Transcription
I'm here to talk about education. I've been a teacher since 2009. I would ask you really simply: if education was an investable, tradable commodity, would you be interested in investing in it?
When we think about education and we think about investment, they don't go hand in hand. When you want to invest in something, you want something that's fluid, something that's dynamic, something that's going to be changing, adapting with the times. And then you get education, which may be the most static, stagnant thing that exists. That is accepted. If I bought a computer from Apple, if I bought a computer from any computer company, and they told me, "You can buy stock in my company, but I'll never change the product," I would immediately turn around and walk away. But in education, we love that, and that is the problem.
And I've had, as a teacher since I entered the profession, now people argue with me all the time. They say, "Well, of course education is change," and I'd say, "Yes, it's changed superficially," the same exact way this girl is the exact same person she is underneath her, sit underneath these copious layers of makeup; she's not changing herself at the core. And that's what I'm talking about. In a change in education, can you change education at the core? Get away from grades, get away from all these ridiculous standards and expectations, and realize that we are dealing with a population that is there to gain knowledge from us in a space that should be free of judgment. We should be able to construct them criticisms, give them constructive criticism without them being fearful of taking risk.
Now, education doesn't always look this way. This is me waiting for kindergarten, my first day of kindergarten. I apparently waited for, like, I believe my mom told me, 22 minutes at the end of this driveway. Why? Because what school was supposed to be, when I was a young lad in this chair here at four or five years old, was exactly what I saw on Sesame Street and Barney and all these shows I watched on TV: supposed to be fun, dynamic, engaging, playing with friends. I should be digging in sandboxes to learn about things, not reading and writing, or writing about them on worksheets. And education started as an absolutely incredible place for me.
Now again, god bless my mom. When I moved from Ontario to Alberta, she scrapbook my life, which is awesome. I always bring this in for Throwback Thursdays at school, at school. And I like kids look, but the beautiful part about this is this is every school photo I've ever had taken of me. And check out what happens between grade five and six. So why stop smiling? It's where my education experience goes down the proverbial toilet. And it does this because it's one play, and fun and discovery-based learning is eliminated in favor of worksheets and straight rows and silence and order and regime. Last I checked, very few workplaces like that. As a matter of fact, I don't think any speaker that was on this stage today talked about being orderly, being following direction, and on all these things. They talked about being creative and innovative, and I don't think school does that.
So I quoted myself, because why not? And I realized, after a few years of quote-unquote research, and I'll get to how I did that in a second, I realized that the education system is a system that is totally in an engagement crisis. We blame the kids, and we blame lack of resources, and we blame all these things, when in reality these kids are bored. And what do we do when we're bored? The same thing you'd be doing right now. If you're bored of me, you are looking at your phone; you are counting the amount of lights on the ceiling; you are determining if your shoelaces are tied perfectly; you are doing everything to entertain yourself when you are bored in a situation. And that is what I think school is for kids.
Now, like any good educator, I ask myself, "What would Bill Murray do?" And Bill Murray, of course, would tell me to make a difference. Why do I use Bill Murray? When Bill Murray was stuck in Groundhog Day, arguably his best film, he turned around and he said, "Okay, I finally realized what the issue is: I'm a jerk to everybody, and I need to fix being a jerk in order to advance out of this problem." And he does, and everyone's happy, and he learns a life lesson. That's exactly what needs to happen in education. We have to realize that education to kids is Groundhog Day, every single day.
So I said, "Yes, Bill Murray, I will. I will make a difference." So here's my research. You have to understand something: as an educator, I can tell you that the single biggest untapped resource in education are the students. We will ask every single person what they need except them, and they'll tell you. So I sat down with them and I said, "All right, what do you guys dislike about school?" Because I was fortunate enough to start my career in kindergarten to grade four phys ed, where you saw kids loving school. They were so fired up about school; they'd come off the bus, they'd tell me about everything that they did that day, even though I had no clue what they were talking about, but they were excited. Then I had a career change, and I ended up in a grade eight science class—massively different, totally different set of hormones we're dealing with in grade eight—and all of a sudden I had kids who couldn't care about anything I was talking about. And the kids that cared didn't care for the right reason; they cared because they're often scared about their parents being just disappointed about the grades. So I said, "Well, do I really want to do this for the next 20-some years of my career, add to the cycle I think is broken?"
So I talked to the kids, and I got three common trends. First thing I got is kids told me flat out: school is boring; it is repetitive; it is the same thing every class I go to, except instead of science I get math, instead of math I get social, and they go forward and forward and forward with this continuously. Now, I learned to check my ego at the door as a teacher pretty quickly, and what I actually heard when I wasn't angry and I wasn't like, "Oh, what do you mean my class was boring?" I—they said, "Give me a reason to care about this stuff." Because at 13, why the heck do I have to know what a mitochondria is? I don't even know how to spell mitochondria, and I even I don't even know how I got to this classroom. All I know is that if I look at my phone and I go to TikTok, then my tongue will pop out like a dog, and that's way more important to me than vents, than biology. So I was like, "Okay, that's totally logical. I've been 13; I wasn't too interested in that content."
So I come across—Brittany Brown came up a lot today—like, just read her stuff; she is so phenomenal. And she says, "You know what? If we want to reignite passion, we have to humanize work," and you could literally just cross out work in this code and pop in school. You have to make kids believe that they are doing something for a reason, for a purpose.
Second common thing I got is kids feel like they have no choice in anything all the time, and I don't disagree with that at all. I hear it, and I've lived it. This is the project you have to do with these stipulations, and this rubric is how it's marked, and that's all you get. And all of a sudden the kid who's like got this wicked idea gets buried, and it falls to the copy-paste. I used to drive me nuts as a teacher the first year I taught this: every project was the same. Why? 'Cause they googled the project, and whatever the first hit was was what the project was, even if they had no idea what it was. They literally were like, "I don't even know what this is, but here it is; that's what you wanted, and it fits every criteria on the rubric, so sucker, you gotta give me a hundred percent." And I'm like, "To all men, that's again good logic." So I said, "What are they actually saying?" They're saying, "Trust me, because I have a brain in between these ears, and I can do something," and that's backed entirely by Daniel H. Pink, who is a TED Talker and a business leader, talks about how control leads to compliance; however, autonomy leads to engagement. So I said, "Okay, I got these ideas now. Now they're starting to drive around on my head."
And the third one, and this is my favorite because I'm all about passion, and that's what this stage is for: "Why can't I do things in the way that I want to do them?" Which exactly, from a teacher's perspective, says, "Can you just let me be creative for a second? Can you let me take this rubric that I don't like and shred it, and just—I'll—you want me to build this, I'll build it, but I want to use my stipulations and my parameters, and I want to inject music 'cause I'm passionate about music." No problem. And that again is totally backed, and this is being forecasted as a huge problem in education at the World Economic Forum in February. And I'm gonna say this name, hopefully I get this name right: Shafiq, who is the head of the London School of Economics, as well as John Ma—I think it's John Ma, if I'm not mistaken—who is the richest man in Asia, founder of Alibaba, is warning the world that the projection by 2030 is an elimination of 800 million jobs due to automation, because he said—and I love this quote as a teacher—"If a robot can do it better than a person, someone's gonna pick a robot over a human." And what does school do? School says, "Here's everything I just told you; got it? Write it on a paper. Good, you're smart." But in reality, the kids often have no concept what they're writing because I didn't go deeper.
So I said, "All right, what am I gonna do about this? Autonomy, engagement, engagement crisis, no control, no choice, all these problems." And I said, "Well, let's go back to our absolute founding roots." I'm a physical educator as my degree, so play is so fundamental to me, and it's so important to me. So I looked around and I said, "Okay," did some Googling, and I came across this concept in 2015, very in its infancy in education, called gamification. And what is it? It literally means take the principles of game design and plunk them in an area where there's no game, like school. Matter of fact, school is probably the most anti-game thing you can have. We are, however, totally victimized by gamification on a daily basis. How many of you buy Tim Hortons coffee right now, specifically because Roll Up the Rim? I do; my coffee consumption goes up a hundred times because I just want to roll up and get another subpar coffee, but there's nothing more I can do about that. How many of us have a credit card where you go around and on that credit card you had a choice between a regular one or a points one, and then you get a points credit card and you're like, "I'm totally screwing the system; all these purchases are getting me points," then you're like, "Sweet, I got 72,000 points; what am I gonna get? A toaster! Awesome!" This is a seventy-two-thousand-dollar toaster. So now we have problems and issues with this.
So I said, "Okay, I'm gonna do it," but now the problem I got when I talked about gamification in its early infancy was people said, "Gamers: big, slobby people, live in their basement." And I'm like, "Oh, seriously? We still talk about this?" No, this guy is actually hyper-dedicated to what he does, and if I could get kids this dedicated about science, I'm totally doing my job. The second thing is that games are just absolutely littered, littered with creativity—Minecraft, so popular in terms of the actual gaming community, it is simply because it is a sandbox game. If you want, don't want—no one has to tell you anything; they're literally just like, "Here's some blocks, and put them on other blocks," and holy cow, why are you playing this for 14 hours? But they will, why? Because someone will come to this castle and go, "Oh my god, dude, that's amazing," and you're like, "It is amazing; I am awesome, and I'm gonna go ahead and build more things," and they just get absolutely stuck in the fact that they are doing something 100 percent at their choice. And let's just not forget this: there's nothing wrong with play and fun. So many times I meet parents who are like, "Well, when you were playing, I mean, how can you be learning?" And I'm like, "So you're calling play the antithesis of fun?" And they're like, "If that means what I said, then yes." And I'm like, "Okay, so you're telling me then that when when we play we learn nothing; it is a hundred percent a waste of time and energy; no point." Proven: animals play to teach themselves things, like, you know, hunting skills and survival skills and all that. We play for entertainment, but there's also these quick things that we gain with, like, reaction speeds and all these kinds of different things that actually can come through games.
So I said, "Okay, I'm going to do it." So in 2015, I unleashed something called the Fight for Scientia Arrow, which is nothing more than the Fight for Science Land, but it sounds way cooler in Latin. So I went about it, and I stripped my classroom bare, and I said, "I am gonna find out what's actually valuable to you. Do you need desks? Do you need chairs to learn, or is that something that teachers think you need?" So they build their furniture in my room that teaches STEM learning, something that I couldn't get through. They do practical application of all of their knowledge continuously. We build things to help people, to save people; we battle monsters in trivia contests; we go through—through—say—us helping younger children, you come across in this game by delivering lessons to them that they memorize to then go help their own communities and yacht. And the whole concept is wrapped around eliminating rote memorization, because rote memorization is useless. This device that we all carry in our pocket will do anything and everything I need it to do at the moment I needed it, so why would I say, "Hey, while you write this test, you don't get to use that, but when you start your career you get to use that?" It's completely hypocritical. So I decided to just use it all the time.
So I thought I was a genius. I was like, "Man, this is awesome; Gosling's gonna tweet me, 'Hey, Scott, you know, let's get some coffee; you're doing fantastic work.'" But in reality, I got a lot of backlash. The reason I got a lot of backlash is because I realized three things: when you want to innovate, you want to create, and you want to change, we are fearful of change, especially in education. Here's why: if my parents learned in desks, and their parents learned in desks and rows and quiet regime, well, I'm screwing up the future if they are not in desks, because look at all the cool stuff we've done in our society with desks. And I go, "Whoa, wait a second. If you read a lot of the research or a lot of the quotes about people, they were anti-desk, and a lot of them didn't even finish high school and use their own creative processes to develop the things that are so famous today."
The second thing I realized: we don't like failure. However, at every teaching conference and convention I go, they bring up some researcher who says we need to fail, and then we're like, "Okay, sure. What's the best practice? I don't know, but that's something we should definitely be doing." And I say, "Okay, so we're cool with, like, Pinterest fails; these are viral. Right? Here's the thing: we tried it," but when it comes to a classroom, I saw how resistive teachers were about failing in front of their kids, and I'm like, "But wait a second, you want them to fail, but you don't ever." So I will purposely teach lessons and experiments that screw up, and then have kids pick apart why it went wrong and pretend like I had no clue, unless they watch this, and now they're in on it, but I will do these things to show them that I want them to take risks.
Now, this again is probably the quote I live by. I was fortunate enough last year to go from convention to Global News to the front page of the Edmonton Journal to making the front page of Reddit with this approach, to where I started getting really awesome keyboard warrior comments about how I was ruining the future, pandering to kids, good, releasing another generation of snowflakes, whatever that even means. And I real—and this was hard for me—I was like, "Man, I'm really trying so hard to do good for kids; I just wanted them to care about school; I don't care about grades and all that." I mean, let's let's be honest here; let's go back to the incredible talk by Shelby: grades in grade eight are about as useless as bringing bikini armor to a sword fight; they mean nothing. The only time grades matter is when they go to university, and that's like, you know, sometimes you do at the tail end of grade 10, 11, and 12. My grade eight kid wears it as a badge that tells him or her if they are good at said subject, and my job is to make sure that number can be as high as possible so that they believe that they are good at that subject, and they might invite future passions and innovations and creativity instead of subject. But if my goal is, "I don't care about you; you're just a number on a paper, and I'm just going to push you through the system, boom, boom, boom," then I'm not doing my job. Kids need to know that in the arena of Education I am not on the outside clapping for them; they need to know that I'm in the arena fighting alongside them, picking them up when they fall down, brushing them off and saying, "It is okay," because that is what is going to create the future innovators that we so badly need with all the crazy problems that the current situations we are in: global warming, problems with food and water, and all these different kinds of things. We need crazy, wild, innovative thinking, not someone who can say, "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell; I'm gonna write that down, and I'm gonna pretend that I'm good at biology." That's what school is.
So back to this quote: I got lambasted by people, and I took—really, really took it to heart—till I realize I don't need to be a jackass whisperer. I do not need to tell people who think it's stupid why it's not. I need those kids in my classroom to believe in what we—and believe in themselves and each other—and we're gonna be fine. So really, it's up to you in whatever facet of work that you have, whether it is business, whether it is, you know, engineering—since that's a whole bunch of things we had about today about engineering, we've come a lot about innovation—and it is your job to take that risk. I love the news talking about stepping off that carpet, take that risk and see what comes out of it, and listen to the people you work with and work for, because they will tell you.
Now I love this quote; I want you to think in your mind when this was said: "If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob students of tomorrow." This was set in 1917. That is 101 years old this year that this quote was said—101 years ago. We identified the education system needed to change. 101 years later, here I am talking about it, and I better not be here 101 years from now, which would be cool, talking about it again. Thank you. [Applause]