A Community Effort

When I taught middle school, Grease was incredibly popular with the seventh and eighth graders. I remember discussing this with my colleagues. Why would a twenty year old movie, set twenty years before that, be so popular with the Gen-Yers?

The best theory we could come up with was that it was the ideal, pop-culture vision of what high school was “supposed” to be. It was all school dances and crushes and cliques and cars and malt shops. For middle schoolers, it was a vision of high school before the reality of 9th grade set it.

In some ways, everyone is an expert in education. Students spend about 900 hours per year in school. Over the course of a K-12 career, that’s more than 10,000 hours spent in school — enough to make anyone an expert. Our parents and legislators and chamber of commerce members and radio hosts and voters have all been to school. They know what it’s supposed to be like. A little nostalgic piece of them wants school to be like Grease. But a bigger piece wants it to be like it was when there were going to school. As institutions, public schools pass on a set of cultural norms. There’s a heritage embedded in the experience that is schooling. That heritage includes the three R’s, but it also includes football and prom and student council and 45 minutes classes and lockers and homework. Passing on that cultural heritage is a big part of what we do.

Teachers are part of this as well. Many teachers chose their profession because they, as students, had great teachers. They chose to follow in the footsteps of those role models. Back in the dark ages when I was in college, my teaching methods professor saw this as a problem. “Teachers teach the way they were taught,” he would say, “regardless of the way they were taught to teach.”

Public schools need to change. I don’t think there’s much argument on that point. When you take a look at the phenomenal change that has happened in our society over the last generation, it is ridiculous to expect that a traditional education, with a foundation in knowledge transfer from teacher to student, will meet the needs of next generation learners. We are seeing this reflected in the choices our families are making when given the opportunity. If the public school is not meeting MY child’s needs, we’ll go elsewhere.

But we need to recognize that public schools can’t change on their own, because of the cultural tradition tied up in the institution. We need to change the vision of what school is. We have to alter our society’s expectation of what it means to be educated, what it means to be a learner. The schools aren’t going to do that themselves, and they’re certainly not going to do it while facing the constant barrage of criticism about how much teachers are paid, or how many disaggregated subgroups aren’t passing the high stakes tests at sufficient levels, or how if we just looked at schools like businesses, everything would be fine.

We have to start conversations in our communities — in our LOCAL communities — about what education WAS, what education IS, and what education NEEDS TO BE for our children. In the United States, at least, education has always been a local responsibility. We need to have honest, local conversations about what a free, appropriate public education should look like for next generation students. The community needs to push the schools to define the new norm for public education, and it needs to support the schools as they pursue that new vision.

Photo credit: evmaiden on Flickr. 

21st Century Workers

I learned early to play the “school game.” Do what is expected of you. Please the teacher. Don’t make trouble. Don’t ask questions. They will give you information. Then, they’ll ask you to give it back. If you follow the rules, you’ll be rewarded with a good grade. Good grades will get you into a good college, which will get you a good job. It’s all good. We have it all figured out. Just do what you’re told.

But we don’t really have it figured out anymore. While a college education makes you twice as employable as not having one, some are suggesting that the cost of higher education does not make it a worthwhile investment. And with the unemployment rate among recent college grads at its highest level on record, a whole lot of grads are going to have trouble paying off those student loans.

At the same time, it’s becoming clear that the job market is demanding skills that schools are not providing. NPR’s Planet Money team took a look at a factory in South Carolina this week. The series examines the changing workforce, and the changing demands placed on current and prospective workers. Reporter Adam Davidson asked if he could get a job there:

“No,” he said. “The risk of having you being able to come up to speed with training would be a risk I wouldn’t be willing to take.”

To become [a good worker], I’d have to learn the machine’s computer language. I’d have to learn the strengths of various metals and their resistance to various blades. And then there’s something I don’t believe I’d ever be able to achieve: the ability to picture dozens of moving parts in my head. Half the people… trained over the years just never were able to get that skill.

The company can teach the knowledge needed to do the job. That’s not a problem. What they can’t teach is the ability to visualize what’s going on. They can’t teach the innovative thinking and problem solving skills. Their workers have to come in with those skills.

Where are they going to get those skills? In the K-12 world, we’re still focused on imparting knowledge. Our teachers are content specialists. They’re experts at teaching information. And while there’s been a push toward higher level thinking skills in education for longer than I’ve been part of the field, there’s still not a lot of it going on in our schools.

In a different NPR piece this week, Emily Hanford examined flipped physics classrooms at the college level. Harvard has determined that lecturing is not an effective  teaching technique. And with information easily and freely available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, some would argue that spending class time to  impart information is now irresponsible. In physics, they found that students could memorize the formulas and plug them in to get the correct answers to problems, but that doesn’t mean they had an understanding of the underlying concepts. Harvard professor Eric Mazur has changed his approach to teaching physics. Students are expected to do background reading to get the “information” before class. Then, in class, they focus on making sense of that information. Class time is devoted to application of the concepts, not memorization of the facts.

We’re starting to see this in K-12 as well. More and more teachers are changing their approaches to embrace next generation skills. There are plenty of reliable sources for explaining the information. We don’t need teachers to do that anymore. We need teachers to help students make sense of the information, to draw connections between the things they’ve learned, to apply their understanding of concepts in order to solve challenging problems.

So our students will leave with knowledge. Sure. Yes. Of course. But they’ll also know how to learn. They’ll know how to connect ideas. They’ll know how to apply their understanding of one concept to different situations. They’ll be ready to face the challenges of their generation.

Photo credit: Avram Cheaney on Flick.

What’s not to MOOC?

The two-week break in the #change11 MOOC has given me an opportunity to catch up a bit, and to reflect on the experience so far. It’s now sixteen weeks since the start of the course, which has included thirteen weeks of content, a week of introduction, and a two-week winter break. According to Stephen Downes, the course has 2,000 registered participants. The course web site has had 38,000 visits. There have been 1300 blog posts tracked with the #change11 tag, and there have been 2500 tweets with the same tag.

On a personal level, I’ve spent about 25 hours on the course, I’ve blogged about it four times, and I’ve tweeted about it, umm, more than once (I think).  I’ve read or consumed more than 70 posts, documents, videos, and web conferences related to the course, and I’ve commented on about 10% of them. My notes are more than 16 pages long and are summarized in the Wordle image on this post (click on it for a better view).

Mostly, I’ve kept up by reading the daily email that comes from the course, which lists the upcoming events, recent blog posts, and tweets that use the #change11 course tag. I also set up a Paper.li newspaper using the #change11 course tag. This gives me an overview of the links posted via Twitter related to the Change course, all formatted as a daily newspaper. Admittedly, I haven’t always been faithful about using the tag, and I’m sure others have been doing the same thing. So the numbers cited above are probably estimates on the low side.

I’ve been trying to keep track of my level of engagement because I’m participating in a pilot project involving graduate workshop credit for MOOC participation. We’re trying to figure out how to make this authentic learning experience fit into the framework of formal continuing education workshops. Why shouldn’t work in a MOOC count toward teacher licensure renewal or salary advancement? Some would argue that participation is a MOOC is more relevant than taking a graduate workshop at a university. But the challenges are many. We have to find a way to ensure that people are really participating, that they’re really engaging with the content and other participants, and that they’re finding a way to make it relevant to their own professional lives. Plus. the regents like to see things like contact hours and some sort of tangible product that can be assessed.

In my case, then, a typical week consists of about 107 minutes of engagement. I read about 5 web resources. I take just over a page of notes. I make a comment on a blog post about every two weeks, and I post on my blog about the course roughly once a month. That’s well below my expected level of engagement, which called for about 30% more consumption of others’ content, and about double the contributions from me.

But none of this counts the related non-change11 stuff I’ve been doing. I bought and read Chris Lehmman’s new book on Web 2.0 tools and Will Richardson’s book on Personal Learning Networks. I passed them around among our administrative leadership team, and we’ve had many conversations about the future of schools. I attended a 21st Century Learning summit with my superintendent, and we spent a lot of time talking about how to reinvent our successful public school to continue to meet the needs of our students. And because my professional learning network is already in tune with many of the topics in the Change11 course, the same ideas keep coming up over and over in the normal conversation flow through those networks. That happens with or without the course tag. For most, that’s just lifelong learning. It’s great that my personal professional development is so embedded in my professional life and my online identity. But in this case, because I’m trying to track it, it’s a little messy.

The challenges for me, moving forward, are to increase my level of engagement with the other MOOC participants, and to bring some of these conversations down to the local level. I need to be engaging my teachers, my administrators, and my community members in these ideas about what next generation learning looks like. I hope to use several different strategies to accomplish this. Without using the terminology and structure, we may be bringing some of the elements of the MOOC into our school district as a professional development model.

2012 is going to be an exciting year.

The Death of 21st Century Skills

My superintendent was looking for an event to attend. He keeps hearing about iPads and 21st Century Skills and digital textbooks and iPads and 1:1 programs and social media and iPads and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and iPads and he needed some context. He wanted some way to make sense of it all. I suggested the 21st Century Skills Summit earlier this month in Columbus. This one day event was sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education, eTech Ohio, Ashland University, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and several other respected organizations and agencies. I thought the day would provide some great perspectives on the real needs of our students, and the challenges schools face in meeting these needs. I was right.

Karl Fisch started things off with an outstanding keynote focusing on personal learning networks. As we make connections and build our own personal learning networks online, we interact with other professionals and learn from one another. He described the impact of the Did You Know video on his own professional life, and focused on authentic work for students instead of simply preparing them to take high stakes tests on largely irrelevant content. The thing that I love about Karl is that he’s a very unassuming guy. He’s one of us. He’s just a math teacher – turned technology director – doing everything he can to help his students. He might speak in front of crowds of thousands and have millions of views of his videos, but he’s just another guy struggling with the same issues we’re all facing.

Author Dan Pink joined us via Skype. He talked about his books, A Whole New Mind and Drive, and drew connections between his work and the education world. For me, the most poignant moment came when he talked about merit pay. Motivation isn’t the problem with education, he observed. “Teachers are the most motivated group of people I’ve ever seen.” These are the people who are up late planning instruction and grading papers. Teachers are the ones using their own resources to buy classroom supplies. Teachers, in general, care about their students and will do anything they can to help them. But IF motivation were a problem, merit pay wouldn’t fix it. Financial rewards help improve productivity and quality of work in menial tasks. If your job is assembling instrument clusters for cars, or emptying trash bins in a shopping mall, or shelving library books, then merit pay will make you more efficient. But for jobs requiring critical thinking, complex decision making, and creativity, merit pay doesn’t improve motivation.

In the afternoon, Ewan McIntosh provided an entertaining description of his work in the area of problem solving. He contends that problem solving is not as critical as everyone seems to make it. Solving the problem is the easy part. The difficult piece is identifying the problem to be solved. That is, how do you look at a situation, identify the problem that is causing the less-than-ideal conditions, and then describe how solving that problem can alleviate the condition? Once the problem is defined, finding a solution is the easy part. He explained that having students doing project based learning where they’re simply solving contrived, hypothetical, over-simplified problems does not really help students develop their critical thinking skills.

Usually, in these types of events, the educational establishment takes quite a beating. Standardized testing and No Child Left Behind are easy targets, as we have transformed our educational system over the last decade to become a race to mediocrity. We devote nearly all of our resources to ensuring that all students meet a basic level of competency, and then stop focusing on them once they’ve passed the test. But in this case, most of the stakeholders were in the room. The state Superintendent for Public instruction kicked off the day with a refreshing perspective on 21st century education focusing on critical thinking, creativity, communication skills, and collaboration. At our table, my superintendent and I were joined by four Ohio Department of Education employees. Their job is to implement Race to the Top. But rather than being defensive about the program, we had several honest discussions of the challenges and success stories surrounding our schools’ adoption of these new literacies. We also had a state board of education member sitting at our table, and his experience as an elementary and secondary teacher, teachers’ association president, school administrator, and school district board member gives him a unique perspective of education from nearly every angle. He, too, seemed frustrated with the status quo and excited and hopeful about the future.

Interestingly, there was one state agency that wasn’t involved in this event. Back in February, Ohio’s new Governor, John Kasich, named Robert Sommers as the Director of the Governor’s Office of 21st Century Education. There’s not really much information online about this new office. As far as I can tell, they have no web presence, no list of staff members or initiatives or even goals. And they’re separate from the Ohio Department of Education. It sounds like the governor wanted to create a distinct entity completely separate from the current structure to take an objective view of 21st century learning, and then influence policy and budgeting with recommendations for improving education for Ohio’s children. On the surface, one would expect that this office would have a vital role in this 21st Century Skills Summit.

But taking a closer look, Sommers seems to have a completely different view of 21st century education:

Sommers’ answers to the question: “What is your vision of the future?”

• Technology will be integrated in such a way to personalize education via “mass customization.”
• Whole group classroom instruction — a teacher addressing an entire class — will be rare if nonexistent.
• Adult success will be judged in terms of student success.
• The use of technology and improved management will make education much more cost effective.

We’ll set aside the “rare if nonexistent” comment, because either I’m not smart enough to understand what he’s talking about, or he doesn’t know what those words mean. Evidently, a 21st century school is one that uses technology to automate the process of education, getting children to pass the tests of minimum standards less expensively. There’s no mention of collaboration or creativity or communication skills. There’s no authentic assessment or project-based learning or critical thinking or problem solving (or problem-identifying). This is all about test prep, at the lowest possible cost.

By the way, “student success” is a code word for “student test scores.” And “cost effective” means outsourcing to companies who provide bare minimum services and pay their teachers $30,000 per year with no benefits. “Mass customization” means 60 students per class, generally working individually with little or no interaction with their peers or their teachers. Just so we’re clear.

So it seems that we have two completely different views of 21st Century Education in Ohio. We’re at the point where the term is essentially meaningless. The two visions are so completely different from one another that we can’t use the term anymore to identify a common ground on which to base discussion. So I’m moving on. I’m not talking about 21st century skills or 21st century learning anymore. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (proper noun) focuses on next generation learning. Maybe that’s a better way to think about it. We’re not educating for the 21st century. That term was really cool when the 21st century was still a decade away. But the 21st century is going to be half over before we really figure out what we’re talking about. Let’s focus instead on educating the next generation.

21st century skills are dead. Long live next generation learning.

Analysis Paralysis

I started last week’s presentation on Google Docs with this xkcd cartoon.

I’ve commented many times that my smartphone replaced more than half a dozen devices that I used to carry around with me. I no longer need a digital camera, digital video camera, mp3 player, navigation system, PDA, or wristwatch. I have access to the Internet all the time. But even if I didn’t, I could text Google and they would try to answer my questions.

I can also send a message to anyone in my personal learning network, regardless of where they are, and typically get a very quick reply. The network is always there. It’s always on.

That’s what Erik Duval means by abundance. His  session for this week’s #change11 course,  Learning in a Time of Abundance, resonated with me more than any of the others we’ve had so far. As a computer science professor, Erik has the opportunity to model the change he thinks we need in academia. Why do teachers stand in front of a group of students for 40 minutes (or 80 minutes) and present information? The students already have the information. Facts are easy to find. Explanations of nearly all of the concepts we teach in school are readily available online. And they’re going to be online forever. What does that mean?

Before written language, we had to remember everything. The entire sum of all human knowledge had to be passed down from generation to generation orally. If it wasn’t, it was lost. Eventually, we developed ways to store things outside our brains. We started writing things down. And it’s a good thing we did: I can’t remember even a tiny fraction of all of the things I’ve learned, let alone all the stuff everyone has learned.

But now we’re in a new age. The sheer volume of stuff we’re writing down is growing faster than we can count it. The current state of the art changes faster than we can identify it, let alone teach it. Duval is a professor and researcher working on human-computer interaction. He knows a lot about the subject, and stays on the cutting edge of that technological frontier. But if he focuses just on information — just on passing on the current state of knowledge in his field — his students will be behind by the time they leave university.

Instead, his classes take a different approach. He starts by giving his students access to the information. All of the information. All of the time. They have cell phones and laptops and tablets and all kinds of Internet-enabled devices. They use them in his class. All of the time.  They don’t have to unplug. And this era of information abundance is a two-way street. In addition to having access to everything, his students also share their work. Everyone has access to the work they’re doing. They’re blogging and tweeting and publicly sharing their work. The students set goals that are measurable and trackable. They build tools (it is a computer science class, after all) to track their goals and visually monitor their progress. The students develop and use a variety of quantitative measures for formative assessment. The summative piece looks more like a job performance review than a course exam. Look at the goals. How have you progressed? It’s a conversation between professor and student. The result is a narrative, which is then boiled down to a numeric score.

Things are a little more difficult in K-12 education. We have a lot of cultural baggage that is hard to change. Classes have to be 50 minutes long, and students have to take 5-7 of them per day. Each teacher has his own teaching style, his own grading methods, his own philosophy of how this education thing should work. Parents, for all they say about preparing their children for the future, really just want school to be like it was when they were students.

Duval suggests that teachers work to change the things in their control — the things that happen in their classrooms. Don’t try to reform the entire educational system. Give students access to the information. Stop lecturing so much. Adapt grading styles to be more authentic. Push students to move from remembering to applying and creating. Get over the fact that you can’t be in control of everything. Seek forgiveness rather than permission.

We spend a lot of time talking about these things. There really is nothing new here. From Bloom’s revised taxonomy to the framework of professional learning communities, to the 21st Century Skills movement, everyone is talking about the same things. But we suffer from analysis paralysis. We spend too much time talking about what schools should be and not enough time making them that.

Be the change.

Image credit: Randall Munroe, xkcd.

OK, Now What?

It was a message on Twitter from one of our administrators:

@schinker ok now what?

He had signed up for a Twitter account because he wants to connect to the community. He realizes that there’s a conversation happening online, using (but not about) social media tools. How is education changing? How are schools adapting to meet new challenges and increased demands with fewer resources? He wants to engage in the “big picture” questions that often get lost in the immediacy of managing a school district. So he plugged in. But he hasn’t yet tuned in.

Now what?

How do you build a personal learning network from scratch? For me, it started with blogging and podcasts. It took years to build and curate my network. Much of that work happened before Twitter even existed. But he doesn’t have that kind of time. So, here are my tips for getting started with Twitter:

Find some people to follow
Twitter is pretty boring if you’re not following anyone. The hardest part of peeling an orange is getting it started. The same is true for Twitter. If you start with a few really good people to follow, it gets much easier to find more. If you already know someone on Twitter, see who they are following. If you’re interested in education and technology, you can even start with the list of people I follow. Add a few of them. Don’t overdo it.

Curate
Twitter is not personal. If I’m not getting value from someone’s tweets, I stop following them. Some people are really smart, have wonderful ideas, but are annoying on Twitter. There are some fairly well known speakers in my field that I don’t follow, because they’re frequently doing workshops and “showing Twitter off” to a group of teachers. “Tell me where you are and why you use Twitter.” I don’t have time for that. Others have great ideas, and their tweets are valuable to me. But they’re so prolific that they overwhelm my Twitter stream. So they get unfollowed.

For the people I find really valuable, I take a look at who they’re following. If I have a lot of respect for someone on Twitter, I’ll start following some of the people they follow. It’s kind of like a recommendation system. I follow easily. If I find, after a few days, that the new person isn’t meeting my needs, they get unfollowed pretty quickly.

You have to manage your follow list to produce the volume you want. Follow too many people, and it can be overwhelming. Follow too few, and it’s boring.

Don’t follow back
All good teachers are lifelong learners, and most would say that they learn a lot from their students. But most teachers are not going to have their professional development needs met by following their students on Twitter. Some people find the things I post on Twitter to be useful, entertaining, or somehow helpful (I know; I don’t understand why either). That’s great. I’m glad they’re getting some use out of the things I’m posting. But that does NOT mean that I will find the things THEY are posting to be valuable.

On Facebook, if you’re my friend then I’m automatically also your friend. On Twitter, it doesn’t work like that. The link is not reciprocal. I might follow you, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow me. No hard feelings. It’s not personal. Don’t feel bad about not following people back. And don’t feel offended when people don’t follow you back.

Stay away from celebrities
There are lots of celebrities on Twitter. They have thousands of followers. Most of their accounts are manged by their publicists or their agents or someone who is working to craft their brand. That’s noise. There are a few celebrities that I follow because I’m entertained by them and I’m pretty sure it’s really them. Drew Carey is one. Craig Ferguson is hilarious but rarely school-appropriate. But these are distractions. Use sparingly.

Share
This social media thing is a two-way street. It works because people have things to share, and they use tools like Twitter to share them. When we learn something new, we typically want to share it. Maybe you saw something on TV, or you were listening to the radio and a news story caught your ear. Or you were having a conversation with a colleague who pointed out something you hadn’t noticed before. Or you may have been on a web site and you saw an interesting study or blog post or discussion or news item. You want to share that with people. So use Twitter to do it.

If people find the stuff you have to say to be valuable, they’ll follow you. Congratulations. You’re published. And you’re helping people. You’re teaching. You’re giving back. You’re part of the conversation.

Don’t drink the fire hose
Do you have cable TV? How much do you pay for that? How many channels do you get? Let’s say you pay $75 per month, and you get 150 channels.  You’re paying a lot of money to have access to that programming. Do you watch it all? Of course not. Do you even watch one of the 150 channels all the time? Probably not. Do you read every word on every page of that newspaper or magazine? Not unless it’s an awesome publication like Wired. Don’t feel like you have to read everything in your stream. Pay attention to it when you have time. When you don’t, skip it. You don’t spend hours in your car in the driveway listening to the radio so you don’t miss anything. You’re going to miss some things. Let them go.

If you’re overwhelmed, consider a tool like Paper.li. Sign up for a free account, and it’ll look at your Twitter stream and collect all of the links from everyone you follow. Then, it’ll divide them into categories and format them like a newspaper. Every day, it’ll re-generate itself based on the new stuff that people tweet. Plus, you can share your personal newspaper. What to see mine? It’s right here.

Twitter is a great tool for sharing information and connecting with a community. Once you get started, it can be a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in your field. What other advice do you have for new Twitter users?

Image credit: TPorter2006 on Flickr.