Technology: Crossing the Border

Technologies—think of the printing press, the wheel, firearms, electricity, semiconductors, the internal combustion engine, and so on—always mark the borders between eras. Those who continue to hold onto the technologies of a past era pay a very high price for their procrastination or blindness.

For example, in Chapter 7, I tell the story of a college that needed to increase student enrollment, at $30,000 per school year. They had no idea how technology had changed the rules. For example, they could not understand that an iPod (now a smartphone) is a personalized, on-demand, content provider, and that this device virtually negated their business proposition because it could deliver the best content on earth for free. Their challenge was how to compete with free.

And Pete's experience with third graders setting up a classroom reveals the dramatic shift—a technology-driven shift—from traditional education to the new learning platform. This story also explains why so many technology rollouts fail. New tools—the tools of a new era—combined with old thinking leads to failure and waste. Ultimately it all sinks back into old ways.

Want to see what is really at stake here? Shannon Buerk captures a major burning platform issue for K–12 education in America: “As long as time stays a constant and the teacher-student ratio remains constant, public schools are not going to survive. The year-after-year increase in the cost of education is a crisis. Education today is a people-intensive business and that is not sustainable. It must become a blended model, leveraging technology, and one where students can be more autonomous.”

Ken Robinson concludes, “The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”²

To make the necessary strides in performance and to close the widening equity gap, we see only one solution—individualized learning through technology. This is major, an historic shift. In other words, new technologies are confronting old and sclerotic ways of modern education just as refrigeration once confronted icehouses or sailing vessels challenged propulsion by oars.

Or consider the farming revolution from a horse and plow to the tractor: “It took a farmer an hour and a half to till an acre of ground with five horses and a gang plow. With a 27-horsepower tractor and a moldboard plow, it took only a half-hour to plow an acre and only 15 minutes with a 35-horsepower tractor and a moldboard plow. Today, using a 154-horsepower tractor and a chisel plow, a farmer can till an acre in five minutes.”³

Most traditional schools would not consider their system as a horse-drawn plow approach. And most cannot imagine digital tools as having the power to transform learning. But when we consider that we are all digital immigrants our lack of imagination makes sense. We, too, often approach digital technology like print natives. Our comfort zone acts as the choke valve controlling the fuel of learning to our students. Pete Dugas' experiment in letting students set up the furniture and technology for a classroom demonstrates the power of a “tractor over horse” approach. Just provide a small amount of instruction and structure and let the student's curiosity and engagement fuel the learning.

Disrupting Class

Usually the first problems you solve with a new paradigm are the ones that were unsolvable with the old paradigm.

—Joel Barker, Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future

In 1971, Alvin Toffler predicted a kind of change that would create psychological and sociological culture shock: he called it “future shock,” in which disruption is a major and inevitable component. A quarter century later, Clayton Christensen tested those observations in his bestselling book, The Innovators Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (McGraw-Hill, 1997).

Years later, Christensen and Michael Horn wrote Disrupting Class (McGraw-Hill, 2008), applying the same theory of the Innovator's Dilemma to education. Charter schools are not the threat to public education that many portray them to be. If anything, charters push public schools to improve the quality and efficiency of their education platform.

The threat is at the low cost end of the spectrum. The kind of innovation that upsets the apple cart starts by solving a problem no one else is interested in, or one that is better than nothing for those who can't afford anything else. Just remember that Khan Academy looked like the rotary phone of education in 2004.

Why Is Change So Complicated?

While the examples of Pull learning discussed earlier—my son's immersion in music and Pete Dugas' story of third graders setting up their classroom—seem simple, perhaps even heartwarming, the issue is more complex. Here is what it really looks like: Exponential change and obsolescence, moving vast amounts of static content to a dynamic and interactive medium, linking these to a centralized infrastructure, establishing and managing security protocols, scaling the rollout to thousands of students and teachers and then coordinating facilities, procurement, curriculum, human resources, and IT—now it is no longer simple or heartwarming.

This complexity means our whole approach to selecting, implementing, and maintaining technology has to shift from departmental silos, making detached decisions, to an integrated process of stakeholders. Buying systems is different than buying things.

Pete Dugas told a story of one school district that passed a billion-dollar bond for new technology. The funding for the capital equipment was assigned to the facility budget. So, Facilities issued their bids and awarded the technology contract to a well-known tablet computer supplier. That was the most visible piece to what became a disconnected puzzle. A smaller portion of the budget went to IT for set up and maintenance. However, the classrooms were not equipped with enough electricity to charge that many tablets, and the servers were not designed to integrate or process the new volume of data. Because the tablets ran their own software and were not cloud-based, no one considered what it would take to continually update software one tablet at a time. No one included the teachers or considered the affect on the curriculum. The only professional development provided was on how individual students could use the tablets; not one dime or detail was provided on how to redesign lesson planning, the flow of the classroom, or empower the students.

The Los Angeles school district iPad fiasco followed a similar narrative. Consider Michael Horn's assessment of where Los Angeles went wrong, “LA is emblematic of a problem we're seeing across the country right now. . . . Districts are starting with the technology and not asking themselves: ‘What problem are we trying to solve, and what's the instructional model we need to solve it?’ and then finding technology in service of that.”⁴

Buzzwords Are Fuzzy Words

Shannon Buerk's firm, Engag2Learn, has worked with more than 150 school districts implementing active learning strategies. That almost always involves technology. So they have learned to ask a vital question at the front end, “What is it you really want?” That question is, of course, essential when schools request something that is trendy or contains a hot buzzword.

So I asked, “How would you explain personalized learning?”

Personalized learning is a current favorite. As with all buzzwords, there are multiple interpretations. Technology vendors are pushing the concept because of the way that group defines personalized—they mean each student in front of a computer. Parents and others want to see education become more personalized, because to them it means individualized. The danger is that personalized education, by itself, does not have a collaborative component. The best models for learning include both individualized and collaborative learning. That strategy has worked. Test scores for those schools jump significantly in the first year. If we move to just “personalized” learning, we will lose the humanizing social component of education, which for us is the heart of learning.⁵

Another buzzword phrase, “one-to-one,” has come to mean that each student has his or her own tablet. When Page Dettmann was executive director for Sarasota Middle Schools she did not follow the trend but adopted an active learning STEM model in her math and science classrooms that had a four-to-one ratio (see Figure 13.1). Their team-based teaching model drove that strategy. Page's team saw the interaction and socializing of learning as crucial. Handhelds allowed each student to have individual interactive abilities.

Sometimes purpose becomes obscured by the attraction of shiny objects and the desire to simplify. Asking, “Why” repeatedly will either lead to the true reason or reveal that they don't know what they want.

STEM is another popular buzzword. When I asked Shannon to explain more about what makes STEM different, she asked, “What do you mean by STEM? Are you talking about a STEM course, a STEM pathway, a STEM cluster, or a STEM culture? Each of those means different things.”

I simply said, “Uh, I'm not sure what I mean.”⁶

Neither do most people when they use buzzwords. We found the schools with strong positive results began by clarifying their teaching strategy, one that was grounded in, “What kind of experience will engage kids most and prove effective?” We all know that technology and programs should adapt to serve those ends. But too often we become enamored of the romance of technology. Or, schools may secure funding for a program and bolt it on without integrating it into the overarching approach to teaching.

Why Is the Timing Right for Transformation?

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

—Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations

Why is this transition taking so long? We see two reasons.

1. One obstacle is called the innovation adoption curve.
2. Those in leadership today are digital immigrants, not digital natives.

Digital devices and applications have yet to become second nature for today's leaders (that includes me). That's why most teachers confess that they find it challenging and stressful to feel proficient with multiple devices and software platforms. As Clay Shirky points out, we're just beginning to get to that socially interesting phase as tablets, personal devices, Facebook, Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Google Docs, and other cloud applications become boring.

Jeff Wacker, former EDS Futurist and Fellow, sees that information technology adoption follows an approximate 20-year cycle. The first 10 years of the cycle is called Growth and Innovation. The second decade is called Refinement, Design, and Application. The first phase breaks new ground with a lot of ideas. The second phase builds stable and useful applications.

Let's look at some examples.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched Google in 1998 and took the company public in 2004. Today, Google represents the standard for search. More important, search capacity turns information into a commodity. We no longer need to spend time memorizing facts. So why is the search for information still the primary mode of teaching and testing?

Jimmy Wales introduced Wikipedia in 2001. In 2005, I told a group of professors that Wikipedia would be the new model for gathering information, and that it would replace the expert peer-review encyclopedia model. That was shortly after Nature magazine compared the accuracy of Wikipedia to Britannica and concluded that it was a statistical dead heat. That idea was understandably offensive to the professors. That offense has been experienced with other educators and librarians I have addressed since then. But today most people assume Wikipedia's accuracy.

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004 he set the standard for social media. Facebook has entered its phase-two growth period and is expanding more deeply into organizing our social worlds.

In 2004 Sal Khan began tutoring his cousin in math, making short YouTube videos. As those demonstrations got passed around the Internet, he attracted a sufficient following to launch Khan Academy in 2006. As late as 2014, I heard an executive for one of the large textbook publishing companies criticize the quality and value of Khan's “homemade YouTube videos” for education.

She obviously had not seen one recently.

Khan Academy has attracted funding from the Gates Foundation, Google, AT&T, NASA, and other major American institutions. It is now in its phase-two cycle of growth. In 2015 the College Board partnered with Khan Academy to provide free SAT training. With its current trajectory and the analytics it is collecting, Khan Academy could conceivably overtake many curriculum providers. If the College Board doesn't radically reinvent, it, too, is vulnerable. Now imagine the disruption and transformation for education if curriculum and all assessments were virtually free? In Texas alone testing costs over $1 billion. Over dinner one night, Bill Latham and I projected that shifting that billion dollars could modernize 20,000 Texas classrooms.

The iPhone was introduced in 2007; we now see the hardware growth and innovation cycle slowing. That means it is poised for phase-two expansion into pervasive applications. The iPhone marks a new mobile era of digital living and learning. Smartphones provide a new and potentially game changing personal learning platform for schools because of their low cost, cloud storage and broad adaptability of applications.

Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Khan Academy, and smartphones have dramatically changed the way we think and live. So why does this most important consequence of digital technology go missing when we consider technology for the classroom? Our imaginations and personal experiences somehow get shoved aside as we narrowly focus on devices, features, applications, and budgets.

Flow: The Creative Zone

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.”

—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

As already referenced, Eric Hamilton began studying what happens when teachers can ascend from simply delivering content to creating content. But this work actually began in the 1980s soon after Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began releasing his research on the phenomena called flow. When a teacher can step into that immersive creative zone they achieve what is called a peak state or peak performance. It is magical for them and their students. Using video as a medium for engagement, content immersion and synthesizing learning has proven effective globally, including remote villages in Africa.

Eric Hamilton summarized, “We're trying to figure out if there is something that we can tap into, is there a vein of activity or pursuit that is replicable without requiring a magical teacher, or is there a vein that we can pursue where teachers can become magical in their own way? And that's what we think we've found.”

Blended Learning

Christensen and Horn address how to leverage the disruptive power of technology to personalize learning, and how to avoid the common mistakes made over and over again in district wide rollouts. “Too many schools miss the potential that technology offers to personalize learning at a scale never before imagined,” Horn explained. The cart is far ahead of the horse when educators look at technology solutions. They fall in love with devices and software without beginning with a grounded theory of technology-based learning tied to strategic learning goals.

Horn notes that the growth in blended learning is climbing at an exponential rate, but still not approaching its potential with personalized learning. The Clayton Christensen Institute has collected the most robust repository of schools and districts that have been successful in their adoption of blended learning and improved student results. Their synthesis of lessons learned and best practices provide an essential resource for a leader considering a blended model.

Gamification and Financial Literacy

Game designers are obsessed with emotion. How do we create the emotions that we want gamers to feel, and how can we really make it this intense, emotional experience?”⁷

—Jane McGonigal

Brian Cahill, the California Division President for Balfour Beatty, and a member of our MindShift team, carries a true passion to equip our nation's youth with financial literacy skills. That passion goes back to the influence Junior Achievement had on him when he was in high school.

He currently serves on the board of directors for the local Junior Achievement (JA). JA's mission is “to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy.” A few years ago he collaborated with them to create a facility that would teach them students basic financial literacy and how the American free enterprise system works.

The facility includes two high-tech training centers. BizTown is a 10,000-square-foot facility where elementary students learn the basics of personal financial management. Every day approximately 150 elementary school students spend four and a half hours in training. As the BizTown website states, “Elementary school students are not old enough to drive, work, or vote. But that doesn't stop them from managing businesses, operating banks, opening bank accounts, and writing checks.”

Finance Park is designed to give high school students a realistic window into the future by walking them through the process of picking a job and career track, selecting a lifestyle they desire, and then revealing if the job or career they've chosen will live up to their expectations. More than13,000 San Diego High School students experience the JA Finance Park annually. In addition, it is open to family and adult financial literacy classes on evenings and weekends.

Brian's role and leadership made it possible for us to hold a three-day summit at the facility. The summit provided us with a unique behind-the-scenes look at BizTown and Finance Park (Figure 13.2). It was also a great view of how technology is changing the face of learning.

One afternoon our MindShift team got to play in Finance Park. The exercise was so enjoyable and winning that many of us lost track of time.

For example, I learned that my “Life Situation” scenario (a personal profile with all the details of a real life) made me married, a father with two kids, a public works water maintenance worker making $35,000 a year, and facing an unexpected expense of $1,500 to provide braces for one of my kids.

First, I had to create my budget for several predetermined categories; housing, utilities, a car, groceries, insurance, savings, retirement, and so forth. The program automatically deducts taxes. As I watched taxes erode my money, I felt that universal constriction of feeling behind the eight ball.

I decided to set aside savings and retirement first (10 percent for each) and force myself to work with the rest. As the software kept a running tally of what I had left, I quickly found that I was only about 70 percent through my budget and out of money! Then the trade-offs began. I cut a lot of stuff, went barebones with my cable and phone costs, and slashed my savings and retirement funds in half. Eating out and entertainment vanished. When I finished it was time to test my budget against the real world.

My decision to buy a home gave me three options. I chose the lowest cost house. When I entered my choice I was told to go to the bank and apply for a mortgage. After filling out a brief application, I learned that I did not qualify for a mortgage. My tablet then gave me three choices for apartments.

As you can see, the exercise gives a student an idea of the reality of budgeting.

Once we completed the exercise we asked what the experience was like for the students. They told us:

• “I never realized how hard it is to create a budget and then to make it work. Wow.”
• “I appreciate what my mom and dad go through—I don't buy stuff or eat out the way I used to.”
• “I thought I wanted to become a vet-tech until I found out how much they make and how little that will buy.”
• “I decided I want to be an engineer because I'm good at math and engineers make a decent living.”
• I want to wait to have kids until I finish my education and am in a good financial position. Kids are expensive!!

And the MindShift team also had many revealing comments.

• “I'd love to bring my kids here; they could sure use it.”
• “No one ever taught me any of this when I was in school. It sure would have helped.” Real-life simulation is a powerful way to transform teaching into learning.

Finding Our Groove with Technology

Technology has an ethos, a set of behaviors and a mindset that release its potential. It is the kind of mindset that spontaneously takes place in a state of flow that Dr. Hamilton has extensively researched. When your mind overcomes orienting to the novelty or strangeness of the experience it will synchronize with that ethos. This is what good jazz musicians or improv comedians experience when they “find their groove.”

Google's Jaime Casap has been involved in the design of a unique school, The Phoenix Code Academy. He described a very different mindset that drives the academy's mission, design, and curriculum.

One of the challenges I face working at Google is how do I convince Latino kids that this is a path they can take and succeed in? My mother still wants me to be a lawyer, right. Like, I'm not successful until I'm a lawyer. What does she know about computer science? How do you go into a community of Latino kids, low-income Latino kids, and say to a student, “You should be doing programming and computer science.” Parents don't understand. The community doesn't understand. They don't know that's where their future is.

One of the key missions for the Academy is educating the community about the college and career potential in learning to code and focusing on Latino students. The school will graduate 120 Latino kids a year, fully qualified to work as computer scientists.

I was at one of my board meetings and a lot of the board members just came from a robotics competition. They were talking about how fascinating it was to see these kids, about how engaged they were, and how they were collaborating even with opponents to fix pieces on their robotics thing and they were all into it. It's a Saturday and they were there for 14 hours and they're like fascinated by all this.

I'm listening to this conversation and finally say, “None of this is fascinating. What's fascinating is that we've been able to trick kids into sitting still and not moving for the past 100 years.” That's fascinating because moving and interacting is kids' natural state.⁸

The Path of Change to Blended Learning

Page Dettmann had some old and tired school buildings, a high percentage of free and reduced-cost-meal students, discipline challenges, a declining interest in math and science, and an increasing dropout rate.

Mark Pritchett, the CEO of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, completed a study that revealed Sarasota ranked barely average for students' interest in STEM careers in a city that was trying to attract more science, medical, and technology companies. Their studies also showed student scores and interest in math and science dropped in middle school, and that is where intervention could turn the tide. “What if we could transform the way teachers teach and students learn?” With this question in mind, the Gulf Coast Community Foundation launched a five-year initiative they branded STEMsmart and offered a partnership to the secondary schools.

This common interest forged an alliance between Page and Mark that led to a remarkable transformation and national recognition. Our team spent three days in Sarasota listening to the different stories and observing the students' experiences.

Page is a seasoned and savvy teacher and administrator. She knew that the system, left to its natural bent, would revert to entrenched silos, politics, and turf. One of the first steps she took was to bring all of the departments together along with her administrators and teachers to begin a dialogue and begin asking some fundamental questions. They were well aware of the data. It was not a surprise that change would be on the horizon. The difference is that change was not handed down—it was developed together.

Page asked the teachers to engage the kids and ask them to write essays on what they thought twenty-first-century learning could look like and how they best learn. They got responses such as the following.

• The teacher should not be in the front of the room. Put the teacher's desk in the back.
• I'd like it to be hands-on style.
• I'd like to be part of a team
• Learning from kids is easier than learning from adults.
• The chairs should be comfortable, with padding.
• It would be great if our chairs were on wheels
• Have round tables with built-in computers.
• Just reading about things is not the same as doing them.

Page brought all of the departments together to take a day and ask, “If we could create the best experiences and environment for learning, what would it look like?

“What does learning look like in the next five years?

“What will our roles look like?”

That conversation led to identifying the four Cs for future-ready kids: collaboration, communication, creative thinking, and critical thinking.

After this work they brought in a graphic designer to illustrate some of the ideas for learning. John, the Director of Construction, created cardboard mockups of tables, custom designed by the kids and teachers, ideas of what the classroom might look like, and simulated how instruction would take place. A local architect took these ideas and developed a concept plan that would provide a budget for converting a classroom. The cost estimated was approximately $50,000 per classroom—$25,000 for environment and $25,000 for infrastructure.

Page took this vision to the Gulf Coast Foundation. Initially they were willing to invest $100,000. However, it was clear that the vision was much bigger. Additional local businesses and individual donors were invited to take part.

When the team and support was fully in place, Page began a deeper discovery process.

The outside of Sarasota Middle School looks like a tired 1980s designed and built structure. The stand-alone pillbox-shaped buildings house three classrooms. The STEM classrooms, however, were completely transformed (see Figure 13.3). Each room had six half-moon shaped tables that seated four students. The monitor hung on a monitor arm so students could position it for viewing or presenting. The teacher stayed in the middle of the room with a custom-built table to house his or her equipment. This allowed them to be three steps away from every team and any student.

Teachers and students had earlier simulated what instruction might look like but the rehearsals needed to become codified into culture, protocols, and a playbook. One example of protocols is Accountable Talk. The kids in previous years never interacted to this level: they usually had very little face-to-face interaction; they just stared at the back of the head in the next row. The teachers quickly learned that face-to-face engagement and working in teams would create more friction. So the teachers had to teach the students how to engage with the idea, not the person.

We also learned that discipline problems in the STEM Active classrooms dropped dramatically. Kids reported that bullying disappeared within their STEMSmart classes. Each classroom was branded as STEMSmart Tech-Active, giving the classrooms and program a distinct identity. Both kids and parents felt proud walking into the rooms. The tables had names, allowing each class to personalize their space.

The school provided tours and many open houses so the kids were able to share their experience. Reinforcing the vision, ongoing training, and continuous communication with the community and key stakeholders has sustained the momentum and growth. Page collected the stories and student testimonials in order to engage the community. That has also helped to expand the effort.

Our team heard a beautiful and powerful story of an autistic sixth grader who would not speak. In seventh grade, however, he stood up in front of his team and presented to the class.

Their strategic direction was in response to the Foundation's report and district data. Page began communicating a new vision very early; she built both community and internal alignment before they moved forward. The success of their tactical execution came from cross-departmental integration at the front end and building a solid, clear, and coherent teaching approach based on the science of engaged learning. The adaptive element became an ongoing effort of leading by example, creating a safe atmosphere to experiment and learn. That built transparency with parents and the community and reinforcing the new values and behaviors they defined essential for student-engaged learning.

The Golden Triad of Pedagogy, Technology, and Place

During the 1500s the innovators of our current education system designed a learning approach that would take advantage of the powerful new technology, the printing press. Print media and subject-trained teachers provided, for the first time, standardized learning. They created an institutional machine to replicate and scale those standards. Naturally that standardized system had to be facilitated by standardized buildings. We are still using that same technology of learning.

This chapter examines the learning technologies that represent a new era of preparing our children for a new future.

New pedagogy, new technology, and new environments form a triad for the new era of engaged, individualized, and future-ready learning. These new learning environments are often referred to as the “Third Teacher.”

New schools don't look like schools. Why? What is so dramatically different about these new learning environments, and what difference can they make? In the next chapter, we look at some of these magical schools and see how their new pedagogy drove their design.