Moving the Rock

Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education

Grant Lichtman

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119404422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Politique d'éducation

Advance Praise for Moving the Rock

"The future comes at us fast — which means school reformers don't have time to wait. They need real tools in real time. That's why Moving the Rock is so important. Grant Lichtman has guidance for anyone — teachers, parents, administrators, government officials — intent on helping young people succeed not 'someday, ' but today."

— Daniel H. Pink, best-selling author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

"Grant Lichtman's book is a clear and comprehensive guide to the "what" and the "how" of educational transformation. Organized around essential levers for change, it is a must-read for anyone who wants to make a difference in our schools."

—Tony Wagner, Harvard Ilab Expert in Residence, and best-selling author of The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators"

"This book gives me hope for a brighter future in education. Despite the dark clouds imposed by misguided policies, Grant Lichtman diligently tells stories of grass-roots innovations in the classrooms and schools all over the world. Moving the Rock is an inspiring call to action for all educators."
—Yong Zhao, Ph.D., Foundation Distinguished Professor, School of Education, University of Kansas

"If you have children, or teach children, or want our children to succeed, this is a must-read book. Grant Lichtman throws down the challenge for all of us; that WE can change education, and he shows us just how successful schools everywhere are overcoming change-killing inertia in our schools."

—Todd Rose, best-selling author of The End of Average; Harvard University

Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education gives educators, parents, administrators, students, and other stakeholders a clear paradigm for transforming our outmoded schools into schools that will help our children to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

It's no secret that our educational system is stuck. Moving the Rock shows the important roles all of us can play in un-sticking it by moving seven specific levers that will change the focus of education from what we teach to how we learn.Importantly, moving the levers is completely possible today, and in fact is already happening now in many schools.

Drawing on research and extensive experience in the education community, Grant Lichtman outlines the seven essential levers that can profoundly change our schools so that we are teaching all our children how to learn, including

• Creating the Demand for Better Schools

• Building School-Community Learning Laboratories

• Encouraging Open Access to Knowledge

• Fixing How We Measure Student Success

• Teaching the Teachers what They Really Need to Know

• and more

At the end of each ofeach chapter there areone or more challenges, ways that all of us can collectively turn the pioneering work of others into transformation for all our schools.

CHAPTER ONE

The Future of “School”

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed; if in terms of 10 years, plant trees; if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.

Confucius

Albermarle County stretches across rural rolling hills from the red brick monuments of the University of Virginia to backwoods grade schools in some of the poorest corners of central Appalachia. One might look elsewhere for the changing fabric of education, unless one had heard of Pam Moran, the diminutive, insightful, fiery, passionate superintendent of Albermarle County Schools who has gained a well‐deserved international reputation for breaking pretty much any boundary that stands in the way of great learning for her 13,000+ students. Pam, her supporting cast of educational leaders, and their students have been featured in articles, on television, and across educational social media as they rethink and rework the place we call “school.” Their students gather in informal, somewhat noisy collaborative spaces that used to be hushed quiet by attentive librarians. Budding student musicians and robot‐loving techies, who used to rush off campus after the last bell of the day, now hang out after‐hours in the recording studios and the maker spaces, publishing their latest songs and building stuff out of odds and ends. Teachers are celebrated, not disciplined, for taking risks. One principal moved his desk into the middle of the school entry hall to make the point that his job is “in” the school, not behind a closed door.

Albermarle County does not have deep pockets, and many of their students come from underserved communities where education is poorly understood and often not supported in the traditional social fabrics of farm, town, and family. But Pam says that “what is emerging right now, what is coming out of work we have been doing over the last decade when budgets have been very tight, is a network of choices and opportunities that are not dependent on funding or direction from the government. We have been forced to figure out ways to encourage schools to adapt beyond‐the‐horizon opportunities for our students” relying largely on themselves. What sets Albermarle County schools apart from many other districts is that they have actually done it, not fearfully or cautiously or tentatively, but boldly and courageously.

Redesigning the School “Operating System”

The education‐industrial community, the system that is hugely responsible for shaping the lives and opportunities for your children, spends billions of dollars every year and an endless flood of human capital in building, updating, and reforming the “hardware” and “software” of K–12 education. The problem is that we have virtually ignored the K–12 education “operating system,” which has not had a substantial redesign since the middle of the 19th century. We will not fundamentally change education until we stop designing around an operating system that is 150 years old. How we change this operating system by finally getting around, over, or past the frictions that have kept it stuck is the problem we need to solve.

Whether you are a parent, an employer, or a classroom teacher, it is highly probable that you underestimate the magnitude of change coming to K–12 education. As I detailed in an article for the Transforming Teaching Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Lichtman, 2015), the K–12 operating system includes not only physical campuses and teams of people but also the processes, standards, assumptions, and mind‐sets that determine how schools have worked for at least 150 years. The current K–12 education operating system guides everything a school does: how we measure student progress; how we compartmentalize learning by subject; how we assign teachers to groups of students; our outdated daily and annual schedules; suffocating and ineffective professional development for our teachers; vast overuse of standardized testing; rigid, top‐down decision making; prison‐like physical campuses; and impermeable boundaries between schools and the communities they serve.

This system performed extraordinarily well when measured against the economic and social needs of the late‐19th through mid‐20th centuries when the alternatives for learning were limited largely to cloistered monasteries, ivy towers, and red one‐room schoolhouses. Most educators and many students and parents, similar to those in Albermarle County, recognize that the system is critically flawed when matched against the outcomes we want for students in the 21st century. And yet most educators continue to design curriculum, instructional practices, assessment, schedules, training, physical campuses, support systems, and new digital technologies for a system that no longer meets current and future expectations. As Alan Daly, chair of the education department at the University of California, San Diego, told me “We are not thinking about education at a systems level. We think in narrowly defined parts and believe that if we can hone practice or solve a problem in one narrow area then all will be well, and this is just wrong. We have to intersect much more carefully and systematically among teachers, districts, colleges, student‐users, and community stakeholders as co‐thinkers, codesigners, and co‐constructors of a better system of learning.”

Where the Rock Is Going to Roll

So, let's ask the question: What will “school” look like in 20 or 25 years? Will the type of dramatic changes we see taking root in places such as Albermarle County schools over the last decade become the norm, or will they still be outliers? What is the inevitable future with which we must try to intersect? In work with John Gulla of the EE Ford Foundation in 2016, we reflected on the hundreds of schools, thousands of educators, and numerous education thought leaders with whom we have collectively crossed paths in the last five years and offered this general vision:

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Adult and student co‐learners will seamlessly connect physically and virtually via multiple optional pathways in a web‐like, global, socio‐neural network to create and share wisdom and knowledge, unrestricted by the bonds of time and space, unfettered by the boundaries of subject, classroom, and age, and learning skills and tackling timeless questions and profound problems that face us as individuals, as communities, and as a species. “Schools” will be critical portals into this web of practice, physical places where we gather as relationship‐rich communities. These school portals will offer spaces to interact in traditional face‐to‐face settings as well as providing easy access to individual and group virtual reality devices with which learners in one physical location can form deep, authentic relationships with multiple co‐learners in any other spot on the globe. Adult and student co‐learners will share insights, experiences, and data, generating artifacts of ideas and actual physical objects that will “print” anytime, anywhere. The sum of human knowledge and, increasingly, nuance will be accessible to anyone on the globe with an Internet‐connected device, in real time by posing questions in a common language without the need to query, program, or understand how a computer thinks differently from how a human thinks. Adults and children of all ages will be teamed according to their respective unique talents, aptitudes, interests, and passions, progressing at differentiated rates through a series of increasingly complex challenges as they grow in understanding and ability. School will not be an event that occupies our lives for 10 months a year for 12 or 14 or 20 years in our youth. We will all be connected to “school” throughout our childhood and adult lives, diving in when we need, to find what we need, for as long as we need.

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If this future is inevitable, what will happen to the big pieces of the education operating system: classrooms and buildings, the teachers, unions, textbook companies, district offices, and administrators? What will happen to the architects who design campuses, bus drivers who pick up our kids in the morning, and the single moms who need somewhere for their children to go during the work day? What will happen to our 150‐year social commitment to public education that is open and available to all? Will these all completely disappear in 20 years? Hopefully not; the richest elements of truly transformational learning are relational, not transactional, and these relationships can develop only when a diverse group of students and adults spend a great deal of time together.

Twenty years from now there will have been a series of tectonic shifts of people, money, and other resources away from mainstream traditional public and private schools into alternative learning systems that are fundamentally different from the dominant models today.

But there will be dramatic changes way beyond what many educators conceive today. Many of these changes are already taking shape. Families have much greater choice about how and where their children learn than just a decade ago. That curve, along with other demographic, economic, technological, and social trends, is only growing steeper and, in fact, may be leading to a step‐function leap unlike anything the system of education has seen since the invention of the printing press. Twenty years from now there will have been a series of tectonic shifts of people, money, and other resources away from mainstream traditional public and private schools into alternative learning systems that are fundamentally different from the dominant models today. Those shifts will have disrupted the lives of many within the extended system of education. Some people and schools will adapt; others will probably not. That is the nature of real evolution: some species and individuals thrive while others die out.

How Will the Learning Experience Change?

Students, teachers, and sources of knowledge will be hyper‐connected via a variety of virtual pathways, most of which have not been invented yet. Every student and teacher will have Internet‐enabled devices that are either free or extremely cheap. There will be no hard textbooks. Students and teachers will access content from universal libraries of digital curriculum that are open source, fully accredited, and free.

Rather than treating all students as part of an averaged group, the primary academic focus will be on how well a student can explore and learn along a “lane” tailored specifically to each individual. The sorting of students that now takes place largely along lines of test‐based scholastic aptitude will broaden to include a combination of aptitude, interest, learning style, and social‐emotional abilities. There will be few, if any, subject boundaries; learning will take place across broad interdisciplinary themes that combine real‐world problems and direct experience. K–12 and postsecondary learning systems will have adopted a vastly greater emphasis on social and emotional awareness that helps create a balanced life for students and teachers.

How Will Schools Function Differently?

Physical schools will still exist, but students and adults will spend much more time in a diverse ecosystem of physical and virtual communities and less in isolated classrooms. Schools will have developed powerful student and adult partnerships with colleges, universities, companies, incubators, laboratories, and nonprofit nodes in this greater learning ecosystem. Daily schedules will have many fewer, if any, boundaries, and 10‐week summer vacations will have largely disappeared.

The static teacher‐student ratio, one teacher in a room with a given number of students for a fixed period of time, will become vastly more fluid. All teachers will not be essentially similar cogs on a wheel with the same skill sets or expectations. Schools will have a mixture of master teachers, assistants, coaches,...