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.

Although the Flipped Classroom model is only one aspect of Blended Learning, it is a particularly important one because it is one of the more accessible models for most teachers. In fact, it is also one of the most conservative models of Blended Learning.

As most people know at this point, Flipped Classroom instruction is based on taking a classroom model of classroom lectures and problems for homework, and then flipping it so that the lectures are delivered by video at home and the homework is done in class with teacher supervision. Keith Hughes is a flipped classroom history teacher and has posted a good video for those getting started with it:

The problem with this, as Kim pointed out in this week’s COETAIL blog post, is that the method is still focused on lectures to deliver content. When I teach, even if I am doing a ‘lecture’ I still try my best to ask questions of the students and make the process as Socrative and interactive as possible. How does this fit in with a Flipped Classroom model?

There are a few tools that have come out to help teachers with this. The two that I like best so far are Curriculet and Edpuzzle.  I learned about Curriculet from Jill Bromenschenkel at the EARCOS Teachers conference in Kota Kinabalu. At first I thought it was somewhat interesting, but then I saw this post by Beth Crawford on how she used it to get her kids more engaged with poetry. Curriculet lets a teacher take a text, whether a book, poem, or newspaper article, and add a layer of interactivity to it. The layer can be text annotations, videos, or questions for the students to fill in.

The value of structuring a lesson like this comes from several aspects. As many flipped classroom teachers have noted, it ensures that students actually read their homework because they have to answer one or more questions about it. It also helps teachers model techniques of textual interrogation and critical thinking. Beth used it to embed videos that were needed by some students for background material but less useful to others. By structuring this in a flipped classroom context rather than doing it in class, students were able to receive varying levels of scaffolding and support.

The other tool that I has similar functionality is EdPuzzle. What Curriculet does for text, EdPuzzle does for videos. Teachers can take a video from YouTube or Vimeo, then add a layer of text or voice annotation, or a question to the video itself. Previously, these features were available only through somewhat expensive software like Camtasia; now they are free. You can see Jill’s example of this on EdPuzzle if you enter her class example code: aMwoxB.

Even so, the real power of the flipped classroom model does not come from a one-size fits all lecture, even if that lecture is made more interactive with tools like EdPuzzle. More sophisticated tools like Khan Academy, with help from the Gates Foundation, are working to create adaptive learning environment where learning algorithms are used to create playlists for students that are unique to them.

This principle is expanded in pedagogical approaches like Teach to One, which (as far as I understand it) create individualized playlists for students each day that consist of skills development, independent and group projects, discussions, and other activities that reinforce their learning. If a student does not understand a concept with a particular modality, that concept is retaught the next day with a different modality. Approaches like this are not really possible to implement in a single classroom, but take more of a schoolwide approach.

Similar to this is the Quest to Learn charter school in New York, which takes Blended Learning on a Gamification bent. In this case, the school uses a mixture of blended and classroom learning to help students ‘level-up’ in different areas. They do 2-week intensive ‘boss-levels’ to demonstrate their learning, much like traditional schools do with final exams (but a bit more fun and creative).

Recently my boss shared a video with me by Diane Tavenner from the Summit School system in California. In it she talks about the importance of rapid prototyping in developing school change along these lines. I don’t know if and when big international schools like UNIS Hanoi will follow this sort of example, but I think that the writing is on the wall when it comes to changes in traditional schools.

In his book Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen argued that the tipping point for blended learning would be in 2017, and that after that we would see mainstream adoption of blended and online learning models on a rapidly increasing basis. When I get excited about my job, it’s not because of someone flipping their class with a computer and a webcam. It’s because I think the whole teacher-centered pedagogic approach may very well crumble within the next few years.