Interview with Science Leadership Academy's Chris Lehmann (School 2.0, Part 3)

"We need to stop thinking that the job of schools is to create the 21st century workforce, it's not. The job of our schools is nothing less than to help co-create the 21st-century citizen. We want our kids to be active, engaged citizens of the world. They'll be workers if they are that, too... that part will take care of itself. We want them to be able to engage in the world around them and to make it better. Nothing less than that is our task as educators."

Chris Lehman is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a proponent of "School 2.0." Here is his description of SLA:

"The Science Leadership Academy is a new high school that opened in September 2006 in partnership with The Franklin Institute and the School District of Philadelphia. Opening with a powerful School 2.0 vision and a 1:1 laptop ratio, SLA looks to redefine the learning spaces and tools our students, parents and teachers use. The school uses open source tools such as Moodle, Elgg, Gallery and homegrown school information system software to create a robust school-web portal to support the learning that happens in classrooms. Our goal is to create 24/7/365 learning environment for all members of the community." (From his accepted proposal to speak at NECC this year.)

(We'll be holding open workshops on Moodle, Drupal, and Web 2.0 (with Will Richardson) at SLA in Philadelphia the week of January 29 - February 3. For more information, please visit EdTechLive's workshop page.)

Notes:

• Chris spent 9 years at the Beacon School in New York as a teacher, coach, technology coordinator, and administrator. The experience was amazing. Has come home to Philadelphia to start SLA--"a small progressive public high school with a focus on technology infusion across the curriculum."
  
• While SLA is a public school, their first class of 110 students (the 9th grade) have had to apply for admission and each applicant had a personal interview. Future classes will have current students on their admissions committees.
• Microsoft's School of the Future also opened in Philadelphia this year ("they have a nicer gym than we do"). If SLA is reinventing the wheel, School of the Future is "blowing up the car." Both have a focus on project-based learning and re-imagining what a school can look like, but SLA is based on more familiar pedagogies (sounds like it would be really interesting to interview someone from School of the Future!).
• They are using Linux, Moodle, and Elgg and consider themselves an "open source" school.
• "At the end of the day, it isn't about what computer you use, it's about the pedagogy and how the teachers implement it, and what your goals are for how your teachers and students use it." Technology doesn't change the classroom, pedagogy changes the classroom. The new tools make it affordable to integrate the technology and support the pedagogy, but the pedagogy comes first. If you put the technology first, the tail will wag the dog. "SLA was never a laptop school first, it was an inquiry-drive, project-based school with five very strong core values, and the technology we use supports those core values."
• The five values are: inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection.
• Blogging has helped him be a better teacher and administrator through "reflective practice." It has also helped them through the starting of SLA by allowing for "transparent" dialog by blogging during the planning process--which also produced a very involved community. He feels that this made the SLA very "School 2.o" by doing this from the start.
• "We've got to teach kids to be powerful, careful, and critical consumers and producers of information and content." "The fundamental jobs of our schools as we move forward in this new era is to teach wisdom... unless we realize that our job is to teach kids what to make sense of this world, how to critically analyze what they see out there, and how to do something with it, then it doesn't matter what we do with the technology."
• "We can't be complacent in education--the stakes are too high... the fear of what could go wrong can't stop me from doing what is right."
• All of the students went nuts when they first got instant messaging on their laptops--and the parents were really worried about their children having access to instant messaging during school. Chris's response was: the kids are going to figure out how to have access to these tools even if we try to block them, and they will need them in college and in the workplace eventually... so let's help them to figure out how to use them responsibly now.
  
• They did have a problem with misusing instant messaging (including bullying)... and the students started solving the problems themselves, as they wanted there to be consequences so that they could keep their laptops.
• Chris's definition of School 2.0: School 2.0 starts with a progressive pedagogy that recognizes that the role of schools has changed, and that the role now is to help students navigate an ever-changing world, and to help them have the skills they need to adapt, to create, to judge, to synthesize, and to analyze. It has to be about teaching kids to become critical consumers and producers of the information around them... We can't assume that we have all the answers--we've got to teach the kids to take a core set of skills and find rich, powerful answers that are out there in the world for themselves... School 2.0 doesn't have walls to it--it recognizes that this happens all day every day. When we invite the world in rather than shut it out, we create communities and institutions that are real and authentic and caring, and that kids recognize as valuable in their own lives.
  
• School 2.0 isn't about letting students do anything they want. It's about rigor and passion--keeping students engaged, but also helping them understand the need to work even when we don't want to.
  
• "We actually do know how to fix what's wrong in education. Because the fact of the matter is that there are lots of places in this country where schools are doing just fine... they are good, healthy places where kids are doing well. We know, sadly, that most of those places are not in cities, and when we talk about the crisis in education, what we are really talking about... is urban education... It's not just schools size, it's teaching load... We want to change education?... Let's have teachers teaching fewer classes and planning more... Do that and we will change education."
  

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Educational Blogging with Will Richardson (School 2.0, Part 2)

This interview was intended to help someone new to educational blogging to hear candid advice from Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. However, as you will see, it turned into much more, with Will strongly expressing his feelings about the need for schools to change.

For more interviews, and for information on our educational technology workshops (including those with Will Richardson), please visit EdTechLive. Will is giving a two-day workshop in Philadelphia in early February.
To join in the discussion on School 2.0, please visit School20.net.

Notes:

• You'll notice a change in the sound quality when Skype kept crashing and we switched to my calling Will on a land line.
• Will, as a "frustrated journalist," started blogging in the spring of 2001--at which time there were only 5 or 6 other educational bloggers that he could find. In 2003/2004, something began to happen when interest in what he was writing about really started to take off. He was using blogging in almost all of the classes he was teaching at the time. In the last two years, there has been an amazing spike in the number of teachers and educators who are blogging about what is happening in the classroom.
  
• The other educational bloggers he was reading and who were reading his blog became his "personal professional development community." This became "transformative" for him.
• When I asked him if blogging was as transformative for his students as it had been for him, I expected a really positive answer. However, as he was teaching 9-week classes, he doesn't think that was long enough to see that take place on a general level, even though there were some examples of students who really "got it." So I followed up by asking if he has since seen examples of blogging in the classroom transform students. He said that he is not sure there are a lot of examples of student learning being transformed by blogging and the read/write web tools. This was a surprise, but I think indicates his belief that blogging isn't being widely used in classrooms, not that it's not transformative. In fact, I was expecting that he would mention his own classroom experience with his students and Sue Monk Kidd and her book The Secret Life of Bees.
  
• Will feels that he has a pretty narrow definition of blogging: in order to be a learning tool, there has to be some "intellectual sweat"--reading, writing, commenting, and thinking. That's not something he sees a lot of yet, especially in the K-12 level, although he does see it a lot at the college level. It's much more difficult to do on the K-12 level, and whilit is is happening in some places, it's not to the extent he would like to see.
• Will surprised me with his answer to the question of how to start classroom blogging. I was hoping he would talk about simple things teachers can do to get students to blog. Instead, however, Will kept focusing on the teacher using blogging for their own professional development, which starts by reading educational bloggers and then becoming a part of whatever conversation you are interested in. It reminded me of the maxim that has largely guided my participation in my kids education: if you want your children to love reading, then love reading yourself. Telling someone to have a passion for something carries almost no weight; letting them see you passionate about something provides them with a vision of what that actually means.
• Because of his focus on involving educators in the blogosphere themselves, he starts by teaching about RSS readers.
• Will has recently really "whittled" down the number of sources (blogs, news feeds) that he reads from approximately 120 to about 20, looking for people who are really good filters of the more general conversations, as he can't keep up with as many sources as he used to. At the same time that he is trying to expand the scope of what he reads to material outside of the educational community, to reach out and give him more perspective. One way that he does this is to use RSS feeds for searches--giving him the ability to track or follow ideas rather than individuals.
• Will is not sure how many people actually read his blog, but his best guess is between 5,000 - 10,000 people.
  
• New bloggers will often ask him, "What should I write about on my blog?" His answer: If you are reading what other people are writing, and if you are trying to take their ideas and see how they apply to your own life, that's great fodder for your own blog. It shouldn't be just a journal or a diary, he says--there's nothing wrong with that, but it won't really leverage what can happen with a blog by making connections with others and their ideas.
• He likes the idea that students should be "clickable." (As you will hear, I could image alarm bells going of in every administrators head with this idea...) If someone can click on something a student has written, that person can become a potential teacher for the student. If the student can't be found, then those teachers won't find them. I asked Will how you do that without exposing the student to danger. Many of our students already are clickable, he said, but it's outside of their school experience (MySpace, etc.). However, he acknowledges that it will require helping kids know how to do this in safe ways. This may scare us, but it's the way the world is going, and it's already happening for kids. And, he says, we can do this safely--there are tens of thousands of kids doing this already in classes. He says that we don't teach youth to drive by just telling them how to drive and then giving them the keys when they are sixteen--instead, we train them and sit next to them while they actually drive.
• Even though schools and districts are blocking and filtering a lot of the sites of the read/write web, he thinks that they know that this is a short-term answer, and that most educators realize that they will need to figure out how to use these technologies. Otherwise, he thinks they know that they will left behind and obsoleted.
• Education is not inherently collaborative or social right now, but the rest of their life will be so. Will's vision: the classroom walls need to be mentally obliterated. We have to get beyond the building--learning does not need to take place in a physical space.
• Our kids have to do work with real audiences and real purposes. If we're just passing paper between students and teachers, we are going to be left behind.
  
• We have a huge opportunity to make education a "community" process. There is a lot of learning that we can do in our own community that can be facilitated by these technologies. The One Cleveland project, which allows everyone in the community to interact with students--for example, where local doctors could answer student questions while they are watching a surgery being performed. We don't need to go around the world to do this.
• We have to re-envision our teacher preparation program. We can't keep producing teachers that are being prepared with old paradigms--we have to help them be continuous learners and much less content-oriented.
  
• There is a lot that has to change, because there are going to be many, many alternatives that are going to be cropping up for kids that will allow them to opt-out of education as we know it. He doesn't think he's the all-knowing expert on school reform, but as someone who has had a pretty powerful experience with these tools, and who comes at this conversation knowing that his own learning environment is nothing like what he sees in classrooms. He's not sure how this is going to trickle down into systemic changes, but is convinced that schools will become irrelevant if they can't embrace them.
  
• We have no idea of what the future for our kids is going to look like in even five years, so we have to teach them how to be ready for anything: how to build their own learning communities, how to find their own trusted sources of information, how to network their ideas, and how to publish, become clickable, and be creative.
• On building "Engaged Schools" too much of what we are doing in classrooms designed to strengthen their weaknesses, instead of running with their talents. Teaching is changing, and it's going to take a much different type of teacher to be successful in the classroom than has been the case for the last eighty years.

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