Why Facebook is the end of education

I’ve spent the morning reading education articles in the New York Times. The front page of Tuesday’s print edition carried an article titled “In PISA Test, Top Scores from Shanghai Stun Experts”. Of the 32 industrialized countries or localities tested, the United States ranked 23rd in science, 17th in reading, and 31st in mathematics. In a world where science, reading, and mathematics abilities open doors, this is not a positive sign for the future of American students. I attended a town hall event Tuesday morning where the PISA results were released (yes, you’ll see me in the front row at 1:45) and was surprised to hear that American students predicted they’d score at the top of the pack. For our students, reality doesn’t match perception. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called the results a wake-up call and reiterated President Obama’s statement earlier this year that the country that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow.

The New York Times ran another education article yesterday, “Parents Embrace ‘Race to Nowhere,’ on Pressures of School”. A low-budget documentary has parents, students, teachers, and principals talking about the sleeplessness, hopelessness, and mindlessness many high-performing students experience as they juggle school and homework with sports, community service, college entrance exams, and family. Many students feel they’ve had their childhood stolen from them. Schools across America are showing the film in gymnasiums and auditoriums, and then talking about ways teachers and parents can change students’ experiences.

In our low performing school systems, we hear that students aren’t working hard, that our teachers are untrained, that our programs are failing. But in our high performing systems, we hear that we’ve put so many demands on students that they’ve lost interest in learning. Our education leaders and policy makers tell us we need to improve the quality of instruction in the United States, that we must create a globally competitive workforce, but our top students, the ones who would perform best on international assessments, tell us they hate what school has become. Are we living in separate worlds?

Yes. But it’s more than that. This is systemic. This is a disconnect between the world of adults and the world of students. We adults, the ones setting policies and teaching classes and administering programs, have lost sight of who our students really are. We talk about changing populations, about how today’s students are different from the ones we had even five years ago, about attention spans and personal communication. Veteran teachers reminisce about the days when students used to sit still in a classroom for an entire hour, reading a book or writing an essay. Something has changed.

That something is Facebook. And students will never be the same.

Nearly all of my students are on Facebook. And they’re on it a lot. At midnight. At school. At home. On their computers. On their phones. We teachers say it’s just another piece of technology, like the blogs we never quite understood or the online attendance records we finally figured out how to use. Some of us have signed up for Facebook accounts, so that we can see what all the talk is about. We think the interface is slick, we like that we can connect with people across the country or across the world, and we like seeing and sharing pictures with our friends and family. But we think it’s just another website.

It’s not.

I didn’t understand this until I saw the way my students use Facebook. They broadcast everything about themselves. Here’s the record of one student’s Wednesday night: at 7:06pm, “Ice Cream”. At 7:25pm: “Might have just made my mistake”. More wall posts at 7:33pm, 9:12pm, 9:36pm, 10:51pm, 11:03pm, 12:07am, 12:18am, 12:20am, and 12:21am, along with many comment replies and postings to other people’s walls. This is on a school night; it’s another day at middle school tomorrow morning. And, by the way, all this information was posted publically, available to anyone browsing Facebook profiles. This is just one student among millions nationwide.

Facebook is so much bigger than any other technology. It’s not just transforming how students communicate. It’s transforming who students are. It’s changed the way students access and process information. Facebook provides students with near-immediate feedback. My student’s wall posting at 9:12pm, for example, had 21 comments from friends by 9:36pm. Over the span of a single evening, my student posted 11 different items to her Facebook wall, and most of these received comments. Other nights this week were similar: Tuesday had ten wall posts between 6:44pm and 12:31am; Monday had eight wall posts between 7:32pm and 12:12am; most postings had multiple, back-and-forth comments. Unlike school, where feedback on assignments and ideas comes days or weeks later, Facebook provides an immediate response, and not just from a teacher or mentor, but from an entire peer group.

To adults, Facebook is not a real conversation. When we were young, we learned how to speak to others using eye contact and body language and intonation and pacing, and Facebook can’t replace that. To kids, this is very much not the case. Facebook is real. Facebook is a conversation. Wall postings and comments have become the way our children communicate, and it’s as real to them as an in-person meeting. For the first time in human history, the youngest members of our society perceive online interactions to be authentic and true. It’s a tectonic shift.

But beyond instant feedback, and beyond digital conversation, Facebook has caused another, perhaps more important change in the world of education. Facebook has changed students’ attention spans. Facebook encourages users to move quickly from concept to concept. Postings are short; in the age of Twitter, Americans have grown accustomed to ideas presented in 140 characters or less. Facebook doesn’t present essays or articles, it doesn’t even present paragraphs or sentences. Indeed, it’s built to encourage users to travel constantly from profile to comment to game to photo, endlessly clicking to access new content and new information, always in tiny snippets. Facebook teaches kids to spend only seconds on an idea before seeking out something new. Neuroscience shows us that experiences during childhood and adolescence cause physical changes in the brain; Facebook is wiring students’ brains to best interact with a rapid succession of stimuli. This has major implications for education.

When we look out into our classrooms, we know something has changed. Our students are sleepy. They fall asleep at their desks; they fall asleep in their chairs. We present them with something to read, and they get fidgety within seconds. Their attention wanders after the first paragraph. We show them a video, trying to take advantage of their preference for visual media, and still, after a minute or two, they’ve turned their chair around to do something else…talk to a friend, re-tie a shoelace, or, yes, try to discreetly check the cell phone that we constantly tell them to leave in their locker. Is Facebook the cause? I believe it is. Facebook has rewired our students. Facebook keeps them up late at night, it keeps them focused on digital communication and instant feedback, and it teaches them to move quickly from one idea to the next. In the world of school, where students are often thought of as passive receptors of knowledge, expected to work diligently for long periods of time on a single task, this is not a good fit.

So, Facebook is the end of education. We can try all we like to banish Facebook from our schools, and we probably will succeed. We’ll lock down the web filters, get strict about cell phones, ban all iPads and Facebook apps. We can get Facebook out of school. But we can’t get Facebook out of our students. The change has already happened, and it’s happened where school can’t reach. It’s happened at home, and on the car ride to soccer practice, and at a neighbor’s house, and everywhere with an internet browser. We can say to our students, “Sit down! Study! Focus!” but we’re going to get frustrated, and they’re going to get bored.

We tell ourselves that this new generation is impulsive, obsessive, and inattentive. That they can’t be educated. But this generation is also creative, productive, and communicative. And they can be educated, but not the way we were taught to educate them. We teachers need to recognize that there’s been a shift in America’s children, and running schools the same way we always have is going to cause friction. We can’t walk into a classroom today and teach the students we used to have…they’re gone. We have to teach the people sitting in the chairs, and today’s students are, truly, not the same as those we used to teach.

Facebook is the end of education, but it’s also the beginning. We have an enormous opportunity here. Our students spend hours a day interacting with the world via text and media. Hours. Teachers have struggled for decades to get students to read outside of school. We set up contests, we set up rewards, and still students avoided reading. That’s changed. This generation reads a large amount of text, every day, by choice. They read, and they write. Their words may look silly to us, filled with misspellings and strange abbreviations, but our students are making a conscious choice to write and respond to others. Our students may be apathetic about school, or at least the version of school we present to them, but they are not apathetic about reading and writing. They make it a part of their everyday life.

We so rarely ask our students for their opinion about school and curricula and assignments. We tell ourselves that we know best. That we have the training, the experience, the expertise. But, do we? Do we really know this generation? Do we know how their brains work, how they perceive the world, or how to engage them in education? This group of students is perhaps the most vocal we’ve ever had. They share the minutiae of their life, willingly and with everyone. These students are experts at producing and presenting information. It’s time that we ask students what they want from school.

We call Facebook a distraction. And it is…to us. But we’re not the ones who need an education. Our instant response to the Facebook problem is to block all social media in our schools, to prohibit text messaging and Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Yet these are concepts and tools that are built into students’ lives, things they use to communicate, to create, and to connect to others. Our students are active learners, but they’re active outside the classroom. We need to figure out a way to bring that activity into school. Like it or not, Facebook and everything that comes with it is a part of our students, and until we recognize who our students are, and what they need and want from their education, school isn’t going to be effective.

We’re told that we need to prepare students for careers and citizenship in an information-based economy. Why not be deliberate about it? Bringing Facebook and social media into the classroom, and teaching students to use these tools to communicate effectively and creatively, could transform America’s schools. Will we find success? Will we improve our standing on international tests? I don’t know. But we can’t pretend that we can continue to present students with textbooks, end-of-chapter questions, pen-and-paper tests, and the other traditional hallmarks of American education. Our students are telling us, in our low-performing schools and in our high-performing schools, that the current model of education isn’t what they want. It’s time to get a new perspective.

Why I love the national parks

When I arrived in Washington, DC, I knew I’d be living in a place unlike anywhere else in the country. I knew I’d be living at the seat of government. I knew I’d be living in the shadows of our nation’s forefathers. I knew I’d be living among monuments and museums. What I didn’t know is that I would be living among national parks.

At home in Spokane, it’s a four-hour drive to West to Mount Rainier National Park, and a four-hour drive East to Glacier National Park. Here, I hop on my bicycle and ride a few miles to the George Washington Parkway, cross the Potomac River, and find myself in the National Mall, surrounded by presidential memorials and monuments to American veterans. Each is a national park. I walk throughout the city and find myself at Ford’s Theatre, the site of President Lincoln’s assassination. It’s a national park as well. I stand outside the White House, the symbol of American democracy, and recognize I’m standing before a park.

I’ve loved the national parks as long as I can remember. The sulfur of Yellowstone National Park is the smell of adventure. The alpenglow of Grand Teton National Park is the portrait of natural beauty. The lava of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is the re-creation of Earth’s earliest days. The parks preserve the very best of America. And this year, I’m starting to see that the national parks idea is bigger than just wild places and open lands. The national parks are the story of us.

I’ve explored many of America’s national parks, and I’ve never been disappointed. Just the opposite, really: each park I visit becomes my new favorite. I hike through Glacier National Park and decide that this, above all others, is the finest of the parks. Its scraped, towering walls and quiet lakes are magnificent, stunning, beautiful. I drive through Crater Lake National Park and recognize that I was mistaken, that this is the best park, its pure clear waters and sparkling streams unlike any place on the planet. I ascend to the top of Lassen Volcanic National Park and look out over the Cascade Range, hot springs and forests and rocky outcrops beneath me, and imagine I’m standing at the top of the world. This, certainly, must be the best of the parks. But then I wander through the forests of Redwoods National Park, stunned by the gigantic trees around me, trees that have lived for thousands of years, and feel that I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. This park becomes my favorite.

The national parks in Washington, DC, aren’t visually stunning. There are no mountains, no lakes, no forests. These parks are tiny…they fit into city blocks, into street intersections, into houses. I can’t get lost as I explore these parks. No wildlife greets me, no campfires sparkle and crackle, no trails lead off into unknown places. But these places are national parks for a reason. Like all the others, from Olympic to Acadia, they tell the story of our nation. I’m not just looking at a building or a sculpture. I’m looking at America.

I love the national parks because when I visit a park, I become an American. There’s magic in the parks, and it’s not just in the wildlife and geology. It’s that millions of Americans have come before me, and I’m sharing their experience. I hike through Paradise at Mount Rainier National Park, surrounded by wildflowers and sub-alpine fir, but surrounded by something else as well: memories of the past. This was a place that John Muir once came, a place where he once felt the same wonder as me. He wrote that it was “the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings.” I feel the same. Muir and I are separated by time, but connected by experience. And the park is our medium.

The national parks, like America, are a story of shared experience. Parents take their children to parks and share memories of their own first visit, when their own parents brought them to the same overlook, the same campground, the same waterfall. In the national parks, the stories of grandparents and great-grandparents pass down through time. In the national parks, we walk where our ancestors once came.

Before I came to Washington, DC, I thought there were two classifications of parks: the big and wild parks where we preserve nature, and the small, simple parks where we preserve history. But the truth is, all our parks preserve history. And really, it’s broader than that: our parks preserve America. Our experiences, our ideals, our memories -- each is held for safekeeping in our national parks.

The national parks are where America comes together. Not just because families, friends, and strangers come to the parks together, but also because true understanding of America only comes with an understanding of the national parks. When we visit a national park, we visit not just an American place, but also the shared experience of being American. Step inside Ford’s Theatre, and walk the path of an American president when the very idea of America was in jeopardy. Visit the Jefferson Memorial, and experience revolutionary words that still define American freedoms. Walk past a long black wall on the National Mall, and see America starkly etched into smooth black granite. The parks don’t just represent America – they create a new America. The parks are our living American soul.

I’ve written previously about ways that we can improve education in this country. Here’s another idea: we should be deliberate about sharing the national parks experience with students. I’ve had the good fortune to work in a school district that supports experiential education, and I’ve been able to lead students on expeditions to Puget Sound, to Orcas Island, and, yes, to Yellowstone National Park. Out of all my teaching experiences, from lectures to labs to science fair projects, none have been as successful and rich as my student expeditions to natural places. It’s not just that students learn more about science, or that they gain a sense of how science fits into the broader world. It’s that students are, literally, becoming Americans. At Fort Worden, at Camp Orkila, and at Mammoth Hot Springs, students are sharing in the experiences of the generations who have come before them.

As educators, we put a major emphasis on preparing kids for citizenship in a democratic society. The national parks are an ideal setting for learning like this. When we take students into nature, or to a historic place, and teach them to connect with their surroundings, we suddenly see changes in students’ perception of the world. Talk to any teacher who has traveled with students, and you’ll hear the same story from each of them: students mature during experiences like these. An experiential, learning-focused expedition to a national park, national historic site, or unique natural place has the potential to teach students lessons they don’t otherwise learn at school. A trip to a national park is an elegant solution to the challenge of teaching students what it means to be an American.

When they return from expeditions, my students are filled with stories. They talk about new friendships. They talk about new discoveries. They talk about new insights. They talk about themselves. Their stories and their conversations are unlike those they normally have at school. Their behavior is more mature. Their ideas are more developed. Their interactions are more grown up. In essence, they are becoming adults. They are becoming Americans. Expeditionary learning, even a simple overnight experience, has the potential to help students grow in a way that classroom learning cannot. These programs are not cheap. Weeklong expeditions typically cost $300 to $400 per student. Even a one-night outing can cost $100. Multiply that by twenty students, and in an age of budget cuts, it’s tough to justify expenses like those. But the learning that occurs when students get away from school has real value. Many students never have an experience in a wild or historic place. Not with their families. Not with their schools. Not ever. Providing students an opportunity to interface with nature, with history, and with the ideas and ideals of America, has value. It should be a part of every student’s education.

I ride my bike across the Potomac, back to my home in Virginia. Ninety minutes to the West sits Shenandoah National Park, dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Its forests, trails, and roadways show the Appalachian Mountains as they were when our nation was young. Two hours to the East is Assateague Island National Seashore, with wild horses roaming throughout sandy flats. This was the America of our earliest European settlers. Two hours to the South is George Washington’s Birthplace National Monument, the earliest home of America’s first leader and greatest war hero. Ninety minutes to the North lays Antietam National Battlefield, site of one of America’s most bloody battles, where a Union victory emboldened President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Here in Washington, DC, like no place I have lived before, I am surrounded by parks. I am surrounded by history. I am surrounded by America. And, like my students, I’m becoming a part of it.

Why we need to get rid of science class

This September has been unlike any other I’ve experienced. I’m living in a high-rise building. I’m wearing a suit to work. I’m traveling to a new city every weekend. And, for the first time in twenty-seven years, I’m not spending my days in a classroom.

It’s a step nearly all Americans take. Except for the few who choose a career in teaching or academia, time in the classroom eventually comes to an end. For some, this moment comes early: students lose interest in education or find new responsibilities at home, and their schooling ends before graduation. For some, the moment comes much later: many doctoral students spend twenty or more years in classrooms before ending their formal schooling. But eventually, the days in a classroom end and a new stage of life begins. For me, that moment came this September. My situation is unique, as I plan to return to the classroom next fall, but for the first time in my life, I have an outsider’s perspective on the role of school in society.

I look at our nation and think about the things that tie us together. History. Values. Culture. Should school be on that list? What role does school play in turning us into Americans? The enormous variety of educational systems across the country, and the wide discrepancies in achievement across those systems, makes finding an answer to that question nearly impossible. But we can start with a simple idea: most Americans under twenty have spent more time in a classroom than in any other place outside their home. Regardless of the quality of their school, regardless of graduation rates or AP scores or test results, being part of a classroom is something that is common to nearly all Americans.

Our nation loves to talk about school. It’s no wonder…we all have a personal experience with the topic. We might have little knowledge of international diplomacy or farm subsidies or multi-reagent analysis, but we all have firsthand knowledge of what happens at school and ideas for how our country might make schools better. For this reason, school, like no other concept in the United States, might be the thing that links us together. It’s not that we all learned the same thing at school…because we didn’t. It’s that each of us went to school. School, itself, is part of our national identity.

You would think that we would have long ago solved the problems facing American schools. After all, it’s a topic millions of Americans understand. We know what we liked about school, we know what we hated, and many of us aren’t shy about sharing our opinions. So why are our schools still struggling? It can’t be for a lack of good ideas. Educational reform has been a longtime political catchphrase, and many government leaders have worked hard to enact programs that would improve our nation’s classrooms. Yet we frequently hear stories about the failures of our public schools and how the programs we’ve enacted have seen little effect.

I think that’s all about to change.

Last week, I received my weekly copy of Time magazine and saw a cover story about American schools and strategies for fixing them. The lead story detailed a soon-to-be-released movie, titled Waiting for Superman, that chronicles the struggles of five public school students. (Lest you think a documentary about education won’t find an audience, keep in mind that this movie is the newest film by the producer of An Inconvenient Truth).

Last week, the National Science Board released a report that shows how we can improve our international competitiveness by identifying gifted students and targeting them for specialized instruction in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The goal is to train the next generation of innovators.

Last week, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released its own K-12 STEM education report with seven specific suggestions for how to improve American schools. Recommendations? Train 100,000 new STEM teachers and open 1,000 new STEM-focused schools throughout the country over the next ten years.

Last week, President Obama himself described developments in his “Educate to Innovate” campaign, a public-private partnership to improve STEM instruction in America’s schools.

Last week, I participated in a meeting that focused on inspiring students to seek careers in science. Researchers and professors talked about what it’s going to take to encourage the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Last week, I attended a live broadcast of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” at the National Geographic headquarters, where experts discussed the science of the Gulf Oil Spill and addressed whether it’s too late to save our changing oceans. (Their answer? We need to inspire people, especially students, to take action).

We’re at a point in American history where citizens, media, teachers, students, and government are coming together, independently and jointly, to decide it’s time to change the way we teach American students.

Will we succeed? I don’t know. Schools are complicated, and even simple systems are difficult to change. Telling teachers they need to suddenly try something completely new is going to cause some resentment. But this is an opportunity for bold action.

So here’s my simple suggestion: get rid of science class. And not just science class, but math class and history class and English class, too.

I’m serious…we need to change the way we do school. The goal of science class should not be that students learn science. Instead, it should be that students learn how to solve problems. The goal of English class is not that students learn English…it’s that they learn to communicate. Calling it English or Science or History limits what our students can learn. We can be doing much more.

Any good teacher will tell you they teach students how to think. Why not let them do that, explicitly? There’s no need to compartmentalize learning with labels like English and science and drama. Course names like “Critical Thinking” and “Creativity” and “Social Responsibility” might seem too nebulous for a course offerings booklet, but isn’t that what we really want our students to learn?

The place that change like this starts is, of course, at the top. We have a federal law that requires annual testing in math and English if schools are to receive federal funding. With titles like math and English, can we really be surprised that schools are teaching math and English? No. So we need to change our federal government’s expectation of what happens in schools.

But change like this also works from the bottom. The school experience is common to nearly all Americans, and nearly all Americans attended a school that offered courses in specific subjects and disciplines. They remember going to sixth grade social-studies class, or tenth-grade English. They automatically expect that today’s students should have similar experiences. After all, it’s the only thing they know. So we need to change our citizenry’s expectation of what happens in schools, too.

As citizens, we currently expect certain things from our schools. We ask schools to teach students how to read and write. We ask them to teach students how to use mathematics and science, how to complete assignments, how to work independently, and how to contribute to society. Some schools deliver. Others don’t. But amazingly, our set of expectations has changed very little over the past hundred years. Despite all the change in our world, despite technology revolutions and economic reforms and international trade, we still educate students using the same general philosophies we used in 1910.

We’ve tried many things to improve our schools. We’ve tried smaller classes, we’ve tried smaller schools, we’ve tried new curricula, we’ve tried computers and Smartboards and cooperative learning. But we still teach students English and we still teach them science, and we still do it separately. Some schools break the mold, mixing disciplines and courses, but even they must test their students with subject-specific examinations.

If we really want to effect change, we need to change our set of expectations. We need to define not the segregated subject matter we want students to learn, but the skills we want them to master. And yes, we need to test them on those skills. From parents to politicians, from school boards to teachers, across all elements of society and across all parts of the nation, we need to redefine what we want to school to be.

The No Child Left Behind act requires annual testing in English and math. But there’s a problem with the system: each state can define its own standards. Some states’ tests are rigorous; others’ aren’t. We’ve recognized the disconnect, and there’s a new national movement to develop Common Core Standards and an assessment system that would be shared across the states, so that a child in Michigan could be expected to learn the same things as a child in Maryland. It’s a smart idea that will help states work cooperatively and share ideas for improving instruction. But it doesn’t go far enough. The standards address only two areas…English and math. Our states are cooperating, but they’re cooperating to create a system that will not be meaningfully different from the one we’ve been using for the last hundred years.

Instead, we need to define a new set of expectations for what we want students to be able to do. These expectations need to reflect our current national economy, our current national values, and our current national interests. I’m excited that the National Science Board and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology are calling for major change in the nation’s schools. But our current national assessment system is going to prevent much of this progress. We can try to change the way we teach students, but if students are still going to be tested with subject-specific exams, then teachers are still going to teach them subject-specific knowledge.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed a set of simple, powerful expectations for what students should learn at school. Is theirs the only option? Of course not. But it’s a great example of what we can do to make school relevant, meaningful, and worthwhile for today’s students and today’s economy.

Communication skills. Creativity skills. Critical thinking skills. Interpersonal and Collaborative skills. Problem solving skills. Information and media literacy skills. Social responsibility skills.

These are the things we want our students to learn. These are the things we want our students to know. Why not make it explicit? Why not use these skills as the focus of a national assessment system? Sure, it’s tough to make a test that assesses creativity or communication, but we’re up to the challenge. Politicians and parents throughout the country are talking about education, in ways we never have before. We’re all interested in improvement. Why not start big?

So, get rid of “science” class, and replace it with problem solving class. Use science to teach students how to solve problems…but also use art, and history, and media studies. Get rid of “English” class, and replace it with communication class. Use English to teach students how to communicate…but also use journalism, and web design, and debate. We still want students to learn about natural systems, and we still want them to learn about writing, but we want them to learn about these topics in a different context. The goal is not that we create scientists and writers. The goal is that we create problem solvers and communicators. Science and English are just a strategy for getting there. Replacing our current national assessment system with one that measures communication, creativity, critical thinking…this will give us the freedom to prepare kids for citizenship in modern America. Science and English are just a pathway.

Speak with college professors. Talk to workplace leaders. Listen to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It’s not textbook knowledge of science and math and English that makes our students competitive. It’s their ability to think. It’s their ability to create. It’s their ability to communicate. These are the ideals of an American education, but they’re so often an afterthought in our current system. Let’s make them our priority. Let’s be vocal about what we want from our schools and what we want to see in our students. Let’s be bold.

Why this is the year I become an American

For a little over thirty years, I’ve been a Washingtonian. But I haven’t been an American. At least, not yet.

There’s a difference. It took me a cross-country drive, a visit to Mount Vernon, and a meeting at the U.S. Capitol to see it. Driving through the rolling fields and prairies of the great plains, walking the path of George Washington along the Potomac River, and speaking with teachers from every corner of the nation, my experiences over the past several weeks have me thinking about my identity and what it means to be a citizen of this country.

Until I left for the nation’s capital, I had always considered myself an American. Now, I’m not so sure. There’s overlap, of course: the values of the nation radiate across the states, and my upbringing and my experiences have been similar to those of millions of others throughout the country. But there’s more to being part of this nation than merely living within it.

So who am I? A Washingtonian? An American? I’m not sure anymore. Here at the seat of our nation’s government, I’ve found myself thinking about my country in a way I never have before. It’s not just the marble buildings and the monuments and the museums. It’s something more.

We call it the United States, but I’ve never understood the concept until now. Here in the capital, I’m starting to recognize how the nation fits together. And I’m starting to learn how I fit in to it all.

On my journey East, I pass through Nebraska and Iowa. I’ve always imagined flat fields with endless rows of corn. That’s not what I find. Instead, small family homesteads with charming barns and silos dot the hills, groves of trees separating fields from each other. This was once the frontier, a land of opportunity and dreams.

I walk to work in Virginia, and many of the license plates on the cars that pass me note the state’s 400th anniversary. This is where the idea of America began, the home of our nation’s earliest European settlement. I pass by George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon and recognize I’m in the presence of one of the world’s most extraordinary men.

I board the subway and cross underneath the Potomac into the District of Columbia, and I enter a city with laws and government unlike anywhere else in the nation, where residents couldn’t even vote for President until 1964, and where they still don’t have the right to elect a voting representative in Congress. At its heart sit the centers of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government. The decisions made here define our national experience.

I drive north into Maryland, home of soft shell crab and the Chesapeake Bay, to a place where a Civil War battle bloodied the earth and the nation’s history was forever changed. This land has been part of two American revolutions.

The other Einstein fellows come from Hawaii and New Jersey and Florida and Illinois, from California and Connecticut and Texas. Each brings a different perspective on education, but not just because we all work in different types of schools or with different types of students. It’s because we’re each literally bringing our State’s values and ideals with us to Washington. We, collectively, are America.

I’m starting to see the United States as it literally is: states, united. Until I moved to Washington, DC, I thought I was an American. But I know now that I didn’t start becoming an American until I sat in a room with thirty other teachers from throughout the country and spoke about education. When people come together, that is America.

This year, I’m becoming an American, but I’m starting from scratch. In a way, it’s my turn to be an adolescent again. I thought I knew who I was…a Washingtonian, a teacher, a husband. Those labels are still true, but now I’m becoming something else, too. I’m forming a new identity. Just like the students I teach, I’m trying to figure out who I am, and, indeed, who I want to be. I’ve lived here in the capital for just a few weeks, but I’m starting to recognize that my experiences this year won’t be much different from those of the students I left behind in Spokane.

I’ve begun work in a brand new setting, far from the world of school and science education. The National Science Foundation is not a classroom. But it might as well be. I’m in a new environment, with new responsibilities, and little expertise. At its heart, the experience I have here will be much like that of my middle school students. I need to learn a new vocabulary. I need to develop new relationships. I need to create products that show my knowledge and understanding. I need to figure out what it means to be an effective worker in the NSF environment. And, here in the nation’s capital, I need to figure out what it means to be an American.

I haven’t thought this way about my own identity for many years. Not since high school, in fact. But the path I’ll take this year mirrors that of countless American students. In schools across the country, kids will spend much of their day figuring out who they want to be and how they’ll fit in. For many students, forming an identity trumps everything else. Kids decide every day to try on new personalities. They change their clothing, they change their hairstyles, they change their friend groups. This focus on identify formation has big implications for the way we approach education.

The most important thing we can do in middle school and high school, far beyond teaching any scientific principle or language arts skill, is to give students an opportunity to learn what type of person they want to become. Adolescence is about identity development, pure and simple, and we teachers need to key in on that if we want to make a difference. Effective schools and effective educators are deliberate about giving kids opportunities to see what it means to be an actor, or a politician, or an engineer, or a businessperson.

And the best educators don’t stop there. We give our students opportunities for social interaction, where kids can try out different personalities and learn, in real life, what it means to be a responsible citizen. We teach students how to communicate, how to solve arguments, how to contribute to teams, and how to relate to others. We focus on social development just as much as career or college preparation. We give kids a chance to find out not just what they want to be, but who they want to be.

When schools teach about character development, it’s usually done almost exclusively at the elementary level. We teach kids about diligence and respect and integrity, and we do a good job of it, but then we suddenly stop once kids enter secondary school. We transition to social studies and science and music, and we hope that the principles students have learned in their elementary years stay with them for the second half of their schooling.

But this is exactly opposite the way we should be approach our curriculum. The critical period for identity development is not the elementary years…it’s when kids are in middle and high school. It’s important to set a good foundation, and I would never argue that we should remove character education from our elementary schools. But the true emphasis on character education should be during the middle and high school years.

Parents and politicians would likely say we’re dumbing down our schools, that character education has no place next to AP Physics or English Literature. And maybe they’re right…school should be challenging, and since most character education programs were created for elementary schools, they don’t have the level of rigor our communities expect for middle or high school. Yet, most students would probably benefit more, later in life, from an intensive focus on character education than on geometry.

Whether we focus on incorporating character development into our existing classes (discussing concepts like integrity as students analyze literature, or teaching cooperation techniques when students work collaboratively on a biology project), or whether we incorporate stand-alone character education classes into our course catalogs, it’s important that our middle school and high school students have an opportunity to learn not just what they want to be, but who they want to be. It’s important that we offer some direction as students make those decisions. Teaching students to be responsible, contributing citizens should be the paramount duty of every school in the nation.

So, students, you thought I’d left you this year. But I’m starting to realize that even though we’re 2500 miles away, our experiences will be similar. I wish you the best of luck as you begin your new classes. For maybe the first time ever, I know what you’re going through.

Why school should be like Space Camp

In mid-June, I had the opportunity to visit Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama as part of the Honeywell Educators at Space Academy scholarship program. I’d been excited about it for months, and like any wannabe astronaut, I had expected the shuttle simulator to be the highlight of my week. Complicated, challenging, exciting — my simulated rocket ride would be a true adventure. I had loved space exploration as a child, and my time in the simulator would almost certainly be the closest I would ever come to spaceflight. It had been a dream of mine for many years. Like many other American children, I had at one time been obsessed with NASA. Posters of astronauts and satellites had hung on my walls; books about spacecraft and rockets had laid scattered about my room. Space travel was the ultimate adventure. How surprised I was, then, to find that other people, rather than machines and rockets, could become the most memorable part of my week. My simulated shuttle time was wonderful — indeed, the experience far exceeded my expectations — but it wasn’t the best part of my time at Space Camp.  My experiences with other teachers were the most meaningful and unforgettable parts of my adventure.

I’ve met many educators during my years of teaching, and I’ve been a part of some teacher groups that have truly impressed me with their intelligence and passion. But never have I been part of a group as consistently impressive as my Space Camp peers. We only had a week together. I wish they were my coworkers. It was a delight to be around people who were so adventurous, so creative, so fun, and so smart. I enjoyed talking to my teammates about life in their schools, and I learned a great deal about effective teaching from the stories they told. But I learned something far more important from these people: I discovered that science and learning can be a passion for anyone.

My teammates had a wide variety of life experiences and a wide variety of personalities. Had we not met at Space Camp, I would never have guessed these people were passionate about space exploration. American society, and its school population especially, sees science and math as nerdy interests. Overcoming that stereotype is a challenging task in any classroom — how are we supposed to help kids understand that being interested in biology or astronomy doesn’t turn you into a nerd, when television and popular music say just the opposite? Take a look at nearly any high school science faculty in America, and you’ll find teachers who reinforce the traditional stereotype. But sitting across the table from me at Space Camp was proof that science doesn’t have to be nerdy. My peers were easygoing, fun, and friendly people who just happened to have an interest in science.

Nobody demonstrated this better than my group leader, Amy McDowell. Amy is the ideal teacher. She is confident, poised, personable, intelligent…and more interested in space science than anyone I’ve ever met. If every student in America had a teacher like Amy, our nation’s negative stereotypes about science would quickly vanish. Amy is smart enough to have a deep understanding of science and math, she’s confident enough not to care what other people think about that, and she’s charming enough to be able to connect with anybody. Amy’s not just the type of teacher I would want my own children to have — she’s the type of person I would want my own children to become. She’s a role model for what it means to follow your passions. I’ve never been to Amy’s school, nor seen her teach a lesson to children, but it’s clear to me that Amy empowers her students to pursue their dreams. We all need someone like her.

This was my true learning from Space Camp. I expected to learn about rockets, to learn about astronauts and satellites and Apollo and shuttles. And I did. But I could have learned about those from a book or a movie or a magazine. What I learned at Space Camp — and could only have learned at Space Camp — was that we teachers have the power to help make our students’ dreams come true. Whether in science or engineering or English or drama, we have the ability to help our students find and follow their passions. If we as educators want to make a difference in the future, we need to do more than just teach our students about textbook knowledge. We need to show our students what it means to chase a dream. The best teachers know this already, of course, but in an age of standardized tests and state curricula, spending time teaching students about state-of-mind seems frivolous. Instead, we just hope that the best parts of our personalities will somehow transfer to students. We spend time and money on better curricula, better books, better buildings, better supplies. Maybe all we really need is a better sense of what we’re really trying to accomplish.

The people at Space Camp understand this. Space Camp isn’t about learning how to fly the shuttle or design a Moon lander. It’s about getting kids interested in science and math and teaching them to follow their dreams. The shuttle is just the hook, the thing that gets people in the door. How many Space Camp attendees will go on to become astronauts? Virtually none. But that doesn’t make the experience a waste. Rather, just the opposite — sitting aboard the shuttle simulator may direct kids to an interest in engineering they never knew existed. We can do the same at school, but we need to move beyond the idea that textbook learning prepares our kids for life. We need our politicians, our principals, our school boards, and our society to understand that the topics presented in textbooks are just a hook — just some ideas to get kids interested in learning. The real value of education is in who we teach our students to be, not what we teach them to know.

Not all kids will become mathematicians, just like not all kids will become authors or athletes. Why waste time worrying about whether or not students understand the quadratic equation or onomatopoeia or electrolytes, when what we really care about is whether or not they’re learning to think, create, converse, and present? (High school graduates, be honest…how many of you can explain the quadratic equation now?) We need to put some serious time and effort into teaching students how to develop interpersonal relationships, how to manage finances and families, how to set and achieve goals, and most importantly, how to live and learn independently. We use literature and drama and space and democracy to get those ideas across, and if kids pick up some facts along the way, that’s tremendous. Do kids need to understand how to read and write? Absolutely. They also need to know how to find information, create products, and communicate with others. But our nationwide focus on trivial concepts — Krebs cycle, atomic structure, and Newton’s laws, to name a few from my own subject expertise — is showing kids that school is pointless. Instead, we need to focus on what we really want our students to be able to know and do, and that can’t include fluff like the War of 1812 and vector summation. Future engineers will still learn about forces and motion, and future authors will still learn about dialogue and denouement, but it will because our students are choosing to do so, rather than being forced to do so.

This is what Space Camp showed me…that school should be like Space Camp. Not literally, of course: Space Camp costs big money, and some of its features can’t be replicated anywhere else. But the idea that students have a series of intensive experiences, each with a subject-specific focus, is something that can change education. Deep, real learning occurs when schools decide to teach students concepts instead of trivia. Yep, it’s harder to teach, and it’s harder to grade, but it’s the only way we’ll get our kids thinking critically and creatively. We need to be deliberate in how we prepare students for the future, and we can’t just hope they’ll turn out all right.

How do we make this happen? We start with interdisciplinary studies. We treat our classrooms like Space Camp. We teach kids about rockets and robots and teamwork and trust. We teach them how to solve problems with math and science, and we give them a sense of what it means to be an engineer or an astronaut. We tie in history and language and art and design, and we do it all through the lens of space science. And then, we start something new. We run a drama unit, or a storytelling seminar, or a study of local ecosystems, or a solar car challenge. It doesn’t matter. The point is not that kids learn about monologues or predators or electrons. The point is that students get a chance to do real-life work and learn real-life skills. Our goal is to get kids interested in learning. Our goal is to inspire the next generation of engineers and biologists and fashion designers and publishers. Teachers will say we’ve been doing this for decades, and in a way, they’re right. But we’ve been doing it as an afterthought. If America wants the best for the future, we need to recognize that the entire purpose of school is to inspire kids to achieve, and anything that isn’t focused on that central tenet doesn’t deserve a place in our classrooms.

Most kids love elementary school. They love learning to read and write and count; they love learning how to tell stories and how to make friends and how to build and how to draw. And when middle school begins, and students transition into textbooks and end-of-chapter questions, we’re surprised that kids are no longer interested in school. Would you be interested? We tell ourselves that students need to learn what’s in the textbook, that they won’t be ready for high school or college or work if they can’t grasp the ideas textbooks hold. But the truth is, they’re not going to be ready for the future unless we can prepare them for something far beyond textbooks. Bringing space science and drama week and democracy and dinosaurs into our classrooms – using the same strategies in our middle and high schools as we use in our elementary schools – will give students a chance to see how the world works and how to be a contributing part of it. As students age, the problems they solve become more sophisticated, and the topics they address become more complicated, but the model remains the same. Our singular goal, with every student in every classroom in America, must be to ignite a passion for learning. Everything else is a means to that end.

Schools across the country talk about interdisciplinary work and project-based learning, but most teachers have no idea what that really means. They grew up in classrooms where students read textbooks, answered questions, took tests, and earned grades based on how much information they had learned. Most teachers do the same in their own classrooms…it’s all they know. Most teachers have never experienced true project-based learning, where the topic of study is of less importance than the fundamental learning it leads to. I was impressed by Space Camp. It provided a very real, very compelling window into how we can get students interested not only about science, technology, engineering, and math, but also about the excitement of learning. Space Camp was a true project-based learning environment and a model for what American classrooms should be. Until we change our mindset, until we start giving kids realistic experiences and teaching them to complete real-life projects, as Space Camp does, we’ll be stuck with underperforming schools and disinterested students. There’s a way out, and it’s going to take a lot of work, but it’ll change the way our students view learning and the way our citizens feel about their country. Thanks, Honeywell. Thanks, Space Camp. And thanks, Amy. You’ve lit my fire.

Why I'm moving to the other Washington

In about two months, I'll be moving from one Washington to another.  For the upcoming school year, I'll be working at the National Science Foundation headquarters in the nation's capital.  I'll be part of the Office of International Science and Engineering, which focuses on partnerships between US and foreign scientists.  Most of my job duties will focus on grant administration: organizing grant applications, coordinating review panels, writing recommendations, and monitoring awardees. 

Boring?  I sure hope not.  But even if it's not as high-energy as my normal days in the classroom, I'm looking forward to life on the East coast.  Chesapeake Bay, Virginia Beach, Mystic Seaport, Colonial Williamsburg -- there's so much I've never seen.  It's all part of my Einstein Fellowship, which I was awarded this spring by the United States Department of Energy.  Along with about thirty other teachers from around the nation, I'll be spending a year working at a government agency in Washington, DC.  Some of the other fellows will work on Capitol Hill, some will work at the Department of Energy, others will work at NASA.  The Fellowship program was created by the United States Congress in 1994 in the Albert Einstein Distingushed Educator Act.  This year's fellows will be the largest class ever.  Originally, fellows worked only in the US Senate and House of Representatives, but over the years, other federal agencies have joined the program.  The goal is that classroom teachers share their experience and expertise with government policy makers.  It's also meant to be an opportunity for teachers to learn what it means to work in government and to gain new skills that they can take back home at the conclusion of the fellowship.

Moving 2500 miles from home--woah.  That's a big move.  Emily and I have decided to drive, but we're only taking one car.  We toyed with the idea of going without a car, and just renting one when we need it, but when I did the math, it just didn't work out.  Still, we're planning on living an a high-rise urban apartment where most places we need to go are just a short walk away.  Essentially, we're shooting for a big-city experience for the upcoming year.  Museums, concerts, government functions -- these are going to be a top priority for us next year.  During the interview weekend in April, I finished interviews early one morning and spent a few hours at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum.  If the quality of the exhibits there is anything like the rest of the museums in DC, we're in for an amazing year of culture and adventure.  Now, it's just a matter of finding a place to live, getting someone to rent our house, seeking a way to get health insurance, learning how to get new license plates...