twelchconsulting.com Blog

Jan 2 2010 Supercoolschool

Face it. We used to be dependent on schools (public, private, or charter) to bring together the people and the resources that would make it possible for large numbers of kids to learn things. As time went on, schools made sure they had certified teachers and then “certified” learning in a host of mysterious ways (like A-F grades). Finally, the schools were themselves “certified”, thus closing the loop in a very tight way.

The only real challenge to that was homeschooling but for many reasons, historically, that didn’t account for many students.

We have a new set of realities to face. Now we have entered the “What if” age of education.

What if . . . any individual or group could organize a virtual school? They could certainly provide the content necessary for learning; and provide it in an endless variety of ways to a seemingly unlimited number of learners.

What if . . . there were lots of ways that learners could demonstrate their knowledge and abilities? Frankly, watching a kid on a YouTube video analyze the mathematics and physics of a skate board park she had designed and built would give me a much better clue as to what she knows than if she shows me a report card where she has a single letter grade from a teacher I don’t know in a school I have never heard of.

What if . . . it were possible for kids to learn and not have limits put on their expectations by class syllabi and teachers?

What if all this were possible today?

Would we still “need” schools? Would the public still be willing to pour billions and billions of tax dollars into public school systems with mediocre results?

What scares me is that this IS possible and possible today. If you need proof, check out www.supercoolschool.com. “Get started within a couple of clicks and create your next generation online school – educating others has never been easier!” With a couple clicks of a mouse you can try it free for a 30 day trial!

While there is much that I think needs to be changed in schools (public, private and charter) today, I am truly afraid of schools letting themselves become obsolete because of their inability to change. I am afraid of the ramifications of losing millions of talented teachers and administrators.

Someone remind me why I shouldn’t be afraid of the presence of the wonderful possibilities for learning that I described.

We need to remember what Jarvis said in What Would Google Do? Do what you do best, and outsource the rest! If schools and teachers are no longer the best content resource for anything (and honestly they aren’t in the age of the Net), then where is the real value? I think it’s in the ability of teachers to form long term relationships with learners (at least 3 years) and to take the responsibility of guiding kids to learning opportunities and then documenting learning no matter when, where, or from whom it occurs.

Challenging and exhilarating opportunities!

What if . . . the future is here?

I read several postings today in the National Journal Online on assessing teacher effectiveness.

The voices in the article are those of leading educators for whom I have great respect, but I contend that we still often perpetuate thinking that is firmly rooted in 20th century ideas of learning.

Consider the following:
In the 20th century, for all practical purposes, opportunities for learning were largely limited to schools, with their vastly superior resources, and their tight grip on defining what would constitute learning. These assumptions were often based on the individual teacher’s definition for a particular class period. In that ancient world, measuring “teacher effectiveness” made some sense. After all, the teacher was the “middle man” brokering resources, opportunities and documentation.

Welcome to 2009.

Today student learning is not limited to 8 to 3, nor September to June. Yes, students could always learn outside of class but several factors have changed significantly. First of all, with the growing importance and use of standards, we are defining what a learner should know and be able to do. Second, with the use of ubiquitous technology, students can control the time and materials for achieving those defined standards. As Jeff Jarvis noted so succinctly in his book What Would Google Do?, “the age of the middleman is dead!” Today, the only place a distinction exists between “formal” and “informal” learning experiences exists is at school. Who gets “credit” for “effectiveness” when a student may have learned something by accessing a website from the Smithsonian or NASA or PBS or any of hundreds of thousands of available resources? Would we block those simply because they would interfere with measuring the impact of a classroom teacher?

We need to completely rethink our definition of an effective teacher and how to evaluate effective teaching for the 21st century, rather than keep working from models of 20th century learning.

If all students in a 4th grade class, or an Algebra I class were exactly on “level” at the end of the year would that be the mark of an effective teacher? Heavens no! As any teacher or parent will tell you, if you take 30 individual kids and put them into a class, you do NOT have a single class; you still have 30 individual learners, each one of them with a different pace and style and set of interests. 20th century models demanded that we treat them as a group. Welcome to the 21st century! At the end of the year, the effective teacher would have taken each as far as s/he could go.

Teacher effectiveness should never be tied to false notions of “student achievement” because those are tied to assumptions that student can and should learn at a uniform pace and variance from that pace is indication of a problem. Data regarding the impact of time on learning another language, for instance, do not show that students with X number of minutes or hours or days of instruction “should” be at Y level. Instead, the data show an increasing variance in the standard deviation from grade to grade.

We need to invent a learning system and a teaching system and yes, even evaluation systems for the 21st century. We must stop trying to “improve” or “reform” a system that ignores the fact that we must leave the 20th century and its assumptions about teaching and learning behind.

Two events today –
1) On Face Book I saw two responses to a friend’s posting about virtual courses. The comments were raving about the fact that that particular state has a great network of virtual classrooms, already established.
2) I was in a tech-mediated meeting with someone from Oregon and someone from, well, I guess I have no idea where the other person was located, and it didn’t matter. Among other things we discussed “blended learning” approaches – those that combine elements of traditional face to face classrooms along with a virtual component.

Here was the response those two events triggered as I started to respond to the State Commissioner who had put up the initial post about virtual courses in her state.

I couldn’t help but feel a bit alarmed at the comments about virtual learning opportunities being equated with “virtual classrooms”. It was a well meaning example by well meaning people to take the possibilities of the 21st century and squeeze them into the mid 20th. To be honest, I have seen very few virtual classrooms that didn’t mirror traditional ones (teacher-centered, teacher controlled pacing, teacher chosen content, etc.) I sat through many of them as a grad student as well.

It hit me today, that I think the whole “school” notion could be about to explode. All that is needed to spark that is for parents and students to wake up to the fact that they already can control what, where, when, how and from whom they learn, and they can be given credit for it.

I was in a tech-mediated conf call this afternoon where someone was discussing “blended learning” and it hit me that in 2009, I don’t know anyone under 70 who is not already functioning in a totally blended world (except theoretically in most classrooms).

The promise of virtual learning is not what we used to think (and what those responders seemed to express) — give kids opportunities to take classes that they couldn’t take otherwise. The real promise of virtual learning is that we can begin to help kids understand that we will help them learn anytime, anyplace, anything, anywhere.
I still believe that we can have school from August to June and from 8 to 3 if we want, but NOT organized in current structures. Those are incompatible with today.
This will necessitate radically different responsibilities for teachers, and who is getting them ready??

Where We Go From Here

August 25, 2009

Implementation is always more complex than initially thought, but . . .
As anyone who knows me or has been reading my occasional blogs is aware, I have been struggling for years, in fact decades, to find answers to the question “How do we free each learner to achieve at the highest levels?” Stated another way: “How do we move from the Age of Schooling to the Age of Learning?

I’m well aware of many elements in the system that work against those goals. Worst in my mind is the issue of time. This plays out in many ways but at the deep levels are the notions that effectively demand that all students learn material on the same time schedule and to the same degree, and that school goes for 6 hours a day, 180+/- days a year – with summers off. In elementary level this sets up the expectation that every 3rd grader needs exactly the same number of days to learn exactly the same things. Consider a student who came in with academic advantages. If a student could finish learning everything in the 3rd grade curriculum by March, then “Sorry about your luck, you’re staying here.” What about the learner who came in with academic deficiencies? “Sorry about your luck, too. You’ll either be promoted when you are not truly ready, or you’ll be held back an entire year for what might be a 2 month lag.” At the middle and high school level this plays out in the idea of courses being of a particular, set length (thanks to the “Carnegie Unit”), with enough “seat time” minutes to satisfy someone, someplace. Once again, if students come to a course with a great deal of knowledge and enthusiasm, they know ahead of time that they will still spend exactly the same number of minutes in the course as the student who walked in with nary a clue. And the teachers know that even if their advanced knowledge of child development and the infusion of technology meant that they could teach everything in the curriculum in 85% of the current time allotted, they will still spend exactly the same number of days as they did before all that professional development and technology. In fact, they know that it still takes exactly the same amount of time to earn a credit in Algebra I in 2009 as it did when my mother took the class in 1928! Progress, anyone?

Let me cut to the chase. I like to look at converging ideas and trends, and here are some of the trends and developments that will have a huge impact in the months and years ahead as they converge.
First, common standards and assessments are coming. The good news is that there will be some level of agreement on what a credit in any course should actually mean in terms of what the student should know and be able to do. And it won’t matter if the student lives in NE, KY, DC, MA or AK. And there will be agreed upon systems for determining that the student knows the material at the level required for the credit.
Second, there is an explosion occurring in terms of technologies that can help any child learn virtually anything – and virtually! An article I saw today talked about the 15, 000 – 60,000 apps that have been created for the iPhone, and iTouch just for language learning! This heralds a trur learning 3.0 breakthrough, a curriculum that can be personalized for each individual learner. I have sometimes used the term “mass customization”. Much has been written about how this is occurring already in standard economic and business realms. Unless you have been living under a rock, you should know of the new virtual games, the incredible websites, the iPhone apps, the You Tube videos, even the Twitter feeds (just to start the endless list) ready to help a learner understand a concept on his/her time schedule in the place that the learner controls.
There is a parallel explosion showing the impact and effect of technology in online learning. Two quick reinforcements of this – Christensen et al (Disrupting Class, 2008) predict that half of all high school credits will be earned online by 2019. And we have the new gov’t report from the US DOE (http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf) that concludes: The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better [bolded type mine] than those receiving face-to-face instruction.

Third, the technical and technological ability to move from the ability to track courses, to an ability to track individuals’ learning! Really wasn’t possible until the last few years, but now it is. This is the intersection of “tagging” and technology. A learner can take a module, or “micro-learning experience” (learned anytime, any place, under any circumstances) and tag it in as many different ways as are useful and appropriate The complex migration pattern a student learned to understand the impact of emerging religious expressions in American history might use a sophisticated equation that is required for the credit in precalculus. The learner would “tag” the learning for both “US History” as well as “Mathematics”. This is no longer rocket science. The technology is already out there. (Go look at how flickr photos are arranged at www.taggalaxy.de to see and example in another field.)

Conclusion? These three factors set up the means for the transition to occur. We can keep the structures, but not be condemned to keeping the system inside the structures. There are many reasons why the structural elements are necessary. We have societal needs that mandate having a safe place for kids to be during the day if they are ages five to eighteen. We also have a teaching force in place in every school, and “turning them out” while kids learn on their own certainly makes no sense from any perspective. The solution is “simple”. Kids still go to the places we have always called school (public, private, charter, home, etc); they can even go at the same time of day that we have all become accustomed to (8 to 3, for example), and they can continue the Sept-May schedule (or particular variant common in a local place to account for the required number of days). But what goes on inside is quite different. The main change is recognizing that using the 3 factors above, valuable and valued learning can occur for the learner at any time, any place, in any form or fashion. School goes from 8 – 3, but if the learner spends weeks from 7-10 p.m. learning on “his/her own” , or on weekends, or during summer, with a virtual tutor, a friend in another state, a stand-alone program or an MMORPG game, then that’s great! What happens in school is specialized help, specialized tools and resources, and most of all committed teachers who are guiding the individual’s learning, not “teaching a course”.

With all courses defined (see the first big idea) then the learner works on fulfilling all the elements needed to earn the credit in that course. Everything they learn has potential value because the learning is “tagged” and can fulfill any appropriate learning task or standard. Forget the false dichotomy the “system” has created between “formal” and “informal learning” . Students may actually begin working on learning what they need for a US History credit well before they are the age of current juniors. The work on mastering the learning and skills may stretch over a few years. In fact, every course credit can be seen as growing organically out of learning that has been seamlessly occurring as far back as the learner and the mentor/guide/teacher can look.

Much more to these ideas, for instance the notion that teachers would work with students for years rather than months, notions about how the number of “credits” earned by the end of high school could easily number 50 or 80 or more. Also many ideas about the exciting professional development that could occur as the transition takes place, but those can wait for more explanation at another time.

I want feedback, including all the “Yes, but”(s) . . . you can imagine!

It’s not that fixing/reforming/restructuring/reinventing schools is too tough for us to do. It’s not that we have failed to recognize many of the problems that children in school are having ; it’s not that it’s too large or complex a task; it’s not that we don’t have enough people who sincerely want to achieve the goal. It just can’t be done.

I was reading the book Everything is Miscellaneous (2007, Times Book – just Google it if you want to find out more) by David Weinberger this evening and enjoying his analysis of the Dewey Decimal System. Easy target right? Weinberger was sharing his analysis of why the System is such an interesting reflection of its inventor. Here are some bio highlights of Melvil Dewey himself. Lived late 19th, early 20th century (1851-1931), graduated from a small Christian college where he received a typical classical education, was fascinated with classification systems and with the metric system. That helps you understand why the system is based on decimals, why “Philosophy” has the lowest range of numbers (the 100’s) as the basis for all knowing; why religion is next (the 200s), etc. OK, so did you know that of the ten subcategories in religion, 7 of the 10 deal with Christianity? Judaism has one number (296) and Islam shares 297 with Baha’I and Babism. And oh yes, Buddhism shares a subcategory (294) will all the other “Religions of Indic Origin”. Interesting, isn’t it? Weinberger goes on to point out that Phrenology (study of head bumps as a key to personality) has its own number (139), just like Aristotle (185) and Oriental philosophy (181).

So why not just change the Dewey Decimal System? Read Weinberger’s explanation if you can’t figure it out for yourself. My mother was a public librarian. I will not be the one volunteering to step into each of the hundreds of thousands of libraries using the system to announce that they need to pick up their razor blades and start shaving off numbers, replace them with new numbers, move hundreds or thousands of books in their collections to new spots, and oh yes, remind them that the librarians themselves will need to unlearn and relearn all those numbers! And by the way, this would be done because someone or some expert committee in 2009 had decided what the system needed to look like to reflect the state of knowing today. And then you could also mention that the decision had been made to do this again in another ten years to reflect the world at that point. Yeah, right! Oh, and don’t forget that every card catalogue card or electronically indexed reference will need to reflect the change. Go ahead and volunteer for telling that to librarians the world over.

Weinberger says that as much as folks may want it “fixed”, it can’t be done – and here’s the kicker. The reason is “The Dewey Decimal Classification system can’t be fixed because knowledge itself is unfixed.” Did you get that???? This is why “schools” and “school systems” can’t be fixed, reformed, reinvented or restructured. You can’t affix knowing or knowledge to a rigid structure. And school is certainly a rigid structure. Need an example? Let’s say “Maria” learns a math formula while taking a physics course. She even receives a grade on a test to see if she can demonstrate her understanding of the way the formula describes one dimensional motion. Where does that grade go? In the physics teachers’ grade book, of course! Her use of that formula to solve that problem never appears in the math teacher’s grade book; maybe Maria wasn’t even enrolled in a math course where the teacher was teaching a formula like that. It was affixed to her physics grade. [OK – a quick insert. I know a few people will lose focus here with a red herring of an interdisciplinary course combining two courses, like physics and math and will try to convince me that in a case like that her learning could actually count in both gradebooks. Give me a break! Do you really believe that is a solution for this example? Let’s go on.] The point is – in the system we have, the learning that goes on is affixed to a class, not to the student. The grade “belongs” to the report card in elementary school, or to the transcript in high school. And it’s a “big” grade. If you are Maria, just try breaking off the part of your physics grade that reflected your understanding of the formula and “glue it” into your math grade the next year. Can’t be done. It’s like the Dewey Decimal system. The number is associated with the system, not with what’s inside the book. That’s why each book gets one and only one number!

Weinberger urges his readers to compare that to Amazon. In a system like that, a book can belong to an unlimited number of different categories, depending on what you are looking for and how you might best use a description.

Now the good news. We can do the same thing with learning. That mastery of a math formula can serve Maria in the physics class, she can offer it as proof of understanding for a math class. If she needs it in her Spanish class (to describe a rocket launch in her advanced class) it will be of value to her there and on and on. Lesson from all this: Student learning must belong to the learner, not to the report card or the transcript!

So why does all this mean that we can’t “fix” schools? The reason is that by their very nature, schools are about ordering knowledge into subjects and courses. It’s inherent in their design. You can’t “fix” the Dewey Decimal System to reflect world knowledge and you can’t keep “fix” schools to describe student learning or the paths that students take to get there.

New national standards? I’ve got news for you – they won’t “work”. Even IF you got every state to agree upon them (and even that is not going to happen with the current effort), you’d never get every teacher in every school to help every student master them. Heavens, we didn’t even manage to do that in the last round – and it wasn’t for lack of trying. Besides that, in a minimum of ten years, you’d need to change them again to reflect new discoveries and new ideas, or new leadership.

So what do we do with schools? Nothing! Leave them. Have they torn down the public library in your community? No. In fact, I still go to the library at times. We didn’t have to shut down libraries in order to start shopping with an online bookseller. Let libraries do what libraries do best – they are a physical location where people can go when they need to, or want to, and have a reason to go there. Same for schools. BUT, Dewey no longer “owns” the classification system for books! That belongs to the readers. I can even take Weinberger’s book that I ordered on line and carry it into the library building and work with it there. But keep in mind that I didn’t find the book because I was looking in a card catalogue for books on “Miscellany” or books by Weinberger, or books on business. I found the book on an Amazon page when I was ordering another book on innovation and got the message that “People who ordered [x] also ordered Everything is Miscellaneous.

Imagine after Maria mastered that formula, this message appeared on her computer screen: “Maria, learners who enjoyed solving equations about one dimensional motion in physics with examples from space science also enjoyed . . . “ Do you see where I’m going? The learning must belong to the learner, not the transcript, and schools just can’t affix knowledge any other way. We can’t fix schools.