The first Student Inquiry conference

On Thursday I was invited to attend the first ever State College PDS student inquiry conference, which was held at various elementary schools around the District. It is conceptually similar to the annual PDS intern conference, except that it is the students who are presenting the results of their research, based on their personal wonderings.

Here are a few of the ‘wonderings’ of Houserville’s fourth-graders:

·        Why do some people believe in mythical beings such as Spiderman?

·        Why do marshmallows swell up when they are heated?

·        How do we know which religion is true?

·        What happens when you breed an aggressive dog with a docile one? Why?

·        What does space sound like?

·        Why do we exist?

In some cases pursuing the answers to those questions will bring these students a deep understanding of the very concepts that we are trying to ‘teach’ them. Some of these questions could well fuel life-long passions.

A recent study noted that the number of questions that children ask peaks at about age three, and declines steadily from there. One of our PDS alums wondered why that might be, and asked her students. A couple of their responses:

·        If I ask too many questions, I’m afraid I will look dumb.

·        I’m too busy to ask questions.

It’s hard to imagine that there’s not a relationship between this and another recent study that measured ‘student engagement’ and found that it peaked in kindergarten and went steadily downhill from there. To state the obvious, that can’t be acceptable.

Other studies have discovered that emotion, far from being a distraction, is an essential component of human learning. (It has to mean something.) Yet another recent study has shown that we’re far more likely to remember something that we’ve learned if we think we’re going to need it in the future.

In the words of one 2^nd-grader, “if you don’t care about it, why would you do it?”

What if a portion of school time was set aside to allow students to pursue the questions that are most important to them? (Think the Google model.) Not just the ‘gifted’ student, but every student.  What would that do to student engagement?

At Easterly Parkway we heard from a class of second-graders whose wonderings lead to research, which lead to proposed actions. One of those actions was a well-written letter to the school board, suggesting that we install solar panels in our schools. As the students explained their research, some of the words that I heard used correctly were anecdotal, paraphrasing and life-experience. I am not making this up.

At the end of the day the teachers shared what they had observed over the course of the day: students brainstorming ways to change the world; students consistently ‘on task’; a sense of community – students asking questions of and supporting one another; students working on things they believe will impact others; the experiential scientific process.

Some of the things they found most inspiring: teachers taking risks, empowered students, conversations with colleagues, student-driven learning.

One of the teachers’ wonderings: How does the Inquiry process connect to what ‘has’ to be taught?  My answer: in every way imaginable.

These educators are building something powerful that could have an impact far beyond the boundaries of the State College Area School District. 

Thoughts on HB 805, the teacher furlough 'reform' bill

According to the reporting of Penn Live, Republicans in the state legislature are threatening to hold hostage next year’s state budget - due this June 30^th -  due to the Governor’s veto of House Bill 805, the so-called teacher furlough reform bill.  As if the budget doesn’t have enough problems already!

While I support giving school boards the option of furloughing professional staff for economic reasons, and while this legislation was marketed to appear reasonable (who doesn’t want to get rid of bad teachers?) this would have been terrible education policy and a disservice to students.

The key problem is that for the foreseeable future the authority to furlough teachers would have been tied to a deeply flawed evaluation system. A substantial portion of Pennsylvania's evaluation formula depends on standardized student test results that are neither statistically valid nor reliable, and which do a better job of measuring community wealth than student learning.

Let me repeat that: Pennsylvania's current teacher evaluation formula is currently tied to standardized student test results that are neither statistically valid nor reliable.

Furthermore, even the more 'valid' component of the evaluation system - principal observations - is still in its infancy. In many cases, evaluators have received only minimal training, and most still have very limited experience. Attaching 'high stakes' to these evaluations would have negated their potential value for improving overall teacher effectiveness. (Isn’t that the goal?)

And, by the way, we would also have inadvertently compounded the challenge of recruiting teachers in economically challenged districts. Why? Because part of the calculation of a teacher’s score is the overall school score. As a result, a teacher’s score is automatically lower if they teach in a struggling – i.e., poor – school. Which, in effect, reduces their job security.  I am not making this up.

There have been some proposals for tweaking the evaluation formula. But as long as the legislature is dug in on using these test scores – which were designed for completely different purposes - changing the mixture of the "garbage" that goes into the formula won't improve the validity of the result: garbage-in is still garbage-out. Claims that the public wants to use standardized tests scores to evaluate teachers is a belief not based in reality. Increasingly, the public wants no such thing, and the more they learn about it, the less they like it.

Perhaps our legislators can't be expected to understand this. Few of them have had any direct experience with public education since they were last in school, in most cases, decades ago. And like most Americans, few have a good grasp of the statistical concepts of reliability and validity. Even fewer would understand the real-life dilemmas a principal faces when considering whether to rate a teacher 'unsatisfactory' - such as, will the replacement be an improvement? 

This was another example of our legislature proposing a simplistic answer to a complex problem. The proposed legislation would have done nothing to improve teacher effectiveness. But ironically, there is actually a lot of potential in the relatively new Danielson observation model, particularly if it’s implemented in a climate of trust and greater peer-to-peer accountability. Just maybe we should give that a chance to work.

Mindfulness at the PDS conference - an idea whose time has come?

Plus, thoughts on block scheduling

Another session at last month’s PDS conference that I found particularly intriguing was the presentation on “Community Building through Mindfulness” by a ninth-grade English class intern.

What prompted Carissa’s inquiry was her concern about the level of stress that we know exists in our high school student population, evidenced in part by the disturbingly high percentage of our students who have entertained suicidal thoughts at one time or another.

Carissa’s research found that spending a few minutes at the beginning of each class on some simple yoga and mindfulness exercises reduced her students’ level of stress, and increased their ability to focus in class. Perhaps that is not surprising. (But it is useful, thank you!)

What, to me, was somewhat surprising was the degree to which this also created a greater sense of class cohesion and unity.  The ability to develop a sense of community in the classroom will be an increasingly important attribute of the classroom of the future.  (We make a point of this in elementary school – why not high school?)

What also struck me – at least in my view – is how much easier it is to implement this kind of innovation within the new 90-minute class block schedule.

Which lead me to further speculate: if we were designing our school structure from scratch, wouldn’t this be the logical thing to do? Who would design a system of 43-minute classes, at the end of which you jump up and run to the next class?  We now know from decades of brain research that 1) we need time to process the information we just received, and 2) the brain needs time to switch gears to the next task.

Certainly, this is how adults learn. I’ve never been to an educational conference in which the sessions were not at least 75 minutes long, with at least a 15-minute break in between. No adult would stand for the traditional 45-minute class, 5-minute break that is found in the typical high school. Why would we subject our students to that?