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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??