It’s time to ditch the idea of “rigor” and the damage it has caused, as it is the opposite direction we want to be traveling in. Like my friend, Eliot Washer, Co-Founder of the Big Picture Learning Schools, once told me, “We don’t need rigorous learning, we need vigorous learning!” As educators, we must embrace the idea of creating vigor and vigorous learning and growth. 

First, let’s explore the definitions of both rigor and vigor. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “rigor” as follows:

• Stiffness, to be stiff (e.g. rigor mortis)
• The quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate
• Demanding, difficult, or extreme conditions
• Harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper or judgement
• The quality of being unyielding or inflexible
• A condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable
• Strict precision

Now, lets take a look at Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com’s definitions of “vigor”:

• Active bodily or mental strength or force
• Active, healthy, well-balanced growth
• Intensity of action or effect
• Strong, healthy, full of energy
• Healthy physical or mental energy or power
• Energetic activity, force of healthy growth

When reading these definitions the stark difference between these two words and their meanings is striking. The words we use shape our behaviors and actions. Is a learning experience that is inflexible, severe, harsh, strict, and unyielding actually the learning experience and environment we want for our kids? Or, do we want them to experience a VIGOROUS school and curricular experience? A learning experience that is active, healthy, well-balanced and filled with physical and mental energetic activity? The answer seems obvious. One approach makes things more difficult, hard to bear, and something to try to live through. The other is about being active, healthy, engaged and becoming powerful. 

The old refrain is “rigor, relevance, and relationships.” Unfortunately, since “rigor” was most compatible with the existing order of traditional American education, it received the most attention and work. To be more rigorous, we systematically created an unachievable amount of standards in order to graduate, tougher tests, pacing guides, and tougher curriculum. We carried out the very definition of rigor — demanding, difficult, harsh, making life more difficult for everyone in the system. 

Rigor shows up in all the efforts to create a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” which assumes a mechanical orientation to improvement, believing that a consistent and same set of inputs will produce the same outputs. Want to show you have a “good” school? Show them how damn hard and unrelenting your curriculum and pacing guides are. Then simply give lip service to relevance and relationships. Relevance goes out the door with the idea that a single “guaranteed and viable” curriculum can meet all student needs and personal interests and desires. Rigor has no room for exceptions. Relationships are the cost of true “rigor.” You can either stand with the student against the standards or with the standards against the student. Rigorous approaches choose the later, further dehumanizing the entire system.

The result of rigor is that we’re creating rigor mortis in our kids, teachers, and schools. The constant drone of sameness, of drilling and killing teachers and curriculum directors chasing the illusion that a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” (inputs) will produce consistent, high-level outcomes. Teachers are burnt out and frustrated, feeling that much of their ability to adapt to individual students and contexts has been taken away. Students, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, see and feel the inhumanity of school with its focus on an unrelenting curriculum largely asking them to learn things in decontextualized ways. Rigor also assumes a deficit mindset, dictating all the learning and approach to learning rather than growth-minded and strength-focused like vigor implies

What if American education turned away from rigor and towards vigor? What if we became an education system focused on creating a life-affirming, well-balanced, energetic growth trajectory for our students, teachers and schools? What are some things we could do to move towards a vigorous learning system and approach? 

First, we need an honest conversation about the standards. I’m all for clear standards that create a meaningful baseline that all learners need to reach. Currently, however, the ~300 standards we expect all high school graduates to know and demonstrate are all about proving one’s “rigor.” A vigorous set of standards would include standards from all aspects of life and that every reasonable American adult should know and be able to do. I believe it’s pretty hard to argue that every American needs to know and solve Algebra II formulas and pretty easy to argue that all Americans must have a grasp on basic mathematics, including statistics and probability. Our standards should reflect this more reasonable approach.

Second, to have a vigorous approach to learning, students must have a much stronger voice in what and how they learn. They have to see how what they are learning helps them now and makes them stronger and smarter. They need to be able to explore things that interest them and have teachers around them who can help them see that knowing some science, math, English, history, technology, etc., etc. helps them in their interest areas and improves their life in general.

Third, a vigorous learning environment makes relationships and relevance absolute necessities. Healthy physical and mental energy is dependent upon strong relationships with caring adults helping them engage in relevant and worthwhile learning. The same thing needs to be provided all the adults in the system as well.

Let’s strive for vigorous learning for everyone in the system. Let’s be strength-based, not deficit-based. Let’s be human-centered, not curriculum-centered. Let’s drive learning through vigorous approaches characterized by strong relationships, relevant experiences, and truly deep learning.

The post Rigor or Vigor? What Do We Want For Our Children? appeared first on Getting Smart.

Some of the reasons behind this are quite easy to recognize. Schools as public entities have to appeal to a wide, and often vocal, constituency. Boards made up of lay people, not experts in important-to-the-business fields like a for-profit board, are working for free. These caring public servants are faced with critical decisions about both money and programming. They experience constant pressure from a variety of interest groups wanting or not wanting specific things. Add to the fact that every decision that is made is open to public scrutiny and debate, made easier due to the pervasive existence of social media.

Superintendents, who hold the power to make major changes as well, are always just one Board election away from being out of a job if they make a “mistake” or move too quickly. The typical implicit Board directive is, “Make us great, be innovative, but don’t really change anything.” Parents, teachers, principals, city government, and local businesses all have an opinion about what should and shouldn’t happen and aren’t afraid to leverage their political power to move things their way.

These contextual realities create a pervasive and long-standing culture that is highly risk-averse and often driven by fear-based decisions. What will happen to us if we say yes? In systems like education, there is virtually no immediate or visible cost to saying “no.”  It’s almost as if there is no opportunity cost to saying “no” (a huge faulty assumption). Saying “yes,” however comes with lots of very visible “costs” and a very public eye with people waiting for any reason to point out why it doesn’t work.

Here’s a recent example that illuminates this issue. Over the past few months, I’ve been involved with both district leadership and two influential CEOs of large, locally-based companies to find a home downtown for a new magnet high school. This high school focused on getting students out into the community to work on real problems, building real skills, and applying academic standards in messy, contextualized situations. The lead administrator is very supportive of this effort and wants it to work. This example isn’t about any individual and instead about how a system shapes a leader’s behavior.

We immediately ran into all sorts of barriers and challenges from being able to afford a downtown space, to code issues, to design challenges. At each turn, the two CEOs opened with, “Okay, so how do we solve it? How much money do we need to raise? Who can we contact to help us navigate code issues to get what we want? How can we think about this on different scales? What can we do right now? etc.” This immediately led to some creative and exciting solutions. The district’s focus? “We can only spend X. I’m not sure if the Board will like this idea. I don’t think we can make that happen. I don’t think we have internal support for this. We need more people looking at this, etc.” After about the 2nd meeting, our administrator turned to the group with a smile on his face and said, “I just realized after these meetings that I am the bureaucracy.” It was like the fish recognizing he was swimming in water.

So what does all of this mean? Is the culture of education simply too deep and unmovable to be creative and move forward? Well, it is certainly a big challenge, but enough examples around the country show us it is not unsurmountable. It can all start with that one administrator recognizing they are inadvertently seeking a “no” answer. Since that meeting, I’ve seen this administrator make a subtle but powerful shift in his approach. I now hear him saying things like, “We need to make this happen. What are the big barriers you see now? Let’s identify them and rally around to get them removed.” I see him leading upward more now, making sure the people above him in the organization understand what we’re doing and why. He’s asking for forgiveness now a lot more than he’s asking for permission.

What are a few other straightforward moves an educational leader can make to ensure they can push break-the-mold, innovative changes needed in education today?  

1. Find key leaders in your community and engage them.

Don’t focus on your needs, focus on theirs. They want and need a more skilled workforce and they don’t see schools as listening and responding. Listen, go talk to the Chamber. Take your Board president with you. Then, use the things they say they need and center that in any design you put together. You can then blend in the things we know need to happen to free up students to do these things. Like, rethinking course offerings that are more student-interest-based, interdisciplinary, and focused on the application of skills. Like, For bringing staff on board whose sole job is to connect with the community to find students interesting projects and job experiences.

Now, you not only have a Board President who sees what you’re doing and why, but you also have key, vocal leaders in the community willing and able to stand with you as you push forward these innovations.

2. Simply change your language.

Listen carefully to how you speak of things. Is your first response a question with undertones of “no”? (E.g. “Where would the funding come for this?” “Do you have all the details worked out?”). Instead, approach it with positive curiosity. (E.g. “Nice! What sorts of opportunities would this open up for students?” “Interesting, tell me what you’ve already thought through.”)

3. Quit demanding that all the details be worked out first.

Quickest way to kill anything? Demand all details be worked out ahead of time. First, this is impossible. Second, while seeming counterintuitive, the more you have worked out ahead of time, the more you’re going to find yourself defending the decision when lots of it crashes and burns with the realities of practice. Demand a clear vision and basic direction. Speak in terms of “first iterations.” Help the designers focus on a few key things to get clarity around and allow them to learn on the fly once implementation starts.

4. Be honest with the public.

Make a strong case for the why and make it crystal clear that this won’t go smoothly because we won’t know what we need to know until we get started. Promise that while there will be missteps in the work, the well-being and success of the students will remain at the center.

5. Don’t let the “system” determine all the success measures.

Any substantive change is likely to cause the system’s definition of success to not be immediately met. Have other critical outcomes and measures. Student engagement and sense of joy. Students’ sense of belonging and worth. A number of community projects, job shadows, etc completed. Get students in front of the Board and community talking about how this school/program is changing their trajectories and feelings of accomplishment and belonging. The system’s measures will come with a bit of time – often no worse than what the current system is producing.

The post A Culture of No: How to Get Past Fear and Risk-Aversion to Make Things Happen appeared first on Getting Smart.

What is an “opportunity cost”? The Oxford dictionary defines it as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.”  Wikipedia defines it as “a representation of the relationship between scarcity and choice”. It incorporates all associated costs of a decision, both explicit and implicit.

Put simply, there is almost always a “cost” associated with making any decision. That cost can be monetary, time, lost productivity, and/or forgoing other viable alternatives. For our learners, those costs can also be boredom, tedium, and irrelevance. In an earlier blog, I argue that schools routinely waste a lot of student time. This time is a valuable resource for both the student and the school. When we apply opportunity cost to this waste, we must ask ourselves, “what learning opportunities and experiences are being sacrificed in order to pursue this particular learning opportunity?”

In the school and curriculum-focused paradigm of education, opportunity costs are largely focused on the costs to the institution. “If we offer courses A and B, then we can’t offer C and D. So, we’ll offer A and B because it’s easier to staff and schedule.” The cost is calculated as costs to the adults and to the system’s schedule, not necessarily whether it is better or worse for the learners. Another example is, “If we allow students to demonstrate and document standards for core subjects in non-core courses, projects and experiences, the cost of managing the increased complexity of documentation isn’t something we want to take on.” In this case, the system doesn’t want to incur the cost of adjusting its documentation system or its curriculum to pursue this opportunity. Again, it’s an opportunity cost focused on the institution and not the learner, despite, in all likelihood, the cost to the learner is quite high.

If we want truly learner-centered learning systems, we must first explicitly deal with opportunity costs and second, focus those opportunity costs on the learners – not the school. In this paradigm of thinking, opportunity costs look vastly different. For example, what is the cost of having nearly every student take 180 hours of a course they have little interest in or is taught in such a way that it causes them to dislike the subject or to learn very little? I argue that this cost is quite high for those students and those who like the subject and want to learn it. We’ve taken significant time away from the learners to pursue the things they care about and want to learn. An expense most adults wouldn’t want to incur.

I’ll use my own experience. I struggled with science content in high school. I didn’t particularly like biology and got through it because I sat by my friend who is now a biology professor at a Research 1 institution. What I really learned was that science is confusing and I’m not any good at it. Then, I had to find another science course to take to fulfill my HS requirements. I chose Physics. Why? One, because one of my basketball coaches taught it so I at least liked him (and figured he’d give me every benefit of the doubt) and two, my two best friends, who were heading to Iowa State to be mechanical engineers, were taking the class so I could rely on them to help me make it through. Again, 180 hours and I honestly didn’t learn anything other than how to build a crappy toothpick bridge.

What if the opportunity costs in this example weren’t focused on the efficiency of the institution but on me as a learner? I didn’t hate science. I hated the science required of someone who was majoring in a science-related area because I really didn’t give a damn. I was a writer. I was an athlete. I was a mechanic. I was a woodworker. Yet the school-centered system couldn’t see that the science that would capture my interest existed in those other areas and would help me be better at all of those things – and retain some valuable scientific knowledge. The cost to my learning was not only 360 hours of largely wasted time but it taught me to hate and avoid science. I consider this an immense personal cost, especially when weighed against the meager benefit it provided me. Oh, what I could have done with that time given another option.

Imagine what I could have learned with those 360 hours if the opportunity cost of forcing me to take college-prep-focused biology and physics was considered. It would have been quickly realized that the cost was far higher than the benefit – for me and for the poor students who had to wait for me to either care or try to figure it out. I would have been far better served and gained far more benefit by engaging in the science of woodworking – the makeup of wood types, adhesives, heat, and pressure, etc. Or the physics of basketball.

Here’s a relatable one. What are the opportunity costs of requiring all students to attend every pep and awards assembly? There’s a cost to administrators and teachers tasked with preventing students from skipping out and dealing with the disruptions and behaviors of those who don’t want to be there. There’s the cost of once again trotting out the “winners” in the school as models and examples to those in the stands not being recognized on metrics the school cares about. There’s the cost of the growing resentment and apathy of the students who don’t want to be there. So those are the costs. What are the benefits of that decision on the various subset of students – not the school or system? What data do you have to show you those benefits are outweighing or negate the costs?

As educational leaders move toward more learner-centered learning systems and environments, it is well worth the time and effort to begin to make calculations about opportunity costs. A simple way to begin this work is to ask some simple questions: By making this decision, what will the costs be to our students because we didn’t make this other decision? Will the decision we make provide more benefits for the myriad of students we have than it costs us in time, money, or the headaches of managing it? Is there a third decision we haven’t yet considered that is better than the current alternatives?

The post Understanding Opportunity Costs in Education appeared first on Getting Smart.

First, how do you get more time with students to work on things that really matter to them? While there are myriad ways, here’s one way you might think about it. Let’s take science for a moment. Rather than putting the students who love science into the same class as those who find little interest in it and then teaching things mostly of interest to a science major, what if you thought about it a bit differently? And, no, I’m not talking about old-school tracking. What if you had a school that ensured that every student had the basics of scientific inquiry down and knew how to look at scientific findings/opinions with a critical eye rather than preparing them to be biology majors? For those non-science majors, that might be understanding how and why the earth is warming, how herbicides and insecticides work and their positive and negative consequences, and how knowing some science can make food taste amazing, etc. Rather than “dumbing things down” the results will likely be counterintuitive – more, not fewer, students may discover a love of science because it’s more practical and relevant.

Then, imagine the time available for the students who love science and envision a career in a science field to engage with an equally passionate teacher. Deep, deep inquiry. Internships, job shadows, conducting research alongside college students – and graduates who are incredibly prepared for their next steps.

Since English skills (reading, writing, thinking, listening, speaking, writing, presenting, discussing, debating) occur in every discipline and in most, if not all, contexts, why relegate it to a class? What if students handled the basic English standards and work through an online course supported by a physically-present teacher/coach? Then, with the extra time created for the teacher, they now interact with all the other teachers to teach students English skills in the context of that discipline. The science paper/report now satisfies not only a science standard or two but an English standard or two as well. Students would begin to understand the interconnectedness of these subjects. (How many times has a student told you writing shouldn’t count on a particular assignment because it’s not English class?)

Another way to think about this: consider what our friends at Village HS in the Academy 20 School District in Colorado Springs, Colorado are doing in this regard. Students take online core classes that focus heavily on the required standards and these classes are given a block of time in a student’s weekly schedule. Teachers, now free from constant lesson planning, lesson delivery, assignment and assessment grading, are available and monitor student progress, stepping in to help “just in time” for individual or small group students. They can use the data from the online class to target skills students struggle with and address those directly through enhanced lessons. Now, the rest of the time (about 5 blocks out of 8 a week) is filled with electives built by teachers and students that are high-interest and high-relevance and that provide students opportunities to continue to hone their academic skills. It is filled with time for internships and job shadows. It’s a time filled with strong mentor relationships with teachers having the time and flexibility to build those relationships. It deep dives into subject areas students care about – like the 12 students at Village who wanted to be writers getting to engage in a novel writing course for a year.

An additional value add to having more time would be to engage students in contextually-rich experiences in the community through authentic projects. Like at Iowa BIG, students could choose projects they cared about and work directly with community members in business, non-profit, and government settings working on real problems and opportunities. All while having an opportunity to practice their critical 21s Century/Universal Construct and relevant academic skills in real, authentic, “messy” contexts.

Make no mistake, students are (and let’s be honest have been) questioning the value of school and the time being asked of them to endure so much of what feels foreign and disconnected to who they are and who they want to be. Let’s take that seriously and make that seven hours worthy of their time.

The post What Could You Do with 5 Additional Hours of Time with Students Each Day? appeared first on Getting Smart.

First, I want you to think about those times as a student or educator when you felt joyful in a classroom learning experience. My hunch is you recall coursework that you were drawn to or felt a certain competence in. You may also recall that teacher whose passion and love for their subject and their desire to get you to love it pulled you in. As an educator, it is those times when you get to that unit you really love. I’d place a healthy bet that the farther you got into your undergraduate major, the more interesting it all became to you.

Now, think about those times as a student or educator when the opposite was true. It was likely coursework you felt incompetent in, saw no relevance, or had no interest in. It was the teacher who was either as bored with the subject as you or was so interested in being “rigorous” and “tough” that they cared little about having a meaningful relationship with their students.

Let’s tackle a pesky problem that gets scant attention in today’s school reform-based conversations. The fact that many, if not most, high school classes are geared to introduce pre-major students to important theories, concepts, and content so they are “ready” for college. It’s what AP and IB courses do. It’s what advanced courses do. In fact, the only place it may not happen is in remedial courses although it’s usually just a slower and less-deep version of the college-prep curriculum.

Think for a moment about the students you taught in your career. How many went on to major in the subject you taught? As an English teacher, I know of two former students who majored in English in college and there are likely a few more I don’t know about. My colleague who teaches physics says he doesn’t have a single student who went on to major in physics, yet most of the physics he was asked to teach students he didn’t deal with until he was an undergraduate senior or in his postgraduate studies.

Let’s sit with this important fact: the overwhelming majority of the students you teach are not going to major in the subject you’re teaching. This begs an important question: What is the cost of being “rigorous” with standards and content widely focused on preparing students for college curriculum when most of the students staring back at you have no interest in pursuing this content area in college, if they even go to college? I posit that the cost of this approach has been that a great number of students have developed an aversion to the subject and actually try to NOT learn much about it. Think about the number of students who claim to hate math and science, who refuse to read for pleasure, or who get hives at the mention of history. Isn’t it our primary job as educators not to snuff out the love of learning and curiosity in our students?

As an English teacher who now realizes most of his students won’t go on to major in American Literature, what must I do to help students appreciate and feel like they can engage in literature and reading? I want students to “see” English in their science, math, sports, history, business, etc. I want students to enjoy and be able to draw learning and/or insight from reading whatever it is they enjoy.  And I want that small handful of students who jam on American Literature like me to be able to nerd out to their heart’s content.

As a science teacher, don’t I want a classroom full of students who know enough science to ask good questions and know how to make informed opinions by discerning good research and data from the bad? Don’t I want them all to understand that science impacts us all every day? Like the science behind a delicious and healthy meal, the consequences of maintaining the standard of a beautiful suburban lawn, and understanding why global warming is a thing?

Too many school-based reform efforts continue to have educators implicitly standing with the standards against the students. Pivot your perspective for a moment to the opposite. What does a school where its educators stand with the students against the standards look like?

So what’s the first possible step? Talk to the students. Figure out their current perceptions about your subject. Like what many of you had to do during the pandemic, find out what it is you really want every student to walk away knowing. Those things that every student needs to know no matter their future path? Now, gear your classroom to those students and help them meet standards best aligned to what you want for them. Be honest about the standards that exist purely to prepare pre-majors and make sure your students understand this. Give meaningful and deep work to that handful of students planning to use your discipline in a college major. This may actually be the most positive step towards truly personalized learning you can take.

What will you end up with? A more joyful teaching and learning experience and students who come to place a higher value on the important elements of your discipline in their lives.

The post Returning Joy to Teaching & Learning appeared first on Getting Smart.

The pandemic has and continues to cause ripples across the educational landscape. Over the last year, one such ripple has been a growing number of high school students calling BS on their high school experience. Many students in our area who attended our Iowa BIG program half days were willing to share their feelings about high school post-pandemic. And an interesting pattern emerged. The finding was summed up best by one unabashed student who told us:

“For the last two years I have worked on my school work for 90-120 minutes a day, was successful, and now I’m being asked to give school seven hours a day of my time. Why? They’ve shown me that they’ve been wasting five hours of my time each day. I’ve got more important things to do with my time than give school 20 hours of wasted time each week. Schools talk of valuing its students. How is wasting 20 hours a week of my time valuing me?”

The student went on to share that they were able to work nearly 40 hours a week during the pandemic at $15/hour. He essentially asked why the school was now asking him to forgo $20,000 this school year just to sit in a seat learning what he could have done by 9 am each day.

After visiting with many colleagues across the country, I learned that a similar sentiment exists in many, many schools and communities. The instant defensive reaction by some educators is, “Well, yes, but we had to focus on the core standards and weren’t able to go so deep and, besides, there’s a lot more to the high school experience than the classes.”  Okay. And…

Let’s be clear. These students are not wrong. The pandemic showed students that much of what they were required to do and endure during pre-pandemic high school was a lot of busywork and tasks that held little relevance or interest to them, and apparently didn’t really matter since they were able to be successful without all that extra work. When schools lost their ability to command and control a student’s time, it forced a different economy for schools and educators. It required the curriculum to be pared down to only the essential standards and information. It now had a very real and powerful competitor for the student’s time – a job, a hobby, sports, music, sleep… And boring, tedious and/or irrelevant assignments and work can’t, and shouldn’t, win out. It has exposed the gross inefficiencies of the traditional approach to high school education.

Schools talk a lot about personalizing learning, of meeting kids where they are, and yet we see most high schools continue forward with prescribed, discipline-specific courses conducted in roughly 150-hour annual segments. This approach continues to isolate the disciplines from one another despite the fact that they are highly interrelated. De-contextualized content is boring and lacks that “hook” that helps make learning sticky. This system continues to waste student and teacher time in a myriad of ways, including but not limited to:

• Forcing students who are highly engaged and/or competent in the discipline/subject to have to wait for the curriculum to catch up with them
• Creating a large group of students who believe the discipline/subject isn’t for them and conclude that they hate that subject and should work to avoid it
• Transforming intrinsic motivation to learn into an extrinsic game of point and credit chasing and the belief that you can and should eventually “be done” with learning
• Channeling every student through a course that makes the erroneous assumption that every student in every school is going to major in that subject, therefore making it like a watered-down 101 course that disengages the majority of students
• Taking interesting material, or material few people need to know, and making it boring and irrelevant simply to fill the time and to avoid being accused of not being “rigorous.” Don’t get me started on what “rigor” really means but if you’re curious, look up its definition and ask, “Is that really what I want for my classroom and my kids?”

Students are no longer a captive audience. They have more options and choices. To avoid obsolescence, perhaps schools should focus on making school a place where kids see value and want to come to each day. There are many schools already doing this – Village High School in Colorado Springs, Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis, One Stone in Boise, Idaho, Teton Science School in Wyoming, Crosstown High School in Memphis, and programs like Iowa BIG.

This is a wonderful opportunity to put in place the things that really drive 21st-century skills and give students the keys to their own learning and growth. To truly personalize learning for students, and unlock teacher professionalism and creativity in the process. That extra time could allow students to pursue areas of passion and interest, to dive deep into a subject that interests them, pursue job shadows and internships, and earn and learn on a job.

In the next few installments of this blog, we’ll dive deeper into this opportunity and dig into questions like:

• What could you do with 5 additional hours of time with students each day?
• How could the school leverage the student’s $15/hour job to teach them critical 21st-century skills?
• How could the school engage their community to have students tackle problems and bring to life new opportunities for their city?
• How could you help students meet their standards and learning objectives through their own hobbies and interests?
• How could you help students more confidently own their personal learning journey?
• How could a school tailor its in-building learning to ensure that it maximized student learning around student interests and more efficiently helped them learn those skills and disciplines less interesting to them?
• How could a school place ensure all students had a healthy understanding of and respect for the disciplines above the relentless drive to teach standards focused on preparing discipline majors?
• How could you bring joy back to the lives of teachers and students?
• How could you free teachers from constant grading, lesson design, and chasing down students to get them to do the work?

The post Students Are Calling BS on High School and Opportunity Knocks appeared first on Getting Smart.

I immediately backed up the podcast to listen again. I began thinking about all the ways traditional schools implicitly and explicitly send students and educators the message that perfection is the goal and (more insidiously) that it can and should be met. From celebrating the student with perfect attendance to the student with the perfect ACT score to the student with the perfect GPA to the student with the perfect record of taking all the AP courses, schools send the message that perfection is both attainable and the best way to a successful life. Sadly, this approach has some devastating consequences.

Burnett is right. Seeking perfection is a second-rate idea. Should one always strive to be the very best one can be? To get one step closer to the pinnacle of whatever is being pursued? Absolutely. But perfection? What are the costs of trying to be perfect? In the setting of a traditional high school the costs can be quite high:

• Stress
• Anxiety
• Unhealthy study/work habits
• Depression
• Suicide
• Feeling less-than
• Fearing mistakes
• Hiding or denying one’s shortcomings
• Denying one’s own humanity
• Inflated sense of self-worth or self-loathing
• Cheating and short-cutting
• Missing out on other fulfilling aspects of life

At Iowa BIG, the biggest struggle we have is not with the disengaged students but rather with the students who seek perfection – those with stellar GPAs, who rarely miss a point on a test, and who’ve never fathomed not getting an A. Why? One simple answer: fear of failure. We embrace imperfection and mistakes as a critical part of learning. Students and teachers seeking perfection do everything in their power to avoid making mistakes or acknowledging imperfections. School has taught them at every step that mistakes are dangerous and have long-term negative effects. Get a “C” on that test? There goes your A! Your GPA will now drop .005 points! This idea of perfection implies that learning can be perfect. More damaging is the implication on the learner, who now often thinks twice before doing challenging work in case they don’t believe they can do it perfectly.

Chasing perfection is an aversion to learning. Learning requires mistake-making. You don’t learn by doing things you already can do and perfection, if ever attained, is wildly unsustainable. Any system that implicitly values and promotes the perception of perfection is, by default, a learning-averse system.

Students who are pursuing perfection and experience an inevitable failure or misstep in their projects at BIG have a meltdown. They think they’re failures, that they are going to get an “F” on the project. It takes a lot of coaching to help them realize that it isn’t perfection they’re after – it’s learning and growth – and we don’t hold failures against them like some punishment. Failing and learning is the only way to that perceived A and, more importantly, to some very deep and “sticky” learning and growth.

That’s why we don’t grade projects, we only assess the learning that occurs along the way. Sometimes the biggest crash-and-burn projects contain the greatest and most powerful learning outcomes. Once you attach a score or grade to the level of success of a project, you remove countless opportunities for students to take intellectual risks and learn from the natural missteps that come when learning anything new. It also assumes that there is a right answer and the game is to identify it and apply it. Authentic, messy, contextualized projects that engage the community don’t have simple or single answers. Like the entrepreneur, one has to continue to learn more and more and continue to apply potential solutions, quickly learning from small mistakes along the way. The game most certainly isn’t looking for and securing perfection.

Once students cross over to growth and improvement and away from the idea of perfection, we see stress and anxiety melt away. We see students slow down to engage deeply in learning – something they don’t always know how to do yet. We see students who boldly take on new challenges. And we see students who begin to see that their value isn’t in being a 4.0 student or valedictorian, it’s in being a voracious learner who is curious, engaged, and interested not only in their own learning but learning in community. I saw it in my own daughters. Once they realized that the game of school wasn’t about being “perfect” but was really supposed to be about learning in pursuit of getting better every day, their learning took off, their stress and anxiety dramatically decreased, and their quality of life improved dramatically. Now, as professionals, they excel because they aren’t afraid of taking risks and learning instead of spending most of their time trying to maintain a charade of perfection.

Sadly, we often see this perfection affliction in the educators we work with. Living nearly their entire lives in a system that values perfection, we see them stressed. We see them hide their weaknesses from their colleagues meaning little chance of actually improving their practice. We see them get major anxiety when evaluated because, for some reason, not getting all 5’s on the 1-5 rubric scales for the ridiculous number of teaching competencies means failure. We see them forgo relationships and care for rigor and “toughness” to show they are a “great teacher.” We see them ignore, dismiss, or even refute mistakes which, in reality, means they are refusing to learn and grow. We see it across the education profession.

This is likely one of the reasons schools are widely seen as “second-rate” today. We’ve chased second-rate ideals for too long – perfection, standardization of humans, measures without much meaning, etc. We need human-centered systems focused on growth, not perfection. It’s what “Getting Smart” really means – to pursue relentless growth and learning, not perfection.

This post is part of our New Pathways campaign sponsored by ASA, Stand Together and the Walton Family Foundation.

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