Visit my new blog: http://schoolsandtools.org
(Please note that some content is password-protected.)
This site will continue to be hosted and all content will continue to available, but the blog is on hold.
CT Career Choices, The Center for 21st Century Skills, EDUCATION CONNECTION – we (this is the program that I worked on and ran for the last three years) won a nearly $4.5 million award from the Race to the Top federal grant program. I just found out this morning. The only application funded in Connecticut, with a score that put the proposal well into the top 10 of all scores amongst the 49 proposals that were funded (out of 1700 in total). By far the most competitive RFP I’ve ever been a part of and the most rigorous grant writing teamwork.
Grant writer Mary Bevan deserves a lot of credit for marshaling the resources, checking the RFP again and again – and again, holding everyone strictly accountable for their contributions, coordinating the moving parts, creating master checklist upon master checklist. Mary is the best grant writer I’ve ever worked with, hands down.
And credit of course has to go to Michael Mino, for conceiving of the vision behind the CT Career Choices Program, and shepherding forward the idea when hope for innovation seemed lost. Partners like Rob Keating, Bruce Dixon, Mhora Newsom-Stewart, Sousan Arafeh, EDC, Albert Schneider, and so many more made this possible.
Now it’s up to the incredibly talented team at EDUCATION CONNECTION and CPEP to make this project a reality. I can’t wait to see what they do next!
This is one of my proudest professional days.
Here’s a posting that I made to the news forum of our CT Career Choices E-Commerce Entrepreneurship Moodle course, following the 2010 CT Student Innovation Expo. I wanted to reassure students that although they had not all won awards or honorable recognition at the event, they should be no less satisfied with their experience.
Hello everyone,
I’m writing to follow up on Saturday’s Expo and to share a few thoughts on the year so far and what is yet to come. I want to begin by recognizing all of you for the fantastic work that you have done all year and the outstanding – and highly professional – presentations that you made in Hartford (both in your booths and on stage in your pitches). I have heard from teachers, parents, judges, our own staff, and members of the public at large how impressed they were with the high quality of the work that they saw on display. I am extremely proud to be associated with you and to have had the pleasure of getting to know you over the course of these many months together. I hope you take as much pride in yourselves for the effort, teamwork, dedication, and ingenuity you put into the process of preparing and executing your businesses.
I feel I need to share a few words about the role that competition plays in our curriculum, hopefully to put the weekend’s events in perspective as we all move forward. Those of us who watch sports are familiar with the announcer’s phrase “it all comes down to this.” While this kind of language helps to build a sense of drama, draw an audience, and ultimately generate advertising dollars, I think it’s misleading on several levels. Although Saturday’s Expo may have felt like the “ultimate event,” I want to suggest to you that it was in fact practice. Some of you may present at next year’s Expo. Those that do and everyone else will continue to have presentations, other projects or moments when you will be asked to stand up and deliver on something close to your heart, something in which you have invested hours, days, weeks, and months of your time. You will certainly feel that you “win” some of these events and “lose” others. Regardless of the outcome, I guarantee that there will be more such events.
Knowing this, I think the most important question coming out of any of these kinds of events is not “did you win?” or “did you lose?” but “What are you going to do next?” There are many diverse attributes of successful people, but one thing that they have in common is that they are resilient. This is especially true among entrepreneurs. In the world of entrepreneurship there is no dishonor in pitching an idea that does not get funded. The vast majority of start-ups are not successful as they are originally conceived. Some never succeed. Some transform and become a new product or service, rising like the phoenix from the ashes of an initial attempt that failed.
We believe that our e-commerce program has succeeded when we can put on an event like we did on Saturday and any team could be competitive in any award category. The purpose of the competitive element is to emulate to some degree the reality of business, but we do not want the competition to overshadow the opportunity to learn from the experience and from each other. We are all in this together. The problems that you tackled in your businesses are real. The solutions you proposed are real. There is no single answer, and no single business will solve these problems. If the ultimate metaphor for the start-up company is the image of a small group of entrepreneurs huddled around their product in a garage somewhere, it’s going to take thousands of entrepreneurs working in thousands of garages to solve the world’s problems. You should take pride in counting yourselves in that number.
Best wishes and congratulations on a job well done,
Dan
Here’s an early draft of a new article I’m working on, explaining the structure and function of the CT Career Choices Program (http://ctcareerchoices.org).
This article presents a model for the successful integration of 21st century skills into the traditional high school curriculum. The foundation of the model is a three-pronged approach to learning that reinterprets the language of Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships first coined by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Edvisions. As reinterpreted by the Connecticut Career Choices (CCC) program, the “new 3 Rs,” as they are known, describe a method for delivering blended learning instruction in the traditional high school classrooms with an emphasis on relevance that is articulated via multiple, progressive experiential learning opportunities. Initial data on student outcomes suggests that the model is successful in increasing student achievement and engagement. A longitudinal study is planned for fall 2010.
CCC is a workforce education initiative implemented by the Center for 21st Century Skills @ EDUCATION CONNECTION. The statewide program currently reaches more than 1,200 students annually in more than thirty rural, suburban, and urban public high schools, averaging 40 percent participation by traditionally underrepresented ethnic and racial populations. Students are enrolled in the CCC program as the teacher of their high school course participates in one of nine courses offered through CCC. Which teachers participate is determined through the requirements of state and federal grant funding, collaboration with local school administrators, and an application process which seeks to ensure the best teaching and learning situation. The courses are currently primarily in technology and the sciences but are expanding into the humanities and mathematics. Each course reinvents an existing traditional course for the 21st century. In this way, business/marketing becomes E-Commerce Entrepreneurship; technology education becomes IT Research and Development; biology becomes Bio21: Biotechnology; chemistry becomes Chem21: Nanotechnology; video production becomes Digital Media Moviemaking; and so on. The aim of the CCC program is to (re)engage Connecticut’s students in their education (with specific emphasis on STEM disciplines), enabling them to pursue higher education (preferably in Connecticut), on their way to a career in Connecticut’s workforce.
Many states are facing the inescapable urgency of meeting the current and future demands of their workforce with a curricular capacity that is woefully inadequate. While these challenges are faced nationwide, there are aspects of the workforce crisis that are more keenly felt by Connecticut. Here are a few that have been identified in a 2007 “Keeping Connecticut Competitive” report by the CT Office of Workforce Competitiveness (a CCC funder):
Additionally, the six-year graduation rate for students in Connecticut’s twenty, four-year colleges is 60.8%, with the University of Connecticut the only one of the state’s five public four-year institutions with a graduation rate over 50%. Clearly, the work does not end with college enrollment.
Part of the problem is the growing relevance gap between the textbook-based curricula of traditional methods and assessments and the reality of employer’s expectations and students’ interests. CCC has sought to address this by building, course-by-course, a program of study for high school students that is:
1) as great or greater in its rigorous demands of students than the traditional model;
2) relevant, both to the demands of the workforce and to the modes of learning made available by digital technologies;
3) built on relationships aided by these technologies but primarily originated and sustained by partnerships in support of challenge based student learning.
What follows is an explanation of the design of this program and how it works to unite these three Rs. As you read, it will be helpful to refer to the tricolor graphic (downloadable as a PDF) that depicts the relationship of these three strands–online, face-to-face, and experiential–in the CCC context.
Each course in the CCC program is founded on a core curriculum (indicated by the yellow bar) that satisfies all state standards in the discipline. Students completing this curriculum participate in appropriate traditional standardized measures such as the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) and in school or district-based common assessments such as are often found in the sciences. The curriculum is developed and delivered across the state via the Moodle open-source learning management system, which is easily accessed through an Internet browser and requires no additional software installation. (Some course content requires a free flash plug-in). Course development is spearheaded by a lead curriculum developer who collaborates with select pilot teachers, faculty from higher education, and advisors from industry. Course materials are culled from freely available content on the Internet and assembled as links, and embedded objects (with copyright permission obtained). Learning activities such as forums, assignment submissions, blogs, journals, and other elements are created by the development team.
Each curriculum balances individual accountability and student specialization by dividing the year into an individual portion and a team-based portion. Every student must demonstrate individual proficiency in the discipline by completing each of three work products to a level of competence defined by the criteria in the rubric. The rubric for each of the work products is divided into five categories, each ranging in evaluation from 0 (incomplete or missing) to 3 (above proficient).
Each student must receive at least a 2 out of 3 on each of the 5 categories in order to fulfill the requirement for this product. If a student does not complete the work to the satisfaction of their teacher (following the rubric), the teacher works with the student to continue revising the work until it can be resubmitted for another assessment. This iterative resubmission process continues until the work receives the minimum 10 points (2 out of 3 on each of 5 categories). All students must complete this process for all three work products. Examples of the three required work products fall into the areas of
1) written work, such as a research paper, business plan, or white paper;
2) oral presentation of the written work, formatted as a short “elevator” pitch to an audience of their peers and/or the wider school community;
3) a piece of multimedia, such as a web site, computer game, PowerPoint presentation, film, or other.
This approach to individual student accountability establishes a benchmark for student achievement that is uncompromising in its standards but flexible in the manner in which students may complete the requirement. If you imagine that the traditional curriculum holds constant the amount of time that a student will have to learn a given subject (Johnny is in 10th grade; we’ll see how much biology he learns this year), this model inverts the paradigm. Rather than holding the time constant, the model holds the content constant. So what becomes a greater (although not absolute) certainty is that Johnny will learn a, b, and c aspects of biology; the question is how long it will take him to learn a-c aspects. This is not to stay that students will be expected only to learn a-c aspects of a possible a-p set of content, but that when a student advances past the core requirements, we can be more certain that they have actually learned these fundamentals, and through the assessments that they have completed, that they will retain them.[3]
Students are first eligible to complete these assessments at the end of the first semester. As these core requirements are completed, students are integrated progressively into a team-based approach in the second semester. The balancing act continues as they continue to learn traditional content, but increasingly assume responsibility for individualized roles in their team-based challenge. For example, a student who is studying IT R&D (“tech ed,” as it is often known), will complete in the individual portion of the year a computer game, a white paper, and a presentation. In the team portion, as the class forms its own game company, she will choose a role with a set of established departments within the company: in this case – marketing, game development, web site, or research. This role will become her primary responsibility in her company, but she will by nature of the challenge, take on additional roles as needed. Management responsibilities, for example, are shared by department across the company, as are the roles of presenter at quarterly events and the Expo (described further below).
How does she know which role best suits her interests and/or qualifications? The curriculum is structured so that every student is exposed to the core concepts in the first semester on an introductory level, then given the option to drill down into a sub-topic in greater detail to develop expertise in this role within a company department. After initial organizational and brainstorming units, the curriculum breaks into content-specific departments with required deliverables that contribute to the company’s solution to the long-term to the year-long challenge in the curriculum. This challenge frames the participation of all students as they try to solve a real-world problem with an innovative curriculum-based solution. [4]
Each year the CCC program chooses a theme. From this theme arise variations on a central challenge, with each course opting for its own twist. For the last two years the theme has been “going green” – providing an environmentally beneficial and sustainable solution to a recognized problem. One of the key characteristics of challenge-based learning is that the challenge offers students a real-world application for their classroom skills. Unlike the “applied” problems in a typical textbook (but very much like real-world problems), the problem in a challenge-based curriculum is “ill-defined” – if it is defined at all. One of the skills that students develop is the ability to define a problem before seeking a solution. Theme problems are by their real-world nature interdisciplinary, requiring students to integrate knowledge of science, business, technology, and more. The curriculum is built flexibly to adjust to new themes each year, but the methodology remains the same: research the topic; develop ideas; design a solution; present the solution.
Image used with permission from Tiltfactor.
The challenge-based curriculum provides a platform for the effective integration of learning by designing, an approach that is widely recognized in technology education, engineering, and the applied arts. The notion of creativity as an aid to learning and deep understanding has wide acceptance. As the physicist Richard Feynman once said: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Creativity is an analog to writing in the teaching of literacy. Approaches to teaching reading that do not place an equal emphasis on writing have been shown to be less effective than those that do. Similarly, creative exploration, design, development and presentation offer effective opportunities for learning. Mitch Resnick, professor in the MIT Media Labs and a pupil of Seymour Papert, father of the “constructionist” approach to learning, writes that “[r]esearch has shown that people learn best not when they are passively receiving information, but when they are actively engaged in exploring, experimenting, and expressing themselves… Design projects engage kids as active participants, giving them a greater sense of control and responsibility for the learning process.”[5] An example of a simple design process (for computer games, in this case) is illustrated above.
The curriculum is delivered in a blended mode across the state using the Moodle learning management system, which allows for password-protected access and facilitates communication amongst teachers, students, and course developers. A recent U.S. Department of Education study indicated that students in a blended learning environment performed better than students who learn the same material in a traditional classroom setting alone.[6] Likewise, IBM found that learners using a blended learning approach achieved retention and performance superior to a traditional face-to-face or stand-alone online model.[7] The Carnegie Corporation of New York Commission on Mathematics and Science Education’s 2009 report The Opportunity Equation[8] cites support for innovations such as blended learning with the potential to accelerate learning, and make learning richer, more motivating, and more connected to the real world. The combination of 24/7 ubiquitous access, robust Internet-enabled resources, and effective support for both teacher and student learning communities enables CCC to teach, document, and disseminate evidence of key 21st century skills.
The yearlong work of the CCC students culminates in the Connecticut Student Innovation Expo[9], but this is not the first time that the students give a public presentation of their work. The Expo is the final event in a series of experiential learning opportunities that take place throughout the year, offering opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding through performance. Each course convenes two meetings in the fall and two more in the spring, leading up to the Expo in early May. Each event is held on a college campus or at a professional conference center such as that of IBM, a long time CCC partner. The purpose of the setting is to introduce students to university and corporate environment while they are still evaluating their academic interests, avocations, and prospects post-high school. At these on-site meetings, CCC brings together as many as 180 students from up to ten high schools from around the state and run curricular activities that provide a meaningful context for their social and professional interactions with peers and invited mentors. Each meeting follows a similar agenda designed to introduce a topic of general relevance to the curriculum and yearlong challenge. This is followed by breakout time into working groups moderated by teachers and invited mentors, who provide some personal experience on a topic related to the student work and offer feedback on student ideas. Depending on which of the four quarterly meetings it is, the working group either develops work to present or each department brings with it a deliverable that is displayed for judging by mentors, teachers, and students during lunch. The event closes with student presentations to the full audience and competitive judging on established criteria. Small awards are issued in recognition of strong work, in the form of gift certificates to provide wining teams with additional resources to further their project development for the Expo.
These types of performance-based assessments allow students an opportunity that they do not often receive in their traditional school environments but do find very familiar in an extracurricular context: gaming. As Gee has pointed out[10], good video games are built on the idea that players can demonstrate competence through performance, rather than being asked at the end of a unit to show what they have learned. Each of these experiential learning activities is, in a very significant way, a process of performance and rehearsal for the next experiential learning activity (up to and including the “final” event, the Expo.) In this way, the CCC program attempts to bridge a gap that employers have long observed in their new hires: the difference between what one knows and what one knows how to do. This is the reason that companies looking to hire Connecticut’s engineering graduates often do not find the applicants they seek. The company wants to hire the recent graduate with eight years of experience, but the young professional has four years (or fewer) of actual on-the-job engineering. The employer cannot afford to hire and teach to the extent it perceives it will have to, so the position is offered to someone else–or worse, goes unfilled or overseas. Evaluation data support a claim that the CCC blended model and participation in the Expo provide students with what Harvard educator David Perkins calls a “threshold experience”–an exposure to new content and skills in a way that cements a life-long interest in STEM disciplines.[11]
The overarching concept of these experiential learning opportunities is to offer students the chance to think and act as a professional in the field, cognitively apprenticing themselves to the process and knowledge that is required in this profession. Our evaluation data has indicated that students appreciate this opportunity–which they do not consistently find elsewhere in their educational experience–and that it does have a significant and lasting impact on their plans for careers and future study. Following the Expo, at which students are judged individually and in teams by invited mentors and professionals, the CCC program awards a select number of stipended summer internships in science laboratories, technology companies, and film production studios in Connecticut. Summer externships are also provided to participating teachers, in furtherance of the goal of closing the K-12 relevance gap in understanding of and exposure to the social and cognitive demands of the 21st century workplace.
[2] Understanding High School Graduation Rates in Connecticut, The Alliance for Excellent Education: www.all4ed.org/files/Connecticut_wc.pdf
[3] For a practical example of this approach at the school level, see the Metro Early College High School in Columbus, Ohio: http://www.themetroschool.org/
[4] For more information on challenge-based learning, see the Apple Learning Interchange: http://ali.apple.com/cbl/
[5] For more on this approach in the context of MIT’s Scratch programming language, see http://info.scratch.mit.edu/sites/infoscratch.media.mit.edu/docs/learning-by-designing.pdf
[6] U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies”, Washington D.C., 2009
[7] IBM Learning Solutions, “On demand learning: blended learning for today’s evolving workforce”, IBM Corporation 2005.
[8] Carnegie Corporation of New York, “The Opportunity Equation, Transforming Mathematics and Science Education for the Global Economy”, by Carnegie Corporation of New York and Institute for Advanced Study, 2009.
[9] See http://ctxpo.org
[10] See What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2007).
[11] Perkins, David N. “Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education”, Jossey-Bass Publisher, San Francisco CA, December 2008.
A new report (PDF) from the Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offers findings from a survey of 40,000 K-12 public school teachers. I’ve pasted the the five key findings below with room for some of my commentary.
1. Establish Clear Standards, Common Across States — Teachers see the role standards can play in preparing students for their future, but want clearer standards and core standards that are the same across all states. Nationwide, 74% of teachers say that clearer standards would make a strong or very strong impact on student achievement, with only 4% saying they would have no impact at all. 60% of teachers say that common standards would have a strong or very strong impact on student achievement, with only 10% saying that they would have no impact at all.
There’s so much to be said about standards. Here’s an interesting supplemental quote from the report that helps to shed some light on this perspective:
- Proponents of clearer, common and higher standards are more likely than are Non-proponents to state that up-to-date information-based technology
that is well integrated into the classroom has a strong/very strong impact on improving student academic achievement (90% vs. 55%).- Proponents of clearer, common and higher standards are more likely than are Non-proponents to use student performance data very often to adjust
their teaching.
How does one account for the correlation between the core standards proponents and the 1) integrated IT proponents; and 2) those who adjust their teaching to student performance? It could be that many of those who adjust their performance routinely in response to student achievement would really appreciate having a clearer sense of the benchmarks that their students should be achieving. And that these same teachers use – and would benefit from more use of – technology in these assessments and standards alignment. I ask myself – is there anything about this that doesn’t make sense, that I wouldn’t agree with, that I would put at a lesser priority than something else? It’s hard to see how. Doesn’t every child deserve a teacher who has a clear sense of priorities (that are not muddled with political posturing that leads to laundry lists of what should be taught), a sense of purpose that is shared amongst colleagues in the building, city, state, and nation? And wouldn’t you want that teacher to be responsive to the student’s performance (this presumes that they have a deep and abiding interest in measuring their performance and have an ever-increasing set of tools to address deficits and seize opportunities)?
2. Use Multiple Measures to Evaluate Student Performance — From ongoing assessments throughout the year to student participation in individual classes, teachers are clear that these day-to-day assessments are a more reliable way to measure student performance than one-shot standardized tests. Ninety-two percent of teachers say ongoing in-classroom assessment is either very important or absolutely essential in measuring student performance, while only 27% say the same of state-required standardized tests.
Bingo. We need more performance-based assessments that allow students to demonstrate what they know as they are learning, rather than solely at the end of a unit or semester. Good teaching is an ever-evolving process of re-examination and revision, adjustment, modification and reassessment. But teachers need to be highly attuned to their students’ performance. And what happens at the end of most curriculum units? Students are told to move on. If anything that they are learning is so important, why should we settle for 70%? And if a student is able to reach 100% two weeks before the rest of the class, why shouldn’t they have the opportunity to go further?
3. Innovate to Reach Today’s Students — To keep today’s students engaged in learning, teachers recognize that it is essential for instruction to be tailored to individual students’ skills and interests. More than 90% of teachers say that differentiated assignments are absolutely essential for improving student achievement and engaging students in learning. Also, showing a clear understanding of the world students inhabit outside of school, 81% of teachers say that up-to-date information-based technology that is well integrated into the classroom is absolutely essential or very important in impacting student achievement.
So here’s the innovation piece – the relevance gap and the need for individualization. Without the aid of technology, this kind of work is possible, but exhausting and not sustainable. The vision for this kind of technology integration needs to enable the teacher to select a learning sequence that is customized to the individual student, satisfies the core requirements of a standard curriculum, allows them to repeat or accelerate their learning, is available 24/7, BUT the vision cannot be of a student sitting in front of a computer all day long. This fails the relevance test. You want to have a mix of individual learning sequences that are tailored to student needs and interests, but a portion of the class time that is devoted to the thoughtful application of this knowledge, the development of real-world skills in an interpersonal context. This is the challenge-based portion. There’s no way that this can happen as long as the teacher is at the front of the room lecturing. As I often remind myself, most lectures to high school students (and too often to college students, as well) are a series of answers to questions that the students never asked. There’s no question that the teacher is learning more about the content (and usually interesting themselves to no end), but there’s significant doubt as to the extent of student learning in this mode.
4. Accurately Measure Teacher Performance and Provide Non-Monetary Rewards — Teachers are skeptical of current measures of teacher performance, with only 22% indicating that principal observation is a very accurate measure. At the same time, more than half of teachers indicate that student academic growth (60%) and student engagement (55%) are very accurate measures of teacher performance—much more so than teacher tenure, which a significant number of teachers said is not at all accurate. When asked about teacher retention, nearly all teachers say that non-monetary rewards like supportive leadership and collaborative working environments are the most important factors to retaining good teachers. Fewer than half of teachers say higher salaries are absolutely essential for retaining good teachers and only 8% say pay for performance is absolutely essential.
I haven’t read the details of the report, but I would be curious to know if the percentage of teachers who are interested in having their performance measured by student academic growth and engagement are the same who would advocate for increased integration of IT. In order to measure growth with any kind of accuracy in attribution, it’s necessary to get frequent measures of progress and compare these consistently over time to the alternatives (other teachers, other methods). Very hard to do as a matter of routine if it’s all paper and pen. How many teachers take a baseline measure of where their students begin at the start of the year? How many weeks into the school year is the first student assessment? As a blind guess I would say 4 weeks.
5. Bridge School and Home to Raise Student Achievement — Teachers know what is necessary to build a sustainable culture of achievement in their schools: the right mix of academic instruction, family support and student engagement. Eight in 10 high school teachers (81%) attend after-school and weekend events of their students, and more than half (51%) of elementary school teachers are willing to have parent-teacher conferences at students’ homes. This report breaks down the above data and much more, revealing the diverse opinions of America’s teachers. Teachers’ strong but nuanced views on education are called out, particularly across teacher characteristics in two key dimensions: grade level taught and the length of time they have been teaching. Similarly, state-level data reflecting teachers’ views on education policy and practice are discussed where interesting differences were found. The data tables in the appendix of the report further segment the findings by state and grade level. The quotes throughout reflect the wide range of views of the tens of thousands of teachers who participated in the survey and focus groups.
To borrow another Gates Foundation term: relationships. Ultimately every teacher is teaching a student first, the specific content area second.
This was the title of an article I wrote that was recently published in eLearn magazine (subtitled, “Making student achievement public in the digital age?”). Justifiably, I suppose, the editors decided to title it “21st Century Skills” – a catchier and more timely name. Fair enough.
Here’s the article.
I’m working on a second, related piece about the 3 Rs, a phrase already coined by the Gates Foundation and Oprah, who named them Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships. My take on these three is to keep the words but alter their meaning slightly in light of our work in the Connecticut Career Choices program. Rigor maps to (online) curricula, relevance maps to experiential learning and related “threshold experiences,” and relationships describes the multiplicity of connections amongst teachers, students, mentors, parents, administrators – each with each and each with the other.
But back to the article on student work. One point that I make in this piece is similar to a point I was trying to make way back when I was working on the videopaper project – that the concept is global but the library is local. I saw the videopaper tool as a way to create a local collection of highly relevant examples of teaching practice that could be shared within a single building. Part of what I was aiming for was to disarm the initial reaction by teachers (a natural reaction and one that I have myself, to be clear) of saying – when offered an example from another teacher’s classroom of how successful they are in their methods with their students – that this particular example is idiosyncratic and relevant only to that teacher. Part of what you can get at through student work is the generalizability of teacher practice, since students are the common currency of the teacher’s shared economy. By and large, it’s more or less true that your students are just as likely to be my students (provided that we teach student in roughly the same demographic and socioeconomic status – which, if we share a building, we do). If we can train the camera on the students, just as we train our figurative eyes on their student work when we make that the subject of our discussions, then we have a common ground on which to base our preference of certain practices over others. If we focus first on the outcomes and then on the methods that achieve these outcomes, we may be able come to a shared understanding more quickly. But more on that to come…
A friend shared with me this article about the “Economy of Attention” after we had been talking with another friend about his no-laptop policy in his lectures. I was initially pretty surprised that he would ban laptops from his lectures, thinking of all the meaningful work that can go on with open internet access during a lecture – students can IM each other about the professor’s arguments, question each other about their own interpretations, google facts for themselves, etc. But as we got to talking he shared that in reality he felt that not many of his students actually put the internet to such good use, and that he found it enormously distracting to try to lecture to a students who never made eye contact. I know that I would never survive a lecture class without my laptop at this point, as my handwriting is so poor and slow compared to my facility with a word processor and the ability it gives me to create outlines on the fly, edit and cut/paste text as I reorganize it to fit my thoughts. But I began to see his point.
Last week I spent a couple of hours working with students from all over CT whom I’d only just met, instructing them on how to create e-business web sites using wordpress. By design I had them working at small tables, focused on their laptops with my voice and presentations somewhat in the background. Granted this is not a university lecture atmosphere, and I would not presume that what I was explaining was half as complicated as my friend’s lectures. As long as I could get student attention when I needed it for a minute or two – and I think I could – I wasn’t disappointed to have them all working away while I was talking. But I was presuming (as were they) that they had the ability to listen to me and take from my words the information that they needed while they remained largely focused on the task in front of them. Is this kind of parallel processing actually possible, I wondered?
So my other friend, who’d been a part of the conversation this weekend, sent along this article. Here are a few choice passages:
the ability to shape people’s attention is now a more valuable commodity than the things around which our attention is presumably focused.
Whoa. So the ability to hold attention is a commodity in itself. I always wondered about this when I was working in the military. The Navy took the solitaire and other games off our Windows machines, ostensibly so that we would not waste the government’s money not doing the government’s work. But I know that if I didn’t want to do work, I would simply swivel my chair and stair out the window. The Navy wasn’t prepared to take away my window, I don’t think. So what was accomplished by taking away the games? What is accomplished in taking away the laptop? Does it raise the ADHD threshold, removing the easiest temptation to doodle and dawdle on the keyboard?
The article goes on to describe the technologies that the group has created in order to channel and focus the listener towards more active involvement in the lecture/discussion.
We assembled a suite of digital backchannels — including chatrooms, web links, virtual environments, and archives, and then directed the audience toward their use, thus altering the traditional economy of attention toward a more decentered experience where the interactions among audience members were integrated into the situation’s overall meaning. When backchannels are successfully implemented, the parameters of the lecturer’s work must, in turn, expand to take account of the user practices that are part of the overall composition of the event. Therefore, the periphery of the situation is centralized for the individual user, transforming what is typically referred to as backchannels into channels of parallel discourse that amplify audience participation.
Before I go any further I should pause to note that this is not my element and I may easily be misinterpreting the intent or context of the article. It seems to me that the technology being deployed here is a means by which to channel the kinds of distracted thoughts one (or least I) have when listening to a lecture or panel discussion. I have lots of reactions and unexpressed thoughts and responses that usually just pass by the way. But what if I could respond in real time to the presentation and pose questions and responses for discussion by the presenters? I wonder how distracting this would be, to be discussing a topic and constantly have new questions and comments flashing over head. It would certainly seem to destabilize my authority as a presenter. I would really be in direct competition with my own audience for the attention of my audience. A kind of call-in show where the calls are ongoing and visible throughout.
Not sure how I feel about this. Perhaps I’m feeling old fashioned. I’m not sure that the audience – who may or may not have thought long and hard about the topic at hand (and presuming that the presenter(s) have) deserves equal time. Perhaps it would make sense to have 30 min of presentation and 30 min of “open back channel” or some equivalent. I’d like to think that there is still room for authority and once earned it can be respected.
We use http://www.polleverywhere.com/ at student meetings. But this feedback is quite a bit more controlled and orchestrated…
This article in the January/February issue of The Atlantic has really got me thinking. The article reports findings from a study of Teach For America teachers. A brief collection of highlights from the article:
This is not to say that being reflective is not a great aid to improving one’s teaching; it is. But using reflectiveness – the ability to learn from experience and apply that learning to future improvement (my definition, but hardly an original one) – as a component of the hiring process was not effective. The article doesn’t really get into why self-awareness is not enough, but I would venture (as someone who has learned this over time) is that you can’t really self-reflect your way out of a paper bag, so to speak. Self-reflection without external perspective, without further action and persistent re-examination of methods and strategies, looks like a cat chasing its tail. Thinking is not enough, in other words.
This makes sense on an intuitive level. Teaching is not a sprint, but a marathon. On any given day there are a million different reasons why one might not succeed, a million reasons why you might decide to give up. But if you can handle living with a certain amount of failure on a regular basis, you can begin to succeed in a significant way.
This article quotes an earlier article by Clay Risen, in which Rhee says: “As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles,” she told me. “You can’t say, ‘My students didn’t get any breakfast today,’ or ‘No one put them to bed last night,’ or ‘Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.’”
That seems to me to be the picture of perseverance. But it takes some time and mentoring to gain a sense of perspective: What is beyond/within my control? How can I manage my expectations so as not to live in the future/past, but have preferences so that I live in the present, dealing effectively with the reality of my classroom.
This was interesting because it’s not something that had ever occurred to me. But it does make sense. In part because teaching is leading, and teachers must demonstrate leadership. And – most importantly – people simply do not follow a leader who is unhappy, or worse, who COMPLAINS. If you think back to some of the least effective teachers you know, some of the least inspirational, least likely to motivate and engage students, I would bet you’d name a lot of complainers. People who are satisfied (not self-satisfied, but simply happy doing what they do) are much easier to follow, to spend time with.
I flag this statement not so much for the statement about knowledge mattering (of course it does), but for the last sentence: a master’s degree has no impact on classroom effectiveness. Could you imagine a finding that a master’s degree in engineering had no impact on the effectiveness of an engineer? A master’s in business administration had no impact on the effectiveness of a business administrator/manager? The discussion of this statement is probably best saved for another time.
But this article did leave me with some important insights on teacher evaluation in the hiring process. And the linked article gave me a great deal of respect (on top of what I already had) for Michelle Rhee – as a teacher and as a leader in school reform. Whether or not you agree with the organization in its aims and methods, Teach For America continues to drive thinking in education.
A few striking numbers from the ACT Profile Report – Connecticut’s Graduating Class 2009
- only 37% of 9,240 CT students graduating in 2009 were deemed “college ready” by their performance on the ACT.
- only 9% of African American CT students in the class of 2009. Only 21% of Hispanic students.
Here are the numbers for MATHEMATICS:
25% of African American/Black students
44% American Indian/ Alaska Native
65% of Caucasian American/White students
42% of Hispanic students
80% of Asian American/Pacific Islander
This is appalling.
Now imagine that of the 37% of seniors who are college ready, slightly more than 60% will graduate from a four-year college within six years of matriculating. What’s 3/5 of 37? Roughly 22%. That’s a little better than 1 in 5 graduating seniors actually completing their college degree within six years. This is according to paper by the American Enterprise Institute, “Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don’t)”
There are clearly a multitude of factors contributing to this dismal condition, and there is no silver bullet to address all of them at once. But the numbers are pretty shocking. It’s not hard to see why remediation rates are so high in four-year and community colleges, and why the Gates Foundation has recognized this need in some of its latest funding efforts (in CT and across the country).
My New Year’s resolution is to keep better track of information – that is now or may in future be of interest – by actively processing it. I’m going to use this blog space as a tool to collect, sort, annotate, and reflect on news items that catch my attention. I hope that this processing will help me to make better use of the vast amount of information that I receive on a daily and weekly basis.
With that in mind…
This post by Tom Vander Ark got my creative juices flowing as it named a few of the elements of the schools of the future. Imagine if students could work at their own pace to achieve proficiency in core subject areas while they also worked together in highly relevant, real-world, project-based tasks that paired them with mentors from the working world who were motivated to help bridge the gap between classroom and applied learning environments.
How many times in my own learning experience did a teacher insist that I get 100 (or even 70) on a test/essay before I could move on? Not many. If what we were studying was so important (as we were generally told that it was), why was it acceptable for us to move on without fully understanding the material? It wasn’t because the teacher didn’t care; it was because – within the design of the educational environment - they really couldn’t do anything about it. It always seemed that the constant was the amount of time that we had to spend on a given subject and the variable was how much we would learn. And this was at a progressive independent school in New York.
One school that I was lucky enough to visit recently, in Columbus,OH: http://www.themetroschool.org/, does invert the traditional paradigm. The question is not how much you will learn, but how long it will take you. If you can clear your core requirements then you are free to pursue higher level, more independent work. If a subject area is that important, if a particular topic is crucial for student understanding, then educators and educational environments need to be structured to insist appropriately that students learn before moving on. And if they do not demonstrate proficiency, then students should receive additional support (and time, resources, etc.) until they do succeed.
My design for courses in the The Connecticut Career Choices (CCC) Program follows this approach, where individual students must complete 3 products of their own during the first (fall) semester before joining their team in full in the second (spring) semester. Until they have completed each of these 3 products to the satisfaction of their teacher (using CCC rubrics and guidelines), the teacher’s role is to continue to instruct, remediate, and revise submitted assignments. Students in this situation are still participating in group activities, but are ultimately responsible first and foremost for their individual work, with the group work a lesser priority. In this way we can offer greater assurance to the community colleges (with whom we are arranging articulated credit) that the individual students have both demonstrated proficiency themselves, and also gained the “soft skills” that are best taught in team-based, project-based challenge environments.
The promise of individualized, web-based instruction has also to be tempered with the need to maintain and develop interpersonal, applied skills – and much of this work will also increase the students’ awareness of the relevance of what they are learning. As we might guess, the solution is not in putting students online exclusively, but in finding a blended solution that expresses the rigor and relevance of 21st century education without compromising the value of strong relationships.