Chapter 8
The Pandorification of Learning
The Future Is Here
Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. . . . It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.
—Clay Shirky1
My first impression of Dr. Page Dettmann was that I had met a quiet and reflective academic. But within the first minute I saw her flip a switch and turn into a fast-thinking, checklist-driven, visionary trailblazer on a mission to transform learning.
Our MindShift team met the Sarasota County (Florida) Executive Director of Middle Schools when we arrived in Sarasota for a summit on the future of learning. We heard about the results in Dettmann's seven schools, representing close to 6,000 students. Our 60 educators, futurists, architects, and other specialists knew that the success of her middle schools has become a nationally prominent model. Naturally, we were eager to spend a day with Dr. Dettmann, her team, and her kids to study their progress after three years of a radical shift in teaching and engagement.
Sarasota, with a population of just over 50,000, has a large retirement community; the city is often called “God's waiting room.” It is also known as a coastal city, with affordable housing and respected opera, ballet, and other visual arts. U.S. News had recently ranked Sarasota as the 14th-most-livable city in America. Tourism, health care, and construction provided the economic base but the community needed to build on emerging industries to make it more attractive to young families. Marine science, Ringling College of Art and Design's digital arts program, health innovations, and performance sports offered a new growth trajectory and a new image. In order to create this new future their schools would have to excel, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) curriculum.
In 2009 community and school leaders looked closely at troubling statistics. Sarasota schools ranked as barely average and students showed little interest in STEM. The leaders knew that middle school was the point where achievement began to fall and kids began to drop out of school. Fifty percent of students in the county received free or reduced lunch (that number ranges between 35 and 85 percent from school to school). Sarasota was like many other communities: great wealth was concentrated in a few gated areas and the majority of the citizens struggled. The leaders could see that good schools—more important, twenty-first-century ready schools—were vital to Sarasota's well-being and future.
Dr. Dettmann, with the partnership of Mark Pritchett and the Gulf Coast Community Foundation, felt that transforming the middle schools provided a linchpin strategy and a place to test new concepts before scaling a program for the district. 2010 became a year of discovery, learning, visiting, strategizing, and prototyping. Mark described it as similar to IDEO's Design Thinking approach. The program they developed is called STEMSmart with an emphasis on math and science.
Two things immediately stood out when we walked into the first classroom of our tour. First, the furniture was dramatically different from what we were accustomed to seeing in traditional classrooms. Instead of rows of student desks facing the teacher's front and center desk, each classroom was furnished with a half dozen pods (table and chair clusters for four to six students). Each pod gave the students clear visual access to flat-screen monitors. Second, none of the kids looked up. They were deeply engaged in learning. They seemed oblivious of 35 adults roaming throughout the room, exploring and kneeling down for a closer look at the equipment and activities taking place. One of our team educators observed, “We were the least interesting thing in the room.”
We saw the goals, the content, the timeline, and the purpose displayed on the front wall in each class. Every student seemed to know what to do as soon as they entered.
After we toured several classrooms our team reassembled in the library to talk with a panel of students from sixth to eighth grade and their teachers. We listened to the kids describe their experience. They had a deep understanding of the new learning strategy and displayed a high level of ownership for their learning and progress. The kids knew the daily routine and did not wait for instructions when they entered class to begin a project or the lesson of the day.
We also learned that the classes included kids from different grade levels. We asked how they liked it. One of the sixth graders told us that she liked having an older student who could help her with some of the material. She knew she had someone who would also look out for her. An eighth-grader said that helping younger students had helped him learn the material better. Furthermore, when he graduates from the middle school to high school, he will already know more than 30 students there, “So it won't feel as intimidating.”
The teachers explained how their role had shifted. They felt they were able to invest more time in designing the learning and coaching rather than managing the classroom. Perhaps our biggest insight was about how the culture had changed. Two years earlier, negative behavior and violence were big issues. The environment was stressful. But, at that point, they had no recorded discipline problems for the 2015 school year. When we asked why, one teacher said, “When you're looking at another student's face instead of the back of their head it makes them human.” She also said that the kids love their classes and feel engaged in learning. The interest and achievement in STEM has dramatically improved.
And, of course, such a transformation passes through painful stages of growth and adaptation. For example, because the funding to convert a single classroom and change the curriculum ran about $50,000, not all of the science and math classrooms had been converted. When a girl who had experienced the STEMSmart model in her sixth grade was assigned to one of the old traditional classrooms along with the traditional curriculum for her seventh grade, Dr. Dettmann received a letter from the girl's father asking if his daughter had done something wrong. His letter, and other similar letters, show how important the new classrooms and curriculum are to students and parents, and confirm the new direction. They also give evidence of the sad futility of remaining in the same old Gutenberg model. Too many schools lack the capacity, the vision, or the leadership to provide every student with what Page Dettmann's kids experience every day.
Later that day, we were offered a different lens on the experience; we met with some of the business leaders supporting the transformation. Several of them joined us for dinner. I sat next to Kristian, one of the founders of a telecommunications firm with more than 300 employees. “So, why are you supporting this change?” I asked him. He replied that, because of his own bad experiences in the Education Machine, he simply didn't want another creative kid to go through the same stultifying process.
In creating a new learning experience, Page and her team studied schools that were successful in breaking out of tradition and rethinking learning. She embraced and followed a form of problem solving called Design Thinking.
Design Thinking evolved at Stanford University in the 1970s to address the challenge engineers faced in designing technology and software for humans. You and I have bought, at some point, a confounding piece of technology and wondered, “Who was this designed for?” To solve the challenges of human-device interface, Design Thinking places the designer in the role of a user (not simply interviewing users, but as a user) and creates a role for users to codesign the solution.
For example, I worked with a hospital that wanted to improve patient care. They hired IDEO, who developed a process called Patient Journey. Nurses and doctors went through a complete admission process as if they were patients and were passed through the hospitals on gurneys like other patients. The experience radically changed not only many of the processes, but also the facility. One of the insights is just how much time a patient might spend waiting in the hall, flat on their back on a gurney, looking up at the ceiling. One of the nurses who went through this journey was able to count the number of holes in a ceiling tile.
Imagine a process called the Student Journey or Teacher Journey. What is the current day-in-the-life experience and what might the future experience look like?
This is a very effective framework for anyone challenging old forms. It starts by gaining empathy for those you are hoping to serve, putting yourself in their shoes. Before you can help anyone, you must experience life through his or her lens. Our trip to the middle school placed us inside Page's world to experience a day in the life of that school and some of its students.
How Do We Envision the Future?
I am trained as a futurist, so I designed the Sarasota summit to take our MindShift group into that world and way of thinking. Instead of trying to “solve a problem,” we considered what the possibilities might look like. Futurists do not predict the future, but rather try to see or imagine it. To do that requires a shift of framework and narrative—creating new language and categories, interpreting leading indicators, designing cartoons and animations, developing or detecting the new rules, and rearranging past structures or contexts into new shapes and sounds.
Timelines are also important to futurists. Projecting 10 years from now seems to free the mind from sinking into “problem solving,” but also keeps that projection imaginable. Projecting longer time frames seems to inevitably swerve into fantasy. In other words, everything can be different and more imaginable when you place it in the near and somewhat familiar future.
The future always intrudes into the present. Just as the past is always here, but leaving, the future is always here and still coming. But the future's presence is not always obvious. We need skills and tools in order to find the future. Like an old radio receiver, those skills and tools scan the horizon and pull in the (sometimes weak) signals of things to come. Once these signals are captured, we look for what is common and distinct and begin a process of looking for trend lines.
The clues for the future of learning are usually found outside education and schools. We often find them in outliers or positive deviants, schools that defy conventional wisdom and get superior results.
Jane McGonigal, PhD, best-selling author and Chief Creative Officer for the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, gave a keynote presentation for the 2016 SXSWEdu conference in Austin, Texas. She told the conferees to always ask questions when we see or hear signals from the future:
- What kind of change does this represent, from what to what?
- What is driving this change (the future force behind it)?
- What will the world be like if the signal gets amplified?
- What if it becomes common or even ubiquitous?
- Is this a future we actually want?
During our Sarasota summit we engaged in a futuring exercise to imagine if a company like Facebook, Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Nordstrom's, Uber, Google, Zappos, or another game-changing companies were to run education. For example, we playfully imagined:
“How would daily announcements or class instructions sound if a Southwest Airlines' flight attendant delivered them?”
“What if you could schedule time at a school Genius Bar to get help on a project or assignment?”
“What if school replaced buses with Uber . . . and called it Scoo-uber?
“What if classrooms were spread across the community, the library, park, recreation center, a business, or at city hall? A Scoo-uber can pick students and deliver them to the proper location.”
The Pandorification of Learning
Michael Lagocki, a well-known graphic scribe, has become a vital part of our MindShift process. He captures our comments and stories on large white boards—sometimes filling a whole wall—creating a mural that illustrates the evolution of our conversations. When completed we have a wonderful piece of art and, more important, a visual synthesis of our work.
After capturing all of the ideas and listening to the playful applications to learning, we found a nice framework to shape our scenarios. And that framework addressed several challenges that are always present when individuals or groups try to think creatively. The mind needs mental bridges that take it outside its cloistered world. That is why the 2016 SXSWEdu exercise described earlier picked familiar and interesting companies for our consideration.
Pandora, a music-streaming app, is the child of the Music Genome project. The leaders for this project identified 450 essential attributes of songs. From these musical traits, mathematical relationships (algorithms) were used to create a signature for each song. Pandora uses these algorithms to allow listeners to find music that matches personal preferences. It works by first selecting an artist and a song as the seed for a new station. When the song is finished Pandora streams a new song based on the attributes assigned to the first artist and song. The simple binary choice of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” begins to build a very complex and refined personal radio station.
For example, I like Eric Clapton. In particular I like several of his versions of “Crossroads.” So, if I choose that, the next song Pandora selects may be another Eric Clapton song—maybe “Tears in Heaven” from his acoustical unplugged album. I prefer his blues and rock so I tap “thumbs down.” The next song is Stevie Ray Vaughn's “Texas Flood.” Big thumbs up. In a short time the algorithm translates my selections into a genre of music that becomes my signature. I seldom have to make adjustments.
Now, imagine a learning genome built on a range of key attributes. The genome, a “Pandorification,” is made up of subjects, times of day, people type, focus, creativity, effort, energy, personality type, and so forth. The Genome then goes to work with thumbs up and thumbs down directions. It tracks what I enjoy learning, where I learn best, what time of day, my optimum mode of testing, my level of engagement, and other details. It provides a tailored stream of learning that gets continually smarter and continually improves my engagement.
Using this concept, let's look at two stories from the future of learning.
2025: Sarah and the Pandorification of Learning
Sarah is a 14-year-old freshman at FutureNow Academy in San Diego. At the beginning of her academic path2 Sarah takes a series of assessments—cognitive, academic, personality, and other—to prepare for FutureNow and to program her learning genome. The cognitive strengths assessment helps her to identify her interests, preferences, and what engages her most. Her academic assessment takes her through several different modes of learning, linking each academic subject with the process that will work best for her. It determines she is a social reader but tactile when it comes to learning math and science. She also takes a battery of non-cognitive assessments developed through the University of Pennsylvania, covering areas of emotional intelligence, resiliency, her growth mindset, and level of well-being.3
These baseline parameters seed her signature learning style and inform her learning stream. With this, Sarah and her algorithm launch their journey together. Sarah's equipment includes a palm-sized Interactive Intelligent Learning Buddy (IILB, nicknamed IILBe) and an 11- by 7-inch multitouch film screen with a virtual keyboard.
On the first day of classes Sarah awakens early. As she prepares her breakfast, IILBe quickly scans and records her choices for the morning. IILBe also captures her level of excitement and nervousness about her first day.
At the school shuttle stop, Sarah greets some kids she knows and some she doesn't. IILBe observes their interactions and registers familiar versus formal tones as well as the balance between positive and negative dialogue. Sarah's driverless shuttle arrives at school in a smooth sequencing of more than 50 shuttles, all synchronized to arrive and depart in a continuous flow. As Sarah enters the school, IILBe directs her to math, her first class.
Because math is not Sarah's favored subject, she often finds herself daydreaming in middle school math class. So IILBe tries a different strategy for Sarah. During the set-up IILBe learns that lectures or clever videos receive “thumbs down” for engagement. When the teacher partners Sarah with two other students, IILBe records a high level of engagement and interprets this as “thumbs up.” But this preference needs to be cross-referenced with Sarah's ability to demonstrate comprehension and mastery. If she does, then IILBe creates a reinforcing feedback loop to return to this partnership approach for future math challenges.
At the end of the class there are no bells. IILBe prompts Sarah to go to the next class. But then IILBE senses a drop in Sarah's energy level and focus. The last class was a positive experience, but it still represented hard work for Sarah; it just did not come naturally to her. Although the engagement with the other kids was positive, it still required some effort because she did not know them before class began. So IILBe decides to help Sarah recharge. Instead of taking a direct path to the next class IILBe guides her through the courtyard, filled with sunshine and a beautiful and fragrant garden. This has an immediate uplifting effect. Sarah has time to sit and enjoy the moment. IILBe guides her through a three-minute mindfulness exercise that Dr. Amit Sood developed at the Mayo Clinic. She remembers three positive people in her life and sends them a virtual thank-you.
Sarah then enters a class in contemporary English literature. When the teacher asks each student to name his or her favorite novel, Sarah chooses Happy Together, a science fiction novel set in 2050. It is the story of Anna, a young girl, and her animatronic friend, based on Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near. The teacher asks Sarah to read her favorite passage.
Sarah unfolds her screen and immediately finds her favorite section. As Sarah reads the passage she reaches her highest level of engagement and enjoyment for the day. IILBe tracks her emotional response to the passage.
That evening at dinner Sarah's mom and dad scan ILLBe's dashboard to review Sarah's day. In addition to recapping the events, ILLBe allows them to find and explore the inflexion points of Sarah's day.
Sarah and IILBe had a full and fun first day in high school. ILLBe feels very natural to her. She has never before experienced a day that seamlessly flowed from one event and experience to another. In the past she often hit brick walls or mentally checked out. But ILLBe helped her navigate effortlessly through every challenge. Even her teachers seemed more attuned, almost clairvoyant, about when and how to help. As ILLBe prompts her to wind down the day with a mindfulness exercise, Sarah expresses gratitude for ILLBe; she knows they would be happy together. IILBe continues to work, taking in the many terabytes of data from the day and fine-tuning Sarah's learning genome for tomorrow.
2025: The Free-Range Learning Community
Jaime, a 12-year-old sixth grader, lives with his mom, Maria, on the Southside of Chicago. Maria, an immigrant who fled Cuba, doesn't speak English well, but she has picked up enough to follow basic conversations. The welfare check is essential to Maria and Jaime's life. Government attempts at reform, restructuring, and bold programs have left Maria and Jaime's community in worse condition. Everyone knows that something has to change.
More than 6,000 students are spread over eight middle schools. Community leaders, knowing that middle school years are critical years for students, close five of the schools and turn the remaining three into open-plan, project-based, blended learning centers. The revenue from the sale of property and equipment and the reduced operating costs release resources that can be invested in other uses.
The bold program is called the Free-Range Learning Community Co-Op (FRLCC). The program begins by mapping a community's social assets: libraries, parks, museums, recreation centers, embedded local businesses, health-care providers, nonprofits, public services, and so on. The mapping process then invites the identified resources to partner with the schools. The partnerships can include the use of private facilities, supplying part-time teachers or coaches, and providing internships or other support. Once the levels of support are identified, software begins to match the resources with the students' needs.
Most of the learning takes place outside a school building. The schools are primarily used for assessments, coaching, recognition, filling the gaps, and celebrating achievement. The Learning Genome baselines Jaime's academic and non-cognitive skill levels and compares them to his learning and life goals. The school then fits Jaime with his own personal IILBe. Jaime's IILBe has seen signature genomes very similar to Jaime's; it knows how to map a new course for him.
And Jaime has to find a new course—for his life! In the face of gangs and turmoil at home, Maria does her best but doesn't really understand the value of school. She has pulled Jaime out of class several times in order for him to go home and watch his little sister. They moved a few times during the school year, seeking lower-priced housings.
But Jaime has a passion for architecture. Could he follow the education path required to learn architecture it in the new course of his life? Can the new technologies make a difference in low-income families like Jaime's?
On Tuesday morning, IILBe notifies Scoo-uber to pick Jaime up at 9 AM. This allows him to get his sister ready for school. Scoo-uber also picks up two other students before 9:00 AM. Because of new technologies, on that Tuesday morning Jaime and his classmates are able to visit the Robie House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright at the University of Chicago.
Jaime and his classmates got a full tour of the house and its history. In addition, a professor from the William Heck Research Center for Architecture is there to show them some of the hidden design and engineering features of the house. The professor has brought four virtual reality headsets, one for himself and the others for the students. This is their first exposure to augmented reality. The professor guides them through the house; they are stunned at how the headsets allow them to see the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing fixtures behind the walls. He then takes them to the patio so they can scan the landscaped grounds. He sets the program to go back in time and see the area when the house was first built in 1909. Then they watch the changes unfold in 10-year increments.
After the tour the students and the professor return to the Research Center. The professor leads them the long way around so that they can walk through the neighborhood and hear about the architecture of the early 1900s and the history of the area.
Back on the campus of the University of Chicago, they learn that each building has a compelling architectural story of its own. Jaime cannot remember ever experiencing such a happy and engaging school day. IILBe records his emotions and will put this learning to work again.
Scoo-uber picks the kids up at the Research Center at 4:30 PM and drops them all at their homes within an hour.
Jaime's next day is a little rougher. A shooting in the neighborhood has put the community on edge; Maria cradled her daughter, rocking back and forth, all night long. When Scoo-uber arrived Jaime is exhausted and stressed. During the seven-minute trip to the learning campus, IILBe takes Jaime through mindfulness exercises.
When he arrives a school physician escorts Jaime to the campus “Chill Room;” with muted lights, soft furniture, white noise, and appealing food and beverages, to help to restore Jaime's sense of peace and ability to focus on his studies.
The Free Range model takes away the stress and pressure of bells, schedules, and stampedes between classes. In addition, many kids arrive at school with worn or dirty clothes, and some have not bathed. The school stocks jeans and T-shirts in all sizes. It also provides showers and can even wash the students' clothes during the day.
As you can see, the FRLCC represents a complete, holistic, and very human approach to learning. It prioritizes student health and peace, and uses technology to support the unique needs of each student; no one is lost in the robotic regimens of mainlining. The FRLCC discards old concepts about the uniformity of time and place. Learning is viewed as a seamless and continuing part of life, not a silo of elite and bureaucratic instruction.
Threading It Together
Futuring utilizes different dimensions: the feasible, the possible, the plausible, and the imaginable. Each serves a different function. The stories of Sarah and Jaimie fall in the range of the feasible and possible. Many of the elements in the story are already here today, but are used outside education. Each of the scenarios is entirely possible. For example, Altamonte Springs, Florida, recently abandoned plans to build a new and technologically advanced bus system. Instead, they partnered with Uber.4 Clues to the future present themselves everywhere.
Some of the technologies and insights in Sarah and Jaime's stories can be found in the models of Uber, Siri, the iWatch, Oculus Rift, Austin Community College, Birdville Center for Technology and Advanced Learning, the Apple Genius Bar, Pandora, Gallup Strengthsfinder, AtlSchool's, School of One, Quest for Learning, Momentous Institute, Delos Well Living Lab, My Fitness Pal, the StessTest app, the NREL Energy Dashboard, Khan Academy, Dragon Dictation App, Rosetta Stone, Institute for Coalition Building's Stakeholder Wheel, and Social Asset Mapping guide.
As William Gibson said in Talk of the Nation on NPR in 1999, “The future is already here, just not evenly distributed.”
Will We Improve the Past or Make the Future?
With the iPhone, Apple chose to make the future. Nokia, Motorola, Palm, and BlackBerry pursued improving the past. Instagram represents another example of making the future. It is simply an app. In 2010 the future was imagined to be sharing on social media. Ironically, Instagram's icon is a graphic that resembles the Kodak Instamatic camera. In the same year that Kodak declared bankruptcy, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.
Improving on the past is a bad strategy if your universe intersects with Moore's law (processing power or speed will double every two years).
In his 1970 book, Future Shock,5 Alvin Toffler predicted that living in a world where the new and novel overshadowed the familiar would cause psychic and social breakdown. Since 1955, 88 percent of Fortune 500 companies have disappeared due to what is called “creative destruction.”6
Glenn C. Wintrich Jr., Dell's Innovation Leader, has said that their past success was based on what he called “fast follow.” In other words, wait until an innovator like Apple or Microsoft announces a new product and then quickly follow up with something cheaper and faster. Given that the innovation cycle of 18 months has tightened and there is no longer enough time to get a product to market and monetize it before the next innovation makes it obsolete, Dell is being forced to get into the innovation game.
Let's assume that the Education Machine is a fast follower and pose this question, which challenges both Dell and education: How do you take a culture that pays for and attracts talent that is good at reverse engineering (copying), rewarded for rapid copying at lower cost, trained and managed to engineer and not innovate, and then flip it on its head and expect the same people to become innovators?
What Improving the Past Looks Like in Education
In 2015 I attended a panel SXSWedu with Mary Cullinane, Chief Content Officer for schoolbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Prior to the conference she wrote,
There's no doubt that we need a radical change. But, given the high stakes (who wants to experiment with the education of our kids?), the largely bureaucratic and matrixed environment that is our current K–12 system (adoption process anyone?), and shrinking and shifting budgets (healthy lunch versus interactive whiteboards—you decide), is radical disruption even a realistic goal?7
I asked if she had looked outside her building lately to see what the rest of the world was doing, and had she seen the disruption and rapid drop in her own company? I then asked what she thought about Khan Academy. Ms. Cullinane said that Khan Academy couldn't be taken seriously “because they are a bunch of homemade videos on YouTube.” I guess she had not seen one lately. Clayton Christensen, renowned scholar, Harvard professor, and author of The Innovator's Dilemma, is exactly right when he says that disruptive innovation is invading education. Salman Khan's videos started as homemade, but then Moore's law and Metcalfe's law took over.
According to Metcalfe's law, the value of a network grows exponentially more valuable with each added machine or participant. For example, the first fax machine was, well, worthless. But the second made it useful . . . for two parties. Then, the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 289th, and so forth kept increasing the value. Moore's law also increased the speed, lowered the cost, and improved telecommunications. Finally, as an example reflecting the two laws, fax machines gave way to scanners and now scanners are obsolete because our mobile devices can take and send scanned images.
Three months after my exchange with Ms. Cullinane, the College Board, providers of the SAT, announced they were partnering with the Khan Academy to provide preparatory training for the new SAT assessments—for free. Other partnerships with the Khan Academy are changing the face of learning and offer specialized content: NASA, The Museum of Modern Art, The California Academy of Sciences, and MIT.8
What Making the Future Looks Like in Education
Previous SAT prep courses were standardized. But Khan Academy allows personalized training. Khan Academy's content is free and provides one bridge for those on the other side of the achievement gap. The content will expand. The achievement scores can be cross-referenced and data analytics will improve and suggest new content. Can you see where this is going, in view of Moore and Metcalfe's laws? There will be a tipping point where Khan Academy has the best content, flexibly designed, for personalized learning on a global scale.
Max Ventilla is the founder of AltSchool, one of Silicon Valley's billionaire club charter schools. They are creating a Learning Progression Dashboard. It assesses a child on the front end (formative assessment) and predicts how he or she will do on a test. It matches the child's results with other kids with similar results and then maps the best learning strategy. It functions a lot like our Pandorification of Learning. Max said, “We are changing the role of educators from someone operating in the dark to someone who can actually guide a student through their optimum personal path.” He told his SXSWedu audience that we have to reconsider adding more bodies to teaching as a solution. “It's about a force multiplier, and technology is that lever.”
AltSchool has also created an application called a Student Playlist; it is similar in concept to an iTunes playlist. It provides a personalized curriculum for students. With its “parent portal,” the platform reduces the cost of flexibility and transparency by providing a newsfeed-like report on how each student is doing in real time.
AltSchool plans to build out this platform and prove its effectiveness with one or two schools. Once complete, they plan to license it to any school or district. Play out this trajectory through Moore and Metcalfe's laws.
Sarasota Middle School, Signature Academy, the Engage2Learn model, High-Tech High, the NuTech schools, Expeditionary Learning, and Quest for Play are each examples of a growing base of student-led learning models. This new direction requires a complete mind shift and new culture and skills, but is an accessible strategy for schools to explore.
The final example is the growth of blended learning. The Christensen Foundation defines it as a formal education program in which the student is learning partly in class, partly online at home, and the mix and support is tailored to the “modalities along each student's learning path.9” This approach also changes the role of the teacher from the “sage on the stage” to a coach, mentor, and troubleshooter. The Christensen Foundation is tracking the success of schools using blended learning and developing a rich source of case studies to view. Numerous schools districts across the nation are testing the model.
Each of these examples of the new era of learning is moving up the innovation curve at the speed of Google. The real magic will happen when these schools and their respective paths begin to converge. Apple's 1984 Super Bowl ad announced a new era of personalized computing; Apple's 2007 unveiling of the iPhone fulfilled that promise to humanize technology. Everything points to a similar experience in humanizing learning.
Creating a Future for Everyone
For now, “magic” is only a reality for about half of our kids. A growing income gap means almost half of our kids start and stay behind, creating an even wider digital divide between the haves and the have nots. Jaime's world is a tragic reality for more that 44 percent of kids. That is 32 million of them! The next chapter takes us deeper into that world and asks the question, “Is zip code destiny?”