Ideas in the Nick of Time

Heard any good ideas lately? How about training rats to sniff out landmines? Or asking cab drivers to gather air pollution data? Or combining mobile phones with gaming to help illiterate children and their parents learn to read?

Attending the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford last week, I was struck by both the ingenuity of world-changing ideas and the urgency to get more good work accomplished—and fast. From global warming to health pandemics to pending water shortages, the world’s problems aren’t about to go away on their own.

Among the highlights were keynotes by former President Jimmy Carter and former Vice President Al Gore, both Nobel laureates. President Carter showed us what optimism looks like at age 83 as he talked about his quest to eradicate waterborne illnesses that disproportionately affect the poor and the young. Vice President Gore explained why his relentless quest to end global warming is now focusing close to home. “To convince the world as a whole to act in time,” he said, “first we have to convince the U.S.”

Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health and subject of Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, is another social entrepreneur who has no time to waste. He has devoted his life to bringing quality health care to the poor, first in Haiti and now in Rwanda, Peru, and elsewhere around the world. This means delivering “goods and services that should be rights,” he argued in a firebrand address, “not commodities.”

This was the fifth-annual conference about a field that is still in its infancy. Social entrepreneurship harnesses strategies more often found in the business sector to solve social and environmental problems. Many who practice in this arena like to talk about “silo busting,” or breaking out of narrow ways of thinking about problems. They often pull from disparate fields to come up with new ideas. Sometimes, they even reach over into the “silo” of education to effect change.

For example, much of India suffers from alternating cycles of torrential rain and drought. It’s also a place where poverty and illiteracy are generational. Bunker Roy, an engineer by training, decided to build underground tanks to collect rainwater during the wet season. Then he built village schools atop the water tanks. Children who were previously not enrolled in school began attending so that they could drink what Roy calls “sweet water.” This was the start of an idea that has blossomed into Barefoot College, a rural development effort that connects villagers with practical knowledge to improve their own lives.

Social entrepreneurs and their big ideas offer the world such hope that some researchers have made a study of their defining qualities. Not surprisingly, they tend to be risk takers and innovators. They often react with righteous indignation when they encounter injustice. But they are also stubborn optimists. Don’t these sound like qualities you want to nurture in your students as you prepare them to become global citizens?

I’ll share more highlights from the Skoll World Forum, both here and on the Spiral Notebook blog, in coming days. You can also find video clips from the conference at the Social Edge blog. For classroom-ready videos and unit plans about this field, take a look at The New Heroes PBS series (full disclosure: I helped to develop the online materials for educators). And if you’re still wondering about those mine-sniffing rats and other ideas that kicked off this post, take a look at: Herorats and MobileActive.

Faces Speak a Thousand Words

Terry Smith, fourth grade teacher in Hannibal, Missouri, established a collaboration between his class and students in Australia. What better way to get to know aussies than to taste their favorite treat? Terry's Vegemite Communications video tells the story. But don't stop here-- check out other gems in this busy teacher's treasure chest of imaginative projects.


Find more videos like this on Classroom 2.0

Big Screen, Big Lessons

What’s your school best known for? Do you have a tradition of excellence that you share with your community or even the larger world?

Next Monday night, a full house is expected at the 1,600-seat Rosebud Theater in Effingham, Ill., for the fifth-annual AHA Film Festival. The event showcases the work of talented young filmmakers from a high school multimedia class (students also plan and organize the festival, learning more real-world skills). It’s a testament to what teachers can accomplish when they give students room to run with their ideas.

The successful program is the brainchild of two award-winning educators, Joe Fatheree from Effingham High and Craig Lindvahl from Teutopolis High. Their schools aren’t even in the same district. Effingham is a small town (pop. 12,000), and Teutopolis is only a fraction of its size. But such factors haven’t stopped these teachers from teaming up to pool resources and creative energies so that students can make real movies about topics that matter to them.

What makes it all worth doing? In a recent discussion about digital storytelling on Spiral Notebook, Fatheree told me about the value of challenging his multimedia students to use higher-order thinking skills for advanced problem solving. He cited more benefits from collaborative learning, project management, and other life skills. He went on: “It will help them develop an entrepreneurial mindset that will prepare them to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Students cannot hide ‘C’ work on a 30-foot screen.”

He's not just talking hypothetically. Fatheree and Lindvahl are also accomplished filmmakers themselves.

This year’s student festival includes documentaries, comedies, animations, music videos. Across all genres, viewers can expect solid storytelling, careful editing, powerful visuals—all skills that students master in the classroom and then take into their own productions. A jury will award one of the entries a grand prize, but it’s easy to see that everybody wins as a result of this tradition.

Watching a Project Unfold

What do the myriad details of project-based learning look like in action? What sorts of questions arise when teachers agree to collaborate for the first time? How do you make sure a project adds up to more than a series of engaging activities?

The answers should become more clear in coming weeks, thanks to a dynamic high school math teacher who has agreed to open a window on her next project, from start to finish.

Jane and I met Telannia Norfar Thursday night during a conference call organized by Sarah McPherson, discussion leader for ISTE's SigTE book study group. Telannia told us about a class she teaches called Logic, Inc. She's the CEO. Students take turns sharing management responsibilities as they work on real-world applications of mathematics.

Telannia suggested that teachers would benefit from watching a project unfold--from initial idea through collaborative planning to implementation with students and engagement with experts. We agreed, and she gamely offered up her next project as a real-life, real-time demonstration.

Will it get messy? Maybe. Will everything unfold according to plan? Probably not. Will it be worth watching? I think so.

Already, Telannia is showing us some of the qualities that PBL teachers tend to exhibit. She's willing to try new ideas to meet her students' learning needs. She came to teaching after earlier careers in journalism and telecommunications. So she knows from experience that projects aren't just an interesting idea in education; they're how the real world operates. And she wants to make sure her students are ready and able to participate in life after high school.

I'll be checking in often to watch her next project unfold. (Her students will be blogging about their experience, too.) Stay tuned for updates.

Where Teachers are Entrepreneurs

Recent press about high test scores for students in Finland has many wondering what secrets we can learn from the Finns. In eSchool News, this story about an international delegation organized by the Consortium for School Networking emphasizes Finland’s emphasis on project-based learning and teacher autonomy.

The Wall Street Journal (in “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?” ) describes a Finnish approach to learning that’s “simple but not easy,” emphasizing “well-trained teachers and responsible children.” What does this look like in action? As WSJ reports:

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says (Andreas) Schleicher of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

One more factor is worth nothing: teacher collaboration. Our research about real-world project based learning led us to interview a cross-grade teaching team from Oulu, Finland, about the development of a project to foster inquiry among primary students. Teachers wanted to encourage young students to pay attention and ask questions about the real world, so they had them use camera phones (ubiquitous in this mobile-phone-loving country) to snap photos en route to school. One student team got curious about local recycling habits and used their photos (along with GPS and a networked learning environment) to gather more data. They wound up advising the school on how to expand its recycling efforts—applying their understanding to an authentic problem. Pasi Mattila, one of the teachers who designed the project, calls this kind of approach “meaningful and motivating learning.”

If students grow accustomed to learning that is meaningful and motivating right from the primary grades, it shouldn't surprise anyone when they continue to excel academically as teens.

Projects for the Privileged? Let's Hope Not!

In the February issue of Educational Leadership, Jane David takes a look at the research behind project-based learning.

Within her overview of PBL pros and cons, one important point gets buried: "Because teachers tend to find this approach difficult to implement with low-performing students and may lack supporting technology, it is less likely to be embraced in high-poverty schools, which could increase rather than lessen existing inequalities."

Seems critical to challenge this perception so that real-world projects aren't seen as just another perk for students of privilege. I know there are many excellent examples of authentic projects that engage diverse learners (including students growing up in poverty). Marco Torres and his students' powerful multimedia projects come to mind. With access to digital tools and new approaches to learning, these students--growing up in one of the poorest areas of Los Angeles County--gain an outlet for their eloquent voices. Shouldn't that be a possibility for every student?

The Future Starts Now

Will Richardson's question--"What do we know about our kids' futures?"--has sparked a firestorm of discussion about 21st-century learning imperatives. Miguel Guhlin has synthesized the many suggestions on a wiki and invites others to contribute. Not surprisingly, his list echoes the big themes of the refreshed NETS-S, highlighting such critical skills as collaboration and problem solving. But there are some interesting new ideas here, too, such as being courageous, having empathy, being "design aware," and having an orientation toward the future.

What might unfold with more competency in all these areas? Here's a recent application of 21st-century skills that seems to fill the bill: Babajob is a new social-networking site in India's Bangalore region that connects the poor with potential employers. Seems simple, yet it took an economist to figure out that poverty persists here because the poor lack connections to find better-paying work. Babajob, created by a former Microsoft researcher, combines the power of personal connections with social-networking technology, along with some creative problem-solving strategies for overcoming the digital divide. This New York Times article about Babajob tells more of the back story, and gets me thinking about those essential "future skills." Seems like we need to be teaching them today.