 Hi everyone, Scott McLeod here. I'm absolutely delighted to keynote the overcoming obstacles strand of the K-12 online conference this year Thought I'd start with a couple thoughts about what we know about schools. The first thing we know about school is that it's relentlessly boring mind-numbing for many or most kids the Gallup poll folks for example surveyed about half a million American public school students last year and You know about three-fourths of elementary kids so that they were engaged with their learning That's not too bad by the time that slides down to middle school. However, we're down to three out of five By the time we're finishing up high school We're lucky if two out of five kids say they're engaged with learning rather than there because they have to be by law Or just because their friends are there We also know for example that School doesn't do a great job of pairing kids for work or economic success in many ways due to its Relentless focus on level-level thinking work So, you know in the American economy over the last few decades What we've seen is a very sharp decline in the number of jobs that are available that require manual labor or routine mental work Really the only growth in the American economy are jobs that require non routine analytical skills or non routine interpersonal skills those Top two lines on the graph The research shows us that at every level of the system elementary middle and high school Somewhere around 80 to 85 percent of what kids do on a day-to-day basis in school is factual recall its procedure work Irrigitation it's exactly that low-level mental work that routine Knowledge work that basically has no economic payoff in today and tomorrow's economy so When I work with schools, I talk a lot about this sort of these three big shifts That we're all trying to navigate Simultaneously the first one is a shift from lower-level thinking to higher-level thinking. How do we get kids? Doing more critical thinking and problem solving How do we get them to engage in more creative work to be those effective communicators and collaborators that we know we need? How do we get them to live up in the upper end of Bloom's taxonomy or level four of web's depth of knowledge wheel or Everyone to categorize it more often than they do now second big shift is really a shift in student agency It's a shift from sort of teacher directed classrooms to maybe more student-driven learning You know every school has some kind of mission or vision or purpose statement that says blah blah blah lifelong learners blah blah blah And yet students rarely get a chance to actually Direct their own learning to be those autonomous self-empowered Self-directed learners that we say we want upon graduation able to reskill and adapt as necessary and rapidly changing environments So how do we give kids more control and ownership of their learning? How do we figure out ways to personalize and individualize more often to really? Move away from environments where kids are told what to do every minute of every day all the way up to the point of graduation And really let kids drive their own learning, but that's more as facilitators That's the second big shift Third big shift of course is from analog to digital. That's relevant in and of itself You know our entire information landscape of course is now digital and online. It's mobile and hyper connected and Our entire information landscape Is bits in the ether now floating around in ways that you know didn't exist a few decades ago And so that shift is relevant on its own But it's also relevant because it enables the other to digital allows kids to be deeper Thinkers to be higher-level thinkers in ways that weren't possible in analog environments Kids can be empowered learners and drive their own learning in ways that were simply inconceivable and ink on paper spaces And so the digital enables the other to which is why so many of us educational technology enthusiasts Are pushing for you know devices and access for kids in that sense So we have a lot of schools that are sort of attacking this problem head-on They're sort of embracing what Chris Lehman the principal of science leadership Academy in Philadelphia describes here What we need to do is Honor the lives kids lead. What if we said high school is not preparation for real life? What if we stop saying you'll need this someday? What if we said to kids the lives you need matter now what you do matters now What could they build what could they create? And and when you go to one of those schools, you know, that's amazing work But of course the objections are inevitable you get the yes butts flying around they go something like this We can't do what that other school is doing. They're bigger. They have more resources. They're smaller. They're more nimble They're rural. They are strong knit communities. They're urban. They have access to the city. They're suburban They have more money. They don't have the same time issues that we do They don't have the same discipline issues that we do. They don't have the same personnel issues that we do They don't have the same financial issues that we do. They don't have the same transportation issues that we do They don't have the same accountability issues that we do. They have parent support. They have community support They have business support. Well, they have parents. They have teachers aides. They have volunteers They have a different schedule. They have different standards. They have different policies They have different professional development They have more supportive administrators. They have a more supportive school board They have more expert veteran teachers. They have more eager new teachers. They can get kids to come before school. They can get kids to come after school. They can get kids to come during school. They don't have all the extra committees that we do. They don't have all the extra duties that we do. They have computer labs. They have computer cards. They have laptops. They have iPads. They have Chromebooks. They have a better internet. They are private school. They are charter school. They are magnet school. They are an online school. They have whatever, wherever they are, they don't have our kids. So when we hear those yes but objections, right, there's lots of stuff going on there. Some of it is fear, fear of change, fear of having to alter instructional practice, fear of venturing into the unknown away from traditional mindsets of what learning teaching and schooling should look like. Some of that is around control, it's around our traditional need for control over every aspect of the schooling environment or the classroom environment and now you're talking about us moving away from some of that. There's concerns of course around time, you know, we're so busy doing last centuries teaching model or maybe the previous century before that's teaching model that, you know, we can't figure out ways to initiate the learning and teaching that we know we need to get moving along and there's also issues around permission, right? So a lot of educators, whether it be teachers or administrators, particularly in sort of some of our recent policy environments, really feel hemmed in. They really feel like they're in a very tightly enclosed space with big walls and fences around them and you know I think in actuality, although some of those fences may be there, there's actually lots of room to run and roam within those in ways that we don't really think about. So I thought I'd spend most of my keynote talking about the schools that instead of focusing on the yes buts, focus on the why nots and on the how can we use the ones that instead of allowing resistance points to dominate and defeat promising ideas are instead working hard to try and reframe opposition and the possibility by asking, you know, well, why can't we do that? And how could we do that? So let's start with some schools that are playing around with small chunks of time. Small chunks of time are usually pretty non-threatening schools can figure out different ways to carve out, you know, a few hours here or there or maybe a day or two or maybe even a week or so or two out of the school calendar. We're not talking about blowing up the whole school system into something new. So I had a chance a few weeks ago to go visit the International School of Brussels in Belgium and they had this in the zone event, right, where they ran all of their middle schoolers through six different zones. They had the zone where they created an electronic car that ran on tweets. They had another zone where students wrote and performed a skit around heroes and heroism. They had another zone where they worked together in smaller subgroups to do different components of creating LED light boxes, the end results of which were really cool. They had a zone that was around coding where you could either learn Scratch if you hadn't played with that or if you already had, then you could dive into App InVenor and the task was to devise a voice-activated app that drew something on your smartphone. They had a zone around mindfulness and meditation and yoga and they had a zone where they were working with Sky Television there in Europe to learn how to create a newscast. Lots of fun stuff, sort of this one-day event, right? And we're also doing some one-day events in my own area, Prairie Lakes Area Education Agency. We go out and work with some of our schools in Northwest Iowa and we're doing some single-day events like pop-up maker days, right? Where elementary kids get to create pom-pom launchers or see who can make a boat out of tinfoil that will float the most coins or washers. Maybe they're playing around with squishy circuits. There's a rotation where they can do art paper fashion runways. Maybe they're trying to make the longest marrable run, and time it. They're working on spaghetti towers or newspaper sculptures. They're creating puff mobiles, which are structures built out of a sheet of construction paper or two and some lifesavers and straws and tape and try to see who will go the furthest with breath propelled, right? And sort of these one-day maker events at our different elementary have now led to the creation of several maker spaces, which is kind of fun. Over at Preston Middle School in Fort Collins, Colorado, they have this awesome library maker space where kids can go spend time during breaks or maybe, you know, during a class period or something. And they really have this focus in the maker space on philanthropic engineering, where they're trying to use their 3D printer to create solar chargers that will glow for a few hours at night and add additional lights to the day for people in, say, Uganda who don't have a steady electricity and a light supply. And then we have, you know, some schools everywhere across America and elsewhere who do things like exploratories where teachers will create blocks of time where the kids can rotate into and explore interests that the teacher has. So for example, maybe a teacher really loves to do quilting or is interested in anime or playing the guitar or reading science fiction or doing archery and the kids can rotate into that and spend some time learning how to do some of that sort of learning from the teacher in a different capacity other than just core content. Other schools figure out ways to do sort of 20% time or genius hour sort of blocks of time where instead of it being a teacher created exploratory where the kids tap into the teacher's interest, it's really where the kids engage in inquiry projects and develop their own interest. Kids might say, I want to learn more about dinosaurs or knitting or goth music or hydraulics for my car or I want to teach myself to piano or whatever. Right. So going back to Fort Collins, going over to Puder High and Preston Middle School, you know, here's a passion project where a kid worked with our high school student worked with the Department of Natural Resources and Parks and Recreation and so on to design a new mountain bike trail in the area. Over at the middle school, you know, we have a young student who was interested in researching the effect of magnesium chloride and radicy germination and mealworm behavior and this is her research poster, like you might see in a science building at a big research university when you're walking the halls. Back at the high school again, you know, one sophomore girls passion project that year was to design from scratch and then build by herself a tiny house, which is then displayed quite proudly in front of the school as you walk in spirit like high school and spirit like Iowa. They've taken that a little further. In fact, we now have four or five school districts in our region that are doing what we call J term or May term projects. These are where perhaps you would come back after winter break and there would be a January term or J term for a couple of weeks where school is suspended as we know it and kids immerse themselves into about a 50 hour teacher created project. So the teachers figure out what their projects are going to be in the fall, they advertise them right before winter break, students sign up for them. And then here's some examples of some things that students have done spirit like theatrical production in Spanish of Alice in Wonderland. They sent some students to the local snowmobile manufacturer Polaris to learn about lean engineering techniques right how to calculate cycle times using Yamazumi charts and learning about elemental spaghetti diagrams and so on. Had another project where students use their language arts and graphic design and historical research skills to create a website and map of the haunted history of Iowa. They worked with the humane society to create online course about animal cruelty and responding to some concerns in the area that when it was cold in the winter in Iowa, there wasn't a lot to do. They did a public awareness campaign of winter recreation activities in their county. And then you know, here's another project where they took the logo for their performing arts center and they created this massive enormous metal sculpture based on the logo that now sits out in the front for everybody to see as they walk in. So lots of different ways to carve out small chunks of time everywhere from a few hours here and there to all the way up to maybe a couple of weeks. And I think, you know, take a pause here for a minute and pause the video and just think about what do you think about those? Could you and your school system do something like that either in your classroom or at the school or district level where they seem too scary or difficult or they seem quite possible? If you were able to do them, what might they accomplish for you? So the next level of this is to move into course level redesign, right? To move beyond just small chunks of time and really hack at maybe an entire course and see what could you do at sort of that level. So back and forth Collins at Puder High, you know, some of their courses are trying to get some of these three big shifts around deeper thinking and student agency and robust technology integration and maybe also real world authentic work into their courses, right? So in their agricultural education class, they have a lot of passion projects plus some group investigations. Here's one students, you know, work around rabbit hair genetics. When I was there, they were studying the slaughtering process of cows and how to make that more peaceful in terms of sight lines and sounds and so on because stress cows apparently emit hormones that make them taste not as good. So, you know, sort of some real world projects there. Interesting stuff. The culinary arts class is basically the caterer for the district. They also do outside catering, really sort of, you know, put in taking this out of the classroom into the real world. When I was there, they were trying to raise funds to set up for Collins fourth food truck. They were planning to work with the business and marketing students in the high school to figure out what kind of food they should serve and where it should be in the community and, you know, stuff like that. Apparently, there's a geometry and construction project nationwide. So there's this Habitat for Humanity House in the back of the school where students spend two periods working on it. One period they're in the construction trailer learning basic principles of geometry and then they in the next period they go out and actually apply those right at the house. I had a student tour guide in 11th grade who told me that it took him three years to pass algebra, but he was acing geometry because of what he learned in the construction trailer he was able to immediately apply with the house and I thought that was pretty cool. So just some basic course level redesign where they figure out how can we insert some of these three shifts elements into what we do. Here in Ames where I live, we've got an interesting new course at Ames High. So they have this fantastic environmental science teacher who has always gotten kids outside working on various projects related to the environment and the world around them. This year they decided to take that environmental science course and that hands-on orientation and combine it with a government and sociology credit. So half credit of government, half credit of sociology where they're not only learning the environmental science but they're also learning government through the policy and political lenses of environmental science and in the source credit, in the sociology credit they are learning the human impacts and sociological principles through the lens of environmental science. They've also added a third credit to that experience of English language arts where they're writing and reflecting and advocating and sharing and so on and all of that adds up to this really awesome experience, right? Students are wading through marshes looking for macroinvertebrates in rich soil. They're working with an award-winning filmmaker to create informational artworks that explain watersheds and the story of Iowa's water. They're talking with county naturalists and scientists and farmers and community activists and civic leaders. They're tracking the lawsuit that's been filed by the Des Moines Water Works against the upstream counties that are allowing farm chemical runoff into our state capitals water supply. At the end of this course, students will be researching, designing and conducting a community impact project of their own choosing. What I really like about the AIMS High approach is that they didn't have to create any new courses. All of these classes already existed. They already had the two semester-long courses in government and so she already had the year-long courses in environmental science and in English language arts. They just had to agree to teach them together in an interdisciplinary manner so that, you know, every day, second, third, and fourth period, is this large block called the Integrated Capstone Seminar where students are in there with all three teachers and doing fantastic stuff. Maybe our most innovative school here in Iowa, it's called Iowa Big. It's over in Cedar Rapids and Iowa Big is co-located in this former Brownfield site of the Iowa Steel Plant. They're co-located with the Startup Accelerator which allows some interesting interactions there and in Iowa Big students spend part of their day at the local high school and then the rest of the day over to Iowa Big. And the premise around Iowa Big is that there's this pool of community-created projects where the school people have gone out to local corporations, government agencies from the city and county, local nonprofits, and so on and they've said help us create a pool of projects that enterprising talented young high school youth could work on. Maybe projects that you don't have the personnel yourselves but you've always wanted to do. In fact, there's so many projects right now that they're having to pitch them to the students. There's not enough students to work on all the projects which is kind of neat. So they have to sell the students, you know, please come work on our project. And then these projects are required to be interdisciplinary. They have to require to have a participatory third-party audience, typically the organizations that have contributed projects to the pool or serving as mentors and so on. And so some of the things that students have done as part of Iowa Big so far, they're starting year three now, is that they've transformed the local sort of defunct zoo into an interactive and educational urban farm. They've co-researched the evolution of grapes with University of Northern Iowa. They've created a one handed keyboard for amputees. They're working with a local architecture firm to redesign one of the elementary and to steam magnet. They've developed a waterborne drone or they're trying to that will measure plastic waste in local rivers and in the ocean. They're designing arthritis friendly utensils. They've created a documentary of the county's first medical examiner. They're designing and testing an aquaponic system in North Africa and they've initiated a young women's entrepreneurship community and annual conference. They hold hackathons. They build stuff and they test it. They learn essential curriculum through hands-on work and of course play. They make and tinker and explore. So here's one student's Wi-Fi recycling pin that tweets to the cloud which you recycle. And they've even not had enough sort of original work that they're creating for... they're filing for intellectual property protection for four different sort of business ventures in order to protect the work that they do and maybe start making some money and feeding some of that back into their program. The students love this. This is real world embedded community work in ways that are pretty cool. And then students get elective credit for this work. They like to look at the projects that they're doing. So for example that waterborne drone project requires a lot of math and a lot of science and they go back and they sort of backwards map standards. So in order to get that drone working you had to do these things in math, these things in science. Look you've got half a credits worth. We're going to give you that on your report card kind of thing. So that's sort of an interesting way to do that. To have the work and drive the standards and the credits rather than the other way around. So just like we did before, think about you know sort of these course level redesigns. Puder High School's attempts to get some of these three big shifts into existing courses. Ames High's interdisciplinary approach. Iowa Big where they're awarding elective or maybe even court credit through some of these community pool of projects and so on. And just think about could you do something like this you know is again is it too scary or difficult? Maybe it's quite possible or probable that you could do some of this with a little bit of rethinking you know and again if you did what might they accomplish for you. Take a pause here and just think about that stuff. What might be the final level of all this is sort of redesigning at the school level right? We're moving beyond small chunks of time. We're not just playing around with individual courses or maybe academic programs but really restructuring entire schools to be reoriented around student agency and deeper learning to be able to authentic work and using robust technology integration to facilitate all of that. So we think about a place like the New Tech Network right? There's over 175 schools now including New Tech High and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And the New Tech Network classes typically are taught in pairs. Teachers work together to create three to four-week projects that students will work in and groups of around four. Those teacher pairings might be something more traditional like math and science or English and humanities and English and social studies or it might be something more unique like maybe a geometry teacher combined with a graphic design teacher. Teachers take their standards as supposed to cover for the year and they literally slice and dice them into small chunks and then they put chunks together. So the teacher might say these three standards of mine go together with those four standards of yours. What would an interesting four-week project look like that coalesced around those seven standards. That approach allows them to cover pretty much everything they need to cover by the end of the year. There's also across the network there's a project pool where teachers can tap into and see what kind of projects the teachers are doing in other locations. The project usually emphasize community-embedded work whenever possible and it's sort of this great example of the fences analogy that I used earlier where even though there are some fences for students right the teachers create the projects for some standards that have to be satisfied there's lots of room to run still within the projects for the kids to take it in directions that they want to go. The new tech network is really focused on engaging curriculum empowering kids using technology to make that happen. Here's what a you know typical classroom might look like where there's kids working in the center around the edges. Teachers are roaming around helping them. Here's you see them also entertaining some visitors. If a student group gets stuck right and they've exhausted the resources for learning about something that they need to learn in order to come to the project successfully they can request sort of a pull-out sort of direct instruction moment where the teacher will show them a few things point them a few resources teach them something directly and then get those kids back on track so they're not wholly on their own for example you might have a project like write the sixth act of Macbeth or you're working with the Department of Game Fish and Parks for the state of South Dakota to create a public advocacy campaign around using South Dakota native grasses and flowers and so on. One of the neat things about the new tech network is that they emphasize what they call school-wide learning outcomes. This idea that 60% of any project grade will be the mastery of the content itself but the other 40% of the project grade is around these other outcomes that the network deems is important. Things like work ethic, oral communication, tech proficiency, critical thinking and so on. Now those school-wide learning outcomes may be in varying proportions based on the project so for example one project oral communication or written communication might be 10 to 20% of the overall project grade whereas for another one it might be only 5 to 10%. They have standard rubrics for each one of those that are consistent across teachers, across courses, across grade levels I think also across schools within the network so the neat thing is that you know let's say that a student has to give 40 to 60 public presentations to the community as part of exhibiting their project work by the end of their four years at the new tech school. Every one of those presentations is judged against the same rubric with the same criteria for what constitutes an effective presentation. So as you can imagine that consistency allows by the end of the students high school experience that she is probably a fantastic presenter because she knows what to expect and how to do that and then they have this sort of unique online grading system and parent portal called ECHO where they not only put in the academic content as a grade but they also put in the other school-wide learning outcomes as well so that a teacher can sit down with a student or a parent can log in and see that hey you know student you're maxing you're blowing the doors off on your content stuff but you know your written communication you're still struggling a little bit so let's focus on that in the next project and see if we can get you you know moving forward in some new directions. New tech has premised completely on this idea of powerful group work which means that unlike traditional schools where group projects typically involve a lot of whining and moaning and complaining about who's carrying the load and who's slacking off and who deserves the grade and who doesn't and all that mess you know parents you know get upset and so on. New tech seems to figure a lot of that out right they have these group contracts where they put all the contact information on they commit to backwards mapping what needs to be done for the project and outlining the tasks needs to be done so learning those essential project management skills and time framing skills along the way. They talk about how they're going to work together they all sign in and commit to it. They have this sort of interesting structure where if a kid is slacking off on a given day or as part of their project the other members of the group give that student warnings and after some point it escalates to say teacher and parent and then finally the student and kid just get fired from the group which means that then he or she has to essentially do the project on their own so nobody gets fired more than once and it just seems to work right and so when I was talking with the freshman at the new tech high in Sioux Falls you know they were saying that it takes a while to get used to based from a traditional school environment but it really just does work for them and they have lots of creative ways to highlight the power of the groups and realize that they're interdependent with each other and they do personality tests to sort of create these complementary group formations. They'll do things like submit resumes without names on them and then the group leaders have to pick what they want for their team who they think can help accomplish the job and just you know lots of focus on strong collaboration and making sure that the groups function and function well. Neat stuff. The Mew School is a pre kindergarten through fourth grade school in Los Angeles. It's a private school, one of the few private schools that I think are profiled here, maybe the only one other than the International School of Brussels. They have an extremely strong emphasis on environmental sustainability everywhere you go you see window boxes and you know window planters and these sort of box garden boxes that you see on the right of the screen is like a hundred of those all around campus. They have larger gardens. They have inside herb garden. They have a worm farm. They have these little round planners and square planters just everywhere. There's just stuff growing everywhere right. They raise goats and chickens. They have beehives and they deal with the bees. They have this amazing sort of maker space as they call it which is not robots in 3D printers but rather literally like a junkyard. It's scrap pieces of wood and plastic and metal and you know tubes and pipes and you know just whatever floating around and you know here you can see some kids project they're working on some kind of cart with wheels which is kind of neat you know there's all the equipment that the you know the young younger elementary students use you know they actually use it so like my tour guide say yes I know how to use a circular saw with supervision and so on it's just all very carefully supervised but also very empowering for the kids they just you know go in there with hammers and wrenches and nails and screw divers and go at it. MUSE is based on sort of five main pillars. They have a very strong academic focus. They have even though they're private school they voluntarily adopted the common core and use that as a framing lens for their academic content. I mentioned already their environmental sustainability emphasis. They focus a lot on teaching kids to be self-efficacious and also focus on strong communication so they use the process communication model to help students with that and then finally they have this passion based learning component where every student is on some kind of individualized learning plan and working on passion projects as well. One of the neat things about MUSE is that at the beginning of the school year there's nothing on the walls nothing bought from a teacher store or created by a teacher. Anything that needs to go in the room is created by the students. So you need a job chart. Let's make one. We need a chart that says how do we want to work today? I want to work by myself and a small group and a large group maybe with a buddy. Let's make the chart. Let's make the clothes pins. Let's put it on the wall and so on. They decorate the rooms with whatever theme they want for the year so you can see the sloth room here decorated with leaves and vines and sloths. Over on the right you can see the door where they're talking about being open and resourceful and persistent. Some components are being self-efficacious and for each one of those they have examples around them of different ways that they've been open to new experiences recently. Different ways that they've been resourceful recently. Different ways that they've been persistent recently so they can think about those and what those look like. Here's an example of sort of that process communication model and action. It's very fun to see second graders say things like when you blank I feel blank because blank and I would prefer blank and I'm in return unprepared to blank. You know they're just working on that sort of compassionate conversation and how to make that work. They learn their academics through the lens of sustainability in many instances. So for example here's where they're learning graphing through the lens of how much have they composted each week or each day and so on. Here's another individual learning plan project where students decided that they wanted to cut out their room of the art floor and make student-created art underneath in these sort of like manhole cover type installations which is kind of fun. You know another one of our tour guides was growing 250 heads of lettuce to feed the entire school for two weeks as her passion project lots of interesting stuff going on. Even down at the pre-K level so maybe say the four-year olds they try to give kids lots of agency about how they learn and what they learn and so they have what are called blueprints where each week one of the students in the class would say I'm interested in ballerinas or dinosaurs or princesses or whatever and that would be the lens for the week. So maybe it's Meyer's week and she's interested in cats right. So all of their literacy work is going to be done through the lens of cats all the numeracy work is going to be done through the lens of cats and the teacher co-plans the week with Meyer to put those lenses on it and to learn some of those essential outcomes. So they're not only studying cats themselves but they're accomplishing essential academic learning content and other learning goals through the blueprint of whatever Meyer's interested in. And then of course the next week might be ice cream because that's the next kid's interest and so on. And the idea here is that what might begin as an interest will eventually develop perhaps into a passion and so on. So lots of opportunities for the kids even though they're young to have lots of control and ownership and say into what they do and how they learn. Up to the middle school and high school level the middle and high school levels are very similar around environmental sustainability. You can see for example on the right through the sixth grade math essential questions again that strong emphasis on conceptual understanding and deeper learning and deeper thinking which is kind of cool. And yeah, that's a muse. At the New Village Girls Academy in Los Angeles they basically have this challenge where they're trying to address a very specific student population. New Village is the only all girls public school in California. 100% of the girls there living conditions of poverty of the 110 girls that are there about half of them are parenting or pregnant. Maybe 30% live with foster parents or in institutional foster homes. Many of them are English language learners. This is Los Angeles and there's quite robust diversity there on the linguistic front. And many of the girls bring to school personal and family backgrounds of drug abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, self harm, incarceration just about every sort of disadvantage and condition that you can think of. The school itself is not super impressive. It's basically a dusty courtyard with a few places to sit and eat lunch. There's classrooms around the edges. And again, sort of, you know, the facilities are not superb. But they're decent, right? And then, but you know, there's not like this gleaming new shiny facility that they're using. But, you know, New Village helps its girls reclaim lives and sends an incredible number of them on to college. And they do that through sort of four key components. The first one is deep advisory base relationship, building and support. So every day when the girl shows up to school, she goes to her advisory. She does both of her humanities courses there. And the advisor is not only doing the academic content, but also checking in with her around, you know, her mom's getting out of prison. How do you feel about that? You know, your brother's out in parole. How's your baby doing? Did you check in with your social work? I mean, all sort of those social supports that are necessary to help keep that girl going and being successful. And then connecting the girl to whatever school or community resources might be needed along the way. A second key component of New Village are these complex interdisciplinary passion based inquiry projects that require really, really deep thinking. I'll highlight some of those in just a minute. They also do community based internships here where twice a week every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon the girls go out into the city and do internships in their community with local organizations. The idea behind those internships is that they're not supposed to be free labor for the receiving organization, but rather they're pretty much trying to learn how to run the place, which is kind of neat. And then finally, and I thought this was brilliant, they focus on mindfulness techniques to help girls recenter themselves amidst the chaos that surrounds them. So twice a all, you know, they teach them all how to do meditation. If they so choose twice a day, they have a 15 minute block of time where they were where they're quiet. They can pray or meditate as need be and just sort of recenter themselves. And then the idea is that they will then take that out of the school and do that at home in their own lives as needed. Lots of sort of deep essential questions going on at New Village. When we were there, here are some of the questions that they were looking at. As you can see, these are not easy questions with right answers, right? These are questions that involve deep investigation and exploration, so which is fantastic. Some of the projects that we saw while we were there, you know, like here's one on what would the world be like without oil? How could the world run out of gas? Is the intersection of politics and gas companies bitter bad? Is gas worth killing for? Right, girls sort of exploring what her project might look like. Here's another one. How has immigration shaped the nation? Why do immigrants cross the border? How do immigrants affect the economy and our culture? Why can't states just handle the immigrants? This is pretty deep, complex stuff, right? Here's a third one. Should animal testing even happen? What constitutes animal cruelty? How can cosmetic companies ensure safety without using animal testing? Should animals have their right to pain killers? Should science classes be able to dissect animals? You get the idea. This is rich, robust, intellectual work, not just recall and regurgitation. Some of the internship locations because it's Los Angeles, they have all the resources of the city available to them. Some internships are more mundane, like maybe they're at the local bicycle shop. Others might be more impressive, like say working with the ACLU or the California Science Center. Similarly, you might be at the local Harley Davidson. You might be at the hospice. Maybe working with a law firm in the Los Angeles Police Department. Maybe you're just working with the local knitting store or the income tax shop or maybe you're working with legal services or the U.S. Senator's Office. Lots of opportunities for internships that happen here. Here's a picture of me talking to one of the girls. She had just finished doing her. So the previous semester she had done an internship with a kennel because she really liked animals and she really loved the business aspects of running the place. But realized that most of that work was cleaning cages and grooming animals and that didn't grab her as much. So this semester she had been working with a dog trainer and she was sort of fascinated by the behavioral and psychological aspects that were involved in that. And here I am talking with her about whether it's different to work with dogs or to train orcas at Seawall. And we're having a great conversation. And she had just submitted her SAT scores that morning to four or five universities across the country that had strong zoology programs. So sort of the path between dog kennel internship and zoology major at a major four-year institution is shorter than we might think. So New Tech Network, the Muse School, New Village Girls Academy and so on. These are all examples of school-wide models where they decided to just revamp the entire school and orient them around sort of student agency and deeper learning and real-world authentic work and using technology to make that happen. So one last time, maybe, you know, what do you think about these kind of whole school models? Is there opportunities for you, are there opportunities for you to do something like this where you are? Maybe it's too scary, maybe it's too difficult. Maybe it's quite possible. What might they accomplish for you? Pause the video and think for a bit. So when we visit these kinds of schools, it raises some pretty profound questions about what kind of schools do we want, right? School that's designed for inquiry is very different than the school that's designed for compliance, school that's designed for critical thinking and problem-solving and creativity is very different from one that's focused on worksheets and textbooks and lectures, stand and deliver, call and response. Hopefully these examples help you see that it can be done, right? And so the question is what are we willing to do to create new kinds of schools that are relevant for today and tomorrow? I mean, there's no reason to expect that our factory model schools that are designed for an analog manufacturing economy would be the right fit for a hyper-connected, hyper-competitive, digital, global, knowledge economy and information society, but of course that's what we have. Schools are perfectly designed for the results that they get. If we want different kinds of results, if we want different kinds of outcomes for our graduates, then we have to redesign learning and teaching and schooling. So what are we willing to do to create these? And hopefully these schools show you that where there's a will, there's a way. So we have the ability to, as Seth Godin says, make school different, right? We can focus on deeper learning. We can focus on student agency. We can focus on authentic work. We can use the digital tools to make that happen. And we just have to get beyond this idea that it can't be done. There's whole networks of schools that are out there. There are literally hundreds and thousands of different kinds of schools, nontraditional schools all around the world. You can visit the websites of any of these groups and see what they're doing. You can see their strategic plans. You can see example lessons and curriculum. You can see videos of kids and teachers in action and just have lots of food for thought back home. So are you willing to move beyond yes but? Are you willing to move toward why not and how can we? I love the idea of spending our time talking about how can we instead of yes but? The former focuses on adaptation, forward progress, collective effort and efficacy. The latter doesn't do anything except keep us stuck. Doesn't mean that concern shouldn't be aired. Challenges, barriers, other issues, absolutely need to be put on the table and addressed. But too often we get mired in negativity and defeatism instead of recognizing that both individually and collectively we usually have the ability and the capacity to do and be so much more in our current reality reflects. Why couldn't our schools and classrooms do these sorts of things too? Just like these other schools that I just showed you as Chris Lehman says in the video, instead of teaching our students a bunch of stuff so that they can do amazing things and make a difference later, why not have them do amazing things, make a difference right now? We give too much attention to yes but, we rarely if ever embrace the more powerful questions of why not and how can we? Hopefully you're willing to make that shift with me to move towards a different way of thinking about schools and what's possible. Let's move forward. Thanks for watching.