Patrick F. Bassett, President

www.nais.org

The Right-Brained Future: Creating 21st C. Schools (The What, The Why, The How)

Patrick F. Bassett, President

www.nais.org

1.For “Teaching in 21st C. Schools (The Right-Brained Future)”: See The Right-Brained Future PPT

2.For “Change Agency Leadership (How To Change When Change Is Hard)”: See Change Agency PPT

3.For “Schools of the Future (Creating 21st C. Schools)”: See Schools of the Future PPT)

Can We Agree on What To Teach in a 21st Century “School of the

Future”?

What Can 5-year Olds Teach Us?

The skills of …

The values of…

What’s on your list of skills and values that we should teach for the 21st C.?

Creating the 21st. C. Curriculum

The Generative Question: What curriculum will prepare students for the 21st Century? What skills & values will be required?

• creativity and innovation• facility with the use of ideas and abstractions• self-discipline and organization to manage one’s own work and drive it through to successful conclusion• leadership• ability to function well as a member of a team

Creating the 21st. C. Curriculum

The Generative Question: What curriculum will prepare students for the 21st Century? What skills & values will be required?

• disciplined mind (expertise in a field)• synthesizing mind (scanning, filtering, and weaving into coherence)• creating mind (discovery and innovation)• respectful mind (open mindedness and inclusiveness)• ethical mind (moral courage)Multiple

Intelligences

Creating the 21st. C. Curriculum

The Generative Question: What curriculum will prepare students for the 21st Century? What skills & values will be required?

• cross-disciplinary knowledge• communication skills• teamwork• analytical reasoning• real world problem-solving skills

Creating the 21st. C. Curriculum

The Generative Question: What curriculum will prepare students for the 21st Century? What skills & values will be required?

• Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving• Collaboration across Networks and Leading by

Influence• Agility and Adaptability• Initiative and Entrepreneurialism• Effective Oral and Written Communication;• Access and Analyzing Information• Curiosity and Imagination.

“There is no strong evidence that any of the Seven Survival Skills are being taught at any grade level in American public schools. Instead, class time is narrowly focused on teaching only the skills and content that will be tested.” (pp 76-77)

Creating the 21st. C. Curriculum

The Generative Question: What curriculum will prepare students for the 21st Century? What skills & values will be required?

ETS’ new Personal Potential Index 1-5 scale for recommendation letters to accompany candidate’s GRE scores to graduate school:• knowledge and creativity• communication skills• team work• resilience, planning and organization• ethics and integrity

KnowledgeWorks newsletter, Oct. 2007

The public perception of the gap between “what’s important” and “how effective schools are in teaching it.”

Creating the 21st. C. Curriculum

The Generative Question: What curriculum will prepare students for the 21st Century? What skills & values will be required? Bassett’s Conflated List:(1) character (self-discipline, growth mindset, empathy, integrity, resilience, persistence, and courage); (2) creativity, imagination, and entrepreneurial spirit; (3) real-world problem-solving on a local, national, global stage (analysis, filtering, & synthesis: project-based, not text-based learning, & technology-enhanced); (4) communications, especially public speaking; (5) teaming; (6) leadership.

Can We Re-think How To Assess for 21st Century Skills and

Values?

Assessment for 21st C. Schools

Value-added Testing (formative not normative): MAP & CW&RA

Outcomes over time: Longitudinal Studies of Graduates

Demonstrations of Learning: ePortfolios for students and teachers

Demonstrations of Learning: “What you do, not what you know, the ultimate test of education.” ~PFB Tweet

1.Conduct a fluent conversation in a foreign language about of piece of writing in that language.

2.Write a cogent and persuasive opinion piece on a matter of public importance.

3.Declaim with passion and from memory a passage that is meaningful, of one’s own or from the culture’s literature or history.

4.Produce or perform a work of art.

5.Construct and program a robot capable of performing a difficult physical task.

Demonstrations of Learning

6.Exercise leadership.

7.Using statistics, assess if a statement by a public figure is demonstrably true.

8.Assess media coverage of a global event from various cultural/national perspectives.

9.Describe a breakthrough for a team on which you participated in which you contributed to overcoming a human-created obstacle.

10.Demonstrate a commitment to creating a more sustainable future with means that are scalable.

Life’s Real Tests: “Paper tests are poor proxies for the tests of life.” ~PFB tweet

Answer “Yes or No”

1. Under pressure, do you do the right thing?

2. Is your default attitude positive in your places and spaces (the workplace, the home, and the community)?

3. Do you see failures as growth opportunities?

4. When you witness bad behavior do you assume it’s a matter of situation rather than character?

5. Do you leave the trail cleaner than you found it?

6. Do you confront incivility when you find it in your midst?

Life’s Real Tests: “Paper tests are poor proxies for the tests of life.” ~PFB tweet

Answer “Yes or No”

7. Do core virtues win the daily battle for your soul?

8. Do you exceed the need when meeting your family and community obligations?

9. Do you give more than you take?

10.Are you playful?

11.Do you model that hard work trumps talent every time?

12.Do you believe in something larger than you and yours?

PFB Tweet: “Values are the value-added of an independent school education.”

How Do We Teach the “Right-Brained” Skills and Values for

the 21st C.?

Left Brain = Logical, Linear, Convergent, Analytical Thinking (IQ)Right Brain = Imaginative, Intuitive, Divergent, Empathic Thinking (EQ)

Teaching to A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)

Teaching the Six Aptitudes for the 21st C. Conceptual Age:

#1 Design: Beyond functionality to beauty and message. Photography in poetry class. Designer frames via CAD and fabricators in applied

science class.Snowball grenade launcher in middle school science (New

Canaan Country Day School) (eggs for warmer climates)Rube Goldberg contests (Fay School & Morgan Park Academy) Robotics competitions (Falmouth Academy & Delbarton &

Canton Country Day School). Photoshop assignment: create a book jacket that conveys

visually a truth for novel: parent jury.Conserving energy at school & home via thermal camera

analysis (St. Richard’s)Third graders as inventors.

Teaching to A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)

Teaching the Six Aptitudes for the 21st C. Conceptual Age:#2 Story: Beyond argument & info to compelling

narrative. Story is where “high concept” and “high touch” intersect.

Tall Tales (Allen-Stevenson School)

Oral/video histories (The Urban School (interviews of Japanese internment camp and Holocaust survivors)

Mock trial competitions (Louise S. McGehee School)

Julius Caesar converted to modern context (Lakeside)

Role-playing Dinner w/Jefferson (Conserve School)

Podcasts @Smithsonian & Mobile podcasting (Holton Arms & Landon; check out Gcast for hosting and Polleverywhere.com)

Cartoon caption contests (New Yorker & NAIS)

One-sentence stories: e.g.,. Complete this sentence to make it a story: “The head of school left….”

Teaching to A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)

Teaching the Six Aptitudes for the 21st C. Conceptual Age:

#3 Empathy: Not just logic but identifying and relating to others. Not just capitalists but social entrepreneurs.

www.FreeRice.com viral marketing. Locks for Love.

Service learning @ Breck and Columbus School for Girls & Lick-Wildmerding’s Center for Civic Engagement

Punahou economics + social entrepreneurship = capstone project as graduation requirement.

Teaching to A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)

Teaching the Six Aptitudes for the 21st C. Conceptual Age:

#4 Symphony: Not just focus but orchestration. Beyond analysis to synthesis. Complex real-world problem-solving via team-structured, project-based learning.

Lake Ridge start-a-business. K-4 harvesting & selling eggs at Lamplighter. Coral reef research via scuba diving at St. Mathew'sStudent credit union at Kent Denver Meadowbroook XO laptop partnership with South

African school. Green Cup Challenge – Ethel Walker School VideoRio Grande School’s forensics simulation. Web-based collaborations: NAIS’s Challenge 20/20. Pre-schoolers and third-graders as researchers at Boulder

Journey School and Foothills Elementary.

Teaching to A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)

Teaching the Six aptitudes in the 21st C. Conceptual Age.

#5 Play: Unsupervised, unstructured play teaches creativity, negotiation, conflict resolution. Daily moments of joy and “flow.” Play related to “flow” for peak performance & humor.

Rediscovering the outdoors (Last Child in the Woods) at Albuquerque Academy: building a fort, playing in a stream; eventually: wilderness solos.

Web-based games Teacher-created games: Grammar-ama

Teaching to A Whole New Mind (Daniel Pink)

Teaching the Six aptitudes in the 21st C. Conceptual Age.

#6 Meaning: Beyond comfort and abundance to meaning and spirit (Maslow’s hierarchy). Sharing how YOU find (and make) meaning in life.

Asking kids, “What do you believe?”Inviting kids to write Letters to God.

So what’s your vision for the school of the future?

Your first small steps?

The End!See Related Slides in the Appendix

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink

Left-brain dominated schools and economy: 20th C. belonged to the left brain

analytical thinking, measured by SATs and schooled by knowledge acquisition.

Produced an economy and society built on analysis and based on logical, linear, technological capabilities of the Information Age.

Rewards went to techies writing code; attorneys crafting contracts; MBAs crunching numbers.

These skills will still be necessary but not sufficient.

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink

Right brain transformation of the economy and society: 21st. C will belong to the right brain, measured by

creativity and empathy.Produced by an economy that outsources production of

goods and intellectual professional services and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture understanding of the Conceptual Age

Rewards will go to creators; empathizers (EQ); pattern recognizers; meaning makers: i.e., artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, big picture thinkers …and master teachers. The “Creative Class.”

Right brain rising into prominence.

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink

Daniel Goleman’s (Emotional Intelligence) meta-analysis of % of career success related to IQ: What %?

a) 50-60%b) 35-45%c) 23-29%d) 15-20%

Answer: 4-10% (“Confining your answers to the givens is slavish adherence to left-brain linear thinking.”)

IQ influences choice of career, not success in it. “The ‘A’ students become…”

Message from the Marketplace: “VUCA University” Source: Knowledge Works Foundation Primer, Dec 2006, Bob Johansen

The U.S.’s National War College ( a graduate school for military and defense service leaders)— is now informally calling itself “VUCA University,” for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

The War College is transforming itself into a different kind of educational institution: simulation gaming as a primary pedagogy.

To thrive in the VUCA world, people must learn the skills of vision, understanding, clarity and agility.

Message from the Marketplace: “VUCA University” Source: Knowledge Works Foundation Primer, Dec 2006, Bob Johansen Students, the “digital natives,” have the media savvy to learn

in new ways, if teachers of all kinds can learn to use the media that the kids already know to use. (cf. Mark Prensky)

Wikipedia definition of dilemma questions the traditional definition with its focus on two equally bad choices: multiple possible choices. Educate beyond “problem-solving” to “sense-making” of dilemmas that are unsolvable, threatening, recurrent, complex, and enigmatic (cf. NAIS’s Challenge 2020).

Skill-set: beyond tactical rules-based problem-solving to strategic, principles-based “sense-making”: e.g., ethical “right vs. right” dilemmas.

Message from the Marketplace: Tough Choices or Tough Times Report of the New Commission on The Skills of the American Workforce, 2007: Nation@Risk2

“The crucial new factor, the one that alone can justify higher wages in this country than in other countries with similar levels of cognitive skills, is creativity and innovation.” p. 29

“[O]ur schools emphasize memory and analytical abilities and therefore may not benefit creative students. This is not true of the best of our independent schools and suburban schools But it is emphatically true of most of our schools.” p.30

“People those who are comfortable in working in artistic, investigative, highly social or entrepreneurial environments are more likely to succeed…. Schools will have to learn to simulate those environments….” p. 31

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink

All six aptitudes rooted in the right brain.High Concept: capacity to capture patterns &

opportunities, create beauty, to craft a compelling story, to combine ideas into something new.

High Touch: capacity for empathy, social judgment, joy, search for meaning and transcendence.

PFB: Best leaders have both. Best teachers are high EQ, high touch teachers (right-brain), rather than having the most discipline-specific expertise (left-brain), although they have that as well.

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink Agricultural Age (18th C. farmers: brawn) Industrial Age (19th C. factory workers: stamina/repetitive

skills)

Information Age (20th C. knowledge worker: left brain)

Conceptual Age (21st C. creators and empathizers: right brain)

Transitional Stories: – Coming of the Industrial Age: John Henry vs. the Pile-

driver– Coming of the Conceptual Age: Gary Kasparov vs. Big

Blue

Business on the Right-brain Bandwagon

“What we’ve got at GM now is a general comprehension that you can’t run the business by the left, intellectual, analytical side of the brain, and you have to have a lot of right side of the brain. You have to have a lot of right side creative input. We are in the arts and entertainment business, and we’re putting a huge emphasis on world-class design.” ~Richard Lutz, Vice-chairman of General Motors Corporation.Source: New York Times (06/09/05)

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink

The Implications for Schools“MFA the new MBA”: UCLA Art more selective than

Harvard Business School: Corporate recruiters downplaying MBAs and looking for the creatives at RISD, Art Institute of Chicago, Cranbrook Institute of Art.

Medical School: Columbia Medical School: Beyond computer diagnostics

to “patient narratives” Yale Medical School students studying at Yale Center for

British Art to hone powers of observations of subtlety. UCLA medical school makes students role-play

symptoms to be hospitalized overnight to empathize with how it feels to be a patient.

Independent schools: Imagination and EQ and right-brained values (ethics) the new RoI: “Values are the value-added….”

A Whole New Mind ~ Daniel Pink Robert Sternberg (Yale & Tufts) and the “anti-SAT” Rainbow

Project: Instead of the SAT, candidates for college given…A title and asked to write a narrative (“The Octopus’

Sneakers”) (Tufts Admissions Essay: “Confessions of a Middle-School Bully”)

A social problem and asked how to solve it (“Tufts: “You’ve been a straight A student and you get your first D Your roommate stays up all night. ”). PFB Note: similar skill to “I Love Bees.”

A Lego robotics team assignmentA blank New Yorker cartoon and asked to supply the

caption.

Results?Twice as successful in predicting success in college than the

SAT.

School Re-engineering Options

A school within a school:

– open to any or all for part of their program

– opportunity to “concentrate” in an area of interest and strength: e.g., robotics; the arts; entrepreneurship; inventors workshop; design workshop; Web2.0 development; podcasting; or any of the traditional disciplines: e.g., Shattuck-St. Mary’s “Centers of Excellence (hockey; figure skating; soccer; arts); Wilbraham & Monson’s Center for Entrepreneurism & Global Studies; Hawken’s experiential ed extension campus at “University Circe” in Cleveland.

– early-ed signature program: e.g., Reggio Emilia

A semester school option:

– within one’s own school or among a collaborative

– Mountain School (VT), CITYterm (NYC); The Island School (Bahamas); SEGL-the School for Ethical and Global Leadership (DC); Maine Coast Semester; Ocean classroom (MA); Rocky MT Semester (CO); Conserve School (WI)

School Re-engineering Options

Re-tooled Missions or Pedagogy: Mel Levine’s “Schools Attuned” or Purnell School’s “ (NJ) strengths-based” affinities program or Wildwood School’s (CA) project-based curriculum built around developing seven habits of "heart and mind," including collaboration, ethical behavior, perspective and service to the common good.

Virtual collaboratives

– match schools from all over world

– project-based curriculum addressing real-world projects and problems

– Virtual Science Fair for NESA (Near-East South Asia Schools Association) international schools

– NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) Challenge 20/20 Program based upon Jean-Francois Rischard’s High Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years To Solve Them.

School Re-engineering Options One-day per week or month-long alternative

curricula– Service and career co-curriculum on Wednesdays

at Madeira School (DC)– Colloquia Wednesdays at Northside College

Preparatory School (IL)– Tech internships at the Cristo Rey schools (CA) – Winterim (January) at Harpeth Hall (TN) and

Immersion at Miami Valley School (OH) and Oakwood School (CA)

Whatever else inspires the “R&D” design team – Volunteer team within the school: students, faculty,

venture capitalists, board members, and parents

Vision #1 The Hallmarks of 21st C Schools Philly’s “School of the Future”

Built by the school district for $63M, largely with public funding and with “knowledge” support (“Microsoft smarts”) from the software giant.

Admissions by lottery: No entrance exams or tuition: 170 freshmen picked by lottery from 1500 applicants: 90% African-American; 10% special needs, 85% poor.

Wireless, tablet PC provided for each student.

Paperless school functioning on web-based lessons and customized interactive software for students, digital whiteboards for classrooms, and smart cards for “business” (opening doors, lockers, and paying for lunch, books, and supplies).

Philly’s “School of the Future”

Forsaking of traditional subjects in preference for real-world topics and project-based learning. "It's not about memorizing certain algebraic equations and then regurgitating them in a test," Grover (the principal) said. "It's about thinking how math might be used to solve a quality-of-water problem, or how it might be used to determine whether or not we are safe in Philadelphia from the avian flu.”

New Microsoft software, “Virtual Teacher Assistant” provides customizable interactions with students so that they can direct their learning pace and so that teachers can test and measure their progress online.

Philly’s “School of the Future” Tracking online by parents of their child's work and teacher

feedback.

LEED-certified, environmentally-friendly building: natural lighting; photovoltaic glass that produces electricity; cabinets from trees removed in the building process and from sustainably-harvested trees; energy-saving, insulating gardens on the roof; 40,000 gallon reservoir tank that captures rain water to flush toilets; a 50% more efficient heating system; native grasses and plants in landscaping to eliminate the need for a sprinkler system and hence huge savings of water.

Assessment of students and staff related to Microsoft’s “education competency wheel,” a set of 37 essentials skills, a tool modeled on Microsoft’s hiring and professional development competencies.

Philly’s “School of the Future” Graduation requirements: fluency in a foreign language; completion of a

research project; demonstration of 21st. C. skills such as problem solving and time management.

Online tutorials from Villanova honors students. Online courses, such as one in urban design and another in robotics from the University of Pennsylvania.

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The Catholic School version of innovation includes the Cristo Rey high tech schools: 4 days of classes, one day of internships in the tech industry.

The Charter School versions of innovation include CHAD (Charter High School for Architecture and Design) in Philly and Hyde Charter School in DC.

The Google School: Google launches classroom project (Source: By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com 10/11/2006): Google for Educators: how-to video tutorials for products like Blogger; lesson plans for applications like Google Earth; links to a training academy for "Google certified teachers," a pilot program for teachers to learn about technology.”

What’s School Like for Kids?

How was your first day in kindergarten?

“I loved it, but it’s a long time to keep your shoes on.” ~Avery Maher, Age 5

How about for adolescents?

“There’s no obstreperous behavior on the part of an adolescent that a little rational discourse…

…won’t exacerbate.” ~Anonymous, on the Internet

The Adolescent Brain

Under construction: Prefrontal cortex (PFC) not fully formed until 20s. Adolescent response to stimuli more amygdala (instinct)-driven than PFC (intellect)-driven. PFC is responsible for…• setting priorities• organizing plans and ideas• forming strategies• allocating attention• controlling impulses

Need caring, present adults and school environments that help them learn appropriate adult behaviors. ~”The Adolescent Brain”: Weinberger, Elvevag, Giedd

PFB: Also need schools that engage them.