This was written by Gary Stager and Sylvia Libow-Martinez who writes and speaks about progressive education. He is the co-author of Invent to Learn. Gary blogs here and tweets here. Sylvia's website is here and tweets here. This post is an excerpt from his book Invent to Learn.
by Gary Stager and Sylvia Libo-Martinez
Anytime an adult feels it necessary to intervene in an educational transaction, they should take a deep breath and ask, "Is there some way I can do less and grant more authority, responsibility, or agency to the learner?"
Understanding is the result of existing knowledge accommodating and explaining new experiences. If we focus on a handful of powerful ideas and create experiences where students naturally need to stretch their understanding, students learn more. The role of the teacher is to create and facilitate these powerful, productive contexts for learning.
One simple way to do this is to make your teaching mantra, "Less Us, More Them." Piaget suggests that it is not the role of the teacher to correct a child from the outside, but to create the conditions in which the student corrects himself. Whenever you are about to intervene on behalf of a teachable moment, pause and ask yourself, "Is there a way I can shift more agency to the learner?"
Less Us, More Them (LUMT) doesn't exempt teachers from the learning process, or minimize the importance of their expertise within the learning environment. LUMT raises expectations and standards in our classrooms by granting more responsibility to the learner. In this environment, it is natural to expect kids to look up unfamiliar words, proofread, and contribute resources for class discussion without prodding from the teacher.
To start making your classroom more student-centred, demonstrate a concept and then ask students to do something.
Walk around and support them when asked. Bring the group together to celebrate an accomplishment or seize the next teachable moment. We need to operate as if students own the time in our classrooms, not us. Kids rise to the occasion if we let them. When students own the learning process, they also own the knowledge they construct. Self-reliance results when we relinquish control and power to our students.
This was written by Gary Stager who writes and speaks about progressive education. He is the co-author of Invent to Learn. Gary blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.
by Gary Stager
Principles…
Things need not be as they seem!
Strong progressive public schools are the bedrock of our democracy.
Knowledge is a consequence of experience.
Learning is not the direct causal result of having been taught.
Young people have a remarkable capacity for intensity and it is incumbent upon teachers and parents to build upon that capacity, otherwise it manifests itself as boredom, misbehavior or just wasted potential.
The Common Core is on the wrong side of history.
There is no sudden epidemic of bad teachers!
Parents and teachers should do everything possible to help kids get through high school without hating it.
Modern knowledge construction is inseparable from computer programming and every child needs a laptop computer.
Schools will no longer enjoy the monopoly on children’s time they currently enjoy.
Students are competent, but we may not behave as if children are competent if we behave as if their teachers are incompetent.
We know what to do. Those of us who know better need to do better.
Kids need constant access to diverse expertise.
The desire for personalization or individualization may not supplant exposure to concepts, skills and ideas that kids may not know they love.
School policy should provide clear and convincing evidence that our society loves children.
In education, bad ideas are timeless and good ones are incredibly fragile.
The best thing school can do is prepare kids to solve problems that school as not even anticipated.
What if our education policies were based on the assumption that each educator wakes up each morning and asks themselves, “How do I make this the best seven hours of a kid’s life?”
Gary Stager and Sylvia Martinez wrote a marvelous book Invent to Learn. If you spend time with kids, you need to read this book.
Saying we want to personalize learning and putting students first are platitudes. They are easy to say because who in their right mind would disagree.
In the video below Sylvia summarizes the problem succinctly:
There is a disconnect between what we want to have happen, what we know works and what's really happening.
Grant Wiggins tells us that "when practice becomes disconnected from purpose, rigidity sets in" and Susan Engel writes, "What we admire and what we deliberately cultivate aren't the same."
If you are interested in making school more student focused and more hands-on and minds-on, take 30 minutes and watch this video.
The maker movement and project based learning does not supplement testsandgrades -- the maker movement and project based learning replaces testsandgrades.
This was written by Gary Stager who is the executive director of the Constructivist Consortium and founder of the summer learning institute Constructing Modern Knowledge. Gary blogs here and tweets here. This post first appeared here.
by Gary Stager
This isn’t my first time at the rodeo. I led professional development in the world’s first two laptop schools 22 years ago, and in the intervening years I’ve helped schools across the globe go one-to-one, most recently a Korean international school where every K–12 student has a laptop. From the beginning, one-to-one computing wasn’t about arithmetic—it was about stance. The pioneering schools recognized that traditional approaches were failing to amplify children’s potential. Personal computing was a provocation. It placed unprecedented agency in the lap of the learner and tore down hierarchical school structures that had been in place since the Middle Ages. The laptop embodied a school’s commitment to realizing the dreams of John Dewey, Seymour Papert, and John Holt: to embrace learning-by-doing anytime, anyplace, unencumbered by the traditional curriculum or bell schedule. Giving laptops to children at a time when few executives had one was a statement that things need not be as they always have been.
Propelled by chutzpah and a sense of wonder, the early laptop schools were not sure how things would change as a result of personal computing but that change was both eagerly awaited and embraced. Matters such as class size took on a new urgency when 20 or more projects were under way at the same time. Teachers’ curriculum needed to be reorganized and the schedule changed to support maximum time for interdisciplinary project work. Furniture and even architecture needed to respond to the changes in students’ work habits. Parents reported that kids were spending countless hours programming and that their work exceeded the curriculum’s low expectations. Teachers marveled at the abilities of their students and were challenged to grow at a similar pace. There was a consensus among educators that they were part of something great. They were on the right side of history.
While some educators are excited to use computers to teach what we’ve always wanted kids to know, my work has been guided by a desire to help kids learn and do in ways and in knowledge domains that were otherwise inaccessible. Computing, the act of using a computer to make things—programs, novels, art, video, robots—is the game changer.
From the beginning, there was an inevitability to one-to-one computing. It’s sad that we are still debating the merits of such student empowerment two decades later.
There is much to admire about the iPad (and its imitators). I love mine. I watch TV on it. It’s light and small, and it has great battery life. In a classroom, the iPad’s profile ensures eye contact with the teacher, if that’s important to you. My 96-year-old grandmother uses an iPad without any district-funded PD. The iPad is a heckuva computer. Too bad Apple prohibits computing on the iPad.
As a result of misguided marketing decisions, not science or engineering, the iPad can’t do the things I most value in a computer for learners. Apple disallows the creation of executable files, meaning that you can’t make anything that may be used elsewhere. The most powerful form of computing, programming, is verboten. Robotics is impossible. Filmmaking is theoretically possible, but I suggest you go first.
The business model of selling software for the iPad is such that the best educational developers can’t afford to create iPad apps. There may never be constructive software of the caliber of MicroWorlds or HyperStudio available for tablets. Apple even disallowed Scratch, the free multimedia authoring software used by millions of kids.
“App” is a diminutive word. Apps do simple things reliably. Learning requires more complexity, flexibility, and room to grow. You don’t want your alarm clock to be creative or your map to be inventive, but you want kids to be. The laptop is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that allows kids to do what adults imagine and so much more.
The iPad is a consumption device. Sure, you can use it for Web browsing, video-watching, or note-taking, but the laptop affords a much greater range of expressive possibilities. Apple’s embrace of digital textbooks reinforces a quaint view of education that transfers agency from learners to publishers. The tools for creating e-books, such as iBooks Author, require Macs, but the laptop cannot read the books it creates, forcing schools to choose between textbooks and computing. Apple has made it clear that education is about content delivery and testing, no longer about the power to be your best.
Schools are buying tablets with a reckless ferocity. There are pronouncements of how iPads will revolutionize or transform education, without a coherent vision of what that might look like or a single example rooted in practice. The iPad provides an illusion of modernity with no real challenge to the nature of schooling—a win-win proposition unless you’re a child. Add hysterical Web filtering, social media bans, and locked-down devices incapable of installing software, and the tablet becomes a tool of compliance, not empowerment.
Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don’t. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use.
This was written by Gary Stager who is the executive director of the Constructivist Consortium and founder of the summer learning institute Constructing Modern Knowledge. Gary blogs here and tweets here. This post first appeared here and here.
by Gary Stager
There are three competing visions of educational computing. Each bestows agency on an actor in the educational enterprise. We can use classroom computers to benefit the system, the teacher or the student. Data collection, drill-and-practice test-prep, computerized assessment or monitoring Common Core compliance are examples of the computer benefitting the system. “Interactive” white boards, presenting information or managing whole-class simulations are examples of computing for the teacher. In this scenario, the teacher is the actor, the classroom a theatre, the students the audience and the computer is a prop.
The third vision is a progressive one. The personal computer is used to amplify human potential. It is an intellectual laboratory and vehicle for self-expression that allows each child to not only learn what we’ve always taught, perhaps with greater efficacy, efficiency or comprehension. The computer makes it possible for students to learn and do in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. This vision of computing democratizes educational opportunity and supports what Papert and Turkle call epistemological pluralism. The learner is at the center of the educational experience and learns in their own way.
Too many educators make the mistake of assuming a false equivalence between “technology” and its use. Technology is not neutral. It is always designed to influence behavior. Sure, you might point to an anecdote in which a clever teacher figures out a way to use a white board in a learner-centered fashion or a teacher finds the diagnostic data collected by the management system useful. These are the exception to the rule.
While flexible high-quality hardware is critical, educational computing is about software because software determines what you can do and what you do determines what you can learn. In my opinion the lowest ROI comes from granting agency to the system and the most from empowering each learner. You might think of the a continuum that runs from drill/testing at the bottom; through information access, productivity, simulation and modeling; with the computer as a computational material for knowledge construction representing not only the greatest ROI, but the most potential benefit for the learner.
Piaget reminds us ,“To understand is to invent,” while our mutual colleague Seymour Papert said, “If you can use technology to make things, you can make more interesting things and you can learn a lot more by making them.”
Some people view the computer as a way of increasing efficiency. Heck, there are schools with fancy-sounding names popping-up where you put 200 kids in a room with computer terminals and an armed security guard. The computer quizzes kids endlessly on prior knowledge and generates a tsunami of data for the system. This may be cheap and efficient, but it does little to empower the learner or take advantage of the computer’s potential as the protean device for knowledge construction.
School concoctions like information literacy, digital citizenship or making PowerPoint presentations represent at best a form of “Computer Appreciation.” The Conservative UK Government just abandoned their national ICT curriculum on the basis of it being “harmful and dull” and is calling for computer science to be taught K-12. I could not agree more.
My work with children, teachers and computers over the past thirty years has been focused on increasing opportunity and replacing “quick and easy” with deep and meaningful experiences. When I began working with schools where every student had a laptop in 1990, project-based learning was supercharged and Dewey’s theories were realized in ways he had only imagined. The computer was a radical instrument for school reform, not a way of enforcing the top-down status quo.
Now, kindergarteners could build, program and choreograph their own robot ballerinas by utilizing mathematical concepts and engineering principles never before accessible to young children. Kids express themselves through filmmaking, animation, music composition and collaborations with peers or experts across the globe. 5th graders write computer programs to represent fractions in a variety of ways while understanding not only fractions, but also a host of other mathematics and computer science concepts used in service of that understanding. An incarcerated 17 year-old dropout saddled with a host of learning disabilities is able to use computer programming and robotics to create “gopher-cam,” an intelligent vehicle for exploring beneath the earth, or launch his own probe into space for aerial reconnaissance. Little boys and girls can now make and program wearable computers with circuitry sewn with conductive thread while 10th grade English students can bring Lady Macbeth to life by composing a symphony. Soon, you be able to email and print a bicycle. Computing as a verb is the game-changer.
Used well, the computer extends the breadth, depth and complexity of potential projects. This in turn affords kids with the opportunity to, in the words of David Perkins, “play the whole game.” Thanks to the computer, children today have the opportunity to be mathematicians, novelists, engineers, composers, geneticists, composers, filmmakers, etc… But, only if our vision of computing is sufficiently imaginative.
Three recommendations:
1) Kids need real computers capable of programming, video editing, music composition and controlling external peripherals, such as probes or robotics. Since the lifespan of school computers is long, they need to do all of the things adults expect today and support ingenuity for years to come.
2) Look for ways to use computers to provide experiences not addressed by the curriculum. Writing, communicating and looking stuff up are obvious uses that require little instruction and few resources.
3) Every student deserves computer science experiences during their K-12 education. Educators would be wise to consider programming environments designed to support learning and progressive education such as MicroWorlds EX and Scratch.
I was listening to a panel discussion featuring Stephen Downes, Howard Gardner, Alfie Kohn and Gary Stager on Reforming Education Reform.
Here is a portion of what Alfie Kohn had to say about the state of public discourse around education reform:
The discussion that we have about education is only as good as the way that discussion is framed by the people who have ready access to the means of communication. So if public officials and corporate officials and corporate media have framed the conversation in a particular way, then it's likely that we will ask some questions and studiously avoid others. The default assumptions -- the things we take for granted because we've never been invited to reflect on them turns out to be the limits, the barriers, the boundaries to anything we talk about. So for example, if no one invites most people to rethink whether education could be more than just transmitting a set of facts or skills to passive receptacles, then nobody is likely to look around at schools and say, "how come they are still characterized by worksheets, lectures, quizzes, tests, grades and homework just as they were twenty years ago and fifty years ago." Because we think that is how school has to be.
And if nobody has said standardized tests tend to measure what matters least and there are more meaningful and less destructive ways to assess individual students as well as whole schools then the public discussion will just be based on a sort of monosyllabic grunting of "test scores go up that's good", and if the larger public conversation assumes that government is always a bad thing and the free market delivers results then we will be inherently suspicious about the great democratic institution of education in this country and we will look for ways to undermine its public status or be receptive to people who attempt to do that. Which is exactly what we are seeing now in the name of choice.
Dr. Gary Stager is the executive director of the Constructivist Consortium and founder of the summer learning institute Constructing Modern Knowledge. He may be reached at gary@constructingmodernknowledge.com. This post first appeared on Tech and Learning here.
by Gary Stager
Interactive White Boards (Smartboards) and their clicker spawn are a terrible investment that breathes new life into medieval educational practices. Aside from producing an illusion of modernity, interactive whiteboards are a pre-Gutenberg technology; the priest chants while the monks slavishly take dictation on their tablets. They reinforce the dominance of the front of the room and teacher supremacy. At a time of enormous educational upheaval, technological change, and an increasing gulf between adults and children, it is a bad idea to purchase technology that facilitates the delivery of information and increases the physical distance between teacher and learner.
I work in schools all over the world. Many of these schools have installed IWBs on every surface of the facility, including the parking lot and football field, yet they go largely unused. The unfortunate administrative response to this top-down waste of money is to purchase canned curricula provided by the IWB vendors and our friends at the multinational textbook conglomerates. This “content” is an insult to 50-cent flash cards. It focuses on low-level repetition, memorization, and discrete skills devoid of any meaningful content. Some schools proudly show cartoons followed by comprehension quizzes on their IWBs with a self-confidence bordering on parody. The IWB vendor demonstrations at conferences are embarrassing and don’t rise even to the level of toddlers “playing school.” If such “lessons” were presented in a teacher education course, the candidate would now be selling churros.
Worst of all, the remarkable power of computers to liberate learners and construct knowledge is squandered in the service of test-prep and teacher agency.
Here are the inevitable reactions to my argument.
• The kids are so engaged. Twitching is not interaction, and fidgeting is not engagement!
• It’s just a tool. Technology is never neutral. It always influences and shapes behavior. Some teachers may be able to use the IWB in a creative fashion, but this hardly justifies the investment of one for every classroom. The teacher should get an IWB if they can justify its use.
• It all depends on how teachers use it. We don’t buy a chain saw for every teacher. If we did, a few teachers would do brilliant work with the chain saws, a few others would cut off their thumbs, and the vast majority would just make a mess. Even in the case of the great teachers, the best we can hope for is one of those bears carved out of a log—not high art.
• You should see it when the kids use the board! That usually means that a kid is permitted to stand up and click on the right answer or present information to the class, effectively substituting one lecturer for another.
• We use it to share student work. Great! Buy a better projector and use that.
• Our ninth graders went to Israel for a month and didn’t miss a math lesson. If your “lesson” can be reduced to screen captures, you’re in trouble; and why not allow kids to have authentic experiences?
I had an educator approach me at a conference recently to volunteer that “Our school is not ready for Google Docs.” Set aside whatever you happen to think about Google Docs; it’s a word processor in a Web browser, right? I told the tech director, “Congratulations, your school district has apparently managed to employ the last breathing mammals in the solar system incapable of using a word processor.” Isn’t it odd that technology directors are not held accountable for such failure over three decades? Could they possibly be enabling co-dependent behavior and helplessness in the teachers they are meant to lead?
I think Khan is a true transformer, a visionary, activist, architect and engineer of a new form for teaching and learning that will raise the educational prospects of millions, perhaps billions of students.
While Jonathon is entitled to his opinion, I whole heartedly disagree. And I was thrilled to find Will Richardson's comment:
Education will only truly be transformed when we stop trying to jam content into our kids’ heads and start allowing them to explore and learn in contexts that feed their desire to keep learning. To that end, I don’t think Khan Academy does or can change much at all.
There is nothing revolutionary or transformative about how the Khan Academy encourages educators to "shoehorn" technology in a way that merely supplements traditional, less-than-optimal teaching and learning practices which ultimately leads the classroom to revert to the way it was before.
At best, saying the Khan Academy is transformative is to admit that education reform is blind drunk on technology, and at worst, the Khan Academy is an instrument for the likes of Bill Gates implicitly and explicitly attack public education.
One might think it a stretch to accuse the Khan Academy as an attack on public education, and it is, but here's where I'm coming from:
In regards to Sal Khan, Gates has commented, "this guy is amazing" - leaving many to identify Khan as Bill Gates's favorite teacher.
At the same time, Gates has commented on the do's and dont's for policy makers faced with a financial crunch:
Gates spoke to the nation's governors mindful of the severe financial woes that many of them face as they try to bridge deficits totaling about $125 billion in the coming fiscal year. He said there are some clear do's and don'ts. Among the do's: Lift caps on class sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers. Those teachers would get paid more with the savings generated from having fewer personnel overall.
While many educators have lost the capacity to be outraged by the outrageous, Gary Stager has not:
You would think that nothing else could surprise me, but now, Bill Gates has descended into the delusional world of Charlie Sheen. Gates told the nation's governors (they seem to speak with Bill more than their caddies) that the critical cuts to public schools could actually improve education if class sizes were increased so that we can "get more students in front of the very best teachers." That's right, Bill Gates is now advocating for larger class size! Since when do philanthropists call for the deprivation of children?
Gates' crazy plan to raise class sizes FOR THE CHILDREN is one thing, but his desire to get more students "in front of the very best teachers" reveals his ignorance on how learning occurs. Learning is an active process constructed by each learner. It is not simply the immediate result of being taught.
If Bill Gates's favorite teacher is Sal Khan, and he is encouraging policy makers to "save money" by "lifting cap sizes and get more students in front of the very best teachers", I can't help but see a disturbing connection.
Look, the Kahn Academy is not a direct threat to public education, but Sal Kahn, perhaps inadvertently, has become an accomplice to those like Bill Gates who very much are a threat.
What concerns me when I listen to folks like Bill Gates wax rhapsodic about Khan Academy is that it seems to me to be one more moment when people who should know better are, essentially, saying, "See! We don't need teachers anymore!" As if every student could learn from a pre-packaged delivery model of content.
It doesn't work that way.
Khan Academy is great if you need a refresher... or if you need another look at an idea. But watching a video about a concept isn't the way you necessarily learn it... even when you have a somewhat drill-and-kill quiz system behind it. Khan Academy will work well for the kids whose teachers still spend 80% of the time lecturing at the front of the room. But it won't do that much anywhere where teachers have learned how to present ideas concisely and then spend their class time working with kids.
Sixty years of research tells us that we don't internalize knowledge by simply being told to do so. Real learning is constructed from the inside while interacting with others. While examining technology with a constructivist's lens, we must discriminate between the prolific and poor uses of technology.
Far from being transformative or revolutionary, the Khan Academy is an ingenious way of improving school without changing a thing.
I first came across David Perkins' book Making Learning Whole from a Gary Stager tweet. I was not dissapointed. It is a fantastic book that really should be read by educators for all grade levels.
For me it really helped me to see why learning in-a-context and for a purpose is so important.
An instant classic! Making Learning Whole will be used for decades by those interested in a framework for making classrooms better places for learning. The book performs a great service by reminding educators that each student comes first – complete with individual needs, talents, experience, curiosity and passion. The job of curriculum is to connect personal experience with powerful ideas, not deliver a bunch of facts in a mysterious incomprehensible sequence. Perkins takes such a common sense metaphor, playing the whole game, and uses it to transform the learning experience for each student.
For educators seeking a practical way to create productive contexts for learning, Making Learning Whole, is a superior approach to the top-down pedagogical tricks advanced by Understanding by Design.
A couple days ago, I wrote a post that was critical of how some people use technology in education. It turns out that my critical words for Richard Byrne and his post on how to create self-graded quizzes in Google Docs were not well received by some.
I often see teachers so enamored over technology that the appeal for it often trumps pedagogy, and so I think teachers who choose to share their resources have an obligation to share it mindfully. Alfie Kohn offers this:
Seymour Papert, known for his work on artificial intelligence, began one of his books by inviting us to imagine a group of surgeons and a group of teachers, both from a century ago, who are magically transported to the present day. The surgeons visit a modern operating room and struggle to understand what's going on, but the teachers feel right at home in today's schools. Kids, they discover, are still segregated by age in rows of classrooms; are still made to sit passively and listen (or practice skills) most of the time; are still tested and graded, rewarded or punished; still set against one another in contests and deprived of any real say about what they're doing.
Those tempted to point defensively to updates in the delivery system only end up underscoring how education is still about delivering knowledge to empty receptacles. In fact, snazzier technology -- say, posting grades or homework assignments on-line -- mostly serves to distract us from rethinking the pedagogy. Interactive whiteboards in classrooms amount to a 21st-century veneer on old-fashioned, teacher-centered instruction.
Take a look at Richard Byrne's YouTube video below on self-graded quizzes. Can you see how this is an example of what Kohn and Papert speak of? Can you see that using Google Docs in this manner is simply a 21st century veneer on sit-and-get-spit-and-forget, select a response assessments? Isn't this still about delivering knowledge to empty receptacles packaged as snazzy technology? I wonder what Seymour Papert would say about this video? Take a look for yourself...
Before I go into my pedagogical objections to such an assessment practice, let's read this comment left by Richard Byrne...
...preaching is not the intent of my blog. I'll leave that to others that I think are more qualified for that and to those who think they are qualified to preach. The ones that I think are qualified, I refer others to (some of those include Scott McLeod, Gary Stager, Chris Lehmann). Those that I don't think are qualified, I ignore.
Since I didn't see my name on Richard Byrne's Pedagogy VIP list, I get the feeling that I, like many other people who are just teachers, will likely be ignored; so let's look at what some of these Pedagogical Heavy Hitters have to say about using technology in this manner:
We have to be careful not to let what should be a discussion centered around education become hijacked into a discussion about technology. Chris Lehman writes:
We should have a great debate in this country about education. Educational ideas are -- and should be -- controversial. The space between people like Alfie Kohn and Robert Marzano, between Deborah Meier and Ed Hirsch, could fill volumes. How we teach, what we teach, how we assess students... these ideas should be debated and discussed at dinner tables and PTA meetings across this country.
That's not the discussion we're having.
What is going on right now has little to do with education. We are having a labor debate masquerading as an education debate. And that's an important debate to have, but it's not really about education, and we should recognize that.
The conversation we should have is actually about education. Most high schools in this country are still structured off of the Taylor Scientific Method decades after business moved on. We still, in so many classrooms, put the desks in rows and put textbooks on the desks and expect learning to happen. In too many schools the innovations that have touched every other aspect of our society are absent. And in too many schools, the only thing that matters is how well students perform on someone else's test.
I say as both an educator and a parent -- we need a great debate about education in this country.
Rather than talk about how Google Documents can save teachers time in perpetuating the status quo (creating and delivering select-a-response quizzes, then grading them based on one right answer and averaging the scores into percentages or letter grades) I would rather talk about how Google Docs can be used for real learning.
But that's hard to do if teachers wash their hands of their responsibility for being mindful of their pedagogical practices. Teachers can choose to blog or not to blog; they can choose to share or not to share, but I don't believe they can choose to ignore pedagogy. And because pedagogy should never be reserved for the elite, all teachers and all parents should engage in this discussion. If someone wants to create a blog that shares free technology with teachers and manages to get a Google Readership of 7,000 subscribers, and 11,000 followers on Twitter, they have a glorious opportunity to initiate and influence the education debate that Chris Lehmann speaks of above. However, such an opportunity can also become a crisis. In other words, Alfie Kohn puts it this way:
To paraphrase a famous quotation, all that is necessary for the triumph of damaging educational policies is that good educators keep silent.
So why do so many educators opt out of this discussion? Why are we having a technology debate masquerading as an education debate? And why can't we recognize the difference?
I often joke that the difference between a novice computer-using educator and an expert is a two-hour workshop. Our expectations for what teachers might actually do with computers are so low that those goals are easily achieved. Well, one would think so. Human nature suggests that the less we expect of others, the less they will actually achieve. The goals of simple word processing, web surfing and strapping kids to a drill and practice program seem hardly beyond the reach of a living-breathing teacher, yet even these modest goals remain elusive. One look at a state or national educational computing conference and you would have to conclude that ‘cutting and pasting’ represents the post-doctoral level of the field. The banality of most conference programs would suggest that the ceiling for learning with and about learning with computers is low indeed.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that we should not expect teachers to use computers in more creative intellectually empowering ways if they are incapable of achieving the most pedestrian of objectives. This line of reasoning misses two fundamental variables – motivation and scarcity of resources. Inspiring teachers by the limitless potential of computers to empower students to learn and express themselves in previously unimaginable ways requires a different manifestation of expertise, leadership, and a community’s desire to embrace the construction what’s new. Experience would suggest that schools excited by the potential to engage more kids in rich learning adventures would challenge teachers to ‘think different’ and provide the support necessary to support such motivation.
Using cool technology to efficiently facilitate bad assessments won't help Chris Lehmann spark the education debate he wants us to have, and it sure won't dispel the ill-conceived conventional wisdom Gary Stager warns us of.
Despite all I've just put before you, perhaps Richard Byrne has a point when he commented:
Over the last three year I've helped tens of thousands of educators do the jobs that they're required to do more efficiently thereby giving them more time to do the things that make teaching the best profession in the world. The fact of the matter is that many many teachers are required to show administrators test and quiz scores. I'm not saying that is a good thing, I'm simply stating it as a part of the profession. Should that change? Probably, however while we work toward that change we also need to work with requirements of our employers.
At no point in my blog post that you criticize did I say that giving quizzes was a good educational practice (although I do tend to agree with Dave's comment about the use of quizzes). The point that I intimated at the end is if an educator can spend less time doing the tedious task of grading formal tests and quizzes, he or she can spend more time developing engaging learning experiences for their students.
Richard Byrne does have some very valid points here. Indeed, he has helped tens of thousands of educators do the jobs that they're required to do more efficiently (and I'm one of them)... but this is true in two very different senses. Alfie Kohn describes this situation better than I could:
Whenever something in the schools is amiss, it makes sense for us to work on two tracks at once. We must do our best in the short term to protect students from the worst effects of a given policy, but we must also work to change or eliminate that policy. If we overlook the former – the need to minimize the harm of what is currently taking place, to devise effective coping strategies -- then we do a disservice to children in the here and now. But (and this is by far the more common error) if we overlook the latter – the need to alter the current reality -- then we are condemning our children’s children to having to make the best of the same unacceptable situation because it will still exist.
Too often technology has been less about creating more meaningful assessments and more about online grading that has simply led to more data - therefore amplifying the already less-than optimal assessment practices. It is very true that, "by saving time on grading you can give students feedback quicker than before." But we have to ask ourselves what kind of feedback are we providing? In Byrne's video, I saw children and their learning being efficiently reduced to numbers and averages... it sounds like a case of an assessment road-trip where we are lost while making good time. This really does give insight into what Gerald Bracey meant when he said:
"There is a growing technology of testing that permits us now to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn't be doing at all."
While I provided a critique of Richard Byrne's use of Google Docs, I too received critiques on the tone of my post. There were two comments I found most notable:
I don't agree, at all, with your final statement nor the tone of the post. It exemplifies the divide between those who are trying to make the shift and those sorting through many of the realities of a flawed system. It is a remark that I would not expect from someone trying to demonstrate the evolution of education and teaching. It shows one-mindedness and definitely not the tone that would encourage these educators to re-think their practice.
If you wish to see change take place in education, perhaps it would help to model the behavior you'd like to see. How does attempting to shame practicing teachers fit into your philosophy?
To quote one of my favorite bloggers (dy/dan - google it): You have seriously overestimated the effectiveness of contempt as a precondition of reform.
Scott and Joanne both make good points. Dan Meyer's quote is very powerful and I can see myself using it in the future.
While my intent was to draw attention to this topic, even at the cost of a heated debate and even bruised egos, my intent was never to polarize the discussion to a halt (Richard has chosen to block me on Twitter).
Again, I will draw from Alfie Kohn's wisdom. Here is how Kohn begins Chapter 5: The Questions left Unasked in his book The Homework Myth. I believe it outlines why I was outraged by all this:
Too many of us sound like Robert Frost's neighbor, the man who "will not go behind his father's saying." Too many of us, when pressed about some habit or belief we've adopted, are apt to reply, " Well, that's just the way I was raised," as if it were impossible to critically examine the values one was taught. Too many of us, including some who work in the field of education, seem to have lost our capacity to be outraged by the outrageous; when handed foolish and destructive mandates, we respond by asking for guidance on how best to carry them out.
Even when we do regard something as objectionable, that doesn't mean we will object to it. Indeed, We're apt to see the situation like the weather - something you just learn to live with. We may not "accept" (that is, believe) everything we're told by public officials and professionals, but in the other sense of that world, we tend to accept (that is, put up with) what they do.
If we simply resign ourselves to the status quo, and find ways to more efficiently comply and cope with the way things are now, nothing will ever change and our children will grow into adults who will do the same to their own children.
At the very least, we need to be able to ask these tough questions that challenge the pedagogical fabric our everyday classroom activities are built upon.
I love the message that this video portrays. That is - the days of the jug and mug - we pour what we know theory of learning - is done. Never has it been more evident that kids can know more than their teacher.
This reminds me of a discussion I had with a teacher who, when exposed to the idea social networking with students (Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums) said that kids misbehave far too much to be trusted with such tools and that they would not stay 'on-task' or 'focus' enough. Essentially, this teacher believed that kids couldn't be trusted with using social networking in school - and that we shouldn't allow them to use it until they can prove to be trustworthy.
This line of thinking is concerning for me, to say the least. First of all, does anyone really believe that these kids will wait for our permission? I mean, they are already living social networking. Secondly, if kids are not provided the opportunity for guidance and modelling, how will they ever become 'better behaved'? And thirdly, do you have any idea the kind of resentment these kids will develop for educational dinosaurs who refuse to allow social networking into their lamenated lesson plans?
