Grand Slam

On February 16th, Newton's Lab and the Greengineers hosted the MA Secretary of Education, Paul Reville, Newotn Mayor, Setti Warren, and almost 200 other guests for a showcase of educational innovation. The central theme of the day was "collaboration."

The link below will connect you to a short and wonderful slideshow/video of the event, produced by the Newton Patch.

Innovation and Inspiration at Newton's Lab

We seem to use that word (collaboration) a lot in the lab. And the more I think about it, the more I agree that it is the correct word to describe the work of innovation and ingenuity.
Despite the recent spin on the power of introverts, I believe that real implementation and progress depend upon collaborative efforts.

I know that most of the impetus for change often comes from that singular and quiet place of introspection, but it would also die there, in that quiet place, without the axis of collaboration to motor and maintain change.

I invented the Greengineers, from an intellectual  quiet place, but the Greengineers have grown far beyond my vision because of the students' ability to engage that vision and make it their own.

One of the most important aspects of that engagement comes from Preston Cline's research on Mission-Critical teams. He's articulated that one significant element of a mission-critical team is that every member sees themselves in a leadership position regardless of their role on the team. That's true for the engaged student and classroom.  I've written this before, but one question that keeps popping up for me is, "how necessary are our students?"

In most classrooms, the answer is "not." The truth is - Students are not necessary.  Well, engagement will not happen in that environment. Impossible. Never going to happen.

Every time a teacher begins planning a lesson, they need to grapple with that question before they plan one minute of curriculum, instruction, or assessment. And if they don't have a good answer, (hint...the only answer is "I have no lesson without the total (87%) investment from my students, or I better pack it up and head home, if my students are not essential to this plan), then STOP.

STOP and find an ally to help re-imagine how to design your students back into your lessons.

And YES the times demand this reverse engineering, this re-imagination.  In the past (limited to industrial education, aka modern, traditional education), essential students  were not necessary, because "teacher" was sole source of information. Now, schools and teachers must see themselves as translators and inventors in this information age. Access to information is no longer limited to the classroom and teacher. Those two things (classroom and teacher) should not be in competition with the endlessness of digital information either. Our role as educators is exactly how Umberto Eco predicted in "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," when he hints that it's not the source of information (he called it "communication") that's important anymore, but the destination. We, as teachers and scholars, are responsible for facilitating the discussion of the arriving message, at the destination of information (our communities) - "in light of the codes at the destination, comparing them with the codes at the source."

In the past, power sought to control the source and the channel of information. That was the function of industrial, traditional, modern education. However, the internet forced a change, similar to telephone and television, but on a scale unimagined.

EVERY AGE has been the information age. Listen humans. For humans, every age is the information age.

Pre-Gutenberg the source, channel, and destination of information were close in proximity and shared. Which means information was verifiable by experience and observation.  Circa Gutenberg these three (source, channel, destination) were distant, but shared, and limited in translation and interpretation. We had to hope the great documents were being honestly translated and interpreted. This post-Gutenberg (internet) time is a bombardment of information, a ceaseless, scope-less, purposeless mess of incredible, horrifying, and beautiful information.

We, the educators, must facilitate the complex and ill-defined dialogue to engage this endless information. We, as we have always done, will guide communities (and more importantly INDIVIDUALS) to filter out, slow down, and grapple with this new (not new) information age.

That's 21st century learning.  Which is actually 1st century learning, with new tools and new challenges.