What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills: Grant Lichtman at TEDxDenverTeachers

The rate of change in the world demands that we re-imagine and restructure the foundational learning relationship among students, teachers, and knowledge. In September 2012, pursuing a decades-long passion for transformational education, Grant packed up his Prius and set off on a solo, nationwide research tour to discover what schools are doing to prepare students for an evolving future. Find out what he learned from three months on the road visiting 21 states, 64 schools, and the great ideas of 500 educators. Presented by Grant Lichtman, Author and Educational Consultant.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

[MUSIC]

[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much and for

all coming out here this morning.

I imagine that all the presenters
here today share a common journey.

And that shared journey is one to
disrupt the Industrial Age model and

mindset that has defined American
education for most of the last century.

I took my first steps on that journey
about 30 years ago when the buzzwords

in education were first critical
thinking and problem solving.

And I had the temerity to ask myself,

what do we do in the classroom to
actually get to the point where we're

better at teaching things like
critical thinking and problem solving?

And I and a small group of other
educators came up with a model that said,

our students should be asking
questions more than giving answers.

And we should be thinking about systems,

instead of being
compartmentalized into subjects.

We should be finding problems,
instead of solving problems.

And we took that model to the Dean
of a very famous ed school,

a university in California.

And he very politely said,
no, no, no, you know what?

You can't teach that stuff to students,
they won't get it.

Even high school students.

So flash forward 30 years now and
after a career in the private sector and

about 15 years working at a large
independent school in San Diego, I felt

like the world has finally maybe caught
up with where we were back in the 80s.

When we said, yes, we should and
can be teaching these things.

And so this last Fall, I begged my
wife forgiveness in advance, packed

up my Prius, and took off around the
country on a journey of 89 straight days.

I've visited 64 different schools.

Public schools, private schools.

Drove about 10,000 miles.

Probably interviewed 6 or
700 different educators.

Got 48.3 miles per gallon
in the total trip.

>> [LAUGH] [APPLAUSE]
>> [LAUGH] And, of course,

it was a really incredible
informal experience for me, and

I wanted to sort of synthesize
some of that for you today.

First, the bad news, and I don't think
this is a real surprise to anybody here.

The bad news is schools are not
very good at innovation.

We are large bureaucratic,
bulky organizations.

We are buffeted by political winds and

driven by that more than by educational
ideology, quite frequently.

We have a lot of competing
interests that we serve, and

perhaps most importantly,
schools are risk averse.

The downside of taking a risk
at schools has always been

far greater than the upside
of taking a risk.

That big red f that you got on your math
quiz in fourth grade probably exemplifies

that as much as anything.

And so that's probably one of the biggest
issues I ran into at all these schools is

that we really struggle with change and
innovation.

The good news is that for
every problem that I encountered, and

I logged hundreds of them
on interviews on this trip,

there was a school right down the road
that had already solved that problem.

I go to one school,
big problem, we can't do this.

Yes, but I go to the next school and they
said, yeah, we solved that problem but

we can't solve the other one.

So the schools are out there, the analogs
are out there, the models are there.

We just need to connect at
events like this, reach out,

and take advantage of those.

The other bit of good news is this,
and this is really important.

It's sort of blue letter
law in innovation and

change management that change is really
hard, institutional change is really hard.

And I think we have sort of
allowed ourselves to take that on.

There was a day in South Carolina,
I visited a school in Charleston, and

this is two-thirds of
the way into the trip.

And for many, many schools,
every school I visited we talked about how

hard change was and
the stages of grief, etc, etc.

I visited a school in Charleston and there
was a senior administrator who had her,

literally, her head in
her hands like this and

she just says,
I don't know why it should be this hard.

We talked about that.

That afternoon I was driving west up
through the piney woods of South Carolina

and I think it was because I'd been
reading a book about the Berlin airlift.

It suddenly came to me.

I said, you know what, no.

The Berlin Airlift was hard.

Homesteading the Kansas Plains
in the 19th century was hard.

Raising children in poverty if
you're a single mom, that's hard.

And going to the moon was hard.

These are what we do.

We're Americans, we do hard things.

A young person going to stand
their post in the dust of

Kandahar in Eastern Afghanistan for
a year, that's hard.

And saying goodbye to that child as their
parent, for that year, that's hard.

Change at most of our
schools is uncomfortable,

it's complicated, it's messy.

But I ask people to really look deeply
inside themselves and think about what's

the difference between hard and
uncomfortable, and let's get beyond that.

And so I had this wonderful experience and
visited this mosaic of schools where every

school I visited there were brush
fires and bright lights of innovation.

And so I'm trying to put that mosaic
together into some sort of synthesis.

Schools are becoming so dynamic.

They're messy, they're noisy,
they're chaotic.

That's the vision.

That's what student ownership
of learning looks like.

I was in a school and

I had a sixth grade boy at a small school
in Virginia telling me, you know what?

Bloom's Taxonomy is not a triangle.

Our teachers asked us to think about
Bloom's Taxonomy and design it.

And I said, I drew it as a circle and
then I realized that was wrong too.

And I drew it as a spiral and
I looked at him, and I said,

how do you even know what Bloom's Taxonomy
is, you're a sixth grader?

He said, in our school since kindergarten,

our teachers have been talking to
us about that, about how we learn.

Schools are becoming permeable.

They're not about being
on campus in four walls.

We're getting online, off campus,
in our communities around the world.

We're becoming adaptive.

We're taking courses and we're melding
them, we're crossing subject boundaries.

I had another student,
a 10th grader tell me,

you know at my school, we don't have
to switch off from Math brain and

into Science brain and
into Spanish brain in a day time.

Our brains are on all the time because
that's how our courses are constructed.

Our schools are becoming irrelevant.

They're crossing those
boundaries of subject and

allowing schools to connect the dots in so
much more authentic ways that engage them.

We're becoming self-correcting,
we're taking time.

Students and teachers taking time for
authentic reflection during the day,

to think about what they're doing.

The word empathy is
embedded in our goals now.

And we're taking the time to think about
that balance between constant innovation

and yet the strings and
chords of tradition that make us strong.

And maybe more than anything else,
schools are becoming creative spaces, and

you're gonna hear about that
from some of the speakers today.

Students getting up out of their chairs,
writing on the walls, thinking, designing,

building.

I had a second grader at a small school
in Atlanta, a second grader sit there and

tell me, on one of those little bitty
chairs as I was sitting on a little

bitty chair with him.

You know, at our school,
we design and build and

prototype and ideate and
fail forward and fail upward.

And I said, you're a second grader.

That kid is never going back in
the box of the Industrial Age model.

And so, we take those buckets of synthesis
about what schools are looking like,and

you see this list on the screen now.

Maybe it's because I was trained as a
geologist, an environmental scientist, but

I look at that list and
those are the characteristics and

drivers of a natural ecosystem.

The same characteristics and
drivers that determine the success or

failure of a coral reef or
a rainforest or a grassland or a pond.

And they are fundamentally
different than the drivers and

characteristics of our current and
past Industrial Age model.

And I think one of the real frustrations
we all have is we keep trying to put

that square peg of the Ondustrial Age,
engineered, designed model into

the round circle of the ecosystem that
we know represents great learning.

These two systems are fundamentally
incompatible, and it means that we have to

change at a foundational level,
not just at the margin.

And this ecosystem that
we now are living in,

education, is not defined
just at our school level.

This, in fact, I believe,
is a global ecosystem.

For four and a half billion years, and

this is the geologist in me coming out,
for four and

a half billion years there have been
exactly four global systems on this Earth.

The lithosphere, that's the rock,
the hydrosphere, which is the water,

the atmosphere which are the gases and
the biosphere which are all living things.

And yet right now,

we are living through the explosive
evolution of the fifth sphere.

It didn't exist ten years ago,
it's just evolving now.

I've given it a name,
the Latin is a little sketchy but

I call it the Cognitosphere.

This is the system of knowledge creation
and management that was not possible

until we had essentially
universal access to knowledge.

Two weeks ago, three weeks ago now,

I was in the Philippines
with a group of students.

And we were living in villages in the
rural Philippines where people are living

off of $2 a day or less, which represents
about three billion people in the world.

And many of those people now have access
to the cognitosphere through a cellphone.

And so this is the substrate,
the neural network that our schools,

our teachers, our students have to
participate in and be active in,

because this is how we're going to
connect in the world going forward.

We're a knowledge-based industry,

and this is fundamental to
that knowledge-based industry.

The cognitosphere is the substrate
of education going forward.

So where do we really want to be?

And now I'm trying to
synthesize 600 interviews and

10,000 miles on the road and
in one long drive, I had a concept.

And then I distilled it
down to three sentences.

And then I distilled it down to
a phrase and then down to three words.

And I finally said, you know what?

No, this all comes down to,
I think, one single word.

Where do we wanna be as educators?

What does great learning look like?

And you all know that that's
what great learning looks like.

In all those schools I visited,
in all those bright lights that

I was privileged to see, all that
sharing I did with all those teachers.

Not a single one of them would
John Dewey have been unhappy with.

We know what great learning looks like.

Dewey and Montessori and Parker, 100, 125
years ago, told us what that looked like.

And so why is it so hard for
us to get back to that?

Why have we yielded that high ground
of the progressive era of education

to the Industrial Age model
that's been implanted on us?

I think there are three things that
keep us from getting back to Dewey.

The first one is that we, the adults,
have constructed a series of anchors.

And these anchors are based on ego and
our intent

to control education, rather than that
being controlled by the students.

And those anchors are three, there are,
that egotistical attraction to time,

space, and subject.

This is my classroom, my subject, my time.

The second one are dams
that we have built.

As you look at schools, and I've visit a
lot of schools who are k-12s and k-6s and

all these different grade levels, you see
these marvelously metacognitive kids.

And as others have said,
that innovation is marvelous,

creativity is marvelous, and
then we just sort of beat it out of them

as we cram them into these quantum
packets of time, space, and subject.

And by the time we get to the high schools
and upper schools, the two biggest dams

that were mentioned to me, the college
board and the college admissions offices,

that want us to shove those kids into
packets of content rather than context.

And the third are the Silos that
we've constructed around ourselves,

that prohibit us, that keep us, the
structures that were mentioned earlier.

That keep us from communication,
from collaborating,

from networking all the things that we
know over 500 years of innovation best

practices since the Renaissance
are key to innovation and change.

We've built ourselves into these silos of
classroom, department, division, school.

We're very inwardly focused and
we don't really get out and

see what's possible out
there in the world.

The schools that have started to
trim these anchors, to cut them, to

break down the dams, to breach the silos,
are those where innovation is exploding.

And it's a marvelous,
beautiful thing to see.

So in a time of rapid change,
what do we really have to do?

How do we reduce this down
to these singular goals?

We need to teach into the unknown.

By definition, in a time of rapid change,
rapid change in the world, we don't know

what the future looks like, and therefore,
we have to teach into the unknown.

And that's difficult,
uncomfortable, messy and

unfamiliar to us, and we need to learn
a different set of skills for that.

Also, by definition, if the world is
changing rapidly like this, we don't know

that the skills that we're talking about
today, we call them 21st century skills.

I hate that term.

I think they're timeless skills
that have defined success and

happiness throughout human history.

We don't know necessarily
that those are the skills

that our students are going
to need in their future.

So we need to teach them to
be self-evolving learners.

So that they can meet whatever challenges
crop up in the world in the next 30 or

40, 50 years of their lifetime.

And in order for us to teach students
to be self-evolving learners,

we need to become
self-evolving organizations.

We're not good at that, we haven't
been good at that in the past, but

we really, really need to do it.

We need to embrace constant change and
the methodology of constant change.

And so at the end of this trip,

I wrote down what is
education innovation to me.

I think it's about preparing our students
for their future, not for our own past.

And if we can keep our eye on that,
I think we don't go too far afield.

What was interesting was, of course,

as I was looking out the front
window of my car on this long trip,

I could just as easily have been
looking into my rearview mirror.

Because that's exactly what Dewey told us
almost word for word over 100 years ago.

And so here's the challenge that
I would really issue to us.

And this is a challenge that I
think I've become more vocal and

a little more proactive and maybe even
some would say aggressive about recently.

We've been talking about this.

We've been talking about
what great learning and

what great education looks like for
a long time.

Some of us for years, some of us for
decades, some of us for over a century.

I think it's time we stop talking as much
about it and we just start doing it.

And that's the challenge I urge all of us
to take on is to go back to our schools

and aggressively start to implement,
start to fan those

brushfires of innovation that are out
there in every single school.

And not wait for an entire other
generation, an additional generation,

of students to miss out on those kind
of great learning opportunities and

engagements that we all
know define great learning.

So thank you very much and
it's gonna be a great day of sharing.

>> [APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC]