Dangerously Irrelevant

Something’s seriously wrong with our system when ye olde Google search brings up this:

via http://cheezburger.com/7111711232

But maybe I get those results because I want schools to change and that’s reflected in my online surfing. Anyone get anything substantially different?

—

March 11 addendum. We just asked 5 students at New Tech High in Sioux Falls, South Dakota to complete this phrase. They said…

• enjoy school
• have fun
• be ready to be someone
• proficient
• feel like it’s one big family and I can talk to anyone

Did you know that…

• Google Apps can help you ‘launch a stress-free implementation of the Common Core’s required technology components?’
• these 5 apps will help your kids meet the new Common Core standards?
• FASTT Math is ‘the only fact fluency program to extend beyond math fact fluency practice into more rigorous Common Core objectives?’
• ‘Great Books programs meet Common Core standards?’
• these student center activities are ‘aligned to the Common Core?’
• all of these Pinterest resources are ‘aligned with specific Common Core standards?’
• every one of McGraw-Hill’s ‘core math, reading, and language arts programs fully align with the Common Core?’
• you can watch video clips of ‘Common Core-aligned teaching and learning?’
• NWEA ‘has developed a set of MAP assessments aligned to the Common Core?’
• you can get access to ‘the world’s first and only on-demand, comprehensive training on the Common Core standards?’
• all of these software programs are ‘aligned to the Common Core,’ even Timez Attack?
• you can ‘become a Common Core Black Belt?’
• the new SimCity video game will ‘conform with the Common Core?’

As expected, with the advent of the Common Core we are seeing a lot of labeling and re-labeling of instructional materials, resources, and activities. Publishers are adding the Common Core designation to existing textbooks, resources, assessments, and professional development opportunities just as fast as they can. Educators are unpacking the Common Core and affirming to themselves that they’re already doing what the standards expect. Lots of Common Core hoopla. Lots of Common Core assurances. Lots of old educational wine in new Common Core bottles…

Plus, of course, lots of gratuitous Common Core labeling and hucksterism. Because if it’s not stamped ‘Common Core’ these days, hardly anyone’s going to look at it. 

We have the standards. And publishers’ criteria. And state and school district certification efforts. But we also have lots of confusion, including whether or not teachers are prepared or unprepared to implement the standards.

As we sort out that confusion – and as we work together to become better prepared for implementation of the Common Core juggernaut – we need to be critical consumers of both our own lessons and the vendor pitches that accompany the standards. Because if there’s anything that policy-level folks agree on, it’s usually that the Common Core is supposed to be different. Very different.

• If the math in a ‘Common Core aligned’ textbook looks like the math you experienced as a student, put it down.
• the traditional US mathematics curriculum must become substantially more coherent and focused
• “I’m scared of rewarding bullsh*t,” Coleman told me…. “I don’t think it’s costless at all.” By bullsh*t, Coleman means the sort of watered-down curriculum that has become the norm in many American classrooms. [statement censored by me so as to better enable passage through draconian school Internet filters]

Of course if we absorb the Common Core into what we’ve always done without substantially changing anything – and this is extremely likely given our history – then things won’t be different at all. We know from past experience that standards usually don’t change instruction much. Neither do they change the day-to-day learning experiences of most children. Implementation always trumps wishes. Regardless of the rhetoric accompanying the Common Core, our historically high rates of reform assimilation indicate that what kids do in school on a daily basis is unlikely to be very different in most places. As Richard Elmore notes,

Internal accountability precedes external accountability and is a precondition for any process of improvement.

What does it mean to you for things to be ‘Common Core aligned℠?’ [Although Common Core chief architect / circus barker David Coleman believes that "people really don't give a sh*t about what you feel or what you think", I do.] Perhaps more importantly, what are you and your fellow educators doing to avoid old wine in new bottles?

P.S. Never fear. This blog post is Common Core-aligned℠. See ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.8.

The more I work with administrators and teachers, the more I’m convinced that, for the most part, the answers we seek lie within us.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of fabulous educators in recent months. We’ve been talking about facilitating deeper learning, fostering better technology infusion, and increasing student agency and ownership of the learning process.

While I’ve been sharing resources and trying to spark some ‘urgency’ to move forward faster, much of the time I’ve been asking questions. Questions like:

• How can we get more problem-based learning into our classrooms?
• What are some ways that we can make students’ learning experiences more global?
• In two minutes, can you come up with five ways that you could increase student voice online?
• How could you put your students to work to make something that benefited others?

Invariably, the educator pairs or small groups come up with a wealth of possibilities. In many cases, the ideas come pouring out as if from a firehose, as if they were bottled up just waiting for someone to ask the questions so that they could be released.

As leaders, we have to continually remember that there’s an incredible wealth of untapped talent, expertise, experience, and wisdom in our faculty. In our search for solutions, we need to turn less to outside experts – at least at first – and instead uncover what lies dormant within. If we ask the right questions – questions that are tightly focused and solution-oriented – most of the time we will generate numerous options that can be thrown out for more discussion and explored in more depth.

What are the specific, progress-oriented questions that we could be asking our faculty but haven’t? What untapped possibilities are lying dormant within our school organizations? As principals and superintendents, how can we better utilize targeted questioning to open up new lines of innovation? Once we generate some exciting new conversations, then the challenge is for us to facilitate and support those ideas so that they translate into sustainable changes in practice. That’s difficult work, of course, but it’s also energizing, movement-oriented work. And buy-in is inherently better because it came from the group, not from us or an outsider.

Ask your faculty some new questions. They’ll probably amaze you.

[Of course everything I said here also could (should) be done with students. It no longer should be an epiphany for educators that we should be doing less to students and doing more with them.]

Image credit: 007 The Answer 12|12

Meira Levinson says:

Many schools, especially those that serve predominantly low-income children of color, model civic disrespect and demand that their students practice submissive obedience rather than empowered engagement. They enact a continuous series of civic microaggressions against their students. These regular but unacknowledged mini-invalidations of children as civic persons worthy of respect are often barely noticeable to their victims – and usually totally invisible to their perpetrators. Together, however, they can cumulatively erode the self-confidence and self-image of those at the receiving end. Urban students’ experiences of these civic microassaults may profoundly influence their civic skills and identity development.

Levinson, M. (2012, March). School culture and the civic empowerment gap. Harvard Education Letter, 28(2), 6-8.

It’s that time of year again… time to register for the 4th annual Iowa 1:1 Institute!

The last two years of the Institute have averaged 1,200+ attendees. There are multiple reasons why the Institute is so successful. It’s a grass roots conference at which peers talk to peers. The focus is on learning and teaching, not tools. Session emphasis is on hands-on work, discussion, and participant engagement. No ‘sit and get!’ Students are encouraged to present and there usually are multiple student-run sessions; those are always great. Whether you’re currently in a 1:1 setting – or are interested in moving that direction – or are simply passionate about robust, technology-infused learning, the Institute will be a phenomenal event for you.

This year’s Institute is on April 4 in Des Moines. We always have guests from other states so please join us. Register soon – the Institute fills up fast. Group discounts are available. Plus you can get free registration if you present!

In honor of Digital Learning Day, let’s ask this question: How should communities assess their schools’ integration of digital technologies for learning and teaching?

See the list of proposed indicators below. What do you like? What would you add or change?

1. Access to learning technologies for students and teachers (e.g., 1:1 computing initiatives, ubiquitous broadband Internet access, creative software, etc.)
2. Technology integration in classes across the curriculum (e.g., English/Language Arts, Science, Math, etc.)
3. Adequate personnel resources for supporting technology integration (e.g., learning technologists, information technology support staff)
4. The role of technology use in class instruction (e.g., student v. teacher use, consumption v. production, replication v. acceleration or transformation of learning and teaching)
5. Accessibility of adaptive technologies for students with special needs
6. Ongoing, content-specific professional development for teachers that focuses on pragmatic solutions to technology integration in their context
7. Student and family access to learning technologies after/away from school

This list is courtesy of Julian Vasquez Heilig, Greg Russell, Katie Jackson, and Dongmei Li at the University of Texas-Austin and is part of a larger project focusing on alternative, community-based forms of school accountability. If you have time, please give them some input. Thanks!

Image credit: Slide – Fancy iGadgets

Here are two amazing videos that highlight ways that educators can empower kids to make a difference in the world. Happy viewing!

Schools That Change Communities

The Future Will Not Be Multiple Choice

It’s hard to look back over the last four decades and find ways that education technology has made deep, lasting changes on schooling. It’s also hard to imagine a future where we don’t depend upon emerging technologies to shape learning across our lifetimes.

Justin Reich via http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2013/02/ten_tough_questions_for_digital_learning_day.html

Gary Stager says:

There are three competing visions of educational computing. Each bestows agency on an actor in the educational enterprise. We can use classroom computers to benefit the system, the teacher, or the student. Data collection, drill-and-practice test-prep, computerized assessment, or monitoring Common Core compliance are examples of the computer benefitting the system. “Interactive” white boards, presenting information or managing whole-class simulations are examples of computing for the teacher. In this scenario, the teacher is the actor, the classroom a theatre, the students the audience and the computer is a prop.

The third vision is a progressive one. The personal computer is used to amplify human potential. It is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that allows each child to not only learn what we’ve always taught, perhaps with greater efficacy, efficiency or comprehension. The computer makes it possible for students to learn and do in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. This vision of computing democratizes educational opportunity and supports what Papert and Turkle call epistemological pluralism. The learner is at the center of the educational experience and learns in their own way.

Too many educators make the mistake of assuming a false equivalence between “technology” and its use. Technology is not neutral. It is always designed to influence behavior. Sure, you might point to an anecdote in which a clever teacher figures out a way to use a white board in a learner-centered fashion or a teacher finds the diagnostic data collected by the management system useful. These are the exception to the rule.

While flexible high-quality hardware is critical, educational computing is about software because software determines what you can do and what you do determines what you can learn. In my opinion the lowest ROI comes from granting agency to the system and the most from empowering each learner. You might think of the a continuum that runs from drill/testing at the bottom; through information access, productivity, simulation and modeling; with the computer as a computational material for knowledge construction representing not only the greatest ROI, but the most potential benefit for the learner.

Piaget reminds us,“To understand is to invent,” while our mutual colleague Seymour Papert said, “If you can use technology to make things, you can make more interesting things and you can learn a lot more by making them.”

….

kindergarteners could build, program and choreograph their own robot ballerinas by utilizing mathematical concepts and engineering principles never before accessible to young children. Kids express themselves through filmmaking, animation, music composition and collaborations with peers or experts across the globe. 5th graders write computer programs to represent fractions in a variety of ways while understanding not only fractions, but also a host of other mathematics and computer science concepts used in service of that understanding. An incarcerated 17 year-old dropout saddled with a host of learning disabilities is able to use computer programming and robotics to create “gopher-cam,” an intelligent vehicle for exploring beneath the earth, or launch his own probe into space for aerial reconnaissance. Little boys and girls can now make and program wearable computers with circuitry sewn with conductive thread while 10th grade English students can bring Lady Macbeth to life by composing a symphony. Soon, you be able to email and print a bicycle. Computing as a verb is the game-changer.

Used well, the computer extends the breadth, depth and complexity of potential projects. This in turn affords kids with the opportunity to, in the words of David Perkins, “play the whole game.” Thanks to the computer, children today have the opportunity to be mathematicians, novelists, engineers, composers, geneticists, composers, filmmakers, etc… But, only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative.

via http://www.joebower.org/2013/02/technology-is-not-neutral.html

My son is 8. He’s a maker. He makes things out of paper. He makes things out of cardboard. He makes things out of Legos and blocks and TinkerToys and egg cartons and the styrofoam that comes inside packages. We’ve spent a fortune on masking tape and scotch tape and string and markers and glue, just so he can attach things together and decorate them to make even more complex things.

My son is 8. He’s a maker. Outside he makes things out of sticks and rocks and bark and leaves (at least those are still free). When it snows he makes sculptures and forts. He chalks up our driveway. And our porch. And the bricks and siding of our house.

My son is 8. He’s a maker. He draws. And draws. And draws. He writes and writes. He pens stories. He authors books. He creates scavenger hunts and costumes. He creates populations and universes, filling countless notebooks and pads and poster boards and sticky notes and index cards.

My son is 8. He’s a maker. He plays Spore, but mostly to design his own creatures and spacecraft. He likes Minecraft, Eden, Scratch, and Scribblenauts. He loves any video game or app that lets him make his own levels or characters or worlds (instead of playing what the designers gave him).

My son is 8. He’s a maker. He makes movies using our handheld camcorder. He takes funny photos with our digital cameras or smartphones. He uses the webcam and PhotoBooth to create story episodes. He makes up new songs using the piano or music software. He makes up rhymes and dance moves.

My son is 8. He’s a maker. He takes the figures and cards and tokens from multiple board games and combines them to make his own games. He repurposes card games and dice games into entirely new variations. He creates new word games and mind games and teaches us how to play on car rides or at the kitchen table.

My son is 8. He’s a maker. Give him five unconnected objects and five minutes and he’ll make something amazing. He pulls the neighborhood kids into what he makes, creating communities of joyous co-creators. He pulls his classmates and his teachers and his family into what he makes, his smile and enthusiasm infecting all of us.

My son is 8. He’s a maker. Will his classes enable him or quash him? Will his teachers inspire him or suppress him? Will his schools nurture his brilliant divergence or force him into a convergent, one-size-fits-all model?

My son is 8. He’s a maker. His world-changing skills and talents never will be reflected in an educational world of worksheets, end-of-chapter review questions, course exams, and bubble tests. How will you accommodate and recognize his gifts?

My son is 8. He’s a maker. Are you ready?