stand at the front of the room to be stared at. Nor should we make them begin the discussion (unless they want to). I presume we should tell them what to expect before they come, and then once they show up, help kids meet them at the door, and introduce them to a few others students in the class. Maybe we should give them a fancy "guest strawberry lemonade"! (The kids could make it. It could be delicious!)
• At what stage can we get students to do the inviting? This is a great chance for students to practice the art of writing great e-mails (so, so hard!), and learning to work with adults. Really, the more we can train the kids to be in charge of this, the better!
• How can we connect these visits to the rest of our curriculum? 
• Should we create a long list of potential community members who'd be willing to stop by? Anything to make this easier would be great. We might also want to have a very regular schedule (say, every other Thursday, at 2pm) so very busy community members could plan their visit months in advance.
• How often? Every week? Every other week?

Public speaking

A problem:

Being able to speak to groups of people is a superpower.

People, however, are terrified of public speaking. This phobia needn't be — schools can cure it.

Our basic plan:

1. Public speaking will be built into our curriculum. Our students will have opportunties to regularly plan out talks and share them with groups.
2. At first, the focus will be on getting comfortable, and having fun. We can do that with speaking games.
3. Over time, only after public speaking ceases to terrify, the focus will move to improving the quality of speaking.
4. With a teacher, each student will draw up a personalized list of sub-skills they'd like to play with. (For example, "What should I be doing with my hands?")
5. Before they speak, students will write out what particular sub-skill they'll be experimenting with for that speech.
6. After they speak, students will get (and give) limited, specific feedback to help them evaluate how their experiment worked.
7. Video can also be involved. (Watching yourself perform on video is powerful, but few do it because it's so scary. At some point, we can help normalize that.)

Our goals:

We hope to...

• Help students stop being scared of public speaking.
• Help students get really, really good at public speaking.
• Help students actually enjoy public speaking.
• Give students opportunities in the community to use public speaking.

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

If you walked in on a random day, you might see a student giving an animated, short talk to other students about a question they've been commissioned to answer, or a book they'd like to recommend to the group, or a history story they'd like to imaginatively tell, or something odd that happened in their lives.

You might also see public speaking games being played, acclimating kids to speaking publicly, and getting them to experiment with specific sub-skills.

If you came to our end-of-year Learning in Depth or Independent Project presentations, you might see students, dressed up and on a darkened stage, giving short, practiced talks to a room full of adults from the community.

Some specific questions:

• Is this too deliberate practice-y? Too hard-core-skills-development? (I'm a deliberate-practice-in-public-speaking nut, so I'm sensitive that what I consider sensible can be far out of the mainstream!) The secret is to make it fun (and not scary) before going so strong on skills — the kids have to crave useful feedback before we give it to them. And that may take a couple years. (It took me about a year and a half of being in Toastmasters to seek that out.)
• Do we want a list of possible sub-skills in public speaking that students can choose to work on? (Things like vocal variety, coherence of ideas, storytelling, stage movement, hand placement, eye contact, and so on.) Because I know a number of people who could help me plan that out!
• How can we use video to help kids improve? Video can be wonderful here — especially if we give kids the opportunity to speak for a minute, then instantly review what they looked/sounded like from the audience's perspective. (This is key: I once heard a stand-up comic giving advice to public speakers. He said, "If you're not willing to watch yourself speak, why are you asking us to?") It makes me wonder if we should try to have a sound-proof-ish side-room set up for speaking & music practice, during the independent work time.
• How can we use video as a reason to do public speaking? I'm thinking that we could make, say, a YouTube channel where kids present some of the cooler parts of our curriculum — a "cooking with kids!" series, a "Big Spiral History" series, a "horrifying math problems that I love" series, and so on.
• How do we bring in personal storytelling? I've focused here on academic speaking, but I'm thrilled by The Moth, where people tell personal stories. It seems like if we can help kids become good at mining their own lives for meaning, and shaping that meaning to spread to other people… well, we'll go to Heaven when we die!
• At some point, we'll want to hook individual kids up with professional speakers, to get feedback. Some of that (all of it?) can be done over video. That's a while in the future, but we'll want to be looking for peeps now.
• How do we create a culture of valuing great public speaking? How can we bring in examples of great speeches? Do we want to have kids reflect on what makes those speeches good? For example, if we bring in TED talks to our curriculum, we can have kids fill out an evaluation form. (I, um, actually do this when I watch TED talks, public speaking geek that I am!)
• How can we help all our teachers become excellent public speakers? This whole curriculum rests on the ability of teachers to be great public speakers. Happily, public speaking really is a skill that anyone can develop — but our teachers will have to want to. Do we foresee challenges in this?

Dissecting technology

A problem:

We're surrounded by machines made by human brilliance, but we don't experience them as brilliant — we experience them as alien and inhuman and infuriating.

But machinery is wonderful. It can be understood perfectly, and exploring machinery can be exhiliarating, and wonder-provoking.

Outside of shop class, schools don't do much of this.

Our basic plan:

1. Once a month, each of our classes will pick a technology — toasters, for example.
2. They'll make a prediction as to how the device works, and write those down (perhaps publicly, on our chalk wall.)
3. The students will try to figure out how it works: they'll shake it, draw it, bang on it, dissect it, and probe it with questions.
4. Those questions that elude even the class's best attempts to answer, the teacher may prepare a lesson on.
5. They'll try to re-assemble it. They might even try to build another one, from spare parts.

Our goals:

We hope to...

• Help students understand how the world around them works.
• Develop a habit of thinking: how do things work?
• Nurture a (true) conviction that our students can understand anything technical they put their minds to.

If you walk into our classrooms, you might see:

If you enter one of our classrooms, you might spy a student pressing gently on a toaster's exposed spring coils with a pencil, to see how they work. You might also stumble upon students arguing over how something works.

Some specific questions:

• How do we, erm, prevent kids from wounding themselves? Machines can hurt. How do we want to handle safey?