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Chapter 1

Here’s What I Mean by Doing Work That Matters

Are you ready for an interesting confession? Even though I make a pretty good living as a consultant to schools and districts across the world, I can be a terrible participant in traditional professional development sessions. If I wore a body camera to my next faculty meeting, district-level workshop, or school-based breakout session—and as a full-time classroom teacher I go to more than my fair share of meetings, workshops, and breakout sessions—there is a good chance you would catch me checking my email, sending tweets, or surfing the web. I’d lose track of the questions we were being asked to answer, I’d drop in and out of conversations we were asked to have, and I’d walk away having learned next to nothing that the presenter was expecting me to learn.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not learning during those meetings, workshops, and breakout sessions. In fact, if you looked through the emails, tweets, and websites I was exploring, you’d probably discover that I was involved in some pretty deep stuff. I might be having a conversation about best practice with a buddy who is integrating reading and writing into his classroom. I might be checking out a link to a science experiment I stumbled across on Twitter. I might be asking the readers of my blog for feedback on an instructional strategy that failed. While I may not be paying attention to the content being delivered by the expert in the room, it would be hard to argue that I wasn’t paying attention.

The truth is that access has changed me as a learner. In the 1990s, I tolerated (without complaint) staff development sessions that had little to do with my interests or that did little to challenge me as a practitioner simply because I didn’t have any other options. If I wanted to learn—and like most people, I do—I made the best of bad situations by looking for something worthwhile in whatever lesson the principal or professional developer in charge thought I needed to learn. Today, though, I know that ideas, individuals, and opportunities that interest and challenge me are never more than a mouse click away—and that’s made me an impatient learner. Force me to sit through training that treats me as a silent member of a passive audience, and I’ll find ways to steal minutes to study the things I really care about.

Does any of this sound familiar? Have you grown tired of professional development sessions chosen by others that are disconnected from your own needs? Are you pushing back by using your devices to seek out more relevant learning opportunities while simultaneously pretending to pay attention? If so, then congratulations: you are officially a modern learner. Now imagine how bored and frustrated students who sit in traditional classrooms must be. They too are forced to sit through countless lessons that have little direct connection with their own interests. Take the sixth graders on my learning team, for example: just yesterday, they studied the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, memorized the order of operations, learned the finer points of refraction, and practiced with adverbs. How’s that for a riveting schedule of irrelevance for you?

After twelve years of sitting through similar fact-heavy, teacher-driven lessons, University of Nebraska student Dan Brown had had enough. He shared his frustration in an insightful and poignant commentary posted to YouTube:

Two weeks ago, I dropped out of school, not because I’m a dead-beat, not because I was failing, not because I’m not just as motivated as anyone else to make a difference in this world. I dropped out of school because my schooling was interfering with my education. (Brown, 2010)

Spoken word artist Suli Breaks (2012) agrees: “All I’m saying is that if there was a family tree, hard work and education would be related, but school would probably be a distant cousin.”

Working to Engage Students

In response to these criticisms and new realities, innovative teachers are working to find ways to give students opportunities to demonstrate intellectual agency. Some have embraced 20% time, allowing their students to spend 20 percent of their school hours pursuing individual interests (Juliani, 2013). Others have created genius hours, where students study topics that drive them for one hour a day or one day a week (Carter, 2014). Innovation days ask students to master a new self-selected skill and then demonstrate their learning in front of an audience of parents and peers during the course of one school day (Stumpenhorst, 2011). Passion projects provide yearlong opportunities for every student to wrestle with a concept that is deeply personal to him or her. Regardless of title, the goal of each of these instructional models is to make sure that schooling doesn’t get in the way of learning for the kids in our classrooms. “We spend 14,256 hours in school between kindergarten and graduation,” argues A. J. Juliani (2013), a technology staff developer from Philadelphia. “If we can’t find a time for students to have some choice in their learning, then what are we doing with all those hours?”

But are strategies like 20% time, genius hours, innovation days, and passion projects the best we can do? There’s no doubt that introducing some measure of choice into our curricular decisions will resonate with students who are sick and tired of constantly being told what they have to learn. And like most critics of traditional schooling, I am more than ready to celebrate any effort to reimagine the 14,256 hours that students spend in our classrooms. I just worry about the messages that we send to students when personalization becomes the primary goal of education. It feels selfish and isolated to me—and in a world where it is all too easy to “bravely venture forth into life within glossy, opaque bubbles that reflect ourselves back to ourselves and safely protect us from jarring intrusions from the greater world beyond” (Huston, 2009), that’s frightening.

Shouldn’t schools encourage students to wrestle with the jarring intrusions of the world around them? Isn’t developing students with a sense of civic responsibility a fundamental purpose of public schooling? And aren’t we selling our kids short when we assume that pursuing personal goals matters more than participating actively in society? Tony Wagner (2012), author of Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World, thinks so:

Highly conscious of and concerned about a wide range of social problems and proficient in the use of technologies that enable them to learn, to express themselves, and to network, many of the Innovation Generation long to put their mark on the world. Are many of them overly ambitious and naïve? Perhaps. Impatient? Definitely. But they are our future, and I believe that we must learn how to work with these extraordinary young people: learn how to parent, teach, and mentor them—and learn from them as well. (p. 18)

So does Paul Miller, director of global initiatives for the National Association of Independent Schools. He argues:

There are critical problems that are facing the entire world, and the thinking is that it’s not sufficient to wait for students to graduate, get jobs, and reach a point where they might have sufficient authority to address any of these issues. What we really need is for them to start addressing these issues right away. (quoted in Cutler, 2013)

What’s more, the agencies and organizations working to redefine literacy and learning in the 21st century have, without exception, written civic responsibility into the sets of standards that they are releasing. For the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2004), literacy in an increasingly complex world involves “enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society” (p. 13). “Participating effectively in civic life” is a basic expectation set forth by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (n.d.a). And the Common Core State Standards believe that literate individuals should be able to “reflexively demonstrate the cogent reasoning and use of evidence that is essential to both private deliberation and responsible citizenship” (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, p. 3). Educational expert Will Richardson (2012) best summarizes the notion that personalized learning experiences can’t be the final outcome of education when he writes:

I believe there remains a great deal of value in the idea of school as a place where kids go to learn with others, to be inspired by caring adults to pursue mastery and expertise, and then to use that to change the world for the better …. It’s not “do your own work,” so much as “do work with others, and make it work that matters.” (Kindle locations 210, 282)

You see the common thread in each of these arguments, don’t you? Doing work that matters depends on something more than pursuing your own interests or studying your own passions. Doing work that matters starts when we look beyond ourselves and tap into the human desire to leave our mark by making a difference in the lives of others. People who are doing work that matters see themselves as protectors, contributors, improvers, and agents for good. Doing work that matters means coming together to use our shared expertise to change the world for the better.

Project-Based Learning as a Tool for Doing Work That Matters

And make no mistake about it: there are teachers and students all over the world who really are changing the world for the better. Take High Tech High in California, where the juniors in Jay Vavra and Tom Fehrenbacher’s science and humanities classes are working together to protect the San Diego Bay. The entire year is spent studying the habitats of the Bay Area and the impact that humans are having on the environment. Together, Vavra and Fehrenbacher’s classes publish an annual field guide that is used by everyone from scientists to local politicians interested in looking for solutions to improve the overall ecological health of the region (Vavra & Fehrenbacher, n.d.).