“We should be teaching our youth with the intrinsic rewards of awe as opposed to the extrinsic reward of grades. It is what’s needed to nurture a generation that is excited to learn, improve themselves, and contribute to human progress. Such is where awe-based education will re-define the entire learning experience.”
Three signals are required to create a great culture, according to Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
“Be Ten Times as Clear About Your Priorities as You Think You Should Be.”
Executives at 600 companies were asked how many of their employees could name the company’s top three priorities. The executives estimated 64% would be able to name them. Sadly, only 2% were able to do so. Coyle explained that this is not the exception, but the rule, since leaders presume that the people who work for them see things the same way they do.
This makes me think… As we transform our traditional education system, how do we create a culture in which everyone not only knows the priorities, or vision, but also know how to get there?
One method Coyle describes is to use artifacts. When environments are filled with artifacts that embody purpose and identity, they reinforce the signal of what matters.
I saw a fabulous example of this in a school the other day. As the school embraces the principles of design thinking, the principal has started documenting the journey on hallways throughout campus. Her displays reinforce the priority focus on design thinking while also providing a celebratory, collaborative environment for teachers as they embrace the change. And because the displays are in public, often-trafficked hallways, it’s not just teachers receiving the signal. Students, parents, visitors, and support staff are also receiving that signal. She’s crafting a purpose-filled culture.
In what ways are you crafting purpose for your students? Your teachers? Your school or district?
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“There’s never a break. Never.”
It “takes me away from everything I used to do,” says one.
(High School student comments on a Stanford study about homework)
I look forward to the day when the homework debate is no longer a debate. Ask any high school student or parent about homework and I’m sure you’ll hear comments about:
My high school daughter was recently sick with that gnarly virus going around. For a week, it hurt for her to lift her head. She didn’t want to eat or drink anything. She was feverish. Finally, after a trip to Urgent Care and some intravenous fluids, she started to rebound. But then reality set in – a week of assignments to make up. Plus all the homework that would come from the normal week of being back to school. And the anxiety meltdown began.
A big one!
This is not okay.
On a 2015 study by the Princeton Review, over 50% of high school students reported feeling stressed. 25% said homework was their biggest source of stress, and on average students spend one-third of their study time feeling stressed or anxious. What a horrible way to spend their time!
What if we asked ourselves how much time we want to be mandated to do someone else’s work every night? (Not work we choose to do, like grade papers or write a blog post…work someone else decides we MUST do.) And then that is the amount of work we assign to students.
Seriously, we all need and deserve balance. Time to unwind. Time to explore our passions. Time to enjoy our families. Time to just be.
But if you must assign homework, consider this Spring Break homework approach from my teacher friend Toni Stout:
For more posts on this subject:
Holidays Are For Families, Not Homework
Finals = Lots of Homework = Stress = Sickness = Death, therefore Finals are Death
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Defeat is always momentary.
So get up.
Dust yourself off.
Learn from it.
Embrace the opportunity for growth.
And help others do the same.
P.S. And while you’re here reading this, check out my daughter’s blog post on a similar topic:
Failure is Not the Finish Line
Show her some love – her blog is new!
Before I arrived at the SXSW EDU conference, I spent time looking through the conference app, marking sessions that correlated with goals I have for my department. Little did I realize just how much I was going to learn at this conference, and the bulk of it did not happen in those sessions. It happened in the personal connections I made. In the friendships I built.
Those connections will fuel my soul and keep my mind churning with ideas and possibilities long after I forget the “how to” details of the sessions. They remind me why I am an educator; they share in my passions; they push my thinking; and they teach me through their actions and reflections. Can’t get that in a one hour session on learning environments!
Next time you head to a conference, ask yourself, “What friendships will I form?” before you ask yourself, “What new things might I learn?”
In the book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
He explains that people blame the absence of creativity for the lack of originality in the world. (Be honest: Have you said recently, “Why can’t they come up with a new movie idea instead of just refashioning old ones?” I have…)
Grant surmises that people think society would be better off if only we could come up with some more novel ideas. “But in reality,” Grant explains, “the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection…It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.” And when focusing solely on quality, “many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.”
This reminded me of a Steve Jobs interview in which Jobs stated:
Creativity, originality, change… they all require stepping outside the societal norms and limitations placed on us. They require taking risks; ideating and iterating many, many, many times; and understanding that the capacity for creativity is in all of us, but maybe, just maybe, creativity requires work and a commitment to let all those ideas flow! Lots and lots of them. And of course, bashing into walls and living life outside the neat little world!
So how do we provide the conditions for students to bash into the walls (okay, maybe not literally!)?How do we encourage the mass generation of ideas instead of obsessively refining the few? How do we provoke students to question, or even change, rules and systems? In other words, how do we bash into the walls of a traditional, high-stakes educational system and empower students to become change agents (like the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students are trying to do!)?
Educational systems, structures, and beliefs create enormous pressure on students to “get it right” (as determined by people no smarter than us) the first time. One assessment to measure if you learned the chapter content. One essay to determine if you met the writing standard benchmarks. One grade for each assignment. One SAT exam. Each of these with its own set of rules and systems to prove conformity to societal expectation.
When students go against those rules and systems (again, as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students are), adults get agitated and seek to put them back in their place. And yet, when students become adults and seek out jobs, the workforce bemoans their lack of originality and creative problem solving skills.
Our role as teachers and administrators should be, then, to bash into the traditional walls to provide students opportunities to:
What walls are you bashing into? How about your students? I’d love to hear about your classroom or school experiences.
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Laura K Spencer, Ed.D. 