His supervisor was willing to write him a letter of recommendation and would even hire him back if another position in his subject area were to open up. However, this particular middle school social studies teacher, two sport coach, and highly involved staff member was unable to find another teaching job. He spent several months completing applications, interviewing, and being told he was a strong candidate and was near the top of those interviewed, but still could not find a new position. He was professional through the rest of the school year. He didn’t make a production of his termination with his kids as is often the case with some departing teachers.

As his last official day at school passed, and he still had no job or even job prospects. The inclination to falsely tie his ability to get a teaching job with his worth as a person and husband started to get the better of him. He was disillusioned and shaken on a level much more than the professional. He was getting desperate to find a job. He expanded his search, considered longer and longer commutes, and still nothing. It was difficult to watch the events unfold and my 17 years in education as teacher and administrator proved useless in being of any assistance to him.

However, this particular post isn’t about the inequities or difficulties of finding a teaching job in a tight job market and how that relates to a teacher shortage crisis. It’s about the unexpected part of the conversation I alluded to earlier. He’s now switched job paths completely and is managing a fast food restaurant. He doesn’t make any apologies for it and is doing quite well. My casual inquiry about how it was going turned serious when he said, “Rick, I’m so much more empowered now than I ever was as a teacher.” I didn’t expect that and in my own three years in fast food, I never really felt empowered even in the semi-managerial role I briefly held. We talked more about empowerment and the teaching profession, locally and nationally, and pieces of other recent conversations and experiences came together throughout our discourse.

His story is not unique and many teachers willingly leave the profession for myriad reasons. Teachers leaving the profession concerns me, but not as much as the ones who decide (and are deciding) not to come to the profession at all.

Welcome to the Machine

I was at the Virtual School Symposium in November and keynote speaker former Governor Bob Wise, who is now the President for Alliance for Excellent Education, spoke in his presentation about the mounting teacher shortage as being one of three looming crises that are challenging America’s k-12 education system [1] . (The other two being declining state fiscal revenues and increased global demands for skilled workers.) Two of the statistics he presented to support this shortage were

1. In 1987-88 the typical teacher had 15 years of experience.
2. By 2007-08 the typical teacher had just 1 to 2 years of experience. [2]

What strikes me about these two bits of information is where they fall in the milestones tombstones(?) of reform efforts in American education. The connection to the impending teacher crisis may not be strictly causal, but it does give me pause. In 1989, the year following 87-88 referenced above and sparked by the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, state governors convened a summit to focus on education. Out of this the the National Education Goals panel was formed and eventually produced the Goals 2000 legislation [3], signed into law in 1994 . As a follow up in 1996, the National Education Summit convened pledging “to support efforts to set academic standards at the state and local levels” [4]. Also keep in mind in the mid to late 90′s outcomes-based education evolved and messily imploded. Within a few years, states who haven’t adopted academic standards move to do so in the wake of NCLB that is signed into law in 2001. High-stakes standardized testing, school report cards, and the political and continued public vilification of educators soon follow. In 2002 states and school districts that receive Title I funding are required to participate in NAEP in order to keep those federal dollars [5]. High-stakes standardized testing, school report cards, and the political and continued public vilification of educators soon follow.

As the standardized tests explicitly elevated in importance the subjects math, science, and language arts, by extension those potential teachers with a passion for other areas found (and continue to find) themselves marginalized, lost in the hysteria of high-stakes, standardized testing. Math, science, and language arts teachers resent[ed] the building pressure to have their kids perform well on the tests while other teachers resent[ed] the cuts (fiscally, politically, and practically) to their disciplines, especially the arts.

In a world of scale scores, cut points, and proficiency levels, the creative impulse in humans, and its associated propensity toward risk and possible failure, becomes unpalatable.

And, in the name of raising test scores, we continue to educate the creativity right out of our children.

So much so that we have to create “partnerships” and entire buzz phrase endeavors to reintroduce ourselves and our kids to the parts of themselves we’ve tested out of them. Consider also the Wall Street Journal article by Sue Shellenbarger that reports “Americans’ scores on a commonly used creativity test fell steadily from 1990 to 2008, especially in the kindergarten through sixth-grade age group…” [6]. We’ve heard Sir Ken Robinson tell us that “creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status” in one of his creativity and school talks  from 2006 [7]. If that’s too outdated, perhaps we should pay close attention to his take on the arts, creativity, and divergent thinking in his excellent RSA Animate talk from October 2010 [8].

In an environment where just about everything has to be quantified and translated into sterile, lifeless measurable outcomes where learners are commodities to be grown for higher education or employers (rather than being developed as human beings), it’s little wonder that more people aren’t flocking to the profession. This, as many current educators will tell you, is only one point of consideration. There are many more factors that are contributing to our teacher shortage -perhaps we’ll discuss some of them here.

References

[1 ] Slide 2, The Online Learning Imperative Report and an Update on the Digital Learning Council

[2] Slides 7 & 8, The Online Learning Imperative Report and an Update on the Digital Learning Council

[3] Goals 2000: Reforming Education to Improve Student Achievement

[4] PBS Frontline, Are We There Yet?

[5] National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Frequently Asked Questions: Is participation in NAEP voluntary?

[6] Shellenbarger, Sue. The Wall Street Journal Online, December 15, 2010, A Box? Or a Spaceship? What Makes Kids Creative

[7] Robinson, Sir Ken. Schools Kill Creativity, June 2006, www.ted.com

[8] Robinson, Sir Ken. RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms, October 2010, YouTube.com & TheRSA.org

In my early years as a high school assistant principal, in one massive magazine sting operation, I managed to confiscate enough adult “reading” material plastered to the inside of lockers, stuffed inside backpacks, and concealed in car trunks that Mr. Geils’ angel would have herself blushed. The number of people, both student and outside adult, involved in the (reportedly profitable) exchange of these periodicals left me stunned.

All over our schools, I see students from every demographic slice of society who are flirting with varying degrees of physical strain and possible injury from overweight bags an backpacks slung across shoulders, backs, arms and hands. Many of these same students often, quite unexpectedly, a required to pay fines for damages to these books resulting from their highlighting and note-taking in an attempt to make sense of their contents. Ironically, there is a growing demand at the college level for these well-marked books and an enterprising few are capitalizing of these augmented book-ideas. Often enough to be nearly commonplace, educational records, report cards, and, yes, diplomas are held hostage until missing books are ransomed or returned.

In our school libraries and classrooms our students’ minds have been and are being changed and challenged by ancient wisdom and new ideas contained in printed texts, magazines, books, and newspapers. While many school librarians bristle at having their paper reading materials censored, they are because of space, money, politics, use, relevance, or whatever. Because of these ideas set in print, protests have been launched, books have been banned -sometimes burned, and landmark cases have been decided. Are there some nice, sterilized encyclopedias and reference books for them to read for their facts? Sure. But when they do bend the binding on these tomes they often find inaccurate and outdated data. The cost to replace these materials as often as the information in them changes is more than a poor librarian’s budget can bear.

Students, in their attempts to interact with their texts, find their efforts to efficiently search through books for meaningful and relevant information thwarted by their linear layouts and lacking indexes -when they exist at all. Cross referencing subjects in more than one paper source grinds to a halt amid a flurry of note cards, bookmarks, and sticky-notes. They simply get overwhelmed by the massive amount of information there. We don’t really want to talk about those online catalogs, electronic databases, and computer-based resources because that’s way too overwhelming we all know students will just plagiarize that information anyway. At least they don’t do that with paper materials.

Sadly, when (and if) our kids enter public libraries and bookstores (both physical and digital), they often lack the intellectual discernment needed to make appropriate decisions because so much of the paper-base world has been filtered, intentionally or not, from them. When they are confronted with the overwhelming diversity of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, business, self-help, home improvement, religion, cooking, children’s books, graphic novels, political and social commentary, mature reading, art, photography, humor, and on and on, our kids, in their naïve and unintended ignorance, may and sometimes do choose materials that adults around them would frown upon.

Unfortunately the world outside of school holds no positive models for our students either. The public reporting that happens through paper spreadsheets, internal memos, quarterly statements, reconstituted shredded documents, legislative bills, unclassified documents, etc. all contain information that is dangerous and potentially misleading to our children. Their homes are also being invaded by newspapers, subscriptions, junk mail, solicitations, and all sorts of printed materials hung on doorknobs and stuffed into door frames. Look around you now with a critical eye and see the pervasive printedness everywhere around you and what you are exposing your kids to. Shame, shame, shame.

It is unconscionable that we continue to let the villainy of material printed on paper threaten and imperil our children. I propose we flood our state and national legislatures demanding the passage of the Children’s Printed Paper Protection Act. ChiPPPA will provide national safeguards for defending our kids from the dangers of printed materials. Under ChiPPPA our kids will be free from the nefarious influences associated with print.

Our teachers will be relieved from the worrisome tasks of having to determine the educational value of printed materials because only at school each student will have his or her own personal Constant Readability Access Paper filter. While at school the CRAP filter will be every student’s defense against the many dangers of the print medium. Every piece of written material that a student may interact with will be removed and archived by the CRAP filter. So those adults in the schools don’t waste valuable district resources or expose students to the dangers inherent in the vast printed resources, they will also receive CRAP filter as well.

Even more beneficially, since every person in a school might interact with printed resources, every person will need a CRAP filter. These CRAP filters will be highly trained individuals specializing in speed reading. With the addition of the CRAP filters, there will be more jobs in schools and entire departments and staff development resources will be needed, increasing spending and stimulating the local and national economies. The money school districts will save by eliminating printed materials will be used to employ the CRAP filters.

Act today and urge your legislators to pass ChiPPPA and save our children from the dangers of printed materials.

First and foremost, internalize the following:

• The focus should be on learning, not the dispensation of information.
  • If you are “teaching stuff ” that should be quickly recalled with no real connections, your role has been replaced by Google, Wikipedia, WolframAlpha, and myriad web-based tools.
• Time is actually the variable in learning.
  • If you didn’t already believe this on some level, you would never assign homework.
• Your classroom’s walls are permeable (thanks David Jakes).
  • The simple fact is human beings look for connections everywhere and the internet has made this abundantly possible. Your kids are doing it already. It’s time to tap that vast resource.
• Textbooks do not equal curricula. Curricula is the means by which we facilitate learning.
  • If your principal told you all the textbooks in your school were being recalled and would never be replaced, what would that do to your lesson planning and, as a result your classes? Also, textbooks, in many cases, are a waste of money especially if you only “cover” and/or use 25%-40% of the material in them. at $80-$100 a book, that’s lots of waste. While we are on the topic of “coverage,” stop using that way of thinking. We are not applying coats of paint here. That kind of thinking leads us back to the for
• Technology is an essential tool for your work and student learning, not the point of learning.
  • We don’t talk about book, paper, or whiteboard-infused/based/integrated lessons. Stop talking about technology-infused/based/integrated lessons. Seriously. Stop…Stop saying that you did a PowerPoint lesson. You don’t say you did a whiteboard/chalkboard lesson.
• You don’t (and can’t) know it all. You are a learner in all this.
  • We expect that our kids will be life-long learners we should be too. While you may be an “expert” in your area, you can’t know it all. -Sorry to bruise your ego.
• Leverage the power of the connected learning world by building a personal/professional learning network and find those people who are doing what you do and can make you better.
  • Since each of us can’t know it all, it makes sense to connect with others who have something to contribute.

Now, with that said, just because time is the variable for your classroom does not mean that you have to be on duty all the time. In fact, many of these suggestions are ways for you to clone parts of yourself so you can be in multiple places at multiple times. We’ve long dreamed (even in jest) of that technology, but it is here. It has been in multiple forms for some time now.

Basic

• Stop going over your class policies and procedures, rules and regulations, etc. and put them on the web. It doesn’t matter the tool you use (email, Google Docs, a wiki, EtherPad, a blog, -whatever). Make an agreement with your kids that you won’t read the policies if they’ll read them themselves. You can invent whatever way to document and record that they and their parents have read it. At worst have them email you -give them the format of the email response if you want and have them reply to you.
  • Estimated time recovered: 1-2 class periods.
• Post your PowerPoints online, especially if you find yourself turning your back to your kids and reading the stupid thing.
  • Use free web applications like SlideShare and Prezi.
  • Estimated time recovered: Any class period you do this.

Intermediate

• Clone yourself on the Internet and record and post your lectures/content delivery.
  • Assign that as your kids’ “homework” and do the work you’ve always wanted to do with your kids in your classroom. You’ll be able to differentiate and work with kids individually, in small groups, or as a large group as needed.
  • If kids don’t have computer/Internet access, have them download it to their phones, iPods, or put it on a DVD.
    • Here’s some examples from a couple of teachers in Woodland Park, Colorado.
  • Estimated time recovered: Any class period you do this.
• Outsource yourself to the Internet.
  • Use the quality free/open resources available
  • YouTube (and it’s EduClones), MIT (yes, *that* MIT), SAS CurriculumPathways, The National Repository for Online Courses, iTunes University, Prezi just announced and Education Exchange …There’s tons of other resources. Add yours to the comments below.
  • Estimated time recovered: Any class period you do this.

The few, not exhaustive, ideas are just some ways to get you thinking about ways you can recover classtime. I’d wager that if you decide to turn your kids loose with many of these tools, you’ll find the entire nature of your class and the learning you and your students experience will fundamentally change.

Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

Then in November, I received an email stating I would be receiving a copy of their new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. I was initially excited and having signed up on their site I wasn’t too suspicious of receiving emails from them. Cool. I grew excited and found myself anticipating it’s arrival, much like Ralphie in that favorite movie of mine. Then Ralphie’s lesson that he learned from his decoder ring started echoing in my mind…”A crummy commercial!” I slowly began to suspect as much as well.

The blur of the end of the semester and the year swept away all thoughts of the book until it arrived in the mail. There was a letter with the book that said thanks for checking it out. Really cool. I read on to see the catch, suspicious like a kid who’s been burned on an Ovaltine commercial gimmick, and there it was…

“One serious request: Please don’t blog or tweet about Switch until January 15, 2010.”

(You can see I’m well beyond that deadline.) What? Oooh, the secrecy…I looked at the cover of the book and it has a caption at the top “Uncorrected Proof – Not for Sale” (see the picture to the right). Really, really cool. I felt like I was part of some super secret society. I started reading right away and noticed some things that needed correcting -that’s the old English teacher kicking in.

I found the book very engaging, but the holidays hit and the second semester started and I was running on 5-ish hours of sleep for a period of time that made any kind of casual reading impossible. So when I went to EduCon, I was determined to read the book. The flight to Philly and back provided just the opportunity I needed. Although I must say I probably could have finished the book much quicker if I didn’t keep stopping to make notes from thoughts the book triggered. I absolutely love that in a book!

I’m quite interested in the change process, but I’m worn out with the onslaught of change procedure manuals that focus on process and not people. Switch’s focus is on people and how to help, motivate, and encourage them (us) through the change and it’s (often perceived) barriers. It’s not about callous manipulation and sterile, mechanistic change protocols. In fact Switch is an acknowledgement that our hearts, minds, and situations all play significant roles in how we approach and embrace/reject change. Brothers Heath in Switch “argue that successful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader to do three things at once…Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, and Shape the Path.”

Hang on there, Rick. Rider? Elephant? Path? What kind of circus is this? Can these guys really be serious with this stuff?

For sure (and we’ll come back to that), but they don’t take themselves too seriously and they are realistic about the framework they’ve created.

“We created this framework to be useful for people who don’t have scads of authority or resources…As helpful as we hope this framework will be to you, we’re well aware, and you should be too, that this framework is no panacea.”

I absolutely appreciate the practical simplicity of those two sentences and the two sequential paragraphs they introduce in the book. In fact, I’m pretty sure those pages in that section of the first chapter sold me on the rest of the book.

Now, back to the circus.

The Heath’s conversational writing style and engaging storytelling provide fertile ground for their explanations and takeaway learnings. They’re both educators, which adds extra credibility and perspective for me. They know a good word picture/example/metaphor/story when they steal it. Okay, they really don’t steal the stuff they use in the book; they give credit where it’s due. For their framework they have taken an analogy used by University of Virginia psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, of an elephant and it’s rider. -I have to admit I had a small mental image of an circus-type elephant and rider on initial conception, but as I read on I replaced that image with that of an oliphaunt and haradrim rider as depicted in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies.

The essence of the rider, elephant, and path analogy-pattern-framework comes down to this:

• Direct the Rider -our rational side. “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.”
• Motivate the Elephant -our emotional side. “What looks like laziness (or reluctance -my addition here) is often exhaustion…engage people’s emotional sides.”
• Shape the Path -our situations. “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and the Elephant.”

Throughout the book, the Heath’s use surprising and entertaining stories to illustrate and clarify their Rider/Elephant/Path analogy. They are amazing, funny, poignant, incredible and sometimes jaw-dropping. Each story effective reinforces the the sub-elements of the framework. Switch will provoke and entertain, stimulate and inspire, and reframe and refocus (note the section on SMART goals in chapter four, especially). I know it sounds a little like a commercial, but leaders in any capacity will find benefit in these pages. The takeaways at the end of the book with the Problem-Advice format add an additional dimension to the book and reinforce the lessons in the book.

Switch has a wealth of resources for anyone wanting to keep people at the forefront of any change (small or large). I’m interested to see how those in the educational community respond as they read the book and incorporate it into their own change initiatives, knowing it is not an all-inclusive manual about top-down control. Here, the Heath’s caution us, “Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions.”

I look forward to the discussion.

After @NancyW (Nancy White) and I made our bus connection to SLA, I connected with @bhwilkoff (Ben Wilkoff) and @hdiblasi (Howie DiBlasi) and later with @mwacker (Michael Wacker). During the SLA tour, guided by two SLA students, I found my way into several classrooms and posted a few tweets during the process.

On a tour at SLA, now in @mrchase English class. Lesson about Jackson’s The Lottery. #educon

What!? What kind of heresy is this? Laptops right next to lab equipment and kids entering experiment data?! #educon

Now kids reading their poems from their laptops! Not a piece of paper to be found! Who do these people think they are?! #educon

Overheard: You dont want to be on your cell phone in class. You might miss something… #educon

I know the non-educator friends in Facebook (and maybe even some of educator friends) sometimes get a little annoyed by my constant tweets that update my Facebook page. Some of them comment and leave me special sentiments. Like the kids we teach, they engage at different ranges consistent with their areas of interest and/or if they think they can beat someone else to a humorous reply.

Later I found myself in Zac Chase‘s (@mrchase) regular classroom having a conversation about a range of education topics with @bhwilkoff (Ben Wilkoff), @mwacker (Michael Wacker), @shareski (Dean Shareski), @thecleversheep (Rodd Lucier), @jasonmkern (Jason Kern), and several others. I didn’t say much, which, for those of you who know me will probably find that hard to believe. I was there for my own learning and while I wasn’t verbally participating, I found myself making mental connections to some of my own prior learning and working it into this new knowledge. Not everything bore immediate fruit, but as is common for me, I planted seeds from the conversations of others.

Downstairs in the commons and feeling the pressure to steal a few minutes of work, I turned my laptop on for the first time. I didn’t get much work done; there were too many conversations making too many connections for me. @mwacker (Michael Wacker) and I talked a little shop with @akamrt (Gregory Thompson).

I met SLA teacher @dlaufenberg (Diana Laufenberg) and got to hear about some of the internal workings of SLA over a Mediterranean lunch with several people from during the day. Some of that conversation connected to some of the earlier conversations that connected back to another book I’m currently reading.

Afterword, we again found ourselves (with several others from earlier) in Zac Chase‘s (@mrchase) regular classroom, only this time populated with his students. I listened as kids read their sentences attempting to use some of the vocabulary taped to the wall. Later, I was again content to be an observer, but one of @shareski‘s and one of my tweets sums it up:

@MrChase likes being a teacher.

Got put to work in @mrchase English class with @bhwilkoff @mwacker @shareski and others No passive observers here at SLA. #educon

Mr. Chase drafted us to help kids with some of the struggles they were having in working through an assignment where they were using blogs. I didn’t know much about the assignment, so I found myself asking lots of questions to understand. The students were very gracious in their responses, but through the whole process I saw that one of them was listening to the group’s responses and was working them into the 10 items Mr. Chase asked them to work on. There, I made another re-connection: questions are important. It’s soooo easy to fall back on our “Curse of Knowledge” as Dean Shareski made reference to earlier (which also triggered a connection to a book I recently read, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath who also made reference throughout to the Curse of Knowledge).

@bhwilkoff (Ben Wilkoff), @mwacker (Michael Wacker), and I made an unremarkable trip and back to a tweetup before attending the Friday Night Panel Discussion. Now that made lots of connections for lots of people. The Twitter hashtag #educon made it as one of the trending topics in Philadelphia. Managing the conversations on stage and via Twitter proved to be hyper-engaging for me, not really a pacifier as one panelist alluded to regarding technology. I may have gotten a little snarky once or twice.

I followed the crowd out and ended up riding a conversational wave that included connections from @thecleversheep (Rodd Lucier), @shareski (Dean Shareski), @jonbecker, (Jonathan Becker, whom I long tweeted with and finally met in person), @courosa (Alec Couros who, by the way, went around the group of 13 people, introduced by both in-world and twitter names, only missing one who was new to him. That was amazing and shows the power of connections on people.), @bhwilkoff (Ben Wilkoff), @lizbdavis (Liz Davis), @aforgrave (Andrew Forgrave), @msjweir (Jamie Reaburn Weir), @zbpipe (Zoe Branigan-Pipe), and @crafty184 (Chris Craft). My memory isn’t as good as @courosa (Alec Couros) because I’ve left two people out. I apologize.

After the good conversations from the day, I knew I wasn’t going to be going to sleep anytime soon. That stinks because the conversations of the day start early tomorrow (er, later this morning).

Oh yeah, I decided to change my Twitter picture so I can help with putting a name to a face when meeting in-world. Thanks for the suggestion.

Anyway, I did what many dutiful conference goers do, I started planning out the sessions conversations I wanted to participate in and I came down with a bad case of decision paralysis. See, even though I know the sessions will be archived and I can access them when I want/need to, the reality is I may not get to the ones I don’t attend and many of them can fit with the pieces of my own professional/personal/educational Erector set. (That’s probably not a very good 21st century-related metaphor especially since no one actually makes “Erector” sets any more, but hey, it works for me and this is my blog ;-)

Almost every scheduled conversation at EduCon has something that intersects with my slice of the education biz. So…I have to choose while I’m here and I’ve come to the conclusion that while I (we) love having choices, I (we) hate having to choose. It would just be much easier if someone would just give me the formula and I could just plug it in and be off and running. Deep down, I know that cannot and will not work, never has -really, never. That, however, hasn’t stopped educrats from trying their own formulas and continuing to propose new ones for us all. (No, there won’t be any hyperlinks there, all you have to do is pick up or logon to any current educational publication and see the edu-mandates du jour.)

(Like Bud said), EduCon is not about formulas or copying something, but (like Chris said), it’s about the exchange of ideas and the integration of them into my sphere of service.

So, I have some things that are heating up and are in need of some serious exchange of ideas. Those will be where my conversations start, and, definitely not, where they’ll end.

Impassioned (rightly or wrongly, is not mine to judge) people have provoked responses from educational systems from all over America. Many have chosen to post announcements about whether the speech will or will not be available synchronously or asynchronously. Here’s my response -lingua en buccae. This was originally emailed to a colleague to lighten his day after histrionics from multiple sides…

I must protest. Through the media frenzy caused by this, I guess I’m supposed to understand that I apparently don’t have the intelligence to parent or communicate with my son properly. I assume, from the implicit messages on both sides, that I should be afraid to discuss any ideas with him. It appears that simple exposure to this speech is too dangerous and the potential for sudden, irrevocable change is too risky. And if he doesn’t have access to this speech, he will be at a significant educational disadvantage because I obviously don’t know how to challenge him to set educational goals or expect, with my assistance, that he will take responsibility for his education.

It’s obvious to me now that the media commentators do not expect me to communicate with my kid on any level about any new learning or risk exposing him to the President of the United States. Politicians on both sides have helped me see my total incompetence as a parent to either motivate my kid in school or discuss with him the ideas he may learn there. I’m just so glad my son was not yet born in 1991 when another president did the same thing and the opposition side was all indignant then and the proponent side resented their criticism.

So I end where I began. I must protest…the ridiculous behavior of the politicians who demand respect for the office of the Presidency, except when the other party is in power. I must protest…the idiocy of media commentators who create controversy because it’s good for ratings. I must protest…the polarized lunatics on both sides whose hypocrisy forces schools and districts to waste their time and resources on this sort of foolishness.

In case you want to make up your mind for yourself and possibly engage in a thoughtful dialog with your own kids, here’s the Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama Back to School Event.

Back to School

Duty bound to support their local economies, schools dutifully publish, copy, distribute, post, email, mail, broadcast and anyway possible advertise the pinnacle of educational readiness:

The School Supply List

Please pause and bow your head in solemn reverence…Thank you, continue on.

Without the sacred and all-important School Supply List, many a poor soul would be relegated to shame and Trapper-Keeper (do they even make those anymore) want,  left to navigate a cruel world of humiliation and incomprehensible un-preparedness. Woe to he that lacketh supplies! Woe, woe, woe!

…And that’s if the parent buys the wrong brand of binder or paste when a glue stick is obviously required.

So here I sit with the 2009-2010 School Supply List (only slightly modified since the 19th century) for my son’s 7th grade year. (It’s the actual one.)

-1 box of facial tissue (turn in to homeroom teacher on 1st day of school)
-1 roll of paper towels (turn in to homeroom teacher on 1st day of school)
-One ream of white printer paper (turn in to homeroom teacher on 1st day of school)
-One small package of graph paper (turn in to homeroom teacher on 1st day of school)
-Dry erase markers (turn in to homeroom teacher on 1st day of school)
-Large Binder (3″ or larger)
-Three pocket folders with brads
-8 subject dividers for Binder
-Five 70-80 page spiral notebooks
-College-ruled loose leaf notebook paper
-Pencil/pen bag or case- unless the Binder has one built in
-Blue/Black ink pens (no gel pens)
-Personal pencil sharpener
-24 count Colored pencils for core classes (these are separate from supplies for electives)
-Colored markers
-Red pen/pencil for checking and editing work
-Highlighters (yellow, green, blue, pink)
-#2 wooden pencils (must have for CSAP practice)
-Metal ruler with both standard and metric measurements
-Glue stick
-Scissors
-Scientific calculator (TI-84 if in Algebra I)
-Highly recommended but not required, 512 MB memory stick

I can only assume by the first item that there will be much weeping either because so many trees will have been sacrificed in the name of paper-based education or because the kids have to surrender the first five items to the homeroom teacher on the first day of school. It could also be that kids should have 8 subject dividers but only 5 spiral notebooks and everyone knows that 5 divides into 8 evenly to represent the 4 quarters he has 7 classes each. I mean, duh!

Happily for us, my son apparently can expect to be very organized with his bag case and pocket folders (with brads! -are they related to chads? Hmm, I wonder…)  Organization is a very important skill, one he hasn’t mastered despite heroic attempts every year to manage and file all that paper he’s using.  As his report cards attest, he hasn’t done well in the neat and organized category when compared to all those compliant, neat-writing types who don’t fill the margins of their papers with doodles and comic illustrations.

It seems a little strange that in all this focus on organization, they’re going to ask kids to write on all that unlined printer paper. Hey, that’s what the ruler is for. So they can practice making their own college ruled paper. Absolutely brilliant!

It’s also nice to see an early emphasis on post-secondary preparation by requiring kids to have college-ruled paper.  

I know we’re facing some economic troubles, but in a school that has computer projectors in each room I have to wonder about the dry erase markers. They’re usually four in a pack times 630+ kids, equals lots of un-archived whiteboard writing kids won’t have access to in order to reflect on their learning. Oh! How could I be so silly *that’s* what the 3″ or larger binder is for -to write all that stuff down. I’m assuming my son will use the paper towels to write on and keep like a scroll if his binder fills up. That will test his organizational skills for sure. I don’t want to undermine the organizational educational process, but I’m going to tell him to use his glue stick to keep his papers together.

Although he’s enrolled in a science class, his scientific calculator appears to be destined only for use in Algebra 1.  While we’re on the subject of subject isolation, that must be why he can’t use his colored pencils in his electives. Band and Guitar must require a unique kind -maybe the colored markers.

When I asked for a 512 MB memory stick, the kid at the electronics megastore looked pitifully at me and took his Captain Morgan one off his key chain and gave it to me. Other than that, the only other ones I’ve been able to find are the  novelty ones the vendors gave away at NECC. I’m not sure what my son is going to do with all that space anyway. I don’t think there’ll be much computer use anyway – he doesn’t have a computer class this year.

Let’s review what’s important…*Lots* of paper products; organizational items like folders, binders, and bags; colored pens, pencils, markers, and highlighters; and wooden pencils for standardized test practice -because everyone knows you can’t practice with anything else but a #2 pencil and loose-leaf paper. Well, I’m hoping he won’t need any foam board since it’s not on the list and our local Tar-Mart and Wal-Get didn’t have an opportunity to stock it.

I’ve just finished Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander’s book The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. This book caps of a trio of books I’ve “read” since January 2009. (Note: I have placed “read” in quotations because I actually listened to two of the books and some of my English-teacher friends would say that doesn’t really count as having read them. That’s their problem, not mine. I’m all the better for my auditory or visual interaction with them anyway and I’ll use read to signify both kinds of interaction here.) The other two books are Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath and The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica (listed in reverse order read.)

First of all, Zander’s The Art of Possibility and Robinson’s The Element represent the books I purchased because I watched related videos on TED. TED, by the way, if you have never heard of it is “riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.” For all you corporate, copyright, intellectual control, 19th-century business model, knowledge-hoarding authoritarians, you might want to notice that the free media on TED directly contributed to the purchase of two additional, possibly three items -the Zanders’ physical book and Robinson’s audio recording, which I may also purchase in hard copy for future reference. Additionally, after listening to the Heaths’ book, I purchased the hard copy…I’m just sayin’.

I didn’t intend to read the books in the order I did. In fact I didn’t intend to read them at all other than The Element. After watching Robinson’s TED talk and Zander’s TED talk, I had to learn more. Additionally, reading Made To Stick and The Art of Possibility were a result of recurring recommendations by those I follow on Twitter and those whose blogs I read.

…Meanwhile, back to the books themselves. They all have a similar “long line” as Zander calls it, “a theme upon which each [book] is a variation.” That theme is simply to make a difference our own lives and the lives of others. Each author (or groups of authors) present rather compelling and impassioned ways to do this. But each does it in almost the same way; they tell stories -lots of them. In fact stories are one of the six principles in the Heaths’ “SUCCESs” model. Each book speaks to the transformative power of Story. In testament to this, The Zanders have a section at the end of their book called “A Guide to the Stories.” The Heaths include story references from their chapters also in the end section “The Easy Reference Guide.” Robinson focuses often on “epiphany stories,” those stories that “involve some level of revelation, a way of dividing the world into before and after.” For this post, I’ll focus on the Zanders’ The Art of Possibility.

In using stories told from each of their perspectives, Ben and Roz (as they identify themselves in the book) illustrate in concrete ways we can make a difference in our own lives and of others. Of the three books, theirs provides some of the most practical thinking for transformation -well, duh, it is in the title. One of the most compelling thoughts comes early on in the book as they reframe the context of world from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Here are some examples from the book. While note set against each other for a direct comparison, some do flow that way. Some may make immediate sense, while other may necessitate your reading the book.

Further in the book the context for these ideas are framed in the illustration of “downward spiral” and “possibility” talk/thinking. The define the downward spiral talk as “a resigned way of talk [thinking] that excludes possibility…[f]ocusing on the abstraction of scarcity…creat[ing] an unassailable story about the limits to what is possible, and tells us compellingly how things are going from bad to worse” (p. 108). They introduce possibility earlier on page 20, but it stands contrast:

“The action in a universe of possibility may be characterized as generative, or giving, in all senses of that word -reproducing new life, creating new ideas, consciously endowing with meaning, contributing, yielding to the power of contexts. The relationship between people and environments is highlighted, not the people and things themselves. Emotions that are often relegated to the special category of spirituality are abundant here: joy, grace, awe, wholeness, passion, and compassion.”

See the video on Pop!Tech to hear from Zander himself on the topic -and many others from the book. Zander is one of those teachers we all wish we could have. He walks his talk absolutely graciously. It has some similarities with his TED talk, but this one has a kid! Stay for the end. The 30 minutes is completely worth it.

The above quote from the the book, published in 2000, resonates with me as an educator (and I suspect others also). It’s what we strive for as educators it speaks to our passions and best hopes. It’s often how we define our educational reform efforts.

This is one of those must-read books for educators. It has so much more than a blog post can do justice.

If you’ve read this book or have feedback on the post, I welcome your comments.

 The Far Mountains

A mantle white has freshly fallen on the far mountains,
     But through the dirty window
     Crowd grimy cars on the pavement
A crisp curtain of blue crests the peaks,
     And the highway’s rumbling trucks
     Fling their blackened mist
High and low the horizon hops in a pulse line,
     Yet the angular rooftops
     Creep relentlessly across the plain
Situated in marvelous splendor the scene unfolds,
     For the straight concrete barriers
     Feign creation in mocking assembly
Toward the skies the summits soar,
     So progress itself is even outreached
     Revealing feeble hubris

The Fizz

He likes to drink the fizz

            From the top of pop

Fizz! Fizz! Fizz!

            His eyes bulge

His lips pucker

Slurp! Slurp! Slurp!

            And a grin

His eyes twinkle

His lips curl at the edges

He’s captured the fleeting effervescence

            Of bits of dancing bubbles

Too quickly the fizz flattens and flees

            Into the air

Like the breath of youth

            Which, once exhaled,

            Becomes the vapor of memory

In the mind of a father

As an English teacher I sometimes find it annoying when writers seemingly leave us in the dark, grasping to find the light they may have only seen. This feels particulary true with poetry and often shows up in the popular attitudes that poetry is inaccessible only to a few learned so as to not be understood,  or that it is pedantic and trite  warranting no further intellectual investment. As a a result, poetry has lost its place among everyday people and I find that very disturbing on so many levels.

Anyway, I digress. In the poem below, I have deliberately played with the structure intending each though to be encapsulated in the three lines in the 1-2-3 form. That form has multiple meanings for me (and I hope for the reader): person-other-whole; you-me-us; creator-created-creation; and, well, you get the point. Additionally, the poem stands as a whole when read traditionally left to right, but each column is intended to be a complete poem in itself representing another perspective or dimension of the idea. The last phrase ends two of the four poems and can end the first and second column poem as well.

I didn’t intend to write it like this from the begining, but after the 6th line, I really didn’t have a choice. I hope you enjoy it.

Bottles

Photo Credit: gierszewski via Bud Hunt

     With intention
            Filled with purpose
Dripping
     Life flavors 
            Our experience splashes
Colored
     In moments
             Of human hues
Qualities
     For us
            Revealed by others
Mixing
     Fleeting feelings
            And subtle shades
Distinct
     Unique contrasts
            Illuminated in prisms
People
     To be
            Filled with light
Together  
     Wholly made
            As is intended

Without time for a poem
Our minds will stop growin’
The rub, while not right,
Is that even to write
Doesn’t stop time a goin’

A Book

A book
Full of words
Line by line
The story revealed

A book
Pages numbered
Turn by turn
The story told

A book
Authored
Letter by letter
The story crafted

The page
Contains its lines

The lines
Contain their words

The words
Meaningless
Without their links
Before and aft

Each word hangs on the next
As each breath mists into another
Each grows
As the days grow to weeks
And the weeks to months
And the months to years
And the years
A lifetime

The letter second
The word minute
The sentence day
The page month
The chapter year
The book lifetime

Authored artfully
Made meticulously
Crafted carefully
Composed consciously

As randomness contradicts purpose
So does meaninglessness life

The chapter complete
In its number
Fails the book
In its sole telling

The sentence powerful
In its wholeness
Fails the story
In its only completeness

The word essential
In its purpose
Fails the sentence
In its isolation

The letter necessary
In its formation
Fails the word
In its scrutiny

The letter makes the word
The word makes the sentence
The sentence the page
The page the chapter
The chapter the story

To disentangle a sentence from a book
May reveal a morsel
The sentence hangs in the air
But a brief moment
Revealing itself
Hinting at its purpose
In the grand design

But it falls
Lifeless as a petal plucked
Untethered
Laughable

Its purpose lost in the extrication and isolation
Pointless parsing
The whole lost
On one
Why?

• From Governor Ritter’s State of the State address on January 8, 2009: “I’ve seen the promise of Colorado in every corner of our great state, in classrooms…the best economic strategy is an education strategy…we can’t shortchange hope…Now, more than ever, we must focus on policies like this, which will help us rebound from the downturn and put us back on the path to prosperity.”
• Of the $201.1 spending reductions and program cuts, k-12 and higher education shoulder ($45.8 million+ $30 million= $75.8 million)  or 37.7%, larger than any other area, according to his budget balancing plan.
• Of the $289.7 million in transfers and diversions to the general fund, The Higher Education Maintenance and Reserve Fund will lose $47.2 million, again, larger than any other area.

Add those two together and education in Colorado is out $123 million of the $631.9 million, 19.5%, this year alone. This is the “best economic strategy” the governor can propose? Really?

So now, schools (here and here) and colleges (here and here) are left to sort out the mess. We get to do more with less. (Yes, more, didn’t you see that enrollment is up nearly 2%?) What it certainly feels like is that education only really matters when politicians want to introduce “bold education-reform legislation.” By sacrificing education on the political altar, disguised as “protecting life, safety and public health,” Governor Ritter is doing exactly the opposite and revealing that he and all those who support such cuts are actively pursuing the destruction of public education, despite what their press releases say. And when the terrible test scores start coming in and the dropout rates continue to rise and kindergarteners enter first grade miserably prepared and those who do graduate from high school find themselves ill-prepared for post-secondary education or careers; it won’t be the politicians who bear the wrath of public discontent, but those ridiculous educators who need to reform but just aren’t willing to do it. 

So much for “push[ing] hard against the status quo and creat[ing] a bold new vision for education in Colorado,” right Governor? So much for your “moral document” reflecting our values (6th paragraph on page 4). I have a hard time reconciling your actions (especially when you use education as a political tool) with the “sacred trust” you mention at the beginning of your State of the State Address. Perhaps what would be truly bold would be to stand resolute and not cut a single dollar from the State’s education budget, in any form, this year or any hence. That, Honorable Governor, might be the only way we can truly believe you when you say, “Our children deserve nothing less than a world-class education.”

The town hall forums will focus on such questions as:

• What do students need to be workforce ready?
• What do students need to be postsecondary ready?
• Are there special considerations for the workforce or higher education in your region of the state?

S.B. 08-212 requires that the Colorado State Board of Education and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education adopt a description of “postsecondary and workforce readiness” by Dec. 15, 2009.

Further, S.B. 08-212 seeks to establish a seamless pathway from preschool into college or the workplace. Essential to that pathway is an understanding of what it means to be ready for education or the workforce after high school and a plan to ensure that students take the necessary courses and master the content to do so.

These are good questions, no doubt, but CDE is missing a critical element, a new (old) component of postsecondary readiness…

Cost.

I don’t mean how much all this legislation is going to cost. (That’s a whole post in itself.) I mean the cost of going to college. Consider an article from today’s New York Times that reports “…college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007 while median family income rose 147 percent.”

Sure, we need to prepare our kids for postsecondary and workforce readiness; I’m not arguing that -yet. But, once we get them ready -especially for college -then what? Student loans, multiple jobs, navigating college over 6-7 years, scholarships and grants (not for all)? Not likely, probable, viable, sustainable, or practical. How many financial crises do we need in this country until we learn massive debt is NOT a good thing?

Unfortunately, massive debt is what we are really making our kids ready for as long as postsecondary education is a commodity to be brokered on capitalistic terms. That is our fundamental problem at the intersection of democracy and capitalism. We simply want postsecondary education for all, but we really can’t provide it for all. We can’t pay for it because we have to pay for it. No government “ism,” assistance programs, or bailout plans are going to help; no legislation introduced by and governor, president, mayor, or whomever will make a difference until we decide that education is a fundamental right for everyone. We’ll fall miserably short of our readiness goals until we restructure our social, economic, political, and cultural priorities to make it happen.

Duh, right?

It seems obvious especially in for those of us in the blogosphere and in education and in just about any human endeavor. However, I (and I suspect a few of the “we” out there) must continually have this lesson reinforced. Too many times I get caught up in the tyranny of the urgent and pull back from my various support networks only to find myself realizing that I need those very people to move forward. Here are two reflections with that idea in mind. I had what I thought was an insightful post about about personal learning networks (PLN) and the testing and evolution of ideas, but I deleted most of it in favor of the following.

The first is the life the post before this one took on. Like many posts on this blog (and comments on others’ blogs), I felt the need to respond to something. I didn’t intend to write a post that more than tripled the average hits on my blog. I simply needed to express an idea in a sort of fit of reflection. I was testing a thought out. You can see by the comments there that others have extended and challenged my thinking. I am better because other have made me better. That happens because a collective “we” are online and it’s humbling, exciting, and wonderful to be part of the conversation.

Which brings me to my second item, a poem, which was, in a bit of synesthesia, inspired by a hearing quote attributed to Will Rogers while I was flipping through the tabs I had open of blogs I was reading. I often write poems, but they are an intimate form of writing and thinking for me and I’m a little reluctant to reveal some of those elements of my thoughts and personalities most times. Maybe it’s really because they are terrible and I’m willingly blind to that fact and I don’t want someone to point that out to me. Anyway, here’s the quote that inspired the poem, which follows that. The poem is, as of now, untitled. I hope if it’s good or bad, you’ll let me know. Linking to it if you find it good and if you think it bad, sending me a direct message to @RickTanski on Twitter-so no one else can see my public Internet failure ;^D. Also, if you’d like to suggest a title, post a reply and extend my thinking.

“A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.” -Will Rogers

To go on so and others deny
Down paths apparently clear
Follows the way Icarus did fly
With motives we think sincere
So like his lofty wings of wax
Pride-melted more than sun
We pay our independence tax
Levied against the one

To see the future uncertainty
Of dimly shadow-cast years
Gives us pause in the alacrity
Firing fiercely our fears
In imperatives to succeed
We consider it wise
To stop sowing important seed
And gorge ourselves on lies

In our veiled appeals for ways made safe
We realize the road’s been blocked
Prudence rules rightly, though she may chafe
Our thinking now, locked and hocked
Venture not down this fear fueled route
Children with little sense
Plainly the hidden truth comes out
They think us all just dense

Further fuel we add with speech made cheap
For outside the times fly there
With us inside time is wont to creep
Here transformation is rare
Sedately seeming standing still
At us they legislate
Righteous and raucous rail we will
Yet moving much too late

Disbelieved we are still doomed to be
Unless we realize this fact
More In others’ wisdom we must see
In our favor that is stacked
To go on and others accept
We build on their success
And then the truth cannot be kept
To grow more means us less

On Wednesday I got to hear (in person) Ewan McIntosh. He’s a challenging and thoughtful educator who actually wants us to focus on the teaching and learning -with web tools, if necessary, but not exclusively and certainly not at the exclusion of deliberate and purposeful thought. His thoughtfulness came through in his post-keynote session to his respose when asked what “effective technology use” looks like. His response was elegantly complicated: there’s no one way; it depends on what the teacher hopes to accomplish. These aren’t his exact words, but I believe the paraphrase encapsulates the thinking there.

Earlier today John Davitt delivered his keynote about everything and nothing in a sort of stream of consciousness approach. His British wit, subtle and engaging, left the gears turning. For a bit of “what if” be sure to check out his Learning Event Generator on his main page. If you have some of your own, find his contact information there and send him an email.

Later I attended a Marc Prensky session titled “The Death of the Classroom and the Rebirth of Learning in the 21st Century: How Technology Changes the Meaning of Teaching.” Especially in the past few years I’ve read Prensky, read what others have said about, but never heard him directly. Now I have. [Warning: Fit ahead in case you've missed the blog title above. I may have to apologize for being critical, but I can't let some of these things go.] I’m not sure my personal opinion matters too much, but I was, on a fundamental level, offended.

I regularly use my laptop to gather some background information on a speaker and this time was no exception. I found Marc Prensky’s site and clicked on his blog link. At first I thought I was having connection troubles because no headings came up and no recent entries, but that’s how it shows up. I’m not sure if he’s changed his blog lately, but articles can only be accessed by the archive link. I couldn’t use the link at the bottom to subscribe either. Okay, we all have tech issues sometimes.

Prensky has lots of experience behind him and has received a certain amount of attention for the Digital Native/Immigrant ideas. Far too many people absolutely stuff themselves with this artificial, divisive, and damaging distinction. Several, including George Siemens, Jamie McKenzie, and Gary Stager, have been critical of the distinction and David Thornburg even apologized for using it. One of my issues here is that by setting groups against each other with this kind of language only serves to widen a divide between teachers and their kids, producing at best, adversarial relationships founded in insecurity and assumed expertise. Additionally it provides some with excuses not to change by allowing them to sit back and point at the “immigrants” and how there’s so much to know so why bother at all. Further, any kind of language which has such polarity becomes prejudicial, judgemental, and discriminatory. Immigrant/Native language smacks of racist talk and all we have to do is look to most any example from history to see categorizations have significant negative impacts for the categorized. By the way, teachers who struggle with new technologies are not new: did anyone else help out with the film projector, slide projector, opaque or ditto machines? I mean all the Web 2.0 items are projectors in themselves, right? I wonder if there are any documented cases of some student helping her teacher out with that new fangled fountain pen? Nothing new, Mr. Prensky.

He calls himself a visionary and futurist but used a PowerPoint with distracting animation, overused sounds, and far too much text which he often rushed through to plug his upcoming sessions. Has he read Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen? How many of us have worked with kids who discovered animation and sound effects but didn’t realize how distracting they were and counseled (taught) them they could do better? The horns and excessive buzzes were annoying and many times condescending because we ignoramuses obviously couldn’t get the point -maybe because we hadn’t finished reading the slides. I also found it ironic hypocritical that for all his proclamations of the death of the classroom and teaching -gravestone graphic included -he still found it necessary to address us, via direct lecture and 20th century PowerPoint. Revolutionary…

Despite all these things, he received quite an ovation from a very crowded room. And, as people dispersed I heard many accolades and I wondered if some had finally found the excuses they were looking for and were relieved an MBA from Harvard and MAT from Yale told them they didn’t belong in this digitally-racist world and that it was okay because the kids have all the knowledge they need.

As long as educators continue to thoughtlessly buy the immigrant/native schism, they will undermine their own credibility, impair their abilities, and destroy their capacity.

In this packed session (notes below), Chris gave us his take on education first and then took us, as a group, the process of developing an UBD lesson. Along the way he masterfully facilitated the development, asking refining and clarifying questions, redirecting as needed. I could almost put myself into his school and see how he works with his staff through this process. really, really good stuff. I think I want to work at the SLA.

Although they appear below, they bear repeating when considering our approach to education, leadership, and related technologies “Tools don’t teach, but they change the way we teach. AND It’s not about the tool; it’s about the teaching.”

That’s the truth.

One of the other benefits of the session and also the conference is that I got to meet several of the authors of the blogs I read including Wes Fryer, Will Richardson, Karl Fisch, Bud Hunt, Stephanie Sandifer, Chris Lehmann, and Ewan McIntosh. For all of our online interactions, it’s very nice to shake hands and talk with people face to face.

By the way, before Chris Lehmann’s session ended, Ewan McIntosh had already posted about the session. When Dean Shareski asked how he could post before the session was over, Ewan tweeted in response “McIntosh always posts before the session’s done. I’m tomorrow’s NECC today ;-)” Good humor.

Chris Lehmann’s Session Notes

In our hurry to learn “What’s new,” we can’t lose sight of “What’s best?” Examine using the new tools in a school-wide, constructivist manner.  Recommended by ISTE’s SIGTC

·         http://ubd21c.wikispaces.com/

·         We work best and learn best when it matters to us

·         Create caring institutions

o    Who the direct and indirect objects of our sentences are

§  We teach kids first, subjects second

·         It’s not about us

·         It has to be inquiry driven

·         It has to matter

·         It needs to be metacognitive

·         Technology infused

o    Ubiquitous, necessary, and individual

·         It has to be driven by understanding

·         How do we get there?

·         Pedagogy matters a lot

o    (it matters for everything)

·         Progressive teaching

o    Using 21st Century Tools

·         How to prevent Technology Overload

o    What’s good is a better question than what’s new

§  The best one is the one we decide to use

·         5 things for kids

o    Research

o    Collaborate

o    Create

o    Network

o    Present

·         A Convenient and Reasonably False Taxonomy

o    Tools for each

·         Tools don’t teach, but they change the way we teach

·         What are your goals and what tools get you there?

o    It’s not about the tool; it’s about the teaching

·         Understanding by Design

o    How much more could kids learn if they didn’t have to spend all this time figuring out the adults

§  Transparent Learning

o    Step 1: Desired Results

§  What transfer goals and content goals will be met?

§  What should students come away understanding?

§  What essential questions will students explore and address?

§  What knowledge & skills [content] will students leave with?

o    Step 2: Assessment Evidence

§  How do we authentically assess?

§  What performances and products will reveal evidence of understanding?

§  What other evidence will be collected to reflect other Desired Results?

§  (the schools we need) Tests and quizzes are dipsticks to see if kid get the skills

§  (Authentic assessment is not just an end game)

o    Step 3: The Learning Plan

§  What activities, experiences, and lessons will lead to achievement of the desired results and success at the assessments?

·         http://www.scienceleadership.org/drupaled/keywords/showcase

Session Description

How is the read-write Web appropriated for connectivist learning and teaching? What are the implications for teacher knowledge-building, professional development, and assessment? This forum will connect theory with practice to address these questions.

Special Features

·         iEARN –International Education and Resource Network

o    http://www.iearn.org/

o    From the About us Page http://www.iearn.org/about/index.html

o    iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) is a non-profit organization made up of over 20,000 schools and youth organizations in more than 115 countries. iEARN empowers teachers and young people to work together online using the Internet and other new communications technologies. Over 1,000,000 students each day are engaged in collaborative project work worldwide.

o    Since 1988, iEARN has pioneered on-line school linkages to enable students to engage in meaningful educational projects with peers in their countries and around the world.

o    iEARN is:

§  an inclusive and culturally diverse community

§  a safe and structured environment in which young people can communicate

§  an opportunity to apply knowledge in service-learning projects

§  a community of educators and learners making a difference as part of the educational process

o    Brief description for linking: iEARN(International Education and Resource Network) is the world’s largest non-profit global network that enables young people to use the Internet and other new technologies to engage in collaborative educational projects that both enhance learning and make a difference in the world. Established in 1988 as a pioneering online program among schools in the the Soviet Union and the United States, iEARN is now active in more than 25,000 schools and youth organizations in 125 countries.

·         GlobalSchoolNet

o    http://www.globalschoolnet.org/

o    About GSN http://www.globalschoolnet.org/index.cfm?section=AboutUs

·         KidLink

o    http://www.kidlink.org/english/general/intro.html

o    http://www.kidlink.org/english/general/overview.html

§  Kidlink is a non-commercial, user-owned organization that helps children understand their possibilities, set goals for life, and develop life-skills. 

§  Its free educational programs motivate learning by helping teachers relate local curriculum guidelines to students’ personal interests and goals. Kidlink is open for all children and youth in any country through the age of 15, and students at school through secondary school. Most users are between 10 – 15 years of age. Since the start in 1990, used by children from 176 countries.

§  The Kidlink knowledge network is run by 500 volunteers in over 50 countries. Hundreds of public and private virtual “rooms” are used for discussion and collaboration. Information is available in over 30 languages. Statistics.

Assessment and Supervision of Online Teachers

-Allison Powell, Vice President NACOL

NACOL Standards

·         http://www.nacol.org/nationalstandards/NACOL%20Standards%20Quality%20Online%20Teaching.pdf

Education in the Post-Digital Age

-David Thornburg

·         OR Going Back to Tomorrow: Leaping Past the Future http://www.tcpd.org/ http://www.tcse-k12.org/ http://www.tcpdpodcast.org/

·         In the beginning

o    Mainframes

o    Dumb Terminals

o    Smart Terminals

o    Truly Personal Computers

·         Where are we headed

o    From Personal Computers to Networked Personal Computers

o    Online Applications

§  Smart Terminals

o    Dumb Terminals

§  With built in web client connected to distributed servers

o    Will we leap past the future?

·         Entering the world of Cloud Computing

o    The network is the computer

o    What happens when bandwidth approaches processor speed?

·         Thinking Influenced by

o    Lev Vygotsky

o    Henry Jenkins

o    George Siemens

o    Pierre Levy

·         Technology as a pedagogy amplifier

o    Stand-alone computers support Piaget’s cognitive constructivism

o    Networked – Vygotsky

o    Seymour Papert

·         Reality of the Cloud

o    Beyond hardware

o    Knowledge lies outside ourselves

o    Thoughts exist in space and time

o    Learning is a network forming process

o    Our view comes from node

·         Pierre Levy

o    Everyone knows something; nobody knows anything; what anyone knows can be tapped by the group

·         Networked Learning  is about

o    Connections, not just content

o    Connections between nodes builds understanding

o    Moves beyond content and concepts to causes

·         Groups and Networks

o    Different

·         Rhizomes vs Trees

o    Deleuse and Guattari

o    Hierarchical vs Non-hierarchical

o    Hierarchical impose structures

o    Non-Hierarchical reveal structures

·         Henry Jenkins Participatory Culture

o    Affiliations

§  Second Life

§  Orkut

o    Circulations

§  Blogging –Introduces concept of beta reader

§  Podcasting

§  Skype

o    Collaborative Problem Solving

§  Cmap http://cmap.ihmc.us/

·         Can put inside own firewall

§  Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

§  Moodle http://moodle.org/

o    Expressions

§  Fan Fiction http://www.fanfiction.net/

§  Flickr http://flickr.com/

§  Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu/

§  YouTube http://www.youtube.com/

·         Today’s Learning Space is all the above

·         Small World

o    Six degrees of separation

o    The power of the network increases as the square of the number of users

o    Powerful jumps when every student has networked computer

·         Are Schools Ready? [No]

o    Bandwidth limited

o    Many ban blogging

o    Many ban social spaces

o    Filters are mandated

Connectivism, Curriculum & Telecollaboration: Shifting Knowledge

Judi Harris, School of Education, College of William and Mary

·         Her site http://virtual-architecture.wm.edu/

o    Happens via networks

·         Telecooperative VS Telecollaborative

·         http://txtipd.wm.edu/

You can view the larger cloud at the Wordle site also. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Associated Press (as I traced the story back to them) through FoxNews.com and other outlets are reporting that Wake Forest University will drop the SAT and ACT for admission requirements and, as the University’s site says, make them optional. This, according to the the Wake Forest News Service, in light of some studies questioning the value of the tests. 

“‘While many top-tier universities are increasing their reliance on standardized testing in the admissions process, recent research suggests that standardized tests are not valuable predictors of college success,’ said Wake Forest Provost Jill Tiefenthaler, the university’s chief academic officer whose office oversees admissions.” 

The Raleigh News & Observer reports in their article,

“There is a growing movement among colleges to de-emphasize the test. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a Cambridge, Mass., organization that monitors standardized testing and advocates for alternatives, counts about 760 schools that don’t require the SAT or ACT. In recent years, highly regarded liberal arts colleges in the Northeast have joined the trend.”

The Wake Forest News Service also quotes director of admissions, Martha Allman, regarding the University’s reasoning,

“By making the SAT and ACT optional, we hope to broaden the applicant pool and increase access at Wake Forest for groups of students who are currently underrepresented at selective universities.”

Admirable, but is this really just a way for Wake Forest to keep the perception of being a highly selective university while broadening its applicant pool revenue stream? Time and bookkeeping will tell.

Further in the Wake Forest article you’ll see Allman remarking that 

“Removing the test requirement will demonstrate emphatically that we value individual academic achievement and initiative as well as talent and character above standardized testing.”

Interestingly the Wake Forest article makes this reference.

“Some studies indicate performance on the SAT is closely linked to family income and education level, while others suggest a possible testing bias against certain minority students.”

Ah, enlightenment in 2008, yet seems this has entered the collective understanding since at least March 9, 2001 (longer when you look at some of the research he sites) when Alfie Kohn published his article “Two Cheers for an End to the SAT” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Consider some of his bulleted items.

• “Year after year, the College Board’s own statistics depict a virtually linear correlation between SAT scores and family income. Each rise in earnings (measured in $10,000 increments) brings a commensurate rise in scores.”
• “Individual scores don’t reflect a student’s intellectual depth. The verbal section of the SAT is basically just a vocabulary test. It is not a measure of aptitude or of subject-area competency.”
• “SAT’s don’t predict the future. A considerable amount of research, including but not limited to a summary of more than 600 studies published by the College Board in 1984, has found that only about 12 to 16 percent of the variance in freshman grades could be explained by SAT scores, suggesting that they are not particularly useful even with respect to that limited variable…”

There’s plenty more there with one item referencing research from 1996.

So, I just have to ask… Knowing this specifically about the SAT and generally about standardized testing in general, how do we, in good conscience, perpetuate these practices? Why are we considering using a battery of tests from a similar company as part of our college and workforce readiness assessments?

Today at the CASE Legislative Debrief, we received an overview of the very active legislative session and the education bills that were passed (and defeated). One of the bills, SB 08-212 signed into law on May 14, 2008 by Governor Ritter, I have been writing about (see my CAP4Kids tag) and expressed some concerns. Later at the debrief round-table session I asked a series of questions about some things that haven’t been sitting well with me. I ask them here again (with some additional thought and background).

Is the purpose of schools [in Colorado] to produce workers? “Workforce Readiness” means preparation for getting a job and “College Readiness” means going to college to get a degree for a job, right? So schools are to be worker processing factories; that’s really what we are talking about, right? Take for example this excerpt from The General Assembly’s Finding (c) on pages 3 and 4 of the Bill,

“To be successful in the workforce and earn a living wage immediately upon graduation from high school, a student needs nearly the same level of academic achievement and preparation that he or she would need to continue into career and technical or higher education.”

This certainly seems to indicate worker production preeminence. What if a kid doesn’t want to be a worker in the traditional get-a-job sense?  Doesn’t this kind of thinking simply reinforce our old industrial models? The logical next question in response is “If not college or workforce readiness, then what?” My response is that those things are important, but we’re still negelcting the same things. What if a kid wants to be a musician, artist, novelist, actor, athlete, missionary, entrepreneur, public servant, or [add your own]. (disclaimer: there are requirements that standards be created in Visual and Performing Arts and PE, too, but we have those and they don’t figure figure into any of the state or national accountability reports now.) Right away I can anticipate the old arguments about managing money and “what if she blows a knee” and “kids still need to know how to read and write” and [commence hand wringing and brow furrowing] and other traditional “that’s not practical” objections. And before some get all “that’s not realistic” with me how many stories are out there and haven’t been told like Ben Kaufman’s, who started making money at 12?

Here’s some reasons why this has been so widely accepted. We K-12 people, especially us high school folk, finally have a law saying Higher Education has to work with them and not dictate to them. Higher Education loves it because they get tap into their revenue streams potential students in 8th grade (See Definition 13 on page 7).  The business community loves it because it gives them a consistent flow of workers and all those kids Higher Ed weeds out will already have their workforce skills mastered. Lots of  grades 3-11 educators love it because it’s not CSAP. (Be careful, fellow educators, what you wish for; you just might get it.) The testing companies, particularly ACT, love it because they get to make all kinds of money from all those School Readiness and Workforce Readiness assessments. (Think I’m exaggerating? click on the ACT link and look at the wording on the left side of the page.) Legislators love it because they have so many constituents in those other sectors who love it.  Lots of voters will love it because who can really argue against “School Readiness” or “College and Workforce Readiness” anyway. The feds are going to love it because we’ll be testing the kids like crazy -all the time. The media will love it because they can draw more people to their outlets when they sensationalize just how miserable a job education is doing because they’ll be able to manipulate all this testing data to tell any story they want.

I understand that we’ve been told we’re failing in so many areas in education when compared with the rest of the world. (Those notions, by the way, are also debatable on so many levels.) America is bleeding out jobs all over the world. America’s dominance in [add your lost American sector here] is [fill in rank here] to [fill in global competitor here]. So we must act with an Act using the ACT in order to perform the same act again. Maybe I’m becoming cynical and being critical, offering no solutions, but we have long identified the problems, proffered remedies, and ended up in the same place. Professor Daniel Tanner of Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Education put his finger on it.

“No less than any other era, the contemporary scene is marked by waves of conflicting and contradictory criticism and reinvented demands for reform. Following an era of damaging retrenchment, public school educators may be justified in hesitating to find fault with any of the recent reports and studies of our schools when these documents call for a vast increase in our investment in education. But unless the profession sorts out the demands and prescriptions for reform, the schools will continue to be buffeted by conflicting demands and will ride whatever sociopolitical tide is dominant.”

The American High School at the Crossroads from ASCD (1984!!!).

Having been a high school assistant principal, I have often been accused of being a poster child for coercive education. Indeed, the coercion passes from the Compulsory Attendance Laws through the office of the assistant principal right into the laps of kids who, because we have sold out to corporate mentality of money for time, are told they have no choice in the matter. We threaten with truancy proceedings and grade jeopardy, but we simply miss the fact that we must do a better job of demonstrating to them why it’s important for them to be there. We undermine our message of importance when we engage in ridiculous “traditions” like letting seniors (not underclassmen, mind you) out a week early or penalizing students 50% or more for not writing in cursive.

We are coerced, ourselves, by flawed national and local educational policies that reduce educational pursuits to little more than industrial-era performance metrics, workforce preparation, and college readiness (which has of late become a euphemism for workforce preparation). This is a recurring theme for me previously on this blog here, here, and here . Plainly, we have abdicated our social-moral responsibilities in favor of power, prestige, and money.  When the specter of school finance looms over every single decision we propose or make, we have no choice but coercion so we can keep our funding dollars. The priority simply becomes the money and not the kids.

Wes writes that “We must move beyond our current school finance systems which pay school districts based on seat time.” I submit that movement beyond is not enough; we need the complete and utter destruction of the current methods of school finance. This means obliterating capitalistic and corporate influences and mentalities in education and that’s not going to happen in a global society where our primary indicators of success are largely economic. I’m not advocating for setting up any “ism” here (before anyone accuses me of doing so); it goes beyond that.

Nearly everything about education is about competition: the highest funding ratio, the best grades, the best test scores, the best colleges, the best jobs, the best schools, the best technology. As with every competition, there must be loss. It’s here that I agree with Dr. Cook,

“The purpose of education  in a free society must be to liberate the full powers of the individual toward the common good…The common good is not served by the loss of any person…No democracy has any business accepting, much less supporting, any endeavor that does not hold the good of the individual  and the good of the society to be the same…To put it another way, education must not be the means by which individuals pursue their own goals to the detriment of others…And it is not a contest to be won…it is on this point that democracy and capitalism collide” (p 129-130, Unencorporating Education).

Some will probably accuse me of being un-American right about now; that’s not my intent. I think Wes and Dr. Cook have hit upon something that goes to the core of our culture and, for all of our rhetoric (mine included), I’m not sure we have the honest will to do anything about it, if may also echo Gary Stager as well.

Any information parents want to give the school which would be helpful for the student’s educational placement, needs to be addressed to the grade level counselor, and received no later than…

I wonder if I should submit a response like this…

My child needs active, engaging, teachers who work with technology as a platform for instruction, extension, investigation, revelation, inspiration, engagement, collaboration, innovation, authentic experience creation, and connection to the world. He needs teachers who won’t assume that learning results from assigning worksheets and who use homework as a leveraged investment in the educational process. He should be placed with teachers who hold themselves to the same standards they hold their students. He should be placed with teachers who have high standards without being rigid. He should be placed with teachers who have figured out that they teach kids, not subjects. He should have teachers who have been given the freedom to do all of these things by their leaders and have chosen to do so even though it may not necessarily be easy or convenient. He should be placed with teachers who value and engage in professional collaboration for the good of their kids. He should be placed with teachers who will never call themselves digital immigrants or him a digital native. He should be placed with teachers who have been given the resources they need to accomplish all this. And, he should be placed with teachers who get paid enough not to have to choose between gas and groceries.

“At the same time, some other hour of the day, might be taught them the rules of arithmetic, and soon after the elements of geometry, even playing, as the old manner was.”

When I looked up the reference at the back of the book it said

“Both Plato…and Quintilian recommend the use of games as pedagogical tools.”

Pedagogical tools from Plato and Quintilian? I just had to find out what in the ancient world they were talking about. And since it had been a very long time that I engaged with any of the classical authors, I consulted Google and via The Perseus Digital Libray at Tufts University, here’s what I found from Plato (emphasis added)…

“What I assert is that every man who is going to be good at any pursuit must practice that special pursuit from infancy, by using all the implements of his pursuit both in his play and in his work. For example, the man who is to make a good builder must play at building toy houses, and to make a good farmer he must play at tilling land; and those who are rearing them must provide each child with toy tools modelled on real ones. Besides this, they ought to have elementary instruction in all the necessary subjects,-the carpenter, for instance, being taught in play the use of rule and measure, the soldier taught riding or some similar accomplishment. So, by means of their games, we should endeavor to turn the tastes and desires of the children in the direction of that object which forms their ultimate goal. First and foremost, education, we say, consists in that right nurture which most strongly draws the soul of the child when at play to a love for that pursuit of which, when he becomes a man, he must possess a perfect mastery” Plato, Laws, Book 1, 643b-d.

And from the research of Lee Honneycutt, Associate Professor in the English Department at Iowa State University from Quintilian (emphasis added)…

“There are some kinds of amusement, too, not unserviceable for sharpening the wits of boys, as when they contend with each other by proposing all sorts of questions in turn“ Quintilian Institutio Oratoria Book 1, Chapter 3, line 11.

It seems that the Greeks were talking about games in education in the 340′s BC and the Romans in the 1st Century AD. We’re still talking about them today. Now they are framed within the context of video games or edugames. Both David Warlick and Gary Stager have offered their (mostly) differing opinions. The comments on David’s post have some interesting takes as well. Whether it’s Gary Stager’s ignorance arguments, or David Warlick’s thoughts about counter-pedagogies or the approaches that gaming might take in schools from the people over at The Games, Learning, and Society Group, we still have a long way to go in this gaming discussion. Just a couple of days ago, Scott McLeod wrote his latest entry about games and cited a stat about only 15% of “teachers have a more difficult time seeing how platforms generally associated with entertainment -i.e., video games, MP3 players, and cell phones -can be used as educational tools” (slide 15). Definitely a long way to go.

Just how much video games will influence (or not) our current systems of education remains to be seen. However, gaming is pushing its way in and it is having rippling effects, seen and unseen. Perhaps that’s what concerns some now just as it concerned Plato 2400-ish years ago “that those children who innovate in their games grow up into men different from their fathers; and being thus different themselves, they seek a different mode of life, and having sought this, they come to desire other institutions and laws” Plato, Laws, Book 7, 798c.

From the keynote…

One of the things I appreciated immediately was that he set up a blog entry with some links that he would be referencing through his keynote. During the keynote, David Warlick brought all the tech down to the level of students and teachers. That’s his mission, passion, and purpose. It’s not about the stuff; it’s about making meaning and making education meaningful.

Web Sites

• http://www.landmark-project.com/ -David’s site that has more resources I never knew I needed
• http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?p=257 -Warlick’s blog post about today. My friend and amazing teacher Michael is next to me in the red shirt.
• http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutlineForRLPresentation -Handouts
• http://davidwarlick.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RedefiningLiteracyForThe21stCentury -Slides

Items of Note

• Information has changed. What it looks like and what you can do with it and how we interact with it.
• We’re spending too much time teaching our kids to use paper.
• We’re preparing our kids for the future they are going to invent. We know almost nothing about the future we are preparing them for. “For the first time in history our jobs as educators is to prepare our children for a future that we cannot clearly describe.”
• We should stop integrating teachnology and integrate literacy. Being suspicious about the information they find. Investigate and become a digital detective.
• If all we have taught our kids is how to read, are they literate or dangerous? Adults were taught to read what was handed to us. Our kids are not reading this way. They are reading in a global electronic environment.
• We can’t rely on the gatekeepers to be the sentries of information. It must become a personal skill.
• Find information, decode it, critically evaluate it, organize it into personal libraries.
• We should not just develop literacy skills, but literacy habits.
• We should not just develop lifelong learning, but a learning lifestyle.

Keynote Centerpiece

Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic expand our notions of what it means to be literate by

• Exposing what is true
• Employing information
• Expressing ideas compellingly
• Ethics -The thread that weaves all of them together

A compelling quote, “We will have achieved educational reform when no teacher believes they can teach the same thing the same way every time.”

I’m ready to learn more in the roundtable sessions…

On Thursday (4/17/08) this week I received my BriefCASE from the Colorado Association of School Executives (CASE) detailing the legislative updates and amendments for Senate Bill 212, also called Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids (CAP4Kids), that passed the second reading of the bill in the Senate. I have referenced this initiative-turned-bill in two of my previous posts on March 19, 2008 and March 30, 2008.

CASE writes (I’ve added links): “These amendments will put Colorado on a fast track to piloting EPAS (Educational Planning and Assessment System) for purposes of data collection in the 2008-2009 school year. The next phase would call for the elimination of 9th and 10th grade CSAP and adoption of ACT College Readiness Standards for reading, writing, math, and science. It would move forward the following assessment package: Explore in 9th grade; PLAN in 10th grade and ACT plus ACT writing in 11th grade. All assessments would be administered in the spring.”

Later that day, I received a news release from the Colorado Department of Education(CDE) that detailed Commissioner Dwight D. Jones‘ “concerns about rush to adopt assessments before standards.” CDE Communications can be found at http://www.cde.state.co.us/Communications/index.html. Here are some quotes from the press release.

Colorado Commissioner of Education Dwight D. Jones today expressed his concern that amendments to Senate Bill 212 approved today may tie the hands of the department in choosing the best possible standards and assessments for Colorado students.

Specific concerns (abbreviated and bulleted, read the full text here)

• Alignment with standards. The ACT/EPAS products are not based on content standards adopted by 178 school districts across the state.
• Achievement gap information.“The Colorado public needs an assurance that any proposed system would provide a similar or better view of achievement gaps.”
• Costs. “No state in the country has gained federal approval for what is being proposed today,” said Commissioner Jones. “No costs have been projected or identified for the process of gaining federal approval…
• Growth model. “It’s unclear what adjustments are needed to fit a new test into the growth model,” said Commissioner Jones.

This appears to be the first skirmish in the highly publicized legislation. The legislative amendments definitely seem to be an acknowledgement, albeit political, of the general (correct or not) perception that CSAP is an irrelevant (at least in terms of usefulness to students beyond high school) exam. CDE has spent much of their time and energy on a longitudinal growth model that has CSAP scores at its heart. See Reference 1 and Reference 2for more information. There’s a sort of disconnect since the legislature, in House Bill 07-1048, required CDE to work with a technical advisory panel appointed by Governor Ritterto “to revise the growth model developed under HB 04-1433 to better quantify student growth (CRS § 22-7-604.3). The statute stipulates that the analysis of longitudinal growth should serve as the cornerstone of Colorado’s education accountability system.” (Note: HB 07-1048 is in the appendix in Reference 1 and mentions CSAP specifically. See the press releasefrom the technical advisory panel from March 6, 2008.) Apparently the House, Senate, Governor, CDE and the 178 school districts have lots of work to do before this becomes a practical reality. Is practical too hopeful of a word?

As an additional point the people over at ACT must be absolutely drooling over the prospect of getting an entire state of 9th and 10th grade students taking their tests. Of course we have mandated the ACT for our 11th graders already. Let’s not forget that although ACT is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit company, they aren’t giving their tests away and it’s in their best interests to capture as many kids as possible to give weight to their college and workplace influences. Their continued corporate health directly depends on their sustained growth. Their National Career Readiness Certificate and the associated WorkKeys assessment can’t be far behind if we go down the currently proposed legislative path. 

CSAP or EPAS, I could go on, but I already have: Fit: Corporational Education; State Standardized Test Questions. Let’s just hope there’s not more Death Threats for Test Scores (Thanks, Wes!)

The parental involvement I don’t mind, but when it comes to tri-fold poster displays, it becomes less about parental involvement and more about uh, parental guidance -and I don’t mean Mike Parent’s blog. (Although a blog does eventually play a part in this tale -read on, Digital Reader).

I dispise tri-fold poster displays and their inbred cousins, construction paper cut outs and foam display boards. They’re the so analog, so last-century, remnants of ancient business presentation expectations that have infiltrated our classrooms and science fairs. They’re very useful for the static displays of parental creativity and competition in gymnasiums converted to exhibition halls. Some may publicly look down their noses at the neatly arranged, heavily parent-influenced items on the tri-fold, but secretly covet the blue ribbon hanging on the corner of the board. And that’s where it starts. The pitiful tri-folds find themselves stuffed in the far less-traveled corners, assuming they even make it out of the classroom. So, in an effort to help our kids present themselves in a positive light, we parents make suggestions that turn into directives that turn into maddening scrambles and searches for mom’s special scrapbooking scissors that add some flare to this border. I wonder how many Sunday nights have ended with parents meticulously gluing display doodads while the kid is off in the other room playing video games. Nobody else? Must just be my house.

No longer, I resolved this time. (Plus, all the craft stores were closed and we were fresh out of foam board having used it all up on a quite beautiful State of Ohio display, which, by the way resides behind a door in the spare room downstairs as a monument to a maniacal frenzy of parental involvement.) It was time to take a chance with our kid’s education. Risky, I know, but I just didn’t have it in me to top the Ohio display.

About then I made a crazy Web 2.0pian decision and suggested that we put the required pieces of the assignment on a blog. Since this would be my son’s first foray into the blogosphere, I would set the blog up for him and give him a basic how-to after he had recorded all the required elements in a Word document. I wanted the initial blog experience to be more about the learning and less about the technical manipulation.

So he proceeded with his experiment, recording the materials and his hypothesis and the procedures and and the data and taking pictures as required. I set his blog up so he could copy and paste his text from the laptop. I made sure to make his blog viewable by invitation only because I knew I’d have to convince the hand-wringing, Internet fear mongers that this wasn’t a digital terrorism plot or would jeopardize his safety on the Internet. The really radical part was that we had several discussions about safe online behavior and what to include on the blog. We spoke about the type and amount of pictures he would be using and what he hoped to communicate with them. We talked about design and formatting and how each of those could help his audience understand him more clearly. We had more meaningful conversations that connected more of his past, current, and future learning to what he was doing just then. Certainly much better than the strained interactions of previous display-type projects. We’ll have more of the same conversations, I’m sure -and that’s just great.

With the entry edited and posted, I turned my attention to the science teacher and the district. This was going to be a surprise for the science teacher and I didn’t much appreciate those when I taught. I figured, more hoped, it was worth a shot. Just in case, I made a PDF of the blog post and emailed it to her after the blog invitation. She was able to see the blog from home and later on at school. She made some meaningful comments with questions and my son responded with thoughtful answers. I thought their exchanges were much better than a grade written on the back of the poster. Even more, she was very encouraging with the next assignment asking him to make another post.

For us and the teacher, it’s a dynamic resource easily accessible, not shoved in a corner or behind a door. We can look at the difference between the two entries and see the improvement -although he didn’t initially proof his spelling and mechanics on the second one, but we’ll work on that. His teacher shared it with some of his other teachers, who asked us to invite them so they could view it and we did. I was glad to see his excitement and his teacher’s. When the time came for the second assignment on the blog, he needed very little direction in the creation and organization. In fact he planned from the beginning how he was going to use the digital tools to accomplish his task. Score one for the Web 2.0pians.

As we discussed the Meaning chapter, some of my previous thinking surfaced and I found myself (probably) rambling on to the group about the various definitions of success we have in education and how they are tied to meaningfulness. It went something like this…

It doesn’t sit well with me that our primary gauges of success in education are college and workforce readiness. The most obvious response is “if it’s not college or workforce readiness, then what?” It’s a struggle to come up with an answer. However, if we define success (through school mission statements, especially) as economically productive, competitive global citizens prepared for future success (or some derivation like that). Many schools don’t necessarily have that idea explicitly stated, but our practices, often externally mandated, reveal such a focus. The big testing companies sell their world-o-work diagnostic tool as part of their business models so kids can know at 16, 17, 18 where they fit in the world of work or college. How do we reconcile this with some of the labor statistics and college major numbers cited by Did You Know and Shift Happens? I suppose that means we should be producing well-rounded students who have the ability to adapt and continue learning their whole lives. That seems to stand in contrast of streamlining kids into specific career and college paths. Do and will some kids go that route? Sure, but I’m not convinced that we should structure our educational systems so that all kids have to. Regardless, our system is structured to produce college and workforce ready people and that’s how we define our success and how we’ll expect them to define their success. The ways to success are to get a good job either with a college degree or without it.

What does good job mean for many people? Good money. Satisfaction and fulfillment all play a part, but like some fool said in answer to how much money is enough…just a little more. So there it is. If our definitions of success and meaning are closely and inextricably tied to that path of success, then the acquisition of wealth is really our metric. After all, it’s how we evaluate the colleges and businesses that pass dictates and judgements on to our schools. What about colleges why we’re at it. Why so many college drop outs? They want to blame inadequate preparation in high school, but perhaps it’s an inadequate ability for colleges to create meaning for their students as the colleges propel students to corporate bondage.

So now that we have defined education over the last 100+ years in the context of joining corporate America, we have no other way to define education. And that brings me back to “if it’s not college or workforce readiness, then what?” Self determination; the pursuit of happiness; the pursuit of knowledge; the search for meaning, service, caring, compassion, passion, creativity, individual expression, and on and on. Does any of it generate income? Can a corporate society support such an approach? It’s hard to conceive and even harder to see how these directly increase the bottom line. Can we do without college and workforce readiness? No. Can we do without all those other things in the pursuit of college and workforce readiness? Not for very much longer. If you think I’ve missed the mark, then I ask you to ponder the following and give an honest answer.

If a society defines success as the acquisition of wealth and the individual loses the capacity to create wealth, what value and meaning does the individual have to that society?

Today’s (Thursday, 4/11) keynote featured Robert Currie from Michigan Virtual High School who discussed, among other things, Michigan’s online learning graduation requirement and the CareerForward initiative created in conjunction with Microsoft’s Partners in Learning ”to help Michigan students understand how to plan their work lives and career opportunities amid the implications of the global economy.” Specifically, students ask and attempt to answer the following “challenge” questions: What am I going to do with my life? What is the world of work like? What will I need to succeed? What’s next for me? 

Those are compelling questions for sure and Mr. Currie gave his presentation in the context of 21st Century Learning Skills. However, are those questions really anything new? Do we see them afresh in the spotlight of the future? Ask Gary Stager about his take on 21st Century Learning and he’ll probably tell you something like those are nothing new. Ask Will Richardson, Dave Warlick, or Wes Fryerand they’ll paint a slightly different picture. Regardless of where you (or they) land, the spectrum seems to support a deliberate and reflective approach to purposeful, relevant, engaging, and meaningful education. Additionally, if you haven’t read Alan November, Scott McLeod, Mike Parent, Karl Fisch, George Siemens, Clay Burell, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Jon Becker, and others to get a flavor of the varying perspectives, you must and soon. Feel free to contribute “must reads” of your own in a comment.

Here in Anatevka, we have traditions for everything. How to sleep. How to eat. How to work. How to wear clothes. -Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof

I recently saw Fiddler on the Roof at one of our local high schools.  The production amazed me; it was much better than the 1988 version I performed in high school. I took my son and as we spoke about the themes of the show on the way home, a few things struck me.

First, The show starts with the song Tradition. This song establishes everyone’s roles and the part they have to play in the community. It clearly defines the rules and perspective: “Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years,” and “And because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”

Immediately after Tradition, we meet Tevye’s five daughters and his wife, Golde, waiting for the matchmaker who is about to fulfill her traditional role in assisting the girls’ parents in arranging the eldest daughter’s, Tzeitel’s, marriage. Of course Tzeitel bristles at the thought of the arranged marriage; this being complemented with the arrival of Motel, the poor tailor, Tzeitel’s true love interest. Love, however, has no bearing on the choice of spouse, but this is about to change. The three eldest daughters will each choose for themselves a husband, each moving further and further away from established traditions until the thrid daughter elopes and marries outside of her “kind” and completely outside of her traditions.

The play sets two dichotomies against each other: Tradition and Change. These parallel education today. The play has multiple connecting points of application throughout, but the central themes of tradition and change are the most salient.

Our very traditional educational system has poignant illustrations in two of Tevye’s lines in Tradition  (one modified slightly) : “Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years,” and “And because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what [he is expected] to do.” Now, however, we find that we are off balance and many of us are seeking to discern our new roles in light of traditional, not necessarily wrong, expectations. We are still expected to educate our kids and prepare them for their uncertain futures; that hasn’t changed. The traditional ways of doing so must. Unfortunately, our concept of “school” is defined within the traditional boundaries of school where education is dispensed by a highly qualified expert during specific times of the day and year to arbitrarily sorted groups of disengaged learners craving relevance.

We’ve been arranging these educational marriages for so long that it has become our traditional definition of education.  To conceptualize education any other way seems “unheard of” and “impossible” as Tevye sang on more than one occasion as two of his daughters presented him with husbands of their choosing. Like Tevye, attempts to change the tradition are often met with stalwart opposition in the name of upholding tradition. The Tradition refrain winds its way through the course of the play like many themes in education. As Tzeitel begs to be released from the artificial betrothment bargain Tevye has made Lazar Wolf, we beg to be released from the artificial structure of seat time equating to learning. Anyone who may choose to respond here can probably list myriad traditions that stand in the way, but ultimately under the current educational tradition we arrange for our students educational spouses they neither love nor care about.

We simply must examine our traditional practices and determine how much has changed since their inception. Whatever doesn’t fit or has become outdated, we must cast off in order to adopt new ways. Those, too, may become traditional, and we must constantly examine and adjust our practices for relevant alignment so our purpose doesn’t become as “shaky as a fiddler on the roof.”

What educational traditions are we holding on to that are getting in the way of change?

“At 2:32 a.m. this morning (April 1) television stations and the Gazette in Colorado Springs were sent a hoax e-mail that looks like a press release from Academy School District 20. The fake press release states that high school students have to retake CSAP tests because some tests were destroyed. All TV stations and the Gazette were alerted this morning that the press release is fake and that the content is erroneous. No CSAP violations have occurred in any of our testing and there are no students who have to retake the test. Some media agencies made no attempt to confirm the e-mail they received and did air the erroneous information or posted it to their websites. Most corrected the information by 8:30 a.m. today.”

It turns out that the ”news release” sent to the various news organizations had the district’s logo of some form, the superintendent’s signature of some kind, the mispelled name of our Public Information Officer, multiple misspellings, different font types, and was sent from an non-district email address.

April Fool’s Day hoax commentary aside, how does the story get run at all in any reputable news outlet? Who missed their information literacy standards and why has there been no public outcry even if it was April Fool’s Day? Perhaps it’s because most people already know the truth: the established, commercial media is cannot be trusted so it doesn’t matter anyway. If this sort of communications blunder had happened in the context of a school district mistake, I guarantee those very media outlets would be leading some kind of investigative report calling for someone’s termination.

How did our trusted media sources respond?

From the Gazette:

“Turns out the official looking “news release” from Academy District 20 about high school students needing to retake CSAP was a prank. District officials are trying to determine who sent it to local media. The “why” is obvious.

In keeping with the spirit of the day – good one!”

KRDO NewsChannel 13:

“Early Tuesday morning, NEWSCHANNEL 13 received an apparently legitimate e-mail from District 20. The e-mail explained how the district would be re-testing 9th and 10th graders who had already taken the Colorado Student Assessment Program exam. Multiple local media organizations reported this false information, until the District set the record straight…[text of email]…Obviously, unless for another reason due to a particular circumstance, no students will have to be re-tested. The e-mail is under investigation.”

I was unable to find anything on the other three news stations websites. I guess we’ll just have to trust them.

The joke’s on us.

The CASE newsletter reports that the bill, containing more than a dozen amendments, has support from CASE that “strongly believes that it will reach into classrooms with a new vision for standards and assessments as well as alignment at the critical junctures of preschool to kindergarten and high school into postsecondary options.” The newsletter reports that several superintendents testified in support of the bill as well. CASE reports “direct involvement in a series of amendments that were adopted into the next iteration of the bill. Many of these amendments were jointly presented by the anchor group members (CASE, CASB, and CEA), and we appreciated joining efforts with Great Education Colorado on the important resource questions that this bill raises.”

The article also reports “Boulder New Vista High School Principal and CASE member Rona Wilensky opposed the bill because she does not think that college and workforce readiness mean close to the same thing.” Wilensky’s commentary in the Denver Post can be found by following this link. Additionally, Principal Wilensky wrote a blog post in Education News Colorado titled Shooting Holes in CAP4K Underlying Premise on March 26.

Her Denver Post piece raises several issues that align with my “Points of Concern” in the previous post. I’d like to see more discussion about this beyond the PR news reports. I’m hoping that the analysis that CASE will be doing will be of substance and provide some insight. I can’t say that I have become a supporter, but I can’t say I have become an opponent either.

Here’s some ideas from his presentation as they are filtered through my processing and frenetic note-taking. I have added the categories above the bullets for reflection more than anything else.

Right On! 

• Stager cites a quote from Daniel Hillis’ Pattern on the Stone book [extended slightly for context]: “The computer…is a device that accelerates and extends our process of thought. It is an imagination machine, which starts with the ideas we put into it and takes them farther than we could ever have taken them on our own.”
• If your classroom questions can be answered with a Google search, then let them.
• Learning occurs in a community of practice where expertise is distributed.
• Eliminate self serving and schizophrenic practices and policies.
• We shouldn’t think of education as a competition.
• Be open to emerging technologies and decentralizing tools.
• The tools don’t matter unless they get in the way.
• Collaboration begins at home.
• We have operated on the SDSU curriculum for too long (Sit Down and Shut Up).
• He routine meets kids who have never had a meaning conversation with an adult.
• For faculty, collect the experts you want to study with.
  • Create a community of practice.
• We should use technology to create authentic experiences in more domains in ways never possible before.

Hold On!

• Stager doesn’t really care for Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and wrote an article called The Worst Book of the 21st Century – a review.
  • It would seem to be a little incongruous for me to have a few posts ranting against the corporate influences in our school and then write so much about a business book. Essentially, I think we must look beyond the rigid structure of American education and begin the discussions that will take us there. That’s the take-away of Pink’s book for me even though Pink never intended this book for education.
• ISTE should take a stand on how computers should work.
  • He said something like this very quickly and got a smattering of applause. I’m not sure where he was going with this, but to generally discount the efforts of ISTE leaves me cold.
• An educational revolution will not result from web 2.0.
  • Maybe not completely, but it certainly could provide the spark. Indeed, many have suggested it already has.
  • Also, I think he may have thrown a backhanded insult at those of us who consider ourselves bloggers for education, saying we are standing outside the circle of expertise. He seemed to contradict himself when he asserted that a way to join the community of practice was to learn from our [experienced] elders and emulate their behavior and practices. I’m not sure what to do with that. Maybe I should ask Karl Fisch, Wes Fryer, Alan November, George Siemens, David Thornburg, Dave Warlick, or any of the other educational leaders that write on The Pulse blog.

Go on…

• There’s nothing new about 21st Century Skills. They are simply the skills that rich people wanted their kids to have in the 20th century.
  • I would like to see a little more from him here than a simple dismissive attack.
• Every course should be taught as liberal art.
  • He didn’t spend enough time here to give me a good picture and I’d like to know more.

More about Gary Stager so you can check it out for yourself… 

• “Stager-to-Go is the place where Gary Stager can share news & views not suited for his professional outlets.” He’s the Senior Editor for District Administration and its blog The Pulse.

He prefaced his talk by saying he is most often asked variations on the question: “How did you do it?” As he spoke, he repeated several main points (among others) that translate to our journey as educators.

• Do what you have to do.
• Fix the communications.
• Decide to grow as a result of and through your experiences.
• Keep the faith in each other and beyond yourself.
• Learn from each other. 
• Use your sense of humor.

He mentioned that we initially may think that we, as educators, may not have a whole lot in common with POW’s and their struggle, but he repeatedly brought his story back to us and illustrated the connections. At the beginning he referenced that his captors firmly believed in the divide-and-conquer through isolation and the prisoner’s way through that was to develop a system of communication so they could share and transmit their common knowledge and experiences. The POW’s, used their collected knowledge, simply, to survive. They relied on the experiences and knowledge of everyone to educate, entertain, and, even in a POW camp, grow. It’s a great illustration of how a community of connected individuals united under a common purpose does more than just survive.

Student as Contributor: Digital Learning Farm
Before tractors and combines, more that 60% of the population in North America was involved in farming. Today less than 2% lives of the population works on farms. Farm children made a vital contribution to the family with real chores. While technology eventually eroded the meaningful work of children, we have enough technology today to restore the dignity of real work in school. All of our students can use collaborative online tools and research and global communications skills to add value to the learning community.These contributions include:
* Curriculum Review Team
* Tutorial Creation/Organizing/Design Team
* Global Communication Team
* Official Scribes
* Resource Finders
* Technical Editors

If you are unfamiliar with Alan November, I would encourage you to check out the November Learning website and all the resources there. I’ve already registered for his Building Learning Communities Conference in July. Alan is crazy. I heard him say so today. And you know crazy people have dangerous, sometimes blasphemous ideas. The excerpt above makes myhis point. That’s dangerous stuff when you think about it. Are we ready to have kids do those things? (For an expansion on those ideas, check out TxDLA’s “blogstress” Harriet Watkins’ post about the keynote.)

As for his blasphemy, he suggested we actually let kids use Wikipedia with all its errors and unreliability! Only he took the insanity one step further when he suggested that we use that type of technology to give our students a global platform for publishing, commenting, and idea refinement. That kind of crazy talk will surely have some reaching for their benzodiazepines. (If you are going to click on that link to see what that word means, you are risking your educational sanity by using an unreliable source even if you get everything you need to know in the first sentence. You’ve been warned!)

Maybe we only want to give lip service to this whole 21st Century Learning stuff. Alan doesn’t. He made his doctoral students actually contribute to a Wikipedia article for their peers to review. Wow! I want to be crazy like Alan November!

• Governor Ritter’s Press Release
  • The complete bill
• The Denver Post (Denver)
• The Rocky Mountain News (Denver)
• CBS4Denver (Denver)
• 7News (Denver)
• 9News (Denver)
• NewsFirst 5/30 (Colorado Springs)
• The Gazette (Colorado Springs)

Points of encouragement (I may expand on these later)

• Re-examination and refinement of standards; most have been around in their (relatively) current from since 1996  
• Educators from around the state will be involved
• “The next generation of standards-based education must take into account the fact that different students have different aspirations…” (page 6 lines 24-26)
• “Public education must be designed to encourage and accommodate students’ exposure to and involvement in activities that develop creativity and innovation skills; critical-thinking and problem-solving skills; communication and collaboration skills; social and cultural awareness; civic engagement; initiative and self-direction; flexibility; productivity and accountability; leadership; information technology application skills; and other skills critical to the twenty-first-century workforce…” (page 7 lines 11-19)
• “…achieving the goals outlined in this part will likely require the reallocation of state resources to meet increased needs at the state and local levels, including but not limited to significant investment in professional development for educators.” (pages 8-9, lines 24-27, 1)

Points to watch/Points of concern (I may expand on these later also)

• Implementing model content standards for pk-13, currently we only have model content standards for grades 3-10
• The development of a significant amount of bureaucracy to facilitate this
• 45 references in some fashion to the Colorado Commission on Higher Education
  • 4 references to technology (3 of those with in context of information technology)
• Assessments aligned to postsecondary and workforce readiness (PWR)
  • Scoring criteria to measure students’ level of PWR
• Requiring “each local education provider to require each high school student, beginning in 9th grade and continuing through 12th grade, to enroll in the PWR program.” (page 3, second to last paragraph) 
• Requiring “each high school student’s final transcript to describe the student’s level of PWR based on the student’s level of performance in the PWR program and on the PWR assessment.” (page 4 end of first paragraph) 
• Endorsements and outstanding achievement indicators on diplomas
• Amending “college admission and remediation policies to permit students to earn qualifying credit by proficiency, not by “seat time” or course titles alone.” (bullet point on the press release page) 
• The reactions of colleges and universities

More on this as it evolves. I’d be interested in the thoughts of others in the blogosphere related to this.

Say what? A rational, research-based, purposeful approach to a problem? What will the social activists on NBC and in Washington, DC say? What will all the school Internet filter managers say? What about CIPA?! What shall we do?!

Here are my suggestions -lingua en buccae,

1. Ignore the research and the professionals in the field and make decisions based on hysteria and sensationalized media reports.
2. Don’t educate yourself by reading Internet Safety and Social Networking for Parents or Safe Digital Social Networking. They’re posted on wikis and everyone knows those are unreliable. In fact, did you know wikis lure our children to their intellectual demise and are completely unreliable? People who want to corrupt our children use, ugh, wikis…and blogs and social networking sites and all of those newfangled tools of destruction.
3. Let your preconceptions make your decisions.
4. Avoid tough topics and conversations about the nature and sources of the problem. They may make you and others uncomfortable.
5. Scare people by telling them only part of the truth. It’s best just to tell people only about the bad stuff that’s out there -so they can know.
6. Fool yourself into believing that you can monitor and restrict all your kids’ online interactions. Who uses text messaging anyway?
7. Blame the schools.
8. Underestimate others and overestimate yourself. After all it worked for Great Britain and the colonists, the church and Martin Luther, Hitler and the British, South African people and the apartheid-South African government. 

Social networking isn’t just about the high profile online sites, it’s about the millions of blogs like this one. In fact, if you’re here and you don’t think you’re a social networker, think again. Do all of us need to be aware of the risks? Absolutely. However, I’m still waiting for the media frenzy and social activism for the greatest risk of all to our kids, one we actually expect most of our kids to participate in. I shudder to think of the rights violations arguments and lawsuits that would happen if we took the same fear and control approach.

Dad: “Son, the CSAP tests are part of the Colorado Student Assessment Program and, look here, the law says so, ‘Every student enrolled in a public school shall be required to take the (state) assessments (in the content areas and grades administered). – Colorado Revised Statutes [22-7-409(1.2.a.1.d.I)].’”

Boy: “When will I know how I did?”

Dad: “Four or five months from now.”

Boy: “When I’m in the next grade? Will my new teacher tell me how I did?”

Dad: “Well, they send the Performance Report home and the results get stored in a data warehouse that your teacher has access to.”

Boy: “If I do well, how will that help me in school?”

Dad: “It won’t; it shows your teacher, school, and district did a good job. It helps them.”

Boy: “What if I don’t do well?”

Dad: “Well, they might put you in a different class to help you get better.”

Boy: “With other kids who didn’t do well? You know, some kids just write anything in their tests. Will any teachers want to teach that class? It sounds like a tough job.”

Dad: “I’m sure the teacher will do her best.”

Boy: “Our principal came on the announcement speaker and said we should get lots of rest and eat a good breakfast the day of the test. How come he only says that during testing time? Is it okay to stay up and skip breakfast the rest of the school year?”

Dad: “No, you…”

Boy: “And how come we don’t have any homework for the testing weeks? My teacher said it’s because they want us to concentrate on our work. How come we don’t do that all the time?”

Dad: “Well, see…”

Boy: “I kinda like testing time. We actually don’t do that much work in class for almost two whole weeks. And I can’t wait until I get to my junior year in high school. Those kids don’t have to come in until noon because the freshmen and sophomores are testing all morning. Except one day when only sophomores take the Science test. And some kids’ parents say they don’t have to take the test. Our principal says that those kids’ tests count against our school.”

Dad: “That last part is true, but it may be changing.”

Boy: “Do the teachers still get paid for not teaching those weeks?”

Dad: “Yes, it’s part of their jobs.”

Boy: “Wouldn’t they rather be teaching?”

Dad: “Without a doubt. But some people say this will help them teach better.”

Boy: “But our teacher says that our 5th grade class will be compared to next year’s 5th grade class. Is that right? I mean, we’re pretty smart but the fourth graders are a bunch of booger pickers.”

Dad: “Um, the State is working on that. They are trying to look at how you do and, hopefully, improve each year.”

Boy: “That makes sense. How come they haven’t been doing that all along?”

Dad: “What else have you been told about the CSAP tests?”

Boy: “Somebody named Nickelbee made the schools give us all these tests. We have one or two administrators who are in charge of the tests and some secretaries that help sort and bubble the outside of the tests with information about us and if we finished the tests. In fact, we had a visit from a nice lady from the district office who says her only job is to coordinate all the tests the kids in the district take. She’s nice, but I think she likes numbers a little too much.”

Dad: “Now be nice. You know if a teacher messes up and give the wrong test or a kid goes ahead, she gets blamed?” 

Boy: “When you add up all the teachers, support staff and secretaries, paraprofessionals, building adminstrators, district administrators and support staff, and all the people at the state level, and all the paid test graders, for all the 477,000+ kids in grades 3-10 in all the schools in all the districts in the entire state and multiply that by the three or four tests each kid must take over multiple days, that seems like lots of time and money.”

Boy: “Dad, is it worth it and where does all that money go?”

I took a survey today in order to give “input to understand the expectations that various stakeholders have of Colorado’s graduates.” I think there is an implicit assumption that the input come from Colorado people, but the information is publicly available on the web at the Colorado Department of Education website under the CDE Communications link.

Disclaimer: I have the utmost respect for many of the people at CDE and those serving on the Graduation Guidelines Development Council. I know more than a few of these people personally and I’m excited about the change in direction. More than one of them is absolutely brilliant and I apologize if this is perceived to diminish their work. I really am hoping for the best, but it’s dark, and the iceberg has been spotted. The opinions listed below may not represent anyone else’s but my own. I reserve the right to change my opinion after further consideration and persuasion -and emergence from this fugue. Maybe it’s Dr. Cook’s book, but it’s sure a raw nerve right now.

With that said, some of the questions stood out. Most used a Likert scale that had the items Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree. One question read…

6. What should be the primary outcome(s) of public education? How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following? (Insert Likert scale after each item with check buttons)

a.) Post-secondary Readiness    
b.) Workforce Readiness     
c.) Minimum competencies 
d.) Socialization and general education
e.) Create thoughtful and responsible citizenry
f.) Other

And another…

7. How can the high school experience be improved? How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following? (Insert Likert scale after each item with check buttons)a.) Increase the rigor and expectations
b.) Provide relevancy for the subjects taught
c.) Integrate more career and technical opportunities
d.) Increase the chance to apply content learned
e.) Provide students with access to programs and curriculum so that they can make informed decisions about their post-secondary lives     
f.) OtherAnd…8. How can high schools motivate students to excel? How much do you agree or disagree with each of the following? (Insert Likert scale after each item with check buttons)

a.) Offer students an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of course content in order to move through the system at their own rate
b.) Provide internships to apply content learnings to “real work”
c.) Create high schools that are “career pathways” thus enabling students to plan their post-secondary careers early
d.) Offer opportunities for participation in a variety of rigorous academic programming to assure students have the skills necessary to make post secondary choices
e.) Offer students more “dual credit ” opportunities that count toward high school graduation and college credit
f.) Other

First of all, I’m encouraged that some of the choices reflect some more modern considerations and some of the later questions have some of the same types of progressive choices. When I considered the choices and the areas they represent (not counting “other”), one or two of the responses fell outside the corporate realm. (As an aside, as you’ll see below, I group colleges and universities in with corporations.) I hope this is an opportunity to change things, at least in Colorado, but with the disproportionate weighting of choices, I’m discouraged. I gave my thoughts at the end of the survey, right or wrong, practical or not. I submit them here for your consideration…

Our kids should NOT be held to the so-called achievement metrics that have their origins in corporate America. The current educational practice in Colorado and the US to create workers, either right out of high school or eventually out of college, makes us (education) subservient to the corporations who have a vested interest in having a constant flow of employees. Our focus on seat time, and core subject standardization (at the expense, often, of non-tested areas), and school days and calendars that were designed in the Industrial Age have moved us away from the pursuit of knowledge, democracy, collaboration, communication and innovation. The difficulty in quantifying these ideals makes them unpalatable for a culture obsessed with wealth accumulation and proves that we should be educating and developing kids, not producing automatons for colleges and businesses.

We have let colleges and universities in Colorado dictate to us what courses our kids should have in order to attend them. We acquiesced; as a result, we are a party to educational discrimination and elitism. When we examine the source of these dictum, we find that they come from those with a vested interest in maintaining a fiscal bottom line, not a human one. The colleges and universities, who hunger for more tuition dollars, have partnered with corporate entities, like ACT, to produce a self-serving set of requirements designed to increase their capital intake. Meanwhile kids continue to drop out of our schools citing lack of relevance and lack of engagement as primary reasons. They are smarter than we think. They see a life of servitude either to the higher education or corporate machines. In that regard we have failed them.

Our current educational system is designed for a world that no longer exists. Schools are constantly prevented from producing a moral populace of learners and teachers, innovators and communicators, citizens (both local and global) and thinkers, servants and seekers, creators and collaborators. We are stopped by business methodologies and corporate expectations. The world has changed fundamentally especially for the US, yet we want to keep reinventing our archaic, outmoded, and ill-conceived system. This survey seems designed to justify that position.

This bothers me. I have considered multiple reasons: bad breath, voice, delivery, context, and on and on. I may have a hunch; I call it Replacement Theory and it works a little like this. When we hear new ideas and are trying to assimilate them into our understanding, we try to fit those ideas into the framework of our prior knowledge and sometimes our preconceptions. Upon familiar association we take those new ideas and attempt to completely replace our existing constructs. For example, when I tell people that I’m working on the development of an online high school, I can almost see how they replace their current idea of “school” with their now-forming conception of an online school. Different people use different mechanisms for this and their questions reveal their station of operation. Educators, of varying expereinces ask questions that seem to be founded in outdated concepts of correspondence courses or in irrelevant industrial models of schooling. Some ask me questions rooted in control: “How do you know if the kids are doing their own work? How can we make sure they are spending enough time on the…?” Current students ask me questions about dances, clubs, activities, and other opprtunities for social interactions.

I think most people are trying to see the entire picture even though they don’t have all the pieces. They either use their existing conceptions to fill in the pieces or simply leave the holes. Either approach often leaves irreconcilable gaps that form into impossibilities and those manifest themselves in the initial facial distortions and closed body postures. Almost all try to understand and their questions are insightful and helpful; however, when trying to put themselves into their newly formed conceptions, they cannot always make the leap. In the face of that uncertainty, they assume incompatibility and many times, failure.

My job is to educate, purposefully. It was like that when my content was English or technology. That has been my focus regardless of job title or assignment. That part -purposefully -encompasses many facets of the educational process, but ultimately I have to connect the prior knowledge and experience of the learners to the new. I can assist them in their journey of understanding in being deliberate, thoughtful, and innovative in my approach. If my goal is deep understanding and thoughtful response, I am obliged to purposefulness. If I’m simply a fact distributor, my usefulness ranks lower than a computer with an Internet connection and bookmarked wikis. It’s only through the higher levels of thinking and interacting that we will accomplish our educational intentions and overcome Replacement Theory and some of the automatic assumptions of failure and incongruency.

Those are the top reasons the book study participants gave today when I asked them to tell their story and frame it within the question of why they got into education. Empathy, chapter 7, in A Whole New Mind contains a portfolio section called Empathize on the Job. In activity #2  How Did I Get Here? Dan Pink writes “Sometimes you work near people for years but have little idea about the path that brought them alongside you.” So today I asked. We, at the request of the group, modified the activity and had each person tell his/her own story to the whole group. I took notes on one side of a notecard and listened for themes in each person’s story. The dominant ones are at the top of this post. The word passion came out of every story directly, simply, plainly, and unflinchingly. This, from a group that ranges in experience from only a few years to 20+.

I wasn’t surprised about passion, being influenced by another teacher, or making a difference. Those seem to be very common bonds among educators. The other, called to the profession, surprised me a little. Many in the room spoke about being called to the profession, having it in their blood, or simply knowing from an early age they were supposed to be in education. More than one took a circuitous path, some resisting, but we all ended up here. It seems to be somewhat anachronistic, especially in today’s postmodern technological realm, to respond to a call.

This identification of purpose or meaning (Chapter 9) resonates and grounds people, making them unshakable stalwarts. Passion permeates what they do, who they are. Not all educators reside here, but the ones who do simply radiate and attract kids (and adults) to themselves. It’s not out of ego or grandiosity; it’s their quality. The same thing happens when the sunrise stops us or a piece of poetry gives us pause. We cannot really quantify it, but we can see its results. Kids, other staff, parents, even you know who these people are.

The ones who answer their calling are not limited to education, but few other vocations so poignantly intertwine people and purpose, message and meaning, wisdom and wonder. Can we teach kids to answer a call regardless of vocation? I’m not sure, but we can prepare them to be ready, receptive, and reflective. The purpose of education starts there.

I’ve spent almost all of my life in the formalized world of American education. I entered education, like many people, around age 5. I have very few memories of my early years in school. In fact I don’t remember much before 6th grade. I’m not sure why, but I have very few contextual experiences which jog my mind for those early years. My family moved around quite a bit and the four consecutive years of high school were the longest stretch I ever attended in one school -so I’ve been told.

For kindergarten through 1st semester of my 8th grade year, I went to public schools. Second semester of my 8th grade year I went to a parochial Catholic school. I hated the change in the middle of the school year, but my dad wanted me to go to a “good” school and this particular parochial school fed into one of Columbus, Ohio’s best high schools, Bishop Watterson High School. The school’s profile reads that it is a “comprehensive, co-educational, Catholic school for grades 9-12…A large majority of parents are college educated, business and professional people…The curriculum is largely college preparatory. More than 98% of graduates enter four-year or two year colleges and universities.” The Student Handbook dives deeper into the school’s philosophy, beliefs, and mission. Although I, at first, I reluctantly attended Watterson, I grew to like it. I was challenged -sometimes too much, I thought, and I found places to connect like the theater. I wasn’t a stellar student, but I wasn’t average or below. The further I got from Watterson, the better I remembered it.

I went on to Colorado State University (CSU) and earned my Bachelor’s in English and completed my coursework secondary teaching license there. Again, I wasn’t a stellar student and was only below average for the first year or two. I eventually made it to the Dean’s list my last few semesters, but that was when the courses got really interesting and engaging. Most of the teachers I had now have a * next to their name indicating emeritus status. I wouldn’t consider myself old, but that doesn’t help. I can’t recall any of the names of my education teachers and when I look over the faculty pages, no one rings a bell. I completed my student teaching at a high school in Fort Collins, CO where CSU is located.

After graduating from CSU, I began teaching at a high school in northern El Paso County, Colorado. I began as an English teacher and through a series of improbable events ended up teaching technology classes as well as coaching basketball -neither of which I had done before in any meaningful capacity. During that time I went to the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) for my Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction: Educational Computing and Technology. They call it Instructional Technology now. That degree and the work I had done teaching allowed me to become the school’s technology coordinator and later the database administrator for the district.

Later, I completed the coursework for my principal’s license from the University of Denver and moved into the assistant principalship at two different high schools also in El Paso County, but in two different districts. Now I’m working on the development and implementation of digital/online high school for my district and that’s where my frame of reference comes into play.

I consider myself a lifelong learner and have even explained my moving about in education as a restless desire to improve. I used to mean improvement for myself, but now I reference it in the larger frame of education. I know education can be better. I have hope that we, as a global community, can effect the changes that our kids need. But…it’s our (my) frame of reference that keeps getting in the way. The path that I took to get here is not all that unusual in terms of the schooling progression. Each step, however, contributed to my frame of reference and reinforced the historical traditions that informed (and continues to inform) it. My frame is common, not in a pedantic way, but in a shared experience way. It worked for me so it must work for my (our) kid(s) now, right?

If you’ve read any of the other entries here, you know that’s not what I think. Einstein has been attributed to say “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” That means we have to step outside our frame of reference. When I look at my frame of reference I see the fingerprints of traditional educational history all over it. We live in a very different, accelerated, connected, dynamic, (fill in your own flat-world adjective) time in history when our traditional frames can’t stand up to the expectations of the future. It’s that tension that scares the wits out of most people who have connections of any sort to the educational community.

To drop another name, George Washington is reported to have said “One of the difficulties in bringing about change in an organization is that you must do so through the persons who have been most successful in that organization, no matter how faulty the system or organization is. To such persons, you see, it is the best of all possible organizations, because look who was selected by it and look who succeeded most in it. Yet these are the very people through whom we must bring about improvements.” We all have had some measure of success and many of us (educators, parents, community members, policy makers, etc.) succeeded most, but that doesn’t mean our kids will if we do nothing to alter our current trajectory.

I’m almost a quarter of the way through the book. I’m not buying it all and sometimes it seems that Dr. Cook is often more interested in sounding like an intellectual than with getting his points across clearly. He sometimes makes assumptions that the reader has some background knowledge and content and proceeds without giving any additional information. He doesn’t, at least in the initial chapters, explain why the first word of the title of his book is spelled with an “e.” I get it, but I’d like to have read early on about his thinking behind that. I suppose one could argue that’s the point of the book, but I digress.

Like I said, I’m not buying it all (funny, considering the capitalistic underpinnings of all this), but the idea has been planted and I probably have my business-in-education radar running. Besides all his references to the Scans Report, the Educate America Act, and others in the first chapter, I’m noticing it too. Books Ideas are like that, right? Read the blog entry on the NBR site by the Director of Program Development, Jack Kahn where he asks is education “The next ‘hot’ investment sector.”  Yes, I’m sure, just not the way educators would hope. As if I needed anymore reason to pause consider the statistic Kahn sites: “total education spending in the U.S. is now close to $1 trillion — more than any other service sector except healthcare.” He doesn’t indicate his source, so I went to the Digest of Education Statistics on the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Sure enough, the estimate for 2005-2006 puts it at about $921.8 billion, or about 7.4% of the Gross Domestic Product of the nation. If you go to the site, look at the footnotes. The numbers are probably higher when those variables are factored in and we add two years to the table. Does anyone else find it ironic that potentially useful data from the U.S. Department of Education is not available in a timely manner?

Does that kind of money surrounding education alone prove Dr. Cook’s point? The discussion of money and kids has a distasteful, almost taboo, stigma attached to it, but we can’t serve the kids without it. Are we really diminishing our kids to corporate servitude, as Dr. Cook suggests? Worse yet, does the collective unconscious of some of our young people recognize this and cast them into despair manifested by acts of violence or general apathy? Doom and gloom, I know, but the mashup of school violence and educational encorporation happened for me in only one push of the channel button on the remote. Ideas are like that, right?

The thesis of this book is simple: the nation’s fundamental institutions, by intent or by default, have abandoned the historical Western idea of education and thus have opened the door for a hostile takeover by corporate America. The result is an educational system, if it may be so called, that has been robbed of its essential human nature (educare) and turned into a rationalized process designed to produce profitable workers, according to industry specifications. The individual is diminished to servitude; true democracy rendered impossible.

There is no correcting the existing system. It cannot be reformed, reinvented, restructured, or salvaged. It must be utterly destroyed and new systems of learning and teachings created -systems worthy of human beings. The suggestions offered here are an attempt to begin the action.

It’s a compelling, unsettling, and uncomfortable premise to be sure. To borrow from Malcolm Gladwell and his book, Blink, my initial “thin slice” is one of resonance with a measure of caution thrown in. A guest blogger, Greg Cruey, on the Dangerously Irrelevant blog has a post that touches on some of the same ideas. Watch for more to come as I work through the rest of the book.

Overall

• Intersection
• Discovery
• Examination
• Application 

For Design

• Incorporation
• Democratization
• Engagement
• Alignment

For Story

• Intention
• Direction
• Explanation
• Association

For Symphony

• Innovation
• Determination
• Elevation
• Assimilation

For Empathy

• Intuition
• Demonstration
• Emotion
• Amplification

For Play

• Invigoration
• Distribution
• Enjoyment
• Advancement

For Meaning

• Implication
• Discussion
• Epiphany
• Analysis 

One of the interesting parts is that any IDEA in any chapter could be applied to any other chapter. I don’t define the bullets very much leaving the connections to the individual members. My goal is to get them looking at each bullet and find intersections of the book and their professional practice, uncover discoveries of ways to engage themselves (and later kids) in the big-picture ideas, examine the way they (and kids) do what they do, and apply all of it in a 21st century (or a Whole New Mind) context. The results are as mixed and as varied as you might think.

As a side note, besides Dan Pink, I have to give credit to Dan Maas who first made a presentation about A Whole New Mind at a CASE conference session that provoked some thoughts that wouldn’t stop needling me. As a result, I read the book and began thinking about the implications for education.  I needed to hear from others and the book study was born. I still need to hear from others, which is why it’s here now.

I have had some interest in the process I use for leading the book study. So I post here a few guidelines. I’m a little reluctant to put a bunch of content up here because the true power is to customize the study based on the group and their common community. With that said, I did develop some questions for the first three chapters specifically and the remaining chapters generally. I’ve listed some of those below.

The structure of the study has us meeting once a month through the school year (weather permitting) on Saturdays for two hours with the discussion revolving around one chapter. The first three chapters encompass one meeting at the onset. For the chapters on the six senses, we discuss the chapter part and usually transition into some items in the Portfolio section. When I prepare for the group meeting each month, I see what resources I have bookmarked from the Portfolio section and spend some (often too much) time following links and reading blogs and going down digital rabbit trails. Those trails have turned up some goodies that really seem to get great conversations started or help transition to new ideas.

In addition to the meetings, I have created a blog using our district’s web software. I password protect this blog for various reasons, but mostly because I think the sharing among peers is a little more honest and reflective when it’s not subject to the scrutiny of the outside world. Some would argue that we’re missing out on the exchange of ideas on a global scale, but right now, the ideas are for them. I also have them complete a culminating project of some kind to satisfy the fiduciary duty to the district and taxpayers. Projects have ranged from a simple reflection paper to unit designs to in-service sessions to redesigning entire courses and course expectations.

I have approached the first meetings of both studies in much the same insidious way: we’re here to change the world one classroom at a time. The book studies aren’t about complete indoctrination; they’re about giving perspective and providing reflection. The best meetings have often resulted when I have only made the opening welcome and comment or question and have said nothing more. To listen to the conversations, to see the ideas germinate and grow, to feel the energy build as professionals honestly and passionately discuss how they can change the world with their classrooms, that’s why I got into education.

The questions for Chapters 1-3 often start by directing them to a specific point in the reading and turning their thinking to an element of education or culture. Some of them are unsettling once you kind of jump in and get dirty. Some simply elicit a nod of sympathetic recognition. Even though the book is not directly about education, the implications for education are staggering. Should you end up deciding to use the questions, I’d simply ask you to refer to the Creative Commons license on this blog for attribution information. If you’d like more information or to discuss more about the book studies, leave me a comment indicating so with whatever contact information you deem relevant.

A Whole New Mind of Questions -Part 1 -Chapters 1-3 and on

• What is a knowledge worker?
  • Are schools designed to produce them?
  • What will be the responsibility of schools of the future related to knowledge working?
• What kind of thinking has dominated the last few decades?
  • Where do schools fit into this structure?
  • What will be the responsibilities of schools of the future?
• How is the organization of the book metaphorical for the brain?
  • How do schools touch both sides of the brain?
  • How should schools touch both sides of the brain?
  • What are obstacles in making this happen?
• What is high touch and why is it important?
  • Where is this important in our schools?
  • Who has the aptitude to make this happen?
• What is high concept and why is it important?
  • Where is this important in our schools?
  • Who has the aptitude to make this happen?
• What is L-Directed Thinking?
  • Where has been its role in the Information Age?
  • What is the importance of this thinking in the Conceptual Age?
  • What has been education’s role related to this kind of thinking?
• What is R-Directed Thinking?
  • What is the importance of this thinking in the Conceptual Age?
  • What will be education’s role related to this kind of thinking?
• What are examples of abundance in education?
  • What do schools in general or our school specifically offer of value and meaning in this age of abundance?
• Will Asia and related outsourcing be a factor in education?
  • What parts of the educational program could be outsourced?
• How will automation change education?
  • Note: The question is not will, but how.
• Why is high tech no longer enough in education?
  • Did education even get there?
• How have MBA’s (or their thinking) had a place in education?
• Do MFA’s (or their thinking) have a place in education?
• Is education at the end of the Information Age if it has it made it there?
• How does Education currently answer the three questions?
  • What is the value in coming to the schoolhouse?
  • Or how does our school answer the three questions?
• How should educators respond to the ideas in the IQ and EQ section?
  • Should education emphasize both IQ and EQ?
  • How could this be done?
  • What would an EQ school look like?
• How does the Money and Meaning section play out in the educational structure?

Big Questions -Part 1 and throughout

• What are the implications of these ideas for the classroom?
• What are the implications of these ideas for the school?
• What are the implications of these ideas for the district?
• What are the implications of these ideas for the state?
• What are the implications of these ideas for education in the U.S. and the world?

Dangerously Irrelevant posted a link today to the 2008 Education Blogosphere Survey. The deadline to participate is January 26, 11:00PM, (GMT -6:00) Central Time (US & Canada). I took the survey; it only takes a few minutes and will help to get the word out for the educational blogsphere.