The Future is Calling: Are We Listening?

I confess that I think about the future probably more than most people. It may have been predestined. 

I was born the same year the future-themed, Seattle World's Fair opened and I was a member of the Race to Space generation.

Growing up in Renton, Washington, also had its benefits. I can vividly remember looking up at the Space Needle and wondering if the top part could fly into space. (Afterall, it was called the "Space" Needle). I stepped into an elevator that beamed me and my family up to the top of the Space Needle at unimaginable speed. Standing on the outer balcony, the floor below me rotated too slowly for me to feel, and yet the Seattle skyline changed every few minutes. 

I entered kindergarten in 1967 at the height of the Race to Space years. The school I attended was an experimental school funded by Science. Unlike traditional schools that had desks in rows and subjects segregated by topic, my school was round and had walls between “classes” that open in the day to allow my class to move to different stations to be taught by different teachers. 

Reading, math and writing revolved around science. Since Renton, Washington was the hub of aerospace engineering, we frequently had visits from astrophysicist and engineers from the nearby Boeing Plant.

I remember learning by experience rather than text books. I learned how heat molecules were light in weight and density by pouring hot water dyed with red food coloring into a tank filled with ice-cold water and watching the red dye rise to the top. I remember watching cold water with blue ink drop to the bottom of the tank. Instead of reading and writing about Dick and Jane, I read and wrote about famous scientist like Ben Franklin. 

Learning was meaningful and relevant to our school mission: Land a man on the moon before the Russians.  


Sadly, the funding for my school went away after the moon landing and I experienced a different type of learning where the end goal was to find the correct answer. 

Correctness was privileged over wonderment. 

The mysteries of space were replaced with over-priced text books, end of chapter questions that required me to define ambiguous vocabulary terms detached from meaningful experience.

I demonstrated my understanding by using a number two pencil to correctly “bubble” an option of a, b, c, or d, or all of the above. 

I spent hours upon hours tracing letters of the alphabet on ditto pages (now called worksheets). In middle school, English Language Arts required me to progress through "SRA" reading passages.

I learned how to be good at school. I lost my joy of learning.

Today, I fear that our students are being groomed as early as Kindergarten to privilege assessment over learning. Reading and writing are associated with levels, lexiles, preciseness, and scores. 

Our learners are immersed in acronyms that have flooded our education system and have become a language of its own: IEP, RtI, STAAR, CBS, CAS, ELPS, and so on.

I believe it is our moral obligation to move beyond prescriptive methods of teaching that have held our learners (and teachers) hostage. Classrooms should no longer resemble the classroom of the twentieth century. It's time to move beyond the known, and free our learners to explore the unknown!

The future is calling, but are we listening?

Confession Reflection:

• What are some ways we can equip students with future-ready skills in order to be successful in the workforce of tomorrow? 

• Does your curriculum make room for 22nd-century skills to be taught and practiced? i.e. entrepreneurship, experience with digital tools, second language acquisition.

• How can instructional coaches and administrators support resistant teachers to embrace a growth mindset without shaming or blaming?

Fleas in Room 212!

It wasn't my idea to infest the school with fleas. But it happened.

Backstory: Dr. Bertie Kingore is a guru in the field of gifted and talented education, but back in the day I am proud to say that she was my reading professor at Hardin-Simmons University. In the 1980's the amazing Bertie ventured out and introduced the avant guard idea of differentiated
instruction via learning centers or stations.



With Dr. Kingore at GT Workshop

I know, you're rolling your eyes, because learning stations are as common as jam on bread, but in the days of Saturday Night fever and shoulder pads, the concept was virtually unknown. But like everything else Bertie set her mind to do, her theories proved true and have shaken the very core of our educational system landing gifted and talented on the map...which brings me back to my flea story.


Fortunately, I landed my first teaching job fresh out of college at Provident Heights Elementary in Waco, Texas. The school was in an aging, low socio-economic part of Waco. We had no air-conditioning and if you've never been to Texas in the heat of summer, it can get so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk!

I was assigned to first grade. While the other teachers on my team were cranking out ditto packets  using blue carbon copy sheets, I was at work arranging my room into stations! I was naïve and believed that the world needed my genius which was creativity and innovation to meet the individual needs of every learner. Well, this is what Bertie had brainwashed her students to believe!

I recall a variety of learning stations: listening station, puzzle station, painting/art station, reading station, music station, building blocks/Lego station, mystery station, play dough/clay station, cooking station and yes, a sandbox station.

My sandbox was more like a plastic, oblong rectangular trough that was raised above the ground on wooden stilts. I had a drop cloth underneath to catch grains that inevitably fell in the course of learning.

The learning objective was to have a multi-sensory approach to allow my six-year-olds to trace their spelling words into the sand with an occasional prize hidden somewhere in the sand. It was easy to convert the sandbox/tray to a fossil hunt when teaching science about rocks and fossils which was the enrichment piece.



My principal, Mrs. Stapler (not her real name) seemed to like the idea of students moving to learn, just as long as the talking stayed at a minimum and I continued to use the math and reading primer that my team was using.

And then it happened.

The first bites happened in the reading area where my students sat on a throw rug I had picked up at a local Goodwill. I was sitting on a chair reading to my students when the bites started. In case you've never been bitten by a flea...those suckers are quick!

First you feel an isolated itch, but when you scratch there is nothing there. These little boogers are not like mosquitoes where you can hear them coming. They are tiny creatures which, I believe, are really aliens sent from the planet Fleazore, which will someday take over our planet.

I didn't report the bites at first, because I didn't know what they were. But within days, my students had spots popping up on their arms and legs and scratched more than they engaged in learning. The situation continued to the next room and it seemed like the entire first grade were scratching scabs on the playground, at lunch and their teachers began complaining. Our principal brought in an exterminator to spray over the weekend. It was determined that the fleas were nesting and hatching in my learning center!

And so it is with life. Implementing new ideas can be messy and full of set backs. If I had let all that I had learned in college leave with the fleas, I would have gone the safe route. My students would have spent the rest of the year sitting in desks, coloring work pages and live in a "one size fits all" classroom.




I confess that while I hate the fleas and the embarrassment it caused, I also gleaned wisdom on how to be a leader who encourages others to take risks and that failure is part of the pathway to success. Life is full of setbacks and we make corrections and move on.

I'm proud to say that my first grade students learned to read and write, as well as, their peers in the traditional classroom setting. The following year other teachers on my team began to implement learning stations.

 Confession Reflection:

What is the value of encouraging students and teachers to take risks? 
How do leaders/educators deal with setbacks?
Describe a learning outcome that resulted from a setback.
Why is it important to model failure? Give an example.

http://www.kingore.com/