The Surprising Truth About Learning in Schools | Will Richardson | TEDxWestVancouverED

then my great privilege over the last 10 years or so to be able to travel the world and visit lots of schools and have lots of conversations with kids and teachers and parents and policymakers and I'm here today to share with you kind of a surprising truth about learning in schools that I've gleaned from those conversations it's actually a pretty challenging truth it's something that might make us a little uncomfortable both at a personal level and at a systems level but before I share that truth with you I want you to take a moment and just think a little bit about what it is that you believe about how kids learn most powerfully and deeply in their lives what are the conditions that need to be present in order for kids to learn in a sticky way learning that stays with them learning that they can build on as they go through their lives I think if I could get into most of your brains right now I'd find a very consistent strange of answers answers that basically come from our own experience as learners over the last couple of years I've actually asked that question to about 50,000 people at various conferences presentations workshops face-to-face conversations that I've had and I'm going to guess that most of what you were thinking is what they were thinking as well I'm going to predict that most of what you were thinking is coming from this kind of built up stock of intuitive knowledge intuitive common sense knowledge that we have about learning Seymour Papert is one of my best teachers and I think he's right we know what deep and powerful learning looks like because we're learner's as well and so it looks like this this isn't rocket science when we talk about what it learning requires we know that it's based on passion we know that the best learning that we do happens when it's for a real audience for a real purpose when it has relevance in our lives when it's not constrained by time and when there are other people around us who are passionate to learn those things as well but now I want to share with you a list of answers that no one ever gives when I ask that question and it's amazing to me that in just about every school that I visit in just about every classroom that I enter these are the conditions that exist for the kids in those environments these are the conditions that we create for them when we expect them to learn now I think this disconnect between what we believe and what we practice is really powerful and it is this disconnect that has led me to this surprising truth about schools and about learning and that is that schools were not built for learning now I know that's a challenging statement I know that that makes us feel uncomfortable but I believe this not just because I've been able to visit these places and talk to all these people but I also believe this because I'm the owner of two teenagers these are my kids this is Tucker who's 16 he's a junior in high school that's my daughter Tess who just graduate from high school in June this is one of the very few pictures we have of my kids in close proximity when they're not tearing each other apart it's nice for me to be reminded that those moments exist what I found in their 22 collective years of public and private education is that the learning that they do on their own looks very different from the learning that they do in schools and I want to talk a little bit about that because I think that that that kind of comparison is important for us to think about my wife wanted me to title this presentation the science of kale and basketball math and the reason she thought that would be a good idea is because these are the things that my kids have a passion for right now my daughter is probably the healthiest fittest person that I know she is constantly engaged in communication with other people online with other experts on what to eat what to cook what recipes there are how to exercise she basically has built a curriculum around health over the last two years with very little help from school she was actually devastated a couple months ago when she learned there is such a thing as too much kale did you know that you can have too much taking too much kale my son as you can see is a basketball player that's his passion he loves to play basketball and he has learned a great deal of math in fact I think he's probably learned more math that's going to serve him well in his life through his passion for basketball then the math that he's learning in school he has a number of fantasy teams he's constantly looking for statistics and predictive analysis on which people to draft which players to keep he is engaged in the box scores whenever teams are playing and he's thinking hard about numbers in ways that are relevant to him and powerful in his life a couple months ago actually we were watching an ESPN sports science segment where he learned that Steph Curry shot is actually has a much higher arc than LeBron James shot and that Steph Curry shot because of that actually has two times the potential to go in the basket then LeBrons does LeBron has to be really accurate so Tucker at that moment went out in the driveway and started shooting a very high arc on his shot to the point where I actually had to cut some branches off the trees that were about the goal because he wanted to practice that and it worked he's been shooting and and playing a lot better based on his knowledge of numbers now basically my kids live in a moment where they can learn about these things that they care about whether it's kale or basketball or whatever else because they live in a moment of abundance they have abundant access to the sum of human knowledge two three and a half billion people - almost a million apps and technologies that exist in the devices that they carry around in their pockets and while this is an amazing thing it's also a complex thing they need different literacies different skills to pretty much help them make sense of all of that abundance that they have available to them but it does give them the opportunity to do what another one of my favorite authors calls calls productive learning Seymour Sarason defines learning productive learning in and when it when it engenders wanting to learn more when there's something that happens that we want to learn more about that's when learning is really productive in our lives and when we don't want to learn more it's unproductive and that really resonates for me and I think it probably resonates for most of us that the things that we've learned most powerfully and deeply are the things that we want to learn more about and so that's the reality that my kids live in but the reality of school is that most of their learning has been unproductive be honest very rarely have they come home saying things like I really want to learn more about this thing that we're talking about in school and most of their learning actually looks something like this this was a worksheet that Tucker got last week to study for the periodic table the elements on the periodic table and he studied for a couple of hours and he memorized this sheet and basically he took the test the next day and he got a hundred but I wonder if he takes that test again six weeks from now if you'll get a hundred I wonder if he takes that test six months from now if how he will do on that test I have a feeling he won't do as well because this is not something that he wanted to learn more about this is not something that matters in his life and it's not presented to him in that way either now I can't imagine the Tucker's chemistry teacher wouldn't agree with us if we asked him what he believes about how kids learn I think he would say the same things that were on that list I think he would have those same thoughts and I also can't believe that he doesn't know in his heart of hearts that Tucker probably isn't going to remember this for very long and it's that disconnect again between the things that we believe about learning and the practices that we have about learning that I think are so profound right now I don't think it's surprising at all when we read headlines that show that most Americans can't pass a very simple science quiz and that's because we've forgotten what we learned about science in school it wasn't a very productive experience for us now I know for some of you this really isn't much of a surprise this kind of contrast between what we believe and what we do has been around for a long long time and I think most of us know it but we maybe don't want to acknowledge it I think we're going to have to acknowledge it right now because I think that this contrast that we have between those two things is putting our kids futures at risk at this point the world has changed in some very very powerful ways and our ability to learn is changing on a regular basis and I think we're going to have to have some very interesting conversations moving forward about the direction of schools given this modern context given this modern world in which we live you know schools were built for time that really doesn't exist any longer schools were built for a time that said if you want to learn something if you want to learn algebra or French or Shakespeare or whatever else you have to be here at this particular time with this particular person with other kids who are your age from your neighborhood to go through this curriculum at this pace and be assessed in this particular way and that is the narrative that all of us carry that is the narrative that all of us own on some level because that's the narrative that we experienced but the narrative now is beginning to crumble the narrative of traditional schooling is beginning to break down two years ago Gallup did a survey of 500,000 kids and asked them what their level of engagement was and by high school only 44% of kids said they were engaged 44% I don't think that's acceptable I think that that's signifies a real problem and by the way I have lived this line as a parent watching my kids go through school a couple months ago the survey was done of college professors 14 percent of them said the kids were ready for college coming out of school and only 29 percent of them said they were ready for the world of work a couple weeks ago we found out that SAT scores are the lowest they've been in ten years despite our best efforts to move the needle to make them better to prepare kids better and better and better it's not working and one of the biggest problems with schools right now is we have a very traditional system that's preparing our kids for a traditional idea of work which doesn't exist any longer 40% of Americans are now engaged in jobs that are non-traditional contingent jobs and that number continues to grow and so what's happening is you have a lot of educators a lot of authors a lot of parents who are standing up and saying we need to change this this is Scott Looney the headmaster of a very prestigious independent school outside of Cleveland called the Hawkins school and in this beautiful 24 page PDF that he sent out to his parents two years ago he started it by saying this in my 28 years in education I have never been more excited or so fearful for the future of Education in the future of this world education in America is fundamentally broken fundamentally broken so why do we do this why do we continue along the path that creates this huge disconnect between what we believe and what we actually do in our classrooms I think part of this is obviously nostalgia this makes us comfortable when parents can look at the grades that their kids receive and have some sense of what that means or when they come home and talk about their experiences that resonate in ways that we experience those things it gives us a comfort level that I think is important and part of it is policymakers who some of whom are still living in the nineteenth century when it comes to what chil what children need and what kids need to be learning and doing in school who create these standards and expectations that really haven't moved into the modern world very much at all but I think what we're going to have to do is start talking honestly about what we know about learning and I want to call those things the elephants in the classroom if you will there are a lot of things that we know to be true but we don't really discuss them because if we discuss them it would put the entire experience of schooling into a conversation that many of us don't want to don't want to have for instance I don't think we can ignore any longer that our kids will forget most of what they learn in school and we know this because we have forgotten most of what we learned in school I don't think we can ignore any longer that deep and powerful learning requires a personal interest it has to be something that we are invested in if we're going to learn it for the long term we have to now admit that deep and powerful learning isn't served by many of the structures that we have in schools that the only place we're learning is limited by time and age and by discipline is in school that doesn't look anything like the real world in terms of the way we learn when we're on our own we have to admit that kids with access are learning more more productively on their own outside of school then we're allowing them to learn inside of school and I don't think we can ignore any longer that our current grading systems and the structures that we create to evaluate kids and teachers are at best counterproductive and at worst harmful to the whole process so how do we fix this how can we create schools that are places for learning well I think the first thing we have to do all of us as educators as parents as policymakers is to go back to the beginning question and ask ourselves what do we believe and to articulate those beliefs out loud to write them down to share them with other people and then once we've done that as individuals I think we need to come together as schools and articulate those beliefs together to create principals if you will of what we think learning looks like in our schools in our places in our classrooms with our kids and then finally once we've done that I think we need to align our practice to our beliefs we need to see our beliefs around learning happen in our classrooms and if we do that I think we'd find more and more schools like the mosaic school school that I just visited this week in Colorado where kids are asking interesting questions that they have a passion to answer where the creating interesting artifacts that live in the world solutions to problems that are meaningful to them or Northern Beaches Christian school outside of Sydney Australia we're basically design is a fundamental part of what they do they iterate they innovate they are trying to answer problems that maybe most people aren't even asking or my favorite school in the world right now the science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia where kids are making solar panels for hospitals in the African bush where they are making biodiesel generators for people who can't generate their own electricity in Central America and where they are constantly trying to raise voter registration rates in the city of Philadelphia doing real work for real purposes and when you walk into the schools you can feel the difference kids are engaged kids want to do this where kids want to learn more I think Dewey was right about a hundred years ago when he said our mission in school should be to teach everything that anyone wants to learn and especially today when we have access to so much information so much knowledge so many people so many technologies why wouldn't we do that why wouldn't we let kids bring their kale to school why wouldn't we let them bring their basket ball to school and make that the focus of developing them as learners because this is a most amazing time to be a learner there may never have been a better time to be a learner in history and our challenge right now is how do we make schools amazing places of learning for kids the good news about that challenge is that we know the answer we know what it takes for deep and powerful learning to happen in our lives and in our kids lives the only question we have right now is do we have the commitment and the courage to make that happen thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 287,569

Rating: 4.9186797 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Education, Achievement, Children, Classroom, Education reform, Innovation, Teaching

Id: sxyKNMrhEvY

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2015