Coldplay Support Design for Change

They have put us up on their website Exhibition Wall!!

The Soul of Education - Conference

I am flattered to have been invited to present a workshop on "How To Be Human - Revisiting The Purpose of Education" at the Soul of Education Conference along with my Design for Change colleage Richard Dunne, Head Teacher at Ashley CofE Primary in Walton on Thames.

Richard and I will be sharing some of the impact of Design for Change on the children and staff at Ashley and we will look at how Richard  and his staff are leading the way on embedding sustainability in every part of the school curriculum.

I will also be interviewing Satish Kumar - founder of The Small School in Devon, celebrated author, editor of Resurgence, and perhaps most famous for walking without passport of money from Delhi, India, to Washington, USA, via Moscow, Paris and London as a protest against the proliferation of nuclear arms in the sixties.

Satish has been a quiet guru of soulful education and sustainability for over four decades.

The Soul of Education: How To Deliver Person Centered Learning

Channel 4, 124 Horseferry Road, London, SW1.

10^th June 2011, 9.15-5.15pm with networking reception until 6.30pm

A solution focussed conference delivered by the experts, for the experts. 

This unique event combines CPD accredited training with the opportunity to network with other practitioners and leading thinkers. Alongside the new tools and practical approaches, there will be the chance to share best practice, find solutions and explore the opportunities in delivering a truly person centered education.

The Life Project CIC are a social enterprise with a reputation for putting inspiration back into education. Combining cutting edge experts with real educators from real environments sharing “what works”, the Soul of Education series is solution focused, energising and effective. 

Ticket prices: 

Early Bird until the 21^st March 2011 £99-279 + VAT sliding scale. 

For more information, to download the brochure and to book online, please visit the conference website.

or call 01273 724050. 

New video about DFC from India 2009 to UK 2010

A quick summary of how DFC began and the first year in UK.

If we want to stop the collapse of our education system, we must stop talking at children and listen

Few dispute that education in the United Kingdom is in dire straits. What was once held in the highest esteem around the world is becoming tired, confused, misguided and fundamentally destructive to the mental, emotional and spiritual development of our children.

It is harsh and unfair to point the finger at teachers. Of course there are many teachers who "could do better" and there are a few who should be marched from the school and "excluded" for stupidity, bullying and for just being downright appalling at teaching - but that is no different from any other profession.  There are also many exceptionally gifted and inspirational teaches who are struggling to maintain their passion and gifts because successive governments are sapping their will to continue. How is it that government still fails to understand the very basic requirements of an educational system: to prepare children for life in the real - changing - world? 

Dr. Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College and a highly respected educator recently wrote in The Independent, 

Our education system is collapsing into a form of mass indoctrination.

This is unequivocal and damning, and from someone who heads up one of the top independent schools in the country. Let's put this into context. Wellington does not have to cope with the harsher inner city struggles of poorly educated, impoverished families for whom reading, writing and arithmetic - and if Boris Johnson has his way, Latin - may not be their first thoughts as they wake to face the harsh realities of life in Britain. Dr Seldon's is not just talking about where education is under greatest stress; he is talking about the whole system. His words carry considerable weight. We are listening.

Seldon is not the only one; it is not easy to find a teacher anywhere who is not close to despair about what governments have been, and continue to do. Ofsted - while often protesting its commitment to creativity in how the curriculum is delivered - is nonetheless feared by most Headteachers and their staff. Sir Ken Robinson, whose review of creativity in education rang warning bells years ago, has become something of a YouTube star through his lecture at the TED Conference in 2007. Passionate applause welcomes his assertion that,

creativity is as important now in education as literacy and that we should treat it with the same status.

There is no shortage of imagination, no shortage of thought-leadership and no shortage of vision for the future of education. There is no shortage of examples of excellent practice. There is, however, a terrifying lack of communication of best practice, and a breathtaking lack of commitment to engage in radical reform - not just from some teachers and their unions, but from parents who know full well that things are disastrously wrong, but who fear change more than the mess we are in. One colleague recently offered the opinion that the single reason no government has tackled the fundamental issues of what we should be teaching and how we should be teaching it (instead of how we should be testing pupils, and how we should be grading establishments) is because the Daily Mail and Middle England simply would not stand for it. If he is right, then we must experience the complete collapse that Seldon warns about, before we have no choice but to build again from scratch.  I do hope this is not necessary.

So what are these fundamentals that we are not addressing in education? There are many jockeying for top place but for me there is an obvious starting point. We need to start listening to children. Really listening. This is a horrifying concept to a middle class that craves "respect" from the young, and finds it unimaginable not to be "in" authority over the young. But when we do listen - deeply - two things happen as if by magic. First, children and young people have a natural wisdom and intuition way beyond their knowledge. Some may not be articulate, but they know how thins ought to be. They often do know what's best. Secondly, by listening we create the base foundations of respect and love; two values that simply cannot be demanded. I remember from my own school days being bemused by any adult demanding something that could only be given voluntarily. My compliance (usually after the threat of physical violence with a cane) did not contain so much as a grain of respect. From respect and love come engagement, courage and trust.  It is not just abuse by Catholic priests and nuns that shatters trust; trust can be chipped away, bit by bit, day by day, by not caring enough to listen. When no one is listening, it is easy to lose one's voice. There is no point in speaking of "pupil voice" if adults have forgotten how to listen.

Next on my list is the need for children to learn that what they want is more likely to bring fulfillment than what other people want for them. Having spent most of my working life as a coach listening to the frustrations of intelligent, conforming, "successful" adults I know that at some point in life, almost everyone discovers that the life they have been living is a life designed for them by others. Who really made our subject choices at school and our career plan? Who chose to abandon our dreams of being an artist, a dancer, a singer and drop our creative subjects for more useful career ones? Who deigned our lifestyle aspirations, and signed up to our progression through the milestones of the consumer society - accumulating more and more things. And if and when we open our eyes we notice that we are working harder and harder just to keep the show on the road, while knowing deep down that there is a different life of meaning, purpose and joy living simpler and long held dreams. Does this have its roots in our schooling? Well, we spend the majority of our time learning things we have no interest in, or capacity for, and little if any time being empowered to pursue our own instincts, interests and passions. We submit to a curriculum of what the adults think is good for us. Young people are rarely listened to; they spend their formative years learning how to conform or rebel, rather than how to engage and contribute.

At the heart of all good education should be the opportunity for each child to discover who they are, how they should relate to others, and what they love about life. Sir Ken Robinson.

Let's explore the opposite: that we don't now who we are, we don't know how to relate to others, and we dare not think too long about what we love about life because we know that we can't have what we want. How would this feel? Would it feel so frustrating and claustrophobic that our responses to real life would become fearful, or repressed, or depressed, or violent? These words seem to be a failry accurate description of the current state of the world? Surely the law of cause and effect tells us that there are some profound clues here as to what we need to do to put things right. If it needs spelling out - what we need to be doing is the very opposite of what we are doing now. 

Fortunately, to test this, we do not have to throw caution to the wind. There are a quiet handful of people showing what is possible, and that the possible is replicable. Kiran Bir Sethi, the founder and director of the Riverside School in India, has created a school that excels by every measure and outperforms the top ten schools in India. The children spend 40% of their time outside the classroom because the school insists on blurring the boundaries between school and life. (In the UK this figure in primary education is between 0% and 5%.) Kiran's teachers spend 60 days a year in professional development, a big percentage of which is spent challenging the way they have been doing things and looking for new ways to engage and empower children. (A teacher in a UK gets about four days of development - largely focussed on subjects and systems.) But the biggest difference at Riverside is that the children are listened to - not in a soft "active listening" way - but profoundly so.  They are asked to feel the things in their community that frustrate or disturb them. They are asked to imagine solutions to these problems. They are sent out to do something and put their ideas into action. They are encouraged to share their stories of change and become an inspiration to others. They are asked to sustain the changes or move on to new ideas - thereby becoming leading citizens and direct contributors to a cohesive society. The stories are utterly breathtaking - and all that really changed is that the adults stopped "knowing best", stopped telling the children what was important, stopped directing the children and they asked a handful of questions and listened to the answers. From this, Riverside has promoted a global school competition where the Feel, Imagine, Do, Share, Sustain process is producing unimaginable inspiration to adults as much as their children.

For a government looking for quick wins that cost nothing, this seems a blindingly obvious experiment to pursue. We can but dream! Michael Gove has abandoned all plans to implement an inspired draft primary curriculum that followed the two independent Rose and Cambridge Reviews. From what we can deduce so far, the Liberal Conservatives are hell-bent on reinvigorating the system of schooling that emerged from that unholy marriage of Bismarckian education and English puritanical self-righteousness. 

What Kiran and others are discovering is that sometimes adults do not know best. And for the empirically minded - just take a quick look at life on this planet: the product of an intelligent, educated, affluent society. Does it look like it's working?

When children do good - they do well. Kiran Bir Sethi, TED India Conference.

If Seldon and Sethi are right, it seems that as a child making my way through life, first I need to start with me - understand my Self. Who am I? How can I learn to love and value me? What else do I love? What is important to me? Then I need to lift my focus a little bit, and understand others. Who are you? How do we differ? How can I learn to love and value that? Then I lift my focus higher still, and try to understand us. How can I come into a relationship with you so that the two of us become more resourceful together? How I begin to assimilate male and female, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, atheist, agnostic? Now I belong to a community that is larger than my family. How do I be me, with you being you, in a community of others being themselves? How do I speak with my own voice and hear the voices of others and have it all make sense?

Then - and only then - can I make real sense of my study of literature, music, mathematics, science, art. Only then does my learning have a purpose. And I will inevitably discover that in the real, wide world, I don't need it all. I don't need top marks in twelve subjects most of which I will never, ever refer to again. I need top marks in how to live productively, passionately, confidently and compassionately in a state of love, peace and harmony in a rich and complex world.

Is this a fantasy? It is almost the mirror image opposite of what happens for most children in formal education - not just here, but anywhere that has cloned our 19th century school system. 

If we are to do more than innovate around the edges of education (improving what we have rather than making something new) then we must face the fact that we are teaching almost entirely the wrong subject matter in almost entirely the wrong way. If this is read as a criticism of teachers (rather than the system) I have failed in my intent.  It is a cri de coeur, a call to arms, a call to adventure. I fear it will not stir government into action; it will scare the trousers off the vote-obsessed politician.

But some of us do care, very much, about the legacy we are leaving our children. We must start to listen to children, and to all young people and frankly get out of their way. Of course the puritans will tell us that we are "spoiling" our children; the truth is that we have been spoiling education and therefore wrecking our children's prospects of happiness and fulfilment. Someone must do something about this soon.

Kiran Bir Sethis ends her TED conference lecture with a question,

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Children in the World

Thames Ditton Infant School

Update from this lovely school:

Our project is going very well. The cildren chose to focus on the amount of litter present in the school and the local town.

They have decided to make posters to advertise the need for putting rubbish in the bin and/or recycling it.

They are going for an hour into the town this Thursday morning. This will have a few meanings for them. They will be handing out the flyers for their posters to local stores to have them placed in their windows and smaller versions given out to shoppers by the shop keepers.

They will be spotting litter they can see and counting it. They will also be conducting a survey of people shopping and shop keepers themselves to gain their insight into what can be done in the local community to reduce litter.

Another sub group from this collection of Design For Change children will then be writing to the local council with our information gathered to ask for more litter bins to be placed in the local community, specifically in the town.

2010 Awards in India

The 2010 Design for Change INDIA Contest has completed and they have announced their awards..

Here is an extract from a very happy email from Kiran Bir Sethi:

This year, over 200,000 children across all 29 states of India became Changemakers! The stories grew bolder and several age old superstitions and rituals like Mrityu Bhoj (rituals based on feeding people when a family member dies) and Black Magic were challenged!  

Children designed solutions for a range of problems such as traffic, rain water harvesting, eco friendly Ganesha's, drug addiction, science aids for the visually impaired, bullying, heavy school bags and garbage.  

The children showed all of us what can be achieved when we say 'I CAN', instead of 'Can I'!!

Here is a selection:

Mrityu Bhoj, Satya Bharti School, Alwar

Children set out to convince their community to end the financial hardship of the 100 year old traditional Post Death Feast where poor families are spending money creating a funeral feast instead of saving the money to spend on education and other priorities. 75% of the community have been persuaded to change this tradition, and money is now being channelled into building four new classrooms for the school.

Jal Hai to Kal Hai, Satya Bharti School, Jaipur

Children were bothered that precious rain water flowed directly off the land and away from the village. They designed a solution and mobilised the villagers to build water pits that would catch and store rain water creating a solution to what had been a very long term problem.

Every Child is an Entrepreneur, Sunrise English Medium School, Pune

Children from an extremely poor community school dream of having computers available for their learning. There is no money to pay for them, so they create a fair to raise the finds to enable the school to buy its first computer.

Go Garbage, Amrit Vidyalaya, Kalol, Gujarat

"We go to school, we find garbage. We go to play, we find garbage." Children were bothered by the community's approach to clearing garbage and keeping their environment clean. They set about designing a campaign to "change the minds of people". Through street theatre, song, rallies, door to door campaigning and soliciting individual pledges they have inspired their community to change. They have enrolled other schools in their campaign and their influence is spreading.

Rethinking Education

Sir Ken suggests alternative approaches to educating children than the industrialisation and mechanisation of schooling.

Full - non-animated presentation HERE.

Spreading Happiness

Seth Godin spreads a little happiness.

Most important bit: he re-tells Ziz Ziglar's story about transforming a school through happiness at 02:46

Brief DFC News from Around the World

India - our partner from Orissa, Bipin Mohanty, had translated the toolkit into BRAILLE!!  India has reached over 30,000 schools, and the registrations have started coming in - you can look them up here.

USA - got its first sponsor - Think Fun - who have generously offered to donate 10 of their best games as one of the prizes!  

Bhutan - Main TV channel partnering with DFC.  Children of Early Learning Centre were filmed to 'infect' the entire nation!

Finland - Jury members selected and toolkit has been translated into Finnish.  Unicef is supporting DFC Finland!

Brazil - made the first movie on Raffi's 'I CAN song'....( will be soon uploaded on the main DFC site )

Sri Lanka - Read about the infection on Mihirini's blog

Mexico - 10,000 schools infected!

Thailand - 1,500 students infected with Design for Change.  Of these, over 200 students worked together to submit 56 projects to improve their community.  Top five will win some award.  

Taiwan / Japan - Kiran to visit both places mid November for DFC events.  Cengage group supporting DFC in Japan.

Canada - TEDx Toronto includes DFC in their event on Sept 30th - Kiran to speak via Skype and Raffi to be present at TEDx - The 'I Can Song' will be played at the event.