Manna

Today was the 2nd day of the GE Foundation’s Developing Futures in Education 2010 Conference, an invite-only conference for the districts they fund throughout the country. This morning, we had the pleasure of hearing the many schemas for schools from David Jackson, partner in the Innovation Unit, an education futurist non-profit organization in London, UK. I learned a few things that are (for better or worse) irrefutable:

1. Many of us are just not ready to think 3.0 when we’re still catching up to 2.0.
2. Teachers specifically want something tangible when discussing anything about the immediate or abstract future.
3. We have little faith that our colleagues as a whole will want to let go of their power structure within the system.
4. Many of us are still waiting for the manna to drop from the sky, or the higher-ups.

By manna, I’m referring to the nutrition that came from the heavens when the Israelites needed some nourishment in their travels through the dessert. But for the purposes of this post, I’m also referring to the idea that someone from the higher-ups, whether it be collegiate think tanks, corporation-funded non-profits, or the Secretary of Education. Believe what you will, the system perpetuates the status quo, and the profit models for education currently support millions of dollars going into third party vendors to move what we call standards wherever those in power see fit.

Therefore, when looking at the models Mr. Jackson provided, I pondered for a bit about the work many teachers are doing across the country to truly move the work forward, and the way we need to think about student learning as a whole. Then, when time for feedback came, I stood up in front of the crowd and said, “Well, this is great, and we’re intrigued by the possibilities, but if we’re really going to do the work, it has to come from us. It has to come from the ground up, not the top down. The status quo is the status quo because of this model. Rarely does real change come from the higher ups; the change has to come from students, parents, teachers, and anyone who considers themselves allies to our cause.”

I got a light applause. Appreciated, yes, but the more I thought about the future, the more it made me wonder the sort of curve we’re going to have to slide down to get true change. I sat down, had a glass of water, and just hoped for the best. Educators are practitioners, yes, but we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.

And if our hands are still cupped waiting outside, we better have a huge canteen as well.

Jose, who’s looking to reflect more on this as we go on this journey …

Saturday’s New York Times brought us a fascinating article on robot technology and teaching. In their piece Benedict Carey and John Markoff describe the cutting-edge developments underway where “highly programmed machines” with motion tracking and speech recognition tools can engage humans and “rival” some teaching tasks. In one investigation, reported in the NYT article, a robot named “RUBI” was found to significantly improve the vocabulary of two handfuls of toddlers.

No doubt artificial intelligence can greatly enhance learning opportunities for the growing diversity of students entering our public schools. So many other industries and professions —whether in automobile manufacturing or in medicine —increasingly are investing in technology to enhance productivity and advance professional practice.

But as one executive of a company that makes a remotely controlled robot made perfectly clear: “The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children” and “it’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen” in a classroom. As Carey and Markoff note, “If robots are to be truly effective guides…they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.”

If you do not quite get this point, just turn to another piece in the Saturday edition of the Times, pointing to the large growth in Teach for America — a high-profile effort to recruit recent young graduates of top-flight universities, who receive only a few weeks of basic training before they enter some of the nation’s highest needs schools. Here’s what reporter Michael Winerip writes about Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, who is struggling to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers.

(Liliana) prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken. She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game. 



“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.” 



“Do I have to play?” asked the boy. 



“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered. 



The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order. 



“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”

This is where the nuance of knowing your students well as individuals and having a deep understanding of child development, sociological interactions in a classroom, and behavior management — as well as varied pedagogical techniques in math — makes the difference in what gets learned. And no robot can do it all. Nor can an ill-prepared and under-supported teacher.

We need Ms. Nguyen and thousands more like her, but we need them and those who support them to make a full commitment to the preparation, support and ongoing professional development it takes to become an excellent teacher.

Katie Salen’s perspective on learning is so far ahead that she seems like she is speaking from the future. Her views are synched with the emerging realities that the TeacherSolutions 2030 team describe in our work. By the year 2030 teaching could become a student centered profession that gives students the education they need and deserve.

In the future kids will need to collaborate, work in teams, engage in complex problem solving, practice empathy, and adopt new identities, all in an environment where it is safe to take risks. According to Salen, all of these skills are taught through game design. At Quest to Learn, a grade 6-12 charter school in New York city,  founded by Salen’s Institute of Play, students participate in project based learning grounded in an approach that intertwines game theory and learning theory.

In the interview below, Katie Salen says  a lot of important things but, the one that really made me do a double take was this, Salen says,

“One reason games are so motivating for kids is that they actually know that it was designed for them to be successful within it. They don’t often think about that in the classroom sometimes. I don’t know that they think about the classroom as an environment that has been designed for their success. It often feels like a nemesis or challenge that they have to go through, but they’re not quite sure that they are going to be able to do it.”

That comment hit me like number two pencil in the eye. It blasts an asteroid sized hole in our standards based educational reforms. The current path, so defined by testing, sets kids and teachers up for just that, the chance to fail. That is why we are losing bright kids and brilliant teachers, because, they don’t feel like the educational system is set up for their success.

Games as Salen describes them are actually a stronger accountability system than the current make or break, end of year test. Salen describes how games actually have assessment built into their design. Every second of every game, kids know how well they are doing, they are solving problems scaffolded to just the right level of challenge, and when they are successful, they know it. When they aren’t, its no big deal, just start a new game or go back a level and learn what you needed to learn to move forward.

Listening to Salen describe how learning, assessment, and game theory are so interrelated I couldn’t help but think, if we aren’t too late, the future is now.

Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Salen

from: Public School Insights

I recently joined a group of teacher leaders at a national symposium for teacher leadership. The Center for Teacher Leadership held the conference in my home city of Richmond, VA so I was excited to present but, I was even more excited to meet some amazing teacher leaders from around the country. Among those teacher leaders were Kenneth Bernstein, Nancy Flanagan, and Lori Nazareno the keynote speaker. Lori talked about how ten years ago she was “just a teacher”. She encouraged the audience to let go of that notion of “just” and embrace the powerful position of teacher leader, someone who can change lives.

It seemed like what Lori was trying to say is, “If you are ‘just a teacher’ you will never be able to reach beyond those classroom walls with your influence. If you are a ‘capital T Teacher’ your reach is as far as your imagination.” For a long time educators have tried to explain the importance of the situated reality that we swim in as teachers in public schools. We don’t choose our students, our working conditions, our funding streams, or our health care system. We try to influence these things but, addressing the crippling affects of structural poverty are nearly impossible within the context of the daily interactions with students. We would need to change the idea of what schools are if we are going to really put our money where our mouth is and address the achievement gap. Many teachers like Lori are trying to do that but, it would be a lot easier if they had some help on the context side of public schooling.

Recently a shift has begun in that context approach to school reform. Policy makers are finally beginning to acknowledge the context of schools in their programs and policies. Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone is one such approach. I think his approach has worked because it is locally grown and structured to address a particular community’s needs. Another such effort is taking place in Boston. Recently Claus von Zastrow interviewed some educators in the schools participating in the Boston College project called City Connects: Optimized Student Support. The collaboration between Boston College, local institutions, community partners and teachers to meet the needs of the “whole child” is making significant changes in how school is done in Boston. Every child is embedded within a family, school, neighborhood, and city context that influences their life prospects. If we really want to transform our schools into something better by 2030 we need to look out the window and out or the box for solutions.

Image from: http://www.learningfirst.org/helping-whole-child-view-two-schools

This site–and the larger (book) endeavor it reflects–is about the future. It’s about change. It’s about a massive (re)imagining of how we do teaching and learning. It is, in large measure, about technology and the verbs we use in conjunction with technology: harness, maximize, tailor. I got involved in projects like this, or hear about initiatives like this one, or read comments that champion a wholly new way of structuring education–more and more all the time–and I really want to go off and paint the boat, fist in the air, riding that big white horse of technology into the golden sun(re)rise of public education.

But I have this knee jerk reaction where I also don’t want to do any of those things at all. I want to stay more or less right where I am, both feet on the ground, hands buried wrist-deep in the dark rich mud of teaching and learning. Firmly so. Rigidly (?) so.

And what is the stuff of my strong and strange resistance?

Part of it is rooted in my experience of being a successful teacher. I had four walls, no wireless, 33 desks, and a packet of transparencies. I had a frequently jammed copier, whiteboard markers, and my wits. I taught EL kids and SpEd kids and angry kids and poor kids and I was, by just about any measure devised, very successful. So my knee-jerk to narratives of dramatic-change-now is: Really? and Are you sure? Because I know that I can dramatically improve student achievement in the prevailing educational context, and I know many, many others can do likewise.

My knee wants to take the discussion back to first principles. Do we need to do everything different or do we need to do everything better? Obviously, there’s interconnectivity there, and a lack of mutual exclusivity, but I think it’s an important distinction nonetheless. Like the charter school zealots who believe we should structure an educational system to maximize the principle of choice over the principle of equity, I wonder if we make a mistake of structuring our reform discussions around the principle of change-change-change rather than talk about how to make things better.

My knee wants to say that we’re doing education so poorly right now, that even if we bring about the type of dramatic change to the way kids experience content delivery, or receive services from schools, or interact with adults and each other, it won’t bring about the kind of better results we  need so very badly. Those changes will still be run through the filter of an education system that takes kids who start of with less and gives them less of everything, again and again and again. I’m not reading, hearing, seeing enough from the school 2.0 (or 3.0!) folks to convince me that this will change. What we’re giving poor kids and kids of color may change, but I fear they’ll still get less of whatever that it is, exactly.

My knee wants to say it’s a little afraid that the reform 2.0 folks are lining up with those who promote an excellence agenda, one that says our top kids must be prepared to be better than the top kids from other countries, and never mind what’s happening (or not) in Washington Heights, the RGV, or Deep East Oakland. This isn’t necessarily so, and it isn’t unavoidable, but my knee wants to constantly shout that as we try to (re)imagine what the public schools of 2030 will look, we must do so from the perspective of those schools have never well served.

James Bond, Quantum of Solace

Yesterday, someone asked me what was one of the characteristics I look for in a leader, whether student leader, math coach, principal, district leader, president of the local lodge, the union, the country, or Pat Kiernan (anchor for New York 1, my local cable news network). I used the word “integral.” I think a few people just blinked, so I drew three definitions in my mind:

1) The numerical value of the area under a curve as defined by limits, etc.
2) The quality of any number that belongs to a set of all the whole numbers and their additive inverses
3) The quality of adhering to ethics and morals, or completeness in their person

I found it. I explained my perception about the word “integral,” and someone replied, “Well, isn’t that synonymous to being professional?” Then someone else chimed in, “Well, professionalism is part of having integrity. Or is it the other way around?” Then, a clever lady quipped, “But wait: I know plenty of professionals who don’t have integrity!”

I laughed.

The first replier then said, “Yeah, but when I say ‘professional,’ I don’t mean ‘having a job.’ I mean that they have integrity and a certain set of behaviors …” And that’s where my mind drifted off into situations where professionalism and integrity either worked in concert or not. Plenty of examples sprinted through my mind: the president who gives constant updates about the progress of a crisis, the CEO who sincerely apologizes when his or her company fails at their job, the columnist who gives the whole story and maintains objectivity throughout his or her pieces.

When looking up an example of one person who doesn’t have much integrity but is admired for their professionalism, I thought: Bond. James Bond.

No one would question James Bond’s professionalism. He wears a suit and tie to most occasions. He understands protocol and procedures, and usually respects his chain of command. His expertise is impeccable and he’s constantly searching for ways to improve his content speciality. He’s got the admiration of friends and foes alike.

But does he have integrity? With the bevy of women, his penchant for cold-blooded murder, and reckless abuse of private and public property? Even if he’s killing world-class villains, would anyone call him an integral man? I wasn’t really sure, and neither are Mr. Big or Goldfinger.

It also made me think about teachers and the need for our profession to define professionalism at a time when our professionalism has been called into question for various motives. What new standards do we need to set or update when it comes to professionalism? I don’t have all those answers. I just know that by the time I even got over my 007 delusions, the workshop had moved onto the next topic.

We shouldn’t have moved on.

Jose, who’s stirred, not shaken …

It took me a week, but I finally returned a call to a woman who works at the ed policy advocacy organization for which I used to work. She asked my opinion about a school I’d visited. Then she asked about my school, its community, and what it takes for schools like mine (Black, Brown, and Poor) to achieve at high levels.

I took a deep breath, staring out the window behind me.

I know she’s working on college-and-career readiness initiatives, so I didn’t talk about the poor state of urban educator preparation, or funding inequities, or structural fault-lines in the teaching profession, or California’s annual budget evisceration. I just talked about her target initiative, and for these college-and-career academies to work, I said into the phone, you need three things, and we only talk about two, and only really do one.

1) You have to prepare all kids for college as a mandate and a requirement, not an option. In California, this means mandated completion of the UC/ CSU A-G Course Sequence, a series of classes the dual state university system requires all kids to complete in order to apply.

2) You have to do the career thing in a real and lasting way that does not itself mirror the achievement gap. If all the affluent kids are taking forensic science, and all the poor kids are in floor covering, we’ve slapped a coat of paint on an old practice.

3) You have to make college-and-career readiness fit within a community context. Success cannot mean leaving.

There is a geographical component to persistent low achievement, one that affects kids as they work to acquire skills, and also as they go about applying those skills. If being successful means being elsewhere –physically, trajectorially — we have erected a further obstacle to meaningful closing of the achievement gap, and the alleviation of social stratification. College-and-career academies located in low-income urban settings, not to mention the prevailing urban educational system, will need to begin addressing this issue in a meaningful way. Not to benefit the mythical Section-8 to Berkeley grad kid, and not necessarily to benefit the kid who ends up in juvie, but rather for the majority of low-income kids who fall somewhere in between.

Educational success has to be, ultimately, oriented toward a future context, one that is rooted in a sense of community membership. And we’ll need to teach differently as a result. Not that futile attempt to link every single skill with some sort of real-world application, but forging a deep understanding of the type of membership and productivity our work together is oriented toward. A foundational getting-it of the habits of thought and action that build success outside these four walls. And to build this type of meaningful teaching, schools will need to engage community reform, build partnerships, and expand their role and reach to become true community centers — the locus of change and expansion and the ongoing sense of whats-next.

Then I took a breath, because I had to go teach slope-intercept form in seven minutes, still staring out the window, where last weekend two teenagers were shot and killed two days apart. But we’re so terribly far from that, I said.

Heinlein once wrote, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I am watching my students grapple with the standards for their individual districts and seeing that the teachable moments seem to slip by more frequently in their classes. Who could not stop a science class to discuss the energy of an 8.8 earthquake?
Perhaps more troubling is the trend to get kids in 7th grade select a career focus that will dictate their 5 year high school plan. What happened to nurturing interest and exploring diverse fields to find one that captures our attention. Our rich history of innovation is built on the shoulders of folks who were engaged with rich literature, writing, science, dance, art, music, and math. When we begin to define education by the mimimums we are on shaky ground.

Feeling Left Out

Let’s set a scene too many of us are familiar with.

A group of promising college students sit around a table, assigned to these groups by their college professor, for a group project of some nature. The first big assumption we’ll make is that somewhere along the way, some people will do their part, and some won’t. In many of these settings, one or two people are left to do the work while the other 3-4 don’t do jack.

There’s a dynamic, though, that barely gets discussed in these settings, and where I consider our roles in the dynamic too crucial. Oftentimes, a person whose characteristics are different from the others in the group (and in this sense, it’s usually someone of another gender, sex, or even perceived disability) gets his or her opinion ostracized. For many of us who consider ourselves part of the ostracized group, the stages look like the following:

1. We state an opinion enthusiastically and it’s immediately shut down.
2. We try to contribute to another’s idea, in compromise, and it’s given a shrug.
3. We look for an entryway into the conversation, but the frustration with the perceived (or intentional) ostracization has already started to settle in.
4. We’ll sit there silent and defiant, unwilling now to contribute much of anything, a reverse placement of value (“They don’t deserve what I have to say anyway.”)
5. We try to discuss this with someone who we think may have a smidgen of objectivity, and either the person tries to play peacemaker, or, as is often the case, patronizes us by saying, “That’s just in your head. Try again.”
6. He or she may either walk out, or do something abrupt and poignant, even when the group has shifted to another topic.

Here’s where it gets a little strange, but where huge misunderstandings (and sometimes, latent discrimination) occurs. The older our students are, the more we should give them space to resolve issues within themselves without the micromanaging of a powerful moderator. However, we have to develop a barometer for when things go from simple misunderstandings to blatant pushing-out. As a teacher, I have learned to trust my instincts about the group dynamics within the groups I make, continually monitoring the temperature of chemistries, hoping they all work.

And no matter how well the professor / teacher / moderator means, if he or she lets that occur, then he or she is complicit in the lack of chemistry, particularly if the offended party is acting in the appropriate code of conduct.

For instance, let’s a group of mostly conservative male professors is having a conversation about women’s health, and they decide to ignore the woman’s take in it, then they’re being latently discriminatory, especially as it pertains to a woman’s body. If the woman in the group follows those 6 steps outlined above, then the group will most likely treat her as the problem since she is not considered “the norm” in the group.

Now, if there are one or two male professors in that group who would like to hear the woman’s take on the matter see this happening and silent during this, then they are complicit in this perpetuation of ignorance.

That is to say, the future of education depends highly on how we treat all learners, whether adults or children. True diversity comes from having many opinions and many voices included and vested within the discussion. Even if there are disagreements, at least the conversations are had and the opinions are validated.As long as the participants understand the rules of engagement and bring a sense of value to the discussion, then they should be a part of what we’re doing. And if those of us who see value in another opinion don’t speak up, then we in effect agree that they shouldn’t be at the table.

Every person deserves a seat at the table, lest those who we serve get their own table.

We as humans (of any subgroup, educators included) are not a monolith. Why should our discussions be?

Jose, who thought of this while writing a post about Arne Duncan’s lame assertion (and eventual apology) in my regular blog …

Jon Becker recently skewered several arguments about the direction education “needs” to go in. He did it so well, I couldn’t help but respond in a comment to another false assumption about the direction of schools.

On Educational Insanity Kevin commented,

I think the point Mr. Becker is trying to make is that we need to first decide what we want a graduating senior to know and be able to do, before we can talk about the “how” or “why” of school change. If my analysis of his post is correct then I would agree with him. Too often I find in schools that we try to make decisions in a vacuum without ever deciding what it is we are aiming for. As educational leaders we should be asking ourselves first “Where are we headed?” It is the basic concept of backwards by design. Figure out your endpoint and then decide how to get there.

The idea of backwards design, when it comes to the purposes of education is one of those ideas that sounds good on the surface but, I believe would fly apart upon implementation. Backwards design assumes that we are able to know where we want to go based on the information we have now.

Most of the jobs young students will have in the future haven’t been invented yet.

Just watch, as we try to come up with national standards, how narrow we get with the purposes of school. If you try to make everybody (including the USED) happy all the time, it is hard to say anything meaningful beyond common sense ideas like, everybody should be able to read, everybody should have some ideas about probability. These ideas have already been put forward by various national organizations. The national standards will be nothing new, they will only make what we need to teach kids more specific, and less meaningful.

Kevin, I don’t think we need to incorporate backwards design at this point. When we throw the purposes of education up for delineation it actually makes the purposes of school less democratic in our current society. There are so many “influencers” out there that do not have students’ success and welfare at the center of their arguments that by clarifying the goals of schooling we would defacto narrow those goals. The loudest voices in a backwards design would the ones with the most to gain in the process, industry. At least the way it is now, teachers have the opportunity to squeeze in some Plato, or Joyce, Jack Kerouac, or Abbot and Costello into a discussion on language and meaning. In a backwards designed classroom we will always be chasing the lion’s tail, trying to catch up with a changing society. Students will be doing this because of what some policy maker or eduwonk has deemed important instead of what they have decided for themselves. The more specific we make our goals, the less meaningful they will be. The less specific we make our goals, the more opportunities there will be for students to find meaning. Maybe we should start thinking about the shape of the pegs, when we design the holes, instead of the other way around.

Image: http://www.josephnolen.com/images/monk-riding-backwards.jpg