Category: education reform

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Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit – part 2

The other day I wrote about the Ed in 08 event I attended in Washington DC last week. Although it was a nice event, I really didn’t get what I expected out of it. I expected more details about their platform.

The Ed in 08 campaign is a plan to get the presidential candidates to talk more about education and create more urgency in American politics for improving education. Their three policy pillars are:

  • Higher standards
  • More effective teachers
  • More time and support for learning

Uh huh, sure – who isn’t for these. But what exactly do these phrases mean? There are a thousand interpretations, and a thousand more implementation ideas.

  • It matters a great deal if “higher standards” means “more tests” or “national standards” or “punishing children”. In the printout of the 25 slide PowerPoint they handed out, there is only one bullet point that addresses this, “The next president must lead a national effort to create more common, rigorous standards that are benchmarked to the world’s best performing countries.”
  • It matters a great deal if “more effective teachers” means “blowing up schools of education” as one speaker put it, or merit pay, which is another idea that sounds good but always ends up badly, or some other secret agenda. You can’t just wave a magic wand and pretend that effective teachers will appear out of nowhere.
  • It matters a great deal if “more time” means more of the same, or if there is some coherent plan to make something different happen in that extra time.

As they say, the devil is in the details, and anyone who has lived and worked in the virtuous-sounding “No Child Left Behind” era knows that slogans and empty platitudes aren’t policy. Judging from the examples most often used at the Blogger Summit, what they are talking about is KIPP Academy. If that’s what they mean, they should just come out and say it.

I don’t understand how Ed in 08 expects people to get on this invisible bandwagon. If they are calling for national standards, or a national test, let’s hear it. Otherwise, it’s just a lot of empty words.

Sylvia

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Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit

Ed in 08Last week I had a last minute opportunity to be in Washington DC for a day. It happened to be a day that Ed in 08 was having a Blogger Summit “…to discuss how the Internet is changing the discourse of education reform, and how those changes are affecting the 2008 presidential election.”

Before this event, I’d read a little about Ed in 08 – it seemed to me to be a lot of money to promote very little. They use a lot of vague words — “strong” schools, the need for “reform” without explaining what that means, “fixing” schools, and lots of scary statistics about kids, jobs and the economy.

What is Ed in 08?
Ed in 08 is a campaign run by an organization called “Strong American Schools” as an advocacy effort aimed at elevating discussion during the presidential election about the need for education reform. According to their site, “Strong American Schools is a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, two of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world, have provided grant funding for Strong American Schools. Our budget is estimated to be up to $60 million.”

Newt Gingrich
I was interested to hear Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich as the lunch keynote. I’d heard him speak before, and even though his politics run more conservative than mine, he is a good speaker, and has interesting ideas that don’t come out of the usual political mill.

He actually seems to have spoken to teachers and children and thought about the consequences of policies. It was refreshing to hear a conservative who does more than spout scary statistics, “get tough” rhetoric and vague feel-good slogans. He talked about how top-down mandated curriculum stops creativity and relevance in the classroom. He made some good observations about the need for authentic assessment. Although there were some silly parts about how anyone involved with education can’t be part of the solution, his speech was the highlight of the day for me.

Ed in 08 – Missing in Action
What I did expect was to hear more about the Ed in 08 agenda, but that didn’t happen. The organizers seemed to have been so concerned that the audience would hate a hard sell that they decided to have no sell at all. They also seemed to have forgotten that if their aim was to get education bloggers talking and writing about Ed in 08, they needed to give us something to write about.

What I would have liked is to have a panel where the ideas were really discussed. If they really believe that teacher merit pay works to improve schools, where is the plan, the support, the research, or anything substantive? How would you solve the problems of what to base it on and how do you stop people from gaming the system? And more importantly, teachers consistently report that money is not a motivating factor in their career choice. Why is merit pay even being discussed as a solution? Is this just another rich-guy sound bite?

If they were worried about being fair and balanced, they could have brought in people on both sides of the issue and had a real discussion.

But instead, there was a string of panel discussions and presentations, none of them about Ed in 08. The oddest one was a panel of journalist bloggers who talked about blogging. I guess we were then supposed to blog about the bloggers blogging.

Less Talk About More Time, Please
The lamest speaker was an author who has written a book about how schools need a longer school day. His speech was about how he’s written a book about how schools need a longer school day. It needs to be longer because children will learn more. In their longer day. Because we need more time. To do more things. In a longer day. (This went on for quite a while, but you get the picture.)

There was precious little detail about what exactly happened during the extra time, but plenty of scary facts and statistics about how far behind American schools are and how dumb American children are. It’s amazing how much time there is for research meant to scare and how little time there is for research that supports the foregone conclusions.

Then, he showed a video and lo and behold, teachers and students talked about projects, hand-on learning, teachers discussing student work, teachers planning together, and administrators talking about all the fabulous things they do in their schools. Huh? Where did that come from!

Apparently, all that’s needed to improve schools is a couple of extra minutes, and then, lo and behold, everyone starts doing everything differently. 42 minutes – you get test prep, 43 minutes and **ding** everyone turns into a constructivist. I just found it completely naïve to assert that schools that can’t find the time during a normal school day to even attempt hands-on project-based learning, or can’t arrange for teachers to talk about lesson planning for 5 minutes will suddenly start doing these things for no other reason than there’s more time.

Teacher Bloggers in the Trenches
Anyway, a good part of the day was a a “teacher/bloggers in the trenches” panel. They talked about what their blogging has meant to them, their students, and the community, and showed how complex the subject of education is. There were no simple answers or feel-good slogans coming from these teachers. It was a terrific discussion that actually belied much of the rhetoric about kids that had gone before. By the way, please check out these great blogs (those that still exist!)

What I Learned at Ed in 08 Bloggers Summit
At the end of the day, I have to say that I know nothing new about Ed in 08 that I can share with you. But so it’s not a complete waste of time, here’s what I learned:

  • The Palomar Hotel in Washington DC is really nice.
  • The food was much better than most education events. Thanks, Gates and Broad Foundation.
  • Newt Gingrich is not just another right wing crackpot and I’ll pay more attention to what he has to say from now on.
  • Alexeander Russo of This Week in Education is a really big guy, much larger in life than his blog profile photo. Here’s what he said about me in his blog, “They’re [sic] a woman here Sylvia Martinez with her laptop pointed towards the podium — she’s ustreaming the event (live streaming video). Very cool.” I guess that’s my 15 minutes of fame 🙂

More about the Ed in 08 agenda tomorrow…

Sylvia

P.S. I’m 0 for 2 this week with ustream.tv, a combination of pilot error and lack of a good mic/camera. Apparently there are good videos of the Ed in 08 events that will be posted soon. The Gingrich speech is worth listening to.

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The cost of free courseware

I just got an email from the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. MIT OpenCourseWare puts the entire MIT curriculum online, free of charge. The materials are excellent, and it’s been hailed as one of the top resources of its kind and an example of why “free is the future.”

The email explains all this, and goes on to explain that their publishing and review cycle costs money. It costs money to check the copyrights and get permissions. It costs money to videotape professors, edit the video, and post it online. Bandwidth and servers are not free.

“In total, it costs about $4 million each year to support OCW.”

The email continues with some examples of how courses are helping people around the globe in worthy projects. But guess what comes next…

MIT is committed to keeping OCW open and free to all, everywhere. You know the value of OCW to yourself and how the materials offer a greater value to humankind. And now you know the cost. Your contribution of $25, $50, $100 –– or whatever amount is right for you –– directly supports the production and distribution of high quality MIT course materials.

Please invest in yourself and your world. Click here to make your donation now.

Now really, people…
The MIT 2007 Financial Report shows an endowment of $9 billion dollars (yes, that’s 9,000 million dollars). In 2007, they took in cash gifts of over $330 million dollars. They really need my $25?

Honestly, it seems tacky. They decided to put their resources out there and generate a lot of publicity about being the wave of the future. Now they are looking for someone else (namely me) to help foot the bill?

But no, not just me. According to Wired Magazine back in 2002, “The William and Flora Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations ponied up a total of $11 million for the first two-year phase. (MIT kicked in another $1 million.) Those organizations are likely to continue supporting the initiative, which is expected to require an additional $20 million or so before the rest of the courses are posted by the end of 2006.”

So they asked for money, so what?
I HATE complaining about this, because the MIT materials ARE truly excellent. People around the world can learn from the top lecturers in the field. Every high school educator and interested student should check out the Highlights for High School section of the MIT OpenCourseWare site. There are fabulous multimedia resources, really innovative courses like furniture making and international development, and terrific support materials.

I applaud MIT for finding a way to make all this available AND creating a quality product. The problem isn’t the materials, or even MIT asking for money. (I’m slightly peeved by them asking ME for money, but hey, at least they are being honest about the need to fund their project.)

Free costs money
The problem is that the rest of the world is pretending that because there is no cost to use courseware resources, there is no cost to create these resources.

This particular “free” cost $20 million dollars (probably more!) to get started, and now needs $4 million a year to keep going. Doing some admittedly rough math based on the 1,800 courses online gives food for thought. Each course cost $11,000 to put online, and needs an additional $2,000 per year to keep it up there.

What does this say about the real viability of open courseware in general?

I have to say I’m still struggling with this concept. In this case, MIT is trying to figure out how to expand their influence to become a world-wide leader in education. They obviously made a conscious decision to spend a lot of money to preserve the integrity of their brand by delivering top quality (and therefore expensive) resources. Now they will start to find out what access to this market really means.

In Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business (Wired Magazine 2/25/08), Chris Anderson says, “Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.” With OpenCourseWare, MIT is trying to expand its market beyond a few thousand students, a few company research partners, and past the usual academic boundaries to the entire world. It’s an interesting gamble.

In contrast, many other free open courseware and open content libraries sacrifice quality to lower their initial costs. They rely on users to contribute and edit content, but without a guiding editorial hand, the quality will be variable and the coverage sketchy. The tension between these approaches is yet to be resolved.

What an interesting world we live in!

Sylvia

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Situating professional development

In my recent post, Six Degrees of Professional Development, I grouped PD: Academic coursework, Workshops/sessions, Formal research, Informal, Classroom embedded, Action research. One of the reasons I grouped the 6 types in this particular way is that it situates the professional development.

To me, one of the most powerful ideas in learning is the theory of situated learning. This term was first used by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. I first read this book in grad school, and it has colored everything I’ve learned since. Situated learning happens in Communities of Practice, defined by Wenger on his site as, “… groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Community of practice is a term often used when we talk about teacher professional development. But in fact, I think often it is confused with community of interest. Community of practice is where you DO something. Community of interest doesn’t have to be. When we chat with friends and Twitter buddies about teaching and how to do it better, or what tools to use, that’s a community of interest, not a community of practice.

The primary community of practice for most teachers is within the confines of their own classroom. The participants are the teacher and students. Sometimes other people visit, but these visits are few and short. While teachers may participate in other communities in a professional capacity, for most, the classroom is the only setting for their professional practice.

Traditional forms of professional development remove the teacher from their classroom and attempt to create a community of practice made up of teachers and technology experts. This community exists only for the purpose of imparting information from the experts to the teachers. While there is certainly a place for collegial discussion and access to professional improvement, it is not unreasonable that teachers often reject transparent efforts to force them into participation.

Wenger, in discussing designs for learning inside communities of practice, makes the point that they, “…cannot be based on a division of labor between learners and nonlearners, between those who organize learning and those who realize it, or between those who create meaning and those who execute.”

Common recommendations for technology professional development include that teachers be given more time for independent practice without fear of embarrassment, to watch expert practitioners, go to conferences and workshops, or participate in online learning communities.

The problem is, these attempts to fix technology professional development only serve to reinforce the separation between the teacher learning new skills and real change in classroom practice. In a book chapter called Teacher professional development, technology, and communities of practice: Are we putting the cart before the horse? Mark Schlager and Judith Fusco look at the use of Tappped-In, an online teacher community, for professional development. They say it “… tends to pull professionals away from their practice, focusing on information about a practice rather than on how to put that knowledge into practice.” Mark Schlager is director of Tapped In, so this is not just someone who doesn’t like newfangled online PD.

In short, mere discussion about practice does not create a community of practice.

Even if a great workshop excite teachers about new possibilities and tools, the teachers are removed from the successful context and sent back to the classroom to fend for themselves. They are expected to use their new skills without colleagues or experts present. One-on-one coaching that provides in-class mentors is expensive and rarely available. The technology specialist is not always there, and the “teacher-down-the-hall” that many schools depend on for technology help has their own class to teach. Online teacher communities can only take place outside of classroom time, too late for any intervention or advice to be useful. Maybe you can Twitter out a call for help, but that’s too unreliable to count on in crunch time.

So as teachers struggle alone in their classroom with questions, issues, and problems, valuable teachable moments are missed.

In an interview discussing what changes need to take place in classrooms to allow project-based learning, Seymour Papert says, “What we need is kinds of activity in the classroom where the teacher is learning at the same time as the kids and with the kids. Unless you do that, you’ll never get out of the bind of what the teachers can do is limited by what they were taught to do when they went to school.” (Interview on Edutopia site – Seymour Papert: Project-based learning)

So you know where I’m going with this. You have to look at the whole classroom and maximize the chance that teachers will learn alongside students. It has to be the norm, not the exception. By looking to students as co-learners in the effort to use technology, teachers end up learning more themselves. It takes a willingness to take risks in front of students and to model an attitude of openness to new ideas. I think seeing learning with technology happen through the eyes, hands, and screen of their students is the only way teachers will really understand the potential.

Situating professional development in the classroom is, I believe, the only way that technology will really be integrated into every classroom.

Sylvia

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What is professional development?

Everyone knows that “professional development for educators is important.” It’s one of those phrases you hear all the time without really thinking about it. I did a session at last year’s K12 Online conference called “Challenging Assumptions About Professional Development” that talked about some of the myths we believe about professional development, especially regarding technology. But even then, I didn’t think much about the question, “what is professional development?”

I’ve done some web research, and found lots of terrific resources about things like the essential elements of professional development, methodologies, how to do it, and much more. But what I didn’t find is a simple breakdown of the kinds of professional development that teachers can participate in. Because in my mind, breaking down the kinds of professional development into simple groups gives us a “map” of the possibilities. Sort of like food groups – it can help create a balanced diet.

Here’s my list – I’m open to suggestions…

1. Academic coursework

  • degree/professional certification awarded at completion

2. Workshops/sessions

  • workshops
  • in-services
  • conferences

3. Formal research

  • publish research
  • participate in research
  • apply research to your own situation

4. Informal

  • collegial activities
  • Personal Learning Networks
  • mentoring
  • being a mentor
  • reading, listening to podcasts, watching videos about education/teaching
  • blogging or creating other content related to education

5. Classroom embedded

  • learning from/collaborating with students
  • workshops given in a real classroom situation
  • in-classroom mentor teacher
  • team teaching
  • student teaching
  • observation

6. Action research

  • deliberate reflective practice to change your teaching

My suspicion, of course, is that most professional development falls mainly into one or two traditional groups. I’ll explore this in a future blog post, and how we might create a more “balanced diet” of professional development for teachers by combining different forms of professional development to balance strengths and weaknesses of each type.

Sylvia

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Service learning prevents dropouts, engages and motivates students

An op-ed article in today’s Christian Science Monitor by John Bridgeland contains some powerful evidence that service-learning could be a key factor in lowering dropout rates, increasing engagement, and motivating students.

Service learning tackles high dropout rates and civic disengagement

Service learning programs like our own GenYES create win-win situations where students are empowered and engaged to solve real problems in their schools and communities. In GenYES, students learn how to work with teachers and staff in their own school to solve technology problems and help teachers use more technology in the clasroom.

Service learning is an educational technique that combines classroom learning with community service. What’s critical is that it is not only key to getting more students engaged in their communities, but, according to a report released last week by Civic Enterprises, it is also a powerful tool to keep students on track to graduate from high school.

This report, called Engaged for Success, is well worth downloading – it contains research, case studies, and much more. And it’s not just drop-out prevention. This research would be useful to support adding service learning to improve student motivation, increase engagement, and encourage student voice.

A nationally representative survey of high school students, including at-risk students, paints a hopeful picture. Eighty-two percent of all service-learning students said their view of school improved because of their service-learning classes, and 77 percent said that service learning had a big effect on motivating them to work hard. Furthermore, 64 percent of service-learning students claimed that service learning would have a fairly or very big effect on keeping them from dropping out of school.

Although we hear a lot about “research-based” programs. But many times schools only look for research to justify what they are already doing. Research should be informing the search for innovative solutions, not done as an after-thought.

And it’s something students want. They are looking for opportunities to make a difference, to be somebody, to count and to be counted on.

Although high-quality service-learning programs are cropping up across the nation, such programs are still unjustifiably rare. Eighty-three percent of students said that if their school offered it, they would enroll in a service-learning program. Yet only 16 percent of all students, and only 8 percent of students at low-performing schools, reported that their school offered service learning. All too often students do not have access to, or do not even know about, such programs offered by their schools.

You don’t need to look outside the school walls to find authentic problems that students can solve. Technology integration is just such a tough problem for many schools. The research is clear here too – technology integration improves student achievement. And yet, it remains at the bottom of the to-do list in far too many schools.

This makes GenYES a double-impact research-based innovation. By helping teachers use technology in all classrooms, GenYES students provide a much needed service in their own school and gain much in return. GenYES students learn more than just technology skills or how to help teachers. They learn that they can make a difference, that their talents are useful and needed, and that they can have a say in improving education for all.

Research proves it.

Sylvia

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Students say filtering hurts their learning opportunities

SpeakUp logoProject Tomorrow has just released the Speak Up 2007 National Findings.

Over 319,223 students, 25,544 teachers, 19,726 parents and 3,263 school leaders shared their ideas through Speak Up 2007 surveys.

From their website: Speak Up 2007 revealed a growing “digital disconnect” between students and their teachers and parents about the role of technology for learning, and how well schools are preparing students for the jobs of the future. This disconnect is evident in the fact that school administrators (66%), teachers (47%), and parents (43%) say “local schools are doing a good job preparing students for the jobs and careers of the future,” but over 40% of middle and high school students stated that teachers limit their use of technology in schools. Forty-five percent of middle and high school students indicated that tools meant to protect them, such as firewalls and filters are inhibiting their learning.

“Students continue to be on the leading edge in terms of adopting, modifying and re-using digital content and technology tools to enrich both their personal and educational lives. The students in many ways are far ahead of their teachers and parents not only in the sophistication of their technology use, but in the adoption of emerging technologies for learning purposes,” said Project Tomorrow CEO Julie Evans. “It is in our nation’s best interest that we support and facilitate student usage of technology for learning.”

Other findings:

  • 54% of students are interested in STEM careers
  • One-third of teachers say they would like to teach an online class
  • 84% of administrators say educational technology enhances student achievement
  • 63% of parents say they know more about child’s schoolwork and grades because of school technology

 

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Quote for today

“Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults’ inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.”

– Alan Kay (Scholastic Administrator, April/May 2003)

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Quote for today

“It takes putting kids and adults into a shared community in which they are all members, albeit with different levels of responsibility and skill, different kinds of authority, with each accountable for different parts of the whole. And it takes trusting in our children’s vast intellectual potential along with our innately human drive to understand and master.” Deborah Meier – In Schools We Trust