I'll Be the One

     I was recently reminded of a poem I read in a terrific book called The Book of Hopes and Dreams for Girls and Young Women. Produced by the wonderful Laurel School, it is a collection of thoughts from famous women and students whose goal is to empower girls and young women. Here is a poem from the book written by Rebecca Allen when she was in third grade:

HELP OUT!

Be the one.

Be in charge.

Take a risk.

Be a peacemaker.

Help out.

Be nice to the poor.

Because I believe in you.

You can do it.

But what about me?

Me Rebecca Allen?

Well.

I’ll be the one.

I’ll be in charge.

I’ll take a risk.

I’ll be a peacemaker.

I’ll help out.

I’ll be nice to the poor.

Because I can do it.

I believe in myself.

I’am a super helper.

And I will save the world with my super goodness.

Thinking back on it now, Rebecca Allen must be in college or beyond and I wonder what she has done with her super goodness. I love this poem because of the unbridled optimism of youth and the clear identification that helping and being a part of making the world a better place is something that is practically innate in humans. Look at how many terrific concepts we want for our students that are built into Rebecca’s words: take a risk, be in charge, help out. She ends stating she believes in herself and that she has super goodness: don’t we want that for every child? Finally, she shows the concept so relevant to design thinking and innovative thinking of bias towards action. There is no doubt that Rebecca is ready to go and wants to approach the problems of the world right now. I read this and wonder how well-served Rebecca was in our current educational model and if we nourished her super goodness or drowned it in a sea of AP classes and standardized tests.

Yong Zhao in his recent sessions at the ISACS conference said, “the American dream keeps getting less and less interesting.” As he gave an overview of the argument presented in his book, World Class Learners:Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, he made a convincing argument for changing how we approach education. As the theme of the conference was “Thinking Outside the Box,” it was easy to get on the innovation bandwagon. Zhao and many others referenced the rise of the creative class, while Zhao also supported the entrepreneurial class as well, as proposed by Richard Florida ten years ago. Many referenced how the jobs our students will hold have not even been created yet. But I have heard that all before and I was keenly interested in the skills Zhao was suggesting we should be nurturing in the classroom. We should be helping students have a bias towards action: when they see a problem they should not wait for others to solve it. Our students need to have the creativity to solve the problem and simply copying someone else’s idea just won’t work. They need the guts to put it into action and the resilience to revise and attack the problem again when things don’t work out. This also reminded me of Paul Tough’s work on some of the intangible qualities we should be fostering in our students with a big one being grit.

Walking to our morning assembly the other day, my colleague was noticeably frustrated. While not necessarily an unusual state for a high school teacher, I asked him what the problem was and he nearly exploded about how our students cannot think. He was working on a history unit and had given them the opportunity to ask questions before they got started on their work together. All he heard was crickets. “How could they have no questions? How could they not be curious about anything?” He fumed. The simple answer is that our students were simply waiting for the information. They are consumers, not creators and they do not hesitate to remind us of this distinction with their daily actions in our classrooms.

But who can blame them? We have done this to them, apologetically. Our students will not be able to learn the skills of the entrepreneur that Zhao endorses until we exhibit and model those skills ourselves. How often as teachers do we exhibit these characteristics: global competency, creativity, alertness to opportunity, empathy, risk-taking, foresight, ambition, innovation, risk-taking, persistence (Zhao 82)? If we say that collaboration is a 21^st century skill, how often do our students see their teacher’s modeling it? If we want them to think creatively and want them to be innovative, how often do we exhibit these qualities?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eveliosanchez/7567324630/lightbox/

I can certainly say for myself that while I hope to instill these attributes and skills in my students, day in and day out, I do not model them. There may be moments of creativity, but my concept of empathy is asking them how their day is and moving on, not realizing the thousand different forces that pull on them in the same number of directions. I really don’t take risks when I rely on the same standby approach of peppering my students with questions about Hamlet, act by act, scene by scene, line by line. As for collaboration, teachers seem to be notoriously the worst at this in independent schools. We claim our allegiance to it, have a meeting and then walk back into our rooms and do as we please.

So I fully support Zhao’s call for a change that allows our students to learn the skills of the innovator and entrepreneur while still gaining the content knowledge necessary. His belief in project-oriented learning makes sense and I truly value his emphasis on multiple revisions, a sustained and disciplined process and peer review, but it will take a sustained effort for me as an educator to keep working to change my own behaviors to not only create this experience for my students (to help them become creators, not consumers) but to model this concept of a teacherpreneur.

I wonder how all of the Rebecca Allens of the world are doing. If we managed to test the risk taker right out of her, or was she able to sustain her spirit of super goodness through her trip through our, often-times, well-intentioned educational system. I worry we did not give her the skills to be effective super helper, but I share her enthusiasm and her belief in me that I can be the one, I can take a risk.

Extreme Project Makeover: The Big Reveal

As the bus pulls away and the beleaguered family sees their new home for the first time, invariably the tears start streaming down the faces of all involved. From the tirelessly working mom who never thought she would catch a break to the volunteer who finally felt he had done something worthy with his time, the feeling of fulfillment is a human need not to be denied and is often greeted with a rush of emotion. The Global Action Project Symposium on May 15th, 2012 was no different. At 8:45pm on a day that included a full day of class, coaching a playoff lacrosse game and now two hours of presentations, I was as surprised as anyone else when my eyes welled up with tears listening to a student talk about her hero Malalai Joya, an Afghani political activist, and how her social enterprise was created to be a refuge for women in that embattled nation to seek safety and eventually become independent. She eloquently described how her organization, appropriately called Newstart, was not concerned with immediate scalability, but their strength was through “The women we reach, the women they reach, the children they teach.” She and her partner had truly learned the lessons we worked on throughout the year about the success rates of grassroots organizations, about the plight of women detailed in Nicholas Kristof’s Half the Sky as well as the concepts of sustainability. As I listened to her work and her infectious enthusiasm, I allowed myself to think that she may launch something like this someday.

And so the makeover of The Sudan Project was complete. Instead of just focusing on the plight of the Sudanese, we expanded our worldview with an emphasis on the plight of women, examined our own personal causes (even writing a mission statement), learned about social enterprise with Jacqueline Novogratz and strengthened our work with documentary filmmaking. The students bought in 100%. Whether it was the variety, the personal element, or the empowering feeling, their enthusiasm rarely waned throughout the year. The constant interjections of what others were doing around the world gave them hope where the inundation of the Sudan information for an entire year truly weighed down the students in past years. The problem in Sudan is just so big and so profound that it was hard to be optimistic.

While project-based learning remains a minor form of torture for a Type-A teacher, there was no doubt of the student investment the afternoon before the final symposium. As one group was practicing in the presentation room, there were groups scattered throughout the halls practicing, talking, coaching, negotiating. Making sure that their ideas were clearly communicated to the audience mattered to them. Our Assistant Head of School made an interesting comment to me later; he said he knew the work was authentic because while there were good presentations, there were others that needed revision and polish. He said this was clearly a sign that even though I tried to guide the groups, the final decisions were truly their own. Four years in to the Sudan Project, the Cuba Project and now the Global Action Project, I still get nervous when the students present to a wider audience, but each time, it reaffirms my belief that this experience is so much more valuable to them than most others we provide in a traditional school setting.

Moving forward, I am fortunate enough to teach this class again next year and we need to be better. I want to be more mindful in my implementation of design thinking skills from the beginning of our work together. Students do not like process and they certainly don’t want to be patient enough to work through stages such as inspiration, ideation, iteration and implementation. I don’t blame them; in a world where they have a million assignments to keep track of, sports practice, play rehearsal and tutoring sessions, there is no time to give to thinking in any form, more less something as divergent as design thinking. Students commented that when we did use this process, it felt like a waste of time; I noticed that with few exceptions, students kept one of the first ideas they had and then worked around any weaknesses rather than reinvent or even revise. Additionally, I hope to use the community better. Our business plans were weak because their teacher knows very little about business, but there are plenty of people in the community that can help. Additionally, I hope to get our feet on the ground and see some of the work people in the St. Louis area are doing. The more people I can put in front of the students the better for everyone.

So as Ty Pennington and his crew pull out of town each week, they leave many happy people in their wake and know they are off to have the same experience with a new group in a new place. School years are the same in many of ways: there are new groups in your room and new personalities to learn, but the work continues to be meaningful for all participants. That seems to happen when you know you are building something together.




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