Blogg-Ed Indetermination

This is the last in a series of posts about the major factors that constrain innovation in education. Let me say from the get go that I love reading, I love books, and have found textbooks to be an invaluable teaching tool. A well-written textbook can be a great support to students by providing a mental scaffolding for acquiring and assimilating new information. Teachers new to the profession can find textbooks and their accompanying teacher’s editions to be a necessary if not sufficient support as they make their way through their initial years of teaching. Textbooks provide school district authorities with some assurance of a common curriculum across many different schools and teaches.

But the textbook system is broken. There are too few publishers and those that exist are behaving badly:

• textbooks cost too much.
• teachers are often forced into adopting costly new versions with little additional benefit over the previous version.
• the physical weight of textbooks is contributing to back problems among the students who must schlep them from class to class.
• textbooks consume huge amount of natural resources in their production. Disposal of textbooks is not as easy as one may think.

Fortunately, their are alternatives.

Some publishers are starting to release electronic versions of texts. This helps to address the production and disposal issues, but despite the fact that the cost of goods is now close to zero, most e-text prices are still very high, and the texts may have onerous digital rights management policies attached to them that make it inconvenient for a student to access the text when needed.

A more promising alternative (and one I wager may take publishers off-guard) are open textbooks. Inspired by the open-source software movement, open textbooks are created by scholars and teachers who believe that high quality textbooks should be free, in electronic format, and customizable by teachers and students alike.

There are a number of open textbook projects in operation. One close to home is the California Open Source Textbook Project. There are many more. A good source for information about the state of American textbooks and the open source textbook movement is the Campiaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs.

But the above criticism is more about the form of textbooks. There is also a problem with the concept of textbooks themselves.

Like AP courses and “teacher-proof curriculum (discussed in previous posts), textbooks can constraint teacher creativity, discourage the exploration of the “teachable moment,” and serve as a nagging back-seat driver that second-guesses the judgment of the teacher as to what it or is not important. The textbook is what one is supposed to “cover” in a given course, and if you don’t make it all the way through, you have somehow failed yourself and your class. Who’s in charge here? You, or your textbook?

The term “textbook case” is used to describe events that are typical or classic example of something. I submit that textbooks are a textbook case of what’s wrong with American education.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

-Malvina Reynolds

This cheesy little tune from 1962 (don’t sing it, it will get stuck in your head!) is nonetheless a spot-on description of much of American suburbia and schools. Does anyone doubt that you could be blindfolded, whisked away to some undisclosed location, and upon being unmasked immediately determine if you were in a school building? It would matter little if the building was in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world, in 2009 or 1909. School architecture is universal and universally bad, and therein lies a problem.

As I have discussed in previous posts, our current school system is based on large part on a post-agrarian, industrial model in which efficiency was prized and individualism was perceived as an impediment to the smooth operation of the school. Thus it was natural to put students in neat rows, with the teacher front and center, dispensing wisdom, discipline, and moral judgment. It was natural as well to bolt the chairs to the floor (why would they need to be moved?), make classrooms dark and work-like to discourage frivolity, design libraries as inner sanctums of reverence and quietude, cafeterias as assembly lines of nutrition, and gymnasiums as places of drilled calisthenics and competition.

Since that time there have been cosmetic changes–a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic–but the mother ship itself is still steaming its way towards disaster.

Where to look for inspiration?

Why not look to places where children and teens naturally like to hang out? Say shopping malls, or movie theaters, or living rooms, or parks? Spend sometime like an ethnographer and really watch how kids interact with one another, how they sit, congregate, form and dissolve ad hoc groups and you will begin to see how spaces can be made more adaptable, organic, open, inviting, and alive. Watch how they interact with furniture, what goes where and what they are doing with it. If your school is in the process of building or remodeling and you don’t have student voices in the design you might as well take the picture above and use it as your blueprint.

Fitting 21st century learning and teaching into 19th century architecture based on assumptions about children and teaching makes about as much sense as using a horse and buggy to fly to the moon. Oh wait, we last went to the moon in the 20th century. Well, you get my drift…

I suppose I should start with my bona fides.

I graduated with a Bachelors degree in English education from Central Michigan University, received a Master’s and Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction  from Michigan State University, and for seven years was the Director of Teacher Education and Associate Professor of Education at North Dakota State University (NDSU). In that capacity, I was in charge of our student teaching program, taught foundations programs and graduate-level courses, and worked closely with the state to assure that our students were qualified to obtain a teaching license in North Dakota. While at NDSU, I was part of our department’s self-study team went through a successful re-accreditation process with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).

As a high school teacher, I was a member of the Michigan Education Association (MEA), a branch of the National Education Association (NEA). The MEA actually went to my defense at one time and benefited from their legal team. While at NDSU I was a member of the North Dakota Education Association (though the campus was not organized), and the faculty adviser to the Student  NEA.

Which means that I know whereof I speak, at least a little bit, when it comes to teacher education, unions, and licensure.

Make no mistake, teacher education, licensure boards, and unions have done much to improve the state of teaching and learning in the United States and the world. I am a better person because of my association with them and, I hope, that in some small manner I was able to give back to them as well.

But make no mistake as well that such organizations have hindered real educational reform. They have not done this out of malice. Rather it is due to their nature as mature organizations that have come to that point where they can no longer see the world except through their own lenses—lenses which like the aging human eye can form cataracts or lose their ability to see ahead due to macular degeneration. As bureaucracies they protect and covet power, when the healthier response to the accumulation of power is to give it away.

Within independent schools I have noted occasional disdain for faculty candidates who come from teacher education programs, thought to be less rigorous in their academic expectations. And indeed there are embarrassing instances when fully licensed teachers cannot pass the same basic skills tests we expect their students to have mastered. But these are fortunately rare circumstances, and the vast majority of America’s teachers are working hard to do the best they can. But their best efforts are not good enough, and our children deserve more. And our teachers do to.

Great teachers sometimes have no formal training in education. But these same great teachers nonetheless have a gift for reaching children. And sometimes teachers with Master’s degrees in Education have checked-out and, are just going through the motions, moving their yellowed transparencies to PowerPoint slides and calling it a day. Teacher unions may offer outstanding professional development programs, and at the same time have a knee-jerk  reaction to any promising practice that they perceive to threaten their power base, such as charter schools, vouchers, pay for performance, or tenure reform. State licensing boards sometime equate formal training with knowledge and skill, conflating degrees and coursework with the extraordinary craft and artistry of teaching.

We in independent schools need closer ties with unions, colleges of education and yes, even licensure boards if we are to create 21st century schools that truly work for all children and teachers alike. For too long we have stood apart and aloof from the business of education that holds sway with the overwhelming majority of America’s schools. We are independent for a reason, and we are not beholding to these groups. But we all share an interest in making all of our schools better, and that can only happen when we are in dialog with one another.

One of the hallmarks of factory automation models is the need to standardize parts, procedures, and work flow. It’s no coincidence then that when universal education started to become realized in the U.S. in the midst of the industrial revolution, the best minds of the time brought the industrial model of thinking to bear on schooling. Take a certain set of inputs (students),  apply a standardized manufacturing process (curriculum, teachers, classrooms), and at the end you get a standardized product: a high school diploma, indicative of a certain set of minimum skills.

It seems silly to us now to apply such a simple model to something as complicated as human beings, but I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the current model of American education is not that far different than it was one hundred years past.

Thirty-some years ago as a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, I was fortunate enough to live near a very innovative middle school in nearby Okemos, Michigan. Education at that time was in the midst of very interesting changes. Open-schools, behavioral psychology and teaching machines, block-scheduling, enforced integration, ethnic studies, peace studies…. It was a fertile time for educational experimentation.

Which model should of that time embrace? Which of these competing ideas and ideologies was anything more than a passing fad? What would colleges do with students coming from “different” programs? How could a school accommodate all this diversity?

Kinawa Middle School in Okemos, MI had an idea. Embrace them all, or at least most of them. Working with a creative staff, a daring principal, and a supportive Education Department at MSU, Kinawa created several different programs and provided teachers, students, and parents with the opportunity to choose the program that they wanted to participate in. Several “schools within a school” were the result.

Sadly, I lost track of what was happening at Kinawa after I completed by graduate studies. A quick glance at the school’s web site suggests nothing of this type of experimentation being conducted currently.

But the idea behind Kinawa has stayed with me these many long years.

I am a great believer in the marketplace of ideas. It was now always so. In my youth I could be a zealous, overbearing, and sanctimonious twit. (Some may think that my blog is evidence that I haven’t changed all that much.) But I like to think that I have, over time gained some modicum of patience. I have had the satisfaction of watching my more corn ball ideas be kindly forgotten by friends, and my better ideas come to fruition, albeit often in a more mature and better form.

And so we come to 21st century learning, and my discomfort with the either-or-ness that seems to sometime characterize the discussion:

• You are either full technology or you are against it.
• You are either innovative or stuck in the past.
• You are either global or parochial on your thinking.
• You are either an environmentalist or a you don’t care about our planet.
• You are either a promoter of social justice or a capitalist pig.

We talk a lot about the polarization in politics, and indeed there is ample amount of that to deserve discussion. And yet we fail to see the polarization in our own midst: teachers versus administrators, parents versus the school, teenagers versus adults.

We do not need a new model of education for the 21st century. We needs hundreds, thousands of new models of education for the 21st century. Each school, each classroom, each teacher, and each student has to create their own model of 21st century learning and teaching. The marketplace of ideas will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Curriculum developers (often college professors and researchers who are not now and may not have ever been classroom teachers) are frequently the creators of curriculum innovations designed to redress some shortcoming in public education, such as poor performance in the basic skills of mathematics and reading. In order to prove that a certain instructional approach or set of materials make a statistically significant difference in the performance of students, they attempt to control for as many variables as possible. One of the variables that is most difficult to control is that of the behavior of the teacher. So to decrease the variation of teacher behavior, the researchers provide carefully scripted lessons and encourage (or demand) that the teacher not deviate from the script. If and when the program proves to be a success (and many times this is the case, since children seem to respond to almost any change in their routine), the research project is commercialized and sold to districts desperate to improve scores and meet the goals of NCLB. Show me the money! Show us the scores first!

While no longer in vogue, the term “teacher-proof” was coined decades ago with the advent of direct instruction models of teaching such as DISTAR and Open Court to assure school administrators that no matter the background, creativity, skills, or knowledge of their faculty, the program would work as long as the teachers stuck to the script. The curriculum was fool-proof, even though (most) teachers are not fools.

It’s a wonder to me why this model has not been applied elsewhere, such as medicine, foreign relations, the budget deficit, and other persistent problems that have resisted all attempts at being definitely solved. Why don’t doctors practice “doctor-proof” healing? Or lawyers create “attorney-proof” contracts? Or presidents deal in “politics-proof” health care, financial, and environmental reform?

I can’t think of anything more insulting to faculty than to bring in a “teacher-proof,” scripted curriculum and tell them that they are expected to follow it to the letter, and forget about exercising any professional discretion, creativity, spontaneity, or ambition. But this happens, thousands of times every day in American classrooms. Is it little wonder that education is in shambles, teachers dispirited, and why so many beginning teachers leave the profession?

In a previous post, I questioned the role that AP courses play in education. In many ways, AP courses are simply prettied-up versions of teacher-proof curricula.

I am blessed to work among colleagues that I consider to be the most gifted teachers I have ever seen assembled in a single school. I cringe when I think of constraining their gifts with the types of shackles placed on public school teachers (especially elementary grade teachers). And I am similarly convinced that we can and will develop courses that are superior to the AP courses that are the hallmark and shackles of college preparatory institutions like mine.

Standards of excellence? Yes. Accountability? Yes. Measurable student performance? Yes.

A teacher-proof curriculum? I’ll pass.

AP courses are bad curricula on steroids. The “rigor” that AP courses were originally designed to provide instead serves to constrain our most gifted teachers, forcing them to march in a lock-step, textbook centric fashion. The AP curriculum stifles innovation, crushes spontaneity, and promotes a singular metric, a score on the AP Examination, as the sole measure of success. AP courses are remnants of a 20th century model of curriculum and teaching that is no longer relevant to the 21st century learner.

Okay. Perhaps the APs are not evil in the same sense of he-who-must-be-named or PowerPoint, but it is an example of another boat anchor that is holding back real progress and 21st century learning and teaching. And I am not alone in thinking this.

The Independent Curriculum Group is a group of fourteen, nationally known independent schools who have dropped AP courses and exams and, as of this writing, had not been blasted to smithereens by a wrathful god. Their students still get into the best colleges, teachers still teach (albeit better), and students are more engaged in meaningful learning. To quote from their web site: “Learning unfolds differently at ICG schools. Instead of offering AP European History or AP Chemistry, ICG schools offer advanced courses that cover fewer topics in greater depth…”

It’s well known that colleges and universities are scrutinizing AP credits more closely than ever. Thousands of high schools offer AP courses, triggering fears among colleges that the academic rigor that they had grown to expect in AP courses may not be up to their standards. And then there’s the very real question of revenue. If a student takes enough AP courses to basically lop a semester or two off of her college career, that means less revenue for the college. Ouch!

At one time we had a system that was initially set up with a model of 1950’s academic rigor to provide a means for those few students who needed the challenge of more advanced work, and select colleges willing to cooperate. Now we have a system with millions of students involved, thousands of classrooms, a testing company and thousands of test preparation tutors and publishers of test-prep materials that make kazillions of dollars (actual number, I’ve read their financials), and colleges who still encourage students to take AP courses while muttering “not that we’ll give you credit for them.”)

What a racket!

An axiom for sales agents is when in doubt, use the FUD factor. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. It’s the FUD factor that allows the College Board and its ilk to have such a stranglehold on secondary school curricula.

We’re better than that. Aren’t we?

In a previous post I wrote about the academic school year and it’s roots in an agrarian society, and I called for us to re-think the school year.

This post asks us to think about years again, but in this case it has to do with the belief that chronological age is the best means of organizing students for instruction. Is it?

Thinking about a child’s age and readiness for school begins when the child is very young. As far as I know, parents may even try to conceive children at certain times of the year in the hope that they (the children) will be eligible to enter kindergarten in the fall of the year.

The map to the left indicates the kindergarten age eligibility by state. (Click on the map to see a more readable version).

But as an elementary school teacher can tell you, there is a huge range in the abilities, maturity, and social skills of young students.

Indeed, some parents are using this variability to try to give their children an “edge” by withholding their children from kindergarten despite being age eligible. The thought is that this extra maturity will help them outperform their peers, providing greater confidence that will pay off benefits in middle and upper school.

Once students are in school, significant differences in academic and emotional intelligence may regress towards the mean, or they may become exaggerated. In cases where a child might benefit from a placement at another grade level, it often very difficult to accomplish. Parents may be thrilled to hear that their child can “skip” a grade, but are often resistant when the recommendation is to be “held back” a grade. And teachers may be equally resistant to receive a child in either case in the belief that one way or the other the child will differ substantially from the others in their class.

The focus should always be, of course, what is best for the child. Not what is convenient for the teacher, or the effect on the parents’ egos. Grade levels, I submit, get in the way of making the best decision for children due to the shame associated with being held back and the uneven and often unfair expectations of being prematurely promoted.

There is an alternative to age-based grade levels, but it is not widely popular. “Continuous progress” schools have been around for decades. (The one-room school house was an early forerunner of the continuous progress school.) Continuous progress seem to exist mostly within the “alternative” environment of independent and charter schools, and are characterized by ungraded, multi-age classrooms wherein each child has an individual educational plan and mastery, not time, becomes the variable for progress.

(Making time the variable, incidentally, is one of the major benefits of online learning and its disruptive effects on traditional learning outlined in the wonderful book, Disrupting Class, previously reviewed.)

To make matters even more interesting—and contentious—one can argue that Advance Placement courses are a result of the inequities of a grade-based educational system. Started over fifty years ago, AP courses were designed to allow advanced high school students to take college-level courses in their high school and receive credit for it at the college or university they attended upon graduation. In one way, this can be construed as a nod towards continuous progress insofar as schools recognized that a certain subset of students needed more of an academic challenge than some of their peers. But oh my, what the AP has morphed into now! (More in a future post about APs.)

So no grade levels and no grading? What are you trying to do, remake American education?

Precisely that.

Q: What does a grade of “A” mean?

• The student has demonstrated mastery?
• The student has scored in the upper 5% of all student scores on a particular assessment.
• The student has successfully re-written a prior assignment incorporating all of the suggestions one a project previously judged to be a B+.
• The student is in a class in which the teacher does not believe in grading and assigns everyone an “A.”
• All of the above.
• None of the above.

Give up? Me too. And this is why it’s time for letter grades, numerical grades, and their variations to go. You can’t derive common meaning from a subjective, ill-defined, and emotion laden system so why pretend that you can?

In the early 1970’s I attended a conference, the National Conference on Grading Alternatives I think it was called, and came away with a wonderful little book called Wad-Ja-Get. Though no longer published, you can find it used on Amazon.

From that conference and after reading this book I was convinced that the traditional grading systems used in schools were bogus. Forty years later, they are as entrenched as ever. Was I wrong in my judgment, or are schools clinging on to things that don’t work? Smart people wouldn’t do that would they?

I think we have to admit that smart people can do dumb things, especially when there is so much resistance, so much inertia, within a moribund system and and no agreed-upon alternatives to offer.

Throughout my academic career I was labeled a “good” student, meaning I got “good” grades: A’s and B’s. (Though I suppose nowadays my few B’s might make me suspect.) These grades were supposedly indicative of my learning and performance in various subject areas: math, science, English, history, and so on. Any area in which you got a “poor” grade (C or below) meant you were not “good” at it, or the “teacher didn’t like you.” But the truth of the matter was that I was good a guessing what the teachers wanted to know on tests. God help me if I had to go back and re-take these same high school exams some forty years later! I have forgotten most of the facts and trivia I was so good at reciting then, but I would argue I am infinitely “smarter” than I was then.

“Okay, smartypants, what’s the alternative?”

Let student work speak for itself. We have the technology now to create electronic portfolios of student work that can follow them throughout their careers as students. Let teachers and others comment on student work, and these comments follow the work as well. More work for teachers? Perhaps, but speech to text technology has come a long ways, and vocalizing one’s opinion and professional judgment on the work of students will, I wager, lead to better assessment of student work. Still not enough time? Cut back, perhaps way back, on the number of assessments. Teach students how to assess their own work, and the work of their peers.

Self-assessment and reflection are critically important skills for students to learn at an early age. How are they to learn how to do this properly unless they are taught by mature, self-assessing and reflective adults?

“But what will the colleges do without grades?”

They will learn to deal with it. Work with colleges to help them understand your process and allow them to see actual examples of student work from their portfolios. This would be infinitely more valuable to them than grades or test scores.

“But it’s such a radical idea!”

Letter grades are a relatively new phenomenon in education, one that came along with universal education and the idea that with education now available to the masses, a mechanism was needed to differentiate performance. (Perhaps this was a way to continue class distinctions in society. I don’t claim to be an historian of American education.) But as a matter-of-fact narrative or oral assessment were the norm for hundreds of years in our past, and so returning to such a system may be perceived as a return to a previous practice.

“You’re a dreamer if you thinks schools will ever abandon grades!”

Why thank you. Being a dreamer is, I think, quite a nice compliment. Mark Twain said that an “optimist is a dreamer, more elegantly spelled.” I plead guilty as charged.

In honor of National Bike to Work Week, and as someone who has biked to work for the last several years myself, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on how biking has made me a better driver. Yes, I still drive my car from time to time, but much less so and with much greater care when I do. I attribute my better driving habits to what I have learned from biking.

1. Context is key. I am constantly thinking about where the hazards are mostly likely to be and alter my behavior accordingly.

For example, I ride down a tow-lane, one way street every morning. Is it safer for me to be in the right lane or the left lane? I choose the left lane for two reasons: (a) in the early morning it is mostly drivers who are getting into and out of their cars, and the driver’s door is on the curb side if I am in the left lane, and (b) with right turn on stop allowed at stop lights I am less likely to be cut-off by a driver if I am in the left lane while stopped at a traffic signal.

My ride also takes me past a couple of nursing homes frequented by elderly drivers. I exercise more caution there, and do the same when I pass a local high school frequented by less experienced, younger drivers.

2. Non-verbal communication keeps you safe. Eye contact with others around you on the road can speak volumes for your safety. Clear signals (hand signals, in my case), let people know my intent.

3. Cell phones are evil (when used by drivers or riders). My closest calls regarding accidents have all involved drivers with cell phones and missed stop signs, traffic signals, or simply unawareness of my presence on the road. Cyclists who try to talk on a cell phone while riding their bike are even worse.

4. Courtesy begets courtesy. There are a lot of cyclists who are real jerks when it comes to sharing the road with cars. And there are a lot of drivers who are real jerks when it comes to sharing the road with bicycles. But I have found that a friendly hand wave and even chatting with drivers at stop signs and signals is not only fun to do, but I think often results in creating a more positive environment for both drivers and riders.

5. It takes a lot of energy to start riding up a hill from a dead stop. If I am expending a lot of energy on a bike, think of what your car has to do with hundreds of times more weight! Rabbit starts in a care waste energy. Drive like you’re on a bike and save fuel.

6. Similarly, I really notice the difference when my bike tires are under-inflated, even by a few pounds. That’s prompted me to be more vigilant with my car tires. The U.S. Government says that properly inflated tires can increase fuel efficiency by as much as 3.3%.

7. While riding, I get to enjoy things such as the feel of the road, smells, the feel of the air against my skin, things that as a driver I am insulated against by shock absorbers, AC, and windows. I’ve learned as a driver to appreciate the days of my youth when my dad would take us for a drive on a warm summer night, no air conditioning of course, and we’d feel the coolness and moistness of the air as we passed lakes and streams, the difference aromas of regions of the country near farms or in forests. I drive with my windows down a lot more now.

8. Routine can lead to disaster. We’ve all had moments where we’ve “zoned out” and wondered where the last few minutes went. Perhaps we’re taking our morning shower and can’t remember if we washed our hair or not. Or we’ve been driving and have gone past our exit - the same one we’ve taken for years. God help you if you do this on a bike, while a motorist does the same thing while driving. When this happens to me it’s time for me to vary my route or do something new so that there’s less chance of my mental autopilot kicking in, resulting in an accident.

My worst cycling crash was due to my own inattention. It happened within a few blocks of home, and involved nothing more than a half-inch lip to a driveway from the street, too soft of a grip on the handlebars, and a mind that wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Scrapes, bruises, cracked ribs, and a deeply wounded ego resulted.

I hope you ride a bike to work this week and, if possible, more often than that. If you’re like me you may find that you’ll end up a better driver, too.

Ask the average elementary school teacher what she teaches and she will tell you the grade level or ages of her students.

Ask the average middle school or upper school teacher what she teachers and she will likely respond with the name of her course or her department.

In the best of circumstances, an elementary teacher connects knowledge across the range of subjects taught in her classroom. Vocabulary and spelling words relate to what’s happening in science and social studies, which in turn relate to what’s happening in reading, which relates to the problems students are solving in math, and so on. “Departments” don’t exist. The boundaries between subject areas are fluid and permeable. Knowledge exists and is created without regard to departmental “ownership.”

In secondary schools, the academic model is one of specialization, fragmentation, and territoriality. The boundaries between knowledge are fixed, with little attempt to coordinate learning within or between disciplines. Knowledge is owned by individuals and departments, and don’t you dare teach something in your class that belongs in mine.

I will acknowledge that the above is a generalization. But it is also more true than false. And I think it says a lot about schools, school organization, and the challenges in creating 21st century learning environments.

A few common threads run through all of the thinking regarding 21st century teaching and learning: the need for creating knowledge through connecting information in new ways, seeing the “big picture,” and collaborating across disciplines.

Where, I ask you, do these things happen in the typical secondary school? Where are students asked to think outside the boxes and silos represented by academic departments? At best there’s articulation within an department regarding a scope and sequence relevant to a given subject area. At worst, we all do our own thing and let the chips fall where they may. Ironic, isn’t it, that so many teachers crave colleagues, friendship, and connection yet rarely take time to visit one another’s classrooms.

Interdisciplinary courses hold hope for addressing some of the needs of 21st century learners, but only if the teachers themselves are willing to exhibit the same type of creative, connection-making, big picture thinking we expect of students. In other words, offering an interdisciplinary course wherein faculty take turns teaching their discipline-oriented “take” on a problem or theme without regard to the whole will not work.

In Daniel Pink’s wonderful book, A Whole New Mind (Amazon citation), he talks about six senses necessary for students to succeed in the future: design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. Of these six, it’s symphony that is threatened by the structure of academic departments. Pink describes symphony as big picture thinking, synthesizing and integrating disparate bits of information and creating something new.

As Albert Einstein famously said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Why, then, do we think we can lead students to 21st century thinking skills using the same academic structures of the past two hundred years?

We all know how difficult it is to change schools. If I was certain that teachers and administrators would or could rethink how departments could facilitate rather than inhibit the changes necessary for 21st century teaching and learning to flourish, I would continue to support them. But we don’t have time for evolutionary change to take place. The time is right for us abolish academic departments and think more broadly about learning, teaching, and the challenges that face our children and their future.