Category Archives: Education

At Week’s End

Education, school reform

I am tired on this Friday evening. I have been fighting a chest cold for ten days but today I seemed better. I took the afternoon off and soaked up the sun on our sun porch. I read a bit and just rested, knowing that the weekend provided lots of time for checking in with my online students and doing some website work.

I don’t have any official sick leave from an employer. No one is going to ask for a doctor’s note. I looked at my to do list for the week and felt good about what I had accomplished so I put the lid down on the laptop and took a break. The world lived without me for a few hours.

I earned these hours of rest and freedom while the rest of the world watched the clock because my work doesn’t include seat time. It’s about getting work done rather than being some place for a certain amount of time. And, in many cases, I am the one deciding the work that needs done. For instance, I teach online courses and we are heading into the fifth week of the course. I like to take some time to provide feedback on their work. I use the audio recording feature in Evernote to record and email feedback to my students. I comment on what they have accomplished and look ahead to areas where they may need to dig in a bit more. All of them could be tweeting more, I think, but they are connecting nicely within their course.

I think, in many ways, I represent the future of work. A subcontractor with a variety of clients and jobs to claim my attention. I determine long range goals, focus on daily priorities, and am able to carve out pockets of time for my own work. I may work on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings so I can sit in the sunshine on Friday afternoon. I don’t spend any time getting ready for work or commuting so my mornings offer opportunities to read and write that others may miss as they get to their jobs.

Seat time…it really has nothing to do with learning or working. It is an easy way to hold people accountable: count the number of hours you spent in a particular place supposedly completing particular activities. Projects stretch to fill the hours since there is no real incentive to finish early, just another job designed to fill the day. One school I am working with is using mastery learning to help differentiate instruction. Students work at their own pace, completing activities and projects and then demonstrating learning through formal assessment. I can’t help but wonder what will happen if a student gets done early, say in mid-May. They’ve learned everything they need to learn for 7th grade. Now what? Can they move on? Is the 8th grade teacher ready for them? Or is now when they get to do something fun, during the “extra” time they don’t need?

Earlier this week, Sam Chaltain asked what we should be getting rid of as we reimagine school.  He doesn’t mention seat time but he does wonder about age-based cohorts and I think the two go hand in hand along with the Carnegie Unit, which came into question in a report issued at the end of January. We are starting to focus on what students learned rather than how long they spent learning. And we’re starting to consider that standardized tests are not the only way to determine if students learned, particularly when we are interested in skills and dispositions rather than content knowledge. I believe we are at a moment of transition in education. The status quo is being questioned even by those in the mainstream and interesting conversations are taking place in school divisions across the country. Possibilities seem to be blooming and it is up to us to find our place in the conversation. So, what do you think needs to go in order to realize a vision of a contemporary classroom? Here’s Sam’s question:

What would it need to look like if a system of schools was truly aligned around a different set of organizing questions — where the goal is not to standardize, but to individualize; where the objective is not uniformity, but uniqueness; and where the feelings “school” arouses in the majority of us are not endless shades of grey, but wild and inspiring spectrums of color?

 

What I’ve Been Reading

blogging, Education, programming, testing

Tim Stahmer’s blog post, It’s Not Pearson’s Fault, led me to the Forbes profile of the education giant. As Tim noted, it was worth the read. Two statements from Pearson executives stood out for me. In the very first paragraph, we see how difficult it is to pin down educational concepts. Jennifer Rheinfold writes of Pearson’s goals: “The goal is not merely to build a more successful and sustainable business—an imperative as Pearson’s traditional print operations shrivel—but also to improve the lives of millions of people throughout the world.” But the quote that follows from CEO John Fallon shows an interesting take on improving lives when he comments, ““What we’re trying to do is the same thing—to help improve learning outcomes.” Which translates to test scores. 

Sir Michael Barber, Pearson’s chief education advisor, wrote a report on Pakistan in which he refers to his education philosophy–standards and accountability–as “deliverology.” The image of education invoked by this word is a traditional, teacher- and curriculum-centered practice where students are the recipients rather than the participants.

The Man With 26 Million Students refers to Zach Sims, the founder of Codeacademy. Coding is the foreign language of our era. Fluency allows you greater creativity as you have more control over the development environment. But programming is more than that: it has a logic and syntax that requires critical thinking and deeper learning is often experienced through failure rather than success as Tom Woodward suggests in his post, Rookie Javascript Mistakes.  I’ve been playing around with the Kano I bought and going through the challenges for students that help them grasp programming concepts. I “learned” to program the way Tom did, by thinking about what I wanted to accomplish and finding bits of code that allowed me to do that.  Working through tutorials are helping solidify my understanding. After I finish this post, I’m going to try out this weekend’s pizza challenge.

#28daysofwriting from Oliver Quinlan describes Tom Barrett’s project to blog 28 minutes for the next 28 days. I’m in and hoping that the commitment, one I’ve tried before, will indeed kickstart this blog. I’ve signed on officially and this is my first post.

 

 

The Grading Game

Education, learning,

I don’t know which is more interesting: this blog post about grading or the comments that are almost universally negative. I suspect most of the commenters didn’t bother to read the Alfie Kohn article she referenced that included research showing how grades can be detrimental to real learning. In fact, many of the commenters seem to confuse grades with learning, just as many people confuse education with learning. This comment seems typical of the tenor of the remarks:

By all means remove grades! After all, it is extremely efficient to produce illiterate high school graduates who, never having failed a year and fragile egos intact can then assume their wrongful place in society! Drivel continues to triumph.

By all means, let’s use grades to degrade students in preparation for a future of degrading work and failure. Clearly, those students who do not receive good grades are at fault rather than a system that rewards the ability to play the game.

I’m reminded of my undergraduates at an elite university who protested project-based, collaborative work because it was difficult to identify how to get an A. They were the game players: tell me what to do to get an A and I’ll do it. Challenge me to think and reflect critically and I’m lost. They had never failed at the grading game; I worried that they would NOT be prepared when they encountered a world where employers expected them to be able to think rather than simply perform.

If you dig into the comments, you will find a few who do agree with the writer but they are immediately silenced as ivory tower extremists who do not live in the real world.

21st Century Bake Sale

Education

I used to have a set of notecards with a picture of a playground and the message: “It will be a great day when schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” Several news stories and a recent conversation made me think about that note card. The conversation was with the county administrator where I live. He was discussing how you can tell what a community values by looking at its annual budget. He gave an example of a town that said it valued small farmers and yet had an equipment tax that was very hard on those very small farmers. They made policy changes, backed them up with a new budget and suddenly the SHOWED that they valued small farmers by helping them thrive in their community. The news stories dealt with students and teachers using social media to fundraise for field trips and school supplies. In particular, this Slashdot posting about Google’s flash-funding of teachers’ projects via DonorsChoose got my attention. I will admit up front that I have a love/hate relationship with fundraising. When I was teaching, my students sold gift wrap, cookie mix, magazine subscriptions and more. I understood the importance of those extra dollars to the school but worried about all the negatives such as the students whose families couldn’t afford to buy the overpriced items, the focus on getting rewarded, and just all the extra distraction from an already too full day. My husband refused to buy the gee gaws from the neighbor kids, preferring to turn over a cash donation since the total amount went to the schools. I sat through a fundraiser pep rally in which the presenter repeatedly commented that it was probably much more exciting to be in this assembly than in class. Maybe the cash blowing machine had something to do with that? While kids fundraising isn’t new, teacher fundraising is. Sites like Reddit Gifts and DonorsChoose allow teachers to request funds or materials, often for basic school supplies. The teachers use these sites to help offset their own personal spending for their classrooms. What do you get for your money? The good feeling that comes when you support a worthy cause. And you demonstrate your own priorities with your dollars, something our local, state and federal entities are not doing in appreciative ways. This is all very nice but, like using lottery winnings to support education, it lets government off the hook and leaves the rest of us picking up the slack in an area that most everyone, right or left, agrees is essential to the future our our country.

Is It So Hard to Believe?

Education, research, technology, writing, ,

There are many times when I wish that I was still in the classroom. It seems like there are so many great opportunities to engage students in new ways of thinking and learning. I imagine an exciting classroom space where kids could write and create and collaborate, where my Nancy Atwell style reading and writing workshops could move beyond the walls of the classroom, encouraging students to pursue and share their ideas and passions with the world.

OK, take a deep breath…I was just beginning to get a good rant going about this post from Richard Byrne about the new Student AR app for Google Glass. I went back to click on the press release and discovered that the whole post was an April Fool’s Day joke. Phew!

So, now what am I going to write about? How about the fact that I believed it in the first place? Throw in names like Bill Gates and Salmon Khan and is it so hard to believe that they are busy creating an app that takes the teacher out of the game of assessment? It isn’t so far fetched. The Hewlett Foundation sponsored the Automated Student Assessment Prize, designed to encourage development in the area of automated assessment, and EdX has created discern, automated scoring software. At least one researcher is busy showing that the computer can grade as well as a person and much more quickly.

The article from University of Akron about the work of Dr. Mark Shermis is interesting and a little ironic. Perhaps the writers should have used the software to avoid the grammatical error in this paragraph:

The study grows from a contest call the Automated Student Assessment Prize, or ASAP, which the Hewlett Foundation is sponsoring to evaluate the current state of automated testing and to encourage further developments in the field.

Did you find the mistake? “Call” should be “called.” I would also suggest that the communications and marketing department should refrain from calling their website the “news” room since this is obviously a press release. It makes passing reference to critics of the research study but doesn’t dig too deeply into the controversial nature of automated scoring. Lucky for us, The New York Times takes news a bit more seriously and describes the real criticism of the grading software: it can be fooled. Les Perelman, the retired professor from MIT who launched a petition against adopting such software, takes great pleasure in both critiquing the research AND gaming the system.

Those who criticize Perelman point out that the purpose of the software is to provide instant feedback to students so they can learn to be better writers. The final product will be read by a real person. So, what of that instant feedback? Karin Klein’s daughter found that the software was more confusing than helpful. And, Barbara Chow, from the Hewlett Foundation and quoted by the University of Akron, seems to undermine that very argument. Automated scoring will mean more writing on tests and less human grading:

“Better tests support better learning,” says Barbara Chow, education program director at the Hewlett Foundation. “This demonstration of rapid and accurate automated essay scoring will encourage states to include more writing in their state assessments. And, the more we can use essays to assess what students have learned, the greater the likelihood they’ll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication.”

It turns out that fact checking is exactly what the software doesn’t do well. It is checking for basic structure and grammar rather than knowledge or critical thinking. As an adjunct for several universities, I laughed out loud at Perelman’s argument for why higher education is so expensive:

“The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents,” he wrote. “In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.”

Dr. Perelman received a top score for this well designed argument. Oh, if the computer scoring software could only make it so.

I hope you have a great April Fool’s Day…try not to be taken in as I was by jokes that border on truth.