Cutting Edge Research

At last night's meeting, the Board approved two potentially exciting research proposals.

The first involves a collaboration between an assistant professor of Education at Penn State and the creative writing class in State College's (High School) Delta program. What makes the proposal interesting is that it will study a key component of "21st-century" skills: the ability to communicate in different styles to different audiences, depending on the purpose. As Dr. Whitney noted, there is a big difference between the writing skills required for a Biology class assignment, and what is involved in persuasive writing.

Traditionally, that difference has not been given enough attention, nor is it assessed by typical standardized tests.

"A key component of (writing) competence is the ability to write in different genres, discerning the particular demands of a rhetorical situation ... to produce texts appropriate to that situation and its audience.  However, pedagogy and assessment efforts at the secondary level currently focus almost exclusively on writing .. in the single genre of the expository essay."

The result is that students get little experience deciding which genre to use, a fact that has been substantiated in several casual conversations I've had with university writing instructors.
...

The second proposal will study the impact of a "service-learning" project which will be designed and implemented by the students of Park Forest Elementary School. This study is notable in several respects, beginning with the idea that you can begin to develop citizenship skills in elementary age students. Particularly exciting is the idea that every student has the potential for leadership, and that those skills can be developed and nurtured.

(Traditionally, a few students will demonstrate leadership capacity -  and those students are the ones who are encouraged to take on official leadership roles. It becomes self-fulfilling.)

Several questions the study hopes to answer:

• As a result of the project, do the students feel more empowered to make their surroundings a better place?
• Does the project impact the students' sense of belonging to their school community?
• Do the students learn new skills, (for example: the ability to explain your ideas in public) and gain a greater sense of confidence?

Their school climate assessment tool is very sophisticated; I'm looking forward to the results.

Recommended Reading

Without a lot of added comment from me, here are a couple recent articles I found interesting.

This article from Education Week provides a number of examples of how students can begin to take ownership and responsibility in their schools, learning some citizenship skills in the process.

Anything a Child Can Do, a Teacher Shouldn't, by Joan Goodman.

As part of their excellent series, Bridging Differences, another article from Education Week talks about the dangers of relying too heavily on a single assessment tool.

The NCLB Paradox Enters the Twilight Zone

A better model of accountability

The last of my reports from the NSBA conferernce:

At his session on "Change and Stability" Douglas Reeves discussed the challenges of systemic change in large, complex organizations, as well as the implications of some recent research.

Reeves suggested that any organization considering a significant change should first complete an "initiative audit". His "Rule of 6" refers to "Initiative Fatigue" and the natural limit to the number of new initiatives that an organization can successfully manage at any one time. He stressed the importance of making clear to all stakeholders, at the outset, those things that will not change.

Reeves defines "teacher leadership" not by positions or titles, but as "the act of influencing the classroom practices of professional educators." His 2008 research indicated that the single greatest influence on professional practice is “advice from colleagues”, which far outweighs the impact of graduate courses or professional journal articles.

This suggests that one key to successful change is to provide opportunities for teachers to observe models of best practice, as demonstrated by these “teacher leaders”.  A number of schools accomplish this by digitally capturing examples of mini-lessons and effective teacher collaborations which are then posted on the web or shared via DVD. It turns out, that the most confident teachers are generally willing to share their mistakes as well as their successes  He also discussed the importance of creating a safe environment for teachers to "critically review and rehearse successful practices."

He encouraged schools to develop a culture of "hypotheses testing". Rather than beginning from an assumption of "this will never work" or "teachers will never buy in to it", Reeves argues for a culture of curiosity and accountability: let's test promising ideas and see if they actually work. He says that far too often, educators live in the culture of the untested hypothesis - such as: "if students performed poorly on a test, we need to drill them harder" – without subjecting the hypothesis to examination. 

Reeves suggested that not only should we have broader, more meaningful measures of student competency, we should also measure the "antecedents of learning"; that is, we should monitor the factors that we know contribute to a positive educational environment. (This is consistent with current work being done in the development of national school climate standards.) Said another way, we should be monitoring and measuring what the adults in the school community are doing, as well as the students.

A legitimate criticism of the accountability movement is that it defines accountability far too narrowly. If the only measures by which schools are held accountable are standardized 11th-grade math and reading scores, then that's where the instructional focus will tend to be.

A couple of his research results:

• The number of extracurricular activities in which a student is involved (up to four, where the impact begins to level off) is predictive of a student’s GPA.
• the amount of non-fiction writing done by students is predictive of achievement in all subject areas.

"Digital Cheating"

A recent national survey on "high-tech cheating" in school has produced some predictable hand-wringing on the part of education adults. The concern is not only about the numbers of students who have admitted to using their cell phone to cheat on an exam (about 35%), but the even higher number (about 50%) who think it's ok to do so.

For the benefit of the adults in the room, here are a few examples of what students have admitted to: storing information to look at during an exam (26%); warning their friends about a pop quiz (48%); downloading a paper from the internet to turn in (21%); and using the internet to find a teacher's manual that has problem solutions (32%).

To me, this is not only an issue of what it means to "cheat", it raises the question: what is the proper role of assessment in education?  Today, the "real test of competency is not in a regurgitation of data; it is in applying that data to real world problems in order to create new knowledge."

What is the value in measuring whether students are able to memorize a piece of information that they could look up on the internet in a matter of seconds?

Already, students - generally on their own initiative - are using technology to find alternate explanations of material they didn't understand in class.  They would also like the opportunity to record class lectures to listen to later - but the typical school policy prevents access to technology during the school day that students have at any other time. (Surprisingly, only 9% of teachers in the survey thought that cell phones were a distraction that should be banned from the classroom.)

The article concluded by calling for a national discussion on the concept of "digital ethics."  I hope the adults don't turn it into a national "lecture", instead - our students may have something to teach us about the nature of learning in the digital age.

Disrupting class, epilogue

Christensen made several other observations worth noting:

Future (and current!) teachers will need to know how to work with different types of learners; this should be a key component of their professional training. Continuing to train teachers to perform in a world of teacher-led content delivery - being taught to the dominant style of learner … trains teachers for the past.

Current educational research rarely produces results that are actionable; that is, “under this set of circumstances, these actions will produce the best results”. He encourages graduate students to focus their research on discovering the styles of teaching that work best with different types of learners.

And finally: Recent research indicates that nearly all the variation in the cognitive ability of students entering kindergarten can be explained by the amount of “extra talking” that parents did with their children in the first three years of life. (“Extra talking” is conversation beyond “Don’t touch that!”.) Think of the potential impact on society if every high school student learned that one additional piece of information.

He concludes that the billions of dollars that we’re investing in early childhood education may be misplaced. Instead, the author suggests that high school might be the best place to “teach the methods of early cognitive development to tomorrow’s parents.” (Let’s be honest: the next generation isn’t learning “parenting skills” anywhere else.)

Disrupting Class, chapter 3

According to Christensen, if we are to realize the potential of digital technology to transform education, it needs to fill a need that’s not currently being met through traditional means. A recent NY Times article offers an intriguing possibility.

Chinese educational leaders have begun to recognize that in order to be globally competitive, tens of millions of their students will need to become proficient in English. They’ve also discovered what any American with two years of Spanish instruction already knows: passing a high school (or college) foreign language exam doesn’t mean that you have the skills to order a hamburger at McDonald’s. “Throughout the world people experience the same problem… (they) study languages, but cannot communicate.” 

China doesn’t have the resources that would be needed to do this with traditional methods - so they developed a virtual game, initially targeted for 7-12 year-olds. After choosing an ‘avatar’, students pick a scene (such as a supermarket) in which their avatar is confronted with say, the challenge of buying a piece of fruit - in English. They advance through levels of difficulty just as you would in any virtual quest. If they get stuck, students can consult “the wizard’s library” for additional instruction.

For years we have known that our students would like to begin foreign language instruction in the elementary grades; we’re also aware of the cognitive advantages of having them start early. But within the current system, the cost is prohibitive: How many teachers would we have to hire? Where would we find them? How would we decide which languages to teach? Where would it fit in the schedule?

This is a classic opportunity for a “disruptive innovation.” Here are a couple of others.

Faced with incomprehensible lectures, college students are turning to U-tube to find subject matter explained in a way that is more consistent with their preferred style of learning

And students in Baltimore County are learning how the environment surrounding Mount St. Helens has evolved since the volcano’s 1980 eruption, using virtual technology developed at Johns Hopkins. See: Virtual 3-D lab aims to stimulate learning.

Disrupting Class, chapter 2

People have been trying to reform the Educational System for over a generation. Christensen cheerfully suggests that these efforts are largely doomed due to the interdependence of the system's parts.

For example, suppose someone developed an innovative way to teach 6th-grade language arts. Even if everyone thought this was a swell idea, what would it take to implement it?  You would need to coordinate the curriculum with what precedes it (fifth grade) and with what follows (seventh grade and beyond) - and note that the fifth grade teachers are probably in different buildings, reporting to different administrators. If the innovation is cross-curricular (such as project-based learning) the curriculum and training for entire departments would have to be modified. Eventually, teaching colleges would have to change their curriculum, and how all this fits in with state and federal mandates and content-area "standards" is almost too complex to imagine.  Did I mention teacher contracts?

By contrast, the "system" of the electric lamp is completely independent. If you want to introduce a new technology (such as the CFL light bulb) your only requirement is that you design something that can be screwed into a lamp socket.  Similarly, you can pretty much do anything you want with the lamp, as long as it interfaces with (plugs in to) a 110V electrical socket. (By the way, "Windows" is another example of an interdependent system; change one line of code and you pretty much have to redesign the entire operating system.)

In order to "change the system", therefore, you need what Christensen calls a "disruptive innovation". He used the transistor to explain the concept.

Within a relatively few years, the transistor replaced vacuum tubes as the dominant technology in the production of radios, TVs, etc. But it would not have succeeded if it had challenged vacuum technology head-on. Transistors were too expensive and insufficiently powerful to be used in the large table-top radios that were then commonplace - but they were perfectly suited for small portable radios, which did not then exist. Even though the sound quality wasn't particularly good, for teenagers looking for a way to listen to the World Series in chemistry class - or to music out of earshot of their parents - this new technology was better than nothing. Having a market in which to develop without “competition”, transistor technology matured, became less expensive and eventually replaced vacuum tubes altogether.

So what’s the disruptive innovation that will transform education?

For 25 years we have been proclaiming the computer to be the Next Big Breakthrough in education, but it hasn’t materialized. In too many classrooms, computers sit in a row, underused, because – literally - nobody knows what to do with them! The reason: too often the computer has been viewed, not as an innovation, but as an ad-on, another way to do what we’re already doing.

(State College has avoided the worst of this by gradually and systematically “rolling out” computer technology, (one grade level at a time at the elementary level). This has allowed the innovators and early-adopters to discover what could be done. As they share with their colleagues what they’ve learned, the adoption of the technology is less intimidating for those who follow.)

Book Report: “Disrupting Class”

I spent part of a week at the beach reading “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns” by Clayton Christensen. Here’s a summary in three parts.

The great advantage of the one-room schoolhouse that was the dominant educational model of 19th-century America was that every student received what we would now call "individualized instruction."  This was a necessary consequence of teaching a room of students of vastly differing ages and abilities. What followed, however - the standardized, factory-model that became prevalent in the last century - was not only a response to increased urbanization, it was seen as a desirable improvement: factories were proving to be an effective and efficient engine of economic prosperity. Why wouldn't this work for education?

But over the last forty years, two things happened. First, it became clear that having a relatively small percentage of our students educated to their full potential is no longer sufficient. (Until then, it was by design that only the elite received an education beyond high school; for example, we educated engineers who could design and manage factories in which the less educated could be successfully employed.)

The second was a growing recognition - among both educators and later, neuroscientists - that there is no single measure of intelligence; rather, people have (as first described by Howard Gardner) "multiple intelligences", or aptitudes. (The list varies, but it goes roughly like this: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Most people rate highly in only two or three areas.) We also discovered that students learn in different ways, often in alignment with their personal areas of strength. (For example, students who are high in spatial intelligence tend to learn best when they can "visualize" the concept being taught.)

This has interesting implications for math instruction, to give one example. Not only are students who do well in math typically high in "logical-mathematical" intelligence, they tend to be taught – particularly in high school and beyond - by teachers of similar aptitude. Overwhelmingly, those who go on to become math professors come from the same pool of students. In turn, they teach the next generation of math teachers using the same methods – and the cycle continues. As Christensen put it, "members of intellectual cliques are often unaware of the extent to which their shared patterns of thinking exclude those with strengths in other kinds of intelligences."

One of the ironies of No Child Left Behind is that its emphasis on standardization almost guarantees that some children will be left behind. The standardized testing that is at the heart of NCLB favors students with linguistic and mathematical intelligence, at the exclusion of others.

 (The cycle breaks down, notably, when the next generation of math teachers are taught by education professors who understand the importance of different learning styles. That’s why university education and math faculties tend to see this issue differently.)

This presents educators with an big challenge: how do you educate every student if every student can’t be taught the same way? (To do this within our current system is very expensive: on average, a special education student with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) costs about twice as much to educate as a “regular” ed student.) However, it should be noted that some success has been achieved at the elementary level, when several adults are available to assist students at multiple learning stations.

While our students would clearly benefit from a customized, “student-centric” education, how do we get from here (standardization) to there (mass customization)?