Modern Learners show

Modern Learners

Summary: Education is at a crossroads, and it’s becoming more and more clear that a full reimagination of school is now needed to best prepare our children for a fast-changing, globally-networked world of learning, work, and life. We discuss how these principles can provide a framework for educational change in your school.

Podcasts:

 ISTE a Wrap! | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 36:58

Last week, one of the premier edtech events in the world took place in San Antonio, and it was our good fortune (Bruce, Missy, and I) to all be in attendance at the ISTE 2017 conference with about 16,000 others. In this podcast, Bruce and I reflect on the love/hate relationship we both have with the conference, and on ISTE's historical context as we reach a half a century of living with the idea of computers for learning with kids. We also entertain our very first SpeakPipe comment and question, one from Cheryl Doig in New Zealand who made us think about the humanity of technology and ISTE and edtech in general. We invite you to add your questions or comments below, and we'll weave them into our discussion next week. Some quick links: Taking IT Global is Michael Furdyk's amazing site for social justice and great projects for students who want to change the world. The ISTE17 conference page. Our conversation at ISTE17 with Michael and Gary Stager.

 AR, VR, AI, and BS: The Modern Learners Podcast, ISTE17 Edition | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 36:39

Greeting from San Antonio, where Bruce, Missy, and I are gathering for our second Change School retreat, our first Change School Social, and, of course, the mammoth #ISTE17 conference where something like 17K educators from around the world are getting the latest about technology and how to (or how not to) use it in the classroom. Full disclosure, ISTE is always a bit of a love hate for Bruce and I, and you'll get that sense in this episode. The conference is always heavy on tech but, in our minds, light on real learning. Rare are the discussions truly about creating agency for the learner and letting them do amazing things that change the world. (Hence the Papert quote below.) We hope you enjoy Episode #17 from ISTE17.

 Modern Learners Podcast #16: Helping Students Build a Presence Online | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 35:34

To what extent should we give students the opportunity to create their own presence and, dare we say it, brand online? On the college level, that's being done with the project "Domain of One's Own" which was started at Mary Washington University a few years ago and now has expanded to many other universities. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the school provides every student with a personal space on the web, hosted by the school, and administered by the student. It's a way of teaching both digital literacy and digital citizenship in an age when being online is more and more a requirement for learning, for business, or just about anything else. But what if we moved the idea of a Domain of One's Own down to the high school level? Can we wait until college to provide students with a space online? That's the question that Bruce and Will discuss in this podcast. Specifically, they talk about a must read post by Martha Burtis, one of the originators of DOOO. You'd be well served to check it out before listening to this episode. (You might also check out Audrey Watters' great riff on the project as well.) What are the tensions between having students publish their work online and making sure they act responsibly and safely? To what extent do teachers and leaders have presences online that they can use as models? What are some first steps that schools and individual teachers can take to begin to help students build their "findability" online? As always, if you like what you hear, please head on over to our iTunes page and leave a rating and comment. And tell your friends! Finally, use the Speak Pipe app below to leave your thoughts, questions, and comments that we can answer or riff on in next week's podcast. Thanks for listening everyone!

 Are Your Schools Tracking These “Trends” on the Internet? | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 45:42

What are the "Internet Trends" that educators need to wrap their brains around? That's the question Will and Bruce kick around as they take a deep dive into Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report released last week. They don't discuss all 355 slides in the report, but they do pick out several top level themes and discuss the impact those trends will likely have on schools. Such as: Continuation of the Move to Mobile Adults spend 5.6 hours a day on devices and 3.1 hours specifically on mobile. To what extent will schools need to support learners in finding balance in life? How will we help students learn how to be physically and mentally healthy in the face of this very connected world? Also, what responsibility do w have to make sure students know about the data their mobile phones are tracking and sending to advertisers? Voice Search Voice recognition software is actually meeting the threshold of human accuracy. More products are being developed that are powered by voice. Twenty percent of all queries were made by voice as of May 2016. That number will likely continue to increase because of the accuracy now available through voice search. Video There is no doubt that video is king right now. Social media continues to put greater emphasis on video creation and sharing. Bruce and Will discuss how much better video has gotten for learning purposes. In Change School, it is common to have 40 people from all over the world on a video conference at once. The quality is surpassing our initial expectations. Gaming The gaming trends are mind-blowing for educators. Will specifically references slide 80 because of it's refernce to Modern Learning. Today there are 2.6 billion gamers and the average age of those games is 35. Interactive gaming revenue comes in at $100B. Gaming is optimized for learning and engagement. Just Dig Into the Internet Trends Report It is really important to dig into the rest of the report. Take what you can and do your best to think deeply about these topics and the impact they will have on learning. Will and Bruce mentioned Byjus.com which is a learning site from India with some similarities with Khan Academy, but after you see it, you'll agree that Byjus.com is so much more. We'll be talking about the report in our Modern Learners Facebook Group. We'd love for you to join us there.

 When Leaders Leave Can Change be Sustained? | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 41:28

What needs to be in place for high-bar change initiatives in schools to sustain when the leader of that change initiative retires or moves to another school or district? That's the question Bruce and Will discuss in Episode #14 of the Modern Learners Podcast. Too often, "hero leadership" is the driver of change. Not often enough are their cultures that feel deeply invested in change that can not only survive a change at the top but also drive the process to replace them. This includes building capacity in teachers, students, and especially parents to understand a new narrative of schooling and advocate for consistency and coherence in that vision from one leader to the next. Building that culture takes time and intention, and Bruce and Will discuss some practical ways to make that happen. Because the last thing anyone wants to have happen at the moment leadership leaves is that the people on the bus begin to panic about reaching their destination. Also in this episode, a first blush discussion of Mary Meeker's important annual report on Internet Trends that has huge implications for education and educators. Don't forget, if you want to ask a question, leave a comment, or suggest topics for future discussions, just click on our Modern Learners Voice Mail widget below and start talking! We may use your voice comment in future podcasts. And btw, have you gotten a copy of our 10 Principles of Modern Learning Whitepaper? Thanks for listening!

 Overcoming Obstacles | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 32:50

In this new podcast episode, Will and Bruce discuss the barriers to making change happen in schools. First, they reflect on the work they have done with school leaders recently. They often begin work with school leaders by asking the leaders to identify the barriers to school change. Before they get too far, it is important to define the school change Will and Bruce and the rest of the Modern Learners team is aiming to push. School change is not only about adding technology, Genius Hour, and Makerspaces. The change we support is change that moves agency over to the learners. Bruce took a guess as the barriers Will heard from leaders at his workshop a few days ago, and he divides the typical responses into two categories: compliance and hesitation on the part of faculty. Those two components were certainly shared by the leaders Will was working with in addition to parent expectations, higher education's traditional expectations, time, and budget. Will tells the story of asking the question, "Of all the barriers we talked about, how many of them are impossible to overcome?" The truth is none of those barriers are impossible to overcome. All of the barriers have been overcome somewhere. Bruce and Will are impressed with the change work in New Zealand schools. As a country, they are working to create the conditions necessary for modern learning. They have great examples. Bruce tells the story  of leading two workshops within a couple of weeks of each other. One in Wellington and one in Aukland. Same workshop content. Same demographics. The people in Wellington approached the work with great breadth and depth. They had a sense of professional freedom. They had guidance but were encouraged to experiment. The people in Aukland were different. They said they can't make the changes being suggested.  Why in one city within a country the people take on the work and in another city reject the work? Complacency -- people are in a place of comfort and familiarity, habit and tradition. That becomes harder to break out of. Culture can break barriers. The culture said you have the professional freedom to do what you know is best because you know what is best for kids. Doing different means putting everything on the table and examining it in the new contexts for learning. Obstacles are internal. We create external obstacles so that we don't have to work on the internal obstacles. It becomes a personal challenge and not a systems challenge. If we admit that we can't overcome an external obstacle, then we have to ask why aren't YOU overcoming the obstacles. The provocation for school change needs to come from leadership. Leaders foster attitudes and dispositions. Leaders influence school culture. School change will consist of 9 Cs (and we might add more as we continue to work with leaders in Change.School): Courage - This work is not easy. Commitment - This work takes time. Curiosity - This work requires us to ask lots of questions. Conversation - This work demands discussion. Confidence  - This work is the right work. Culture - This work creates positive cultures. Clarity - This work is defined by our beliefs about learning and without them, we can't do the work. Context - This work needs to embrace the modern world and the rate in which change is happening. Consistency - This work means creating the conditions for learning and those conditions should not be starkly different from one classroom to the next. We must tell the new story of learning. Parents and communities understand school from the lens they looked through as a student. The world is changing and so is school. If we don't prepare our young people to meet the changing demands of the modern world, we will fail them. Change will not happen in schools until there ar...

 What’s Changed? Recap of 200 Shifting Conversations | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 53:18

In today's episode, Will and Bruce reflect on six of their two hundred Shifting Conversations posts that they have written over the last three years. Some things have changed, and some have not. Often times, educators feel powerless to change their current conditions in ways that deeply impact learning. That was the focus of this post, Are You Powerless?, but Will reiterated in the conversation that we can all start with our personal practice. We can all work to make sure our personal practices match our personal beliefs about learning, and in that, there is power. Bruce really believes that people are starting to get beyond shiny objects syndrome. People are starting to ask what extent technology impacts learning, and for that he is relieved. Back when he wrote Road to Nowhere, schools were spending millions of dollars on devices, but that money was not changing practices. There is hope. The technology underwhelm is discussed in Everything You Think is Disruptive Isn't. Often people get really excited about emerging technologies, but the technology has very little impact. If we focus on learning and keep the focus on learning, that is when we may start to feel the change. Beyond Better was a conversation about making change in incremental shifts or by fundamentally changing. Will again emphasized that the world is not changing incrementally, but unfortunately schools are. We need to focus on aligning our beliefs with our practice, and that will require a fundamental shift. Getting a little bit better is not sufficient. The shifting conversation that is likely the most provocative is What We Know Isn't What We Do. Will and Bruce even suggest that there is some level of educational malpractice and negligence in situations where we clearly know what is best for our learners and we don't do it. It feels a little uncomfortable to speak in terms of negligence, but as a profession, we must think about it deeply in order to do what is best for our students. The Mystery of Pedagogy conversation simply begs us to question, "Are we outdated?" And yes, there is a real chance that we are.

 Getting Parents Ready for New Context of School | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 32:32

Bruce and Will talk about the challenge of helping parents understand the new context for school and work. After debating for a bit about how much responsibility the school should take for this work, they agree that school's must play a role in educating parents and communities about the changing contexts. Parents need reference points for the new context: This show starts out discussing three articles from Pew Research, The New Yorker, and The New York Times that help us to see and define the modern context and the importance of understanding it. At one point Will points out the gap between the cost of college and the cost of information, and because the gap is so large, people are opting for alternative paths to acquiring skills. More people are acquiring micro-credentials and badges to signal they have a set of skills.  Check out the links to better understand what they were discussing. Future of Jobs and Jobs Training Is the Gig Economy Working How to Prepare for an Automatic Future Vision Must Meet Practice In regards to how school's can begin embracing the modern context, Will and Bruce have some great advice. They discuss the importance of crafting a modern vision that is informed and shaped for the modern world. Once the vision is crafted, practices will need to be adjusted to meet the vision. They encourage people to use a range of media. Books and newsletters are not enough. Social media, technology, and face to face conversations cannot be ignored. The communication of the vision and the implementation of modern practices needs to be slowly dripped to parents and community members, so they start to see something different. As they see different, different will become the expectation, and change will occur. Why The need to move to a modern learning environment is necessary if schools want to be relevant. If schools want to serve our learners in the most relevant way, we must work to understand the modern contexts our children will live and work. Preparing them for that begins with our own learning. Want to Learn More Enrollment for Change.School is open. Definitely, check it out. We'd love to have you join us.  

 Voice, Choice and Mastery with Rodney Bowler | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 49:52

In this episode, Will Richardson talks with Rodney Bowler and Aaryn Schmuhl from Henry County Schools in Atlanta, Georgia.  Rodney is District Superintendent for Henry County Schools, while Aaryn is Assistant Superintendent for Learning and Leadership. Highlights of their conversation include: Why being intentional by being courageous at the same time are really important dispositions for the leadership of a change movement. Why we have to change our metrics of success and start thinking differently about what makes the kids life ready. How do you measure the immeasurable? Why sometimes a hard reboot is what a school or District really needs. What does giving students voice really mean, and what are the implications for their learning? Why it’s not about tailoring content to kids, but rather it’s about giving kids the power to learn how to tailor content to themselves. How do you do that? How do you get teachers to be authentic project based learners as well? The importance of moving away from the sit and get or the spray and pray models of professional learning and really challenging teachers to engage in ways that are meaningful to them and building out competency based kind of professional development expectations for teachers. Why the biggest pressure point right now in schools is relevance? Why its important to be very intentional and tell people that they have permission to stop doing things. How their community became a pressure point for change. Why the chocies in change are too often limited to moves that teachers make based on what they think they can do, instead of what they should do. Why a willingness to be transparent to engage them in broader community discussions requires parents to be a part of our redesigned teams at our schools. Transcript for the Show Well hey again everyone.  I'm Will Richardson and I want to welcome you to Season 1 of the 2017 Modern Learners Podcast where this year we’re scouring the world for schools and districts that are raising the bar when it comes to thinking about relevant and sustainable change process that’s centered on shifting agency over learning to the learner and in creating a culture both in schools and in their communities that embraces constant change and innovation. Transparency, self-reflection and a commitment to learning together as adults and students all play a big role in their work.  I've learned a great deal from their efforts and I'm sure you will too. Remember, if you want to learn more about this podcast series about our whitepapers or our master classes or about our new eight-week course on modern leadership that we’re launching in March check out our private Modern Learners Facebook Group or head on over to ModernLearners.com where you can sign up for our amazingly interesting and informative weekly newsletter that checks all the opportunities and challenges of learning today. But for now sit back and enjoy my conversation with Rodney Bowler and Aaryn Schmuhl.  Thanks for listening.  I'm just wondering what the kind of burning question is that’s driving the work in Henry County right now. Rodney Bowler:  Sure.  That’s a great question too and it’s one that we feel like we finally have been able to come to terms with and then that really is the students that we’re serving.  We’ve been able to do really move away from being stuck in the box of having to protect the adult practices and traditional methodology in order to be able to really look at how we best serving our students and are they really getting exactly what they need in order to be successful within the content and within the curriculum and within the educational environment.  And when we ask that question in our traditional methodology the answer is no. 

 The Realities of Deep Change with Lawrence DeMaeyer | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 44:07

In this episode, Will Richardson talks with Lawrence DeMaeyer about the realities of deep change at Peel School Board outside of Toronto, Ontario. Lawrence received his Masters in Education from the University of Toronto, and in recent times has lead much of the development of many of the elements of the Peel School Board’s  Empowering Modern Learners initiative. As such he is now Peel Board's coordinating Principal of Modern Learning and guiding the implementation of the new vision for modern learning. His responsibilities include: implementing the new vision: Empowering Modern Learners coordinating professional learning and training that aligns with Ministry of Education and district priorities championing e-learning supporting principals and vice-principals with technology and data-related matters supporting protocols and practices to ensure that all data is clean, accurate, accessible, secure and available for integration advising Learning Technology Support Services regarding the appropriateness of software and hardware solutions Highlights from their conversation include: What are the learning outcomes that you’re aiming for and how can technology play a role in helping that to really happen How did you go about getting to that point where you could put a consistent definition to some of those bigger terms? How is this new vision vision different from what the traditional experience of classrooms has been in Peel? Why are we dividing our school day into 75 minute blocks or 40 minute blocks in some places and forcing kids to switch from a Science hat to a Social Science hat to a Math hat in 40 minute intervals? Given we work really hard as educators to try and control the learning outcomes for students.  We’ve predetermined what it is that they need to learn, and how they go about learning it.  That’s a very teacher focused, or teacher centered point of view or perspective on a learning process. What can we do about that? How do you unleash students’ ability to determine for themselves what some of their learning outcomes need to be, and how they’re going to go about building their capacity and competency to reach some of those outcomes? What is the role of instructional coaches? How can they best help teachers make pedagogy and their teaching and learning, the focus of how they use technology? Why it is important to provide teachers with some time to sit and talk about and work out for themselves, what a vision actually means in their school, with their community, in their classroom, and how they can leverage their own prior learning to make this happen, and where some of the gaps are. The importance of having top-down predetermined professional learning, whether it’s for administrators, or for teachers. Why you should be trying to get away the role, where we’ve taken away all the power and all of the voice and agency, away from the learner. Transcript for the show So, what’s it like to lead change at what may be the most progressive school district in one of the most educationally progressive places in the World? Hey, everyone, I’m Will Richardson, and that’s the question we’ll be discussing in this episode from season one of the 2017 Modern Learners Podcast, where we’re spanning the globe to find leaders who are setting a higher bar for relevant, sustainable change in their schools and classrooms. Lawrence DeMaeyer is the principal of Modern Learning for the Peel School board outside of Toronto, Ontario.  A board that serves about a hundred and forty thousand students.  Lawrence and his team at Peel made a huge splash last fall with the release of their long in the making new vision document titled,

 Change.School is Ready for You. Are You Ready for Change.School? | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 22:22

Change.School is Ready for You. Are You Ready for Change.School?

 How Community Voice Can Drive Change in Schools with John Jungmann | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 49:53

How Community Voice Can Drive Change in Schools with John Jungmann

 Diversity in a Complex World with Rafranz Davis | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 39:16

Diversity in a Complex World with Rafranz Davis

 Confirmation Bias and Literacy – The ML Podcast | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 29:52

Confirmation Bias and Literacy – The ML Podcast

 Developing a Culture of Yes with Pam Moran | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 55:19

Developing a Culture of Yes with Pam Moran

Comments

Login or signup comment.