EdTechTrek

This morning, I was reading this news story from NPR titled, ‘40 Years of Lessons on Sesame Street‘. The article is one of a many reflecting on the 4oth year anniversary of the popular children’s show. As I reflected on the lessons learned over those 40 years by the show and its producers and cast, I realized that many, if not all of these lessons, are relevant within our education spheres. Here are those lessons:

1. Children are adaptable.
2. G00d [muppets] take time to evolve.
3. Change is unavoidable.
4. “C” is for competition (not just cookie).
5. Freshen up.
6. Learn from your mistakes.
7. Keep it simple.
8. Push the envelope.

I am not going to make this a long narrative, but just simply want to quickly reflect on each of these lessons.

Children are adaptable: The certainly are. What comes to mind here though, is that children both adapt to good things in their environment as well as to not so good things. In schools, my concern is that children have adapted all too much to our didactic, passive, rote methods of teaching. I see this when they arrive at the college/university level. Many are struggling to battle this all-too familiar adaptation they have masterfully undergone for 12 or so years. Although, I must say many gladly rise to the challenge and move from the “feed me” “hoop jumping” and “minimum criteria” types of environments when relevant opportunities are placed before them, but it can be a struggle, nonetheless.

Good [muppets] take time to evolve: The evolutionary process can be indeed slow. Many of us get frustrated with the lack of evolutionary speed in schools. However, one key principle of evolution is that of natural selection. Wikipedia defines this as “is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations.” So, what are those traits (often influenced by environment, not just heredity) in education that seem most dominant and lead to their survival, while others just don’t seem to gain a significant foothold? Why is it that the progressive vision for education conceptualized by the likes of John Dewey, Johann Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Jerome Bruner… and their contemporaries like Herb Kohl, Deborah Meier, Ted Sizer, and others… seem so hard to achieve?

Change is unavoidable: So why does education spend so much of its efforts on avoiding change, not the superficial window dressing kind of change, but substantial, revolutionary change? It seems that we are living the axiom, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Coming back to evolution, what are those most dominant traits that keep us from substantial change?

“C” is for competition: We have moved to this very competitive model of education over the past years. We are competing and ranking internationally on assessments like TIMSS. We rank and compete internally (NAEP)with one another for the top districts, top schools, top scores, quickest to meet AYP, top students,… We are competing for federal dollars that get dangled like carrots in front of hungry rabbits (Race to the Top, NCLB,…). (If you haven’t watched this lecture given by Yong Zhao, especially the first part of it, it is worth your time.) Competition often serves to make us better. But it is in defining “better” and “success” that we have become lost. As with Faust, have we make a bargain with the devil that has robbed us of what Dewey and other progressives understood as being most valuable?

“Jefferson told us where to look to see if a nation is a success. He did not say to look at test scores. Instead, he said to look at ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ ” (Keith Baker, 2007)

And then, Alfie Kohn and  Dean Shareski remind us all of the importance of joy in learning, both for teachers and students. Is that one of those traits that will selectively be extinguished if we let it?

Freshen Up: Who can argue with giving things a fresh look. However, too often we have giving things in education a “fresh look” in the name of meaningful change. Many folks see the addition of the interactive white board, for example, as a symbol of the 21st century classroom – a needed facelift to the aging chalkboard. They are nice and the technology is impressive. However, when major budget dollars are allocated to “fresh look” kinds of changes without any meaningful change or innovation ever happening, the result can often be no more than expensive window dressing. And then there are the schools that really need freshen up… paint, roof, air conditioning, pencil sharpeners that work, desks that aren’t broken, computers that run, physical education, art, and music equipment,… What are we doing?

Learn from your mistakes: In education, and elsewhere, we love to report on mistakes, humiliate and criticize those who make mistakes, and grade mistakes as a form of punishment rather than constructive feedback. Many have learned to avoid taking risks for fear of the consequences of making mistakes. The fact is, we learn best through our mistakes when a grade is not the end of the learning cycle. Programers understand this. Debugging is a powerful and critical part of the programming process, as it is in the learning process. Seymour Papert, Gary Stager, and others have been and continue to be passionate proponents of children learning through programming, through meaningful projects, and learning by doing meaningful, relevant, and therefore engaging things. Somehow, with current educational policy, we are not learning from our mistakes. Instead, we seem to be making the same ones over and over again. This brings me back to evolution and natural selection. What’s driving this perpetuation of the same?

Keep it simple (stupid): Embrace and keep what works. There is no need to make things overly complicated. Some of the most effective pedagogies and learning principles are not all that complicated when it comes down to it. Often, it is the limiting structures, policies, roadblocks, and other expectations that over-complicate things.

Push the envelope: To me, this is my daily challenge when it comes to growth. I try to convey this to my students ad nauseum. The opposite of this is status quo. Don’t rock the boat. Do what’s familiar. Keep things comfortable… all the enemies of business… and education. It’s about growth – becoming and remaining a professional. I am so appreciative of the countless people in my personal learning network (PLN) that share evidence of this every day. One thing that my learning network has done for me is that it has broken down the walls of isolation and has connected me to educators and experts who are truly doing great things around the globe with their students. We do not have to feel (and be) limited by those within our physical circles of influence. Too often, teachers feel isolated and become tunnel-visioned, thinking that what they see and experience around them is indeed reality on a larger scale. I am thankful to say that it isn’t. My students are beginning to understand this – that they don’t have to limit their imagination – that they can connect with inspiring, passionate and excellent teachers and experts in so many ways never before possible – that they indeed have a voice that can make a difference.

As I conclude, what has struck me in writing this morning is that many of these lessons are interrelated, making meaningful and substantial change difficult. As such, I have certainly not done each justice in my narrative here. Are we really learning from these lessons? How do these lessons resonate with you? I’d love to hear what you think.

Who would your Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Ernie, Bert, or Snuffleupagus of education be?

This video, titled “What I Want for My Children”,  is a good follow-up to my last post. I think it speaks for itself. So much gets in the way of this message becoming a ubiquitous reality in U.S. schools.

The answer isn’t PowerPoint, digital whiteboards, blogs, wikis, PRS systems, high-speed Internet, Web2.0, … But, they can be part of a solution. [Generalization coming...] Why are we not pushing many of these attributes presented in the video with the same passion that we are pushing (and adopting) new technologies? As a geek-at-heart, it sure is much easier to get excited about “potential” or promise of new technologies rather than focus what we already have that is not working. Much of the time, things are not “working” because of much bigger issues than old technologies or technical support (don’t get me wrong… technical support is crucial). So, if your students are not excited about your language arts (math, science, social studies…) program, ask yourself “Why?”. My guess is that it’s not mostly because they are not using the aforementioned technologies.

I would encourage you to read one of David Warlick’s recent posts titled, “If it’s not about technology, then what is it about?“. Be sure to have a look through the comments as well. Lots of food for thought. (It’s where I discovered this video, too.)

The headline reads: “Colleges spend billions to prep freshman.” The by-line: “High school graduates increasingly unprepared for college work, remediation falls most heavily to community colleges” A study is quoted at reporting that as much as one third of American college students have enrolled in remedial classes. Although this is often done at great expense to colleges, I think the sadder story is that it needs to be done at all for such high percentages of college freshmen. But, to shed some light on a different aspect of the problem, I share the following quotation from the article:

Eric Paris, who earned a 3.8 high school GPA but is finding his freshman year at Virginia Tech much more challenging, says the big difference is “it’s all on my own.” In class, “it’s up to me if I want to sit on Facebook or pay attention.” He, too, wishes he’d taken more challenging high school classes but thought a high GPA was more important.

We lead students to believe that grades are everything, that having a high GPA is critical to getting into a good college (and it is, but it’s not the only determiner), so they then take easy courses to boost their GPAs and end up with this false sense of accomplishment that get stripped away when they are told that they must enroll in remedial writing or remedial math their freshman year. I have had students like this. You wonder how the system has failed them. Actually, I have had graduate students who have never had to write a real research paper. I have had elementary education majors who wanted to teach high school, but could not complete the requisite math courses. They figured since they were not all that good at math that they could at least teach younger students. I want to strangle them at this point of the conversation.

You know, we have a number of highly complex problems that continue to plague American education. This should not be one of them. We desperately need strong math and science teachers at the elementary level. I, myself, am a recovering math disaster, largely due to many of my elementary teachers who did not have a clue as to how to really teach mathematical concepts. Sure, they could teach the rules of regrouping or the definitions of polygons, but all that takes is reading a few statements out of the teacher’s manual. That didn’t meet my needs. Today, I have a much healthier and sound conceptual mathematical understanding and am so thankful for some of my education professors who taught methods of teaching math and remedial math methods. I now reteach my own son when he comes home from school, not understanding the most basic of concepts.

I avoided the hard courses to keep my grades up in high school. I hope that my children do not. I hope that they are both empowered and challenged by their teachers. I hope that their teachers will see areas of need and address those needs ASAP. I hope their teachers will teach to their strenghts and strenthen those areas of weakness. I hope their teachers will value their interests and make learning relevant. I hope that their teachers use all resources and tools at their disposal. I hope that their teachers will fight for resources and tools that they do not have access to and desperately need. I hope that their teachers believe in them.

That’s a lot of hoping, isn’t it.

Should so much at stake be resting in the arms of hope?

Is there a difference between a “good” teacher and an “effective” teacher? The LA Times recently covered an english teacher who made a significant impact on a tough group of students in one year. The story is worth reading, but here are a few quotations that struck a chord with me.

This 35 year teacher veteran coming from a prestigious prep school into a tough urban school is described in the following situation:

“Holmes had nothing unusual planned (for a lesson where a student asked to be excused for what she thought was a good reason). He considers every lesson, every minute of class time, to be important, and, at age 66, he often stays up past midnight preparing for the next day’s lessons.”

No one can say that being an effective teacher is easy. No one can say that effectiveness can be routine. No one can be effective in the classroom without a great deal of dedication, passion, conviction, knowledge, and skill.

The article goes on to describe various attributes of this teacher in his last year of classroom instruction and also reports on a number of anecdotes. The article goes on to end with this statement describing his last class teaching:

“There are no fireworks, no speeches, no round of applause. Just this: As he walks out the door and heads to the parking lot, Phil Holmes knows that today he delivered a good lesson. He didn’t waste a second. He made the students think.”

Now I know some would take up issue with the word “delivered” and take the philosophical viewpoint that instruction should not be “delivered” but rather experienced and socially constructed, but those same folks would often sacrifice “effectiveness” for poorly implemented cooperative learning, differentiated learning, on-line learning, project-based learning, technology-mediated learning, social learning, problem-based learning… The list goes on. All of these pedagogical structures have merit. But, the bottom line is measurable results that validate effectiveness as a teacher. Here is a teacher that perhaps takes an unpopular approach to teaching. The article does not even mention all of the technology-based tools that he uses to reach a digital generation. I suspect that he uses few to none. But, he gets results… excellent results. Students care about him and appreciate his skillfulness in the classroom.

How do you define effectiveness? Is technology really a required prerequisite? Or, should we let effectiveness and results speak for what should be required?

I am reading brain rules by John Medina and love this quotation as it relates to how we learn:

“If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom.”

He is not saying that one cannot learn in a traditional classroom. We all have. However, he does challenge the notion that it is the best or most effective way to learn.

Oh, what we sacrifice in the name of “efficiency”.