Illusion of standardization

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Socrates

When "collaboration" is really code for standardization, professional development becomes nothing more than control over actions. 

Just like how mandated sentences strips judgement from judges, so too does standardization deny teachers the ability to teach. Maja Wilson puts it this way:

Mandating practices in the effort to improve teaching paradoxically creates the kind of environment that undermines good teaching. [Standardization] contributes to an environment that actually stunts teachers' ability to make good decisions in the classroom and obscures bad teaching with its illusion of uniformity.

It's not easy to object to standardization; I know a lot of good teachers who believe consistency is a good thing...

While its true that standardization provides us with consistency, it tends to act less like a floor and more like a ceiling. In other words, standardization is attractive because it offers a kind of guarantee, but that guarantee tends to come at an alarming cost.

Seymour Papert describes with chilling accuracy just how costly the illusion of standardization really is:

It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and maintain quality control. They prefer the kind of curriculum that will lay down, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the teacher should be doing, so that they can keep tabs on it. Of course, every teacher knows this is an illusion. It’s not an effective method of insuring quality. It is only a way to cover ass. Everybody can say, “I did my bit, I did my lesson plan today, I wrote it down in the book.” Nobody can be accused of not doing the job. But this really doesn’t work. What the bureaucrat can verify and measure for quality has nothing to do with getting educational results–those teachers who do good work, who get good results, do it by exercising judgment and doing things in a personal way, often undercover, sometimes even without acknowledging to themselves that they are violating the rules of the system. Of course one must grant that some people employed as teachers do not do a good job. But forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones.

If we are to achieve the kind of wisdom that Socrates spoke of, then we need to understand what standardization does and does not do. We need to understand what we are actually prescribing to when we standardize curriculum and assessment.

Children are not widgets that simply require a better regiment of assembly line workers. Children are not interchangeable cogs that would benefit from simply being treated more like their peers.

We have to stop pretending that we can meet one learners' needs by pretending that all learners have the same needs.

We have to stop pretending that highly prescribed curriculums and standardized testing has anything to do with good teaching and real learning.

Our fixation on quantity and control is doing a massive disservice to our children.

In the context of educating children, a proper definition of terms would have us realize that standardization serves to make the shallowest forms of teaching and superficial learning appear successful.

Fair isn't always equal

When we confuse fairness with equality we marginalize and victimize the very students who need us most.

The only people who gain from such standardization are those who the system had in mind.

What about everyone else?

Public education is for the public - it's for everybody. Standardized testing is by definition exclusionary. See the problem?

Sherry Turkle Podcast

I just listened to this podcast from Harvard Business Review featuring Sherry Turkle. It's a great listen.

I particularly enjoyed how Turkle frames the use of social networking and technology less as an addiction that must be simply stopped, and more like a diet that must be monitored and regulated in appropriate moderation.

My favorite line from the whole interview was:

If you don't teach your children to be alone - they'll only know how to be lonely.

If you found this interesting, you might like to know that Sherry Turkle will be in Edmonton in May 2011. More information here.

When would this ever be appropriate?

Can someone please tell when it would ever be appropriate to purposely provoke a child in such a manner that you intentionally elevate their anger and anxiety to such a heightened level that they are guaranteed to have an outburst?

Then tell me when it would ever be appropriate to place the child in an isolated "time out", and then time them to see how long it takes for them to de-escalate - if they take 45 minutes to calm down today but it took them 60 minutes yesterday then we are making "progress".

Under what circumstances... in what context... would this ever be considered appropriate?

Interview with Mona Knudslien & Joe Bower

Here is a 12 minute interview featuring my past principal Mona Knudslien and me. Together, we discuss how a school can innovate and improve while focusing on progressive education.

I enjoyed reminiscing with Mona how both of us experienced our time together, and I will be forever thankful for her supportive, and nurturing leadership.

Thank you to Brian Mason and Tim Lee for putting this interview together!

Standardization: it will fill you up but with nothing good

I know an awful lot of teachers who see consistency and standardization as a good thing.

It reminds me of the old sports joke where one spectator asks another "what did you think of the officiating?" and the other says "it was consistent... consistently awful... but it was consistent."

You can walk into a McDonald's anywhere in the world, order a meal and be "guaranteed" to get exactly what you expect... it will fill you up, but with nothing good. Sure, you could get by living off this standardized guarantee, but who would want to?

Sir Ken Robinson continues the fast-food metaphor for standardization in his book The Element:

Education is being strangled persistently by the culture of standardized testing. The irony is that these tests are not raising standards except in some very particular areas, and at the expense of most of what really matters in education. 

To get a perspective on this, compare the process of quality assurance in education with those in an entirely different field - catering. In the restaurant business, there are two distinct models of quality assurance. The first is the fast-food model. In this model, the quality of the food is guaranteed, because it's standardized. The fast-food chains specify exactly what should be on the menu in all of their outlets. They specify exactly what should be done in the burger or nuggets, the oil in which they should be fried, the exact bun in which they should be served, how the fries should be made, what should be in the drinks, and exactly how they should be served. They specify how the room should be decorated and what the staff should wear. Everything is standardized. It's often dreadful and bad for you. Some forms of fast food are contributing to the massive explosion of obesity and diabetes across the world. But at least the quality is guaranteed. 

The other model of quality assurance in catering is the Michelin guide. In this model, the guides establish specific criteria for excellence, but they do not say how the particular restaurants should meet these criteria. They don't say what should be on the menu, what the staff should wear, or how the rooms should be decorated. All of that is at the discretion of the individual restaurant to meet them in whatever way they see best. They are then judged not to some impersonal standard, but by the assessment of experts who know what they are looking for and what a great restaurant is actually like. The result is that every Michelin restaurant is terrific. And they are all unique and different from each other.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future of education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and "de-individuation" but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.

Just as standardization ensures that a real cook will never be employed by a fast-food chain, education reforms that mandate highly prescribed, content-bloated curriculums and standardized tests are working hard to ensure that real teachers need not work in schools again.

Policy should never trump people

My dad tweeted a very cool article by Richard Branson who wrote how an employee of his airline, Virgin Atlantic, personally refunded a customer from her own pocket in order to help him reach his destination in time:

Another story that demonstrates the importance of the service chain involves my own company, Virgin Atlantic. An Upper Class customer's free limo failed to connect with him at his New York City hotel. (It turned out the customer had been waiting at the wrong door.) He jumped in a cab to Newark Liberty International Airport, a fair distance from the city. Traffic was bad. By the time he got to the airport he was angry, late and panicking. But the Virgin agent calmed the fuming customer, apologizing profusely and assuring him that he would not miss his flight. From her own pocket, she refunded his taxi fare and rushed him through to the gate with 10 minutes to spare. Like the leather jacket incident, it demonstrates how great customer service can convert a negative into a positive. 

But here the chain broke. The agent told her supervisor what happened and asked to be repaid the $70 cab fare. Rather than congratulating the agent on saving the day, the supervisor asked for a receipt. When her answer was, “There was no time for that,” he chastised her. He said, “No receipt, no reimbursement. You'd better take more care next time.”

I find it sad that some might read this through a financial lens and empathize with the supervisor, but at the same time I know many, like me, would be disgusted by the supervisor's lack of emotional intelligence. I draw hope from the idea that perhaps more people would see this situation less through a corporate lens but through a humanistic one.

And yet the kind of rule-mongering the supervisor exhibited is precisely the premise our education system's highly prescribed, content-bloated curriculums and high stakes standardized testing assessment regimes are built upon. Under these systems, accountability is simply code for assigning blame, and collaboration becomes nothing more than comply with your colleagues.

When policy becomes more important than people, we lose our way - we lose the plot.

Perhaps it's time to rethink the term "gifted"?

This was written by John Robinson who has taught High School English Middle School Language Arts 16 Years, School Level Administrator 5 years, BA English, MA Instructional Technology-Computers, MSA School Administration, EdS Educational Leadership, Licensed Teacher, Instructional Technologist, Principal, Superintendent.

You can find him on Twitter here: @21stprincipal. 


And he blogs here: http://the21stcenturyprincipal.blogspot.com/


by John Robinson

“Talent is not a thing; it’s a process,” is the argument made in David Shenk’s book The Genius in All of Us.  For years, the nature versus nurture debate has simmered, with most of us coming out on the side of nature at times. Since psychologists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray warned that our society was increasingly becoming stratified between those who have the genes for intelligence and high cognitive functioning, and those who are unfortunate in that they inherited genetically the lot of mediocre intelligence and only average cognitive functioning, it has been widely accepted that there are those who are “gifted” or “talented” and then the rest of us.


But, what if, genetics is more complicated than that? What if our talents and giftedness are not solely dictated by those magical genes we carry inside us? Shenk’s book tries to provide such an argument by pointing out a new “dynamic model” of genetics called “interactionalism.”  In this model of genetics, rather than being blueprints that dictate who or what we become, genes are more like “knobs and switches” that respond to a wide variety of factors both internal and external. According to Shenk, these factors include things like: nutrition, hormones, sensory input, intellectual activity, and even other genes. The old genetics model basically says that genes come first and influence what we are and what we become. The interactionalism model says it all begins with interaction with these internal and external factors which determine how genes express themselves.


This model of genetics is intriguing to me as an educator. Like Shenk, it makes me ask the question, “What if no one is genetically doomed to mediocrity?” Shenk clearly qualifies this model of genetics by saying that it doesn’t necessarily mean that we can become whatever we want to become. We are still limited within both environmental factors and genetics, but he gives us a perfect analogy in his book to describe our genetic differences. He says, “Our genetic differences aren’t straitjackets holding us in place; they are bungee cords waiting to be stretched and stretched.” Perhaps we as educators can consider ourselves these “stretchers of bungee cords” in some fashion. Our job is to find a way to tap into and use what Shenk calls “Positive Environmental Triggers” to pull all we can academically from our students. Shenk gives a list of some of these positive environmental triggers in his book:

• Speaking to children early and often
• Reading early and often
• Nurturance and encouragement
• Setting high expectations
• Embracing failure
• Encouraging what Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset”

David Shenk’s book and the ideas of genetic interactionalism are definitely something we as educators should ponder. What if our school policy is actually holding back students who could otherwise demonstrate a level of talent or giftedness of which we were not aware? What if there are missed opportunities to “stretch” students beyond the achievement boundaries many have set for them? I think we’ve all known those occasional teachers who seem to miraculously do just that. They get students to do things that no one else has ever been able to do. Just maybe, these teachers actually redefine the word “gifted” by what they do with kids.

Why preschool shouldn't be like school

"'College begins in kindergarten.' No it doesn't. Kindergarten begins in kindergarten."

-Sir Ken Robinson

If you are a fan of direct instruction and the banking metaphor of education, you might find it interesting to read Alison Gopnik's Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School. The article features two experiments:

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy. 

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum, Tom Griffiths, Patrick Shafto, and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy.* This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go." 

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

All this brings new life to an old quote from Seymour Papert:

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.

But if this is true then perhaps it's not just preschool that shouldn't be like school. Perhaps all learners would be better off if every level of education was a little less like school.