Craig Vezina Conversation with Dan Menelly (abridged), May 17, 2020
Dan Menelly: I think if kids can see the meaning and connect that meaning of what they’re learning to their future you’ve got them. And you can ask more of them if they think a subject and a project more particularly is relevant. A lot of times I remember I taught for 25 years lab science. I remember the biggest motivator was I could say is what we’re doing is this something a scientist would need to do when you’re in the laboratory. I would say is this worth doing. Is it meaningful? And the kids would say yes or now and you could go from there. I think running a museum was the best place to refine my approach to teaching and learning because kids can simply walk away if it’s not interesting and meaningful. That has been a powerful lesson and it really has made me think more intentionally about technology and specifically how technology overlaps into the whole social hemisphere of learning.

Because you can only blackmail them into performing so far with a grade or some external indicator. But if you got them involved viscerally. If they felt that the project that they were working on or a lab or a paper or research project was personal to them and interesting to them and it meant something you could get better quality work from them. Starting with the birth of Citizen Science I think it was with ornithology when they created a model where anyone with a mobile device could photograph a leaf or a bird and then the geospatial coordinates would become a tag or a marker. At that point kids as little as seven, eight, nine, ten years old could become part of a data community and they could see their contribution become part of something else. When I came to the museum field when we started to build exhibits we realized that one of the most powerful attractions for children was the ability to participate and share their experience, their experience, their understanding and to be part of the experience with a group that is really, really meaningful.

Especially now with the COVID pandemic and classrooms how have sort of lurched forward into this new hybrid reality where everyone is now a teacher of something and it’s fascinating to me to see how well both the learners and the educators have adapted. We wanted to encourage teachers to partner with not just museums but other cultural organizations like historical societies, research centers because right now we’re living in this new hybrid reality that isn’t the new normal but it’s getting ready for the next normal and this is going to be constantly changing. And the skills we’re using right now are the skills we’re going to need to sharpen and develop wherever we go next. I think if we go back to the classrooms eventually the skills that we’re mastering now are going to still help us.

I think that kids online have a more precise control of where they go next in their learning and I hope the teachers see that as an opportunity, not a threat. I’ve had to shift from a binary mindset. I thought you were either going to be a great teacher online or a great teacher in the classroom. The reality is we need to be both and I find that we don’t switch one off and the other on, but I think that if you are really, really smart at applying technologies to the social hemisphere of learning you’re going to position these learners for success later in life. You’re going to teach them that technology is this tool that isn’t something that is used outside and only outside of learning, but it’s in the process and it’s really granular. It’s advancing so fast I think that a lot of deep learning is going to advance with sentient analysis. I think that now we can actually do textual analysis. We can analyze each other’s writings. People are seeing that oh gosh, I can use this to help me sharpen and refine my skills and come into the workforce with a better, more agile mindset. It’s an exciting time.

How we’re going to move our way forward. I wish when I was younger I had a deeper sense of research tools and also data. That’s one thing as a grownup I learned to differentiate between different forms of data and I hope that when we find our way forward we can understand data that’s really causal models and not just persuasive. A lot of times people will come to me looking to guide a decision with advocacy research. There could be a white paper that’s presented by someone looking to sell something or to build engagement in an idea, but to make the right decision you have to look at a synthesis of research evidence. And that’s a lonely place to be. But I think as kids and as learners come into these data communities they’re going to have a better sense of things like cybersecurity, data integrity. They’re going to look more critically at the sources of data and they’re going to rely on vetted sources of data.

I really admire the education media when it’s a living document. I think for it to be relevant it’s going to have to be a living document that we revisit, we refine and we have to continually pulse the learner. We have to get real ten feet back on what we produce and what we share and we have to have the agility to adapt and improve it when we learn how it works and how people respond to it. And that’s one big push that I see happening both in schools in formal and informal learning is that we are very much informing our practice by the perceptions of the participants and that’s really a big step forward in learning and social and technical systems as well.

I worry about the disruption of the disruptors. You can run down the field without the ball and overinvest in an idea or a technology that could be rapidly obsolete. You have to really understand the innovation cycle and you have to understand when is the best time to dive in and to make an investment. I have kissed a lot of frogs. I remember in the early 1990s we invested in a lot of structures that didn’t really help, but now we’re more careful and we’re looking more carefully at where technology is coming from, where is the data going, are we monetizing somebody else’s model or are we building something that’s truly for the common good. I think as we look across nations I think we need to look at consortia that are going to have the best interest of all the stakeholders at heart. I don’t want to give up our autonomy and I don’t want to become part of somebody else’s model. I want to make sure that what we contribute is meaningful and when I collaborate with partners specifically in technology learning I want to make sure that what our organization offers is essential to the project’s success.

I also want to make sure we learn something that we could have never learned in any other context. I think the ones, the organizations that are succeeding online are the ones who are fully collaborative and the ones who bring the most meaningful inputs, the ones who honor their commitment to projects and I think that’s the lesson that I’m learning into the future. When I look towards people who are really thought leaders they are known for being polymaths, good at several things, but also really clear and expressive. I think that a lot of what we did in schools was helping children become more compliant to help them become good workers in somebody else’s systems, but I think for them to be successful we have to coach them into self-identifying as innovators. We have to make sure the types of things we experiment with in teaching is good enough for our own kids, not just he neighbor’s kids.

I think that what we do with education and learning right now is very serious. It has to keep learning at the center. What we offer kids has to be meaningful and interesting and relevant, otherwise they’re not going to stay with us. They’re just going to tune out. Parents that have come to me with great honesty and said look, I really want the best for my kid but I don’t always know what is the best way to keep them engaged in learning. I thought it was a lot of parents that had the humility to say to educators let’s partner, let’s find a way to keep my kid involved in the learning beyond where it becomes so complex and abstract they might drift away. I see social and emotional learning is now becoming one of the foundational concepts in these early learning and curriculum. I run an interactive children’s museum because I happen to think that’s the best investment in learning because when you position young learners for success those tools stay with them their entire learning arc, all the way through their lives.

Social and emotional learning and the curricula that’s being built around that is really exciting because it shows that the teacher is watching a child’s development and they’re observing very important skills. I don’t want to call them soft skills because it’s actually deeper and more strategic than that. Getting young learners to A, be able to partner with others to add value to society over the long term starts in the classroom to become a supportive presence but also to be able to take risks in your thinking. And to my math I think if teachers don’t take risks in their teaching they’re not going to be able to ask learners to take risks in their learning and they really do model that. By the way, if we had this conversation 25 years ago and if I said to you oh yeah, you’re not going to send a letter in the mail. You’re going to have a computer that fits in your pocket and you’re going to be able to send a letter instantly by post, they would have sent me to the nurse. They would have thought I was crazy. Look at today now. You and I can look and talk to each other and it really is like you’re 18 inches away from me but you’re not. You’re in Paris and I’m in southwestern U.S.