Resources

• Here’s a boatload of resources for teaching programming to kids.
• Paired Videos for Computer Science Week
• Fall 2020 roundup of new programming environments for you and the kiddos.
• Podcast discussion: Does Everyone Need to Code?

Computing was, is, and should be fun!

– Gary Stager

One question I often ponder is, “Under what conditions could recreational computing return to the lives of children?”

1

I explore this question and make the case for computing in this video of a keynote I gave in June 2020. This was the closing keynote address at the Virtual MakerEd Unconference Online.

2

A few years before I ever touched a teletype connected to a timeframe system, three student teachers in Minnesota, including an old friend of mine, Don Rawitsch, created an “educational game” that is played and revered to this day, Oregon Trail.

A fabulous new documentary has suddenly appeared on the YouTube machine recounting the origin story of Oregon Trail.

Stager’s First Law of Technological Innovation suggests that any technology more than five years old can be created by school children or their teachers.

So, you know what to do…

Resources

• Here’s a boatload of resources for teaching programming to kids.
• Fall 2020 roundup of new programming environments for you and the kiddos.
• Podcast discussion: Does Everyone Need to Code?
• President Obama Discovers Coding – Yippee!

Writing, recording, and editing a completely new talk is extremely hard. In order to fit within the constraints of the time allotted by the online Re[Learn] Festival, I had to cut a great deal out of the video I prepared. Here is some of what I left out of the “official” conference talk. These issues pertain to what kids and teachers can do.

Speaking of innovation and educational disruption, take a look at this bit of schlock being peddled on Facebook as educational innovation.

Steve has done an impressive job of assembling a who’s who of my fellow bloviators for his virtual conference. Watch more speakers at https://www.homelearningsummit.com

Steve Hargadon created some shorter experts from the video for those of you with short attention spans or good taste.

One could hardly disagree that recent generations have experienced increasingly mechanized school practices. Issues impacting school administrators such as data-driven decision-making and management theories, borrowed from industry, are obvious examples of this trend. Most educators accept ability grouping, standardized testing, A-F grading, zero tolerance and compartmentalized curricula without a second thought because they have never been exposed to an alternative. 

Schooling is on cruise control even when common assumptions are not in the best interest of learners. The automation of schooling limits autonomy and allows services to be “delivered” on the cheap. Enrichment is derived from Latin for “children of rich parents who complain.”

Enrichment is derived from Latin for “children of rich parents who complain.”

When skillful teachers get to really know their students, they can use their creativity to design activities and materials that meet each student’s needs. In such contexts, curricula, pedagogical strategies, assessments and even the physical learning environment may be changed to realize the potential of each student. 

School leaders can get away with homogeneity or mechanized instructional practices until kids fall through the cracks and parents complain. This partially explains the curious epidemic of learning disabilities as well as the proliferation of IB and AP courses, and gifted and talented programs. When children are treated like interchangeable widgets, parents will demand labels designating their children as unique and deserving of services. Enrich What?

I’ve taught incarcerated teens diagnosed with a plethora of learning disabilities and 10-year-olds engaged in cancer research, engineering and music composition. These kids have more in common than one would think. They need productive contexts for learning in which teachers build upon their individual needs, talents, expertise and desires without sorting, labeling, name calling, fear or coercion. Students need to engage in meaningful work with the support, materials and time necessary to demonstrate understanding. 

In the absence of learner-centered conditions, gifted and talented and special education services are required. Ironically, these interventions are endangered by the very forces that required their existence. Today, shortages of funding, leadership or imagination cause gifted and talented programs to be sacrificed for something called enrichment.

Enrichment is derived from Latin for “children of rich parents who complain.” In many cases, enrichment becomes its own course for children fortunate enough to gain entrance. Enrichment is too often a pull-out program where a very small number of kids leave their regular classroom to engage in the sorts of enriching activities that would benefit every child, while disrupting the child’s classroom. My informal research and experience suggests that enrichment is where lucky students experience project-based learning, read books they enjoy, play games and take field trips. Sometimes any child (who can afford it) may elect to be part of enrichment. Field Trips

I am all for field trips-lots of them! That’s where many students see their first play, hear a cello, touch a squid, see a Van Gogh, meet a scientist, climb a fire truck, consider a career, or spend their own money in a gift shop. Field trips offer the opportunity to learn many lessons related to the curriculum and life outside of the classroom. Field trips provide poor children with the sorts of opportunities more affluent students take for granted.

At a time when funding priorities have made field trips a distant memory, they are a hallmark of enrichment. Not only does this aggravate educational inequity, but the field trips for enrichment students often have little educational value. Trips to the mall, Disney films, Broadway shows, or even the circus are not uncommon treats made available to enrichment students whose parents can afford them. Such field trips are an entitlement that sends the message to a handful of children that you are deserving of privileges your classmates won’t enjoy. 

Curriculum connections could be made to ensure that field trips are educationally meaningful, but why bother? There isn’t time during the occasional enrichment session to explore the significance of the Titanic. But what the heck, we’ll bus them to look at Titanic artifacts anyway. Besides, enrichment and its field trips aren’t about enriching the curriculum. They are about telling one group of parents that their children are better than the rest. 

Gary S. Stager, gary@stager.org, is senior editor of District Administration and editor of The Pulse: Education’s Place for Debate.

From the August 2008 issue of District Administration Magazine.

A friend called a few months back and asked me to tell him my most dangerous idea. What a great question! My answer, “Curriculum is bad.”

Allow me to make the case.

I can turn to almost any page in a textbook, article or website and find an outlandish, inaccurate or confusing idea some curriculum writer thought was brilliant. Even the most well intentioned efforts at relevance or context stretch credulity, often in a hilarious fashion.

Indigestion
A recent article in Edutopia (July 2006) presented a new method for making connections between art and math, called Aesthetic Computing. The following example demonstrates how the method might be used to teach teens about slope intercept form.

Aesthetic computing attempts to reach those frustrated by traditional math instruction by presenting abstract mathematical concepts in a more creative and personal way… For example, a standard equation for graphing lines on a slope such as y = mx + b might become a hamburger, with y representing the whole burger, m referring to the meat, and x standing in for spices. Multiplication is indicated by the fact that the meat and spices are mixed together, and b is added to represent hamburger buns. Students then write a story about the burger or draw a picture of it.

What? How is drawing a burger related to slope? One abstraction (slope) is replaced by even greater abstractions. The concept of variable is muddled and equations are presented wrongly as recipes. Worst of all, this is referred to as a hands-on project when it’s just coloring. (Note: If you think this is just one out-of-context example, I encourage you to read the primary sources on aesthetic computing. There you will find profoundly confusing examples of pedagogical tricks masquerading as constructivism.)

Fumble!
Corporations often write curriculum tie-ins to their products. Some are shameless marketing ploys while others are more altruistic. The NFL recently announced a $1.5 million marketing campaign to get kids more active and fight obesity –  a noble public service gesture. It’s not their fault that curriculum is bad. They’re just playing along.

A language arts lesson has students create and perform a rap that demonstrates action verbs. A science lesson has kids play scooter tag, with one group of students representing cholesterol and another representing healthy hearts. (Associate Press, 10/19/06)

The NFL might solve two problems simultaneously. The Kansas City Chiefs can become the Cholesterols and the Redskins, the Healthy Hearts. Racist mascots could be replaced with scientific models while local school kids rap about vascular plaque. Multiple-choice comprehension questions appear on the Jumbotron.

Lola Falana Math
Textbook publishers use graphics and word problems to recycle old content. Units often begin with “real-life” content to help students make “connections.” One 7th grade math text has a photo of Walter Matthau dressed as Einstein. I know what the curriculum designers are thinking. Kids are just nuts for Walter Matthau!

The text below the photo reads something like, “In the classic motion picture, I.Q., Matthau plays Albert Einstein. Meg Ryan is his niece and Tim Robbins is a mechanic with a crush on her… Later in the film Tim Ryan’s character asks the niece, ‘How old is your uncle?’ Einstein overhears the question and yells from the other room, ’10 times 2 to the third.’”

Get it? They’re teaching exponents. What a hoot! All of the film stuff was unnecessary trivia that distracts from what should have been a simple arithmetic problem – not that anyone would ever express their age in exponential form.

The point of exponential notation is what? How does it work? Why?

Surely, the mere invocation of Einstein in the passage makes this a science lesson too.

I Know What You’re Thinking
Gary is against “bad” curriculum like the examples above. No, I oppose all of it. Curriculum is the arrogant folly of adults who don’t know the children who will play cholesterol scooter soccer, yet are self-ordained to prescribe what those students should know and when they should know it. Curriculum is the weapon of choice for ranking, sorting and labeling children. It is indifferent to individual needs, talents or desires. Worst of all, curriculum creates an impermeable barrier between teacher and student. Without curriculum, failure would more difficult as would the assorted pathologies of discipline problems, drop-out rates and violence that plague too many schools.

This hybrid teaching stuff sure is a lot of work. How would you suggest reducing teacher workload and stress?

Good teaching is not about what the teacher delivers to the students, but creating the conditions for deep and rich student experiences. When students work on meaningful projects and make their project development visible to peers, classmates can provide ongoing feedback throughout the learning process, not just on ta-da day at the end of a unit. If assessment is viewed as a way of benefiting learners, then student collaboration and natural feedback is best, regardless of the environment. In a hybrid environment, there are interesting opportunities to incorporate digital creative technologies, design, and programming in new ways, taking advantage of the affordances of being online and remote.

What’s the best technology for hybrid teaching?

When it comes to software, only two functions are critical – the ability to engage in conversation via threaded discussions (asynchronously) and a way to chat in real time. While it is easy to be distracted by a cornucopia of commercial software packages, educators would be well-advised to embrace text (not texting) as an incredibly rich vehicle for learning.

Here are but a few benefits of text:

1. Text requires very little bandwidth and therefore is more reliable than video and even audio.
2. Text is writing with opportunities for being deliberate and reflective. Editing clarifies what you are trying to communicate and improves writing skills.
3. Communication via text contains less noise and chatter than synchronous audio or video.
4. Text communication requires reading. Reading is good.

If some of our students are in class and others online, is there a better approach than “Room & Zoom?”

The term, Room and Zoom, is being used to describe a teacher teaching some students face-to-face while others watch remotely. This approach is not only be rough on teachers, but is awful for kids at home.

A bit of flexibility is required, but it seems that the best way to address such a “hybrid” model is by deploying faculty more cleverly. Assigning a teacher to teach the remote students, even if the class is multi-age, allows that professional to deploy the best practices of synchronous and asynchronous teaching while other teachers engage with children in the same physical space.

Once everything returns back to normal, the students taught remotely can either stay together as a class or be reintroduced into the school community. Kids are pretty resilient and the benefits of being taught well online outweigh any stress associated with going back to school, whenever that occurs.

For answers to these questions and more, Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager will be leading a two-day online workshop, Teaching Like the Future Depends on It, on October 19-20, 2020. Click here for more information and to reserve your spot.

Should this question be interpreted literally? Systemic racism, narrowly standardized curriculum, and deprivation are the ingredients baked into the impoverished educational experience consumed by far too many American children, yet still I wonder, is it possible that kids are not being taught something as fundamental as the importance of voting? Are we so racist that our educational system is deliberately disenfranchising “other people’s children” from even minimal access to participatory democracy? Even if a child never encounters a decent teacher in twelve years of schooling, are the social studies textbooks so shitty and bowdlerized that voting isn’t mentioned? How can an American not know about voting?

Perhaps I am overreacting. However, the highly visible actions of NFL and NBA players on and off the court suggest otherwise. They are engaged in an attempt to right a wrong and increase voter participation. This accompanies efforts to educate players and their fans about how and why to vote.

Whenever faced with a societal challenge, upheaval, or shift, I instinctively ask, “How are educators responding?” What can each of us do to remediate this disempowerment crisis?

It is a cataclysmic failure of teaching if one American youngster leaves school without understanding their rights as a citizen, doesn’t know how to vote, or thinks that their vote does not matter. Around 30% of US millennials think democracy is absolutely essential.

What do do?

Between now and November 3^rd, it is imperative that every teacher in every school reminds every student that their grownups need to be registered to vote and vote in the upcoming election!

I understand that some of you are afraid of being accused of indoctrinating children, but you could not be more mistaken. Developing citizens is a primary responsibility of teaching. Nothing is more important.

You are not telling children who their grownups should vote for (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Being employed as an educator is not contingent on surrendering your basic rights. Sustaining democracy is your job. Whether you like it or not, education is an inherently political act.

OK, some of you scaredy cats are still afraid that someone will look askance at you if you remind fellow citizens to vote. I get it. Therefore, I have another suggestion for how you can change the world and meet your obligations as an educator.

Embrace democracy in your classroom. Every day between now and November 3^rd (and hopefully long after) have students in your classes vote on something. Every day, regardless of the subject you happen to teach. Model democracy. Practice democracy. (resources below)

Read: Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore (The Atlantic)

There is one more thing you can do.

You need to vote. That’s the very least you can do. Participating in the process would be even better, but voting will suffice. In any jurisdiction teachers represent the largest employee group. That is true at the village, city, state, or national level. If teachers were to vote in their own self-interest, they would change the world.

Remember what my mentor and great champion of democratic education Deborah Meier preaches, “Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.”

Notes 

Shaquille O’Neal reveals he just voted for the first time (Yahoo News – October 8, 2020)

Chris Paul: More than 90 percent of the league is now registered to vote (Yahoo News – October 4, 2020)

Reports: Just 20% of eligible NBA players voted in last election (NBC Sports – August 31, 2020)

Doc Rivers: NBA players will get registered to vote in the bubble (USA Today – August 29, 2020)

Getting Black communities to vote is personal for LeBron James, other NBA stars: “We’ve seen our voices muted our whole lives” (USA Today – September 20, 2020)

Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore (The Atlantic – October 2018)

The troubling charts that show young people losing faith in democracy (World Economic Forum – December 1, 2016)

How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’ (NY Times – November 29, 2016)

Teacher Resources

• Kids Voting USA Project
• Every Kid Votes (mock election)
• Teaching Voting Rights Toolkit  (Color of Change)
• Voting and Voices Classroom Resources (Teaching Tolerance)
• Teaching Voting Rights in 2020 (Zinn Education Project)
• 9 Ways To Teach about the Election: A Social Justice Approach (Anti-Defamation League)
• Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States (Zinn Education Project)
• The Election Collection – An Educational Guide to the US Elections (PBS)
• High School Lesson Plan: To Vote or Not to Vote? (PBS)
• New Lesson Plan: High School Voter Registration (League of Women Voters)
• League of Women Voters Collection of Classroom Resources
• A Documents-Based Lesson on the Voting Rights Act (Civilrightsteaching.org)
• What Our Students Should Know About the Struggle for the Ballot — but Won’t Learn from Their Textbooks (Zinn Education Project)
• NOW with Bill Moyers. For Educators. Voting classroom resources
• League of Women Voters News Clips of Young Voter Action
• More than a Vote
• Vote.org
• NEA Election Guide
• AFT Election Guide

Audio recordings of our recent Ask Me Anything  conversations and the Virtual Constructing Modern Knowledge Celebration Day  are featured, along with the recording of a recent online keynote address by Gary Stager.

The web site for the podcast is live.constructingmodernknowledge.com

You may also subscribe to the podcast at the following sites:

• iTunes/Apple Podcasts
• Stitcher

Over the past decade or so, I’ve been proud to be his colleague and have collaborated on fantastic school design projects. Prakash does not suffer from what Dr. King called the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” There have been times when I’m the conservative when working with him, but Prakash shares my drive to make the world a better place for kids.

In a desire to help schools navigate the chaos of COVID-19 and beyond, Prakash Nair authored a white paper, Outdoor Learning: Leaving the Classroom Behind. It may be purchased from Amazon.com. Since readers to my blog know that I am all about the love, you may download your very own copy here, free of charge. I’m pleased to share this important work with you and proud to have played a small role in its creation.

With COVID-19 seemingly here to stay, there is now a serious move to take learning outside to maximize school capacity. Social distancing is easier outside than within the confines of a classroom. It is likely that outdoor learning, until very recently a novelty, will soon become quite widespread. This white paper is the most comprehensive treatise on the subject of Outdoor Learning presented from the perspective of educators, architects, neurologists and environmental scientists.

Anyone interested in school design or architecture should read these books by Prakash Nair. They are the gold standard.

• Learning by Design: Live Play Engage Create
• The Language of School Design: Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools
• Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning

For nearly forty years, the education community has been stumped by the seemingly insurmountable challenge of “getting teachers to use technology.” Generational change, ease-of-use, increasing access, and the remarkable power of computation have been no match for, “I don’t wanna.”

If one doesn’t care to differentiate between the various forms and nutritional value of “educational technology,” it might be easy to celebrate how a lethal global pandemic is “getting teachers to use technology at long last. Just don’t look too closely.

500,000 educators responded heroically to the chaos caused by COVID-19 by joining the Bitmoji Classroom Facebook group. This benefits no one. Coloring rarely results in systemic change. Such nostalgic representations of a teacher standing at the front of the classroom in front of a handwriting chart, holding an apple, with propagandistic slogans, rules, and standards on the “walls” are more than capitulation or timewasting. They are evidence of a failure to seize the moment to create modern, humane, and learner-centered educational experiences – to realize our dreams. 

The bitmoji classroom is not just a way for an over-stressed teacher to blow-off steam, or a way to reduce the trauma of students being taught remotely, or communicate with parents. It is a reenactment of Our Gang’s Miss. Crabtree, a desperate self-parody, a Make Schools Great Again hat…

Worst of all, prioritizing classroom décor, real or virtual, is condescending, sexist, and an insult to the intelligence, creativity, and competence of teachers. This infantilizes teachers and resets the system to its default settings, compliance and standardization. Imagine the other things a half million teachers could be doing or learning.

Note: I could go on. There are lots of issues of effective interface design, accessibility high-quality computing experiences, democratic classrooms, and the value/harm of what teachers hang on walls, but I will save those until I am flamed for daring to question the 43 day-old bitmoji classroom tradition.

You might also be interested in yesterday’s article, Stick to Our Knitting.

“The chaotic life in schools today is our inheritance from a century of this continual tinkering with public schools and public dissatisfaction with the result. Add something this year, add something next year, keep programs in place because of “tradition,” and you have, I will argue, the overburdened school, the school that tries to do too much – and ironically ends up not getting many of the results we care most about.”

Kralovec, E. (2004). Schools that do too much: Wasting time and money in schools and what we can all do about it. Beacon Press.

No other adults in society are qualified to educate everybody’s children. That is our role, our value – our secret sauce. When educators happily assume the role of cops, bus drivers, coaches, priests, or fast-food workers we relieve the village of its responsibility to raise its children. As a culture, we cede too much power and responsibility to schools and must assert our teaching and learning expertise. It takes a village to raise a child. In that village there are thoughtful, creative, competent, learned, and sensitive adults trusted with developing the intellect of children – educators.

Such is our value proposition. We look to be facing unprecedented fiscal cuts to public education and massive teacher layoffs. A large number of private schools will never reopen. Identifying and clearly articulating your value as an educator and educational institution is now a matter of survival. Demonstrate your value. Prepare your own proposal for cutting 10, 20, 30, or even 50% of the school budget. Preparation will make such inevitability less catastrophic. Determine alone, and with colleagues, what matters most. How can school add the most value to a child’s life?

I am reminded of my friend Etta Kralovek’s book, “Schools that Do Too Much.” Her book brings into sharp focus the massive time-wasting, misplaced spending, and under-utilized potential squandered in schools. Educators not only face potential economic calamity, but a few months of hastily slapped together “homeschooling under school surveillance” has revealed to parents what school is like. For many, this revelation is not pretty. Some parents have a developed newfound empathy for their children who “hate school.” Others will conclude that the education their students experience is not worth the money, either via taxes or tuition.

When a parent says, “I’m not smart enough to help with my second grader’s homework,” we should not interpret that statement literally. They may be saying, “I cannot believe how tedious, boring, and irrelevant this schoolwork is. Thank god I don’t have to do it.” Maslow is insufficient. Kids deserve better.

We better do something. Our future is at stake. We’ve each been given a MacBook Pro and magic carpet. We should not exchange them for a ditto machine and box of chalk.

The reckless reopening and quicker closing of schools reveals how little our society cares about kids or their teachers. Don’t believe me? In Australia during the lockdown, teachers are being required to teach online and in many cases also report to the schools deemed unsafe for everyone else so they can simultaneously “mind” the children of “essential” workers. Well, that confirms it. Society views teachers as disposable. After all, proper martyrs don’t whine about being forced to potentially contract a lethal virus.

It would be nice if schools cleansed of toxic pedagogical practices during the lockdown had the willpower necessary to not reintroduce them once the bell rings this Fall. However, I am less than optimistic. Far too many of the ”when we return” discussions I have observed start with assessment and design backwards from there. Why can’t we learn from our own experiences, even when we know that a return to the status quo is bad for children? Why wouldn’t we reduce teacher and studio stress by “looping classes for the coming school year?” Why should everyone get to know new classes and teachers just because of the calendar? Why is commonsense so uncommon?

Expensive private schools are reopening with none of the trappings that justify their value, but reopening in some places nonetheless. In some, parents have the right to risk the health and safety of their family be sending their kids back to physical school, while others may choose to continue remote learning – as long as their tuition is paid up. So, naturally such a school would assign a teacher or two to teach the students who are “learning” remotely, right? Creating a cohort of those students make collaboration possible, fosters community, and allows teachers to address the specific needs of students being taught online. Such an approach makes perfect sense and seems like a win-win proposition. So, of course schools aren’t doing that. We’ll just stick an iPad in the back of the room and stream rows of their classmate’s heads with a tiny teacher at the front of the room.

Guess what? Teaching during an uncontrolled pandemic is a giant mess. Why let a crisis go to waste without trying some new things? For a moment, it looked like all of the things teachers despise were set aside – standardized testing, grades, bell schedules, AP tests, SAT/ACT requirement, homework… If this tragic pandemic had a silver lining, it created the conditions for experimentation, alternative model building, and teacher leadership. Many teachers were literally asked, “If we got rid of all the external pressures and administrative demands that keep you from creating the most productive contexts for learning, what would teaching and learning look like? Your community needs you and trusts you to do the right thing!”

Admittedly, I began writing this article four months ago (May, 2020). I was a lot more optimistic before the President and governors demanded that kids return to school at any human cost in the name of “normalcy.”

Normalcy isn’t always better. It may just feel more comfortable. The past week featured news articles about how to punish students online and the enforcement of online dress codes. If a student can wear pajama pants to Zoom school, who knows if they’ll ever sit still in a $7 plastic chair for seven hours a day? One might easily conclude that the normal function of schooling is control, surveillance, and punishment of a captive audience. In that case, a school to prison pipeline is unnecessary. We are already there.

Many workplaces and cities will be irrevocably transformed by the lessons learned during this pandemic. Remote work will increase and business travel will decrease. Populations will shift. By the look of things, classrooms will remain unchanged forever and that’s a real shame.

And still I rise…

Those of us who know better, need to do better. If we don’t stand between children and the madness, who will? There may still be time to show the world what’s possible. Let’s assert ourselves as indispensable leaders, worthy of respect, with talent, ingenuity, and a fearless willingness to stand on the side of what is right for children. We sure could use less Maslow and more Malaguzzi! (use the google) 

In schools where making, art, and music are not being sacrificed in favor of children completing worksheets in socially distant plexiglass cages, there are genuine concerns about sharing tools and other materials. One way to do that safely is for every kid to have their own set of stuff. However, that could get expensive. It does not have to. The BBC micro:bit (why it matters) is a low-cost miracle of a microntroller development board (brain board) that may be used for fun and exciting computer science, mathematics, electronics, and engineering projects. The affordability of the micro:bit makes it possible for kids to take them home whether school returns to normal or face future interruptions. The family workshops I’ve run in which kids go home with their own micro:bit Go Kit testify to the power of this potent portable makerspace.

In order to help educators plan for Take Home Makerspaces, I have created four options – all under $100 (US). These prices are approximate since micro:bit prices fluctuate based on availability. You may be able to buy some components in bulk or save a bit by buying a bit:booster with a micro:bit. Adafruit gives a 10% educator discount for purchases greater than $250 and they also discount all of their components when purchased in bulk. I suggest sources for these components and hope to convince a company to create an online storefront where kits may be purchased easily.

These “take home makerspaces” can be easily mailed to students or safely picked up at school.

Note: Super clever hackers may quibble with my component choices or have ingenious solutions of their own. That’s great. The purpose of creating this document is two-fold. 1) Demonstrate what’s possible and 2) Make deployment simple for educators.

The micro:bit Go kit is the place to begin building your Take Home Makerspace. The Go kit includes a BBC micro:bit micontroller development board, complete with sensors, a display, accelerometer, compass, input/outputs, Bluetooth, radio, a battery box, batteries, and USB cable for transferring programs you write from a computer to the micro:bit. Even if you connect via Bluetooth (in Scratch or from a tablet), the battery box allows you to run the micro:bit untethered to a computer.

Throw in two 10 mm (big) LEDs and four alligator clips, I like the short ones from Adafruit, and a ton of programming and electronics projects are possible.

Bargain Take Home Makerspace Kit

• micro:bit Go kit
• Two 10mm LEDs
• Four alligator clips

For another twenty-five bucks, you can really get the party started by programming musical tones and a bright colorful LED light strip. Both components connect to the micro:bit with alligator clips, making setup and reuse a breeze. The LED light strip is not only colorful, but offers all sorts of opportunities to deal with patterns, sequences, and computational thinking. The strip may be used to decorate projects (or your bedroom) or as a display for presenting numerical data.

Party Pack Take Home Makerspace Kit

• everything in the Bargain Kit
• 1 Monk Makes Speaker
• 1 Adafruit LED strip with alligator clips

Your micro:bit snaps into the bit:booster, an expansion board for connecting DC motors, servos, and LEGO allowing you to build micro:bit-powered machines that move. The bit:booster also has its own speaker, so you don’t need a separate one and a bunch more programmable neo-pixel lights right on the board. It also has a built-in battery pack for powering motors. Throw in some recycled junk, a couple small continuous servos or some DC toy motors harvested from previously loved toys and the micro:bit becomes a robotics kit suitable for all sorts of engineering projects.

Hard Fun Take Home Makerspace

• The contents of the Bargain Kit
• 1 LED light strip with alligator clips
• 1 bit:booster
• 1 pair of continuous servo motors with wheels

micro:bits can communicate with one another via radio frequencies. This lets you not only send secret messages between them, but allows you to use a second micro:bit as a remote control for others. Imagine steering the vehicle you built, controlling a micro:bit-based puppet, or programming a “Pong” game across two microcontrollers. In a classroom where each kid has a micro:bit, such collaboration is easier. If you’re home alone, you can never have too many micro:bits!

Ready to Roll Take Home Makerspace

• The contents of the Hard Fun Take Home Makerspace
• 1 additional micro:bit or micro:bit Go kit (a few dollars more)

One More Option

We are gigantic fans of the Hummingbird Robotics Kits. Read why here. For not much more money than the kits described above, you can have a fantastic easy-to-use, yet powerful, programmable construction kit for exploring math, science, robotics, engineering, and computer science in a playful creative context.

Resources

• Find micro:bit Go retailers near you (international list)
  • Adafruit (reseller)
  • Sparkfun (reseller)
  • Kitronik (reseller and developer of cool micro:bit accessories)
  • Robotshop (reseller)
• The Invent To Learn micro:bit resource page
• Gary Stager’s micro:bit project prompts for getting started
• Invent To Learn Family Workshops
• Birdbrain Technologies (developer of the Hummingbird Robotics Kits)
• The micro:bit Matters
• Flip the Script

In mid-1997 I suggested to the late great Dr. Terrence Cannings, Associate Dean of Education at Pepperdine University, that we needed to create an online masters degree program. I sensed that online education was about to blow up and we needed to be at the vanguard or be left behind. He called me a charlatan. A few months later, Dean Cannings asked if we could revisit my idea. So, in late January 1998, I prepared a proposal for an online master of arts in educational technology program to the Dean. (I was just an adjunct at the time.) She listened politely and asked, “What year do you think we should shoot for?” Forgetting that universities tend to innovate at a glacial pace, I replied, “The program should begin this July.” The Dean smiled politely and sent us on our way with a knowing giggle. With Professors Linda Polin and Jack McManus, we had the program accredited by that May and our first cadre of students was on campus for what became known as “VirtCamp” in July. The students would meet face-to-face at a conference in January and present exhibitions of their work the following July on campus. The rest of the program was entirely online.

There is much I could write about the program that remained barely unchanged for two decades, but the most important thing to say is that I am grateful that my more senior colleagues had a longstanding commitment to progressive education traditions and constructionism. Our MA program viewed the online space as the perfect place for enhanced collaboration, community, creativity, and knowledge construction. Nothing was missing from the traditional graduate school experience besides tests, quizzes, and lectures. For several glorious years, we ran the entire online experience on Netscape Newsgroups for asynchronous discussions and Tapped-In for synchronous discussions.

For about a dozen years, I taught a variety of courses in the program, almost including the first trimester, “Learning and Technology,” class. This learning theory course for the digital age used Papert’s The Children’s Machine, Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, and Frank Smith’s Book of Learning and Forgetting as its primary texts. (All three books withstand the test of time) Seeking to model progressive education traditions in this new virtual world while providing experiences demonstrating the power of computing in knowledge construction, I developed a pedagogical approach I called, “Learning Adventures.” My hope was that the experiences my mid-career graduate students enjoyed online would impact their physical classroom teaching as well.

I remember writing a conference paper for an Australian academic conference a year earlier, but I just discovered that there exists video of a talk I gave by the same title, “Learning Adventures: Transforming Real and Virtual Learning Environments,” in June, 2009. That video and a recollection of the session written in 2009 are below. That conference was very special for me. I was invited to be a keynote speaker at what would be the last National Educational Computing Conference (now ISTE) in Washington, D.C. where I gave an outrageous (surely career-ending) talk to the largest audience on earth. I honestly do not know how good the presentation (below) is, but I think it may be of value to educators trying to create productive contexts for learning online in 2020 and beyond. Let me know what you think.

(July 25, 2009) Fueled by adrenaline from the early-morning keynote debate, I got the enormous NECC stage to myself to make a presentation called, “Learning Adventures: Transforming Real and Virtual Learning Environments” The video of that presentation has finally appeared online and I am most grateful that ISTE filmed the session at such a high level of quality. I am enormously proud of this presentation and am thrilled that my mouth worked pretty well that morning, June 30th, 2009.

As I’ve said in other contexts, I’ve been online since 1983 and have taught online since the late 1980s. Therefore, I look upon the euphoria and controversy accorded “online learning” like a fish looks at water. It just isn’t that interesting to me that people communicate online. I expect it. I depend upon it. Everybody does it, right?

My work is driven by how adults can create the productive contexts for learning in which every human may enjoy the widest array of deep experiences that hold the potential of resulting in the construction of knowledge and a happy life.

It seems cruelly ironic that the viability of school as a “technology” is dependent on the very activities and disciplines (band, choir, drama, studio art, laboratory science, etc…) that schools cut first. Could this just be a manifestation of the phenomena Seymour Papert described in his 1990 speech, “Perestroika and Epistemological Pluralism?“

This NECC spotlight session captures many of my thoughts about how online education rarely reaches its potential and my struggle to transform my own teaching online to reflect the most learner-centered, non-coercive, creative principles of face-to-face education while using what I’ve learned online to inform my real-world teaching.

I sure hope you will take the time to watch it! (perhaps even blog a bit about or at least tweet)

There is more information below the video...

My most sincere apologies to David Perkins for being unable to remember the correct title of his terrific new book, Making Learning Whole – How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education. I highly recommend that educators familiarize themselves of Perkins’ important work.

PS: I’ve learned that if I’m on a stage that large, I need a monitor at the front of the stage and to walk around less.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an impressive lecture by veteran MIT Professor Patrick Winston, simply titled, “How to Speak.” The lecture was recorded in its entirety eighteen months before his death. While I don’t agree with everything he says, anyone who speaks publicly or teaches from the front of the room will find plenty to learn from this masterclass.

Patrick Winston’s How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), usually to overflow crowds, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules. Professor Winston’s collection of rules is presented along with examples of their application in job-interview talks, thesis defenses, oral examinations, and lectures.

You can get a sense of Professor Winston’s communication skills in his often hilarious tribute to his mentor, Marvin Minsky, at the 2016 memorial event. Patrick Winston and I are also contributors to the book, Inventing Minds: Marvin Minsky on Education.

MIT Press will publish a book inspired by the How To Speak lecture/course on August 20, 2020. Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform not only addresses effective speaking, but writing as well. My copy is on order!

Notes:

1. Term attributed to Sugata Mitra and defined here at http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/MIE.html

Theory

For generations, established musicians and athletes have recounted the lessons learned riding the bus with seasoned veterans. This may not be where they learned the specific skills of their vocation as much as what it means to be a ballplayer or artist. Tall tales, legends, and practical advice are shared, tacitly and directly, without a formal curriculum. When one looks back upon the knowledge “dropped” at just the right moment they realize that it was within the zone of proximal development. The “lesson” was just slightly out of reach of the newcomer – yet retained and recounted for a lifetime once the recipient matures sufficiently to recognize the critical wisdom imparted at that pivotal moment. Such lessons are big and small. A raised eyebrow, pat on the back, being lent a book to read, or being tossed across a room are some of the myriad of pedagogical strategies employed by more accomplished colleagues.

Even if motivated by a mere desire to hang out with someone you admire, such experiences provide the context for the assimilation and accommodation processes required for personal knowledge construction. (learning) Such cognitive development happens inside the learner but is often situated within a social setting. This is the basis of constructivism.

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger attempt to distinguish themselves from Piaget’s notions of intellectual development by asserting the importance of the social setting. For them, knowledge is always socially constructed, while Piaget was open to that idea, but neither stated it definitively or dismissed personal learning. Lave and Wenger introduced the idea of legitimate peripheral participation (LLP) to describe how newcomers become experienced members and then eventually old timers of a community of practice. As “newbies” develop mastery, their participation becomes more essential to the functioning of the community and are valued for their expertise. Apprentices evolve into mentors who can bestow legitimacy upon newcomers once they demonstrate the habits and commitments valued by the community. It is the very access to expertise that aides the developmental process. Lave and Wenger’s LLP theory suggests that without such access to expertise and proximity to examples of practice, learners will experience limited growth. Learning is growth.

“Riding the bus” is a prime example of LLP. By initially participating in casual or low-risk activities such as observation or listening, rookies learn the expectations, vocabulary, shared traditions, and mission of the community. Other communities of practice have their version of “riding the bus” or “the locker room.” Many musicians call this “the hang.”

The hang is what I love about jazz musicians; they have perfected the hang and raised it to an art form. In fact, it is not uncommon for the hang between or after sets to be as profound as the performance on-stage. The hang is the glue that holds any community of practice together. It provides nourishment and sustenance. Access to the hang is an invitation for newbies to assess how they measure up and if they wish to be a member of that guild. 

Fans engage in LPP by observing the interactions of musicians young and old at different levels of development during a performance. If they can summon the courage, they sneak backstage to peek into the green room. Stand in the doorway of the kitchen at the Village Vanguard between sets or at the end of the night and witness the camaraderie, serious planning, and hijinks of the musicians blowing off steam or preparing for the next set. Old friends, mentors, and aspiring talent come and go in a ballet of mutual respect, tradition, and reciprocal inspiration. One’s knowledge, talent, reputation, willingness to imitate the behavior of the experts, and humility are all part of the price of admission to a community of practice. Sometimes, love and respect for the what the elders do is sufficient for being tolerated on the periphery of the hang. Persistence is a form of dues paying that may bring you closer to the center of the action over time. Chutzpah is often rewarded by an invitation to join all sorts of communities.

In the hang, expertise and relationships are fluid and not always hierarchical. Depending on a particular situation, teacher/student or mentor/apprentice relationships will switch at the microlevel since expertise is distributed and embodied in various members of a community. Newbies often have something to teach the veterans even within a group sustained by legitimate peripheral participation. Papert wrote about the power of the Brazilian samba school as a metaphor for ideal learning environments that appear to resemble “school,” but benefit from all of the best aspects of LLP. Across Brazil, community organizations exist for the purpose of performing large, colorful, and spectacular dances for the annual Carnival celebrations. In the samba school, you are part of something larger than yourself. Young and old gather to dance together. Traditions are passed down. New dances are invented and perfected. Along the way, members of the LLP create something of great complexity only achievable in such a democratic setting rich in joyous and purposeful effort.

Me

Even though my schooling experience was often unpleasant, unproductive, and complete with bullying (by kids and teachers), from third grade on I could always find a teacher to hang out with. I remain in touch with some of those educators who long ago became cherished colleagues and friends.

When I became interested in education, educational computing was where you would find the smartest, bravest, and radical thinkers. Making the world a better place for kids has always been my objective, so I pursued the expertise leading such efforts. Luckily, as in other seminal moments, unlikely mentors came into my life at precisely the right moment and ushered me into spaces I otherwise could not have accessed. I shared some of those apprenticeship experiences in my most recent TED Talk.

At twenty-three years old, I drove my Toyota Corolla to MIT for the international Logo ’85 Conference. I parked the car and before I could lock the doors, a woman yelled, “Hey kid! Come to dinner with us!” That woman was Dr. Cynthia Solomon, one of the inventors of Logo and the mother of educational computing. Many of the people I met that evening have not only become my greatest friends, mentors, and colleagues, but they participated in last week’s online Constructing Modern Knowledge Celebration. Cynthia Solomon and Brian Silverman have been faculty treasured members of the CMK institute faculty for twelve or thirteen years. The expert educators and inventors I met between 1984 and 1986 not only taught me how to teach and learn, but we have traveled the world together and taught a bazillion educators along the way.

There was one memorable evening in particular that changed my life. A few months after the Logo ’85 conference, I flew cross-country to attend the first West Coast Logo Conference in Los Angeles. I remember the opening cocktail reception vividly, Brian Silverman and David Thornburg (who would also become a dear friend and cherished colleague) were engaged in a spirited conversation about Ada Lovelace. I had never seen anything like it. I made sure to listen carefully and stay on the periphery of the conversation while thinking to myself, “I want a life of this!” I wanted to spend time with intelligent people and argue about interesting matters, large and small. While silently participating in that conversation, my worldview and trajectory were transformed. 

Communities of practice thrive in the interstitial spaces – on the bus, in the locker room, at the bar – not typically in the classroom. 

Us

I often fear that educators are “hang deprived.” Sure, they attend conferences and have sheroes or mentors, but where are the rich multigenerational traditions built, sustained, and shared? Student teaching is a form of apprenticeship, but how often does that master teacher become a lifelong colleague? (In many cases, they just surrender their class to the newbie and split.) Where does an educator enjoy the inspiration, love, or rejuvenation found in the sort of “hangs” described above? What are the costs of such deprivation?

The annual Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute (CMK) was created as a space where experts, novices, and practitioners of all levels in between assemble to work on projects that matter to them. No one sorts folks into ability groups or takes any notice of what a person teaches, where they come from, or what they know. They’re just part of the “the hang” where everyone works on projects for four days, surrounded by different levels of expertise on-tap as needed or learn from through careful observation and casual encounters.

The project work at CMK is the “official hang.” Informal conversations with new colleagues over meals, walks with faculty members, and sneaking conversations with our remarkable guest speakers represent the hang within the hang. I know what it has meant to my development to not only meet most of my education sheroes and heroes, but to actually get to know them. There is no greater joy than sharing these friends and colleagues with educators who get to say, “I spent time with ___,” rather than, “I heard ___.” There are countless stories of participants engaging with experts, visionaries, leaders, and inventors at CMK while no one else was looking. Such experiences can be life-altering.

The conversations at last week’s virtual Constructing Modern Knowledge Celebration were an opportunity for CMK faculty and alumni to reflect upon their experiences at our institute and share the ways in which our samba school impacted their lives. Those personal epiphanies were enormously gratifying. After two such ninety-minute Zoom sessions, the last event featured an Ask Me Anything session with the legendary education author and ingenious provocateur, Alfie Kohn. Alfie engaged in conversation with the assembled educators, as he has done three times at CMK and challenged our thinking for more than an hour.

Then something even more extraordinary occurred. After we said, “goodbye,” to Alfie and officially ended the day-long event, some people didn’t leave. Old friends I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, former grad students, CMK faculty, mentors, and friends of mine stuck around to hang in Zoom for the next two and a half hours! 

Best of all, we didn’t retreat to a “private room” but carried on our mixture of the profane and profound in full view of the “audience” who stuck around on the perimeter of the circle, just like I had during the Ada Lovelace discussion all those years ago. Like most, this hang was filled with humor, life experience, questions, arguments, reminiscing, advice, and love. Occasionally, someone from outside my inner circle of friends would ask a question or contribute to the conversation, but several dozen other educators just lurked. That thrills me!

In an online context, lurking is a form of apprenticeship. It is legitimate peripheral participation. That is why, in this period of chaos and uncertainty, it is so necessary to share such opportunities for conversation and the sharing of learning stories. My online Ask Me Anything sessions are my contribution to educators hip enough to participate, even if participation consists entirely of lurking (for now).

Since the start of the pandemic, I have hosted six Ask Me Anything sessions, four with guest speakers, plus the Constructing Modern Knowledge Celebration. Since it’s summertime, I’ve decided that the next four Thursday night sessions will offer lighter fare. Each Thursday, I will begin the proceedings with an evocative tale from my career and then hang with anyone interested in discussing anything.

Won’t you please join me and invite your friends too?

For more information and to register, go to stager.org/ama

References

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation. (2020, July 20). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://­en.wikipedia.org/­w/­index.php?title=Evolutionary_­history_­of_­life&oldid=925898335

Under the best of circumstances, 98% of school is language arts and the remaining 27% is dedicated to a thing called math. Every other subject is fungible. Under the best circumstances, art, music, drama, and making things are under constant threat of underfunding or elimination. I have been receiving pleas for advice from art, music, and maker education teachers facing a “return to school” in which their programs are being shelved due to safety concerns while their hallowed spaces are being annexed for socially distant small group reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic.

The hastily thrown together plans are based on woefully incomplete data, questionable assumptions, fear, and frankly, exhaustion. Creative teachers are being asked to watch as the curricular programs they built, developed, fought, and fundraised for, are being sacrificed for “School.” While these changes may be made with all of the best intentions, they will narrow the curriculum, denature what the educational experience, and marginalize some of the system’s most creative educators. History suggests that once these programs are eliminated, they will likely never return.

So, here is my advice for the teachers expert in learning-by-doing. Stand your ground. Fight for your programs. Defend your turf – literally and figuratively. Make it abundantly clear that when face-to-face school resumes, you’re not going anywhere.

They call your subjects “specials” for a reason. It’s time to reclaim that term and rid it of its pejorative connotation. What you do is special! It is why many kids come to school. If you work in a private school, your programs are probably why parents pay for their children to attend.

The non-desk-bound subjects are your school’s value proposition. They are what keeps school viable. Many of you just demonstrated that accessing information, writing, engaging in conversation, attending lectures, and test-taking – the meat and potatoes of schooling – may be done online. (The dirty little secret is often in far less time than the school schedule suggests.)

So, here’s my million-dollar idea. If you can stomach attending another virtual committee meeting to plan the coming school year, make the following case. Any hybrid or face-to-face model of schooling in the future should prioritize the preservation of art, music, drama, making, and hands-on science. Start with that goal and work backwards to create plans for realizing that vision of education. Flip the script!

All matters of space allocation, staffing, scheduling, and funding should support the goal of preserving and sustaining the experiences that are best (or only) achieved when adults and children are located in the same physical space at the same time. Imagine what school would look like when committed to helping children realize their fullest potential and emphasizing that which makes us human.

Let me be even less ambiguous. School should be about art, music, drama, science, and making things. Do not settle for keeping your job while your role is diminished, and your programs are marginalized. This is the time for school to expand the experiences children cannot enjoy on the Internet, on TV, or from a book.

I won’t insult readers by reciting the evidence for how these experiences improve “academic performance,” improve attendance, motivate students, or enhance a community. You know all of those things already. The decision-makers who continuously chip away at such essential programs know so too. We should use this moment to do the right thing.

Do not confuse my radical suggestion as a short-term intervention for dealing with the immediacy of the COVID-19 crisis, but rather an exercise in educating for an inevitable future in which today’s arbitrary school schedule will be as impractical as it is unacceptable. In the very near future, children will attend schools more and less than today with flexible schedules based on shifts in parental work patterns, individual student needs, and a plethora of productive contexts for learning – online, in school, and in the community.

The most predictable opposition to my modest proposal is a concern for safety. I am not an epidemiologist and certainly do not wish to jeopardize anyone’s health. My answer to the question, “How can we do this safely and maintain social distancing and proper hygiene?” is “I don’t know. Figure it out.” There appears to be consensus on the practical tactics being employed by those seeking to open joyless schools where children may be minded, fed, and lectured to. Surely, those tips and tricks apply to my humane and vibrant model as well.

• Maintain appropriate physical distancing as recommended by scientists and medical professionals
• Wear a mask
• Wash your hands
• Do not share tools or musical instruments
• Reduce class sizes
• Spend more time outdoors

Let’s explore the last three tips since those relate specifically to the sort of schooling experience I propose. Science classes and maker spaces may need to focus on experiments and projects using a smaller number of low-cost materials than they did pre-Pandemic. Each student can have those materials assigned to them and stored in safe containers. Think of a toolbox per kid. There are a million and one science experiments and explorations one can conduct with household items. Perhaps each kid will build their own microscope as many already do in schools with maker spaces. Classes in making may focus on the protean maker space, computer programming. A great deal of physical computing may be explored via the $15 micro:bit, four alligator clips, and two 10mm LEDs; I could write a semester course for any grade level with those materials. Of course, the richest nation in the history of the world can afford a personal multimedia laptop computer for every child and their own musical instrument.

Class size reduction gets a bit trickier. You may have to lead many smaller music ensembles and choirs. Plays with smaller casts may be produced, phone-based video production can be created, and drama may be represented by socially distant staged reading. The lack of extracurricular activities and other distractions creates a fertile opportunity for students to read, write, program, and practice more than ever before.

There are at least several months during which the weather is pleasant enough for educational activities to occur under the stars (or a canopy). Thanks to climate change, it’s rarely too cold to go outside and kids are not as fragile as schools pretend they are – see football, marching band, Scouts, playing outside, winter sports… Bundle the little kids up and tell yuppie parents that this is a forest schooling or experiential learning. They may even pay more for that. The kids will love it too!

I have infinite faith in teachers, administrators, parents, and school boards coming together to chart a course for realizing this new agenda for schooling when physical school resumes. Things need not be as they seem. Chart a new course! You got this!

During Gary Stager’s recent Ask Me Anything session with Deborah Meier, her Habits of Mind and Ted Sizer‘s Essential Principles for schools (especially secondary schools) were discussed. Watch a recording of the Ask Me Anything session, here.

Deborah Meier’s website

Deborah Meier’s Bridging Differences column with Diane Ravitch, et al.

Books by Deborah Meier

Documentaries made about Central Park East elementary and secondary schools, founded by Deborah Meier.

Deborah Meier’s Five Habits of Mind, as originally explored in the book, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem.

1. Evidence – asking, “How do you know?”
2. Connections – asking, “How is this connected to something else I already know or care about?”
3. Perspective or Viewpoint – asking, “From whose perspective is this story being told?”
4. Conjecture – asking, “How can I imagine a different outcome?”, and
5. Relevance – asking, “Why is this important?”

Read and watch how the habits of mind are employed at Boston’s Mission Hill School

Books by Ted Sizer, including Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (all three volumes of the Horace trilogy are essential reading)

The Ten Common Principles of Essential Schools (by Ted Sizer), complete with explanations

The Coalition of Essential Schools website

The Coalition of Essential Schools Remembers Ted Sizer

“Defund the police” is an in-artful term that fails as a “brand” because it requires explanation. It is already being used as a weapon against those calling for justice and peace by cynical Republicans and others who never considered the complex system of racism and cruelty that allows the government to brutalize African Americans with impunity.

That said, I am in agreement with those calling for police defunding, police abolition, and prison abolition. The percentage of cash-strapped municipal budgets allocated to police forces is outrageous and unsustainable. Of course, those funds could be put to better use elsewhere. Nearly 54% of the Los Angeles city budget is spent on policing and California cities have relatively skimpy budgets! (Not to mention that the LAPD has a terrible record of race relations, police brutality, and patrols in a fashion where cops can’t discern store owners and from looters.)

I reject the excuse that long stressful shifts should cause the sorts of psychosis that leads police officers to kneel on a man’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. If long shifts are a problem, then it is justification for ending overtime, a hustle police officers engage in to boost their income substantially at the expense of taxpayers and public safety. Accessible and affordable mental health services should be available to the entire community, including peace officers sworn to protect and serve.

We are on the cusp of monumental decisions. The need for social justice and a weak economy are going to require major redistribution of public resources. If not defunded completely, the police (and military) are going to need to be scaled back in both mission and budget.

Two experiences have led me to this point. The first was the 3 1/2 years I spent working inside a troubled prison for teens where we created a radically different schooling experience. When we put the needs, talents, curiosity, creativity, interests, and expertise of the kids ahead of an arbitrary curriculum and treated them like colleagues, not a single student needed to leave the classroom for disciplinary reasons a single time. Not once in more than three years! This was in a facility Amnesty International cited for state-sponsored torture of children. When we treated children with dignity, high expectations, and humanity, they demonstrated learning superpowers and were delightful to spend time with. This experience also leaves me highly reluctant to “lock her up” or “throw away the key,”

About a year ago, I listened to an amazing Chris Hayes podcast, Thinking about how to abolish prisons with Mariame Kaba, in which the activist made a convincing case for seemingly nutty idea, getting rid of prisons – not reforming them, but eliminating the entire prison industrial complex. I was unaware that this was plausible, let alone a movement until I listened to the common sense arguments advanced in this conversation.

Executed properly, this is a moment for serious systemic change. In the recent CNN-SSRS poll, 84% of Americans say that the current protests are justified. This is not 1968 or even just a few years ago. Fellow Americans of good conscience favor doing something differently, perhaps radically differently – now. They just don’t know what that might look like or how to wrap their head around alternative scenarios.

I began thinking about this challenge when an old colleague posted a pro-Police/anti-protestor meme and justified it by saying that we should stop complaining about the police because when his wife’s wheelchair gets stuck in the yard, he calls the police and they help lift her to safety. Would George Floyd or the 75 year-old man trampled by Buffalo police accept that tradeoff? Must we?

I truly believe that there are millions of people who wish to do the right thing and join together to create a more perfect union based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This requires us to stop building systems focused on the extreme worst of human potential. Folks just need help imagining that things need not be as they seem. Each of has an obligation to help paint that picture in order to make the world a better place. 

Here is my first (lame) attempt at doing so.

Solution

Let Richard Scarry be your guide. There are lots of different jobs and helpers in Busy Busytown. Some people help old ladies across the sidewalk, others direct traffic. Some even remind their fellow critters to stay off the grass. When someone is sick or injured, other helpers rush to scene to, well, help. Others clean up litter and make sure that street lights work. New jobs are created to feed hungry people and play games with little critters afterschool. New houses and apartments are built and properly maintained so everyone in Busytown enjoys a comfortable place to sleep.

There are helpers who help you deal with stress or stop taking drugs. Every mommy and daddy in Busytown has a job that pays a living wage and health insurance. They even have enough money left over to take their children on vacation sometimes. And yes, in Busy Busytown, there are even helpers who will help lift your wife’s wheelchair. They just won’t be carrying an assault rifle, pepper spray, or swinging a baton.

A challenge for educators

Which educational practices can you imagine abolishing in schools? I am sure you can think of ineffective, grossly expensive, distracting, or miseducative “traditions” most people take for granted. Can you imagine school without:

• Grades?
• Tests?
• Homework?
• Tracking?
• Silent lunch?
• Discipline problems?
• Bullying?
• Competition?
• School segregation?
• Charter schools?
• Algebra II?
• Football?

If so, this is your moment. What is your plan for doing the right thing?

My colleague, friend, and mentor Seymour Papert used to teach through parables. Here is my lame attempt at maintaining that tradition. No need to thank me. You are quite welcome!

Everyone in the kingdom of Isteeville goes about their lives with a happy-go-lucky attitude and nary a care in the world. Everything is fine.  In Isteeville, there are good schools and terrible ones, but no one seems to notice. There is an easy solution for every problem, as long you pay no attention to funding disparities, lack of resources, or the systemic racism that bestow very different experiences upon kids.

Every year or two a popular blogger invents a clever acronym or catch phrase to excite the kingdom for a short time. A band of agile salespeople and consultants who, like 54-year-old bees, have pollinated many a startup with “edu” or “mentum” in their name, change their corporate polos for the next innovation season. Their whispers about FFL spread via Ploink, the new new new new post-social network. Flippety-Floppety Learning enthusiasts descend upon the Land of the Open Sewer (now a tourist destination.) Just in the nick of time, a new command is bellowed from the leader’s Segway, “Every child deserves Flippety-Floppety Learning! We must scale this innovation at once! “

Any distinctions between teaching and learning have been forgotten long ago. Many Post-It Notes will now be affixed to walls. Masters degree programs scramble to offer new courses on Flippety-Floppety Learning. EdD students write dissertations based on asking a dozen of their colleagues their opinions of FFL. While a minority of villagers debate the origins of FFL, the industrious set out to quickly publish the first Flippety-Floppy Learning Handbook for teachers. That book will be celebrated for its breezy tone and refusal to be bogged down by pesky bibliographic references or recognition of similar efforts in the past.

Schools hire guitar playing convocation speakers to project YouTube videos in which teachers sing the song they wrote about FFL during their faculty meeting. Grad school professors teach their students to tweet reasons they love Flippety-Floppety Learning to those who have yet to be bitten by the FFL bug. Districts find money in the sofa cushions to employ Flippety-Floppety Learning Coaches. Conference programs are full of presentations like, “Everyone Get Flippety-Floppety,”  “Seven Tips for Flippety-Floppety Learning in Your Classroom,” and “Drop and Give Me Twenty: How FFL Can Transform Physical Education.”

Despite its infancy and unproven status as the latest solution in search of a problem, Isteeville will soon be littered with rubrics and calls for Flippety-Floppety Standards. No one is quite sure if FFL is a good idea, but urgent calls go out for ways to measure fidelity to the latest bright idea. Tomorrow, we must commence training teachers how to do it, regardless of merit or being sure what it is, before someone else concocts a new thingy to capture our attention.

A season passes. All of this educator fueled mania sure is swell, but Flippety-Floppety Learning isn’t scaling up quickly enough to satisfy the next round of investors. So, something must be done! 

The kingdom’s elders shout with glee, “Let’s do what we’ve always done!” BUY MORE!

The End

It is amazing how school leaders and districts can always seem to find rainy day money to invest in terrible ideas without a second wasted on considering the consequences of such actions. I realize that you are in a hurry to reopen schools, but are you investing for the future or reacting out of panic?

I remember several years back when virtual reality was being hyped by educator members of the Shiny Object Club flitting from one new scheme to another. Folks desperate to justify whatever they thought VR is would ask, “What do you think about virtual reality in schools?” My answer would always be, “Isn’t that redundant?“

Surprisingly to some, the online world may provide greater opportunities for intimacy, collaboration, conversation, and learning-by-doing. It is the mechanical stuff long overvalued by school – reading quietly, answering questions, worksheets, quizzes, tests, studying – that are much better suited for the virtual world.

You know who I rarely, if ever, see featured in the articles, books, podcasts, pronouncements, panel discussions or prognostications of the futurists “helping” schools prepare for the “new normal?” Music, art, or drama teachers. Why must the future be so colorless and dystopian?

The simple truth is that band was the only thing we did not have at home that justified my kids going to school. Schools tend to undervalue the things to which they actually add value.

When pressed to defend investment in art, music, drama programs (a justification only ever sought after for things kids enjoy), the affirmative arguments often evoke the words of Dickensian shopkeepers. Students in art and music classes do better on standardized tests or get into better colleges or crush the lesser kids. Even those with nobler objectives argue that art, music, and drama programs motivate kids to stay in school and give them purpose. While certainly true, those reasons are also in service of the system. How about investing in performing arts programs with qualified teachers within the curricular day because what students experience in those classes are the things that make us human, nurture democracy, and sustain civilization? To quote the late NEA Jazz Master Jimmy Heath, “What was good, is good.”

This is not small stakes. I write this as fiery protests burn in cities across the United States in the wake of the latest racist police officer killing of an African American. It is a safe bet that kids in the high school jazz band or production of “Fiddler on the Roof” are not out looting a shoe store. They may even vote to support school budgets when they become adults.

Today’s feed

I have been battling for public investments in performing arts education for thirty-eight years (a tale for another article), but today I saw something so deeply moving on Facebook, that its importance motivated this article.

One of the world’s finest vocalists, Kurt Elling, shared a video of a high school choir from Boulder, Colorado performing an adapted version of his arrangement of Paul Simon’s American Tune. Despite their social isolation, a work of high-quality art was produced on iPhones by students who learned to sing together in school. The special poignancy of the performance is heightened by today’s milieu. Even if these young people did not learn to sing in school, this is where they learned to sing songs by Paul Simon like Kurt Elling and to be part of something bigger than themselves. It also happens to sound great.

A cursory Google search revealed that Fairview High School does not just have a choir, it is blessed with nine of them! It has at least three orchestras and a jazz band as well. They employ multiple art teachers as well. Their community undoubtedly values the arts as an integral part of the educational experience and invests accordingly while other schools share YouTube videos of how there’s music in math (Look, they’re counting!) or math in art (Can you see the triangles?). What this school choir has created is so much more profound than the viral videos of one kid jamming in their room, no matter how talented that kid happens to be.

The music education professionals in this school community have pulled off something impossibly hard as arts teachers are often called upon to do. The result is everything that justifies the future viability of public education.

This investment in kids learning to do something well together, including the cost of arrangers and editors to produce this video, sends students the message that they are loved and much is expected of them. Doesn’t every student deserve that?

Note: Having the audacity to point out that arts programs are under appreciated or underfunded immediately provokes school librarians and teachers of other subjects to exclaim their deprivation.  The race to be the most aggrieved by so many educators is disempowering and counter-productive. We must unite to create and advocate for a modern liberal arts education for every child.

The following is the post on Kurt Elling’s Facebook page. It tells the backstory of remarkable high school video (above).

EXCALIBUR’s deeply moving performance of American Tune is emblematic of these times under lockdown. These talented Fairview High School Choirs students from Boulder, CO – isolated from each other – sang into their phones and the finished result is amazing!

Choir director JANICE VLACHOS had commissioned KERRY MARSH to arrange KURT ELLING’s version of American Tune for Excalibur to perform this school year.

JANICE VLACHOS reflected, “The lyrics hit so deep on this one and it was a comfort all year long to us knowing that there have been times the world has felt in turmoil and that we’ve been in this place before. The words ‘it’s alright, it’s alright’, have been soothing to all of us. We sang this song multiple times throughout the year and we were planning on singing it at the last concert, and then coronavirus hit.

“We walked out of school on March 12th and never returned. We were heartbroken on so many levels – the global consequences of the virus and in our own small world of not being able to singing together. We were also saddened to realize we didn’t have a great recording of American Tune. So we recorded it on our phones, and Kerry Marsh mastered it for us beautifully. I often find myself thinking of the lyrics as I’m searching for solace during this time.

Arranger KERRY MARSH notes, “I feel that this is one of the most important arrangements I’ve written thus far in my musical career, frankly. Based on the transcendent recorded version by Kurt Elling, and arranged during the most uncertain time in at least my own lifetime, this prescient Paul Simon composition connects with our modern times in a way that a typical ‘chart description’ is not fit to articulate. Its meaning, as it may relate to the current gaping political divide in the U.S. (mirrored in many countries worldwide, certainly) or certainly the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, will be best communicated by each group that performs it.

“These young musicians (and their director) are absolutely amazing. It was humbling to work on this, and [my partner] Julia Dollison and I shed buckets of tears throughout the process. Really proud of what they’ve accomplished with this and everything else, and confident that this currently messed up world is in very capable hands when these folks take charge.

“As a part of the celebration of their releasing this, I’ve just made this chart available at KerryMarsh.com. Kurt Elling’s version (arranged by Christian Elsässer) was an incredible source of inspiration to work from. Paul Simon’s composition has proved timeless…would that it weren’t so, actually. But these students, in their interpretation of his lyric, provide great hope.

Fairview HS Orchestra director DAVID RUTHERFORD adds this behind-the-scenes perspective:

“Your experience is this: For 7 minutes you watch all their beautiful faces, all together, side-by-side, shining at you with all the love of singing they’re known for. Your heart overflows with the beauty of the music piped through your earbuds. And you smile and say, ‘Beautiful!’

“But think about the experience for each student in the creation of the video. Alone, listening to a click track and accompaniment. No blend. No harmony. Multiple takes because of all the silly imperfections one begins to focus on in a myopic environment like that. Am I in tune? Was I early? How is this vowel? Where is this cutoff? The insecurities never end.

“Then each video is sent off to the producer and engineer, who take all 26 videos and painstakingly line up the sound, which takes literally weeks to do in front of a computer screen. After hundreds of hours, finally, all the consonants are together, the imperfections in pitch have been tweaked out, the entrances and the cutoffs are perfect, and the quality of sound from an iPhone microphone has been processed to become nearly studio quality. Finally the video, after another week, presents those beautiful faces artfully for maximum effect when you watch and listen.

“Again for the students, there was no shared experience here. There was no ensemble. Look at each one of those faces and think about it from their perspective as they sing – the space past that black border is tragically empty.

“So how can they sound so good? Because they remember what it was like to sing together, and they recreate that in their minds. This is a song they had sung all year long – I performed it with them on several occasions. They know how it feels to sing it as an ensemble, to blend their voices into one, and oh my goodness do they know how to connect with an audience. So they sang at an iPhone screen, remembering all this, pretending they were together singing for you….

“Excalibur, thank you for this reminder of just how valuable music is to all of us. The tears on my face are real.”

If cooler heads are to prevail and you wish to come out of the pandemic stronger [insert your favorite cliché], I humbly suggest that school communities begin to plan for the best-case scenario. Here are five realities schools need to ponder, embrace, and address with intentionality and vision.

Any educational experience online needs to combine synchronous and asynchronous elements

Teachers should not be lecturing from bell-to-bell in physical classrooms, nor should they be “presenting” to passive audiences (students) online. “Virtual” courses can be more collaborative, deliberate, and creative than face-to-face encounters where talking-in-class is disruptive. Chatting online during class is not disruptive, tends to be more work related, and often stimulates participation by students who may be prone to hiding in traditional classrooms. The online environment offers the time to engage in substantive projects unencumbered by the constraints of the traditional school timetable.

To teach effectively online, there needs to be a mix of asynchronous and synchronous experiences. This caters to a diversity of learning styles, teaching styles, and content. The online environment affords attentive educators the ability to employ a plurality of pedagogical strategies. I would personally recommend embracing a “less is more” approach and use online teaching as an opportunity to invite students to embrace a variety of learning adventures and share experiences, rather than as a vehicle for content delivery. 

Online education is an opportunity to realize the rhetorical slogan that “everyone is a teacher.” Students should meet together online to collaborate, share resources related to the class, provide feedback on each other’s work, and reduce the load of teachers. Classes and schedules can be more flexible. Students might be able to move freely between “sections” of the same course, or even lurk in other classes. Online education, if done well, can be more progressive and democratic than traditional classroom-based instruction.

Network-based communication platforms are not a rationale for more meetings

I am concerned by the amount of time colleagues are spending in online meetings with colleagues and administrators since the COVID-19 crisis began. Refrain from the temptation of using conferencing systems for unnecessary meetings. Do not use the fact that you cannot physically see teachers as justification for more report writing and bookkeeping. The fatigue teachers are experiencing online is real and adversely affects students.

Schools need to begin sustained conversations answering the question, “Why do the kids show up?”

I have long told educators that while I do not have a crystal ball, I am confident that in the future, schools will not enjoy the monopoly on children’s time that you currently enjoy. Stated differently, “Kids in the very near future will not spend as much time in school as they do today.” The way I know that my prediction is 110% correct is that every politician on earth says the exact opposite. “We need a longer school day and school year,” they proclaim.

That stance is on the wrong side of history. During the agrarian age, kids stayed home with their families. When parents went off to work, kids went off to school. The pandemic has allowed parents to realize that things need not be as they seem. They may already work from home, full or part-time. During the pandemic, parents accepted a large responsibility for educating their own children. If for no other reason than tiring of dragging a teenager out of bed before sunrise to schlep to a school they don’t love, parents will recognize in the very near future that 7-10 hours per day at school, 180 days/year, just doesn’t make sense.

That is why school communities need to take seriously the question, “Why do kids show up at our school?” It certainly is not to read Chapter 3, take a quiz, or suffer “Silent Lunch.” Educators need to come to grips with questions of “How do we gain the greatest benefit from being co-located in the same physical space at the same time?” “What can students learn and do without direct instruction via TV, the Internet, with community members, or with peers?” “Which content from our morbidly obese curriculum can be eliminated once and for all?” “Do we need to have a standardized timetable or group children by similar levels of incompetence?” “Can schools and students have more flexible schedules?” “Are there new subjects we should offer?” “How can we teach critical knowledge domains that only require ten days of instruction in a semester-based school?” “Why can’t students work at their own pace?”

When you honestly engage in this process of critical reflection, you may find that the future viability of schooling, and indeed your school, is paradoxically rooted in the activities and disciplines routinely devalued in the current system. Band, studio art, lab-based science, drama, field trips, and sustained collaborative projects in which students make something are the sorts of learning experiences that justify school. You might also remember that school exists to democratize access to high quality experiences, especially of the sort that may only exist in a school.

Leave the Internet alone

One lesson of the pandemic is that the Internet kept working and working brilliantly. It did not need your clever IT personnel’s help or permission. Tens of millions of students and teachers around the world were able to teach, learn, and communicate effortlessly when freed from the heavy hand of school network policies and protocols. There is not a day that I work in a school, anywhere on earth, where I do not encounter a novel way in which the school’s IT department has interfered with an ability to work, teach, or learn, often without warning or justification. The list of ways in which IT personnel have concocted to disable school computers could fill a library. It is too often that the technology a school purchases works perfectly until the IT folks work their magic and turns a $1,200 computer into a $27 piece of sculpture. One hypothesis few ever consider when pondering why teachers don’t use computers, is that the computers at school may not work. That is not the fault of the technology, but of leadership.

I am not advocating for violating the law or putting children at risk. There are common-sense and inexpensive ways of achieving those objectives. I am asking that the paraprofessionals managing devices and school networks be relieved of their unilateral authority to impose absolute power over the teachers they serve. Their actions should only be to enhance and expand student agency, not curtail it. The default answer should switch from “no” to “yes.”

Think of it this way. When you remodel your kitchen, you do not wake up every morning forever to find the contractor making a cup of coffee. When they finish the plumbing, cabinets, flooring, and paint, they leave. Your school no longer employs full-time telephone operators, electricians, or furnace operators. You might rethink the value proposition in IT staff. 

The richest nation in the history of the world can afford a laptop and cello for every student!

The pedagogical pluralism, curricular flexibility, and limitless potential of distributed learning discussed above are only possible when every student has their own personal laptop with 24/7 Internet access. The issues related to attendance, participation, access, and equity being raised during this emergency bout of distributed learning are because adults have made a conscious decision to deprive children of modernity’s primary instrument for intellectual work, creativity, and communication.

The notion that every American child does not have a personal laptop in 2020 is as unconscionable as hospitals being short of masks and PPE. A personal computer is mission critical for learning forty years/two generations after microcomputers began entering your schools.

Fifty years ago, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon advocated for every child to have a computer they could program. Thirty years ago, I helped Australian colleagues implement 1:1 computing across the curriculum in countless schools. Twenty years ago the State of Maine provided a laptop for every 7^th and 8^th grader, preceded by Henrico, County Virginia. The Eastern Township School District of Quebec rolled out tens of thousands of student laptops around the same time. More than three million children in the developing world received laptops as part of the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Doctoral dissertations began being published in 1992 demonstrating the commonsense efficacy of 1:1 computing in schools. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, one of the first New Orleans schools to reopen was an early “laptop school.” Their community was able to stay in contact as a result of every student being interconnected via their laptop and the Internet.

It has always been the case that you can provide every student with a personal laptop for use anytime anywhere, for 2-5% of their per-pupil spending. There is no rational justification for building walls between students and the world in which they live.

“Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for every child to be given access to a computer.”

– Papert, S. and C. Solomon (1971). Twenty Things to do with a computer. Artificial Intelligence Memo # 248. Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Preparedness for the next crisis, interest in expanding educational opportunities, or demonstrating respect for children and the milieu in which they live requires an immediate embrace of 1:1 computing for everybody’s child.

Your Move

Today’s headlines (April 30, 2020) contemplate hundreds of thousands of school layoffs, states and districts are quickly becoming insolvent, and parents may be less than thrilled by the quality of digital worksheets their traumatized children have been served during this crisis. Today, every educator, particularly every school leader, has a choice to make as to whether they will scramble to reconstruct the system circa 2019 or offer a more humane, creative, modern, and progressive context for learning that prepares children for an uncertain future. If you have ever aspired to leave the campsite better than you found it, this is the time to step up.

Related Reading:

• This is Our Moment!
• Let COVID-19 Kill the Pencil
• Educational Zoom Activity #1
• Time for Optimism
• What’s Your Hurry?
• Books every school leader should read
• Recommended books for faculty summer reading
• A curated collection of videos, papers, articles, books, and activities related to support progressive education

If you’re not feeling up to reading, cooking, playing an instrument, or coding right now, watch an episode of Encore! on Disney+ and you will be remember what school can and should mean to children. Keep a box of tissues nearby and your closest friend on speed dial first.

Here are some of the books that ground, focus, and inspire me. I hope you’ll find some beauty, peace, grace, or meaning from any of these recommendations.

Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth The great Herb Kohl’s gorgeous meditation of a lifetime of learning and teaching.
Wonder Art Workshop: Creative Child-Led Experiences for Nurturing Imagination, Curiosity, and a Love of Learning Skip the stuff about “brain research” and dig into the large assortment of beautiful and magical art experiments. Super fun and creative!
The Book of Learning and Forgetting This book by the great psycholinguist Frank Smith may be my favorite exploration of learning. It was always a favorite text of my graduate students too.
Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope While not Jonathan Kozol‘s most popular or best known books, this is my favorite of his many masterpieces. Ordinary Resurrections is poignant and poetic while giving voice to the most innocent and vulnerable members of our society. This book is timeless and life-changing.
Changing Lives: Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the Transformative Power of Music Read quickly past the fanboy stuff about the remarkable conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, and learn about one the most profound pedagogical approaches on earth, El Sistema. You will be moved by the what’s possible when teachers believe in the capacity of each learner and refuse to acknowledge obstacles. In my humble opinion, this one of the best education books of the past decade. Author Tricia Tunstall also coauthored a notable follow-up, Playing for Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change Through Music.
The Inner Principal: Reflections on Educational Leadership I challenge you to name a more candid, open, or philosophical book ever written by a school administrator, especially one as accomplished as David Loader.
The Muses Go to School: Inspiring Stories About the Importance of Arts in Education The likes of Whoopi Goldberg, Phillip-Seymour Hoffman, Rosie Perez, and Bill T. Jones share the testimony to the critical importance of public school arts education with response pieces by amazing educators including Deborah Meier, Lisa Delpit, Bill Ayers, Diane Ravitch, Maxine Greene, and yours truly (clearly a clerical error).
The Long Haul: An Autobiography Myles Horton’s tales of founding and sustaining the Highlander Folk School, an Appalachian retreat where students included Martin Lutther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Pete Seeger. Oh yeah, We Shall Overcome was composed there too. This book not only tells the important story of an unknown piece of American history, but offers much wisdom and inspiration for all teachers.
Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People Notable scientist, mathematician, and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram book of insightful essays about great mathematicians, scientists, and technologists, many of who he knew personally.
The Children Pulitizer Prize winner David Halbestram’s monumental history of the American civil rights movement and the remarkable role played by courageous young people. This book reminds all of us of each person’s power to change the world.
Books I love to read aloud with kids
Field Trip to the Moon (PK-2)
Harold and the Purple Crayon (PK-2)
Homer Price (2-5) I still love this book and its sequel!
Apprentice with the world’s greatest musicians!
Ever dream of taking piano, bass, vibes, voice, drum, guitar, saxophone, or trumpet lessons from one of the world’s finest musicians? Care to understand jazz or Brazilian music? Wish you could develop your own voice with the help of one of the world’s most acclaimed vocalists?
Perhaps you don’t play an instrument and just enjoy watching great artists explain their craft? That’s cool too. Well, Open Studio is not only the gold standard by which all other online music education programs are measured, but it has cracked the code in teaching impossibly complex and intimate concepts online. Check out the multitude of offerings at every conceivable skill level.

Summer is a great time for kids to read entire series of books. Here are some great ones you won’t find in your school curriculum or approved by the Texas State Textbook Commission, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pearson!
Horrible Histories (grades 4-9) Collect them all! They’re gorey, bloody, irreverent, gross, and filled with historical facts shared in an entertaining fashion.
The Time Warp Trio series (grades 2-5) Jon Scieszka’s zany time travel adventure in which three buddies explore great moments in history.
Guys Read series (grades 5-8) Seven volume anthologies of high-interest short stories with each book featuring a different literary genre.
Books to keep kids active
Jane Bull is the author of countless colorful, clever, fabulous, and fun craft books published by DK. Highly recommended!
New York City Street Games This out-of-print, but still available gem, teaches youts to play all da clasic sports your grandparents played on the streets of NYC. There is a great documentary, narrated by Ray Romano on the same subject.
Books for learning to program in Scratch Here is an article I wrote featuring my favorite books to help kids learn Scratch programming.
Favorite cookbooks for little kids
Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes: A Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up Salad People and More Real Recipes: A New Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up Fabulous books full of wordless recipes for healthy food
Honest Pretzels: And 64 Other Amazing Recipes for Cooks Ages 8 & Up
Little Helpers Toddler Cookbook: Healthy, Kid-Friendly Recipes to Cook Together
The Tickle Fingers Toddler Cookbook: Hands-on Fun in the Kitchen for 1 to 4s
Sesame Street Let’s Cook! Cookie Monster’s Foodie Truck: A Sesame Street ® Celebration of Food
The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs (#1 bestseller) The Complete Baking Book for Young Chefs
Timeless videos I still love to watch with my grandkids Here are some of my favorite videos to watch with the toddlers. They’re funny, kind, not scary, and stimulate imagination.
Pee-Wee’s Playhouse: The Complete Series Never disappoints or fails to entertain. The show is pitch perfect for kids and adults to enjoy together. (a real bargain too)
The Little Rascals: The “Complete” Collection The best available collection of the classic shorts that inspired generations to play, dream, and learn by making – long before there was a maker movement. Trust me. Kids still love these 80 year-old films.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood: It’s a Beautiful Day 30 classic episodes
If you love card games… I don’t, but I have given countless sets as gifts to delighted kids and families.
Fluxx An endless assortment of looney card games where the rules or the objective of a game change with every card!

The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith

Making Learning Whole by David Perkins

The Children’s Machine by Seymour Papert

A Schoolmaster of the Great City by Angelo Patri

She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Herb Kohl

And What Do YOU Mean by Learning by Seymour Sarason?

The Long Haul by Myles Horton

The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation by Lella Gandini, George Forman, and Carolyn Edwards

In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization by Deborah Meier

What to Look for in a Classroom by Alfie Kohn

A Fresh Look at Writing by Donald Graves

Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope by Jonathan Kozol

The Big Picture: Education is Everybody’s Business by Dennis Littky and Samantha Grabelle

A reluctant choice between these books to make sure “math” is covered.

• Math: Facing an American Phobia by Marilyn Burns
• The Elephant in the Classroom: Helping Children Learn and Love Maths by Jo Boaler (I really dislike her recent work)
• The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age by Conrad Wolfram (forthcoming – may be a better choice than Burns or Boaler)
• How Big is the Moon?: Whole Maths in Action by Dave Baker & Cheryl Semple is a quirky out-of-print classroom classic that I love

“You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something” – Seymour Papert

I find potentially interesting education provocations everywhere. The remarkable generosity of the world’s finest musical artists performing online during this pandemic have kept me safe and sane. I aspire as an educator to possess their level of talent, wisdom, expertise, focus, humor, commitment, generosity, and love. It is these very virtues that has made jazz musicians such a source of knowledge, wonder, and comfort in my life. One other very special aspect of “the hang” with jazz musicians is the lack of generational barriers within their community of practice. Most people aspiring to be great at what they do welcome opportunities to mentor newbies who express passion for similar pursuits. What makes the performing arts so special is that, as in the Brazilian samba schools, everyone – young and old alike – “dances” together.

So, in between concerts regularly scheduled concerts by Peter Martin, Chick Corea, and the Emmet Cohen Trio, I’ve watched great musicians discuss music they love at listening party fundraisers for Jazz House Kids (Friday nights) and Wynton Marsalis’  “Skain’s Domain,” (Monday night) where world-class artists spin yarns and take questions from the audience.

When I think about education, these are three ideals I cling to.

1. The best thing we can do is to create as many opportunities as possible for young people to be in the company of interesting adults.
2. Greatness is achieved through a laser-like focus on overcoming bugs that bother you. Once you approach overcoming that obstacle, a new challenge reveals itself. Such focus tends to make experts great teachers since such self-awareness is easy to articulate.
3. If you wish for others to learn from you, your practice needs to be as transparent as possible.

Each of these principles are embodied in the Skain’s Domain Web livestreams (and archives). I highly recommend you watch the one below, even if you do not understand the subject matter, like jazz, or know who the participants are. There is still plenty to learn about learning and teaching.

This class is not a cocktail party!

Back in the 90s, my colleagues and I created online graduate school programs at Pepperdine University. One of my colleagues told students, “This is not a cocktail party! Your online interactions need to be pithy and deliberate.” To make matters worse, she revealed to students that she used a handheld clicker to count their personal interactions.

Upon hearing this, my first reaction was sadness followed by thought that apparently my colleague has never been invited to a good cocktail party. In fact, I set out to use a cocktail party as the metaphor for all of my teaching. I assume that we have gathered for a common purpose. If someone becomes insufferable you can grab another coconut shrimp and participants are surrounded by a plethora of potentially interesting conversations. Social interaction was key to knowledge construction, collaboration and creativity. Worst of all, “measuring/assessing/counting” human interaction had a predictable prophylactic impact on the social cohesion and productivity of the class.

So, here’s an activity for you to try…

• Teachers from a school or department, perhaps even multiple schools, should meet online via a platform like Zoom. A diversity of experience, age, gender, friendships, perspectives, race, etc. are all welcome.
• That Zoom session should be open to the public (or as broad a cross-section of your community as possible) and recorded in order to share the archive. Advertise the session in advance at a time your community may be available to “participate.”
• The participating teachers should discuss any topics they wish, reminisce about their teaching experiences, plan their next units, chill, catch-up on each other’s lives, or a combination of all-of-the-above. If children are watching the online “faculty room,” be sure that the language and topics discussed are age appropriate.
• After 30-45 minutes of the “audience” observing your social fishbowl, open the session up to questions from the peanut gallery. Break the fourth wall.

Voila! That’s it! Go ahead and change the world!

Let me know what you learn.

1. This is Our Moment! 
2. Let COVID-19 Kill the Pencil
3. Time for Optimism
4. Scratch and the Negligent Homicide of Mathland

I hope that anyone reading this is healthy and sane during this period of uncertainty. Teachers and kids alike are grieving over the loss of freedom, social interactions, and normalcy. Many families, even those never before considered at-risk, are terrified of the potential for financial ruin or catastrophic health risks. Since I’m all about the love and spreading optimism, I humbly share a silver-lining for teachers and the kids that they serve.

The fact that you are being told to “teach online” in some vague version of “look busy” may mean that teachers are finally being trusted. Districts large and small are abandoning grading as they recognize that education (at home) is inequitable. I guess it’s better late than never to discover the obvious.

Parents and superintendents are vanquishing the needless infliction of nonsense known as homework. Standardized testing is being canceled, an actual miracle. Colleges have recognized that enrolling students next Fall is more important than SAT or ACT scores. Each of these emergency measures has been advocated by sentient educators forever.

So, there is reason to celebrate (briefly), but then you must act! Use this time to remake schooling in a way that’s more humane, creative, meaningful, and learner-centered. This is your moment!

In the absence of compelling models of what’s possible, the forces of darkness will fill the void. Each of us needs to create models of possibility.

The fact that kids’ days are now unencumbered by school could mean that they finally have adequate time to work on projects that matter rather than being interrupted every 23 minutes. I recently wrote, What’s Your Hurry?, about teaching computer programming, but it’s applicable to other disciplines.

Project-based learning offers a context for learner-centered pedagogy. I was reminded that the new edition of our book, “Invent To Learn – Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom,” includes several chapters on effective prompt setting that may be useful in designing projects for kids at home. Invent To Learn also lays out the case for learning-by-doing. Use that information to guide your communication with administrators, parents, and the community.

The following are but a few suggestions for seizing the moment and reinventing education after this crisis is resolved so we may all return to a new, better, normal.

Practice “Less us, more them”

Anytime a teacher feels the impulse to intervene in an educational transaction, it is worth pausing, taking a breath, and asking, “Is there less that I can do and more that the student(s) can do?” The more agency shifted to the student, the more they will learn.

One exercise you can practice teaching online, as well as face-to-face, is talk less. If you typically lecture for 40 minutes, try 20. If you talk for 20 minutes, try 10. If you talk for 10, try 5. In my experience, there is rarely an instance in which a minute or two of instruction is insufficient before asking students to do something. While teaching online, try not to present content, but rather stimulate discussion or organize activities to maximize student participation. Piaget reminds us that “knowledge is a consequence of experience.”

Remember, less is more

My colleague Brian Harvey once said, “The key to school reform is throw out half the curriculum – any half.” This is wise advice during sudden shift to online teaching and the chaos caused by the interruption of the school year.

Focus on the big ideas. Make connections between topics and employ multiple skills simultaneously. Abandon the compulsion to “deliver” a morbidly obese curriculum. Simplify. Edit. Curate.

Launch students into open-ended learning adventures

Learning adventures are a technique I became known for when I began teaching online in the 1990s. This process is described in the 2008 paper, Learning Adventures: A new approach for transforming real and virtual classroom environments.

Inspire kids to read entire books

Since the bowdlerized and abridged basals are locked in school, encourage kids to luxuriate with real books! Imagine if kids had the freedom to select texts that interest them and to read them from cover-to-cover without a comprehension quiz or vocabulary lesson interrupting every paragraph! Suggest that kids post reviews on Amazon.com for an authentic audience rather than making a mobile or writing a five-paragraph essay. Use Amazon.com or Goodreads to find other books you might enjoy.

• Free Audible books for kids during the crisis

Tackle a new piece of software

Been meaning to learn Final Cut X, Lightroom, a new programming language, or any other piece of sophisticated software? Employ groups of kids to tackle the software alone or together and employ their knowledge once school returns. Let them share what they know and lead.

Contribute to something larger than yourself

This is the time for teachers to support kids in creating big creative projects. Write a newspaper, novel, poetry anthology, play, cookbook, or joke book. Make a movie and then make it better. Create a virtual museum. Share your work, engage in peer editing, and share to a potentially infinite audience.

Check out what Berklee College of Music students have already done!

Teach like you know better

Use this time to rev-up or revive sound pedagogical practices like genre study, author study, process writing, interdisciplinary projects and the other educative good stuff too often sacrificed due to a lack of sufficient time. You now have the time to teach well.

Take note of current events

Daily life offers a world of inspiration and learning invitations. Why not engage kids in developmentally appropriate current events or take advantage of opportunities like JSTOR being open to the public during the COVID-19 crisis? Here’s a possible student prompt.

“Go to JSTOR, figure out how it works, find an interesting article, and share what you learned with the class.”

Let Grow

Change the world by challenging students to learn something on their own by embracing the simple, yet profound, Let Grow school project. A simple assignment asks kids to do something on their own with their parent’s permission and share their experiences with their peers.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Every problem in education has been solved and every imaginable idea has been implemented somewhere. Teachers should use this time to read books about education written by experts and learn the lessons of the masters.

• Here are a few of my favorite books all teachers and administrators should read.
• Here is a free e-book anthology I assembled featuring classic texts related to progressive education. Download Dreams of Democratic Education.

Take time to enjoy some culture

There is no excuse to miss out on all of the cultural activities being shared online from free Shakespeare from the Globe Theatre, Broadway shows, operas, living room concerts, piano practice with Chick Corea, and exciting multimedia collaborations. Many of these streams are archived on social media, YouTube, or the Web. Bring some peace, beauty, and serenity into your home.

The following are some links, albeit incomplete and subjective, to free streaming cultural events.

• April 1-7 Live from Our Living Rooms Concert series to benefit out-of-work musicians.
• NPR’s calendar of online concerts
• Billboard Magazine’s calendar of streaming concerts
• Jazz at Lincoln Center full concerts
• List of streaming jazz concerts
• The London West End Shows You Can Now See Online
• Amazon Prime Video is streaming kids’ movies and TV for free
• How to try streaming services for free during coronavirus

Apprentice with the world’s greatest living mathematician

In A Personal Road to Reinventing Mathematics Education, I wrote about how I have been fortunate enough to know and spend time with some of the world’s most prominent mathematicians and that while not a single one of them ever made me feel stupid, plenty of math teachers did. Stephen Wolfram is arguably the world’s leading mathematician/scientist/computer scientist. Over the past few years, he has become interested in teachers, kids, and math education. Dr. Wolfram spoke at Constructing Modern Knowledge, runs an annual summer camp for high school mathematicians, and has made many of his company’s remarkable computational tools available for learners.

Acknowledging that many students are home do to the pandemic this week, Wolfram led a free online Ask Me Anything session about an array of math and science topics, ostensibly for kids, as well as a “follow-along” computation workshop. You, your children, or your students have unprecedented access to all sorts of expertise, just a click away! This is like Albert Einstein making house calls!

A bit of exploration will undoubtedly uncover experts in other disciplines sharing their knowledge and talents online as well.

Abandon hysterical internet policies

The immediate need for laptops, Internet access, student email, plus the expedient use of available technologies like YouTube, FaceTime, Skype, Twitter, Instagram, and Zoom has instantly dispelled the hysterical and paranoid centralized approach to the Internet schools have labored under for the past twenty-five years. The Internet has never been dependent on the policies of your school or your paraprofessional IT staff to succeed. Perhaps we will learn what digital citizenship actually looks like after teachers and children are treated like modern citizens.

Heed Seymour Papert’s advice

When I worked with Seymour Papert, he created a document titled, “Eight Big Ideas Behind the Constructionist Learning Lab.” This one sheet of paper challenges educators to create productive contexts for learning in the 21^st Century. Can you aspire to make these recommendations a reality in your classroom(s)?

Do twenty things to do with a computer

In 1971, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon published, Twenty Things to Do with a Computer. How does your school measure up a half-century later?

Program your own Gameboy

Yes, you read that correctly. Here is everything you need to know to write your own computer games, build an arcade, or program a handheld gaming device!

Teach reading and programming simultaneously

Upper elementary and middle school students could learn to program in Scratch and develop their reading fluency at the same time. Learn how in A Modest Proposal.

Share my sense of optimism

Shortly before the COVID-19 crisis, I published, Time for Optimism, in which I shared reasons why progressive education is on the march and how we might teach accordingly. We can do this!

Wash your hands! Stay inside! Stand with children!

Today’s horrific health and economic crisis might have at least one educational benefit, students are “working” from home and like everywhere else in the past two generations, communication is largely via computer generated text, not manual handwriting.

Whenever I visit a school, I scan the environment, observe social interactions, and look for learning artifacts. Even while strolling around spectacular schools — the sort of institutions blessed with phenomenal facilities, grandiose grounds, well-stocked libraries, maker spaces, and performing arts centers — I sense reason for concern. The lower primary classrooms have examples, presumably of exemplary student work, adorning the corridor walls. Sadly, the displayed work fails to match the grandeur, quality, and expectations of the school. Por que?

Thanks to the technology of choice, the pencil, your average elementary school student will spend an inordinate amount of time filling a cleverly designed worksheet with two or three banal sentences. I truly lament the lost opportunities for children to create work commensurate with their creativity and intellect. The prophylactic barrier is the pencil.

How many learning disabilities are created by a six-year-old’s confusion between their ability to express one’s self and their physical prowess at etching letters with a primitive writing stick? The development of a child’s fine motor skills is much better suited to typing than handwriting. Few other intellectual pursuits require muscle development.

Word processing is the undisputed winner of the computer age. No serious writer under the age of a presidential candidate uses a writing stick for more than writing “not my fault” in Sharpie. Writers “write” on computers. Period. Full stop. Fin!

I harbor no doubt that the pencil has retarded literacy development. It spawned the five-paragraph essay, inauthentic “writing” assignments, and has made life unpleasant for teachers sifting through piles of student chicken scratch. The pencil has fundamentally limited the quality and volume of student writing. This is indisputable.

You learn to write by writing. When you waste several years teaching kids, not one, but two different styles of ancient stick scratching, you severely diminish opportunities for students to say something with coherence, persuasion, beauty, or personal voice.

Word processing makes it possible to write more, better, and quicker, while the editing process is continuous and fluid. You may still turn in X number of drafts to satisfy an assignment, but each of those drafts is the product of countless micro-drafts. Best of all, word processing eliminates another useless and ineffective subject of bygone eras, Spelling instruction! Bonus! #winning

Spare me the academic papers by tenure-track weenies at East Metuchen Community  College seeking to “prove” that handwriting instruction raises test scores or I will be forced to send you reams of scholarship on butter churning as an effective weight loss strategy or blood letting as an indicator of entrepreneurship.

I am sorry, but publishers of handwriting workbooks and providers of D’Nealian professional development may have to go and get themselves some of those clean coal jobs or find some other way to torture young people. The College Board may be hiring!

If you feel nostalgic about handwriting, offer a calligraphy elective. Now, your school will have an art class! The high-falutin handwritten International Baccalaureate a concern? Relegate penmanship to an 11^th grade PE unit.

The only time I use a pen or pencil is when asked to autograph a copy of a book I composed on a computer. Banking is online, so no more check writing excuses. You can teach kids to sign their name on a greeting card for their great grandmother in a session or two and then say, “Aloha!” to Eberhard Faber. Spend the rest of elementary school how to think and engage in work that matters. Their lumbrical muscles will thank you and their intellectual development will no longer be limited by a Number 2 drawing stick.

Teachers, it’s time to say goodbye to your little friend… Pencils R.I.P

For those interested in “keyboarding instruction,” please read this literature review.

“Prechewed Pencils” by Bernie Goldbach is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A middle school librarian in Grand Rapids Michigan has been running a popular website devoted to comment and criticism on Rowling’s phenomenal Harry Potter series. He and his contributors have created a virtual Harry Potter encyclopedia which provides serious literary criticism of Rowling’s work and easy access to information about the books. Even Rowling herself says that it has been a handy reference for her as she is writing and needs to check something out from a previous book.

The website has never taken any advertising unlike several other web sites devoted to the series. So the royalties the author would earn on the book would be the only compensation he would receive for several years of diligent scholarship. The book, The Harry Potter Lexicon, is based entirely – almost verbatim – on the website. So why is Warner Bros and Rowling seeking an injunction to prevent the book which is ready for release in English and several foreign editions from being published when they have actually encouraged the website. The Lexicon author is featured in an interview to be included in the next Harry Potter DVD by Warner Brothers and a timeline he created for the books will also be on the DVD.

No question has been raised about the Potter web sites that earn tens of thousands of dollars a month through selling advertising so its hard to support the argument in the claim that it’s that the book will be sold that makes the difference. The website has had 25 million hits so the information it provides has already been widely accessed.

What’s so different about buying a book to get the same information?

And isn’t it funny that so many folks have been predicting the death of reading books and this suit argues that a book is more of a threat to their literary empire than a website?

On the other hand maybe a book does have some strengths that a website doesn’t have:

• It’s more permanent
• It’s edited so that the information in it should be more reliable than the website
• It’s portable and can be accessed anywhere including the bathroom, on a plane, in bed
• It doesn’t require access to or use of an energy source

One would think that Rowling would realize that this book has the potential to become a text in literature courses which would enhance her reputation as a literary giant rather than just an author of kids books. Not to mention the future genrations of serious literature students who will be buying her books. Harry Potter could reach the stature of Huckleberry Finn in great literature.

Lawyers are predicting that, because of the murky questions around intellectual property in various media the case could reach the Supreme Court. But that would depend on whether David, the publisher, can sell enough books to acquire the funds to fight Goliath, Warner Brothers.