Seeking Edutopia

["Dale R. Reed" <dale-reed@xxxx>]

http://edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=36chen.h20

May 16, 2001 Seeking Edutopia

By Milton Chen Education Week

“My own experience in public school was quite frustrating. I was often
bored. Occasionally, I had a teacher who engaged me, who made me curious and
motivated to learn. I wondered, ‘Why can't school be interesting all of the
time?’”
—George Lucas

Much of the contemporary education debate can be summarized as proposals to
improve a current system deeply rooted in the distant past. Allen Glenn, a
professor and the former dean of education at the University of Washington,
may well be right when he says, "The biggest obstacle to school change is
our memories."

Creating schools for the 21st century requires less time looking in the
rear-view mirror and more effort anticipating the road ahead. Filmmaker
George Lucas, the chairman of the educational foundation where I work, is
well known for his prescient view of the transformative effects of
technology in the world of entertainment. His work in digital filmmaking is
a result of his impulse to, as he puts it, "run down the path more quickly
than others and come back and tell them what I've seen." At the foundation
that bears his name, our mission is to help educators and the larger public
glimpse the future, through a World Wide Web site, films, books, and CDs.
Our idealism is unabashedly reflected in the title of our newsletter:
Edutopia.

Creating schools for the 21st century requires faith in the potential of
technology to engage many more young learners.
The best blueprints for new schools, however, won't emerge from gazing at
the blue sky. We only have to set our sights on some courageous
pioneers—teachers, principals, and educators at all levels—who are blazing
trails to a new horizon. The seeds of the future are being sown in the
present, if we only know where to look.

Our vision of the future starts with a story. The setting: a small town in
California's central valley. The time: the 1950s. The main character: a
young boy, a daydreamer who likes to write stories. He finds most of his
schooling irrelevant to his deeper interests. For instance, he asks his
mother, "If there is only one God, why are there so many religions?"—a
question rich with intellectual possibilities but absent from his grade
school textbook.

His one passion: the technology of automobiles. Outside of school, he learns
everything he can about cars, from their engines and design to the economics
and history of the industry. He fixes cars, races them, and considers a
career as a car mechanic. A near-fatal car crash weeks before high school
graduation propels him to find a deeper meaning and to pursue further
education. After taking courses in writing, philosophy, art, and photography
at a nearby junior college, he enrolls in a university with a friend,
thinking to continue his photography studies. The photography department
turns out to be a film school. He immerses himself in another technology for
recording and editing pictures, sound, and music, enabling him to realize
his amazing visual imagination.

Many readers can pick up George Lucas' story from there. In 1991, our
foundation was born out of his frustration with his own schooling, as well
as his faith in the potential of technology to engage many more young
learners like himself who learn visually as well as verbally, who like to
use their hands as well as their heads, and whose creative and artistic
talents go untapped in the textbook-based classroom.

Along our own path, we received wise counsel from our national board of
advisers, visionaries in their own right, such as Linda Roberts, the recent
director of educational technology for the U. S. Department of Education,
and Shirley Malcom, the head of education at the American Association for
the Advancement of Science.

During our first few years, we experimented with interactive laserdisc
prototypes to demonstrate how advanced technology could revolutionize
teaching. But our advisers advised that many promising technologies have
foundered on the shoals of school systems unprepared or unwilling to adopt
them. Instead, they urged us to find those schools, perhaps only a few in
each state, that were quietly innovating and creating a very different kind
of future.

They urged us to do what a foundation carrying the name of George Lucas
should do: make films about those schools and help the public visualize what
our best classrooms and teachers look like. At least then, we could point to
real schools, real teachers, and real students. Innovation would not be
hypothetical. In Immanuel Kant's famous dictum, "the actual proves the
possible."

One more thing, they added. It's 1995. There's this thing called the
Internet. Schools and teachers are getting connected to it. If it really
plays out to provide the educational content of our greatest universities,
museums, and libraries, for free, any time, anywhere, it could be the
technology to trump all previous technologies in permeating and transforming
our schools.

So, we set out to find those unsung heroes. One of our earliest discoveries,
in 1996, was a 4th and 5th grade classroom taught by Jim Dieckmann at the
Clear View Charter School in Chula Vista, Calif., not far from the Mexican
border. For our first documentary, we filmed his students collecting insect
specimens, working in teams to obtain information on their insects from the
Web, creating multimedia reports, and, with their teacher, developing an
assessment rubric to evaluate their use of text, images, graphics, and
sound.

The students were connected through a fiber-optic cable connection to San
Diego State University, where, through full two-way audio and video,
entomologists guided them in examining their insect specimens under an
electron microscope. The students' excitement as they prepared to go online
with the scientists was palpable. While many 4th graders can barely spell
"electron microscope," let alone use one, this experience magnified for us
how the traditional curriculum underestimates the speed and depth of
learning done by self-motivated students.

Our model teacher was the hub of his students' learning and a conductor of a
symphony of learning resources.

Five years later, that classroom still stands as a model. Skeptics, however,
deemed it merely a "stand alone" model, too high-tech and unique. They
lamented that their own schools lacked high-speed cable connections and
nearby universities with scientists and electron microscopes. Two years ago,
the University of Illinois' Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and
Technology launched a National Science Foundation-funded program, Bugscope
(bugscope.beckman.uiuc.edu), in which students around the country,
kindergarten through high school, capture insect specimens, send them to the
university, and then schedule the university's electron microscope for an
hour. Using their classroom computer and a Web browser, they remotely
control the microscope, discussing their insects with the university's
entomologists. Bugscope and other projects like it are fulfilling the
Internet's promise of breaking down barriers to scientific experts and their
high-tech tools.

Technology not only can provide new forms of content and connectivity, but
also can transform human roles and relationships in educational
systems—perhaps an even greater challenge. Bruce Alberts, the president of
the National Academy of Sciences, has found that in matters of school
reform, human inertia may be stronger than inertia in the physical world.
"There is much more inertia in human society than there is in physics," he
says. "In physics, if you push on something enough, no matter how heavy, it
moves a little bit. Time after time, talented and idealistic people try to
improve our schools, instituting major projects with major effort; yet, when
the projects end, the schools slide back to where they were before."

Consider, for example, how the Web is changing the balance of power between
patients and their physicians, equipping patients with better information to
discuss their diagnoses. Technology is also leading schools to recast
traditional roles: Teachers become learners, and students can become, in a
new sense, "student teachers."

In our film, Jim Dieckmann was portraying the new role of "the
teacher-learner." No longer the "sage on the stage," but not merely a "guide
on the side," Mr. Dieckmann was still center stage. He was the hub of his
students' learning and the conductor of a symphony of learning resources,
including books, the Internet, and other adult experts. He brought the
larger world to his students, which in turn expanded his own knowledge of
the subject. Students' award-winning Web sites reveal the most
revolutionary role yet: students as designers of curriculum.

Likewise, his students were also taking on new identities as more active,
independent learners, assuming greater responsibility for their own
learning, as well as the learning of their team members and classmates. As
peer tutors and reviewers, they were helping teach one another.

In most schools, students have remarkably little voice in what they are
asked to learn and how they learn it. This near-conspiracy to exclude
students from a role in instructional decisions extends to the hundreds of
educational conferences held each year, which rarely invite students to
present their work or discuss their school experiences. While much has been
said about the heavy burden of teachers faced with large class sizes, we
rarely turn to an overlooked teaching resource already in our classrooms:
the students themselves. Students can serve remarkably well as tutors for
younger students, peer reviewers for their classmates, and "technology
resource specialists" for their teachers.

"Help Wanted: Technologically literate person to create PowerPoint
presentations from teachers' lecture notes. Ability to find best Web sites
for specific topics, such as the Civil War or animal behavior. Funds
limited. Willingness to volunteer appreciated." This want ad describes
positions needed in every school across the country. Generation Why, begun
in Olympia, Wash., trains students in grades 3-12 to be the perfect solution
for overworked teachers needing to learn new technology skills. Now
recognized as an exemplary technology project by the U.S. Department of
Education, Generation Why has grown to more than 500 schools by placing
students into a role formerly confined to graduate students in universities:
the teaching assistant.

Unlike some graduate teaching assistants, however, Generation Why students
first take a semester course on teaching, learning how to support teachers
and effectively integrate technology into the classroom. The program's
graduates often go on to serve on school technology and curriculum
committees, keep computer labs open after hours, and help train preservice
teachers. They are living examples of the belief, rarely practiced among
students, that "the best way to learn something is to teach it."

The ThinkQuest competition for student-designed Web sites (thinkquest.org)
carries student work to its fullest realization. The award-winning sites,
ranging from the history and appreciation of music, complete with a virtual
concert hall, to a comprehensive review of global energy issues, are
astonishing in their professional quality, depth of content, and beauty of
design. Their sites reveal the most revolutionary role yet: students as
designers of curriculum.

As students operate in these new arrangements with each other and with
adults, they will need well-developed social and emotional skills. These
skills will stand them in good stead as they prepare for the digital
workplace, whose job descriptions are constantly evolving and require
"just-in-time learning." Daniel Goleman's recent book, Working With
Emotional Intelligence, describes how successful workplaces, including
high-tech firms, organize employees in teams and place a premium on their
ability to communicate and manage relationships.

Only teachers can provide the human nurturing and mentoring needed for
students to develop their social and emotional skills. No machine ever will.

Our best schools are emphasizing this undervalued part of the "invisible
curriculum." New York City's Public School 15 in Brooklyn uses the Resolving
Conflict Creatively Program developed by the school system and Educators for
Social Responsibility. We observed two 5th grade girls role-playing an
argument when one of them was not invited to the other's birthday party. One
girl calls the other a "lousy" friend: "I have you over to my house all the
time, and you couldn't even invite me to your stupid party?" In a second
version of the same encounter, she learns to use "I-messages" in expressing
her feelings: "I felt hurt and angry when you didn't invite me, because I
thought we were good friends." Her friend responds, "My mother told me I
could only invite two friends because my cousins were coming. I hope we can
keep on being friends."
Such programs reveal a well-kept secret. Emotionally intelligent students
perform better on tests and other measures of learning, because they are
more equipped to concentrate, persist, and think independently. Common sense
and the recent wave of school shootings tell us that schooling must embrace
students' hearts, as well as their minds, that "high tech" must be
accompanied by "high touch." Only teachers, counselors, and administrators
can provide the human nurturing and mentoring needed for students to develop
their social and emotional skills. No machine ever will.

This new decade presents opportunities to redesign not only human
relationships within schools, but also the very brick and mortar that
surround them. Schools have become remarkably isolated from the rest of
society, in physical as well as human terms. As Lee Shulman, the president
of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has observed,
"Teaching has been an activity undertaken behind closed doors between
moderately consenting participants."

The coming wave of school construction presents a historic opportunity to
rethink the buildings we call "schools," in architectural design, physical
location, and virtual connections.Some schools are modeling a new paradigm,
morphing into more broadly based "community-learning centers" and using
their facilities in partnership with colleges, science centers, and
community organizations.

One boy told me how technology should not be a machine you go to, but a
machine that goes with you.
At the School of Environmental Studies outside of Minneapolis, the border
between school and community has vanished. At the "Zoo School," as it is
popularly known, high schoolers attend classes at—the zoo! With access to
2,700 animal species and 500 acres of wetlands and woods, students work
alongside the zoo's staff, studying, for instance, the zoo's endangered
species, such as the Komodo dragon or trumpeter swan, and accessing
professional tools, such as a database on Siberian-tiger genetics. Instead
of the game of musical desks played by most high school students every 45
minutes, these students return from their field work to their own cubicles
and workstations, arrayed around a central open space used for lectures and
group activities. There are now 10 similar "zoo schools" around the country.

For these innovations to spread further, educators and parents, as well as
business and community leaders, must first see them and understand them. The
public is well known for its attention deficit when it comes to education,
but its needs as a visual learner have been largely unmet. Technology itself
can help visualize these innovations. We are encouraged by the growing
number of our colleagues in school reform groups and foundations who are
using video and the Web to share the images, voices, and work of our most
inspiring teachers and students.

In working toward greater public understanding of education, we do have one
small request. On the front of our staff T-shirt is the word "JARGON" inside
a big red circle with a slash through it. The walls erected by
"educationese" are high and obstruct the view of many noneducators. One
example: "Constructivist pedagogy" should be replaced by "teaching for deep
understanding."

Recently, I met some middle school students who carry laptops in their
backpacks. One boy told me how technology should not be a machine you go to,
but a machine that goes with you. He said, somewhat impatiently, "It's a
part of my brain. Why would I want to leave it behind in a computer lab?"
These students are young explorers in this brave new world of technology.
But they might be considered middle-aged.

Even younger students are standing in tidal marshes and at intersections,
using palm-size devices to collect and analyze weather and traffic data.
Portable computing is already opening up new possibilities for students to
learn in and outside of classrooms, nights, weekends, and summers. And then
there's this thing called Internet 2.

These developments will continue to force our human institutions of schools
to respond. They will raise the most fundamental questions of educational
identity and demand more thoughtful answers: What does it mean to be a
teacher? How do we define a student? And how should we design our schools?

Our best schools are already providing answers to these questions and
demonstrating that our students, not our computers, are the most marvelous
learning machines. Children are born wired to learn. Their brighter future
is now, right in front of us, if we can only grasp it.

Milton Chen is the executive director of the George Lucas Educational
Foundation in the San Francisco Bay area (www.glef.org).
The George Lucus Educational Foundation offers resources and ideas for
innovative classrooms. Also, read recent issues of the the foundation's
newsletter, Edutopia. (Individual issues require Adobe's Acrobat Reader.)
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© 2001 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 20, number 36, page 56,42,43