Dangerously Irrelevant

Leon Botstein says:

The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a “right” answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician – and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member – pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

via http://time.com/15199/college-president-sat-is-part-hoax-and-part-fraud

I created a new resource page on Internet filtering and blocking. Hope it’s useful to you…

• Internet filtering and blocking

See some of my other resources too!

Arguing that ‘the line between educational and commercial purposes may be somewhat blurry,’ Katherine Varker, Associate General Counsel for McGraw-Hill Education, asks:

Where does targeted advertising end and personalized learning begin?

via http://digital.hechingerreport.org/content/schoolprivacyzone-emerging-best-practices-for-a-contentious-issue_1301

The fact that you don’t know – or don’t care – means that I don’t want your company anywhere near my kids.

Ira Socol says:

If your school, and your school day, is not about students collaborating, connecting, and building knowledge and understandings together, why would anyone come?

Serious question. If students want to learn in isolation; if they want to sit at a desk and work on their own stuff, occasionally checking in with an “expert,” they have no reason to come to school. They can do a lot better at home, or at their local coffee shop, or even the public library, where both the coffee and the WiFi connection will be better.

…

[A] vast assortment of educators, from that crusty old mathematics teacher … [to] Salman Khan, believe that kids sitting alone, working by themselves, with canned, inflexible data in front of them, is the best preparation for life in the present and future.

Somehow, these educators think the information of the world still moves via paper and pencil, that there are “correct answers” to everything, and that there is a structured cultural norm of learning behavior, best exemplified by the silent child bent over a wooden desk with a thick physical book, which must be duplicated if a student is to succeed in their learning spaces.

No wonder nobody wants to come.

via http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/09/if-school-isnt-for-collaborating-why.html

Image credit: The ABC of Animals

I asked 3 questions of the educators in charge of their district’s upcoming 1:1 student computing initiative. They worked in small groups and used editable Google spreadsheets to record their responses…

1. If our 1:1 initiative is wildly successful, what will we see? We tried to create vivid, concrete images that were emotionally resonant, thus helping with meaning-making. We took our answers and lumped them into ad hoc categories on a separate Google document (e.g., student independence and self-direction, student interaction and collaboration, learning cultures and processes, digital citizenship and information literacy, management and support). We now had a basic picture of desired awesomeness.
2. What will we need to do to ensure our envisioned successes? We focused on the success enablers that will lead to the positive outcomes and desired results that we identified in Step 1. [Not shown in results: We also put those into an effort-impact matrix to see which ones were easy wins or were more difficult but worth the hard effort (and which ones weren’t).]
3. Why will our 1:1 initiative fail? Instead of doing a postmortem afterward, we did a premortem up front to identify reasons that the initiative will fail. We wanted to identify the success blockers that will get in the way of what we envisioned in Step 1.

We then took the responses in Steps 2 and 3 and organized them by Bolman and Deal’s leadership frames. This helped us identify main themes, see patterns, and think about necessary action steps across the spectrum. See our final results.

See the documents that we used to facilitate our work

Tips: Two to three sentences for each response – not single words or short phrases – to facilitate depth of understanding and conversation. After each step, have them look at the other groups’ responses and discuss, first in their small group and then as a large group. Have a separate notes document ready to capture thoughts that emerge from those large group discussions. Working through the three spreadsheets takes 2 to 3 hours; this doesn’t include writing up the final results.

• Visioning spreadsheet
• Tip: Have them look at another group’s responses and highlight the 2 or 3 that are the most emotionally resonant.
• Success enablers spreadsheet
• Tip: Only put numbers in the matrix below the list, not the whole text of each response.
• Success blockers spreadsheet
• Tip: Have them look at another group’s responses and highlight the 2 or 3 most important ones on the list.
• Notes
• Final results

Grades, subjects, and time have been the containers in schools. The Web has no end.

Download this file: png pptx

See also my other slides, my Pinterest collection, and the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool.

Quote: Dean Shareski
Image credit: Endless, ScypaxPictures

Here’s a video about Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy, a direct instruction school in Colorado that uses tightly-scripted lessons:

“I was reading something about Abraham Lincoln and they said that he attended ‘blab schools,’ that all the students would answer with one voice, and it just made me chuckle because that’s what a direct instruction class sounds like.”

This is an awesome format for creating compliant followers. Yes, ma’am! Whatever you say, ma’am! It’s like North Korea…

More memorized student chanting here if you’re interested. Also compare this with the Relay Graduate School of Education video I shared last week. #dreambigger

Hat tip: David Price

Students take action to make a difference. One of the two-week projects that occurred during the Newell-Fonda (IA) Community Schools’ Winter Explorium is profiled by KCAU TV in Sioux City, Iowa. Happy viewing!

Carol Burris says:

[W]atch the Relay Graduate School of Education video entitled ‘[A Culture of Support]‘ . . . . Go to the link and look for the title. In the video, the teacher barks commands and questions, often with the affect and speed of a drill sergeant. The questions concern the concept of a ‘character trait’ but are low-level, often in a ‘fill in the blank’ format. The teacher cuts the student off as he attempts to answer the question. Students engage in the bizarre behavior of wiggling their fingers to send ‘energy’ to a young man, Omari, put on the spot by the teacher. Students’ fingers point to their temple and they wiggle hands in the air to send signals. Hands shoot up before the question is asked, and think time is never given to formulate thoughtful answers. When Omari confuses the word ‘ambition’ with ‘anxious’ (an error that is repeated by a classmate), you know that is how he is feeling at the moment. As the video closes with the command, “hands down, star position, [you are back reading right now]” there is not the warmth of a teacher smile, nor the utterance of ‘please’. The original question is forgotten and you are left to wonder if anyone understands what a character trait is. The pail was filled with ‘something’ and the teacher moves on. . . .

[The teacher] is performing as taught by a system that … better prepares students for the dutiful obedience of the military than for the intellectual challenges they will encounter in college. In schools taught by RGSE teachers, the Common Core State Standards will be, I fear, merely heavier rocks in the pail.

As I watched the video, I thought about the rich discussions, open-ended speculative questions, ample think time, and supportive feeling tone that I find in the classrooms of the teachers at my school. I remember the same culture in the middle school where I taught. Both are diverse schools that serve students with little as well as students with much. Suburban parents would be horrified by the magic finger wiggling and drill techniques used in the video clip. How sad that charter school students are treated as if, were they were given one second to think, the teacher would lose control. How horrifying that [in this school] student grades and punishments are put on public display. The dignity of the learner comes in second to his or her compliance.

via http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/is-filling-the-pail-any-way-to-train-teachers/2012/07/04/gJQADViVOW_blog.html

Is this imposing upon ‘other people’s children’ the kind of education that White, middle class parents would never accept? Or is it merely giving traditionally-underserved students access to the tools required for accessing the codes and cultures of power?

When we deny children openness and connectedness, we nullify the power of the Web.

Download this file: png pptx

See also my other slides, my Pinterest collection, and the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool.

Image credit: Interior of Cellblock 1