Archive for April, 2018

I probably should read “You, Your Child, and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education” by Sir Ken Robinson [published March 2018]. In a short cut way, I scanned through an “adapted excerpt” on the Education Week web site titled “How Much Homework Is Enough? Depends Who You Ask” which was linked from Sir Ken Robinson’s FaceBook feed – and to which I posted a comment (my first time ever, btw).

My comment read “The title and article suggests that the problem is quantity. I would posit that the bigger problem is actually quality. Repetition and application is part of learning for most students…and using the learned knowledge outside of a classroom setting is useful practice towards a lifelong love of learning. However, there is clearly an attempt at substituting quality with quantity. So basically we have a lot of homework with low value and little motivational factoring.”

I kept it quite brief, and had a few drafts before clicking to post. School homework is a touchy subject for many people, and I have commented on this topic from the start of this wiki, particularly stirred by Alfie Kohn’s “The Homework Myth” which I had read in 2011. Since that time, I have taken a critical eye of the homework that my kids have had to do. In my assessment, most of it was junk quality (the meaning of junk here is similar to how it might be used for junk food and junk bonds, or one man’s junk is another man’s treasure). It’s consumable by the masses, but the benefits and circumstances are iffy.

What is the meaning of homework (I am asking this in the same philosophical mood as the question about the meaning of life)? In my view, homework today is a tool of convenience for the education system. Their primary purpose is to differentiate students and justify the education system. But it can be so much more…more fulfilling, more motivating, more purposeful, more about growth and more embraceable.

The typical mode of homework operations reminds me of the criticisms raised by Adora Svitak in her 2010 TED Talk “What adults can learn from kids” in which she touches on reciprocal learning. Is there reciprocity in homework? Nope. From what I’ve observed, teachers are on a mission to get through the curriculum and show grades along the way. Checking homework is a chore (often caffeine-fed) to teachers and for many subjects, it boils down to comparing a homework to an answer guide. That is one of the consequences of the volume of homework that is addressed in the Education Week article.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the problem is the quality of homework. There is a massive QUANTITY of homework because the QUALITY is absent. The quantity is there to compensate for the inability to design homework to optimize for active recall, short and long-term retention, and individual needs. Further, homework perpetuates the problem of the focus on memorization by requiring only convergent thinking (aka logical deductive reasoning). To become a more sophisticated element of learning, homework needs to include divergent thinking in the process. Get that Growth Mindset (tip of the hat to Carol Dweck) into the mix. Train the students to make assumptions and give it a go. Explore the impossible and possible together.

What if teachers were required to design or re-design homework assignments on a regular basis? That is, they would be limited on how much they could rely on textbooks, the internet and other teachers. They would also not be allowed to re-use a portion of their homework from the past. Make it acceptable for the homework assignment to be imperfect. In fact, make sure the students understand that the homework is imperfect and have them deal with it. How enlightening would that be?

I think re-inventing homework needs to be a project that a team needs to work on in future YCISL workshops.

In the WSJ’s The Future of Everything section on Saturday April 21, 2018, I noticed an article titled “Schools As ‘Maker Spaces” by Leigh Kamping Carder. The article is brief, but it does point to several important ideas when it comes to introducing creativity to elementary and middle school students.

1. “…cues from Silicon Valley’s startup incubators.” A better model than a startup incubator may be a research laboratory where experimental skills are nurtured. Students should pick up skills which can be reproduced and improved over time. A laboratory may capture a youth’s imagination more vividly than an incubator.
2. “…flexible work groups.” This is definitely worth exploring further. Flexible workspaces as well as collaboration groups are primers to creative productivity. One could also extend flexibility to the work styles, communication channels and oversight. Encourage divergent thinking.
3. “Maker Spaces.” At Stanford, we have the d.School, Product Realization Labs and the create:space. They’re spaces which provides nodes to creative activity. Within each node are sub-nodes which include the equipment (a 3D printer was mentioned in the article) and other tools necessary for the activity. How are these nodes being connected?
4. “Educators are still learning how students can best benefit from such spaces.” Let the experimental design begin.

A page A3 article titled “District Drops Plan to Name School After Blackstone CEO” by Tawnell D. Hobbs appears in the April 13, 2018 of the WSJ. I am in the process of wrapping up composition of a YCISL white paper on adding Philanthropy to the YCISL program as a platform and cause.

The article reports on some gesticulation over a $25 million gift to a public school. This incident is interesting in that it highlights the distinctive features of conditional vs un-conditional philanthropic gifts of the monetary kind. For this conditional gift which involved naming and re-naming, a blanket of negative emotion was thrown on and it is certain that all named stakeholders (community members, the school board, the donor, and all other parties enabling the transaction) have had their positivity sucked out of them. Applying the lesson from Alison Ledgerwood’s TEDx Talk “Getting stuck in the negatives (and how to get unstuck)”: there was a framing problem for this particular gift and getting into the negative will have a lasting impact outweighing a series of positives. That’s too bad.

Could the gift have been framed in an un-conditional manner and the re-naming of the school be floated as a possible sign of gratitude? Should the re-naming of the school have been just one of the options that came up as a result of brainstorming ways to show gratitude? Could that brainstorming have been done in a way that all stakeholders respect the ideas expressed? What kind of prototyping of the most promising ideas could have been done? Do people prototype philanthropic ideas (I don’t know) or is this usually set up with pre-set extrinsic motivators to draw in donors? How do you decide what the best “skin” is to wrap around the engineering/design/architecture so that the beneficiaries and overseers will focus on the positives? How (timing, content and attributes) was the donation articulated? Did all stakeholders understand the PROMISE and the ASK?

I am wondering whether the lessons we incorporate into and attempt to impart through the YCISL program can help our students navigate through philanthropy projects and build LI (Leadership Intelligence). Maybe. I can’t wait to try it this summer.