The “New Story” hasn’t caught on because it is not a new story – it’s not even a tech story or a web 2.0 story. The New Story doesn’t catch on because it is not a story you can hear or read about and really understand. To understand it you have to work with a class of students that you really know. You know who knows how to do “traditional school”, who gets traditional work done, who doesn’t. Who is motivated and who isn’t. Who is outgoing and who is shy – even painfully shy. Who is in control and who is out of control – even spooky out of control. Who likes to please and who could care less.

Next you have to do things differently. You have to empower students in group decision making and social skills. Allow students to do work that brings out the hidden talents in the room – from artwork, creative writing, problem solving, “making things” and tearing them apart and putting them back together, etc. You have to teach them how to find and think about information and then give them permission to show what they know in various ways and “their way” at least sometimes. Then you have to come up with an idea for a project – as real world and community service based as possible is what I feel is best. Then turn them loose in cooperative groups to do it.

What happens next is often magic. Students who are out of control are not out of control (at least for longer than they usually are). Students that are shy might not be shy today – and might even blow your socks off with a flurry of outspokenness or leadership. Your unmotivated students might still be, but some will be among the most motivated in class. Those that know how “to do” traditional school (old school) might be lost – and might be watching or listening to a usually unmotivated or out of control or bullied student to find out how the heck to do THIS. Students that never get excited will FIND YOU and constantly report to you what they found or learned or did or didn’t do (even though you didn’t ask them to). Students will ask you or other students how to do something they don’t know how to do because they HAVE to know how to do THIS. And your classroom becomes a bee hive – there is a palpable buzz of activity and learning – what you became a teacher to experience.

But if you are an outsider observing in that room… And you don’t know THESE kids… then you might see a glimmer of the magic… but you don’t experience the magic or get the magic. You don’t know that when Molly is berating her group for getting off task and they listen to her… that all year she has been that dirty, quiet, strange girl that no one really pays much attention to unless they are making fun of her, but now her group is following her lead…amazing. Or that Darrel who… “he never does anything” has just spent the last 30 minutes helping a group member paint their dirt “Mars Red” because then they are going glue it down on the bottom of the greenhouse he designed and he needs that kids help. If you don’t know these kids you miss that (and many other things) and so you miss the value and the point.

You can’t plan for all the good things that are happening, you can just design projects that meet certain standards knowing that a whole bunch more are going to be met along the way… and some things are going to happen that aren’t standards but you know are just good things. Things that a well rounded person needs to know about – but doing nothing but small reading groups and keyword summaries and circle-seat-center and reading about science and social studies and art in reading groups but almost never doing them – aren’t going to be learned.

So where’s the tech? It’s there. It’s how much of the research was done. It’s how some questions were asked and some answers were received. It’s how product was produced and edited and questioned and talked about with peers and experts from anywhere. AND it’s how the work was presented and shared and discussed and questioned and tweaked and archived and copied and more – much more.

But if you don’t know those kids – you just might not get the whole story. That’s what we have to overcome to spread the word and activate change. We have to get more people to experience THAT.

Learning is messy!

The edublogosphere has been pleading for an answer to how long it will take to make significant change in how schools do school.
From the time I started teaching 25 years ago there has been talk about schools needing to change – so this isn’t exactly new ground.

First I think the initial jump onto the tech-driving-school-change bandwagon fell on its face very hard. “If it’s done with tech it must be valuable learning!” attitude put many people off – especially when it was so obviously not true. This was followed years later by the “if they made a Powerpoint presentation about it they must be experts on the subject as well as world class programmers and problem solvers!” era – as well as the “They made a web page so they must have learned a ton!” stage and the…well you get the point.

Not long ago I sat through a Powerpoint presentation about Abraham Lincoln that the teacher had chosen out of all the presentations her class had made because it was the best. I asked the three student designers about what they had learned about Lincoln and it became painfully obvious that the answer was not much. They had cut-and-pasted images and facts from the internet and scanned some parts from books without much thought. The fact that they could cut-and-paste and scan was very impressive to the teacher and the students’ parents – they didn’t know how to do that – so this was very high level work to them – how could they help but not learn the content? The same will be true of blogs, wikis, video, and anything else we want to run at students if we don’t use the correct approach. The good news is I think we know that approach now and have embraced it – more on that later.

Second, when schools have tried to change that hasn’t always gone well either. I’ve had conversations with people that were supposedly mad as hell that schools were still doing things the way they did when they were in school. But as soon as you start making suggestions about what kinds of changes to make you find that they really don’t want much change.

The message becomes very clear – “Schools are a travesty – schools need to change fundamentally how they do things, as long as when you’re done changing them schools are pretty much the same as they were when I went to school!” Why? Because anyone that was successful as a student had learned how “to do” school – and the easiest way for them to tell if their child and their school are doing the job is if they see things they are familiar with and can help with. That is going to be a difficult wall to break through.

The point is this. The examples stated above point out that the problem was not Powerpoint or any other presentation – the problem was that tech was the content instead of Lincoln – therefore students ended up not understanding the power of either. When students design their work to teach or provoke meaningful discussion that’s when the content is leveraged by the tech, which is when those of us that have witnessed it happen get so excited and “tingly” about it. I agree with Will Richardson when he says:

“Not only can we ask our students to teach back what they know to a potentially large audience, it’s not a contrived audience, because the people who learn from it are motivated to do so. They will self-select it. And in doing so, there is the potential for connection and community building that can extend the learning that occurs in the classroom.
Ironically, this is especially true, I think, with the more multimedia technologies that we talk about. Podcasts, vidcasts, screencasts all give students the opportunity to take what they have learned and turn it into teachable content. That’s what I hear when I listen to Bob Sprankle’s or Tony Vincent’s kids. That’s what I sense with the Wheaton Academy vidcasts. And that’s why I am so intrigued with screencasting as a new medium for students to use to teach.
That’s an interesting shift I think. Instead of being focused on how well our students can test on the material, what if we focused on how well they can teach it?”

Read in the entire post –
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2006/03/12#a4817

We hear we should be telling the story – but maybe we shouldn’t be telling the stories ourselves but our students should – with high quality, thoughtful, thought provoking content, lessons and messages. Then change will sell itself, we will be beating them off with a stick.