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Grant Lichtman wrote a great post on 'Teaching the Death of Compromise" that I found really essential. But one quote caught as I read past -  "In school or at home we would never countenance such a solution amongst our children. The idea that changing the rules to win because, at this moment, I can, and that somehow that is the right thing to do, runs contrary to everything mature adults know about how human social groups work best."

It caught as I tried to digest it because, well, isn't this exactly what we do to children in our schools every day? "The idea that changing the rules to win because, at this moment, I can, and that somehow that is the right thing to do."

My first thought was the obvious - that teacher who says "you're late the minute the bell rings," but 50 or 80 minutes later says, "the bell doesn't matter, you wait for me to dismiss you." Yes, these teachers still work in our schools. But it's so much bigger and so much more insidious than that.

We all know that we constantly change the rules with kids so that, "we win." We change the rules every time kids change classes so they suit our personal adult preferences. We change the rules depending on the day, the month, or just adult mood swings - perhaps one child has angered us or upset us - perhaps it is testing month - perhaps we think the weather is bad, even if kids don't. Perhaps many things. But for whatever reasons our rules for kids change so that 'we win,' so that we remain in control.
Instructional Tolerance
More than a decade ago at Michigan State University's College of Education ( this is NOT an endorsement of any graduate program there - just to be very clear) a few of us began to talk about Instructional Tolerance, the idea of teachers - school adults - accepting student choices: choices in seating, in technology use, in use of time, in use of learning strategies, maybe even in order of skill and knowledge acquisition. It seemed both an incredibly radical idea and yet so amazingly obvious. After all, this concept had been proven across the world for a hundred years - from Marie Montessori to John Dewey to the Summerhill-style and open classrooms and Schools-Without-Walls of the 1960s to the 1980s. But, of course, it was an idea vehemently denied by over a hundred years of school administrators and teacher education institutions.

So, what's the truth? And what's the problem?

The unfortunate truth is that classroom management and our structures of school are indeed about "winning." About winning a victory over what we see as the great dangers of childhood and adolescence. We treat children and adolescents as if they are dangerous aboriginals who must be civilized. The spontaneity, the curiosity, the invention, even the patience of kids are conceived as things to be crushed and eliminated.

The bullying that occurs in schools begins right there, with adults seeking victories over kids in that cultural/colonial war. And that is the primary thing kids learn in school.

They learn about power, and how power is personal, and how power is abused. They learn that humans don't really deserve to be seen as equally deserving of dignity, but are to be classified and ranked, honor rolled or not, put on the team or cut.

When we read Grant Lichtman's brilliant piece on the disintegration of our society we in education need to accept our share of the blame. We teach the wrong things, we sell the wrong vision of the world, we allow Mitch McConnells and Donald Trumps to develop and see themselves as entitled.

And that's what makes Instructional Tolerance essential. The minute we teach children that our own personal preferences allow us to limit their world and their learning simply because of short term positional power, we start down the dark path to the current way our Supreme Court justices are chosen.

How do we change that? How do we change that now?

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What "Instructional Tolerance" means and why it matters...

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Grant Lichtman wrote a great post on 'Teaching the Death of Compromise " that I found really essential. But one quote caught as I read past -  "In school or at home we would never countenance such a solution amongst our children.

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The More Innovative I Have Become, The Less Classroom Management I Have to Deal With

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The More Innovative I Have Become, The Less Classroom Management I Have to Deal With

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Someone who was reading " The Innovator's Mindset ", approached me and talked about the impact it had on their teaching and learning. I was honoured by their kind words, but this statement that she made has stuck in my head:

"The more innovative I have become, the less classroom management I have to deal with."

Simple yet mind blowing.

Is this not true? Giving student ownership of their learning and thinking about the question, " Would I want to be a learner in my own classroom?", would create an environment where students are more likely to be a part of their learning, as to separate themselves from the classroom. This question has never meant to be a "yes or no" answer, but something to have educators reflect on their work every single day. Thinking about this question daily would only lead to more success in our profession.

In another conversation, an educator talked about their school trying to figure out what to do with student absences in their classrooms. While a group was looking at types of consequences to "deter" absences, this principal was wondering why students didn't want to come to school in the first place? We often want to fix others, as opposed to explore our own actions and try to understand what those are leading to. We should always look first at changing the environment, not the student.

Sheila Vick recently wrote a blog exploring this statement, and providing, " 4 Ways in Which Innovative Education Simplifies Classroom Management ". They are the following:

1. Innovative education naturally gives students more choice and autonomy. They take ownership of their learning. This inevitably means that students are more excited and interested in their learning and thus, more engaged and focused on their work. Students are too immersed in their learning to have time for misbehavior.

2. Innovative education is a naturally inclusive approach that respects diversity within the classroom. It is a collaborative approach that allows for varying abilities, strengths and intelligences (think Howard Gardner). A good teacher will work to unearth and develop every student's strengths and passions and help them to find their purpose within the group. No student is left out. This is also all an important part of their social and emotional learning and it creates a sense of community within the classroom - a community that values everyone.

3. When we give students a voice, choice and autonomy, it also gives the message to our students that we trust them, which helps build the teacher-student relationship. What I have learned about attachment theory over the years, is that people (including students) obey out of a function of attachment. Essentially, we want to do good by those we like and feel connected to. A strong teacher-student connection, therefore usually leads to more positive student behaviour.

4. In an innovative classroom, the teacher becomes a leader and facilitator (versus boss of the classroom and feeder of content). The teacher learns alongside the students. They guide their students in identifying problems and in solving them, including as it pertains to classroom management issues. This more level playing field of sorts, has students less interested in "bucking the system, " if you will, and more interested in working in collaboration with the teacher on the classroom climate and culture.

Vick goes on to make this important connection:

To summarize, an innovative approach to education results in all students being more included and engaged in their learning. Relationships between the teacher and students, as well as between students are strengthened, which results in the classroom community naturally working better together. Classroom management becomes a whole group endeavour and not just the teacher's job.

This is not to say that student's shouldn't have any responsibility on their own behaviour in the classroom. I believe that we need to teach students that ultimately they create their own future and that there are some times in school, work, and learning, where things will be boring and we have to plow through. But this applies to ourselves as educators as well. We create our own realities. A teacher's job isn't to "entertain", but showing value and meaning in learning, can often help connect the seemingly most menial tasks to a larger purpose. When we focus on what we control and constantly work towards creating deeper and more meaningful learning opportunities for our students, the impact on our students will be that much more profound.

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"The more innovative I have become, the less classroom management I have to deal with."

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Someone who was reading " The Innovator's Mindset ", approached me and talked about the impact it had on their teaching and learning. I was honoured by their kind words, but this statement that she made has stuck in my head: "The more innovative I have become, the less classroom management I have to deal with."

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Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson

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Ted Talk: What Adults Can Learn From Kids

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Ted Talk: What Adults Can Learn From Kids

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What adults can learn from kids | Adora Svitak

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The Agile grouplet formed to try to take this idea and spread it throughout the organization. It did so by banding together and reaching out to as many groups as it could to teach the new process. It created "Agile Office Hours" when you could stop by and ask questions about the process. It handed out books and gave internal talks on the topic. It attended staff meetings and created the concept of the "Agile Safari," in which you could volunteer to work for a time in groups that were using Agile, to see how it ticks.

When you're moving as fast as Google is, you don't always get the chance to button up the little things, and over time they build up and become annoying. In addition to the efforts of our professional quality assurance team, we have the Fixit grouplet, which coordinates special Fixit days when it tries to have our engineers focus on solving one class of problems. Sometimes we have Documentation Fixits, when we try to catch up on all the internal documentation that we have let slide.

Or my favorite: the Customer Happiness Fixit, when we fix all those little things that bug our users and make them sad - for example, when the hotkeys aren't just right on mobile phones. Many of these events come with special T-shirts and gifts to reward the engineers who take a little time out to work on them.

In my 20 percent time, I started the Testing grouplet. This was born of the idea - not mine - that if developers wrote automated tests as they wrote their code, their code would be better for it. Less time fixing bugs means more time building stuff.

We started with engineers from all over the company meeting every couple of weeks to brainstorm. Slowly, over time, we started turning into activists, planning to actually start improving things.

We started building better tools and giving informal talks to different technical groups. We started building a curriculum for our Nooglers - newly hired Google employees - so that they would start off right. With our pooled 20 percent time, we slowly turned the organization on its axis and made developer testing a common part of the development practice.

Google works from the bottom up. If you have a great technical idea, you don't have your V.P. send out a memo telling everybody to use it. Instead, you take it to your fellow engineers and convince them that it's good. Good ideas spread fast, and this approach keeps us from making technical mistakes. But it also means that the burden falls upon you to spread your idea.

In the Testing grouplet, our idea was to have developers start writing their own tests. But no matter how hard we tried, we weren't reaching engineers fast enough in our growing organization. One day, toward the end of a long brainstorming meeting, we came up with the idea of putting up little one-page stories, called episodes, in bathroom stalls discussing new and interesting testing techniques. Somebody immediately called it "Testing on the Toilet," and the idea stuck.

We formed a team of editors, encouraged authors to write lots of episodes and then bribed Nooglers with books and T-shirts to put up episodes every week. The first few episodes touched off a flurry of feedback from all corners of the campus. We received praise and flames, but mostly what we heard was that people were bored and wanted us to hurry and publish the next episode.

Eventually, the idea became part of the company culture and even a company joke, as in, "Excuse me, I need to go read about testing." That's when we realized that we had what we needed: a way to get our message out.

OF course, the grouplets need guidance to make sure they are aligned with the company interest. Having a lot of people who are self-organizing can be powerfully positive or negative, and not every idea is a good one. To help deal with that, a number of grouplet organizers meet once a week to make sure they are not at cross-purposes.

But when you give engineers the chance to apply their passion to their company, they can do amazing things.

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The Agile grouplet formed to try to take this idea and spread it throughout the organization. It did so by banding together and reaching out to as many groups as it could to teach the new process. It created "Agile Office Hours" when you could stop by and ask questions about the process.

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How 3M Gave Everyone Days Off and Created an Innovation Dynamo

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How 3M Gave Everyone Days Off and Created an Innovation Dynamo

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In 1974, 3M scientist Art Fry came up with a clever invention. He thought if he could apply an adhesive (dreamed up by colleague Spencer Silver several years earlier) to the back of a piece of paper, he could create the perfect bookmark, one that kept place in his church hymnal. He called it the Post-It Note.

What you might not know is that Fry came up with the now iconic product (he talks to the Smithsonian about it here) during his "15 percent time," a program at 3M that allows employees to use a portion of their paid time to chase rainbows and hatch their own ideas. It might seem like a squishy employee benefit. But the time has actually produced many of the company's best-selling products and has set a precedent for some of the top technology companies of the day, like Google and Hewlett-Packard.

The 15 percent program seems squishy, is now key to 3M's business strategy.

Today, 3M is a multinational powerhouse, with more than $20 billion in annual sales across a product line 50,000 deep, from adhesives to optical film. It boasts 22,800 patents, many derived from its 15 percent program. The program has been key to 3M's business strategy and could be a model for other companies eager to innovate. Says Kurt Beinlich, a technical director for 3M: "It's really shaped what and who 3M is."

Founded in 1902 in a little town on the shores of Lake Superior, 3M started out in the mining business as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. The company thought it had found corundum, a mineral ideal for making sandpaper. But instead, it was low-grade anorthosite - of little value. With mining hopes dashed, the founders bought a sandpaper factory and struggled for years over how to run it. New investors had to pour in cash to keep it afloat. Eventually, one of them, Lucius Ordway, moved the company to St. Paul, where 3M hit upon some key inventions, among them: masking tape and cellophane tape.

3M launched the 15 percent program in 1948. If it seems radical now, think of how it played as post-war America was suiting up and going to the office, with rigid hierarchies and increasingly defined work and home roles. But it was also a logical next step. All those early years in the red taught 3M a key lesson: Innovate or die, an ethos the company has carried dutifully into the 21st century.

15 percent time is extended to everyone. Who knows who'll create the next Post-It Note?

"It's one of the things that sets 3M apart as an innovative company, by sticking to that culture of giving every one of our employees the ability to follow their instincts to take advantage of opportunities for the company," says Beinlich, who tries to get most of his 70-person technical lab team to participate.

How is the program implemented? In Beinlich's telling, workers often use 15 percent time to pursue something they discovered through the usual course of work but didn't have time to follow up on. And even that depends on other factors - how closely managers keep tabs on projects, for one. What's more, 15 percent time is extended to everyone, not just the scientists (you can hear the cheers in marketing), the idea being: Who knows where the next Post-It Note will come from?

There is failure. As a company culture, it's accepted, if not entirely embraced. In Beinlich's department, engineers designed a heat-repelling cover to protect car finishes from welding sparks. But there just wasn't a market for it: Automotive workers didn't want to shell out for another product when they could keep layering blankets to protect finishes like they always had. "When we found that out, we celebrated that we had found something that was innovative and had its place. But we said OK; let's move on,?" Beinlich says.

The 15 percent program has clearly inspired copycats. Google's 20 percent time famously gave birth to Gmail, Google Earth, and Gmail Labs. (Google would neither confirm nor deny that the idea for its program came from 3M, but it's hard to imagine otherwise; after all, 3M's program had been around 50 years before Google even filed incorporation papers.) Likewise, Hewlett-Packard Labs offers personal creative time.

Still, it's a rare perk at most companies, technical or not. For starters, it's expensive. 3M invests more than $1 billion in R&D alone; 15 percent of that starts to be a sizable outlay. Author Scott Berkun writes about business innovation. He says these policies only work when the outcomes are backed. "Many companies have tried to emulate the ?20 percent time idea" but failed because they remained conservative about supporting the new ideas,? he says. And experts agree that this kind of nudging probably works best at companies where there's a high level of creative competitiveness; that is, where impressing peers is just as important as the innovation itself.

Some have tried to emulate 3M's program but failed because they wouldn't support the new ideas.

3M's got that in spades. Once a year, about 200 employees from dozens of divisions make cardboard posters describing their 15 percent time project as if they were presenting volcano models at a middle school science fair. They stand up their poster, then hang out next to it, awaiting feedback, suggestions, and potential co-collaborators. Wayne Maurer is an R&D manager in 3M's abrasives division and calls it a chance for people to unhinge their "inner geek." He elaborates: "For technical people, it's the most passionate and engaged event we have at 3M."

Past projects have included making clear bandages, optical films that reflect light (seen above), and designing a way to make painter's tape stick to wall edges (to protect against paint bleed). All these products are on the market now.

Sometimes ideas can languish for years. One worker had a hunch that if he reshaped particles on sandpaper, they wouldn't dull so quickly. But that was 15 years ago, and the technology and feedback weren't there to advance it beyond an interesting idea. Two years ago, the same worker started looking at the problem again during his 15 percent time. He made a poster. This time, he got different feedback with the help of new employees and new technology. They discovered they could retain a particle's sharp, pyramid-like shape just by changing the mixing order (see image up top). Now 3M has a winner in the Cubitron II (above), a sandpaper that acts more like a cutting tool -? and one that still stumps copycats, despite that it's been on the market since 2009. If not for the 15 percent time, this worker's idea might've never taken off.

Another obvious benefit of this "think time" is in recruiting. Specialized workers are highly prized and fought for. Companies that offer roughly the same salary as another, can tip the scales with paid personal time. (The snow in Minnesota might be another issue.)

"What you're offering is essentially freedom, and that is very attractive for the right person," says Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and the father of open innovation business practices.

Paid personal time is, of course, just one way to help a company innovate and, given the expense, it's not best for everyone. Chesbrough says advances in technology can be achieved if companies generally soften boundaries between where ideas come from and how they take root. A company can limit risk by letting internal ideas spin off into external companies, which might be bought back. On the flip side, internal groups can pursue external ideas. Perhaps the real lesson is that the best ideas can come from anywhere. And an innovative company will find a way to champion them.

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How 3M Gave Everyone Days Off and Created an Innovation Dynamo

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In 1974, 3M scientist Art Fry came up with a clever invention. He thought if he could apply an adhesive (dreamed up by colleague Spencer Silver several years earlier) to the back of a piece of paper, he could create the perfect bookmark, one that kept place in his church hymnal.

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Birmingham Covington: Building A Student-Centered School

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Birmingham Covington: Building A Student-Centered School

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Educators take on the role of guides and motivate students to direct their own learning.

A group of middle school students in full beekeeping gear examines one of the hives their school keeps in the woods nearby. "Ooh, there's honey!" says one excitedly. "I see nectar!" says another.

These eager fifth and sixth graders from Birmingham Covington, a public magnet school in suburban Michigan focused on science and technology, are empowered to become self-directed learners through hands-on experiences in and outside their classroom.

Birmingham Covington's student-centered philosophy is embedded throughout the curriculum, from third- and fourth-grade classes focused on teaching individual resourcefulness to an almost wholly independent capstone class in seventh and eighth grade called Thinkering Studio. Teachers at the school often say they're "teaching kids to teach themselves" and rarely answer questions directly; instead they ask students to consider other sources of information first. Even the classrooms, with their spacious communal tables and movable walls, emphasize fluid group and peer-to-peer dynamics over teacher-led instruction.

The 650-student school offers grades 3 through 8 only and pairs grades together, following research that shows that mixing age groups accelerates learning. For more than a decade, Birmingham Covington's students have ranked at or above the 95th percentile in overall performance for all Michigan elementary and middle schools.

By relentlessly focusing the classwork on student interest and independence, the educators at Birmingham Covington hope to transform students into active learners who will be successful throughout their lifetimes.

"When you get kids collaborating together, they become more resourceful and they see themselves as experts," said Mark Morawski, who's been the principal since 2013. "All of a sudden you've opened the ceiling to what kids are able to do, and they surprise you sometimes."

Solving Real-World Problems: The Bee Project

Birmingham Covington's unique bee project, like much of the coursework prioritized at the school, was driven by student interest. After reading an article about the extinction of honeybees in their science literacy class, fifth- and sixth-grade students said they wanted to do something to help.

In the class, which combines inquiry-based science and English language arts (ELA), students build their research, literacy, and collaboration skills through small group projects aimed at effecting lasting change around real-world problems. Working on a range of activities-from building a website to managing a real beehive-students become more active and engaged learners, teachers say.

"Science literacy is teaching our kids to be curious about the world around them, with the problems they identify," said ELA teacher Pauline Roberts, who co-teaches the class. "Even as students, they are learning how to become effective agents of change. It's bigger than the science content-it's about helping to develop the citizens that we hope our children become."

Teaching Resourcefulness

Throughout Birmingham Covington, both coursework and instruction push students to learn lifelong skills like independence and resourcefulness, which teachers encourage early on in the primary grades.

Third- and fourth-grade teacher Jessie Heckman says she empowers her students to become more resourceful by solving common problems with the support of their classmates. Instead of raising their hands when they have a question or encounter a hurdle, for example, Heckman's students clip clothespins to their computers and fellow students circulate around to troubleshoot-a system she calls the help desk.

"Kids need to learn teamwork-based skills because every other class in any other subject that they have-third through eighth grade-requires them to work in different sized groups accomplishing different tasks," Heckman explains.

Modeling Collaboration: Teacher Labs

Students aren't the only ones at Birmingham Covington improving their collaboration skills-teachers also identify as a "community of learners" who use planned, peer-to-peer feedback to help each other raise student outcomes throughout the school.

The school's voluntary Teacher Labs-facilitated by an instructional coach and organized around a clear, written protocol-enable teachers to reflect on their craft with support from their peers. Through the labs, small groups of teachers observe each other's classes and then offer constructive feedback around a stated objective.

"We're really asking teachers to step outside of their comfort zones," said Roberts, who serves as the lead facilitator in the labs. "We are creatures who live behind closed doors. To experience being in someone else's classroom is really powerful."

Increasing Independence for Older Learners

As they near the end of their time at the school, Birmingham Covington seventh- and eighth-grade students are accustomed to self-reliance and problem-solving. They put these skills to use in Thinkering Studio, an elective class where they design their own independent learning projects, and Engage, a class focused on design thinking-a system of solving problems that follows the steps of inquiry, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

In Engage, teachers Roy McCloud and Mathew Brown guide students to work on various self-directed, team-oriented projects like designing a new sport for third graders or building a roller coaster. Their support and feedback direct students toward the right resources while encouraging them to dig deeper: Did students ask the right questions? Did they get the right information? Did they go to other groups for feedback?

In these culminating classes, as in the curriculum more generally, teachers act as guides rather than instructors, directing students toward helpful resources but ultimately insisting they solve their own problems.

Grades 3-8 | Bloomfield Township, MI

Enrollment

650 | Public, Suburban

Per Pupil Expenditures

Free / Reduced Lunch

5%

Data is from the 2015-2016 academic year.

This innovative, student-centered approach to learning-the bedrock of the school's vision-takes the long view, helping students develop skills and interests they can continue to draw on after they leave the school. The school believes that this model better prepares students for real-world challenges, since modern workplaces are increasingly collaborative and involve complex, interdisciplinary problem solving.

"The ultimate questions we're going to be asked by future employers is 'Can this person work well in a team? Does this person have the ability to problem solve and critically think?'" said Morawski. "Because our students are more resourceful, they have more intrinsic motivation in the learning process and ultimately, are learning to be learners."

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Birmingham Covington: Building a Student-Centered School

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Educators take on the role of guides and motivate students to direct their own learning. A group of middle school students in full beekeeping gear examines one of the hives their school keeps in the woods nearby. "Ooh, there's honey!" says one excitedly. "I see nectar!" says another.

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Developing Independent Learners: Guiding Students to Be More Resourceful

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Developing Independent Learners: Guiding Students to Be More Resourceful

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Student: We saw a bunch of frost on everything, so this is a picture of the bench.

Jordy: You've got your depth of field right in the middle there. How did you get it to do that?

Student: This playlist on YouTube gave us all these good ideas.

Jessica: Because our kids can discover the vast amount of resources that they have access to, kids are then able to seek out answers, rather than just ask for them.

Jordy: You get to try and figure it out by yourself today.

Student: Oh yeah.

Mark: When you get kids collaborating together, they become more resourceful. They see themselves as experts, and the teacher can oftentimes not guide them to the answer, but to another resource.

Jessica: Look around, people. These are your friends that might need your help today.

Kids need to learn teamwork based skills, because every other class and every other subject that they have, third through eighth grade, requires them to work in different sized groups, accomplishing different tasks. So the learning goal today was, how do I solve problems using the people around me as a resource?

Who has had a problem so far? Sean?

Student: So I got a picture and then everything just disappeared.

Jessica: Let's take a look at this picture problem. Do you guys want to help me out?

Students: Yeah.

Jessica: All right.

When we get to a certain point in a project, there are so many people that have the same type of problem.

Who is somebody that is an expert?

I try and remember who has had similar problems and has gone on to successfully solve them.

Student: First you go on the internet. Then you click view image.

Jessica: Yeah, you got it.

Eloise: You get to help people, and they'll help you. Then you learn more and make school easier.

You right click it.

Ooh, we got it.

Another strategy that I use when kids are having problems or need assistance--

What's your question?

Instead of just having students raise their hand, I have a clothespin system that I call the help desk.

We accidentally wrote twenty B's.

Jessica: Oh man.

The clip indicates that I'm having a problem with something, and I need somebody's help with it.

Student: Our screen is frozen.

Eloise: I'm good at computers, so people sometimes ask me to help them.

Probably turn it off and turn it on again.

Jessica: So at a certain point, I say, I'm now releasing anybody that's not actively working to go and circulate and help with some of these clips as well. They're psyched to be in that capacity.

Eloise: Is it the earth?

Sometimes I discover something that I didn't know I could do.

Jessica: All right, time to celebrate.

At the end of class, we build each other up with celebrations.

I want you to celebrate if somebody was helping you today.

It's just a quick thing that gets everybody fired up and really thinking, well, what did this person do for me?

Student: Sophia helped me do, like the pictures.

Jessica: Sophia, do you hear that?

Sophia: Yeah.

Jessica: How would you like to be celebrated?

I have a menu on my wall of celebrations.

All: [singing] Ah, ah, ah, ah, you're really cool, you're really cool.

Jessica: So we create this environment where kids have an excitement and a fire for finding the right resource to solve the problem.

You should feel really good about what happened today.

Student: Thank you, Miss Heckman.

Jordy: In third, fourth grade, one of the biggest goals is learning to solve your own problems. And so I get kids that already have some of that when they come to me.

Yeah, you need to quit for now.

In life, we have to be able to teach ourselves.

You need to make a new page.

In my class, students come up with a project idea.

Student: My project is learning Turkish.

Student: I'm learning how to play the ukulele.

Student: I want to teach myself how to get better looking photos.

Jordy: Students look at a template that has a series of questions that help them plan what they want to do. What do they expect to learn from this project? What steps are they going to take? Who or what can they go to when they get stuck?

Let's jump down to resources. The people, the websites, any books you used.

I'm not going to accept a proposal where you don't have a resource to go to if you get stuck, whether it's an online forum, a YouTube channel.

Teacher: All right, Zoe, what's up?

Jordy: Another teacher, a parent at home.

Teacher: So you're going to make your own acid.

Zoe: Yes.

Teacher: That's the same stuff that's in your stomach.

Zoe: We also learn managing your time and kind of guiding yourself without having as much, like people telling you what to do.

Sodium chloride and--

Jordy: When you are in high school, when you're in college, when you're in the workforce, there are going to be a set of projects that are not well defined.

Zoe: Even though you're learning hard stuff--

Jordy: Students are going to hit road bumps along the way. Can they get beyond those and produce what they want to produce?

Mark: Because our students are more resourceful, they have more intrinsic motivation within the learning process, and ultimately are learning to be learners.

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Developing Independent Learners: Guiding Students to Be More Resourceful

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Student: We saw a bunch of frost on everything, so this is a picture of the bench. Jordy: You've got your depth of field right in the middle there. How did you get it to do that? Student: This playlist on YouTube gave us all these good ideas.

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Please watch this video created by Rick Burkett and his students:

@gcouros Here is my video response to your evening session @LIU12_PD @rlmaderj #tsdawesome pic.twitter.com/ijk3bcs349

- Rick Burkett (@RickB1) March 30, 2017

This connected with me on so many levels.

We talk about innovation and creativity all of the time in schools, but compliance continues to be our dirty little secret.

Are we saying we are in pursuit of one thing while doing the exact opposite?

This was echoed in my favourite Ted Talk, by then 17 year old student, Kate Simonds:

Look at our education system; as students, we have no say on what we learn or how we learn it, yet we're expected to absorb it all, take it all in, and be able to run the world someday. We're expected to raise our hands to use the restroom, then three months later be ready to go to college or have a full time job, support ourselves, and live on our own. It's not logical.

Many schools and classrooms have moved from compliance to empowerment, so this video is not to say that education has not moved away from the notion of compliance. But I challenge you to watch Rick's video with your students and educators together. What would the conversation look like? What would your educators say and what would your students say?

We can't continue to ask for creativity, innovation, and collaborative cultures with deep, independent thinking, while not acknowledging that compliance driven environments prevent these from happening.

Where is your classroom or school on the scale below? Where do you need to go?

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What We Ask of Our Students and What We Do

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Please watch this video created by Rick Burkett and his students: @gcouros Here is my video response to your evening session @LIU12_PD @rlmaderj #tsdawesome pic.twitter.com/ijk3bcs349 - Rick Burkett (@RickB1) March 30, 2017 This connected with me on so many levels.

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I'm not much of a fan of what folks call "Project-Based Learning." What is sold by places like the Buck Institute is, yes - OK, a step away from school-as-totally-boring, but it is not a step toward student-centered learning, nor toward student agency, nor toward the target of intrinsically motivated children.

So, if work on "Project-Based Learning" comes with a warning sticker that says, "CAUTION: This program does not provide a destination, but only a baby steps toward making your school less miserable" - go for it. But understand that "less miserable for kids" should not be your School Improvement Goal.

Where I work we see this continuum. " Project-Based" adds context to content and helps, yes, but it remains entirely teacher determined education. " Problem-Based" adds critical thinking and perhaps creativity, and begins to break down teacher absolutism. " Passion-Based " puts kids and their interests at the center and changes "teachers" into "educators" who are resourcers, advisors, and supporters.

When we reach Passion-Based Learning we are adding content to context, taking the natural curiosity and interests of kids and making education conform to those individual dreams.

Then we offer the next step -  Maker Learning. Maker Learning assumes that children create most of the ecosystem around them. They determine not just curricular context but time and space. High school girls see engineering education as taking place in a bridge building project where a stream interrupts a walking trail. Middle school kids see natural science education happening via a high altitude balloon project. A second grader rejects classroom math instruction and designs both a video game and the physical controller for it.

"I look for whatever the 'spark' is," one of our Learning Technology Integrators said last week. "Whatever the kid says, "this interests me - excites me," and then we'll build around that. This year he has rural kids deep into stream rainwater analysis via Arduino- controlled sensors; high school kids, elementary school kids, all working together.

"What I want," the principal of our largest elementary school told me last week, "is for everyone on my faculty to be the expert on something. Our kids would have homeroom teachers as advisors and supporters, but then they'd spend most of the day going to wherever they needed to work on their projects." And that would be a true maker school - a school developing truly successful, happy humans in adulthood.

Real Maker doesn't come from kits or recipes. It isn't learned by attending a one day lecture. You can't buy it on Amazon.

Real Maker is an attitude toward children  - an attitude toward childhood and adolescence. It begins with trust in kids, requires giving up control, requires that we stop saying "but..." and making excuses, requires that we understand that learning is messy and inefficient, requires that we learn to say, " I don't know" a lot - and add the phrase, "how can I help you find out?" to that.

Real Maker requires that you challenge yourself and your understandings of time, of space, of behavior, even-yes, of what student safety means.

Can you actually embrace Maker Education? Will you?

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I'm not much of a fan of what folks call "Project-Based Learning." What is sold by places like the Buck Institute is, yes - OK, a step away from school-as-totally-boring, but it is not a step toward student-centered learning, nor toward student agency, nor toward the target of intrinsically motivated children.