My Colleague wrote this last night:

I am convinced education will not look the same in a decade.

Don't build too many Walls :):)

http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/01/legacy-and-lessons-from-stanfords-free-online-classes/



I responded with this:

I absolutely agree.  When I was in Grad school at Claremont I had the privilege to work with a guy by the name of Dave Master. Dave had left teaching to work for Warner Brother’s animation. But what he learned as a teacher, and passed along to me, was how to create a learning environment in which kids work collaboratively on meaningful work with authentic audiences. My advisor and I interviewed dozens of his past students to find out what it was that made his art program so successful (in addition to an engaging curriculum the program produced many young animators which were hired by studios right out of high school). When we analyzed the data the most important factors for success were the teacher's ability to act as "executive producer" and not micromanage every aspect of the kids' work. The kids helped each
other learn and raise their skill level and confidence by being
empowered to share their expertise in a collaborative way. The last, and perhaps most compelling, factor was a constant practice of presentation and critique by Dave and the kids themselves. They had to present elements of their projects to the group at large and learned to give and receive critique.

Later, I worked over three years with Jane Pollock (Marzano associate) on curriculum design and instructional strategies. She emphasized research based methods for designing learning experiences for kids that are systematic and feedback based.  Clear and timely feedback with strong instructional design is empowering and sustainable for teachers and kids.

I envision the Connections space as a place where these worlds come together.

·         Meaningful and creative work in a collaborative environment

·         Clear and timely feedback from adults and peers +

·         Stable & consistent templates and strategies to guide the creative process +

·         Authentic audiences = 

  Empowered kids and connected and applied learning.

     I don't care as much about the tech or the aesthetics as I do the type of work the kids will be doing. Their learning will be dependent on our ability to create opportunities for them to gather, synthesize, organize and apply information.  They will need templates and predictable procedures in order to do this. They will need adult facilitators that are prepared to guide them toward owning their learning and voice with passion and responsibility. Finally, they will need access to a variety of audiences in order to share their work with the "world" in order to inform and influence.  

Tech, textbooks and school buildings will change in a decade. We can see this year to year right now. The fundamental way in which kids truly learn, however, will not.

1. Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Work – and What Does

            In this intriguing New Yorker article, Jonah Lehrer describes how the idea of brainstorming – groups generating lots of creative ideas without criticizing or judging them – was invented by business guru Alex Osborn in 1948 and spread to countless businesses and classrooms. “Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique,” says Lehrer, “a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.”

            Surprising as that may sound, numerous studies have come to the same conclusion. “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas,” says Keith Sawyer of Washington University. The most striking follow-up study was done in 2003 by UC Berkeley professor Charlan Nemeth. She gave three groups of female undergraduates 20 minutes to come up with suggestions on how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay area. The first group got standard brainstorming instructions – no criticism as the ideas flowed. The second group got no specific instructions. The third group was told to freewheel and generate as many solutions as possible, debate them, and feel free to criticize others’ ideas.

            The third group did by far the best, generating 20 percent more solutions than the brainstorming group and far more than the no-instructions group. When researchers interviewed participants afterward about whether they had any additional ideas on traffic, the debating group had lots more.

            Nemeth’s conclusion: “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition… There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is to stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings. Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.” It seems that dissent and disagreement stimulate new ideas because they encourage people to engage more fully and reassess their viewpoints.

            Another problem with brainstorming is its staple, free-association. Nemeth has found that people aren’t very good at it. Most of them come up with very predictable responses. To be creative, it’s important to be exposed to new ideas and unfamiliar perspectives. They surprise us, we work to understand them, and they make us reassess our initial assumptions and try out something new. “Authentic dissent can be difficult,” says Nemeth, “but it’s always invigorating. It wakes us right up.”

            So what conditions produce the most productive collaboration? Brian Uzzi, a Northwestern University sociologist, studied teamwork in 474 Broadway musicals, charting the group dynamics of thousands of artists from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber. He found that musicals produced by teams who didn’t know each other did poorly – but so did musicals produced by teams who had collaborated many times before. A slew of shows in the 1920s produced by superstar teams including Cole Porter, Richard Rogers, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein II were mostly flops. “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever,” says Uzzi, “but the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

            The sweet spot, Uzzi found, was shows like West Side Story produced by people with a mix of relationships (unknown 25-year-old lyricist Stephen Sondheim joined superstars Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Arthur Laurents). “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies,” says Uzzi. “This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently – they had a familiar structure to fall back on – but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.”

            Physical proximity is another key variable in productivity. Studies have shown that co-authors who work within ten meters of each other publish better papers than those whose work locations are more remote. Steve Jobs had this in mind when he designed the office space at Pixar so the bathrooms, cafeteria, mailboxes, and gift shop were all in the central atrium. “At first, I thought this was the most ridiculous idea,” said producer Darla Anderson. “I didn’t want to have to walk all the way to the atrium every time I needed to do something. That’s just a waste of time. But Steve said, ‘Everybody has to run into each other.’ He really believed that the best meetings happen by accident, in the hallway or parking lot. And you know what? He was right. I get more done having a cup of coffee and striking up a conversation or walking to the bathroom and running into  unexpected people than I do sitting at my desk.”

            Lehrer goes on to describe MIT’s Building 20, a temporary 250,000-square-foot, three-story office structure thrown together in the spring of 1942 to house scientists developing radar for the Allies. Despite the fact that Building 20 was freezing in the winter and broiling in the summer and had dim corridors and a leaky roof, this “plywood palace” survived until 1998 and became known as “the magical incubator.” It was the site of extraordinary amounts of innovation – radar technology that won the war, Noam Chomsky’s groundbreaking work in linguistics, Jerald Zacharias’s atomic clock, Amar Bose’s audio innovations that spawned the Bose Corporation, and more.

            The key to all this innovation? “Knowledge spillovers” in the corridors of this chaotically organized, mostly horizontal structure. One of the most productive symbioses was between linguistics professor Morris Halle and the young Noam Chomsky. Although studying different aspects of language, they talked all the time because they were in adjacent offices. “We became great friends,” says Halle. “And friends shouldn’t be shy about telling each other when they are wrong. What am I supposed to do? Not tell him he’s got a bad idea?”

             “The fatal misconception behind brainstorming,” concludes Lehrer, “is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right – enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways – the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant – not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism – that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those that hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.”

“Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth” by Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker, Jan. 30, 2012 (p. 22-27) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer

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