Facilitate Wonder

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Why have there been no new posts? A move is afoot and preparation for that has had me busier than usual. It is scary, but it’s also exhilerating.

At the close of this academic year, my wife Katy and I will start in a new (and old) direction. We will return to the high school as teachers. ‘Return’ is perhaps a misleading word for the high school where we will be teaching is new and reflects a newer model of schools. We will be joining the team at Tapestry Charter High School in Buffalo, New York.

Note that what follows is solely the opinion of Don Duggan-Haas…

The change is driven by several factors, a collection of pushes and pulls. The pull of Tapestry is strong — there is an impressive team of educators driven by a vision of education that resonates well with my own (and Katy’s too). To join such a team fairly early in the process of the creation of a new school is tremendously exciting. As an academic, I have felt that I am a few degrees of separation from actual school change, especially in my work in tradition-bound place like Colgate University. By working with others who are creating a new educational institution, I will become fully immersed in educational change.

This pull toward Tapestry has a corresponding push from Colgate specifically and from academia (and, in fact, most traditional educational institutions K-16) more generally. In my doctoral work at Michigan State University’s Department of Teacher Education, I learned a great deal about the potential of teacher education and I saw that large and messy systems can change in good ways. I engaged in the study of educational systems in a more coherent way than I had prior to graduate school. That work was tremendously gratifying and engaging. My post graduate school work in colleges and universities has been frustrating.

Since leaving MSU, I’ve continued my study of educational systems. In the course of the last twelve months, I’ve come to the conclusion that, while substantial change in large educational institutions is possible, my own professional energies should be dedicated to school replacement, not school reform.

Like Bill Gates (whose foundation is providing some funding for Tapestry), I see schools (including most insititutions of higher education) as obsolete. This is not a claim that schools are broken. They aren’t machines and, as a whole, they aren’t mechanistic. Schools are more like organisms than machines. Nor is it a claim that schools don’t work. They work very well for certain things. And, schools aren’t dysfunctional. If we do think of them as organisms, they are remarkably functional (or remarkably healthy) — they are resilient and self-replicating. Schools, however, generally fail to build understandings of the social and natural world in a way that informs action.

Most people have been taught about the nature of our constitutional democracy, photosynthesis, and the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion (for three examples), but stunningly large numbers of Americans don’t understand these basic ideas. I wish to teach in a setting where my students not only learn how to read text to inform their actions, but also to read the world. I wish to work in a place where the outcomes exceed what would be predicted based on the inputs (generally, the best predictor of what a student will be like after college is what they are like before college).

If we employ what research indicates about how people learn to the design of how people are taught, I believe that the outcomes of schooling can be far more positive and substantial. However, the structure of schools suppress change. Due to global warming, glaciers now outpace academia! Mechanisms suppressing change include (but are not limited to):

• The schedule. There was no educational equivalent of Charles Darwin who articulated a set of natural laws in On the Origin of Courses. The school day, semester and year are relics of an earlier age — we do things in this way at the secondary and tertiary level because it seems like we always have. The common schedules for secondary and tertiery education makes teachers into blips in students’ lives. For students I have in a single college course, I see them 35 hours over the semester — if they don’t miss any classes. I’m a blip. [A post-posting revision: Joe makes a good point in his response to this post.  There are some teachers who overcome the confines of being a blip and do change lives.  I've had a couple as teachers and have known quite a few more through my work in schools.  The point I was clumsily trying to make is that the schedule contributes to blippiness being the modal outcome.]
• Tenure. Working for some number of years while keeping your head down conditions you to keeping your head down. It’s hard to change the world if you don’t make waves.
• “Architecture as crystallized pedagogy” (see Earth in Mind, by David Orr). What would we do with all those lecture halls if we didn’t lecture?

Note that this is a shortened list from papers I have presented at conferences. In all three of the listed mechanisms, Tapestry is different by design. That’s major attraction. What else would you include?

Given that many educational institutions have evolved in such a way that they suppress change rather than invite it, appropriate change in existing systems is far more difficult than the difficult task of starting from scratch. At least I hope that’s the case. We’ll see.
This just scratches the surface, and I hope to find time to expand on some of the above ideas in future posts. For now though, I’ll pose two questions for you:

A question of mine:

• If you could build a school from scratch, unbiased by your own school experiences but informed by research on how people learn, what would it look like?

And a question of Kathy Sierra’s (of Creating Passionate Users, the scary link at the beginning of this post):

• So, what scary thing have YOU done lately?