This was our first full week trying out the Challenge Sprints structure. I’m enjoying having more time with students and doing more facilitation when I’m at school, especially because it is a specific kind of facilitation that I’m really interested in.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to be able to try out these tools with a small group of kids at Mosaic who are all enthusiastic about it. I learned a lot in the first week and we already started making small tweaks here and there based on their experience/needs.

We started out Monday morning by setting up their Trello boards (digital kanban) to manage the Challenges and the workflow for each Sprint. Once the boards were setup, we began by taking 10-15 minutes to brainstorm all of the possible items that could be added to the Backlog* — anything that could potentially be useful in addressing the Challenge and could inform future Sprints.

*On Wednesday, when I was dialoguing with @alonalearning about her process, I proposed we change Backlog to Possibilities, as it is a clearer and more accurate description of what that column represents.

Once they all took the time to brain-dump into Possibilities column, we talked about creating the first Story for this week’s Sprint. A Story is a coherent goal or mini-project within the larger Challenge. The first Story or two come from reviewing all the Possibilities and determining where you are motivated to begin.

In Alona’s case, within the context of her challenge to Understand Genetics she decided she wanted to start with two Stories: Watch all videos and read all articles on Khan Academy and Create a three-generation fake family with odds of them looking like each other. Clearly, Alona has already done some learning about Genetics and had an idea of where she wanted to start.

In cases where the student isn’t able to generate a long list of Possibilities, or doesn’t know where to start with the first Sprint, more active coaching and support (through dialogue) may be necessary. What I’m focusing on is making sure they are motivated by the Stories — help them craft Stories that they are excited to jump into and work through. If they can’t find any, then they may need more support in adding to the list of Possibilities (the ideas that inform the Stories) or, the Challenge may not be fully aligned with their actual interests and internal motivations.

Once the Story (or Stories) are setup for the Sprint, we picked a label color for each Story. From there, we broke out each Task within that Story. Tasks are smallest, simplest, most-actionable items you can have on the board. They need to be specific — often carrying a time-frame, location (or context), and some inherent definition of “done”.

Because you can’t really do “swim lanes” on Trello, I had each student mark all the tasks with the same label as the Story it was associated with. This helps you see where you’re at in the workflow of each Story and to make sure you know which one you’re in when viewing a specific Task.

After the boards were setup we all went about our day. Some of the kids got right into it, others waiting until Tuesday. They are balancing these Challenge Sprints with all the other offerings and activities happening at school. I’m choosing to work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I can be present at Mosaic Mon/Wed/Fri, so on Tuesday I was only communicating with them through Trello.

Once they think a Task is done they move it to “Check-in” (we changed this column name — used to be “Control” but that didn’t feel right). Once they move the card there, I ask them to write @ me in the card so I get a notification that they’re ready for a check-in.

I didn’t explain anymore of my thinking around the process, as to not overload them with info upfront. So, initially, when cards got moved to Check-In they were essentially blank, other than the name of the Task in the title of the card. One I got notified, I wrote back to them and started asking them questions about the task:

What stuck with you from this article or video?

Did you feel engaged and interested throughout most of the task?

What do you feel like you learned?

I asked them to put answers to these kinds of questions in the description of the card for each Task. Other things that came up was when the Task included information or an activity that wasn’t totally clear, or by engaging with it, other questions arose. Thus, we decided to add a new column to the right of Possibilities called Questions. This would be the place to put any unanswered question that comes up for you so it can be reviewed later, marked when answered, or intentionally incorporated into a future Story.

Similarly, I often use the Check-In time to see if there are any new ideas to add to the Possibilities list. This is the real power of the process: within a tightly held iterative loop with lots of reflection of the various pieces, the student is always engaged in a Sprint that is:

• More interesting and/or motivating than the previous one*
• Informed by the the Sprints that came before it
• Always generating new possibilities for future Sprints

*I can imagine there will be times where the interest/excitement in the Sprint may be lower than the previous one, but the motivation will be higher. (Imagine a time when you’ve been working on a project of a while and you get down to the boring parts that aren’t super fun but you’re really motivated to complete them because of larger goal that you’re connected to).

I did some one-on-one check-ins with the kids on Wednesday and then we all met for 30 minutes at the end of the day on Friday. We took this time to simply see how everyone felt about doing this for the first time. Was it helpful? Was it annoying? Was it useful? Overall the feedback was positive. @willmh wasn’t there on Friday, so I’ll have to check in with him, but the other three all wanted to complete this Sprint and set up the next one.

Alona learned that there are TONS of videos and articles on Khan Academy about Genetics, so she renamed her Story according to the topical section she was exploring that week and kept the original idea in Possibilities. She’s now setup to do her second Story — a family tree and gene mapping.

Liberty intentionally practiced Spanish on DuoLingo each day for at least 10 minutes and determined it was worth continuing that, so she set up a new Story with similar Tasks. She also tried out talking to Spanish for an hour one day (even if others couldn’t understand her) and added that to her Possibilities list. She’s now planning to continue with DuoLingo and “Talk to people who speak Spanish”, which involves a series of Tasks.

Gabe’s Challenge to “create a Pong replica with C# in Unity” was iterated to “create a Pong replica with Java in Unity” as he decided Java was better after engaging in his first Story.

What’s really cool about this is the variety of things they are learning from each Task within this Challenge — things that aren’t directly related to the overarching subject. In Liberty’s case, she is going to practice speaking Spanish with others who speak it during her next Sprint. To do this, she’ll need to identify who those people could be, figure out how to contact them and setup times to have a phone call or see them in person, and navigate the best way to learn from/with them. She’s gaining tons of real-world skills in this process and she’s learning how to find the teachers she needs — a skill that is important no matter what the challenge may be.

Gabe and Will are learning how to do research online that is actually useful and moves you from one place to another. If he sticks with this one, Will’s desire to learn to sail is going to lead him towards a bunch of practice finding his own teachers, as well.

This coming week we are all going camping, so we won’t be Sprinting. When we return we plan to do a 3-day Sprint, as that week is only a 4-day week.

I’m excited to see how this goes after a couple Sprints and what it looks like when the kids find their groove with it. Like any agile tool, I’m most riveted to see how it evolves over time!

More later…

 

At ALC Mosaic, we’ve mostly used “Roots” and “Branches” to distinguish between our locations and the programs/ages that they serve. However, in that separation, there’s also some distinctions in how our ALC model is applied. These variations in application — what a Self-Directed Education looks like — are based on what is developmentally effective, needed, and dare I say *cringe* “appropriate”. 

The basic concept is to support the students in engaging in what we are calling Challenge Sprints — a period of time (usually a week) where the student determines a challenge they want to set for themselves (ex: understand World War II history, build a bicycle, become fluent in Spanish, plan a trip to the White Water Center, etc.). The challenge can be anything, big or small in scale. After they articulate the challenge, they produce a backlog of all the tasks or smaller projects that might possibly exist within that challenge.

From there we discuss all the possibilities and articulate what the first step should be — what makes sense to do first? From that conversation, at least one Story is written, sometimes two or three. These initial Stories become the focus of the Sprint. Within each Story is likely to be the set of Tasks — the smallest, most actionable and specifically articulated steps.

After each Task is complete it can go into Control where it is reviewed by another person (sometimes me, as the Coach, sometimes another expert or experienced person, depending on the nature of the Task or its larger Challenge). If the Task needs more work it goes back to Doing for refining before it goes to Done, all of which is determined in dialogue between the student and coach.

When the Sprint ends, the student spends time reflecting on each Task that made it to Done and the larger status of their board. The Tasks that are finished can be assigned any kind of tags, categories, or information the student wants to document. How did this task make me feel? Was it fun? Was it challenging? What skills did it require? The possibilities for marking what was “learned” are limitless, and ultimately, it is up the student to determine what was valuable about it.

This information can be extremely useful, as it not only provides a large inventory of documented learning for a portfolio or transcript, but more importantly it helps inform the next Sprint. Considering what was learned in this sprint, what new items should be added to the Backlog? What’s the next-most-important Story to resolve? Does the Challenge need to be reframed? Does the Challenge need to be tossed completely? Why?

I’ll know more about what this actually looks like when we do it! 🙂

For now, let me back up and show you what we’ve done so far.

Since I made the offering, the four oldest students at Mosaic opted-in to be a part of the “Wings” group and start playing with these tools and practices. Today we met to do a pre-challenge-sprint exercise I came up with to get them thinking about what they might want their first challenge to be.

The exercise was essentially a series of brainstorming prompts about oneself.

 

They each had their own space to work on the exercise.

After we finished the exercise, they looked through all the columns on the right side, the “I want” side, and chose one or two items from each section that really stood out to them. We then went around and talked about those items and dug into the “Why” for each one — why is it that I am really interested in learning this particular programming language, or gaining car mechanic skills, or becoming fluent in Spanish, or traveling more?

Today their reflection time (built into Friday afternoons at ALC Mosaic) was spent capturing this information in their blogs and expanding on the “whys”.

Monday we start with the first Challenge Sprint!

More to come…

Last week I spent four days in Orlando, FL collaborating with a dozen other folks who are working with Agile practices in Education at the Scrum Alliance Global Scrum Gathering. Most of us met for the first time on Sunday morning, then the group almost doubled in size on Monday, adding even more new faces to the mix. We accomplished a lot in 3 days. We were able to:

• meet
• get acquainted
• share some of the work we’re doing in our respective projects
• analyze our individual and collective strengths in the collaborative process
• explore common values and principles threaded through our work
• write a collective manifesto for what Agile in Education represents
• evolve said Manifesto into an ‘Agile Education Compass’ (better metaphor)
• design a visual representation of said Compass
• compose a succinct introduction to the content of our Compass
• present and share the whole thing at the Open Space
• inspire others around the conversation of Agile in the education space

We all left feeling really good about what we created together, but more importantly we left feeling connected to each other — and, to the larger change that we are working to bring about in the world.

Some of the people I worked with had met each other briefly or worked together in some capacity, but most of us were strangers when we began. For me, this all started by seeing and eventually connecting with John Miller on Twitter, who was doing work with public schools under his brand — Agile Classrooms. John connected a bunch of human dots and last September set up a call for us to all meet. It’s pretty prevalent for folks in the Agile community to be really excited about the concepts they’re working with, because they’ve probably directly experienced some level of personal or social transformation from engaging with them. In our group, it felt like there was even more excited anticipation, as we all recognize the big problems in Education and the really savvy solutions that Agile can provide.

After our call in September we made some action steps. John really liked the idea of getting us together to see what an Agile Education Manifesto would look like and how it could advance our common goals. Not too much longer we landed on meeting in Orlando in April after John was able to get Scrum Alliance on board with supporting us. We have felt a lot of gratitude for John and the way he held this intention throughout the year and did what needed to be done to bring us together. Thanks, John!!

I did have some reservations — or cautiousness — about this event and what it would produce. I was definitely excited for it and really interested to get to know everyone, but I was a little uneasy about whether or not we would find alignment around what Agile really means in the education space. For one thing, I was representing the radical end of the spectrum here — ALCs are designing outside of the current system, which fully removes us from any curriculum or cultural constraint that the industrial education model may otherwise impose.

What was really amazing for me, was that my concerns wound up being completely dissolved by the second day. Of course, there was, at times, creative tension among us in the group — but never did I feel like, “Oh man, these people just don’t get it”. In fact, the opposite was true. While there are significant differences is the degrees of creative autonomy the students may have in our schools, it was clear to me that everyone I worked with really understood what kids are truly capable of, what they really need, and how an ideal educational experience would be fully self-directed and self-organized.

It felt great to show up as my authentic self and hold the pieces of this work that I believe to be so important and to have others who not only recognized and appreciated my convictions, but passionately embodied their own.

While ALC is committed to showing “another world is possible” as we create in our open sandbox, I absolutely understand how essential it is for others to be bringing these ideas directly into the system that we all want to replace. I believe for major change to occur in Education, people need to see effective solutions happening all around them. Elements of those solutions need to brought into the current system to create more spaciousness for students and teachers — to allow them to really access their agency for the first time. Simultaneously, we can be building ALCs and other innovative schools from a foundation of complete composability and creativity.

Ultimately, I believe in a world without “school”. I believe we can have living learning communities in our towns and cities that are self-directed and self organized — completely tapped into the resources that exist all round us and within us. To get to something like that we have to pry back the blinders — we have to give people access to themselves and to different language that is inherently co-creative.

I was so happy to meet and work with these brilliant, big-hearted people who believe in giving students (and adults!) the trust that we all need to start creating the world we want to live in.

*Gratitude bow* to you all:

• Arno Delhij
• Guido van Dijk
• Mark French
• Erin Horn
• Marmy Kondras
• John Miller
• Martin Peters
• Robert Rodenbaugh
• Krissyn Sumare
• Mike Vizdos (facilitator)
• Marian Willeke
• Willy Wijnands

Read the Agile Education Compass here.

Check out everyone’s work here.

It was about two years ago when Nancy and I started planning the first ALF Summer. We needed to find a space that would work for the program, and Mosaic needed a bigger space for the school, as it was outgrowing the double-wide trailer where it all began. Nancy found a great church rental in Plaza Midwood, and so that summer Mosaic split into two locations, allowing the space for Lacy to develop the younger half of the school (Roots).

That first full year was crucial for everyone to have the creative space they needed to develop their ideas, play with them, and then begin to see what unified us as one community under the ALC Mosaic umbrella and the within the context of the ALC model. Since last spring, after having some of those important conversations, we’ve been extra excited about moving both programs to one location and and fulfilling our commitment to being a fully age-mixed community. We’ve called this initiative #OneCampus.

There was some initial movement and energy put into #OneCampus from some parents who were motivated to have all their kids in one spot. I still very-much running ALC-NYC back then, and wasn’t really able to focus on real estate acquisition here in Charlotte. We talked about forming an LLC with a group of families who would all invest and then rent the property back to the school. I think something like that could work, but you would want to make sure you were really, really solid with each of those families and that the intentions for investing were all aligned. We held a meeting for people to share what was important or desirable to them in finding a permanent home for the school, which was an important first start in making visible the ideas, desires, and expectations that we were each holding.

It soon became clear that the multi-family LLC idea was going to be more complicated than it should be, and that our first priority was having #OneCampus. Last summer, a friend who attended ALF Summer mentioned to Nancy and I that they were open to discussing possible investment ideas with their company to support us in getting a property for the school. At this stage the school had virtually no “savings”. We didn’t really allow ourselves to take the suggestion too seriously, but a seed was planted none-the-less.

A few months went buy, and then in the fall, a friend of ours mentioned a property she had been eyeing for a while that would be perfect for a school. I decided to drive by it a day or two later to check it out. I was very intrigued — a 7,000 square foot home with two kitchens and two entrances on 8.5 acres with a private lake in the back. It was as if it had been constructed for a school that had two programs, but wanted to be intermixed at the same time. Nancy, Lacy, and Rick and I all went to see it a couple days later and we all fell in love.

The excitement hit a wall when I discovered in the material provided by the agent that the home was part of a private HOA, comprised of all the properties that surrounded the private lake. The HOA agreement was several pages long and included a clause that prohibited anyone from operating a business out of their home. The agent told me this was an issue for others in the past who had been interested. I did a bunch of googling around and found out who the president of the HOA was and called him. I explained our situation and he pretty bluntly said it wouldn’t work because everyone in the HOA would have to vote to change the rules. I started emailing and calling all the other members, but only heard back from a few. Some were polite and sympathetic, some were a little curt and clear that they didn’t want a school (albeit a small and friendly one) operating in their neighborhood. A week later, the agent told me the house was under contract. Woody Point, the name of the road the property sat on and the affectionate name we gave to it, was dead.

Woody Point inspired us to take this idea a little more seriously. Our imaginations were lit up when we walked around this property, imagining 40, 50, even 80 children of all ages playing, building, and homesteading together. After that we began putting it out to the world that we wanted to find the funding we needed to make #OneCampus a reality — literally, we made some Facebook posts about it and talked with experienced and well-connected friends. It was at this point we were reminded by our friend of his interest in supporting the project, which we took much more seriously this time. We had some conversations to begin to understand how that might work and I started talking to others friend and family members who just maybe would be able to invest or know someone who could.

Long story a little bit shorter, several funding options emerged but none were fully fleshed out. One of them, which has proven to be the most significant in making this possible, is a large donation that has been offered to the school to help us find a permanent home for the whole school. Several other people have offered to invest and support in various ways, as well — all contributing to our renewed feeling that this is actually possible for us. It is a combination of factors; I’m privileged to have access to people with financial resources (significant), we’ve done some really amazing work that has inspired others, and I’ve let go of the thoughts that once held me back from simply asking and inviting others to support this work.

In January, the idea of a multi-family collaboration re-emerged, but this time with talk about forming an intentional community that would exist around and in support of the school. We started having some gatherings and dinners with a small group of families who were all interested in this idea and could potentially contribute financially to it, assuming it would be a more permanent home for them. We found a property that had enough land and was affordable — we looked at it a few times as our discussions increased in seriousness. The project seemed like a massive undertaking, especially because the house and additional garage structure on this property were going to need a lot of renovations in order to used for educational occupancy. That part alone could take 6-9 months — living there seemed like a distant idea. I kept coming back to the highest motivation, which was to find a property that allowed us to have the school all in one place. The next highest priority was for Nancy and I to be able to live there. Next after that was for Lacy and Rick’s family to live there, as well.

In February, Jess asked me if I had looked into the property that was just a few blocks away from where she and Lacy live on Monroe Road. I found the place she was talking about — I had seen it before — but noticed the price had just been reduced another $50K. I went and looked at it with Nancy and the architect that we had connected with over the past month or so. We were pleasantly surprised! The main house was charming and over 3K square feet and the second building, which the listing seemed to undervalue, had a huge open space on the ground floor already coded as an assembly space with two bathrooms and multiple exits. Even better, the second floor of the second building had a very nice two-bedroom apartment where Nancy and I could live. Lacy and Rick’s house happened to be a 5 minute walk from here. When I told them about it, the said they’ve fantasized about having the school at this exact property many times (as they pass it often), but knew it was out of our price range (until recently).

This property wasn’t the 10+ acres that we had initially imagined. It was under 2 acres and much closer to the city, but in an area that is developing quickly. It wasn’t going to be the location of a multi-family intentional community, but there were a lot of houses in the neighborhood that surrounded it that were affordable and could be purchased by some of our families over time. It was a place that we could all be together, where we could have some animals (chickens and even a pig), where Nancy and I could live there, and other facilitators would be a short walk away. It was a place that was accessible to a lot of our families and in a prime location. It had great potential as a gathering space for other events and organizations that we’d want to support.

Now it was time to figure out what our financing options really were. Our friend who initially offered to discuss investing in the project was too busy and unable to find someone to take this on. Adding to the complexity is that he, and his company, are not based in the US. After a few weeks of no clear progress, I made some more bold invitations. Serendipitously, another close friend and her partner were interested in investing in real estate together and she happened to be a huge supporter and ALC collaborator.

It took several more weeks to get clear on all the details and to get a real estate agent in on the conversations. A huge variable for us was not knowing how much the renovations necessary for educational occupancy would cost. The property had been on the market for almost three years, but the recent price drop was making it affordable for us to consider. We started with a really low offer. The Seller opted to not provide a counter-offer, saying they had received offers higher than this in the past. We put in another offer significantly higher than the first and the Seller responded with a counter-offer, though it was only a slight decrease from the listing price.

The whole process was driving me mad. I like to have very open, honest, and transparent conversations. I’m not a fan of beating around the bush, or bullshit in general. This person wanted to sell their property for the last three years and we wanted to buy it. Though the real estate agents involved were super nice, I really wish we could have just sat down at a table and had a discussion in order to get on the same page. Instead, it was a lot of guessing, angling, and maneuvering. BLECH.

We were told that another offer was going to come in from a different party, but that we would get a chance to respond if we were outbid. We submitted another offer, inching our way forward to where we thought was a middle ground, not sure how real or serious this story of another Buyer was going to be. Two days passed. Then we heard that the Seller had decided not to sell. What? With two offers on the table, she’s not selling? The listing came offline and the physical signs were actually taken down from the property. Her agent told our agent that she wasn’t communicating much with her but that she was planning to move back into the house. We were dumbfounded. We decided the only next move was to submit one final offer for the price that she originally countered with and hope that would change her mind. It wasn’t easy, as it meant that we’d have to engage our community in a big fundraising campaign to cover the costs of all renovations now that the closing price was rising well above our target.

This was all happening in the past two weeks. Last Thursday we found out that the Seller decided to “go in a different direction” and that another Buyer had “met her terms”. Just like that it was under contract…and not with us.

The disappointment and frustration set in the next day and I’m almost done fully releasing it. I realize this blog post is essentially a long narrative and reads like an adult diary entry. I don’t know if there’s much value that I’m sharing here, or if anyone is going to find this particularly useful to read. That is OK. I’m mostly writing this for myself — to document this journey and share what I’ve been putting a good bit of energy into lately.

I’ve learned a lot through this process.

I’ve learned that there are so many people in my life that love and support the work Nancy and I are doing — the work that so many of my closest friends are doing. I’ve learned that people are generous when they are inspired. Not just with money, but with their time. It takes a lot of different layers of expertise to figure out how to buy a property and have it legally occupied by a school. I’ve taken a lot of bold actions and have been really clear about my intentions and needs with everyone from whom I’ve sought help and they’ve all been incredibly supportive.

I’ve been able to figure out a way for the school, as a non profit, to leverage the donation that’s been promised, to purchase a property itself with funding from a community lending organization. I’ll be moving those pieces forward in the coming weeks so we are more prepared to act swiftly on the next opportunity.

Really, it has been a huge  lesson in how to create the life we want for ourselves, while being fully present to and grateful for everything we already have.

For me, it went something like this:

Be inspired.

Understand and clarify the source of your inspiration.

Figure out the moving pieces and which ones need attention.

Imagine exactly what you want and need. Imagine it again.

Act boldly. Make explicit and well-defined requests for the help you need.

Assume others want to help you. Recognize when someone may not; that’s OK.

Allow yourself to be captivated by your desire and the imagination you can create around your desires. Let that imagination motivate you to keep acting boldly.

Let go of how it will happen and which form it will take, and stay committed to root of your desire.

 

So we are marching forward!

Trusting that the “right path” will unfold does not mean sitting back and doing nothing — it means taking bold action to your desired goal while releasing specific expectations at the same time. The real lessons of life are learned through our experiences — they appear and reappear often and are self-evident. I have learned — again — that there is to done, there is no end.

“Hey, I’d love to collaborate with you!”

For people who love to please others, are mostly inspired by the endless possibilities they see, or feel like they are overwhelmed and lacking too many abilities they need — it can be easy to welcome in too many people/too much collaboration. Then, it just becomes more work to manage the mismatch.

For folks who are very headstrong, have strong visions, are super proud of the work they’ve done, or are perfectionists — it can be really challenging to remain open to the right kinds of collaborations. Then, you just wind up drowning in the work or making too small of an impact for real growth to be generated.

I’ve been both of these people — on the wrong side of the collaboration sweet-spot. Those experiences have helped me learn how to recognize very quickly who is worth collaborating with and who probably is not. At this point, I feel like this is one of more crucial skills I’ve developed for the role I play in the ALC Network.

Here are a few conditions that I spat out very quickly when discussing with @bear how to determine when it is a right fit to collaborate with someone, specifically in the ALC context.

I may expound on this more later because it is a really important and underrated skill to develop.

• They show respect and reverence for the work you’ve already done.
• They demonstrate a knowledge and awareness of the content you’ve shared.
• They ask permission for deeper levels of engagement.
• Their potential contributions make it easy to say yes to collaboration because they meet a need and build on the work and patterns that have already been established, rather than suggesting disruptions to them. (Unless, of course, a disruption is being sought.)

What am I missing?

This week I was pleased to finally nail down the dates (and one of the locations) for Peter Gray speaking events in NYC and Charlotte. I love Peter’s work and I’m super excited about having connected with him and some other great folks he’s working with these last few months.

I hosted a couple of tours at ALC-NYC this week. One of them was part of a city-wide, week-long, micro-school tour that Manisha Snoyer put together for her project, Cottage Class. Later in the week, I was able to attend an open house at AltSchool at their new location in the LES. It has been great to see more things like AltSchool and the XQ Project coming out of mainstream industries (AltSchool is started by a former Google exec and XQ is funded by Laurene Jobs).

It’s very clear that support for education transformation is going to come from innovative businesses, change-makers, and thought-leaders in management and entrepreneurialism. In our culture, agree or not, success is working for Google or creating the best-selling app, or having your startup acquired by Facebook. You probably saw those articles being passed around a couple months back about Elon Musk un-schooling his kids and more recently funding a small school for them to practice self-directed learning. These are the people who will influence public education to make slow changes overtime — not politicians, and sadly, not local communities.

The last thing I want to do is paint myself or ALC as adversarial to projects like AltSchool, XQ, or any other (new?) Progressive Ed model. I want to both cheer these ideas on, and, at the same time, draw a really important distinction between what they do and what ALC does.

There’s a quote by Peter Gray that sums it up better than I could:

My argument to society at large is that we need to stop thinking about educating children and start thinking about how to provide the conditions that maximize each child’s ability to educate himself or herself.

Everyone hates testing. Duh. It’s easy to see how preparing for and scoring well on a test has nothing to do with anything outside of that menial task. It’s great that people are fighting back against that and demanding changes to public education. It’s great that publications like KQED’s MindShift and Edutopia exist and that there’s EdChat on Twitter and teachers who are passionate about their profession are creating and finding outlets to explore better ideas.

It’s great that Laurene Jobs wants to fund some new high schools and that her organization sees emotional intelligence and student choice as fundamental to an effective education. It’s fantastic that Mark Zuckerberg and other silicon superstars are backing AltSchool, and that they too want to broaden the definition of education to include more than what the industrial era sold us.

All of that is better than none of that. Yet, there is a fundamental and utterly essential distinction between educating kids and supporting them in self-educating. If education is viewed as preparation for life, then the child is learning that there’s always something else to strive for and chase — that they’re not already equipped with what they need, they’re not yet whole. If education is something that educators are responsible for, then children are learning the lesson every-single-day that they’re not in charge of their lives.

When I call the New York State Department of Ed and they need paperwork from me for something, they almost always give me a fax number. I try and remain calm and remind them it is 2015. “Can I have an email address to send a photo or scan to instead”, I usually ask.

It’s worse when it is a massive institution, but the metaphor works on a micro-scale, as well. Parents, grandparents, or teachers who grew up in a completely different world are supposed educate kids about how to live in one that doesn’t even exist yet. The biggest economical and social issues we face as a global society cannot be solved by continuing to pass them down to the next generation, leaving them no choice but to accept them as true. “Deal with it” — the most significant lesson learned in any school.

We have to learn how to cheer our children on as the creators of a new world and as painters of possibility. It can’t and won’t happen until we make their education, their education.