Sir Ken Robinson Keynote Speaker at the 2018 Better Together: California Teachers Summit

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good morning and good morning to all of you who aren't in the room which is the rest of the planet isn't it everyone and all the other centers around California I'm really thrilled to be asked to do this today couple reasons one is that I think this movement of teachers working together collaborating is the most important thing that's currently happening in education not only California which is I think set a standard here there are I think 12,000 teachers are going to get involved today but many more across the state but around the world I have got to know a little of the work of Ed camp a no Hadley focused in this here today and they are now supporting gatherings of teachers like this across the planet I did a pre recorded keynote a little while ago for an ED camp in Ukraine I think they're almost a thousand teachers they're getting together to have these sorts of conversations I think it's really important that teachers take back control of their own profession and this is a big part of that so that's the first reason the second is that I live in California as you can see you know and I have lived here for 17 years now and so I haven't kind of popped over to have a quick chat I'm heading back to my place of origin which is the UK I live here and here's the situation and I have lived here for 17 years for most that time I've been on a green card but on Tuesday of this week I was downtown that the LA Convention Center with 5,000 other people who were officially approved that to become American citizens [Applause] so I am one of you now so my fellow Americans I think it's I've been involved in educational of a very long time I know a lot of you have too and over the my working life in education which goes back somebody was telling this gymnasium was built in the 1960s I was built in the 1950s so I predate this Stadium and for as long as I can recall there have been debates about the nature and purpose of Education and how to improve it it's got a lot hotter latterly I say laterally over the past 20 years really because it's become a big political issue and the reason it's become such a big political issues mainly economic governments around the world have been trying to improve education by raising standards now it's very hard isn't it to argue against raising standards I can't throw a good argument to lower them so you know standards are far too high it's about time we brought them down I don't think so every country in the world is trying to do it and in most cases in my view they're going about it the wrong way there are three bits to education there's the curriculum which is what we want children to learn there is assessment which is how we try and make judgments on what they're learning and there's teaching which is the process of helping people to learn most governments have adopted a three-part strategy including the national government here in the US the first is conformity which is expressed in the whole movement towards standardization the problem with that is that people aren't uniform people are highly diverse it's one of the points that was made that the citizenship ceremony of the day was how the great richness of America was vest in the diversity of its cultures and of people's backgrounds diversity of age orientation of our culture is the hallmark of human existence but most countries have pursued a policy of conformity the second is they've pursued a policy of compliance you know standardized testing which is you know in America is a multi-billion dollar industry and I use the word industry advisedly it's got nothing to do with the quality of education it's not everything's there at the profits of the people who sell the tests and the third principle on which a lot of these movements have been based is competition now competition is important I'm not not against competition I just sat through the whole World Cup you know I'm all over competition in the right place I mean obviously that didn't go as well as it might have done for the best team and the competition you know now as we know competition isn't always fair but but you know the whole strategy for raising standards in schools has been to pit children against each other to put teachers against each other schools against each other in order to rack up some kind of credit for limited resources I think these strategies of conformity of compliance and competition are the exact opposite of what we should be implementing in our efforts to not only raise standards in scores but to leverage the states of the teaching profession and in doing that to transform the education system it's why this conversation is so important today I had a couple of events arisen in my life I won't go into all of them obviously actually why not you know it's good to talk we have that my wife and I have two kids and our daughter Kate three months ago gave birth to our first granddaughter thank you I had nothing to do that you know I mean all babies are great but it's by extraordinary coincidence and I do you think it's a very interesting thing it turns out that Adeline is the most beautiful and brilliant baby who has ever been born so we feel pretty blessed by that but like all children she is a seething bundle of possibilities the reason is that she's a human being human beings are deeply curious deeply gifted deeply talented creatures in most respects were like the rest of life on earth and we ignore the similarities at our peril I think we're discovering that this summer that we can't play with the environment on which we depend and believe we won't be punished back for doing that but we are like the rest of life on Earth in most respects but in some respects we are different we are deeply curious learning organisms and we have unfathomable capacities for reason for critical judgment for imagination and for creativity there is an important difference isn't there between learning education and school Adaline like all children loves to learn I mean think of your own kids you know in the first two years or so our child's life they learn in ordinary circumstances to speak that's a fantastic achievement isn't it when you think of it and the interesting thing is you don't teach them how to do it if you're a parent you do not teach you did not teach your child to speak they just learn to do it because they love to and because they can you know you don't reach a point where your child is 12 months old or 18 months old where you sit them down and say look we need to talk you know or well or more specifically you do and and this is how it's going to work you know you're probably noticed your mother and I'm making all these noises of nast 18 months you know I know it's all rather baffling but the fact is that some of these words mean things some of these noises mean things I mean some of them other names things we call them now there'll be $5,000 for you to get your head round shortly there are other noise we make to chant the names of things their names are things we do with things we call them verbs since another ten thousand of those you'll be picking up along the way and by the way if you inflict your voice differently at the end of one of these verbs you can say whether you have done something or whether you plan to do it so it's about tenses and then we don't worry about the subjunctive nobody gets it yeah it'll be fine no it doesn't work that way kids learn because they want to and they can education is a more formal approach to learning learning is the acquisition of new skills and understanding education is a deliberate process of learning a more organized approach to it you can organize it yourself plenty of people do the most sustained experience most people have of organized education is K through 12 education and that happens for a couple of reasons one of them is that we have come to the view over time that there are some things we want our kids to learn that we don't want to leave to chance we think it's too important so we build them into a curriculum and there are some other things that we think they should learn including those which we consider to be too difficult for them to learn left to their own devices like calculus it's good example you know it does matter how much learning by Discovery you do with your regular rules it's unlikely any of them will come back having figured out calculus they're only two people who did do it lightly to Newton and it took them the whole of history to get to that point so there's some things you know where it's frankly quicker to help people learn and that's what the role of a teacher is the role of a teacher is to facilitate learning now I say that because that's not how the rows of teachers have come to be seen and I'm going to come back to that in just a minute so learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding education is a more formal approach to it the third term is school now a school properly conceived is a community of learners in a way this is a school any group of people who come together as you do today to learn with and from each other is a school the trouble is we've come to do school for young children in a particular way and the result is that all kids love to learn they don't all enjoy education and some of them have a hard time with school teachers love to teach but some of them have a hard time with school and the problem isn't school and it's not learning it's how we've come to do school and this movement of the past 25 years to standardize and raise achievement in education through competition and compliance has made stores often inimical places for learning I came across this recently I'm going to show you a short visual aid here to underline the point that this presentation has been prepared everything I've just wondered on here you know looking for a different conference I came across this recently the a friend of mine Pasi Sandberg who's done a lot of work in education in Finland talks about the global education reform movement or germ and it has proved to be contagious teaching to me is an art form as well as a science and it is I'll come back this before we're done one of the most important professions that anyone can become part of if they're suitably qualified and and passionate about it and the one that probably has more impact on the lives and develop to our young children almost anything else but I came across this cartoon recently and it seemed to me this was a good way of encapsulating how the conformity and standards and competition movement has come to diminish the image of what teaching is about the teachers have become seen as people whose job it is to deliver the curriculum it's like it's a branch of FedEx and the teaching is somehow a service sector role in relation to standardized curricula now I want to argue and I know you all believe it to be true for totally different perception of this that teaching is the centerpiece of Education very little can transform education except the quality of teaching Adaline the say shoes I'll keep mentioning you by the way has is now a three months old she like every other child is born with immense reserves of possibility human resources are like the world's natural resources in several ways they're often but firstly they're very diverse we're all of us born with immense natural capacities but they're often hidden from you from the surface you have to go digging around for them the second is that even if you discover them you still have to develop them and refine them really for example orchids are born with a capacity for language with very few exceptions but you still have to learn to speak and some people if they're exposed to three or four languages at home will learn to speak all of them with equal facility it's harder when you're in your late teens or early 20s do the same thing but then you have to find a purpose for these resources and what all this speaks to is the age-old debate about the relation between nature and nurture now you know there was a time when people believed that children are essentially blank slates and that they come in to be shaped by whatever imprint experience places on them you know that's not true it's not true of you it's not true of your students it's not true of your kids it's not true of anyone we know we are born with a deep genetic imprint what we go on to become is everything to do with our culture and our opportunities pretty much I think the jury's out on the final figures but I think most people assume they're a shipment between nature and nurture it's got a half and a half one of the most important influences on what becomes of children and what they become is education and it's why I think we have to look for a radical shift in how we do school and how we picture and conceive of the role of teachers not that you have to do but we have to get this message across publicly teaching I say is the process of facilitating learning I spoke a while ago at an event in Vancouver it was a peace summit it was called the Vancouver peace summit they're very good at titles in Canada I discovered but the the guest of honor at this event was the Dalai Lama Suzy had to introduce me I had to introduce the Dalai Lama which is a bit of a tricky thing to do frankly here because the Dalai Lama sits atop a faith tradition or wisdom tradition I should say that goes back over 3,000 years and the consequence of all of this is that he is said to be the same soul reincarnated for all that time so there's a lot to get in that's what I'm saying no into an introduction but there's a point at which he was asked a question and he thought for a very long time that he was asked a lot of questions but there's one point at which he asked to quit he was asked a question and he took a deep breath and sat there the 2,000 people in the room and eventually you know we're all think this is going to be great you know it'll be terrific and then he took a breath and opened his mouth and he said I don't know well I was a bit taken aback frankly I thought what you mean you don't know off the top high Lama you know I mean get on with it and but he said you know I haven't thought about that before see what I loved about that that here's one of the world's great teachers who's perfectly prepared to say that he doesn't know something and why would he it was a question that went outside of his direct experience or even his peripheral experience it was I think about philanthropy what I loved was he was that he went on to say or what do you think I'm into the room what that underscored is that nobody knows everything human knowledge is a densely woven fabric of reciprocating ideas experiences values traditions and insights I think one of the most intriguing examples of the way that technology can in it in in the best sense facilitate learning is Wikipedia I didn't event a little while ago with Jimmy Wales and I read and paid that much attention to except I use it all the time but Wikipedia is probably the most sophisticated say no I take away probably the most sophisticated extensive and evolving source of human understanding or the record of human standing that has ever been part of human civilization there are hundreds of thousands of people and I think it's perfect nobody is saying that but it's been woven together by hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of communities across the world is constantly self-correcting and it's growing exponentially this is an attempt to weave together what do we know now and it shows that human knowledge is essentially social socially constructed and distributed and that's the first thing that as a teacher you know that you're not the only person who knows anything your children know all kinds of things that you don't know they have experiences they have insights they have attitudes they they have values they have dispositions which are different and reciprocal so the first thing I took away from this with the DAO Lama is that I mean saving our grace is here today that that learning and teaching are reciprocal activities and they're not properly conceived monologues they are conversations among the participants as the first scores were the first academies were that's why I say a school is a learning community in which people learn with and from each other the other thing is that he was willing to say what do you think you know you don't have to teach enough to know everything but you do need to be able to facilitate learning and you have to see it as a collaborative effort which is why what's happening here is so important a little while ago there's a book published by a guy called Peter Brook it was Matt drama and my work in education I hesitate to call it a career but my time didn't plan it any more than you planned yours probably but my work in education began originally in drama teaching and I remember reading a book by the snide Peter Brook it's called the empty space it's a fantastic book it's not as good as my book this is my book what you think it's good isn't it I mean you could tell and refrain this because there's a lot in there about I think what were the room is for innovation in our system but Peter Brook was writing about it theater and said what is theater about essentially you know his commitment was to make theater the most transformative experience it could be and he spent a lifetime doing that with tremendous success I mean nobody would question Peter Brooks achievements as a theater director but he said if we're to make theater transformative we have to be clear what it is that we're talking about and in order to answer that question he does a sort of thought experiment he says what can you take away from the average theater performance what's the essence what can you take away and still have it what can you remove and and not damage the half of the matter and he said you could take away the script you can take away the curtains you could take away the lighting you could take away the stage that all these things are in essential to theater and it keeps going down the list the costumes in fact you said you can get rid of the building you don't need any of it the only thing you cannot remove and still have theater is an actor in a space and somebody watching the actor performs a drama theater describes the relationship between the performance and the audience and he said it's that relationship that we have to focus on if we want transformative experiences in the theater and we should have nothing to it that gets away from that gets away from it or distracts from it and many things do we have a lot of trappings in theater which distract from the essential power of the relationship so he tried to build it up elementally we see I think the analogy with education is absolutely exact that at the heart of education is a relationship between a teacher and a learner or between learners and each other it's a relationship that we're discussing here not a delivery system and the fact is over the course of the industrialization of education we've created all kinds of peripheral paraphernalia standard eye assess the building code so not not saying any of these things are unimportant or don't have some kind of a role we've built up a whole infrastructure of activities and of expectation sort of interest groups and codes and regulations but at the very heart of it is the separation between teachers and learners you get rid of everything else you don't need any of that to have good education it can be you and a group of students out in the car park and if you don't have that relationship if that relationship isn't good deep profound and purposeful for you as well as the students it doesn't matter what else you've got you can have as many standardized curriculum as many testing systems as you like as many building codes as you like and you won't have good education education hinges around the relationship between students and teachers not only that it's a ratio between the content I mean I know I had teachers who helped me understand things I would not have understood unaided who got me interested in things I wouldn't otherwise have been interested in it's about cultural context and I grew up in a particular part of Liverpool and I had a whole series of teachers who helped me discover some things I was good at that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't I think encountered those particular teachers so this relationship is at the heart of it and it's why I say that this is where the pivot point has to be for the improvement of education and we have to recast it as an art form and all the high performing education systems around the world are doing exactly what you're doing now in Singapore for example I mean I'm not approving of all these systems in mentioned them but they have some common features if you look at the some of the areas of Education would you be attracting a lot of interest sadly mainly in the areas of the that get focused on through the Pisa tests but if you look at some of the high-performing systems they all recognize that teaching is a profession it has to be valued compensated and the growth and development and collaboration of teachers is at the heart of the whole process but there's a very interesting comment that was made by one of the master teachers as they're called in Singapore guys very distinguished as a physics teacher and it speaks to this point he said my job I do not see my job as teaching students physics my job is to help students learn physics and it's a very important shift that that isn't just about transmitting things we know it's developing the appetite cultivating the curiosity for learning which will then make learners go on to be fulfilled and productive learners in the longer term so it is to be an art form it's it's infused by science there's a lot we know now from cognitive theories that we didn't know previously but they've always supported I think what turned out to be fundamental principles of good teaching but thing is where do we go from here I think the first step is putting teaching front and center again I think that's vital the second thing is that teaching tends to be or can be a lonely professional you know you get into your classroom you work with your groups of students and we tend not to work enough with other teachers it's why this movement is I think so crucial I said at the beginning that the approach to education reform has been based on conformity compliance and competition I think we need to flip this over we ought to be developing systems which are based on diversity on creativity and collaboration I say diversity because all people are different all children dif and that's the great hope and challenge and richness of our cultures and our societies you know if you've got two children I will bet you they are totally different from each other aren't they you'd never confuse them creativity is what is the pulse of human achievement it's the heart of our cultures and our civilization and collaboration is what makes all of this work so this is a collaborative program it's part of a global movement and I think the fact this is happening across the state of California is critically important the last thing I just want to say is that you know education is sometimes has been thought of as a kind of mechanical system Laura an impersonal system it is a deeply personal matter education is about people what they want to learn how they do learn what motivates them or what they'll become the best way infinitely the only way we can really personalize education is by deepening this relationship between teachers students students and each other in that community and that's where this becomes an art form what you see is a transformation when this works it's like seeing flowers grow or crop it's a miraculous evolution from a small seed to a flourishing crop sometimes you know we think of these processes of miraculous they are miraculous no but to call something a miracle and I think of people who benefit enormously from education as I have we tend to think of miracles as where events it's why we call them miracles it like an exceptional thing but in education transformation of students at the hands of gifted teachers isn't a rare event it's a common event if we cultivate the talents and the roles and the self-confidence of teachers properly and from that point of view in great schools where the conditions are right there are miracles everywhere and I just want to say that too I think you're in a profession that couldn't matter more to our communities to our children to their families to the great challenges we face on the planet now we'll only meet that challenge by deepening the respect for teachers and the professional development it is through collaboration and also by remembering their fear in education you are in the miracle business and I think it's a great business to be in so thank you for all that you do [Music] okay that was it now we have some questions and I want to thank the teachers across California who sent in video questions there isn't time to get through all of them but we had I think 28 plus fantastic videos I watched them all and they're just terrific but the team have picked some particular questions to ask and I'm going to give a quick response to it I mean you can see when you hit the questions that we could beer all day but I want you to hear the questions and see what answers you would give them but I'll make a few quick comments and we have the first question come up but teachers from throughout the country will be working on how to embed project-based learning in the form of jus inquiry their classrooms I use your video the talk that you gave about teachers being gardeners in my buck Institute trainings with teachers you compare teachers to gardeners and you said that great teachers know the conditions and how to promote growth and students so my question is this who's responsible for creating the conditions of growth and our teachers what are those ideal conditions for teachers to grow and engage in transformative teaching and how do we convince veteran and new teachers to take risks and innovate and to embrace not just the successes but the failures and reflection thank you Jim it's fantastic question it's a whole day's conversation isn't it but let me just say a couple of quick things about it as I see it the role of teachers is to create the conditions in classrooms or in wherever they are or studios or wherever the teaching is happening that will facilitate students learning and sometimes that can be through direct instruction sometimes it's in group work sometimes it's through practical projects great teachers have a repertory of techniques and strategies that they practice and acquire over time like any great profession that's about its connoisseurship it's knowing what might work here in this situation that's the role of a teacher to create that kind of climate for students if you're a conventional school as I sit there there is it's it's part of a bigger ecosystem so transfer Jim's question the role of a principal in a school is critically important because the role of the Prince was to create conditions in the school culture where teachers can do that to create the environment where teachers can work together they can collaborate and they can be part of a common Enterprise within the school and in the community around that there is the the school district in our system here and the role of the superintendent I think and of the board is to create conditions where schools can do that where schools can collaborate there are some countries by the way which which I'm going to Finland is often pointed to us as a good example of that but creating conditions at the district level is the role of the board not a command control role role of just come back to before I've done and at the state level the role of the state legislatures is to create conditions where districts can do that so it's an ecosystem but all of that has to be focused on enabling this relationship between the teachers and the students so that the short answer to Jim is that this is a big enterprise there's no reason to delay it but there's no reason to expect it's going to happen overnight we have to start creating conditions where you are but whether this movement matters so much is the people who can most help teachers learn their craft and practice their craft and deepen it is the community of teachers veterans working with new teachers new teachers working alongside the veterans not only in the school but with organizations like the CSU system creating the conditions for collaboration is both possible and necessary and I think that's where this begins can we have the next question my name is Jen Roberts I'm from San Diego California but this summer I've been spending a lot of time up here in my parents pottery studio and it's been making me think about the way I use space in my classroom I've also been reading this great book called the space and between those two things I've been thinking a lot about how I can use the space that I have in my classroom to promote creativity for my students and promote production of their work and so I think in schools our classroom spaces are very fixed and they're the hardest thing to change about school because they're literally built decades ago and sometimes won't be changed for decades since and I'm wondering what Serkan might have to say about the way we can leverage our existing classroom spaces to promote more creativity and creative production from our students well thank you Jen it's right it is difficult to knock down entire buildings so it's a 2-pound answer this really one of them is that if you're building new schools there is an opportunity to reconfigure conceptually how the building operates that that's the school structure the classroom is often referred to as the third teacher and it's a very important part the physical environment in which people work as a deep effect on the culture of the organization I think of cultures habits and habitats it's you know the routines and rhythms that people practice in their particular institution which also the physical space there are some wonderful examples online of innovative designs for building this there's a whole movement developing area of designers architects builders and others who are Rican sieving what schools look like you may work in some of them but if you're not in a new school then you have to look at the building that you've got and there's still a lot I think that can be done you know it's school systems have become used to particular sorts of layouts particular sorts of furniture particular arrangements of furniture just reconfiguring the furniture is the first thing that we can think about or even getting rid of it in some spaces the decor of the building is so important you know you've I was in a stall a while back to stand by LAX and it was a concrete bunker essentially but when you went inside it felt like an Aladdin's cave the energy in the space it had the kids work up it had the teachers work up again parents work up you really got a sense that this was a place where learning happened and creativity and the imagination was actively encouraged so the decor is important and that certainly is available like in your own house there are things you can do to refit configure the space there's also by the way I mean I'm by no means any kind of expert in it but I remember doing a lot of work in Hong Kong years back and you know in Asian cultures I always get the pronunciation wrong but some of you'll correct me properly this is whole principle of feng shui where the energy of the space can be changed by the physical reconfiguration of the objects in the space and the way the spaces decorate or even with the way the furniture is pointing so there's a lot that can be done to reconfigure spaces and make them more congenial to learning you know apart from having to build a place from scratch and and I think it's a very important part because you know if you walk into a bit of space you get a mood and a movement and a feeling then usually you know if it's a lab or if it's an art studio or if it's a regular classroom and I think genre's a very important point reconfiguring the invite the physical environment is a key part of the transformation of learning don't have the next question district I also have the privilege of working with amazing group of educators teaching at our middle school Rancho Lab School thinking about our lab school and our students and what educators need to know about how to prepare our students for their future I'm wondering sir Ken what advice would you give new educators joining our professions there's a lot of advice as I'm sure you'd all share in this as well I think the first thing is it's a difficult profession you know that I mean famously it's it's very hard to become not only great but proficient at teaching it's a very complex and demanding profession dealing with so many people so many rival demands so I think it's important that people entering the profession maintain their idealism I mean I've tried to do that I know most people who've passed of education do their very best to do that and keep your eye on the bold you're there to help students you know not there to just to fulfill mandates your role is to to keep focused on that the the quality of learning that it's a difficult job it's demanding and you'll have good days and bad days the second thing is though that this is a job that people get better at that there are skills techniques that there are instincts that you develop through experience that you can cultivate and as long as as a as a professional you see yourself that way not there's somebody once said you know that there are like in all professions there are some people with 20 years experience and some people with 1 years experience repeated 20 times and being in the business of your own personal growth and development is critical learning from other teachers being prepared to be humble in the face of people with more experience with techniques they've learned and also to study your craft in the way that other professions do I'm very keen that we should see education for the profession that it is and that means recognizing that there's a lot to learn right the way through your career in education from other disciplines from how people teach different sorts of groups it really is a never-ending program of self-development properly conceived the other thing I would say is that no matter how passionate you are as an educator it's not the only thing you do you have family community commitments and also it's very important that you develop your own your own talents and refresh yourself it can be with the best wall in the world a very draining occupation and you do need time to feed yourself to feed your own spirit and that's part of what I do talk about in created schools here that it's it's if you're traveling aeroplanes you know they always say this put your own mask on first and I think you have to pay attention to your own personal growth and development because the more fulfilled and rounded you feel you are more content your own skills the more like it is I think that you're going to contribute the kind of learning that your students need and the last thing is don't stop being a student you know you don't know everything you never will nobody ever does and you've got as much to learn from your students as they have to learn from you see if it's a conversation rather than monologue and I think you'll be astonished and rewarded by the benefits that you all get from that I think that's the last question because we're going to go into your nesting but thank you so much for the invitation I'd be appreciated [Music]

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Keywords: cateacherssummit, education, mentoring, new teacher center, aiccu, csu, teach, teacher, teaching, learning, professional development

Id: IMOf6FJEATY

Length: 37min 44sec (2264 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 13 2018