Dangerously Irrelevant

Thursday was the inaugural episode of 4 Guys Talking, a new podcast series from CASTLE. The podcast consists of me, Jon Becker, David Quinn, and Jayson Richardson talking about a variety of education (K-12 and higher ed), technology, and/or leadership issues. We're all Educational Leadership professors who care about things like digital technologies, 21st century skills, and the like. Unfortunately, we're an extremely small minority in academia…

For your viewing pleasure this weekend, here’s my session with the Heartland AEA 11 (Iowa) superintendents. The video’s just over an hour long: about 25 minutes of my presentation followed by discussion (and a copy of Did You Know? 2.0). The video was filmed and edited by Dr. Gordon Dahlby, Director of Curriculum and Technology for the West Des Moines (IA) Community Schools (thanks, Gordon!). My presentation materials and other resources are available at the web page I made for the group. 

Sarah Hanawald kindly Tweeted that she was live blogging Mary Cullinane’s speech. I checked it out and am glad I did! Here are a few excerpts for you…

Examples of wrong questions:

• Does technology have a direct correlation on student achievement?
• What is the ratio we need to achieve w/ students:computers?
• Why haven’t we discovered the “Silver Bullet”
• What’s the blueprint for a school of a future? Let’s buy a set and build our school.

and

Where does innovation come from? What is our system for people to share great ideas? What process do we have for evaluating, sharing, challenge and discussing ideas? If we don’t have this kind of process in place, why are we surprised when ideas aren’t in evidence?

and

Failure is not an option at schools. Yet, mistakes are required for innovation to happen. People cannot be afraid of going to the edge.

Happy reading!

One of the students in my data-driven decision-making class (for discussion purposes, let’s call her ‘Jen’) posted this in our online discussion area:

Most grading at the high school level is more reflective of responsibility (just handing things in) and not on whether the student has truly mastered the content.

There are a lot of issues embedded in this short sentence. For example…

1. What does ‘true mastery of content’ mean (or look like) for secondary students?
2. Does high school grading really get at the idea of student responsibility?
3. If yes to #2, is ‘handing things in’ a good measure of student responsibility?
4. Does student regurgitation of low-level factual recall items on quizzes and tests constitute ‘handing things in’ or ‘mastery?’

What do you think? Do you agree with Jen’s initial statement?

The annual ASCD conference is in Orlando, Florida this year. ASCD is looking for some education bloggers who might be interested in live blogging the event. If you’re already attending the conference or are going to be in the area March 13 to 16, ASCD invites you to consider registering as a media representative.

As a member of the media, you will have free access to all sessions, including ticketed sessions. The ASCD communications team will be on site to help direct you to the most appropriate sessions, connect you with speakers and ASCD staff for interviews, and ‘attend to any request that may arise.’ The team also can connect you with educators with particular interests or expertise. Did I mention that there’s a staffed media room and free wireless access to allow you to freely write and blog from the convention center?

ASCD is one of my favorite educational organizations and also one of my favorite conferences. If you’re interested, contact me and I’ll put you in touch with the appropriate people. Thanks!

I’ve had a lot of fun these past ten days posting quotes from Robert Fried’s The Game of School. I think Fried does a fabulous job of highlighting how schools as institutions have largely moved away from many of our desired ends for students and their learning. Not always, not for every kid, but mostly… And, as I hope you have seen for the past 10 days, he’s also eminently quotable.

Here’s a quick list of all of the posts:

• Passive acceptance of student boredom
• Wasting our children’s time
• When it’s time to worry
• The game that demoralizes even when we win
• Our temples of knowledge are lost opportunities
• Learning and power
• Test score burrito
• Complicit in the atrophy of our children’s learning spirit
• When teachers get stuck
• Are we willing to roll up our sleeves?

I also have Fried’s books, The Passionate Learner and The Passionate Teacher, sitting on my shelf. I’m looking forward to digging into those as well.

For those of you who noted that you were inspired to go out and get a copy of The Game of School, I hope that you enjoy the book as much as I did. Happy reading!

I give this one 5 highlighters.

Robert Fried says…

[I]f what we seek is a learning partnership with students, we cannot remain aloof from them or be seen as demanding their respect as a matter of right. Nor can we be viewed as seeking to “buy them off” by offering them a light workload in exchange for minimal compliance and decent behavior on their part. . . . We have to earn their respect . . . by being willing to roll up our sleeves as learners ourselves and to engage them in the pursuit of knowledge worth knowing, of skills worth gaining. [The Game of School, p. 117]

Robert Fried says…

When student resistance to classroom learning is seen as typical and inevitable, and teachers console each other to “just hang on till June,” that . . . is being stuck.

The worst part of being stuck comes when you begin to think that what you are experiencing is the inevitable condition of being a teacher.

To be stuck as a teacher is . . . . dangerous to your spirit. You feel that your school is a place where authentic teaching and learning happen only rarely. It is the rare student who seems to genuinely appreciate what you have to offer, the rare class that responds well to the instruction you have meticulously planned for them. You consider yourself lucky if “most of the kids are paying attention, most of the time,” or if your latest lesson “seemed to go over okay.” You face the daily grind of instructional delivery, content coverage, student apathy, and grade consciousness. Your own learning streams seem to have dried up even as each new school year presents its complement of pedagogical challenges.

When you are stuck, it is not at all clear that there is anything you can do to resolve the situation you’re in. The horizons of your job look unchanging and unchangeable. . . . In such cases teachers stop seeing students, colleagues, and administrators as individuals capable of enhancing their effectiveness, but instead view them as “forces I have to contend with.”

As teachers, we pour incredible energy into our daily work. . . . Such an outpouring of energy and concern is tolerable as long as we are getting something back – so long as the flow of energy goes two ways, and we receive from our students and colleagues and, occasionally, parents as well, sufficient evidence that our efforts are having a real impact, that our caring is appreciated. But when the energy flow seems decidedly one-directional – outward and away – we begin to burn out. [The Game of School, pp. 153–155]

Robert Fried says…

We [parents] become so confused, so conflicted, so fearful that unless we keep our children’s minds “on task,” aiming for the honor roll, the advanced placement courses, the grade-point average of life, we will damage their chances to access the next set of elite learning venues, be they the elementary school’s gifted-and-talented program, the high school’s honors classes, an Ivy League college, or a top-ranked graduate program. Such pressures can easily thwart our desire to see the children in our lives as happy, curious, confident, and enthusiastic learners. We see the contrast between how our children respond to the things they love to learn and how they resist or rebel against the boredom and inanity of much of their schoolwork. But we bite our tongues and (still confused) become complicit in the atrophy of our children’s learning spirit in furtherance of their academic careers. [The Game of School, pp. 80–81]

Robert Fried says…

Like Jacob, the biblical youth who sold his patrimony to his brother Esau for the equivalent of a Big Mac, our youth are cajoled into giving up their independent spirit of learning, their spiritual heritage as self-motivated seekers, to get a test score burrito or a report card wrap.

The ultimate irony of this transference is that those few students who manage to retain their independent learning spirit . . . are likely to be better positioned to blossom academically and vocationally than those who pursue academic achievement through the Game. It is from that minority unencumbered by pseudo-goals that we get most of our inventors, entrepeneurs, artists, and scientists. What leads to success at higher levels of abstraction and study is precisely this ability to turn from the expected to pursue the intriguing . . . to awaken to the new theory or pattern amid the cacophony of conventional thinking. [The Game of School, p. 80]