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21st Century Learning: Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach often speaks of the “moral imperative” for K12 educators to assure that all students gain the skills, knowledge and dispositions they need to be successful in a connected world “where the ability to think critically, collaborate effectively and master increasingly powerful digital technologies” will determine their success in school, college and careers.

Nussbaum-Beach has been an educator for 20 years, serving as a public school classroom teacher, technology coach, charter school principal, district administrator, university instructor, and digital learning consultant. She is a frequent international speaker and the chief executive officer of Powerful Learning Practice LLC, a company she founded with educator-author Will Richardson to provide “professional development for 21st century educators.” PLP’s client list includes public, parochial and independent schools in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China and Norway.

She also serves on the advisory board for the 2011 Horizon Report on national trends in K12 education. Her first book, The Connected Educator, will be published by Solution Tree later this year.

In this interview, Sheryl describes the “shift” she believes must take place in teaching and learning practices if elementary and secondary schools expect to remain relevant in an era when information and communication technologies will continue to expand exponentially.

Tell us something about your professional journey and what you do today...

I wasn’t one of those kids who always wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. In fact, probably the opposite was true. I came from challenging circumstances and schools had never been friendly places. I actually became interested in teaching when I had to make decisions about my own children’s education. I decided to become a teacher because I was interested in homeschooling my own and I didn’t want people saying that I wasn’t qualified. But in those education classes I fell in love with teaching and learning (no matter where it occurred - at home or in public or private schools). I found out I was pretty good at it too. In fact, I’ve won awards doing it. Now I'm in the dissertation phase of completing my doctorate in Educational Planning, Policy and Leadership at the College of William and Mary – and working with schools and districts in the US and abroad to re-envision their learning cultures and communities and help them connect their classrooms and students with the world.

You advocate for student-directed, "passion-based" learning. Tell us about that.

Students are dropping out of school at an alarming rate and even the ones who stay often do not find it relevant anymore. There is a disconnect between the way people naturally learn, in ways that stick, ways that are meaningful to them, and the way schools are expecting our kids to learn. When a student has a lack of interest – when they feel no passion for learning -- that equals zero motivation and investment in their own education.

A solution to this pervasive problem is passion-based learning. A passionate student is a learning student. Deep learning, passion-based learning is not one-size-fits-all. It's not even learner-centered. It's student-directed. It's kids co-creating and co-constructing and negotiating meaning around core content. It's about letting them pick things they're passionate about, finding subjects where their strengths lie, and shaping their own learning systems. We need to think of curriculum not as learning things in a sequential order because a teacher said so, but as learning things when students need to learn them.

Kids shouldn't learn about soil ecosystems just because it's in Chapter 7 of the science book. They should learn about it because they're planning a community garden so they can take vegetables to the local food bank. They’re doing something they’re passionate about, and they’re eager to understand the science that makes a garden successful.

Using passion-based learning strategies and digital media, teachers lead and guide, and students build their own learning experiences, construct meaning, and collaborate with others around the world to solve authentic context-based problems. Teachers who use today's empowering technologies are discovering we can have rigor without sacrificing excitement. The secret: Focus on student passion and interest, reach every student, keep them in school, and lock down their future success.

You often say to teachers, "You don't have to go back and change the way you teach. You have to go back and change the way you learn." What's the message you're trying to convey?

I want teachers to see themselves as learners: learners first and teachers second. As educators, we all have thousands of hours invested in what we know. Think of the time we have spent in inservice training, taking courses, and reading books to become who we are today. It will cost us something to leave all that behind. However, in professional communities where we are connected in both physical and virtual space, we are forced to weigh the contributions of our colleagues against what we believe to be true. We may test out their ideas, and as we come to learn new and better ways of teaching, we leave behind what no longer fits today.

If we’re going to keep making sense of an ever-shifting world, we will need to relearn and construct new knowledge over and over again to improve practice. We need to unlearn the idea that learning occurs only in school.  We need to unlearn that learning is limited by time and space. We need to unlearn that learning is an individual pursuit. We need to unlearn that we have to be THE experts in our classrooms. We need to unlearn that leading is only for the leaders in the front office.

With this unlearning comes the potential to effect a transformation in how we define learning and how we apply it to our classrooms. So often educators want to return from a PD experience and immediately apply everything they learned with students – before they’ve had time to make sense of it themselves first, as learners. My challenge to them is to own the concepts first. Make sense of new ideas for increasing knowledge and skills by using them first to further your own personal learning. Think deeply about the relationship between content, pedagogy, and technology before you change your teaching. Otherwise the focus will be in the wrong place, on the technology rather than the learning. Shelley Wright, one of the teachers in our Powerful Learning Practices network, captures this sense of teacher learning well in a series of blog posts she’s written about her 10th graders’ Holocaust unit.

In your upcoming book "The Connected Educator," you propose a three-pronged PD approach for 21st century teachers. Briefly, what does that look like?

It’s do-it-yourself professional development. The three-pronged approach produces global learners who are “connected.” Teachers who participate in what I’ve coined as Connected Learning Communities (CLCs) experience connectedness in at least three ways:

1. Locally (in community) – through your Professional Learning Community within your school or district - collective face to face connections where you and your colleagues have messy, hard conversations around what works and what doesn’t.
2. Globally (inside a walled garden with a group) -  through your virtual Community of Practice - online connections with educators from around the world who make a commitment to each other to improve overtime through sharing, finding solutions and co-creating innovations together while developing a collective identity.
3. Globally (and very personally) – through your Personal Learning Network or PLN – individual connections to resources and people that inform your learning around many topics, not just education, and result in you having new ideas to bring back to your community and your classroom. (My partner Will Richardson has a new book about PLNs.)

The greatest promise for positive school change can occur by cultivating a connected learning experience through passive, active, and reflective knowledge building in the local (PLC), global (CoP) and contextual (PLN) environments.

What are 2-3 things teachers can do right now to speed up the shift to this kind of learning and teaching?

Become a Connected Learner
The first thing a teacher should do is start to think of themselves as a learner. They need to start making connections, building a digital footprint, managing their online reputation and developing their own hand-selected personal learning network. They can do this by becoming part of an online community of educators and enter into conversations like this one. They should join Twitter and following someone who has a well developed network. Mine is just one of many good examples (http://twitter.com/snbeach). You might pick a few people I have vetted to follow. Do the same with other people whose ideas resonate. Follow a Twitter hashtag like #edreform or #edchat and find people to follow by checking out Twitterers who also follow the things that interest you. You can also start following (through RSS subscriptions) the blogs of people who are transparently sharing about things they are interested in. Or start your own blog, comment on the ideas of other bloggers, build a network that way.

Shift Your Pedagogy
Find a hook. Figure out something that will be interesting to kids right now where they are in their development. Something they can relate to now – not something they are preparing to use when they finish high school or go to college. In creating passion-based learning unit for my own students, I’ll explain that we're going to think about a topic they are interested in. We do a concept map to find out where their interests and passions lie. Then we pick a few topics for teams of kids to choose to work on. Using inquiry methods, they ask lots of questions to decide what they want to learn about the topic. They look for problems to solve. Then I embed certain things into some aspects of what they are working on to be sure we’re covering standards and tested items. One example I've used in covering standards: You're studying the Civil War. What is likely to intrigue students in your age group? How about middle school boys and battlefield medicine – and from there work with them to connect to other history standards.
I let students decide how they will show mastery of the topic. Together we find ways to connect what they are interested in to the content we have to cover. Whatever matters to them. I get them to think of themselves as teachers and how they'll offer what they've learned to the class in a way that's meaningful to them. Ways that require the class to be active learners as we all share what we’ve learned by studying things that deeply interest us.

Your role as teacher and co-learner becomes one of helping students develop transparency – to “learn out loud” – to grow into connected problem-finders, problem-solvers, and critical thinkers. Those are marketable skills in the real world. Kids own the content as well as the context, and the elaboration of what they’ve learned allows for easy recall on any standardized test.

Take an e-Course or join a Community of Learners
You don’t have to go this alone. There are lots of opportunities to explore 21st century learning online, in social networked communities (like the NING site English Companion), or by taking a course with other teachers eager to make the shift. PLP has several new e-courses built on the ideas I’ve shared here. If that’s not quite right for you, look for webinars at ASCD, Education Week or Edutopia. There’s no shortage of options. This summer would be a great time to get focused and move forward. Our students need us to do this. I’ve said it’s a moral imperative for educators today. I believe that.

 

Thanks to John Norton at The Teacher Leaders Network