Last year I was part of a Technology Curriculum group that met several times throughout the year to discuss our school’s philosophy of technology and design as well as how we sought to articulate our curriculum both vertically and horizontally. The philosophy statement we came up with was:

Humans design, use and interact with technologies in innovative ways to address needs and challenges in their lives and in the world.

Technologies assist and enhance learning in all subject areas. Students also need to learn the skills and processes of design thinking to become capable innovators.

UNIS Hanoi strives to develop young people who are confident in addressing the needs and challenges of individuals and communities through the design process.

Learning about the interaction between design and technologies helps students make discerning decisions and develop solutions that shape a more sustainable future.

During these conversations, it became clear that technology could not be limited to discrete subjects (ie. Tech Class), nor could it solely reside as ‘tech integration’. It doesn’t make sense to teach kids how to create a Powerpoint simply to learn the software; the students need to learn the software to accomplish an actual class goal. However, some subjects (like programming) can not be taught by most teachers within the context of other subjects. To learn how to program, you need to take a class in programming.

This year, our principal was concerned about whether or not our assumptions about student knowledge regarding technology were accurate. Were there students falling through the cracks? How do we know whether they have the technology skills that we assume they have at each grade level?

He asked me to identify a few key areas that we could focus on so we could present them to the department heads and see where they fit within the curriculum.  The core areas of tech skills that I came up with were:

• basic knowledge of hardware, operating systems, and software
• digital citizenship
• information management
• media production
• research skills

Afterwards, I began working with our Director of Learning to see how these ideas would fit within the broader curriculum. She immediately connected them with the MYP’s Approaches to Learning, a set of transdisciplinary skills that cover five central areas:

• Communication
• Social Skills
• Self-Management
• Research Skills
• Thinking Skills

The MYP does not spell out exactly what these skills look like, because the idea is that each school needs to develop their own vision and implementation. As I looked at the examples they gave, however, it became very clear to me that technology was a strand running through all five areas.

This raised a broader question: Do we look at technology as a subject unto itself and see how it fits within each of the ATL areas? Or do we look at each of the different ATL areas separately and weave technology use into it?

I do not have an answer to these questions, but one of my goals for next year is to work with our Director of Learning principal, and all of the teachers to create a comprehensive picture of when, what, how and why we are teaching different tech skills across the school. Since a project like this depends on the coordinated efforts of a large number of people, I am not sure about how feasible it will be. However, I do know that it needs to happen and that for the sake of our students we need to be able to fully support them and their use of technology at UNIS Hanoi.

Last week I was working with a team from UNIS Hanoi and from Concordia International School on an event for next October. We are calling it Synapse: Innovation & Action. Our concept is that instead of being focused on technology, like our Vietnam Tech Conference, it will take a broader focus on innovation in general. We identified two strands that were designed to pull in groups of people that don’t often attend these sorts of conferences: Early Childhood and EAL. Then we identified three strands that concern the future of education: Blended Learning, Creative Learning Spaces, and Service Learning.

In a sense, all three of these strands are wrapped together in the concept of Project Based Learning. The Buck Institute for Education identifies some of its traits:

• Designing and/or creating a tangible product, performance or event
• Solving a real-world problem (may be simulated or fully authentic)
• Investigating a topic or issue to develop an answer to an open-ended question

They also draw a distinction between it and its cousin, Problem Based Learning. Problem Based Learning developed in the 1960s in medical schools as a way of focusing on case studies and problems similar to those that the students would face in the future. As the Buck Institute points out, it’s both related to Project based learning and a bit different.

Buck Institute for Education Gold Standard PBL Teaching Practices

At our conference planning meeting, I asked whether we should broaden the focus from Blended Learning to Project Based Learning in general. The response, from tech director David Elliott of Concordia, was that Blended Learning was making possible the vision of project based learning from 100 years ago. For years now, progressive educators beginning with John Dewey have advocated for a radical recentering of education that focuses on student learning.

As Grant Lichtman pointed out in his 2013 TedX talk “What 60 Schools Can Tell Us About Teaching 21st Century Skills”, this sort of change is uncomfortable. “We are large, bureaucratic, bulky organizations… Schools are risk-averse,” he says correctly. And yet, he also points out that there are sparks of innovation across the US and around the world, innovative ideas that Dewey would love.

Lichtman asks the question, why do we find it difficult to move away from an industrial, contained, controlled model of education to a more creative, dynamic ecosystem? He could just as easily be asking why teachers struggle to orient their curriculum towards student generated projects, why teachers aren’t adopting open blended learning tools, why we still have classrooms instead of open learning spaces, and why learning is disconnected from real problems in the community.

Lichtman also identifies three obstacles to this sort of innovation: anchors, dams, and silos. The anchors are the attachment to time, space and subject that both consciously and unconsciously affect the way with think. These are the frameworks that are oriented around making things easy to manage, not necessary easy for learning. The dams are the standardized tests and college admissions offices that rank, order and sort the futures of our students when they graduate. Finally, we have the silos that limit our spaces for communication and collaboration in discovering creative solutions to all of these problems.

Of all of these obstacles, the one that seems most intractable is the reluctance of teachers and administrators to relinquish control over the educational structure. Right now UNIS is working on articulating and uploading our curriculum into the mapping tool Atlas Rubicon. It seems as though the push is to go from a somewhat uncoordinated, teacher centric curriculum to a more coordinated, teacher centric curriculum. Where is the space for kids to learn about what they are interested, at time and in spaces that are of interest to them?

Alan November raises this question in his keynote address at “21st Century Learning — a Deep Dive into the Future of Education”. He talks about a math teacher that he encountered who uses Khan academy with his daughter, but is unwilling to use it in his classroom because it would mean that some kids are progressing faster than others. It’s true: if your curriculum depends on everyone learning the same thing at the same time then blended learning, creative learning spaces, and service learning are not for you. As Mr. November points out, “The biggest problem of all is letting go of control… This is really about shifting control.”

I’ve already written about blended learning, about creative learning spaces, and about refocusing education on authentic problems. Service learning is (or should be) a part of all of this. Even in schools like UNIS, which has a ‘strong’ service learning program, service learning usually comes in the form of an additional class and perhaps some field trips that seek to promote a social goal. The difficult part is to truly integrate service with learning.

However, part of the reason this is difficult is because curricula, whether classroom or service, are often directed from the top down instead of the bottom up. Last year I was placed into a Yearbook service learning group, and while I tried to help where I could I never felt like I had much ownership over the group.

This year, I requested and was allowed to create my own Service Learning group: Tech for All. The goal of the group was to promote robotics and technology across Hanoi. The high school team I was working with signed up for differing reasons, but together we were able to articulate a fairly strong vision and mission. Most importantly, we had a real, tangible goal: to host a Robotics Kickoff event that would bring together both international and local Vietnamese schools to learn about robotics and engage in friendly competition. We held the event last Saturday, on May 16th, and had 60 students and teachers from 10 different schools attend.

To me, this is the heart of authentic, project and problem based learning. The students at UNIS worked to identify our goals, build our web site, design our flier, network with other schools, learn about Lego Mindstorm robotics kits, build a giant maze and sumo arena, co-present material in both English and Vietnamese, and pull off a great event. While I provided guidance and support throughout the project, the students felt like it was their event, not just mine. This is what Dewey was talking about 100 years ago, it’s what progressive schools around the world are working to implement, and it’s what breakthroughs in blended learning and other technologies are making more doable than ever before.

Last month I had the opportunity to attend and present at the EARCOS Teachers Conference in Kota Kinabalu. It was the first non-tech focused conference I’ve been to in a while, and it brought up a topic that previously hadn’t been much on my radar: libraries. I’ve always been a fan of libraries: my mother is a librarian, and I love their mission of freely giving away knowledge and education to any who wish it.

However, like many people I associated libraries with physical books, or perhaps a place to get on the internet if you don’t have a computer. In a 1:1 school environment like UNIS Hanoi, neither of those roles seemed particularly critical for middle and high school students. Yes, they still need to read books, but the idea of checking out 5-7 books on a subject to do a research paper are just ramblings of old-people, as far as most students today are concerned. It’s the equivalent of when my mother would tell me how she had to type her papers on the type-writer a week before it was due so she could edit and re-type it. Quaint.

from Doug Johnson’s wiki

At EARCOS, however, I heard presentations from both Doug Johnson, influential librarian and tech director of Burnsville-Eagan-Savage school district in Minnesota, and Ron Starker, the MS Librarian at Singapore American School. Mr. Johnson introduced to me the notion of a 3rd space. If our 1st space is home, and 2nd space is work/school, most people find it beneficial to have a 3rd space where we can think, collaborate, create, read, explore, play, etc. The classic example is the Cheers Bar, but it varies for different people and can be a coffee shop, living room, restaurant, gym, park, workshop, etc. Mr. Johnson argued that libraries can and should fill this need for students.

When I went to the Singapore American School presentation, I saw an example of this in action. Mr. Starker had designed the library with inspiration from Howard Gardiner’s theory of multiple intelligences. They had a quiet side (introspective intelligence), collaborative side (social intelligence), a ‘Top 10 Den’ for reading (literary intelligence), a room of plants and natural light with their science books (naturalistic intelligence), a music studio (musical intelligence), a recording studio (visual intelligence), a maker space (technical intelligence), and more.

Between the two, I felt deeply inspired. I tried to synthesize my own ideas on the subject, and created a presentation with in collaboration with our MSHS librarian, Debby Wells-Clinton. In it, we argued that not only the role of libraries should change, but even the term ‘library’. The root of the word library is from the Latin librarium, which means a “chest of books”. Debby and I feel strongly that this is no longer the central organizing principle of these spaces, and that terms like ‘Learning Commons’, ‘Learning Hub’, or ‘iCommons’ are more accurate.

Debby and I gave our presentation to the Hanoi Ed Tech group, a monthly meeting of teachers and techies. In the discussion that followed, we talked about the ways in which a Learning Hub is different from a traditional classroom. Probably the most important difference is that in both libraries and learning hubs students have a high degree of autonomy to pursue their learning. Whether it is through an informal study group, a quiet corner to read, or tinkering with robotics, students set their own agenda and schedule.

Similar to recent trends in blended learning, gamification, and problem based learning, the notion of a Learning Hub focuses on creating a student-centered learning environment (rather than one that is class or teacher centered). Yet what if we were to take it a step further. Instead of the Learning Hub being a space where students can relax and learn on their own outside of the classroom, what if the entire school was a Learning Hub?

This sort of thinking about education is progressive, but it isn’t knew. From Dewey to Montessori to Papert, educators have been trying to articulate what this sort of learning environment could look like for over a hundred years. The question is whether technology will be able to bring together the best of both worlds: high quality content that is crafted and scaffolded for students who are mentored by teachers; learning that is given meaning in a variety of project and problem based contexts.