Will

A couple of items from the world of writing and assessment have been niggling at me of late.

First, news that the Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring a $100,000 competition to create automated essay scoring software that, in theory at least, will do as good or better job of assessing student writing on standardized tests than the current human graders do. I get the reasoning behind this. Current “scoring mills” have turned test essay readers into skimmers, and the reality that the more kids write regardless of quality the better they score are well documented. And as currently structured, there is no way current assessments do anything to improve student writing. As always, it’s a time and money issue, but my initial reaction to this is if we value writing enough to make sure every child can do it reasonably well, we should also value the time and effort it takes to evaluate it reasonably well.

I remember the long, long hours of reading and responding to tens of thousands of essays during my English teacher days. The turnaround wasn’t always fast. The notes and marks and narrative comments on the page went largely unread despite the fact that I didn’t give a grade to most pieces. I spent as much time as I could holding conversations with kids about their writing both one on one and in small peer groups. The best assessment and advice came in that analysis and feedback where we had a chance to reflect and experiment with the writing. I know that many of my students learned to really appreciate failure in that process because it was a safe place to try things, to push their practice without any stakes, high or low. I know at the end of the day that every child, including my own, should reach some level of expression that allows them to communicate ideas clearly and compellingly, but I also know that the paths to that place are varied and filled with stops and starts. It’s a highly complex process, much more than putting comma in the right place and simply varying sentence structure (though both of those can’t hurt.)

Having said that, it’s scary to see what passes for acceptable writing on the state tests. Yesterday, Michael Winerip’s piece in the New York Times showed examples from the state scoring guide of writing from the state high school English Regents exam that should be scored a 1 on a 2-point scale:

These two Charater have very different mind Sets because they are creative in away that no one would imagen just put clay together and using leaves to create art.

I’m wondering why that would even get one point. Are we really satisfied that student is sufficiently ready to communicate in writing to the larger world? I get the tension here, too:

If the standard is set too high, so many will fail — including children with special education needs and students for whom English is a second language — that there will be a public outcry.

But if the standard is set too low, the result is a diploma that has little meaning.

But will machine scored essays fix this? The Hewlett Foundation seems to think so:

“Better tests support better learning,” says Barbara Chow, Education Program Director at the Hewlett Foundation. “Rapid and accurate automated essay scoring will encourage states to include more writing in their state assessments. And the more we can use essays to assess what students have learned, the greater the likelihood they’ll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication.”

Look, I’m on board that kids should write more, and that learning what a student has learned by having her write is better than having her fill in bubbles for questions she can use her phones to answer if we let her. But here’s the problem: this is more about money than it is about serving kids well. Let’s be honest, while it may be less consistent and more complex, and while it may take more time and money to get it right, human graders have a distinct advantage over machines when it comes to writing: emotion.  I love the way the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) puts it:

Automated assessment programs do not respond as human readers. While they may promise consistency, they distort the very nature of writing as a complex and context-rich interaction between people. They simplify writing in ways that can mislead writers to focus more on structure and grammar than on what they are saying by using a given structure and style.

Here’s what I know will happen once we move to the machines: we’ll help kids learn how to write what the machines want instead of focusing on the power and beauty and uniqueness of human communication. I can name a slew of brilliant writers who would probably fail the test because they wrote in a unique, compelling style that went far beyond our traditional thinking around “good writing.” Sure, in the name of efficiency we can choose to set the bar low and reward kids for putting together a sentence that’s barely readable but conveys a simple thought regardless. But why wouldn’t we choose something better? 

In the end, I’m getting tired of “efficiencies” when it comes to education. But that’s a larger discussion of priorities that really needs to be left to another day…

The past couple of Educon days at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia were, as always, packed with fun catching up with old friends (and meeting new ones) but, as always, also filled with conversations that have me thinking more about what “reform” looks like and what bold schools might do to get there. It was fun not to lead a session this year and just be an attendee (though I really need to stop putting stuffed animals on my head). Anyway, just want to share out a couple of what I think are compelling narratives around change to start the week.

First, I’d heard of the iSchool in NYC but as with a lot of other innovative schools, I’d never had the chance to get my brain around what they do. I’ll admit to a certain bias for learning the lessons of schools that have been in place for decades that have made a real shift toward more progressive learning. The iSchool is going into it’s fourth year. Nevertheless, the teachers and principals who presented two sessions at Educon made a great case for inquiry/challenge based learning in way that fits the “doing both” spirit of the bold schools I’ve written about. To get some sense of the culture, check out this 5-minute video on “Disastercamp” where students attempted to answer the question “How can first responders to disasters use social media to improve communication and coordination for disaster relief?” And here is another, the 16 Module, where students dive into the question “What does it mean to be 16?” It’s the type of learning that I’d like for my own kids.

But here, perhaps, is the best part. When it comes to prepping for the NY State Regents test, students get access to self-paced, online test prep courses they work through on their own that is then supported in the classroom. That means way more time is freed up to do the real learning work of inquiry in the classroom with teachers who are learners as well. (In one of the sessions, one of the iSchool teachers said they basically start with a theme for a class and then create the curriculum as they go, that they can innovate on the fly which, to me at least, suggests they are learners first, teachers second.) Interestingly, that’s the same approach I heard from Knewton a bit ago, and I’m starting to wonder what’s really wrong with tacking in that direction during the transition we’re in. I do find it kind of scary that former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein doesn’t take issue with this either. If we’re going to be stuck with the test, why not just offload it to technology and spend our time in more valuable learning pursuits? (That’s worthy of a post in and of itself down the road.)

And here’s the other story that I find interesting: I had a chance to chat with Chris Walsh who is the Director of Innovation and Design for the New Tech Network of schools. They’ve either started or refashioned 86 schools across the country at this point and they have an eye on 30 or so more next year. It’s a pretty interesting model for change, especially in the way that communities, not schools, fund their work with New Tech. Basically, through fund raisers, donations and other contributions, the community “invests” in the change that happens at the school which, no doubt, helps those changes weather the problems of leaders leaving, pressures from state governments, etc.  In theory, it allows schools to shift in measured, sustainable ways. I haven’t had the chance to dive into all that New Tech offers in terms of PBL and technology to know if their curriculum is truly “bold,” but that’s an interesting model nonetheless, and makes me wonder how to drive more community investment in change.

As always, the great thing about Educon is the sincerity you sense of everyone in the building in trying to figure out what’s best for kids in terms of learning and schools. No one’s trying to sell you anything or promote themselves or make it about anything other than figuring it all out for their unique spaces and for the larger community. Looking forward to the conversations continuing.

So this pretty much sums it up as well it can be summed up right now:

U.S. schools under the jurisdiction of state and federal governments are now scripted processes that view knowledge as static capital, students as passive and empty vessels, and teachers as compliant conduits for state-approved content. The accountability paradigm is antithetical to human agency and autonomy and thus to democracy, but it serves the needs of the status quo and the ruling elite; in effect, accountability paradigms driving compulsory education are oppressive.

Amen.

(Source: dailykos.com)

Look, I can get to why schools look and act the way they do. They were built to do a certain thing…”educate” every child…at a certain time when folks didn’t have a lot of easy access to “quality” content or instruction. It was a monumental undertaking, and regardless of the fact that the founders of the system wanted to create factory workers instead of problem solving, creative, collaborative, lifelong learners, I have no doubt that a lot of people (excluding John Dewey) thought “yep, this is the best thing for the kids in our society. They’ll all get an education if we line ‘em up and nudge them through, and we’ll all be better for it.”

Or something like that.

But now the premise has changed. We’re getting more and more easy access to “quality” content and instruction (if we’re literate enough to know it when we see it), and that means that some of those once fine ideas for “getting an education” just don’t fit any more. Many of those old answers are feeling less and less useful when it comes to actually developing learners out of our kids instead of workers.

Yet we stick to them. And I know the reasons are many and complex (it’s what we know and what we expect schools to be,) but I think at the end of the day, we’re loathe to change because it’s just easier this way. It’s not what best for our kids, but it’s what’s easiest for us. (I know…a lot of you are thinking “there ain’t nothing easy about this,” and you’re right. Caring for kids and doing right by them educationally in whatever system we have is hard, hard work.)

But I’m thinking it’s time to call some of these old school habits out and ask, “are we really doing what’s best for kids, or are we doing what’s easiest for us?”

Like:

• Is it better for our kids to be grouped by chronological age, or is it just easier for us?
• Is it better for our kids to separate out the disciplines, or is it just easier for us?
• Is it better for our kids to give every one of them pretty much the same curriculum, or is it just easier for us?
• Is it better for our kids to turn off all of their technology in school, or is it just easier for us? 
• Is it better for our kids that we assess everyone the same way, or is it just easier for us?
• Is it better for our kids for us to decide what they should learn and how they should learn it, or is it just easier for us? 

You get the idea. Add yours below.

So, are we in the business of easy? Or do we want to find ways to do this education thing in ways that best serve our kids given the realities of this moment?

Just askin’.

Seth Godin nails it:

“The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, “How does this advance help our business [read: education system]?”

The correct question is, “how does this advance undermine our business [read: education] model and require us/enable us to build a new one?”

Yep. That’s the question alright.

This piece by Nilofer Merchant is more about business, but I think the translation to education is pretty obvious and relevant. 

We must recognize that we are always a product of what we’ve done and who we aspire to be. It is not enough to lead our current businesses; we must also lead our future businesses. Over the past dozen or so years, I’ve learned that to do this, the best leaders do five key things well:

1. Master unlearning. One of the most difficult tasks for corporate innovators is to learn how to unlearn the legacy business models they have perfected. Often, maybe even always, companies take the standards they have for their current business and use that to measure the new model. Start unlearning by explicitly recognizing that these metrics or assumptions are from the past and not necessarily useful for the future.
2. Augment expertise. The knowledge you need for future growth may not exist inside your firm’s walls. You can augment — but not skip — the internal learning process. If you’re investing in a new project and the options look like this: (a) 10 months by doing it alone, or (b) six months with an additional $200K in outside expertise, or (c) outsource it entirely, choose (b). Knowledge can be conveyed, but wisdom is only earned by the experience of trying.
3. Pilot, invest, experiment. Obviously you won’t get “the new thing” right the first time. Peter Sims talks of this as “little bets.” It’s okay to invest in something you know is going to fail. It’s the equivalent of letting kids explore. This is part of unlearning, saying, “Our goal is X, we tried Q, we learned K so our next pilot should be T.” The iterations take time, but it is a “go slow to go fast” play.
4. Reward learning and cooperation. Peg people’s bonuses to the new projects. Here’s how one compensation model I worked on said it: “Base pay covers the core business; of course we need to do that right to keep the core engine working, but bonuses cover the new ideas and unlearning, which will require us to stretch our minds/hearts/abilities.” And regardless of anyone’s focus area, everyone gets bonuses on the shared new area of growth. This doesn’t eliminate but greatly reduces potential checkmate behavior within the company that can block change.
5. Know your aspiration. You cannot find a second market without having a vision of who you serve and why. This doesn’t mean you can see into the future; it means you’ve committed to a process of discerning which unique abilities you have now, and which you’ll need to win a decade from now. Apple ended up not defining itself by its hardware or software expertise but by its design point of view.

I think Sarah Thorneycroft gets it right. In commenting about a student-led Minecraft workshop held online last week, she writes:

Perhaps the best aspect of the session today was that it was truly a ‘flipped classroom’ – not through swapping homework with classwork, but through reversing the roles of teacher and learner and turning learning heirarchy on its head. Learning led by kids is challenging and valuable – it’s learning by exploration and questioning, not rote process memorisation. Kids innovate and create first and think later.

Those who have been reading here for a while know my thinking on teachers needing to be learners first, needing to be the learning experts in our communities, not just the subject matter experts. In a world where knowledge and information are changing so fast, where there is so much to know, education has to be more about preparing kids to be learners rather than learned. Unfortunately, I still get the sense that most educators struggle with that shift. Sure, they continue to learn about what they teach, but few see themselves as master learners. In fact, for many, the idea of being a learning “expert” them uncomfortable.

That’s dangerous, especially right now when so many people outside of education are driving the conversation around reform. We’re ceding the debate to non-educators when we are the ones who should be driving it. We need to reframe the conversation, we need to redefine what education looks like, make it something where “success” isn’t measured by test scores or the number of AP courses we offer or the percentage of kids that go on to college but, instead, whether or not the kids that leave us are true learners, kids who have the skills and dispositions to edit their world, create complex work of quality and beauty and significance, work with one another to change the world for good, and tackle any problem that comes their way.

That is not a place we’ll arrive at if we let Bill Gates or Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Arne Duncan continue to drive the reform bus. And as more moneyed interests become invested in maintaining the status quo, we’ll get farther and farther from that goal.

WE are the learning experts in our communities. (Right?) WE need to lead. And WE need to dive into learning right now, just like those kids in Sarah’s Minecraft class. Flipping that lens, I think, will have a lot to do with flipping the larger conversation around change. 

Steve Goldberg is starting a school in the Fall of 2013 down in Durham, NC called the Triangle Learning Community Middle School. It’s an independent school, which gives him a bit more freedom to innovate. But I just love the concept nonetheless:

Mentor a socioeconomically and culturally diverse group of 20 middle school students for three years to pursue real-world project-based learning. The opposite of industrial model schools, we will build a strong sense of community and provide personalized attention as students discover and pursue their passions rather than a set curriculum. This does not mean students will sacrifice rigor in their academic development – they will work hard and dig deeply into subjects about which they are passionate. Students will become empathetic, self-directed, thoughtful, ethical, creative, engaged, curious and confident global citizens who will excel in high school and beyond.

Over the first two years in the program, students will gain confidence as active learners who take daily initiative to discover more about their world. Beyond this healthy curiosity, students will be encouraged and expected to work hard every day and follow through by completing quality inter-disciplinary projects that responsibly and thoughtfully contribute to society. Sixth graders will complete about 10 short projects over the course of the first year. Seventh graders will complete 3-4 more involved projects. Eighth graders will complete a six-month capstone project for an authentic audience. Graduates will leave confident that they can make a meaningful difference in the world.

Students who complete this three-year program will enter ninth grade ready to excel. Though they will take a non-traditional (but more meaningful) route to get there, graduates will be strong in English, math, science, history and conversant in at least one world language other than English. Most importantly, they will be self-directed learners who engage with the world on a regular basis and want to learn as much as possible. Work at Triangle Learning Community (TLC) will happen with equal intensity whether teachers are present or not, because students have an intrinsic desire to learn about topics they care passionately about.

Steve has also been keeping a blog detailing the methods that he and his teachers plan to use to make all of this happen. His recent posts on tackling the recent financial mess are a great starting point for thinking differently. 

This is what I want for my kids. I know that their schools can’t necessarily replicate the structure of what Steve is doing, but I would hope they could see the merit in the approach and find ways to make inquiry happen in their classrooms at a much deeper level. Yes, they need some knowledge and some context to make sense of the world, all that stuff that’s going to be on the test. But they also need to know how to take that knowledge out into the world and deepen their understanding of it, put it to good use to solve meaningful problems. Our own “co-schooling” efforts revolve around that, but my fear is we’re raising a generation of kids won’t have the dispositions to deal with the world we’re handing them.

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Cathy Davidson’s new book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn, and I couldn’t put it down during my five-hour flight to Calgary yesterday. I want to cover it more completely when I finish the last 75 pages or so (more flights tomorrow) but I wanted to just pull a quick passage that I think frames the struggle that traditional schooling as well as we as individuals are starting to wake up to right now. 

Keep in mind that we had over a hundred years to perfect our institutions of school and work for the industrial age. The chief purpose of those institutions was to make the divisions of labor central to industrialization seem natural to twentieth century workers. We had to be trained to inhabit the twentieth century comfortably and productively. Everything about school and work in the twentieth century was designed to create and reinforce separate subjects, separate cultures, separate grades, separate functions, separate spaces for personal life, work, private life, public life and all the other divisions.

Then the Internet came along. Now work increasingly means the desktop computer. Fifteen years into the digital revolution, one machine has reconnected the very things—personal life, social life, work life, and even sexual life—that we’d spent the last hundred years putting into neatly separated categories, cordoned off in their separate spaces, with as little overlap as possible except maybe the annual company picnic (13). 

What I like about her approach to all of this in the book is that she makes it pretty clear that we don’t have a choice as to whether or not we try to make sense of these shifts. We’re not going back to those neatly separate containers of our lives, that if anything, all of this is going to be more intertwined as we move forward. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a different thing, hugely different in some ways, but there is also great opportunity in the change if (IF) we begin to work to understand it more deeply than just a Twitter hashtag and blog post. We literally have to change the way we interact with the world.

And as educators, our struggle is especially acute. We not only have to “train” our kids for the twenty first century, we have to train ourselves. 

Rather here’s what I see: our institutions, far from evolving and improving, at the time we need to update them most, are actually moving backwards. We’re taking tiny steps—and sometimes giant leaps—backwards in time, deconstructing the basic building blocks of civilization.

Ring true, educators?

(Source: umairhaque.blogspot.com)

Here are three quotes that will hopefully lead you to read this really interesting interview with John Marsh, the author of Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality.

—What I learned — and what I wanted to convey in the book — is the unsettling truth that if people truly care about lessening poverty and economic inequality, they should forget about education.

—People who live in more equal countries live demonstrably better lives than those who live in less equal countries. In more equal countries, people — rich and poor alike — live longer, trust each other more, discriminate against women less, devote more resources to foreign aid, have fewer bouts of mental illness, use fewer drugs, murder each other less, have lower rates of infant mortality, suffer less from obesity, are more literate and numerate, complete more years of schooling, imprison fewer people, and enjoy greater social mobility.

—Although economists and scholars debate it, it is not clear that the United States needs or will need many more college graduates than it already generates.

And for once, there’s a fairly high level, balanced, respectful comment thread that parses the ideas even further. I love when the comments make me think as much as the article.

What do you think?

I mean really, can this be said any better than the way Alfie Kohn says it?

We are living through what future historians will surely describe as one of the darkest eras in American education — a time when teachers, as well as the very idea of democratic public education, came under attack; when carrots and sticks tied to results on terrible tests were sold to the public as bold “reform”; when politicians who understand nothing about learning relied uncritically on corporate models and metaphors to set education policy; when the goal of schooling was as misconceived as the methods, framed not in terms of what children need but in terms of “global competitiveness” — that is, how U.S. corporations can triumph over their counterparts in other countries. There will come a time when people will look back at this era and ask, “How the hell could they have let this happen?”

As Kohn suggests later in the article, educators need to drive these conversations, not politicians and businessmen. And I get the sense from the comments on my last post that people are looking for ways to do just that but are frustrated with the lack of scale. We can only start so many wikis…

One of the benefits of the Web is that everyone can have his or her own voice. One of the drawbacks is that everyone can have his or her own voice. Used to be only a few people started movements. Today, anyone can. So the question is, how do we pull our individual movements together into something that gets some real push behind it? Or do we even need to do that? Is there another path?

In other words, how do we not let this happen to education?

<rant>

In over 10 years of using social media I can say with almost absolute certainty that I have never used the “F-word” in any public post, Tweet, bookmark, note or whatever else…until today. It took me a few minutes to push “publish” on that Tweet, but in the end, the anger I’m feeling about what’s being done to public education in this country coupled with our growing political dysfunction drove me to it. That and the fact that 40,000 other Tweets with that hashtag had been posted in the last day or so, not one of which I could find on a quick search that dealt with schools or learning or kids. The anger is building everywhere it seems, but around education.

I know, I know. As Wes suggests, on some level it probably wasn’t appropriate, and were I still in the classroom, I doubt I would have done it. And I know there are other people besides me who are angry about what has happened to the profession and to the system who are voicing it in more “productive” ways. There are lots of educators taking to the streets this week in Washington, DC, and there are others writing letters to the editor and op-ed pieces and more. I commend all of those folks for doing what they can do to articulate the many complex sides to the education debate.

But here’s the thing: If you’re a public school educator in the U.S. right now, how can you not be angry? How can you not be doing something, even if it is just a profanity laced Tweet? The profession is being trampled. Politicians and businessmen with no background in education are driving reform. And our students are stuck in a system that still thinks it’s the 19th Century. By any standard, including the tests, our kids are not being well served, especially those who live in poverty. As a community, we’re in a fight, whether we like it or not, yet we seem more inclined to figure out Google+ than to make our voices heard to the policy makers who seem to have no desire to figure out what’s best for our children and care more about their re-election campaigns. 

I mean really…what’s it going to take?

</rant>

This danah boyd post is from a few years ago, but it still rings as true as ever. 

Bright people push the edge, but what constitutes the edge is time dependent. It’s no longer about miniskirts or rock and roll; it’s about having a complex digital presence. Naturally, there’ll always be a handful of young people who manage to go through adolescence and early adulthood without any blemishes on their record. Employers need people who play by the rules, but they also need “creatives.”…

My generation isn’t as afraid of public opinion… We face it head-on and know how to manage it. We digitally document every love story and teen drama imaginable and then go on to put out content that creates a really nuanced public persona. If you read just one entry, you’re bound to get a distorted view…

Part of living in a networked society is learning how to accessorize our digital bodies, just as we learn to put on the appropriate clothes to go to the office.

I had an amazingly good time in Toronto last week with the Ontario Teachers Federation, but despite Ontario being a fair length ahead of the change conversation being held here in the states, I was struck by how many teachers struggled with the digital presence thing. Not that that fear is anything new; needing to be Googleable is such a different reality for most adults, much less teachers. But I just still find it interesting that in a room of about 200 teachers, only about 20 indicated they had even checked on their digital presence in the last couple of months.

That speaks volumes about how few are really understanding this shift and the implications for our students. We have a lot of work to do…

(Source: danah.org)