The Big Picture

Education Is Everyone's Business

Dennis Littky, Samantha Grabelle

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781416614609
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What is the purpose of education? What kind of people do we want our children to grow up to be? How can we design schools so that students will acquire the skills they'll need to live fulfilled and productive lives?

These are just a few of the questions that renowned educator Dennis Littky explores in The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone's Business. The schools Littky has created and led over the past 35 years are models for reformers everywhere: small, public schools where the curriculum is rich and meaningful, expectations are high, student progress is measured against real-world standards, and families and communities are actively engaged in the educational process.

This book is for both big "E" and small "e" educators:

* For principals and district administrators who want to change the way schools are run.
* For teachers who want students to learn passionately.
* For college admissions officers who want diverse applicants with real-world learning experiences.
* For business leaders who want a motivated and talented workforce.
* For parents who want their children to be prepared for college and for life.
* For students who want to take control over their learning... and want a school that is interesting, safe, respectful, and fun.
* For anyone who cares about kids.

Here, you'll find a moving account of just what is possible in education, with many of the examples drawn from the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center ("The Met") in Providence, Rhode Island--a diverse public high school with the highest rates of attendance and college acceptance in the state. The Met exemplifies personalized learning, one student at a time.

The Big Picture is a book to reenergize educators, inspire teachers in training, and start a new conversation about kids and schools, what we want for both, and how to make it happen.

Chapter 1

The Real Goals of Education

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."
—John Dewey

***

When I watch kids walk into the building on their first day of school, I think about what I want them to be like when they walk out on their last day. I also think about what I want them to be like on the day I bump into them in the supermarket 10 or 20 years later. Over the course of three decades watching kids walk into my schools, I have decided that I want them to

• be lifelong learners
• be passionate
• be ready to take risks
• be able to problem-solve and think critically
• be able to look at things differently
• be able to work independently and with others
• be creative
• care and want to give back to their community
• persevere
• have integrity and self-respect
• have moral courage
• be able to use the world around them well
• speak well, write well, read well, and work well with numbers
• truly enjoy their life and their work.

To me, these are the real goals of education.

I want students to learn to use the resources around them. I want them to read something or see something they are interested in and follow up on it. I want them to have an idea and then get on the phone and call people they can talk to about it, or pick up a book and read more about it, or sit down and write about it. When I imagine one of my students as an adult, I imagine a person who is a thinker and a doer, and who follows his or her passions. I see an adult who is strong enough to stand up and speak for what he or she wants and believes, and who cares about himself or herself and the world. Someone who understands himself or herself and understands learning. Creativity, passion, courage, and perseverance are the personal qualities I want to see in my graduates. I want them to come upon things they've seen every day and look at them in a whole new way. I want them to feel good about themselves and be good, honest people in the way they live their lives. And, catchphrase or not, I want my students to score high on the "tests of emotional IQ" that life will inevitably throw at them over and over again.¹

Finally, I want my students to get along with and respect others. Someone once asked me, "What is the most important thing a school does?" I replied that everything I believe about the real goals of education is not possible if the kids in the school do not care about and cannot get along with each other or with the people they meet outside of school. I believe that this is at the heart of what we mean when we talk about celebrating and respecting diversity, and it is at the heart of what makes a school and a society work.

When a kid leaves my school, I want her to have the basic life skills that will help her get along in the adult world—like knowing how to act in a meeting or how to keep her life and work organized. Basic stuff that too many schools forget about in their rush to cram in three sciences, three social studies, four maths, and so on. But I also want her to be the kind of person who will keep building on what she got in my school, who will keep developing skills, keep learning, keep growing. Each of us, if we live to be just 70 years old, spends only 9 percent of our lives in school. Considering that the other 91 percent is spent "out there," then the only really substantial thing education can do is help us to become continuous, lifelong learners. Learners who learn without textbooks and tests, without certified teachers and standardized curricula. Learners who love to learn. To me, this is the ultimate goal of education. W. B. Yeats said it this way: "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

***

In 1999, the school board in Howard County, Maryland, removed two criteria from its official policy on determining high school students' grades. You know that neither of them were standardized tests. No, they were, and I quote, "originality" and "initiative." This school board decided that those two qualities of a student's work were no longer important. They decided this because, they said, it is "impossible" to measure how hard a student tries or if a student's work is original. What they were really saying, and what way too many school boards are now saying, is this: If it can't be measured easily, then we can't care about it, we can't teach it, and we certainly can't determine if a kid has learned it. The solution? Take originality and initiative completely out of your educational goals and just teach to the test. It makes me scream.

Ernest L. Boyer, the renowned education expert and then-president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, once gave a speech entitled "Making the Connections." In it, he said (beautifully),

I know how idealistic it may sound, but it is my urgent hope that in the century ahead students in the nation's schools will be judged not by their performance on a single test, but by the quality of their lives. It's my hope that students in the classrooms of tomorrow will be encouraged to be creative, not conforming, and learn to cooperate rather than compete.²

Boyer said this in 1993. He died two years later, after a long battle with cancer. Boyer knew that schools were headed in the wrong direction and he made that clear by saying that his hope was "idealistic." It is so sad to me that if he were here today, he would not only see how idealistic this hope still is, but how far we have gone since then in the exact opposite direction.

I remember in the 8th grade, my science teacher had us do these posters that he put up all around the school. Though it wasn't exactly a test, it was a major project, and we all knew our grade depended on it. So there these posters were, hung all over the walls, and they were beautiful, and the teacher looked good to his boss and colleagues, and he probably felt pretty good about himself, too. I think this was the first time I realized how much of my education was total bull. I knew I hadn't learned anything about what was on those posters, including my own. And the teacher just hung them up. We barely talked about the posters, we made no connection with them to anything else, and he never went any deeper with the learning than that final project. My classmates and I had simply copied pictures and words out of the encyclopedia, and for that we not only passed the test of poster making, but were also assumed to have gained the predetermined "set of knowledge" for that quarter. Never mind that none of us had learned very much about science, let alone about initiative or originality. We did exactly what the "test" required us to do and nothing more—and so did the teacher.

Today, tests as meaningless as that test of poster making are determining the goals of education. Tests are dictating what we as a society hold valuable in our young people. Our addiction to testing is blinding us to what we believe in our hearts are the important lessons our children should learn.

If we worked backward, and thought first about the kind of adult we admire, we would not name characteristics that could be measured on a multiple-choice test. No single measurement or tool can get at what's really important in any area of learning. And the current push for one test that every kid has to pass in order to move to the next grade or graduate makes the whole situation even sadder.

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
—George Bernard Shaw

With their focus on end results, too many schools and education policymakers forget how much the process influences how a kid takes in knowledge and then uses it. Too many forget how intrinsic motivation and desire are to learning. So much of our entire approach to education in the United States cheats kids out of the chance to become lifelong learners.

I want students to be able to find the information they need, to be able to go through the process of finding learning. And the key is that they are motivated to do it. I care more that a student is excited to go deeper in her exploration of the history of women in her native country than I do about that student's ability to answer every question on a standardized U.S. history test. I care way more about helping kids learn to apply knowledge than I do about presenting them with knowledge and finding out if they have memorized enough of the facts to spit them back at me. Most schools just give out the knowledge and then test it. They explain photosynthesis and then ask the kid to spit back photosynthesis. In between, no photosynthesis-like process happened inside that kid! He didn't take in that knowledge and then go to the library to find more books about photosynthesis, call a local greenhouse to go see how it works, or speak to a scientist who studies plants. And he certainly didn't grow at all in between receiving the knowledge and being tested on it. He took it in and spit it right back out—the information and himself, unchanged.

So What Is Learning?

How do we know if our kids are becoming lifelong learners? If they are learning right now? If they are becoming "educated people"? I give a lot of speeches around the United States to people who walk into the room thinking they know what it means to be an educated person. They're ready to learn from me about how to educate, but they feel pretty confident that they know what an educated person looks like. And then I show them that famous scene from the movie My Cousin Vinny. You know the one I'm talking about. Marisa Tomei is on the stand proving to the jury that it couldn't possibly have been the defendants' car that left the tire tracks found at the scene. She spews out all kinds of facts and theories and historical knowledge about cars to demonstrate her case. She generalizes, she pulls things together, she teaches what she knows to the courtroom. It's an awesome scene. And then I stop the tape and ask the audience if they would consider her to be "an educated person." If I see that there are still people who think, "Well, but she's a hairdresser, so she can't really be educated," I sometimes ask them, "If she had the same knowledge about and passion for cars, but was a doctor instead of a hairdresser, would we consider her educated then?" Of course we would.

Regardless of who you are, if you can get up and be passionate about something and tell others about what you know, then you are showing that you are educated about that topic. This is what an exhibition ³ is: It is kids getting up and talking passionately about a book they've read, a paper they've written, drawings they've made, or even what they know about auto mechanics. It is a way for students to have conversations about the things they have learned. Exhibitions are the best way to measure learning because they put the kids right in the midst of their learning, which makes a lot more sense than asking them to sit quietly for an hour and fill in test bubbles with a pencil. And because exhibitions are interactive, they propel the kids to want to learn more. That is what matters.

I remember one time when I was taking a group of 8th graders on a trip to Washington, D.C., by train. The conductor was really having fun talking with them and hearing about their plans for the trip. The kids told him about the research they had done and the decisions they had made together. Then the train conductor told them he wanted to find out how smart they were. So he started quizzing them on state capitals. It is so sad to me that after everything he had learned about them—their unique personalities and skills—and after seeing how passionate they were about learning, he still wanted to know if they were really "smart kids," and he, like so many, thought a memorization test was the way to determine that.

Another example that I use to show people what learning really is is a segment of a videotape on math and science learning called A Private Universe.⁴ The video was produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and shows all these quick interviews with Harvard students, faculty, and alumni on graduation day. Most of them look so "educated" in their caps and gowns and flowing academic robes. And then the interviewer asks them one of two questions: "What causes the seasons?" or "What causes the phases of the moon?"

Twenty-one of the 23 randomly selected Harvard folks give the wrong answer. What's more, their wrong answers reveal the same misconceptions about these things that the answers of grade schoolers do. Then the interviewees are asked to list all the science classes they've taken over the years, either at Harvard or in high school. When I show this video to audiences, I say, "Come on, they've taken every kind of science course possible and passed every one of them, and done this and that, but they can't apply it to something as basic as the change of seasons!?" Because of their Harvard diplomas, these grads are going to become some of the most powerful people in our world, but what kind of power is it when you can't apply the knowledge that the diploma stands for? Elliot Washor, my longtime friend and the cofounder of The Met and The Big Picture Company, points out that this says a lot about how too many schools view learning. He relates it to what we are doing at The Met and our Big Picture schools in this way: "They say knowledge is power. We say the use of knowledge is power."

My point is that learning is about going beyond the knowledge given to you in a class or in a book or at a museum. Learning is personal. It happens one on one, it happens in small groups, it happens alone. Sure, a conference, a speaker, a lecture is motivating—but the real learning happens after. It's what you do with it, how you integrate it, how you talk to your family, friends, and classmates about it. That's what learning is. As noted psychology and education expert Seymour Sarason reminded me recently, it's similar to psychotherapists' belief that patients don't get better during the hour, but between the hours.

I'm not suggesting we throw out everything schools do now or everything those Harvard kids learned. I'm suggesting that we look more deeply at what we define as learning and be honest and try different things and see what works. Learning is about learning how to think.

My new friend Tom Magliozzi, from National Public Radio's popular show Car Talk, has a lot to say about what learning really is in the book he and his brother wrote, In Our Humble Opinion. One of my favorite parts is when Tom, a man with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from MIT, says this:

It seems to me that schools primarily teach kids how to take tests (a skill one hardly uses in real life unless one is a contestant on a quiz show). Elementary school prepares kids for junior high; junior high prepares them for high school. So, the goal—if we can call it that—of schools is to prepare kids for more school.⁵

Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg has written about the dichotomy between his "real world" success and the difficulty he had studying psychology in college. Here's a quote from him that reminds us that, even in higher education, there is often a huge split between what we are taught and expected to learn, and what is actually important "out there":

I have now been a psychologist for 21 years, and one thing of which I am certain is that I have never—not even once—had to do in the profession what I needed to do to get an A in the introductory course, as well as in some of the other courses. In particular, I've never had to memorize a book or lecture. If I can't remember something, I just look it up. The way schools set things up, however, they reward with As the students who are good memorizers, not just at the college level but at many other levels as well.⁶

Learning is not about memorizing. Learning is about being mindful. Mindfulness is a concept I learned about a while back, and it really makes sense to me as something we are trying to develop in our students at The Met. Ellen Langer is a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of the books Mindfulness ^7...