Dangerously Irrelevant

Beginning in the 2010-2011 school year, our school went through a number of transformations and changes, all aimed at enhancing the quality of the learning and teaching within our building. We adapted a 5 x 3 trimester schedule providing longer class periods and a lower student-to-teacher ratio. We added a house system separating the student body into six different houses mixed by age. Through a partnership with Apple, we implemented a 1:1 laptop program with our students receiving MacBooks. Below are five lessons we learned and the two biggest struggles we continue to face.

Lessons learned

1. It's the pedagogy not the technology. Technology should always be at the service of pedagogy. If you've heard Gary Stager speak or read his posts, I'm sure you've heard this theme before. When technology integration moves from what Alan November calls automative to informative, the real fun begins. Technology integration in schools should not be about tacking technology onto poor pedagogy. Rather, the real joy and power of integrating technology into the classroom is the power it has to redefine the relationships in the classroom and reorient them toward a more student-centered approach to learning. In our efforts, pushing for a longer class period also allowed our staff to move away from lecture-driven instructional models and to start implementing strategies that are more constructivist in their nature. Project-based learning, challenge problems, and creative and collaborative work are all enhanced and enabled by high quality technology integration. Using a Google Doc and the Web to do a 20-minute kick-start with teams of students finding, validating, and creating information on a topic within the curriculum is a very engaging way to begin a new unit. Using various tech tools to easily integrate peer instruction strategies based on the work of Dr. Eric Mazur is a great way to leverage the technology. But in all of these examples, it is really the orientation to and relationship with the learning that has changed.
2. Support the pedagogy at all costs. Teachers will and can change their methods when they are comfortable with their knowledge and inspired by what they see from those around them. Any new teacher quickly begins to teach like her peer group. To support this shift in pedagogy, we spent the entire year before the 1:1 program began creating a full period a day for staff to attend PD sessions throughout the year. We created a new position, Director of Instructional Technology, to lead a good number of these sessions with the goal of staff literacy in a number of pedagogical tools before the 1:1 initiative started. As the work is ongoing, we now offer PD sessions after school on Tuesdays and Saturday mornings, giving our staff an array of choices, with a certain minimum number that need to be attended. We compensate them at $27 an hour through our Title II funds. A list of this year's sessions is here. This model has created small groups of teachers who attend sessions that they are personally interested in and who want to integrate these strategies into their classrooms.
3. The plumbing and the plumbers. For staff to choose these strategies, they have to be guaranteed the network and bandwidth will be supportive. To that end, we added to our technology staff, doubling its size from one to two. Additionally we upgraded in a significant way the technology infrastructure by adding numerous access points and made sure our bandwidth pipe could handle 800 students pulling on it at once. I believe these changes are essential and that without them our program would be in peril. Access to the Web has to work and work quickly if these strategies will be relied upon. Additionally, every student and staff member was given a gmail account hosted through the school. In a year and half of running, our network has been down for approximately one hour. It just so happened that one hour coincided perfectly with the superintendent's annual visit and the need to log mid-term grades. Funny how those things work out.
4. Student ownership. We had the choice early on to either externalize ownership to the students or keep the ownership of the machines on the books of the school. In our case - and after much study - we decided to externalize the cost and have families purchase their laptops through the school. We provide financing options to our families. As a private school we have this opportunity. I realize that in many public schools the machines must be school-owned. In visiting with other schools who have school-owned 1:1 programs, the breakage rates seem to be higher. In general our breakage rates have come in below expected numbers for the students. Yet, interestingly, the staff break their machines at a rate four times that of students. If our students want to put stickers and other stuff all over the machine, they can have at it.
5. Principal leadership. If it isn't important to the leadership, it won't get done. I'm not the world's greatest principal by any means - and I make a whole host of mistakes every single day - but if I do anything well it might be modeling technology use. I teach a class every year in the high school and lead a good number of the professional development sessions related to technology-rich teaching strategies. I believe that by spending my time modeling what I believe is important, it allows the staff to get on board. I won't ask you to do something I won't do or won't be willing to learn to do. Of course I pay for the time spent teaching by having to log more early mornings or late nights in the office, but I think the relationships built with students and staff more than make up for it.

Biggest Struggles

1. Classroom management. Our staff has learned rather quickly that if they want to continue to use lecturing as their dominant instructional strategy, equipping the audience with a laptop is not conducive to that end. The computer should be more than a $1,000 pencil for note-taking. Direct instruction in its proper place and within limited time frames can be an effective strategy. When everyone has a machine, how do you guarantee that they are all on task? To this end, our staff has learned about where to be physically while they lecture and how to set up the classroom. Some staff use the LAN monitoring program. In some sense, though, student engagement in a lecture-driven classroom has always been an issue. Note passing and eye rolling have always been there. Switching from passing a note to chatting on Skype is the same problem in different clothes. Good teachers have engaged students.
2. Assisting parents. Our students take their laptops home at the end of the school day and for holidays and the summer. At school we use the Barracuda system to filter the Web and their access and to block the traditional things that a school would block. When our students take the machines home, we presume competence on the part of our parents that they already are dealing with their own rules and Web access issues. For the most part this proves to be true, but I do think we need to do a better job of supporting some of our families that struggle in this area. One fear that some of our staff and families had is that our students would spend all of their time staring at the screen in front of them. This may be true the first week they pick up their machine over the summer, but over the last two years a few interesting things have happened. Discipline referrals have fallen by 50%, absenteeism is down by 30%, participation in school events like Homecoming and the canned food drive has more than doubled, and the number of student-initiated clubs and activities has grown by around 30%. And enrollment looks to be growing for the third year in a row. We interpret these changes to mean that technology is helping our school to form an environment that is truly conducive to student learning in a number of areas.   From what we see school is becoming more relevant and a place where our students want to be.

In conclusion, our journey is an ongoing one. Simply buying the machines and upgrading the network is not enough to be a 1:1 laptop school. The true work is in shifting the pedagogy to be more student-centered. As Gary Stager says, less "us" and more "them." The rewards to this point have been worth the risks.

Charlie Roy is the principal of Peoria Notre Dame High School, an 800-student coeducational Diocesian Catholic school in Peoria, Illinois. He also is an adjunct instructor for Aurora University, teaching courses in school leadership and instructional technology. In his former career, Charlie was an options trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @caroy.

Over the past month I've been reading and thinking about the new Education Blueprint proposed by the Iowa Governor and the Iowa Department of Education (DE) as well as various reactions to that document. If you haven't yet read Trace Pickering's insightful (and also lengthy) response to the Blueprint, be sure to do so. Another important read is school change guru Michael Fullan's recent paper, Choosing the Wrong Drivers for Whole System Reform.

Here are some additional thoughts of my own. These are not all-encompassing - I have additional questions and concerns - but they do constitute a few important issues that caught my attention. I'm also intentionally not commenting on topics for which I'm fairly ambivalent (e.g., charter schools) or don't know enough (e.g., teacher salary schedules and compensation tiers) and instead will leave those to others who care or know more than I do.

Failing 3rd graders fails our 3rd graders

I'll pick the low-hanging fruit first. Failing 3rd graders who can't pass some reading assessment is a really, really bad idea. It doesn't matter how many safeguards and second chances there are and I understand why the policy is being proposed (both educationally and politically). The bottom line is that, regardless of the 'social promotion' rhetoric and whatever gut intuition parents or policymakers may have, the research evidence is overwhelmingly unidirectional that in-grade retention does far more harm than good. Desired test score increases often never materialize and, even if they do, they usually don't persist past a few years. One of the stronger and consistent findings in educational research is that, in the long run, in-grade retention is at best a long-term wash score-wise and the resultant negative impact on students' psyches and their likelihood to graduate is horrific. The Governor and DE don't get to advocate for research-driven practices in other parts of the Blueprint but ignore that requirement here.

Input-Process-Output

We can visualize a box that represents the day-to-day occurrences within a classroom or other learning environment. That box is the most important aspect of schooling: if what students and teachers do on a daily basis in their learning-teaching interactions doesn't change substantially, all hope of achieving 'world class schools' in Iowa vanishes. WE LEARN WHAT WE DO. There are a variety of inputs (e.g., standards, curricula, teacher quality, funding and resources, school structures, technology infrastructure, laws and policies) that hopefully impact what occurs inside the box. We also look at what comes out of the box (e.g., student knowledge, skills, and dispositions) to see if what we wanted to happen actually did happen. This is a classic Input-Process-Output systems model (that hopefully is accompanied by a recursive feedback loop that informs the system).

There are 85 main bullet points, or action ideas, in the Blueprint. As you can see in my annotated version of the Blueprint, I tried to place each action idea into one of three categories: Input, Process, or Output (coded I, P, & O in the document). You are welcome to disagree with my categorizations (and I admit I struggled with some of them), but the evidence is quite stark that the Blueprint is overwhelmingly focused on inputs and outputs and gives very little attention to the day-to-day learning and teaching processes that occur between students and teachers.

This is unsurprising. This is traditional school reform stuff:

We'll change some inputs; let's try better teachers and higher standards. Oh, and we'll also change some structures around. How about reallocating some monies, reorganizing traditional schools a bit, and allowing for charter and online schools? On the back end, we'll assess like crazy by changing our tests or using new and/or additional ones.

In the end, we change only a little and, if we're lucky, we see a little change in results. This is the way most states do it, but it's neither the only way nor the required way. Where in the Blueprint is the recognition that we need to do something DIFFERENT in our classrooms? Where's the acknowledgment, for example, that we need to invest heavily in teachers' ability to facilitate learning environments that foster higher-order thinking skills (an increasing necessity these days)? Where's extensive language about better facilitating student engagement in their courses? There's virtually nothing about students' interest in what they're supposedly learning. There's nary a bullet point about student hands-on or applied or problem-based learning or authentic intellectual work (a great program already being piloted by DE, by the way). To the extent that PBL and AIW and similar issues are addressed at all, the Blueprint does so indirectly; all hopes lie with effective implementation of the Iowa/Common Core and the Smarter Balanced assessments. Instead of just holding educators 'accountable' on the front and back ends of the process, how about directly investing in them so that they actually can be successful? The overwhelming emphasis of the Blueprint is on accountability rather than capacity-building. Go ahead and do a search in the Blueprint for the terms training or professional development or capacity; you won't find anything. If DE and the Governor are truly serious about 'world class schooling' in Iowa, they should be focusing heavily on the Process box - the day-to-day learning and teaching processes occurring in classrooms all across the state - and right now they're not.

Low-level testing

Much of the Governor's education concerns appear to be driven by NAEP scores and proficiency levels, despite the fact that most of the items are predominantly factual recall and low-level procedural knowledge AND despite the fact that the designers of NAEP freely admit that the level designations are arbitrary AND despite the fact that the American Institutes of Research notes that most of the nations to which we are comparing Iowa also wouldn't score well on NAEP. If we want our students to be gaining higher- rather than lower-order thinking skills, end-of-course assessments appear to offer us nothing better. So there's a lot of new and/or additional testing in the Blueprint that's focused on stuff you can easily find using Google - or that can be done cheaper by people elsewhere in the world - instead of on the skills and capacities necessary to really foster a world-class citizenry and workforce. We're not talking about assessments like the College and Work Readiness Assessment or what they do in Singapore. Again, when it comes to higher-order thinking skills, there's virtually no proposed investment in the Blueprint for the instructional side and all of our hopes rest on the Smarter Balanced assessments, for which right now we have no idea what they will look like and no idea how they will operate. The Blueprint essentially validates and tweaks and expands current testing schemes, despite significant warnings to the contrary from our very own National Research Council.

Digital, global world. Analog, local schools.

It's a globally-connected world out there, but the Blueprint primarily focuses on globalization as an economic force to which we must respond, not a societal / learning / citizenship issue to which we should attend for mutual benefit and empowerment. The Blueprint also says that Iowa students and graduates need to be internationally competitive but most of what it proposes is vastly different from what other countries are doing to achieve better results. The Blueprint contains no significant investment in teacher capacity-building, no emphasis on early childhood education, no amelioration of the impacts of family and neighborhood poverty on learning, and no recognition of the importance of strategic foreign language learning (particularly at younger ages), just to name a few.

It's also a digital world out there, but you wouldn't know it given the lack of emphasis placed on technology in the Blueprint. For example, only nominal attention is paid to online learning, despite the fact that it's booming nationwide and despite Iowa's meager offerings compared to other states. Even though Iowa ranks abysmally low when it comes to Internet speed and access, there's nothing regarding the importance of universal statewide broadband Internet access for both educational and economic development purposes. Most damning, there's absolutely no recognition of the power and potential of digital technologies to transform learning, teaching, and schooling, despite the rapid and radical reshaping of every other information-oriented societal sector by digital tools and the Web. In the world of the Blueprint, it's as if computers and the Internet essentially didn't exist. Go ahead and do a search in the Blueprint for the terms Internet or digital or technology; the omissions are quite alarming, actually. There's one meager shout-out to the rapid growth in 1:1 laptop initiatives across the state, but no support for giving every Iowa child a powerful digital learning device, for providing technology integration assistance for educators, for upgrading woeful infrastructures, for rethinking policies, or for anything else of substance when it comes to educational technology. It's 2011. Personal computers have been around for three decades and the Internet has been around for at least a dozen years for most of us. Digital technologies are transforming how Iowans and the world connect, collaborate, and LEARN; this omission is both sad and shameful.

A lost opportunity

There are a few things that I'm glad the Blueprint included. Although there is only a single bullet point referencing competency-based (rather than age-based) student progression, if done well that one thing alone has the potential to significantly and positively reshape much of how we do education in Iowa. I also like the willingness to invest in district-level innovation and to give districts some flexibility. The proof of most of this, like everything else, will depend on the legislative language and the resources committed.

As I think about the Blueprint as a whole (and we are encouraged by the document to treat it as 'a set of changes designed to work together'), it feels like a lost opportunity. The Governor and DE had the chance to dream big and swing for the fences. They had the chance to propose impactful, sweeping changes to the current system. They had the chance to create learning and teaching environments that prepare students for the next 50 years rather than the last 50 and to educate the public as to why those changes are necessary. The Blueprint rhetoric is right but the action items fall far short. I don't know if it's a lack of knowledge or vision or courage that's holding them back, and of course there are political considerations with all of this. But the result is a a tweak of the current system, a tinkering at the edges rather than a rethinking of the core. Perhaps it's foolish of me to wish for more.

I welcome all feedback. Thanks.

I'm working with a school district that's asked me to focus on the primary and elementary grades (Kindergarten through 6th grade, or Years 1 through 6/7). If you only had 1 hour to show some teachers and parents a maximum of 8 to 10 really interesting educational technology projects happening with younger schoolchildren, what would you show them?

I can pull ideas and projects from CASTLE's list of subject-specific blogs but thought some of you might have more targeted recommendations for me. As usual, I'll compile the comments and share back out as a blog post. Thanks in advance for any help that you can give!

Image credit: Flat Classroom Skype

[cross-posted at The Huffington Post]

Earlier this week the New York Times wondered whether investments in educational technology were worth it since most schools don’t see any concurrent improvement in students’ standardized test scores. That’s not exactly a new issue but it’s worth examining again. After all, we are talking about large sums of money here. I’ll start with some broad categories of pushback against the article…

1. Striving for different, higher-level learning outcomes

It’s hard to get at critical thinking, problem solving, effective communication and collaboration, complex synthesis and analysis, and other higher-order thinking skills with a bubble test. Many schools aren’t aiming at low-level factual recall and procedural knowledge with their technology initiatives.

2. An appalling lack of support

Most school districts ask their technology coordinator(s) to support computers and/or people at ratios that would absolutely horrify folks in the business world. Support ratios that are 3 to 10 times higher than in other sectors don’t result in meaningful, reliable technology usage. Also, many (most?) school districts still don’t have technology integration personnel on hand to work with teachers; they just have IT support folks.

3. An appalling lack of training

We shouldn’t expect test score gains when few teachers have been trained well to use digital technologies to improve learning outcomes. Instead, teachers usually are just given various technology tools and, if they’re lucky, some minimal training in how to access the various features. Deep, rich technology integration training that has the potential to change educators’ pedagogy is rare.

4. We need more technology

There’s not enough technology in schools to adequately judge the claim that they don’t impact test scores. The average student still uses digital technologies pretty infrequently. Ask the children in your extended family / circle of friends how many minutes per week they get to use technology to further their learning in school. Most likely will say very little...

5. Technology at the periphery leads to replicative use

Digital technologies have yet to significantly impact the day-to-day core work of learners and teachers. Instead, we have seen mainstream adoption and growth of replicative technologies (i.e., those that allow teachers to mirror traditional educational practices only with more bells and whistles). We still primarily see learning environments where teachers push out basic information to student recipients and then assess them on the kind of stuff that you can find on Google in 3 seconds. Also, when digital technologies are used, it’s primarily teachers using them, not students. Schools still mainly buy teacher-centric tools, not student-centric tools. We’re not actually seeing technology uses that would ‘change the game’ and thus maybe ‘change the scores.’

6. It’s the future [actually, it’s the present]

In case we haven’t noticed, it’s a digital world out there (and will be even more so in the future). What’s the alternative to putting learning technologies in the hands of students? Is there one? Knowledge workers in the real world (i.e., outside of school) use computers to do their work. Can educators really claim to be relevant to life outside of schools while simultaneously ignoring the technological transformations that surround them, as if digital technologies were a fad that were going to go away?

So, let’s sum up…

We have schools and classrooms that are still doing what they’ve always done, but with some additional infrequent and marginal uses of new learning tools. We have educators who don’t really know how to use the tools very well and who also have little access to those tools, reliable IT support, and/or regular integration assistance. For some reason we expect changes in certain learning outcomes to occur anyway, despite these environmental factors and despite the fact that those outcomes may not be what the schools were striving for in the first place. And, if we don’t see those outcomes, we’re going to claim it’s the fault of the technologies themselves rather than human and system factors and then we’re going to claim that traditional analog learning environments are just fine in a digital, global world.

Does this make sense to anybody? Apparently it does, because plenty of people chimed in to support the slant of the New York Times article…

Wrap-up

This has been a long post so I’ll close with three thoughts:

A. I think that George Siemens has it right:

If it changes how information is created…
If it changes how information is shared…
If it changes how information is evaluated…
If it changes how people connect…
If it changes how people communicate…
If it changes what people can do for themselves…
Then it will change education, teaching, and learning.

Digital technologies and the Web WILL change education, teaching, and learning. Maybe not yet, at least not in the ways that we hope (and definitely not in the ways that we think). Maybe not until we get our collective act together and actually get serious about these technologies and start recognizing their learning potential and begin doing the things we should be doing to realize their affordances. Maybe right now we’re still in that place where corporations were in the 1980s and 1990s when pundits bemoaned that productivity gains were yet to be realized from technology investments, the place where we have yet to change the human and system factors sufficiently to realize the desired goals. But change is coming (and for many of us it already has).

B. I also think that Virginia Heffernan has it right (look, also at the New York Times!):

we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills [that students] are developing on their own. And above all, we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it. 

These I didn’t have technology when I was a kid and I turned out okay or technology makes kids dumber attitudes to which Heffernan refers are both rampant and unhelpful. Again, what are we supposed to do, go back to the quill or slate? I struggle particularly with folks like Larry Cuban, who somehow can internally reconcile his statements that digital technologies have no place in P-12 learning environments (“There is insufficient evidence to spend that kind of money. Period, period, period. There is no body of evidence that shows a trend line.”) with his own admission that he has learned greatly from using the very tools he criticizes (“Learning also has come from the surprises I have found in the 1300-plus comments readers have posted. From those comments, I have received ideas I had not considered, sources sending me off to explore other topics, and counter-arguments I had overlooked.”).

C. And, as usual, David Warlick has it right:

There are many barriers that prevent us from retooling our classrooms for 21st century teaching and learning. But at the core is the story of education that resides in our minds. Most adults base their knowledge of schooling on their education experiences from 20, 30, or 40 years ago. It is a story that is etched almost indelibly by years of being taught in isolated, assembly-line fashioned classrooms.

How do we retell the story of education and fashion a new image of the classroom as a rich and comprehensive environment where students learn by asking questions, experimenting with a rich and diverse information environments, and interact with people around the world -- in order to discover and build knowledge?

Right now - as evidenced by the New York Times article and its many supporters - we educational technology advocates still aren’t telling ‘the story’ very well to many educators, parents, community and school board members, policymakers, and/or the news media. That’s something we all have to work on if we ever are to accomplish the goal of making our children’s learning environments relevant to the world in which they and we now live.

Image credit: Holly and Victoria download datasheets

Here are two commercials for the iPad. The first (and newer) one highlights the power of iPad apps to facilitate learning. I like the second one because it emphasizes the lines that are blurring as these technologies (iPad or otherwise) and their accompanying affordances take root in our daily lives.

Happy viewing!

Learn

Now

Eric Marcos says:

Let them touch the computer. That’s how the world changed for me, for all of us. If you give kids a little bit of trust and let them try out some stuff, they’re going to come up with fascinating things that will surprise you.

You can read more about Eric and his students’ Mathtrain.tv project. Beginning this fall (and every year afterward), start asking your child’s teachers - or, better yet, your principal, superintendent, or school board members - this oh-so-important question:

You know, it’s a digital world out there now. How much time per week does the average child in this class / school / district get to use computers as part of his or her learning experience?

If you get an answer of more than 30 to 60 minutes per week (that’s only 6 to 12 minutes per day), you’ll be lucky. And, no, that’s not enough.

Image credit: Curious

The Did You Know? (Shift Happens) videos have been seen by at least 40 million people online and perhaps that many again during face-to-face conferences, workshops, etc. This week saw the release of the latest version, this one focused on the state of Iowa. Titled Iowa, Did You Know?, the video is aimed at Iowa policymakers, citizens, and educators and is intended to help them feel a greater sense of urgency when it comes to changing our schools. Right now there’s a fair amount of complacency; the average Iowan isn’t coming to his or her school board or politician saying, “Hey, why aren’t you preparing my kids for this digital, global world we now live in?!”

Take a look at the video and see what you think. Even if you don’t live in Iowa, I think you’ll find it quite pertinent to your educational context too. More thoughts and resources after the video…

Additional resources

We are hopeful that the video will be shown to groups all over the state. It comes with a facilitator’s guide to help spark conversation as well as PDF versions of each slide. The idea is that any local group – school, Rotary club, senior citizens’ center, community group, or book club (or even just a small bunch of neighbors) - can convene for 30–60 minutes, show the video, and then start talking and acting. Additional resources and information are available at the Iowa Future web site to help these groups. We need a groundswell of Iowans to start advocating for 21st, not 19th, century schools.

Leadership Day 2011

In addition to announcing Iowa, Did You Know?, this post also is going to serve as my Leadership Day 2011 contribution. If our schools are going to ‘shift’ and prepare students for the next (rather than the last) half century, school leaders are going to have to be much more proactive about engaging with parents, community members, and policymakers. Whether it’s pulling snippets from this blog or Mind Dump and mentioning them at every possible gathering, showing videos like this one and inviting discussion and action, or finding ways to regularly and visibly highlight innovative student and teacher uses of higher-order thinking skills and digital technologies, principals and superintendents can’t just focus on what occurs within their school systems. We MUST engage the public and we MUST engage the people who make policy at the state and federal levels. Right now we’re not doing this nearly as much as we should be. For example, we debuted Iowa, Did You Know? at the School Administrators of Iowa conference earlier this week. I heard lots of comments afterward from administrators about how excited they were to show the video to their staffs. But nary a single one said that he or she was excited to use it to help spark needed conversations with parents, citizens, or legislators. If we don’t have these latter conversations too, we’ll continue to run into the external mindset and funding/policy constraints that surround and hinder what we do, regardless of how innovative we are internally.

Does every state need a video like Iowa, Did You Know? Probably. If not a video, then a report or a recorded speech or something that galvanizes citizens to start putting pressure on school boards and lawmakers to do something DIFFERENT when it comes to learning, teaching, and schooling. Right now most of the discussion regarding educational reform is simply tweaking what we’ve always done, trying to make it a bit better or more intense. Given the transformational impacts of digital technologies on learning, communication, the global economy, our jobs, entertainment, and just about every other area of life we can think of, tweaking just doesn’t cut it.

With gratitude

It is with great appreciation that I thank:

• Troyce Fisher, School Administrators of Iowa, and everyone else involved with the Iowa Future initiative for being so patient with me as I worked to get this done, for insisting that the video have an encouraging ending, and for having the original vision for a visibility initiative to reach Iowa citizens and legislators, not just educators.
• XPLANE, who now has done the graphics on 3 of the 5 ‘official’ versions of Did You Know? and who came through yet again despite a very tight timeline. I can’t emphasize enough how creative the folks there are and how wonderful they are to work with. I have absolutely no hesitation recommending them for any project, any time. They are truly amazing and gifted.
• All of the wonderful Iowans, educators or otherwise, who will help spread this video across the state and maximize its impact. I’m thanking you all in advance; it’s up to us to make these conversations happen!
• Karl Fisch, who started the whole Did You Know? phenomenon and has graciously included me on every step along the way.

Previous videos in the Did You Know? series are available at the Shift Happens wiki. Source files for Iowa, Did You Know? will be available there soon.

Happy viewing!

Dan Mourlam said in his recent post that he didn’t think 1:1 laptop initiatives were the starting point for transforming education. Instead, educators should begin with a critical examination of curriculum and instruction and THEN move to laptops as part of a transformational educational process.

Here is the comment I left for Dan:

Excellent post! For the most part, I agree with you: we always should have learning and teaching goals in mind before determining what technology tools best fit those objectives. Otherwise we run the risk of using technology for technology's sake or thinking that every instructional problem is a nail that can just be solved with the hammer (i.e., laptops) we have in hand.

That said, I think we also are finding that student laptops can crack open the door to reconsideration of existing pedagogy. In other words, it's often very hard for educators to keep teaching the way they always have in the face of daily presence of student laptops and community expectations that those laptops will be used. In these instances, the ubiquity of students laptops actually forces or drives instructional change. Not always, but often enough to note...

Your thoughts?

Image credit: Dan Mourlam

I’ve spent the last two days at the Iowa Education Summit. Now that it’s over, I have a multitude of thoughts and observations swirling around in my head. Here are eight…

1. Politics over substance?

From the anti-Governor Christie flyers distributed at the entrances to the invited guests who appeared to be there for political reasons rather than their possible contributions to Iowa education, there was a great deal of political theater at the Summit. I’ll leave it at that. You can decide for yourself who was invited for what reasons.

On a related note, many participants left the Summit saying that they didn’t learn much that was new and that they wished that there was more discussion about solutions rather than repeated reminders of how much Iowa education sucks. Personally, I enjoyed hearing from the various experts that were invited. There was a lot of brainpower at the Summit and I enjoyed hearing perspectives from other places during our two days together. We’ll need equal brainpower, however, to sift through all of the commentary and determine what to do next in terms of policy and implementation.

2. The ascendance of Twitter

The backchannel on Twitter was phenomenal. I have the very naive wish that Iowa policymakers would spend some time going through the tweets. The backchannel conversation was witty, passionate, insightful, both challenging AND supportive, and, most of all, real. Whatever political points were being attempted on stage were dissected in depth and filtered through the honest reality of learning, teaching, and living in Iowa. The very best barometers of how crowd members were receiving the intended message(s) were the tweets at #iaedsummit.

The Summit was the first event I’ve attended in Iowa where the Twitter backchannel was so robust that I had trouble keeping up. I don’t know how many of the 1,600 attendees actually were on Twitter, but the sheer volume of tweets was astounding. I know several people who signed up for Twitter there at the Summit so that they wouldn’t miss the side discussion.

3. ‘Sit and get’ and clickers do not a conversation make

There was extremely limited opportunity for interaction and dialogue at the Summit. Thank goodness for the Twitter stream. The Summit consisted primarily of smart ‘experts,’ either individually or on panels, talking down at the audience (literally down, from a raised dais). Occasionally we got to answer a multiple choice question using Promethean ‘clickers.’ Occasionally we got to ask a question during a breakout panel. If we were really lucky, perhaps a question we wrote on an index card would be read out loud to solicit a speaker response. This does not constitute a conversation any more than a teacher lecture with a few clicker questions and a brief opportunity for student questions constitutes a classroom discussion.

The stated purpose of the Summit was ‘to build a consensus for how to give all [Iowa] students a world-class education.’ I don’t see how Iowans can build a consensus when we’re not allowed to talk and argue and share and collaborate. We need a different structure if we’re truly going to have a dialogue about the future of Iowa education.

4. What could have been

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gives a good speech (and really shines during Q & A). So do current and/or past Governors Chris Christie, Jim Hunt, and our very own Terry Branstad. But the crowd favorite by far was Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond. In a concise, focused talk replete with research and evidence instead of political talking points, she spelled out what high-achieving nations do (and don’t do) in order to achieve high and equitable levels of student learning. Dr. Darling-Hammond was in the running for U.S. Secretary of Education. After hearing her speak, many in the crowd found themselves wishing that she had been selected.

5. NAEP or nope?

One of the driving statistics for the Summit – which was cited repeatedly – was Iowa’s alarming drop in national rank on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I confess that I found it humorous when Dr. Darling-Hammond began discussing higher-order versus lower-level thinking skills. To illustrate her point, she showed an example of a shoddy multiple-choice assessment question for high-schoolers, which just so happened(?) to come from NAEP. Given the consistent emphasis throughout the conference by all of the presenters on the need for more students to be proficient in higher-order thinking skills, I know I wasn’t the only one in the audience wondering why we’re so concerned about results on an assessment rife with lower-level items.

Secretary Duncan and other speakers highlighted federal and other initiatives that are aimed at creating assessments that get at higher-level student work. So should we really care about Iowa’s rank on NAEP since most of the assessment doesn’t get at what we really need to get at?

6. Technology was largely absent

Although there were a few quick shout-outs to the power of technology to transform student learning, there weren’t many specifics given. Secretary Duncan, for example, cited the power of technology to better ‘deliver information’ [emphasis added] during his Q & A time (and mentioned technology not a whit during his main speech). For those of us who are used to talking about the power and potential of digital technologies to empower student voice and engagement, facilitate authentic work, and connect learners to the global information commons and its participants (just to name a few affordances), the lack of specificity was dismaying. I suspect that the very basic treatment of technology stemmed from folks’ fairly basic understandings of what is possible these days. An exception was Max Phillips, who serves on the Iowa State Board of Education and who is thinking big. Very big. I wish we had more policymakers in Iowa who were ready to join him.

As I said on Monday, it’s time for us to get serious about school technology in this state (we can start by having wireless Internet access at every public Department of Education function like this one).

7. We’re ready for something different

Iowa is ready for something different. It’s ready for the things that Dr. Darling-Hammond described. If you look at what high-achieving nations actually do to achieve their learning outcomes – the outcomes that Iowa says it also wants to achieve – their efforts are not in the domains of:

1. greater test-based accountability,
2. improvement of teacher quality through implementation of alternative certification routes,
3. charter schools, or
4. reexamination of teacher compensation structures.

Instead, they are:

5. creating assessments of higher-order thinking skills,
6. reducing the frequency of student testing,
7. empowering and trusting teachers,
8. providing adequate social supports for children and families,
9. substantially investing in better initial teacher and administrator preparation,
10. increasing opportunities for educators to collaborate and share expertise, and
11. equalizing educational resources across schools. 

The panel members generally were closer to what Dr. Darling-Hammond shared with us. The Summit’s main speakers, however, placed great emphasis on the first four items. Which brings me to my last thought…

8. Genuine dialogue or political cover?

The great unknown is whether Governor Branstad and the Iowa Department of Education truly intended the Summit to initiate a statewide dialogue about what effective learning, teaching, and schooling should look like in the state or whether the Summit was just to give cover for implementation of an already-determined political / educational agenda. Only time will tell. Right now I’m willing to take Iowa Education Director Dr. Jason Glass (whom I like more and more every time I interact with him) at his word when he says that he wants us to build the solution together. He’s not the political boss, however, and there was a lot of cynicism regarding this issue in the crowd. If we see policy proposals that heavily emphasize items 1–4 above and deemphasize items 5–11, for example, those skeptics will feel vindicated.

Despite what may seem like an overly-critical tone for this post, I enjoyed the Summit and am glad I attended and participated. Like many of the other speakers there, I believe that we have an opportunity to do – and already are doing – great things in Iowa education. In some areas, we have promising initiatives (like the Authentic Intellectual Work, 1:1 laptop, VREP, and instructional rounds movements) that just need scaling up. In other areas, we have much more to do.

Let the real work begin.

Image credit: spartannielsen

I served on a panel, Education in a Digital World, at the Iowa Education Summit today. Here is what I said during my 5 minutes of opening remarks.

Good afternoon,

We have to start with the recognition that digital technologies are transforming EVERYTHING.

Technology is allowing everyone to do more powerful and also more complex work, but that creative power is accompanied by significant disruptive impacts. For example, the same technologies that allow us to have a voice, find each other, and work together also are destroying geographic boundaries. We're seeing to our dismay that offshoring and outsourcing allow everyone, everywhere to compete with each other and with us. In addition to replacing jobs here with folks overseas, jobs also are being destroyed by software. If the Industrial Revolution was about replacing humans’ physical labor with machines, the Information Revolution often is about replacing humans’ cognitive labor with computers. In short, these new tools are radically transforming every single other information-oriented segment of our economy.

Does the workforce preparation that most Iowa schools do reflect our new hyperconnected, hypercompetitive global economy and the impacts of these new technologies? Nope.

More important than the economic concerns, however, is that digital technologies also allow for dramatic impacts on learning. For example, students and educators now have access to all of the information in their textbooks – and an incredible wealth of primary documents – for free. They have access to robust, low cost or no-cost, multimedia and interactive learning resources - texts, images, audio, video, games, simulations - that can supplement, extend, or even replace what is being taught in their classrooms. Via collaborative Internet-based tools, they can learn from and with students and teachers in other states or countries. They also can quickly and easily connect with authors, artists, business professionals, entrepreneurs, physicians, craftsmen, professors, and other experts.

Students and teachers now can more authentically replicate (and actually do) real-world work through the use of the same tools and resources used by engineers, designers, scientists, accountants, and a multitude of other professionals and artisans. They can share their own knowledge, skills, and expertise with people all over the world. They can find or form communities of interest around topics for which they are passionate and they can be active (and valued) contributors to the world’s information commons, both individually and collaboratively with others.

Essentially, our students and teachers now have the ability to learn about whatever they want, from whomever they want, whenever and wherever they want, and they also can contribute to this learning environment for the benefit of others.

But most Iowa schools do little if any of this. Instead, as Collins & Halverson have noted,

schools have kept new digital technologies on the periphery of their core academic practices. Schools … do not try to rethink basic practices of teaching and learning. Computers have not penetrated the core of schools, even though they have come to dominate the way people in the outside world read, write, calculate, and think.

If we were REALLY serious about educational technology, we would do things like…

• put a robust digital learning device into every student’s hands (or let them bring and use their own) instead of pretending that we live in a pencil, notebook paper, and ring binder world;
• we'd teach students how to properly maintain and manage those computing devices rather than removing user privileges and locking down the ability to change any settings;
• we'd show students how to edit their privacy settings and use groups in their social networks instead of banning those networks because they’re ‘dangerous’ and/or ‘frivolous’;
• we'd teach students to understand and contribute to the online information commons rather than ‘just saying no’ to Wikipedia;
• we'd understand the true risk of students encountering online predators and make policy accordingly instead of succumbing to scare tactics by the media, politicians, law enforcement, computer security vendors, and others;
• we'd find out the exact percentage of our schools’ families that don’t have broadband Internet access at home rather than treating the amorphous ‘digital divide’ as a reason not to assign any homework that involves use of the Internet;
• we'd treat seriously and own personally the task of becoming proficient with the digital tools that are transforming everything instead of nonchalantly chuckling about how little we as educators know about computers;
• we'd recognize the power and potential (and limitations) of online learning rather than blithely assuming that it can’t be as good as face-to-face instruction;
• we'd tap into and utilize the technological interest and knowledge of students instead of pretending that they have nothing to contribute;
• we'd integrate digital learning and teaching tools into subject-specific preservice methods courses rather than marginalizing instructional technology as a separate course;
• we'd better educate and train school administrators rather than continuing to turn out new leaders that know virtually nothing about creating, facilitating, and/or sustaining 21st century learning environments;
• And so on...

If we were really serious about technology in schools, we'd do these things and more. But we don't.

Look, we know, simply from projecting current trends forward, that in the future our learning will be even more digital, more mobile, and more multimedia than it is now. Our learning will be more networked and more interconnected and often will occur online, lessening our dependence on local humans. Our learning frequently will be more informal and definitely will be more self-directed, individualized, and personalized. Our learning will be more computer-based and more software-mediated and thus less reliant on live humans. Our learning will be more open and more accessible and may occur in simulation or video game-like environments. And so on. We’re not going to retrench or go backward on any of these paths. 

Here in Iowa we thus need to begin envisioning the implications of these environmental characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling. We need school leaders who can design and operationalize our learning environments to reflect these new affordances. If we are going to create schools that are relevant to the needs of students, families, and society, we need policymakers who are brave enough to create the new paradigm instead of simply tweaking what we've always done.

Here in Iowa we're currently spending less on school technology than we did a decade ago. Of the 40 states that have some sort of online learning options for students, we are near the very bottom in terms of number of students served. We continue to do the same old, same old and try to sprinkle a little bit of technology on top instead of putting these learning tools at the HEART of everything that we do. We must do better than this.

It's 2011. It’s time for us to be serious about school technology. And right now as a state we’re anything but.

Thank you.