Category: Learning

In Reimagining School, What Must We Hold Onto – & What Must We Let Go Of?

Posted on | by Sam | 18 Comments on In Reimagining School, What Must We Hold Onto – & What Must We Let Go Of?

Think about all the ways in which our brains are already hard-wired to think about “school.”

Desks. Chairs. Tests. Lectures. Lunchrooms. Hall Passes. Freshman (or Sophomore or Junior) years. AP (or Geometry or Spanish) classes. The list is endless.

All of these things came about in the creation of a model of education that was designed for the Industrial Age, when we were trying to answer a different set of questions: How can we batch and queue unprecedented numbers of young people through a system and into an economy that will be largely fixed and known? How can we acculturate waves of immigrant children into the core values of American society? And how can we do all of this in the most efficient, orderly manner?

Say what you will — but at the time when they were being asked, those were probably the right questions to organize a system of schools around. And clearly, they are no longer the right questions today.

Not all of the symbols and structures of our Industrial-era model of schooling need to be jettisoned. The question is, which ones are no longer serving their purpose?

We now live at a moment in history in which the world young people will be entering is both fluid and unknown; when the time between asking a question and finding the answer is almost instantaneous; and when the mark of a successful school is less about the knowledge you put into your students, and more about the wisdom you are able to pull out.

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?

If these were our objectives, how would the structures and aims of our schools need to shift? And once they shifted, what would we need to hold onto from our past ideas about school, and what would we need to let go of — so something new and improved could have the space to come into being?

The first step towards that sort of paradigm shift is simply to think about all of the current symbols and structures of schooling — and to decide if it’s something we will need to hold onto and carry forward, or let go of and redesign.

For example, age-based cohorts: hold on, or let go?

Hall passes and cultures of permission between adults and young people: hold on, or let go?

Grading: hold on, or let go?

Subjects: hold on, or let go?

The act of choosing is its own form of clarity.

What, then, would you choose?

A Murmuration of Student Interest? That’s a Thing?

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Last week, I spent three days at a remarkable independent school in Atlanta. It’s on the verge of designing a new building for its upper school, and I’m part of the team that is lucky enough to help them think about what such a space should look like — and what ultimate purpose(s) it should serve.

The current building is a rather traditional space — wide hallways, classrooms, a gym, a library that is slowly losing its raison d’être. But the vision of the school is something else entirely — a fusion of aspirational habits, cultural norms, and principles about teaching and learning that are designed to unleash the full potential and interest of every student.

Which leads to a really interesting question: If we begin to reimagine the spaces in which learning occurs, how could we construct those spaces so that the movement and flow of human bodies is closer to the improvisatory choreography of a murmuration of starlings in summertime– instead of, say, the tightly orchestrated machinery of an army of soldiers in wartime?

What would a murmuration of student interest and passion look like in practice? What would it engender?

Has Testing Reached a Tipping Point? (Part Deux)

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Has Testing Reached a Tipping Point? (Part Deux)

It appears I was premature.

Exactly one year ago, in an article for the SmartBlog on Education, I asked: “Are we witnessing the early signs of a sea change in how we think about the best ways to measure student learning and growth?”

What a difference a year makes.

In yesterday’s Washington Post, there were three different articles about the growing anti-testing movement, and the looming fight here in Washington over what role testing should play in the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which was most recently rechristened No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

On the Opinion page, NPR education correspondent Anya Kamenetz reported on the growing opt-out movement across the country — and outlined how other parents can join the fight.

In the front section, education reporter Lyndsey Layton spoke about a speech U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan will give this morning, at an elementary school in D.C. Tops on the agenda? Preparing us for the looming battle over ESEA’s future in Congress — and steeling us to recalibrate how we use tests, as opposed to discarding their use altogether.

And then, in the Metro section, Moriah Balingit and T. Rees Shapiro shared the story of an elementary school in Virginia that has experienced dramatic test score gains for its third graders — and is left to wonder if the ends have justified the means. “I just knew it’s a part of the game,” said teacher Carissa Krane. “There has to be a way to be accountable, and this is the way that our country’s decided we’re going to hold kids accountable and the teachers accountable.”

Later in the article, University of Virginia education professor Tanya Moon sounded a similar note. Moon, who specializes in assessment, thinks the testing movement has gone too far. “I believe that everybody should be held accountable for their jobs,” she said, “but there are lots of things that kids bring into schools that schools can’t do anything about and yet the schools are held accountable.”

So, I repeat, one year later: has testing reached a tipping point? And is there a way to maintain the original spirit of accountability — to one another, for another, in the service of a greater, more legitimate quest for equity and equal opportunity — while also repairing the ways in which our efforts to build accountability have narrowed our view on what matters most?

Stay tuned for what promises to be an eventful, significant year.

 

Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

The founder of Intrinsic School and her architects certainly think so. What do YOU think?

Personally, I see some cool stuff, and yet overall something doesn’t sit right. Why, for example, is a school that is pushing the envelope on personalized learning still organizing its students by grade level? Shouldn’t mass groupings by age be the first thing to go?

And is it a good thing to have kids spending 50% of their day on a computer? I suppose the right way to think of it is that a kid is spending half of his or her day doing research, but for a new model of personalization, it feels awfully . . . well . . . depersonalized.

And why is that coastline place set up to have kids literally facing a brick wall? Who thought that was a good idea?

I don’t know — I think this feels more like something that was designed for kitsch, not kids. It’s angular, when learning is round.

What am I missing here? What do you see?

Is this the type of learning story we need to be telling?

Posted on | by Sam

It comes via the U.S. Department of Education, which, of course, has a clear agenda and set of things it wants to trumpet. Does that make the overall package feel unpalatable to you? Or does it capture enough of the spirit of the modern day classroom, and both the challenges and opportunities that are unfolding there, to make you want to see more stories like it?

In Trying to Reduce Class Sizes, Are We Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on In Trying to Reduce Class Sizes, Are We Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem?

Are smaller class sizes the key to breathing new life into today’s public schools, or a misguided effort to solve the problems of a dying era?

I am surprised to say I have come to believe it’s the latter.

First, let’s be clear: the arguments for reducing class size are well known, and have a well-established research base. As Leonie Haimson, the founding executive director of the New York-based Class Size Matters, has said: “There is robust research showing that smaller classes lead to fewer disciplinary disruptions as well as higher student achievement and engagement – in fact it is one of the few education reforms that has such robust research behind it and a multitude of proven benefits.” In one notable study from Tennessee, for example, which included 79 elementary schools and the random assignment of nearly 12,000 students, results showed that whereas all children in small classes did better on test scores, the gains for minorities were roughly twice that of white children, dramatically reducing the achievement gap.

Why is it that smaller class sizes lead to everything from higher test scores to lower disciplinary referrals? As Great Schools explains to prospective parents on its website, it’s “because there is a greater opportunity for individual interaction between student and teacher in a small class.” And as a similarly impressive set of research studies have shown, high-quality, high-trust relationships between adults and children are the foundation from which everything else in a healthy school must grow.

Another compelling argument for smaller class sizes comes from analyzing the current state of play in K-12 education. After all, it’s one thing to work in a school or system that prioritizes holistic child development and growth; it’s another to work towards that goal amidst a larger system in which child development is less valued than, say, higher test scores in reading and math. In the former, everything a teacher does or wants to do flows downstream, and is aided by the supportive currents of well-crafted policies. And in the latter, everything a teacher values most can only come from struggling against the current, and finding success through subversive practices.

In such a context, appealing for smaller class sizes is logical and important, and, in the short-term, it makes good sense.

If you take a longer view, however, there’s a subtle underlying assumption of both the research and the advocacy for smaller classes – and it’s one that unintentionally reinforces our fidelity to the Industrial-era model of schooling.

Think of it this way: if a teacher is at the front of the classroom, imparting a lesson to everyone, the only way he can do that in a more personal way is if there are less students in the room. And if a teacher is charged with corralling the individual attention and energy of a roomful of students, his efforts to impose discipline and order will only be aided by having less bodies to manage.

But what if we viewed school with a different set of guiding assumptions? What if, for example, the default mode of instruction didn’t depend on the transmission of knowledge via a single lesson? What if the philosophy of learning was that children should learn from one another as much or more than from any adult? And what if the model of discipline was not based on restricting a child’s movements, but on unleashing them?

In fact, these are the theoretical underpinnings of Maria Montessori, whose theories of child development have informed the creation of more than 22,000 schools around the world – and who, based on a set of assumptions about teaching and learning that diverged sharply from the Industrial-era transmission model, actually preferred larger class sizes, not smaller ones.

In her classic book The Absorbent Mind, Montessori, who was trained as a scientist and whose theories of learning were continually revised and revisited based on her direct observations of children, explained her rationale this way: “When the classes are fairly big, differences of character show themselves more clearly, and wider experience can be gained. With small classes this is less easy.”

The University of Virginia’s Angeline Lillard, a professor of psychology who has studied the extent to which Montessori’s century-old theories have been affirmed by 21st-century research, unpacks Montessori’s preference for large class sizes a bit further. “She believed that when there are not enough other children in the classroom, there are not enough different kinds of work out for children to learn sufficiently from watching each other work, nor are there enough personalities with whom children can practice their social interaction skills.”

“In traditional settings” in which class sizes are reduced, Lillard explains, “when one person is teaching the whole class simultaneously, that person would have more attention to devote to each child, and fewer children would conceivably allow for better teaching.” By contrast, “when children are learning from materials and each other, having more varied possible tutors and tutees, a greater variety of people to collaborate with, and more different types of work out (inspiring one to do such work oneself) might be more beneficial.”

In other words, smaller class sizes help increase the likelihood of better relationships, but they do so via a theory of teaching that no longer serves our purposes. Montessori schools (and schools like them) also create ample space for relational bonds to develop, but they do so via a theory of teaching that is aligned with what we now know about how people learn.

What should we expect in either case? A deeper investment in non-cognitive skills like persistence, motivation, and self-esteem; fewer disciplinary referrals; higher graduation rates; and greater levels of engagement and well-being.

The difference is this: whereas both approaches will improve our capacity to do all of the above in the short-term, only one requires us to radically alter the long-held assumptions we hold about teaching and learning. So let’s keep pushing for smaller class size – but let’s also start explicitly acknowledging its short-term value, and simultaneously demanding a wholesale revision of how we think about, evaluate, and define adult roles and responsibilities in our nation’s schools.

(This article also appeared in Huffington Post.)

In defense of the Industrial-era model of education

Posted on | by Sam

I spent yesterday attending the Blue School’s fabulous Teaching Innovation conference, where everyone is rightly concerned with how to reimagine education for a changing world.

At a few different points, people spoke about how sad it was that we are working within a system that can’t do the sorts of things we now see are in the best interests of children: personalizing instruction, creating physical spaces that feel less institutional and more welcoming and respectful, and designing learning programs that help young people acquire the skills and dispositions that will be most useful to them as they negotiate their way through a world in which content knowledge is no longer the key to the kingdom — adaptability, compassion, and creativity are.

As I listened, it occurred to me that we need to cut the Industrial-era model some slack. When it was designed, a different set of questions needed to be answered, chief among them how to process an unprecedented number of young people through a system and into a job market was was largely predictable and known. Consequently, it makes sense that such a system would be anchored in the ideas of the factory line and the tabula rassa.

What’s sad is not that our old system can’t do these new things; it wasn’t designed to. What would be sad is if we don’t find the collective courage, capacity, and will to build a new system that is aligned for these new questions, and this new world. That work is just beginning, and it will take time.

Onward march.

 

In memory of Ted Sizer

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on In memory of Ted Sizer

Several years ago, as the director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, I was lucky enough to meet Ted Sizer. A lion in the field, Ted was warm, welcoming, and eager in both theory and practice to create space for a new person like me to join him in his life’s work.

Ted died five years ago today — too young, at 77. In 2011, I edited Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education, to try and honor his work and the impact it had on my thinking. It was a book that stitched together 50 people’s stories of their most powerful learning experiences, and the final one to share was Ted’s.

On this anniversary of his death, I want to share that story here — and urge everyone reading to consider reflecting on, and sharing their own story, at facesoflearning.net.

We miss you, Ted. And we haven’t forgotten what you taught us.

Ted Sizer’s Most Powerful Learning Memory

My first real teaching was in the army, where, as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant in the artillery, I needed to teach my charges—mostly Puerto Rican high school dropouts who were as old or older than I was—how to prepare howitzers to fire at objects that were miles away. It was an important and practical form of geometry, a subject at which I had not been very successful in school. By now I was good at it, but I feared that learning would be too difficult for them, and then we would all fail.

I learned then that most teachers need to learn before they can teach. They have to learn about their students—and especially about what is relevant to them. My students were determined not to hit the wrong target; they struggled with the guns’ sights’ calibrations until they got them right. They took care of the ammunition so that it wouldn’t grow too wet or too dry. They followed all the safety precautions as if they had written the manual themselves. Where they came from, the learning difficulties they had had in the past, the many differences between their childhoods and mine, even what language they spoke mattered less than the job we had to do together. They did their new work successfully and gave me something I have valued ever since: faith in the possibilities for learning if teachers and students align their incentives.

Ted Sizer