僕が7年間経営に携わったTeach For Japanは、日本国内の教育格差を是正するために、情熱がある若者を教員免許の有無かかわらず、二年間厳しい環境に置かれている子どもたちが多い学校に派遣をしている。

これまで100名近くの教員を現場に派遣し、今年一年の採用/派遣を通して100名の配置を目指そうとしている。これはとてつもないチャレンジだが、チャレンジする意味のあるものだと心からそう思う。

教育は人なり
僕は、教員経験や教育事業の運営を含めると10年近く教育現場の最前線に立たせてもらっていることになる。現場経験に追加して、これまで奈良市の教育振興戦略会議の委員や、大學のリーダー育成プログラム評価委員、そして今では文部科学省の中央教育審議会の委員として教育政策を深く考える機会がある中で、いつも立ち戻るのが「教育は人なり」という言葉

日本では、この「人」の要素を何よりも大切にしながら、教育が発展してきたと思っている。先生と生徒の関係性、先生同士の関係性、生徒同士の関係性、部活動における生徒との関係性、保護者との関係性、そしてコミュニティや社会との関係性。この関係性の中、日本というのは高い教育水準を保つことができていたと信じている。特にアメリカの教育制度を調べれば調べるほど、現場に足を運べば運ぶほど、強くこれを痛感する。アメリカの小中高の(特に公立学校での)教育ではこれらの要素が全部断絶しており、人が個の力でどうにかしないといけない状況がある。アメリカというのは非常に残酷な国で、初等中等教育の中での学校間格差がすごいのだ(大学からは世界中から人財が集まるので、また別の話だと思っている)。

日本教育の幕の内弁当化
一方で、近年プログラミング教育やアクティブラーニングの普及によって、日本の教育が迷走しているようにも感じる。「これからの時代に必要な教育」という大義名分の下で、様々な教育に対する価値観やプログラムが教育現場に津波のように押し寄せ、まるで学校教育が幕の内弁当化している。僕は、これまで培ってきた日本の初等中等教育の素晴らしさが崩壊し、本来日本の教育が提供することができていた教育の本質的価値や教育が失われていく事を危惧している。

もちろんテクノロジーやそのほかの環境的な要因は子どもたちの学習に良い影響を与えることも理解している。僕は今スタンフォード大学で研究をしたり、シリコンバレーというイノベーションが起こる立地に住んでいるが、EduTech(教育テクノロジー)の可能性を間近で感じ、未来の教室がどうなるのかを鮮明にイメージすることができている。学校現場は、こういったリソースをどんどん活用していくべきだとも考える。

僕はテクノロジーや先進的な教育プログラムを否定しているのではない。僕がここで言っているのは優先順位の問題であり、人の要素をおろそかにしていては、どんな施策やプログラムも意味を成さず、結局教育効果も期待できないということだ。

EdTechがすべてを解決することは絶対にない。プログラミング教育の導入で教育の質が劇的に変わるわけでもない。僕は、それを生かすことができる人が何よりも大切だと思っているのだ。人(先生)が子どもたちの心に火をつけ、めげそうになる時も伴走して生徒のモチベーションを回復したり、相談に乗ってあげることで学習に取り組める心理的安心安全を担保するのだ。

ビジョンドリブンな教育
僕が、そんな「人」が持つ教育現場での可能性に気がつくことができたのは、Teach For America の Wendy Kopp との出会いが大きい。彼女は何よりも人の要素を大切にしながら、教育活動に取り組んできている。全米で最も優秀で情熱のある大学卒業したての新卒人財を選考とトレーニングを行い、全米でもっとも過酷な教育環境に派遣している。大學四年生で卒業論文でこのアイディアを考え、卒業後すぐに起業し、もう30年近くになる。
wendy
先日、Wendyがカリフォルニア州立大学バークレー校での卒業式でスピーチをした(動画あり)。大学の卒業式で話をする機会がもらえるのは本当に名誉なことであり、これまで一握りのリーダーしかこの名誉を手にしていない。彼女はスピーチの中で、バークレーから今年53名の卒業生がTeach For Americaの先生として就職したとのことやUCバークレーの卒業生である Jojo Lamb が Teach For Cambodia を立ち上げていることに言及している。
berkeley
そのTeach For Americaは時には就職ランキングの一位になったりと、優秀な学生にとても注目されている非営利組織なのだ。彼らは子どもたちに対する情熱の熱量がとても高く、子どもたちの教育環境を改善したい!と時には保護者よりも強く願っている。

そんな彼ら彼女らが、教室の中に入って、まず何をするのか?教育ビジョンを設定である。生徒との対話や信頼関係の醸成を大切にしてながら、ビジョンの実現に向けて日々課題解決を進めていく。自分一人でどれだけ頑張っても根本的な解決ができるわけではないので、学校内外の資源を存分に活用していく。ビジョンを達成するためにテクノロジーを導入する必要がるのであればテクノロジーを導入するし、プログラミングも教える。Project Based Learning もすれば、デザイン思考のワークショップも導入する。
vision
つまり、施策ありきではなく、ビジョンありきなのである。ここで考えてみてほしい。アクティブラーニングやプログラミング教育という言葉はよく聞くが、皆さんはどれだけ教育ビジョンを耳にしているだろうか?ビジョンは地域・学校・教室によっても違うはずだし、何よりも子どもたち一人ひとりが違うはずである。

僕は、ビジョンなくしての教育は意味がないと思っている。

僕はビジョンを何よりも大切にしながら、子どもたちとの対話を続け、そのビジョンの達成にベストな教育を提供することに情熱を燃やし続ける人でありたい。

ビジョンドリブンな人と関わることで、ビジョンドリブンな人が育つんだと思う。そういう関わり続ける中で、Wendyのスピーチにあるように世界中で社会的な不条理を解決し、世の中をよりよくしていくサービスや仕組みを生み出す人が輩出されていくことを願っている。



Speach 全文はこちらから:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2019/05/20/commencement-speaker-wendy-kopp-lead-us-forward-differently/

全文:
Wendy Kopp, CEO and co-founder of Teach For All and founder of Teach For America, gave the following remarks to graduates during her keynote speech at Spring 2019 Commencement:

Thank you, Jesse! Thank you, President Napolitano and the Board of Regents, Chancellor Christ, deans and faculty, distinguished guests, family, friends and loved ones, and most especially, the University of California, Berkeley, Class of 2019!

It’s a real honor to celebrate this day with you. This is a class with extraordinary strengths and perspective. More than one in five of you are the first in your families to earn a college degree. And 90 Dreamers are picking up your degrees today. Each of you sitting here in cap and gown has worked so hard to get here. Let’s hear it again for the Class of 2019!

To the graduates’ families and friends — as a mother of four who have not yet made it across this finish line, I’m in awe! Let’s hear it for them!

And — to the 53 graduates who are joining Teach For America — thank you! Your campus has sent more students to Teach For America than almost any other school in the nation.

I am inspired by what Berkeley stands for and by your generation. Jojo Lam, a Berkeley alumna who is helping build Teach For Cambodia, shared with me how much this institution influenced her. She said, “When you’re surrounded by people who care, it makes you want to care.”

Worldwide, Berkeley is known for student activism. In your time here, you have acted against racism, sexism, sexual assault, basic needs insecurity, income inequality, anti-immigration policies, climate crises, suppression of free speech and many other systemic injustices.

And even beyond this campus, your generation’s commitment to political and civic engagement surpasses that of any that have come before. That’s not just an impression. A survey of U.S. college students showed that your class had the highest levels of interest in political and community engagement in 50 years.

We need your ongoing engagement. We need each of you to get into the arena of addressing the world’s greatest injustices and societal threats, as early as possible.

After spending my senior year in college developing the idea for Teach For America, I set out to make it happen when I graduated 30 years ago. The journey to realize its potential — first at Teach For America and now across Teach For All, a global network of similar organizations in 50 countries and counting — has been challenging, exhausting, messy.

But there is not one year I would trade for a different path — I feel extraordinarily privileged to have found my way to this work early enough to have had the chance to understand the complexity of the issues and to find my way to real solutions. Along the way, I’ve been able to work with and become friends with the most amazingly committed people. I even met my husband in this work and had those four incredible kids I mentioned earlier. I’ve learned so much, including from among the more than 1,000 Berkeley grads who have joined Teach For America over the last 29 years and who are now teachers, principals, civil rights and immigration attorneys, elected leaders and social entrepreneurs, tackling inequity from all levels and many sides.

Most of you are heading into the working world, where activism may not be part of your day-to-day. Many of you are heading to jobs in marketing, consulting, finance, law, technology. These are the right choices for you now, given the many pressures and passions that led you to them. But you may find yourself encouraged to back off of your activism. I urge you to continue with it, and to stay conscious that many of the institutions you’re joining are built on and supporting the status quo — politically, socially and economically.

I think we all recognize that there are major problems with the status quo. We face many issues that seem intractable: climate change, historic levels of inequality, multiplying global conflicts. And the way we’ve been addressing them isn’t working. We tackle one piece and create new problems, or we see only incremental progress, or we are simply immobilized in a vitriolic and divided place.

I’m betting on you to break us through. I’m betting on you — to learn from previous generations, to bring your energy and ideas and, as the most diverse generation of college graduates yet, to bring your experiences, family histories and community backgrounds to the table. I’m betting on you to make meaningful progress in the struggle for justice, freedom and a sustainable future.

This is why I want to share with you the most salient lesson from my last 30 years, which is about the kind of leadership we need to reach our aspirations. I’ve learned that we need “collective leadership.”

Our culture is rooted in the ideal of the individual leader. We hear the word “leadership,” and we imagine heroic superstars. We valorize the entrepreneurs, particularly here, so close to Silicon Valley. We want to be our own bosses, to venture out on our own. This archetype deeply defines our vision of success in this country. But the more I see, the more I realize that individual leadership alone won’t get us where we’re trying to go.

a woman at a podium
Wendy Kopp founded Teach for America in 1990. (UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser)

When I started pursuing the idea of Teach For America as a 21-year-old, I believed individual leadership was everything. I’d internalized — no doubt because of my own experiences growing up in our Western culture — that if I wanted to accomplish something, I just needed to work harder and think harder. The experience of getting Teach For America off the ground and sustaining it only reinforced that mental model. Whether we lived or died seemed to me to rest on how much time I spent raising funds and on how good my plans were.

And my whole theory of change for addressing the extreme and entrenched inequities facing children was to cultivate a bunch of individual leaders — to recruit and develop individuals with leadership potential, to help them succeed as teachers so they have a real impact on kids and gain a deep understanding of the problem and its solvability and then to accelerate their individual paths as school system leaders, innovators, advocates and political leaders who would pursue systemic change.

But over time, what I’ve seen in communities, here and around the world, has led me to rethink my belief in individual leadership alone. I’ve been thinking about the need for collective leadership — a kind of leadership where individuals work together in a new way.

Collective leadership asks diverse groups to maximize their differences, rather than be immobilized by them. It encourages us to come together to speak, listen, reflect, understand the whole picture, develop shared vision for the future and generate new solutions. Collective leadership recognizes that our power is so much stronger than my power.

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time with Anseye Pou Ayiti, Teach For Haiti in Creole. At its outset, its CEO, Nedgine Paul Deroly, spent more than three years in the rural communities where her team was planning to work, building relationships and considering one question: As a people, when are we at our best in Haiti? Stemming from that question came conversations about education and about what the community wanted to be true for its young people. Nedgine listened to reflections that repeatedly focused on respect for local culture, customs and community.

Collective leadership gathers entire communities to exert leadership. The people in these Haitian communities came together, listened to each other and created a vision for what would be true for their kids by the time they’re young adults: that they will have the education necessary to provide for their families, be proud of and value their own heritage and be active citizens and leaders committed to social justice for all.

Almost five years into this work, this collective leadership has created transformational changes. To share one example: Although it’s technically outlawed, Haitian schools for decades have utilized corporal punishment as a primary discipline system. The practice is embedded in the country’s colonial past, passed down from generation to generation as it has been in many parts of our country and the world. And yet, in the five years since Anseye Pou Ayiti launched, whole schools have shed that entrenched approach and created positive discipline systems.

This is deep change — change that laws couldn’t effect. How did it finally happen? It happened because diverse people came together, listened to each other, developed shared vision — and realized they would never get where they were trying to go using that old system. They chose to become more invested in the new vision than the old ways.

In our own country, we too often fail to create the space necessary to bring people from different perspectives together to develop new paths forward.

Take what’s happening in Berkeley’s back yard, in Oakland’s public school system. Thanks to so many committed individuals across the system, there are many things to be hopeful about. In the past 10 years alone, graduation rates have risen from 55% to 73%. Having first visited there 28 years ago, I can tell you that, today, many more of Oakland’s children are on a path to college and to meaningful careers. Yet, there is still so much trauma in the system.

Maybe some of you followed the news of Oakland’s recent teacher strike — protesting untenable teacher salaries that aren’t enough to let teachers live sustainably here in the Bay Area. The successful strike and hard-fought resolution resulted in an increase in teacher pay of 11% over four years. Yet, that’s still not nearly enough to keep up with rising housing and living costs in this area, and many are concerned the deal will bankrupt the district.

Why can’t we figure out how to enable teachers to live sustainably and take care of themselves — and our children?

What I know for sure is that there are no easy answers, and there is no path to progress without dialogue and generative problem-solving. We need all the actors — students, parents, teachers, advocates, employers, philanthropists and government leaders — to talk and to listen. We need them to consider together the whole picture — not only teacher pay, but housing costs, pension costs, our willingness to pay taxes in support of public education and more. And yet, this kind of discussion seems utterly impossible.

It’s impossible because there is deep anger in the community, particularly at the philanthropists who’ve been investing in the city and at any advocates or organizations that accept their support — because it’s corporate leaders who have had a loud voice, even when they’ve played a role in perpetuating the income inequality at the root of Oakland’s issues. With so much anger and fear, there seems no way for people to come together to get to know each other’s perspectives and develop new solutions.

So, we’re stuck. And Oakland is just one example of dozens and dozens across this country where this same story plays out.

To create different outcomes, we need to develop different capabilities than most of us have learned. We must learn to build authentic relationships across lines of difference, to see the strengths in those from different walks of life and different ideological perspectives, to listen and learn from each other. We must develop the muscle to think beyond our own individual pursuits and to hold the space necessary to bring diverse people together. And we must be literate with trauma — our own, others’ and the world’s — so that we can have generative conversations, even when others hurt us.

Class of 2019: I want to challenge you to lead us forward differently — to make it your life’s work to create dialogue, to make it your job to replace judgment with curiosity, to co-construct a vision of the future that works for all, not for some.

You don’t need to wait to find yourself in a position of influence. We need you now. Seek out a conversation with someone who has a radically different view and listen generously. Be curious and willing to be surprised. Understand that, just like you, they have hopes and fears, things they value and things that make them feel vulnerable.

Make time to do the inner work to understand yourselves. Know your deepest values, and take time for your own healing, because as we ground ourselves, we’re able to be more generous with others and more generative in our collective spaces.

Always look around the table and invite in voices that are not heard. And if you’re the one who can offer an unheard perspective, something that can move our shared humanity forward, have the courage to speak up, even when it feels difficult. Real progress requires moments of tension. If we approach these moments with generosity and curiosity, rather than resistance and blame, we can find entirely new ways forward.

This may be slow in the beginning. But I’ve come to realize that many diverse people trusting each other and working together is the only path to achieving a just, peaceful, sustainable, inclusive world.

I’m placing my hopes in you. With every generation, humanity goes through an evolution, and we’re going through one now. Your generation brings new wisdom, consciousness and a yearning for justice. We need your imagination and collective spirit.

I’m so excited to learn from you as you live into your potential as a generation of change-makers and together create the world we long for.

Thank you, Class of 2019, and good luck!