Dangerously Irrelevant

Al Gore said:

We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.

He was talking about global climate change but he might as well have been talking about our attempts to transition schools into the 21st century…

Sylvia Martinez said:

Of course not all “olden days” teachers were drilling students. . . . When people think about the past, of course we all have had different experiences. Talking about how school used to be is meaningless; it’s too dependent on your personal experience. Unfortunately, we hear this kind of language all the time, whether it’s to point at the “bad old days” or the “good old days” Neither of them exist in reality.

21st century skills . . . is a solution to a problem that may not exist. It may just be a reflection of our vast, yet fundamentally faulty collective memory of things that never were.

To which I say:  [see also the reports cited at The hits just keep on coming]

The chief source of the “problem of discipline” in schools is that … a premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest. The teachers’ business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
– John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)

And:

What students do in the classroom is what they learn (as Dewey would say) . . . Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. . . . Mostly, they are required to remember. . . . It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used. . . . Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know . . . [However,] what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing . . . somebody else’s answers to somebody else’s questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed – the art and science of asking questions – is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not “taught” in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued. It is doubtful if you can think of many schools that include question-asking, or methods of inquiry, as part of their curriculum.
– Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

And:

The data from our observations in more than 1,000 classrooms support the popular image of a teacher standing or sitting in front of a class imparting knowledge to a group of students. Explaining and lecturing constituted the most frequent teaching activities … And the frequency of these activities increased steadily from the primary to the senior high school years. Teachers also spent a substantial amount of time observing students at work or monitoring their seat-work … Our data show not only an increase in these activities but also a decline in teachers interacting with groups of students within their classes from the primary to the secondary years. . . . Three categories of student activity marked by passivity – written work, listening, and preparing for assignments – dominate … The chances are better than 50–50 that if you were to walk into any of the classrooms of our sample, you would see one of these three activities under way … All three activities are almost exclusively set and monitored by teachers. We saw a contrastingly low incidence of activities invoking active modes of learning.
– John Goodlad, A Place Called School (1984)

And:

Classrooms in which there was evidence of higher-order thinking: 3 percent. Classrooms in which high-yield [instructional] strategies were being used: 0.2 percent. Classrooms in which fewer than one-half of students were paying attention: 85 percent.
– Mike Schmoker, Results Now (2006) [citing a study of 1,500+ classroom observations]

And:

The average fifth grader received five times as much instruction in basic skills as instruction focused on problem solving or reasoning; this ratio was 10:1 in first and third grades.
– Robert C. Pianta, et al., Opportunities to Learn in America’s Elementary Classrooms (2007) [study of 2500+ classrooms in more than 1,000 elementary schools and 400 school districts]

And:

When you code classroom practice for level of cognitive demand . . . 80% of the work is at the factual and procedural level. . . . [Teachers] will do low-level work and call it high-level work.
– Richard Elmore, excerpt from Education Leadership as the Practice of Improvement (2006)

And:

It’s so boring, daddy.
– 7-year-old Tess Richardson, excerpt from Boring Schools, Boring Content (2005)

What do YOU think?

It’s time for a new contest! This one has nothing to do with K-12 education. Just an idea that caught my fancy that I hope will catch yours too. As usual, the winner gets everlasting fame and a CASTLE mug…

140–character book reviews!

Using the Twitter limitation of 140 characters, write a book review. Can you sum up the essence of a good read in 140 characters? Of course you can!

Here are some pathetic examples. I know you can do better than these!

The World Is Flat. The world is flat.

To Kill a Mockingbird. Girl meets recluse. Lawyer dad fails to defend innocent Black man. Recluse saves girl from real villain. Girl learns important life lessons.

Guidelines

• An entry consists of the book title and the 140–character review. The title of the book and any accompanying explanatory text does not count against your total, but the 140 characters should be able to stand alone as a summation of (or commentary on) the book. This limit will be strictly enforced.
• Any book you want – fiction, nonfiction, textbook, graphic novel, whatever. No limits other than it has to be a book (although you might want to review a book that others have heard of). Could you do this for movies, music, blogs, restaurants, etc.? Absolutely. But not for this contest.
• Submit your entry as a comment to this blog post, please. Otherwise, as I’m discovering with the Leadership Day 2008 entries, I might not find it.
• Multiple entries are welcome.
• Extra points for creativity, humor, cleverness, etc.
• Feel free to use the image above to spread the word about the contest (click on it for a larger version).
• You’ve got 10 days. Entry deadline is July 26, 2008.

Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Update: Given the number of entries it looks like we’re going to have, I’ll pick my top 5 to 7 favorites at the end and we’ll have a group vote to determine the winner. So come back July 27 to start voting!

Update: See the winning entry!

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

The personalization movement, enabled significantly by communication and design technologies as well as global manufacturing supply chains, is well under way…

If I want to, I can personalize – and often even custom design – my shoes, my clothes, my jewelry, my car, my house, my computer, my soda, my candy, my cell phone ringtone, and so on. Even when I can’t design myself what I purchase, the seemingly limitless choices that I have allow me to customize my lifestyle in infinite variations (how many kinds of toothpaste or dog food are there?). Sites like CafePress even allow me to custom brand my own goods if the current range of choices isn’t satisfactory.

The personalization movement applies to where we work as well. Richard Florida has written extensively about how we are sorting ourselves into communities of talent. Creative, talented people are migrating to certain cities and college towns. Companies are following people rather than the other way around. As a result, the vast majority of economic productivity and growth is coming from these ‘creative communities’ while smaller communities or non-creative cities are left behind.

Not only does the personalization movement extend to our jobs, it also applies to our homes. As The Big Sort describes, even within our communities we are clustering with other like-minded people. Whole neighborhoods reflect particular lifestyles and exhibit little ideological or lifestyle diversity. Finding someone in your neighborhood that doesn’t look, act, or think like you is becoming increasingly difficult.

Never before have our politics been so polarized. The so-called ‘independent voter’ is all but nonexistent. Voters that actually listen to both sides and then make a decision comprise less than 10% of the voting population. The rest of us already have sorted ourselves out on one side or the other. The key to politics today is mobilizing the voter base on your side, not persuading independents. The key to the 2008 Presidential election will be the Right’s mobilization of church groups, civic organizations, and other groups that traditionally exhibit stronger ties versus the Left’s mobilization of younger voters, urban areas, and other groups that traditionally exhibit looser ties.

Personalization even extends to education. Between private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, online schools, and home schools, the options for parents to customize their children’s education have never been greater. The same goes for our religious institutions, as churches, temples, mosques, and other places of worship increasingly segment their services to target particular groups.

As I noted in my earlier post about narrowcasting, we also are personalizing our information streams. Our magazines, music sources, television stations, Internet sites, and news channels all are more customizable and individualized than ever before. The likelihood that we might run into information that runs counter to our existing beliefs is less and less probable with each passing day.

So where’s our common ground? As we increasingly utilize digital technologies, employment choices, neighborhood selection, and other lifestyle decisions to segment ourselves, where will we find the glue that holds our country together? Shouldn’t we be talking about this as a society? Doesn’t this need to be discussed somewhere in our educational system?

Will Richardson has yet another post that’s generated a great deal of discussion. This time it’s about the value of Twitter for conversation. Will ponders Twitter’s impact on conversations and suspects that maybe it’s making us lazy…

For me it’s about the conversation but, more importantly, it’s also about the uncovering of personality. The social web is about people and connectivity, right? So every blog, tweet, Skype chat, comment, Flickr photo, YouTube video, Facebook update, or Ning post – they’re each another gap-filler for me. Chink by chink, brick by brick, pixel by pixel – the picture becomes more clear and complete. Is this someone with whom I want to connect? Is this someone with whom I want to converse? Is this someone from whom I want to learn?

That’s the power of Twitter (and blogging and … ) for me. Is it maddeningly disjointed and unconnected? Absolutely. But that’s what happens when everyone has a voice and when there are numerous tools to express ourselves. Our aggregation and monitoring tools will get better in the years to come. In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the power and potential of our new information landscape, despite all of its frustrating flaws and growing pains, because I know that it has greatly enriched my life and exponentially expanded my horizons (cue the violins)…

Photo credit: weblogg-ed.com

I couldn’t agree with you more, Arthus. You’ve just highlighted an enormous failing of our entire system of schooling.

I know that there’s been a great deal of consternation and conversation that has occurred about some of your recent Tweets. I’m going to take a different tack and instead applaud you for being willing to fight tooth and nail for your own learning. An admirable trait in a young adult. Keep on fightin’ the good fight.

Chris Lehmann’s post last week regarding Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and educational change was particularly thought-provoking for me. If you haven’t yet read Chris’ post or the book, move them both closer to the top of your reading list. I thought Chris did an especially nice job of describing how the edublogosphere has been good at the task of sharing and is doing pretty well at community production (thanks, everyone, who’s contributed to the Moving Forward wiki) but has not yet done so well at collaborative action. Why? Because it’s hard to do, as Chris and Shirky note, particularly within communities that have loose ties like we edubloggers do.

Chris feels, however, that we possess the capacity to engage in collaborative action and that we maybe, probably, should be thinking in this direction:

The hardest challenge facing our community is that we’ve done a very good job at going after the low-hanging fruit. We’ve done what was easiest to do… and most of us would agree that it hasn’t been easy so far. To take things to the next level is going to be hard. Not impossible… and a lot easier because of the tools we have at our disposal today, but hard none-the-less. 

But "hard" shouldn’t be the reason we don’t do it.

While I admire (as always) Chris’ good cheer and ‘we can do it even though it’s hard!’ attitude – and even usually possess a high concentration of those myself – right now I’m a bit more skeptical that our loosely-knit ‘community’ has the capacity, time, or even desire to begin engaging in collective action, at least at the level that Chris describes. I say this despite all of the incredible value that I gain from the edublogosphere.

At the very least, collective action is going to require a very focused target outcome and some folks who are willing to shoulder the heavy load of visioning / coordinating / re-centering focus. And I just don’t see that happening right now. I see a lot of good people who care a lot and are even willing to do numerous great things for kids, schools, and/or fellow bloggers. But I don’t see us as being in a place yet where collaborative action can occur on any meaningful and important scale (and I’m also not sure what that place would look like so I’d know that we were there).

Of course I’d love to be proved wrong…

[I confess that I’m also feeling a bit despondent today about the whole prospect of influencing American policymakers regarding K-12 education. After all, if an initiative with a $60 million budget and the backing of billion-dollar foundations isn’t getting much traction in terms of putting educational issues on the political radar screen, what the heck are our chances?]

It’s time to announce the ‘winner’ of the Dismaying Class Assignments Contest. With due recognition to Heather Voran’s music notation note cards, Rick Tanski’s (and David Keane’s) tissues for class credit, Louise Maine’s biome coloring, Amy Vejraska’s number scroll (complete with sand bucket prize!), and all of the other worthy entrants, I’m going to award a CASTLE mug to Sylvia Martinez for her entry regarding high school students’ coat hanger mobiles. Molly, you were an extremely close second with your entry about alphabetizing Revolutionary War battles…

Thanks to everyone who participated. Stay tuned for my next contest!

Live blogging Dr. Kent Peterson, U. Wisconsin-Madison, talking about school culture and climate at the West Virginia Institute for 21st Century Leadership…

Joel
Adkins blogged…

For the past few months, I have played around the edge of the new
philosophers. I have been reading their blogs, listening to the podcasts,
reading the books they recommend, joining their Ustreams, and even observing the
Twitter conversations about everything from baseball to new uses of technology.
I have been an observer and an active participant. . . .

I wish I could Twitter and Plurk all day too.
I wish I could research
blogs and contribute to the online conversation like they do.
I wish I could
Ustream and connect with this global philosophy shift in live streaming.
I
wish I could participate in their witty and fun conversations and travel tips
they share all day and night.
I wish I could get online and ask for
participants from your district because mine…well..they gave up on listening to
me months ago because I am “too far out there”.
I wish I could read all those
books you all talk about and listen to those podcasts while I get ready to take
on a new day.

But I can’t. I have to work.

To which I
responded…

[Y]ou know what?, I have a job too. I’m director of a national center, a
postsecondary instructor / researcher, and coordinator of the Educational
Leadership program at a major research university. Like most of us, I’m
unbelievably busy. And, yet, I find time to do some of this stuff also because
it’s IMPORTANT.

So we have to recognize the time challenges that people face. But we can’t go
around saying that the issues are insurmountable because they’re not and because
if we believe that then our K-12 teachers (and postsecondary instructors) get a
free pass to ignore the societal revolution that’s swirling around
them.

What do you think? Head on over to Joel’s
post and let him know…