The importance of re-imagining our world

In 1964 the folk rock duo Simon and Garfunkel released their song 'The sound of silence'. The album on which they released that song was dubbed a 'flop', apparently selling only 2000 copies. The song however went on to become a 'classic'.

In May 2016 'Disturbed' re-imagined and released the song.

Opinions will vary but, while the rest of the 'Disturbed' repertoire isn't to my personal taste, for me this is one of the most profound 're-imaginings' of a song that I have heard. This singer has taken an older song and created something the completely recognisable, yet profoundly different. This takes creativity, it takes imagination.

In the same way this

is a re-imagining of this

And this (a driverless truck)

is a re-imagining of this

which was a re-imagining of this

Or this

is a re-imaging of this

We live in times of rapid technological change, and this is having a profound impact on employment opportunities. Many of the jobs that we currently know may well not exist in 10-20 years time, and similarly there may well be jobs that exist in 20 years time that we can't possibly imagine today.

All of this is the result of that technological change, but it is also a result of human endeavour. At this stage it does seem likely that much of the creative process however may not be replaced by technology (although even that isn't certain). The re-imagining that I am talking about seems more likely to be around in the future than the job of a truck driver, or a builder, or a tax accountant.

The challenge for schools is to place much more emphasis on critical, creative and collaborative thinking. A lot of the development we are witnessing isn't the creation of entirely new ideas, products and processes, but the re-imagining of current ideas. There are always those radical, revolutionary ideas that come to the fore.  This re-imagining is a critical part of creativity.

We need  more 'Disturbed's to re-imagine for us, more critical thinkers who dare to suggest that horse drawn motive power isn't the future, more collaborators who aren't afraid to work with others re-imagine anything and everything in our world.

Inspired by last week's address by Yong Zhao, we need to stop stifling diversity and creativity, and embrace it, encourage it, celebrate it.

A colleague today made one of those comments that has left an indelible mark on my consciousness: 'We are asking kids to run the marae on their own'. We have to foster collaborative work. I recall listening to Eric Mazur, Harvard physics professor, when he told a conference that in his career he had been involved in writing (I think) 80+ academic papers.Yet not one of those had he authored entirely on his own. If collaboration and re-imagining are good enough for a Harvard physics professor, then they should be good enough for our secondary students.

Let's get re-imaging.

R Sutton
Principal

The future of our education

There is a lot of talk about the future of work, and therefore of how appropriate our current education model is as our mechanism for preparing young people for that future. I recently had the privilege of attending an address by Young Zhao, a Chinese American education 'futurist'.

His comments were thought provoking and affirming.

Let's start by thinking about the future of work. Many jobs as we know them are fast disappearing, often replaced by technological solutions that were the stuff of science fiction writers 100 years ago.
Jobs that we assumed were traditionally available are less so. These trucks pictured working in the mining industry in western Australia are driverless.

Driverless trucks

This block layer can build a house in two days. It is a robot.

Production and productivity increase while employment declines, all the impact of technology. Look at these figures for the USA (Courtesy Young Zhao).

Yong Zhao's argument is that we have traditionally operated an education system that has been designed to remove difference, to stifle creativity in order to create homogeneous workers for an economy of massed production and industrialisation. Technological change, and it's impact on that demand for industrial workers, now means that we in fact need to enhance diversity, to create more lateral thinkers. We need more divergence in talent and people, we need to foster and nurture creativity and talent. More than this we need to nurture entrepreneurship, we ned enterprising people who are capable of looking at the world's problems in new ways in order to come up wiht new solutions.

Zhao has written a comprehensive blog post titled "A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners[1]". His recommendations are worth quoting in full:

"Recommendations

In light of the urgent need for improvement, both immediate and long term, I propose a set of recommendations that policy makers and educators can begin to act on now, that can be implemented over the next several years, and that promise educational excellence for the new age.

• Stop prescribing and imposing on children a narrow set of content through common curriculum standards and testing.
• Start personalizing education to support the development of unique, creative, and entrepreneurial talents.
• Stop fixing solely the teaching force by selecting, training, and retaining better teacher candidates. It takes too long and we cannot wait.
• Start empowering the children by liberating their potentials, capitalizing on their passion, and supporting their pursuits. Start giving the ownership of learning to the children.
• Stop constraining children to learning opportunities present in their immediate physical environments by assigning them to classes and teachers.
• Start engaging them in learning opportunities that exist in the global community, beyond their class and school walls.
• Stop forcing children to learn what adults think they may need and testing them to what degree they have mastered the required content.
• Start allowing children the opportunity to engage in creating authentic products and learn what they are interested in, just in time, not just in case.
• Stop benchmarking to measures of excellence in the past, such as international test scores.
• Start inventing the excellence of the future. You cannot fix the horse wagon to get the moon. We have to work on rocket science."

Hornby High School is re-creating itself as we re-imagine our own future, a future that promotes and develops the diversity and talent that our community and students all possess. Much of Zhao's commentary and recommendations ring true for us, as it should.

My thanks to Garth Wynn, Executive Principal of Christ;'s College who was instrumental in getting Yong Zhao to talk in Christchurch, and for making the address open to the wider educational community.

Encouraging leadership at Hornby High School

Lots of people in our schools are leaders, whether they want to be or not. Often amongst students leadership develops simply because of age and year group. I spoke to our Year 13 students last week, reinforcing this idea that they are leaders whether they want to be or not. I asked them what sort of leader they might want to be.

I've been in formal leadership roles of some sort or another for three decades. When we are put into those roles we tend to adopt a 'leadership style' that perhaps suits our personality; I certainly have. I remember 'teaching' some of the theory that lies behind leadership some time ago at tertiary level, and at that stage the theory suggested that the best approach to leadership was what the textbooks describe as situational or contingency leadership. The style should shift to suit the situation.

At the time of the Canterbury earthquakes for example authoritarian leadership was often the instant and necessary response as many fell into shock and others (at times not the 'formal leaders'), stepped up to 'take control' because lives were at stake. On the other hand when trying for longer term cultural change in an organisation a far slower and more participatory approach is more suitable.

Underpinning all of this there should in my opinion be a set of values that drive those in leadership positions, and those values might best be described with the words 'servant leadership'. Servant leadership is an idea that has been around for millennia. There is reference to it in Indian and Chinese writings from over two thousand years ago. It made a grand entrance to our western management literature in 1970 with the book 'The servant as leader' by Robert K Greenleaf.

The concept is simple: leaders are servants of those whom they 'lead'. Great leaders in history have often taken this path. Consider the leaders of the world's great religions and reforming movements. Whether it's Islam, Christianity or Buddhism, Mahatma Ghandi, or Christ, or Mohammed, the prime figures have seen themselves as servants of their people.

We would produce better outcomes for our world if we were to encourage out students to model themselves around this idea of servant leadership. A quick Google search will take you to a Wikipedia entry (not everything on Wikipedia is bad) which says this:

Larry Spears identified ten characteristic of servant leaders in the writings of Greenleaf. The ten characteristics are listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of others, and building community. Leadership experts such as Bolman, Deal, Covey, Fullan, Sergiovanni, and Heifitz also reference these characteristics as essential components of effective leadership.

The Center for Servant Leadership at the Pastoral Institute in Georgia defines servant leadership as a lifelong journey that includes discovery of one’s self, a desire to serve others, and a commitment to lead. Servant-leaders continually strive to be trustworthy, self-aware, humble, caring, visionary, empowering, relational, competent, good stewards, and community builders.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership)

You'll find these values described in part at the front of New Zealand's national curriculum; they are a critical part of those concepts whanaungatanga, manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga. At Hornby High School we wrap our values up in these four words: Commitment, Achievement, Resilience, and Respect (our CARR values).

I have already challenged our Hornby High School students to see for themselves what is wrong with our world, to get excited, or get angry, to go out and make a change. There are some big issues out there. We have nearly 340000 children who live in poverty in New Zealand. Is that the sort of world we want to live in? This is a challenge I will continue to lay at their feet.

I am encouraging our students not to wait for someone to GIVE them a leadership role. I am encouraging them to TAKE leadership roles, to get out there and make the changes they think our world needs. This is the true test of their character, of their values.

Nga mihi
Robin Sutton

Disappearing jobs and changing education

This week I read the following from 'The Main Report', a New Zealand business commentary newzine:

Robot Trucks Soon For US Roads. US developers say autonomous big rigs will be the next big thing on the road to a safer transportation system. US start-up Otto is equipping trucks with software, sensors, lasers and cameras so they will eventually be able to navigate 500,000km of US highways on their own, while a human driver naps in the back of the cab or handles other tasks. Initially the autonomous part would just be on the big highways or freeways leaving humans to navigate though city streets. The idea is similar to commercial jetliner autopilots, which fly the aircraft at high altitudes while leaving the takeoffs and landings to humans. There is a precedent – so far Google’s selfdriving cars have logged about 2m km in autonomous mode without being involved in a serious or fatal accident. Of the more than 20 accidents involving its self-driving cars Google has accepted the blame for only one. Otto already has installed its automated technology in three heavy rigs and completed its first extended test of the system on public highways in Nevada. It hopes to eventually retrofit all US trucks - more than 4.7m vehicles. It says the new technology will help alleviate a severe driver shortage in the US - last year, there were 47,500 too few, and this will rise to nearly 175,000 by 2024.

It follows hard on the heels of the recently reported transit of a driverless convoy travelling from Spain to Sweden. I also recently shared with staff an article featuring a robotic block laying machine that was faster and more accurate than any human block layer (and I've seen some absolute masters in my time).

Increasingly, the jobs that we have taken for granted throughout our lives are disappearing. I recently read a New Zealand Institute of Economic Research report that predicted that 46% of jobs as we know them today may disappear in the next 10-20 years.

Almost half the jobs in New Zealand may be done by computers and robots in the future, researchers say.
A study by the NZ Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) has found that 46 per cent of current jobs are at "high risk" of disappearing in the next decade or two.
Most that go will be relatively low-skilled and low-wage jobs. The study found that 78 per cent of labourers and 74 per cent of machine operators, drivers and clerical workers are at high risk.

(http://m.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11610112)

 The advance of technology has a clear message for us in education: the things we have traditionally done will increasingly become irrelevant. If we don't change we will increasingly disadvantage our kids. The jobs they thought would be there for them simply won't be. What do we do?

No-one has THE definitive answer, but one thing is clear. Knowledge on its own is no longer enough. Schools must produce people who are critical, creative thinkers, people who can communicate and collaborate. We talk about these 'four Cs'. They represent the thinking curriculum. Of course you can't learn these things in a vacuum, you have to have something to think about, so knowledge still matters, although the nature or definition of knowledge has changed. It now means knowing stuff and being able to do something with what you know. (Jane Gilbert 'Catching the knowledge wave').

The days of the teacher standing at the front of the room delivering knowledge are fast coming to a close (if they aren't finished already). We can find almost any knowledge we want on the internet somewhere. Of course we all have to be able to think critically in order to evaluate what we find, determining whether it is valid or not. But it's the act of creation using that 'stuff' that we have to focus on in schools. That said, we all still need to be literate and numerate. After all, communication is impossible of we don't have at least one language with which to communicate, and some basic maths with which to make sense of the world.

Hornby High School has for 3 or 4 years planned to re-imagine the curriculum. We call it our 'connected curriculum' in which we literally connect ideas, and in which we create. And this isn't just a science and technology thing. Creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication are all equally developed in the arts and social sciences. The catch phrase in some quarters is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), but I prefer the mnemonic STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Maths)

The old jobs are disappearing. We have to find new ways of creating value, and doing stuff the old way simply isn't going to be an option.

We are confronting the age of disruptive innovation. Let's get disrupting.

The benefit of persistence

I remember just prior to Christmas 2013 I was in the car listening to ‘Afternoons with Jim Mora’ on National Radio. Mora interviewed Ginny Blackmore, an up and coming young New Zealand singer songwriter. Aside from the quality of her music, I was particularly struck by her description of her journey to 2013. All she wanted to do was write music, and so she left school early, her parents giving their permission on the proviso that she wrote music full time (quite an act of faith from the parents, I thought). Her ‘overnight success’ took over three years and there she was (at the time of the interview) having just secured a recording deal with a major record company in Los Angeles.

This is something I often see. Success is most often found when we follow our passions. I have seen it with my own children and I see it often with teenagers more generally. When asked to give advice on subject choices, we go through the usual issues of aligning subject choices to possible future career choices, but we should also ask what there is in our children's mix of subject choices that ‘spins her/his wheels’? It is a long day at school if there is nothing in the day about which you could be enthusiastic.

Art Costa, an American writer, established what he described as the 'Habits of Mind', a set of 16 habits of 'dispositions' that seem to be common to successful people regardless of culture or age, and regardless of the activity they pursue in life. One of these is persistence, the ability to stick with a task until complete, until you find success. Art Costa’s ‘Persistence’ is perhaps no better illustrated than in Blackmore’s example. Ginny Blackmore knew what she wanted to do, and stuck at it. She sat in her bedroom day after day, working an eight hour day by all accounts, building a body of material that she could take to the world.

You can find Jim Mora’s interview here:

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/20131213

Be bold be brave

I feel truly privileged to have the opportunity to once more be a part of the Hornby community. It is a great community filled with amazing people. It won't be my normal habit to use this blog to repeat what I say in assemblies, but my first senior assembly contained the essential message that I hope will be the hallmark of my time at Hornby High School.

In my mihi on Monday 2 May I included the following saying:

Korihi te manu  
Takiri mai i te ata  
Ka ao, ka ao, ka awatea  
Tihei  Mauri Ora! 

Which translates as:

The bird sings
The morning has dawned
The day has broken
Behold there is Life!

I want to read you one of my favourite poems.
The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
       
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Why did I choose to read that? 

The thing that many of us fear is not that we are powerless, but that we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginings. 

Know that you have the power to make any change that this world needs and that the only way that you will make the changes the world needs is by taking that path less travelled. Dare to be different, dare to challenge everything around you. Ask why why why!!

I am challenging you to be bold, be brave, be amazing.  They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. To change the world for the better you have to do things differently, to take the path less travelled. 

If I had any criticism of you at all it is that you don’t see how truly talented and powerful you are. Aspire to big things, know that you have the talent. Find something in the world that excites you, or something that makes you angry, and set out to change it. Don’t accept no, don’t accept second best, strive for excellence.