I was rocking my daughter to sleep last night, and I was struck with a realization. My son is now seven, and I don’t remember the final time that I rocked him to sleep. That final time passed by unnoticed.

Too many final times pass by unnoticed.

I think often of who I am as a father and what that means to my children. The quote below speaks a truth about the reality of time and relationships and parenthood that my mind just can’t let itself fully comprehend.

“Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future. We’re just here to be memories for our kids.” -“Cooper” from Interstellar

I think that’s equally true for us as educators.

The time we have with our students is all too finite. And it goes all too quickly. That first moment they step into our classroom door, we begin speeding forward toward their past.

Our time with them is precious. Each day a gift. And in each moment we are presented the opportunity to become a memory. One they will always want to remember, or one they would rather forget.

Which one we end up is our choosing.

Because statistically speaking, the majority of us are the status quo. And the status quo rarely enjoys being displaced.

This is especially true in education where the system has spent centuries building in self-preservation mechanisms that make innovation feel all the more impossible and uncomfortable.

But when places like this do amazing things like this and help students have experiences like this, we get a glimpse of what it could be like.

For the many educators who work to bring about a new narrative for teaching and learning in education, there is a reality to this innovation that this piece from the Harvard Business Review details quite wonderfully.

While the piece speaks more directly to innovation in all institutions of life, the six innovation paradoxes apply incredibly directly to education.

1. Affirming the individual…and the group
2. Supporting…and confronting
3. Fostering experimentation and learning…and performance
4. Promoting improvisation…and structure
5. Showing patience…and urgency
6. Encouraging bottom-up initiative…and intervening top-down

If you are a leader in education, a teacher working hard to offer your students the best learning experiences possible, or someone working to positively influence education in your spheres of influence, I strongly encourage you to read the piece. And consider the six paradoxes above.

Because if we can resolve these as leaders, teachers, students, parents, and communities working together, I believe we’ll see a more powerful narrative of modern learning that will create even greater opportunity for everyone in education.

The question itself is a rather good one if posed with genuine inquiry that seeks to find and actualize the potential that exists when technology meets learning.

Yet there are times when the question is asked with a different spirit. The question is raised with a predetermined answer that believes there is very little to no value in utilizing technology in learning. That it is a distraction. A danger. A hindrance to the progress of developing the intellect of our students and society.

If you know of someone posing the question in this spirit, I hope you will invite them to view the video below.

Technology amplifies human potential. If you find yourself disagreeing, please watch the extraordinary students and staff below demonstrate otherwise.

I’ve been doing a very bad job at a very important part of my job lately.

Our students, staff, and community continue to do amazing work, and I haven’t been sharing the incredible efforts they have been producing nearly enough. See the video above as an example of what our staff and students have been accomplishing.

This fall, our district began a new journey to leverage the promise of technology to amplify student learning. Every student in grades K-2 received a Nexus 7 tablet, and every student in grades 3-8 received both a Nexus 7 and a Chromebook. You can see our Innovative Learning Timeline to learn more about our journey.

And, it is a journey. It will take us a few years to get good at maximizing technology’s potential. But that’s what learning is all about.

This has been an incredible year, and we certainly still have much to learn. It is very difficult for me to properly say just how very proud I am of our students and our staff as they have worked through many challenges, experienced many triumphs, and continue to move forward to embrace the new learning landscape.

From being invited to create the videos below to use our district’s story as part of the opening program to introduce the President at the White House #FutureReady event, to sharing the great stories of our staff, I am incredibly honored to be part of the CCSD59 team.

I look forward to doing a better job at the important part of my job of sharing those stories with you all more as we continue on our journey.

Specifically, I keep coming back to his three phases of intellectual development. He admittedly oversimplifies the development by containing it in three categories, but even in this somewhat rudimentary manifestation, it still gives us as much to think about as we can handle.

Papert calls phase one, “universally successful learning.” This is during the time before we enter formal institutions of learning, and Papert describes it this way. “All children show a passion for interactive exploration of their immediate world. The diversity of possible activity is great enough for different individuals to find their own styles.”

Watch a three year old wonder and make meaning of their world, and you’ll see the qualities of this phase clearly.

Papert calls phase three, “intellectually awake adults.” I really love that. Once again, this is in the space beyond the walls of our formal learning institutions and is replete with diversity of styles. It’s the way we as adults learn that which we desire to learn for a wide variety of reasons and purposes.

Phase two, then, is the space between. Papert’s description of the phase is a bit harrowing. “The second phase is the narrow and dangerous passage in which many factors conspire to undermine the continuation of phase one. School is often blamed for imposing on children a uniformity that suffocates those who have developed markedly different intellectual styles; much as it used to suffocate left-handed people by forcing them to ‘write properly’.”

While phase two is indeed narrow and dangerous, the duration of the phase stretching out often beyond 15 years makes it all the more so.

One of the greatest roles we play as teachers is to serve as the guide to move our students from phase one to phase three. Papert asserts not all adults will make it. That should haunt us.

I hope we do all we can to make the path between as wide, safe, and inspired as possible. Doing so will certainly change lives.

Thanks to Sean Lucas for the use of the Flickr image.

In Project RED’s study of nearly 1,000 schools involved in a major technology implementation, they state “the principal’s ability to lead change is critical.”

As Simon Sinek says, “There are leaders and there are those who lead.”

I’m very honored that I have the opportunity to work in a district where our entire administrative team is pushing and challenging each other to be the latter.

As part of that effort, this year we created the 21st Century Leadership Academy. Every member of our administrative team is taking part, and over the course of this year, each participant will engage in 63 hours of specific, focused professional development on becoming a 21st century leader. That’s a combined total of 2,520 professional development hours for our team.

There are plenty of conversations about the qualifier “21st century”, and wherever you stand on the convention, we find it a very useful way to add the necessary context to say that we want to do things different. We want to move from a traditional means of education to an environment where kids are empowered and given agency in their learning. We want to create a culture where we are preparing students to be successful for life.

We are fortunate to be partnering with Scott McLeod in our efforts, and Scott will join us for seven full day sessions this school year, and our team will then follow up with a two hour session in the weeks between full day sessions. Together, Scott and I will facilitate the conversations about what should change in education and how we as a district can move to an environment where student ownership is actualized and learning experiences are moved from low-level to high-level thinking.

On September 10, we held our first of the seven full day sessions. We spent the entire day digging into the why. We engaged in the thought experiment, “Because of digital technologies, our world today is more…” We talked about the implications for learning and schooling, and through the process, we came to a shared understanding of why we need to change education. Perhaps even, reinvent it, as Tony Wagner suggests. We created ownership through the process. Not buy in, but ownership.

Our team ended the day by joining a Google+ Community we set up for the group to continue the conversations and dialog until we meet again in October.

Think about the power of having the entire administrative team together to have these crucial conversations and wrestle with the concepts. We have a great deal of learning, and thinking, and challenging, and inspiring ahead. I’m incredibly excited for what that will mean for our students.

And that’s partly what I’m afraid of.

Life is also too easily and quickly filled with regret. We hold on to big ideas and dreams and hopes that we play around with in our minds thinking of the someday that will come when we have time or motivation or the right circumstances to realize, only to let the short seconds of “one day I’ll do that” pile upon us without taking any action until the seconds turn themselves into years and weigh more than we can move.

And that’s also partly what I’m afraid of.

And then there’s a life lived with passion. Or without it. Of filling our parades and our short seconds doing what we know we don’t really have any interest or desire to be doing. But we do it anyway. Because as Alan Watts reminds us, we’ve been told and taught that sometimes we just have to “go on doing the things we don’t like in order to go on doing the things you don’t like doing.”

This is where I disagree with Dean. At least in part.

Because I find myself more in agreement with Watts. The video is three minutes and nine seconds that you won’t regret having spent if you let it play through.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/siu6JYqOZ0g

“But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is we’re bringing up children, and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. It’s all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there.”

I’m not sure there’s a person in this world who loves every aspect and is passionate about every single detail of the job they work. That’s reality. There are tough parts of every job, but that doesn’t preclude us from finding a way to bring our passions into what it is we’ve chosen to do. I absolutely agree with Dean that working to support a family, survive, and contribute in some way are incredibly important.

However, there are too many options available to each of us that still allow us to follow what fulfills. Because if you are working a job that makes you miserable and makes others miserable to be in your misery, what’s the point? That doesn’t mean you have to exclusively work in the areas of your passion, but you can find yourself a situation that is satisfying and gratifying in its capacity to allow you to work your passions into what you’re doing.

Teaching our students about capturing the joy in life, about marching in the parade instead of watching it pass by, about choosing to follow and pursue passions which fulfill, about moving when the seconds haven’t yet turned into years of regret- I’m not ready to give up on those things yet.

It also isn’t meant to be anything more than an honest question that I’m trying to find an answer to. I’ve long considered not even writing it for fear that people will misunderstand or misconstrue the question.

But, my inability to find a satisfactory answer in the discussions I have with myself is finally leading me to ask.

As a working, adult professional, I use less than 10% of the math I was exposed to in high school. What does that mean?

I’m sure a similar statement can be made about other content areas, perhaps with a variation of the actual percentage, but still. We spent four years learning content in high school that most of us can no longer remember and don’t use as a part of our profession and hasn’t proved necessary for our success.

It makes me think of two pieces by Alfie Kohn. One, where he states ten truths we shouldn’t be ignoring.

In the second, he details a very interesting observation about the result of a standardized assessment question for a Massachusetts high school math exam.

His quote from Deborah Meier is compelling. “No student should be expected to meet an academic requirement that a cross section of successful adults in the community cannot.”

So, what’s the role of content as it’s presented in today’s education?

Why did I spend four years in high school, and then several more in college learning math that I’ve long since forgotten?

Think back on your high school and college courses. If you were to take the final exam today, how would you do? What does that tell us?

What should it tell us?

I get to tell stories as part of my job. Hopefully, you do, too.

I think, sometimes, people forget the power of human story. Or, at least, we forget the power of telling our stories. Especially in education.

There are so many incredible events happening each and every day in and around our classrooms, and as pressed as we all are for time in the present landscape of learning, I hope we can find more time to tell the stories of what we’re getting to be part of. The successes we see in our students. The celebrations we share with our school families. The connections we’re making with our communities.

The video above is an example of that. It’s something I’m proud of.

And, I think it’s just fine that we admit that. When we’re proud of what we’ve done. We can celebrate that. We can share that. It’s not bragging or flaunting or self-aggrandizing.

We are facing too many competing storytellers who are working to take charge of the message of education and tell a narrative very different and very much in contrast to the great experiences happening in our classrooms each day for us not to find a way to share the good we’re seeing around us.

Committing ourselves to sharing the good also compels us to create the good. It helps encourage us to keep providing those opportunities that we know our students need in order to understand they are part of something important. That they are doing something important. That they are someone important. And that we’re creating opportunities that are good enough to be worth sharing.

I hope you make the time in whatever job you find yourself working to share your stories. We all need the chance to hear them.

Recently, the OLPC organization took boxes of tablets, carefully and tightly taped up, and dropped them in two remote villages of Ethiopia. There were no instructions. No teachers. Nothing but a group of first grade-aged students for whom the tablets were intended. Students who couldn’t read, couldn’t identify the single form of a letter, had never before seen any kind of technology.

What happened is simply astounding.

Six and seven year old kids who had never before encountered any form of written language were demonstrating obvious emerging literacy skills within weeks. Without the interference help of adults.

“I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

As stated, there’s a lot more we need to learn about this story. But there’s also a lot we need to learn from it.

Because it raises some serious questions. Questions I think we need to take some time to answer.

1. Why don’t we give kids more credit for their natural capacity to learn?
2. What if we’re the ones getting in the way?
3. Can we finally put to rest the silly digital immigrant/digital native nonsense?
4. Why does there remain such a fascination with teaching kids very specific technology skills in our schools today?

It’s intriguing to compare the new approach OLPC is taking with the tablets to the approach they took in Peru. Reading through the reflections on the failure* in Peru brings to the surface two immediate observations. The hardware/software wasn’t ready for the task. And the adults continued getting in the way. The second point, to me, is the most salient. Read through each section of Patzer’s observations, and you see how often the breakdown happens in the way the adults try to move the students through a pre-determined way to learn with the device.

I believe the second experiment is working because nobody is there trying hard to figure out how the new technology should fit into the old model of teaching and learning.

And nobody is trying to frame the learning experience through superficial content that the kids just don’t care about.

Because learning isn’t putting content in little boxes to be handed to kids one after another only to have the boxes thrown away quickly after the handling. To be forgotten in an effort to remember the next in the long line to which they can’t see the end.

It’s letting the kids discover what’s in the boxes. And how to get it out of the boxes. And why the boxes even matter in the first place.

It’s setting a goal, establishing an environment to realize the goal, and trusting in the capacity of human potential. Student potential.

And sometimes, it’s just getting out of their way.

*I encourage you to read Gary Stager’s comment below providing more details and his perspective on the Peru “failing.” I think it’s an excellent perspective and merits further thought before we accept that program actually failed.