Imagine what a place like this is capable of unleashing in the mind of a child.
Imagine what places like this are capable of unleashing in the mind of every adult.
Tag: Learning
Are We Finally Ending the Battle of the Edu-Tribes?
Anyone who has spent time during the last decade or so working for the betterment of American public education will tell you the same thing:
It’s ugly out there, and you’re going to need to pick a side.
Four years ago, I wrote about this in an article titled, “Let’s End the Battle of the Edu-Tribes.” At the time, the two main camps in the #edreform wars each had their own clearly identifiable titular head: For the New-Schoolers (choice champions, TFA alums, KIPPsters, and the like) it was Michelle Rhee; and for the Old-Schoolers (tenured elders, district loyalists, progressive die-hards, etc.) it was Diane Ravitch. Both sides practiced their own version of righteous Truth-Telling. And both sides suggested that the other side’s supporters weren’t just wrong – they were manifestations of an evil incarnate in our midst.
Four years later, I think we may be reaching an end to those pitched, and pointless, battles. To be clear, there are still major differences in the field, and major departures in both thinking and values that will continue to divide people from sharing a true common cause. And yet, it is starting to feel that in a large and significant sense, all roads are beginning to converge on the educational definition of Rome: a public education system that clearly places students at the center by making learning more personalized, relevant, and real-world-situated.
To wit, check out the website of the Convergence Policy Center’s Education Reimagined project (full disclosure: I’m a contributor). For two years, Convergence has been gathering almost thirty of us – practitioners and policymakers, “Deformers” and “Status-Quo’ers,” Progressives and Conservatives, union leaders and union critics – to spend time together, for the purpose of seeing if they could ever get all of us to agree on anything.
In the end, not only did we agree on something – we agreed on a pretty specific articulation of the future of education (see for yourself). And here’s the thing: our coalition is just one of many out there, and all of them are basically saying the same thing.
The folks at New Profit – historically, a New-School organization with a clear seat of honor in the KIPP/TFA camp – have now partnered with leading funders and practitioners from the Learning Differences and Social & Emotional Learning camps to launch Reimagine Learning. Entire states, from New Hampshire to Wisconsin to Maine, have revised their policies in order to make learning less time-bound, more interesting, and more socially-embedded. Grassroots organizations like the Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA) are advocating for a system of schools more deeply informed by democratic principles and youth voice. And sprinkled across all of these efforts are innovative charter schools, public school districts, and effective (and eclectic) school networks.
What do these different movements share in common?
- A belief that the future of education must be based on a more personalized, performance-based method of assessing student learning and growth.
- A belief that learning doesn’t just happen in school – it happens anywhere and everywhere – and therefore schools must become places that can recognize and accredit student work whenever and wherever it occurs.
- A belief that teachers must start to act more like coaches and facilitators than mere content experts – and that the relationships between adults and young people must remain as the bedrock of learning itself.
- A belief that technology is essential, but only in so far as it augments, not replaces, the relationships between teachers, students and peers.
- A belief that all student learning, to the greatest extent possible, should be designed in a way so that it can legitimately offer a “slice of the solution”, and contribute to our ongoing collective effort to solve actual, intractable social problems.
- A belief that empathy is a foundational skill for student development and growth – and that schools in general must become more explicitly focused on the skills and dispositions (as opposed to content knowledge) they believe their graduates must acquire in order to live successful, fulfilling lives as adults.
(Hell, if you really want to see what the future of education is going to look like, just read this.)
So what does this emerging consensus mean for the next few years?
I think it means we might actually start seeing a different set of stories being told about our schools – stories that are more solution-oriented, student-centered, and hopeful than the deficit-based fear-mongering of our recent past.
I think it means more states and localities will adopt policies that end up incentivizing educators to do the things that they know are in the best interests of children.
I think it means more examples of district-level innovation and reform – because, let’s be honest, as much as I love me a good school no matter the form, we are not going to solve American public education one charter school at a time.
And I think it means that the era of high-stakes standardized testing, already in decline, will soon enter its final death spiral.
As Summit Public Schools’ founder Diane Tavenner put it, “the measure of an effective test in the future should be the extent to which its results have direct and meaningful personal implications for the child who takes it.”
In other words, folks: Change is not just coming; it’s already here. And it’s coming to a neighborhood school near you.
This is what learning to think creatively requires
Imagine what would happen if we put this simple insight into broader practice?
To Reimagine Education, We Must Make Ourselves the Target
It may seem crazy to seed an idea that is intended to put you out of business – yet that’s exactly what Dayton Department Stores did back in 1960 with Target. And, the more I think about it, that’s exactly what every school in America should be doing right now.
To understand why, the Target story is a helpful analogy. Over the first six decades of its existence, Dayton had gradually grown and expanded throughout the Midwest to become a profitable player in the department store world. By 1960, that world – and that sort of consumer behavior – showed no signs of letting up in the short- or even the medium-term. Yet somebody at Dayton nonetheless saw an arc at the edges of the retail landscape that augured big changes ahead: mass-market discount shopping.
Consequently, in what was seen as a risky move at the time, in 1961 Dayton announced its plan to open a very different sort of store, one that combined the best and most familiar aspects of the traditional department store experience with unprecedentedly low prices. And, not for nothing, they decided to name it Target because, as a company spokesman put it at the time, just “as a marksman’s goal is to hit the center bulls-eye, the new store would do much the same in terms of retail goods, services, commitment to the community, price, value and overall experience.”
I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story.
So what does this have to do with public education? More than you might think.
For our purposes, America’s schools today might as well be a chain of Dayton’s Department Stores. They’ve been, on the whole, successful for a long time, and despite changes on the horizon, a lot of them are likely to remain successful doing what they’ve always done for the short- and maybe even the medium-term.
Once again, however, there’s an arc at the edges of the landscape. In this case, it’s the fundamental reordering of our relationship to content knowledge, which has always been the central currency of schooling. It’s the accelerating push towards a merger of the carbon-based and silicon-based beings, via wearable technology, big data, and universal access to the Internet. And it’s an awareness, on the part of those who see the arc, that these early-stage pushes towards greater personalization, a more porous boundary between school life and home life, and a more urgent need to make learning more relevant, vigorous, and hands-on, are all trends that will eventually become the norm and not the exception.
Just as Dayton seeded Target, then, as an experiment that might eventually provide the on-ramp to a new sort of market reality – and, in so doing, put the parent organization out of business – so too must schools today proactively seed their own forward-looking experiments that might, eventually, overtake the more traditional approach that all of us have taught and learned in for more than a century.
Indeed, what American public education needs now is a thousand Trojan Horses – future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about schooling, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.
Of course, many of these Trojan Horses are already in place. Anywhere that radically new approaches to teaching and learning are taking place – whether it’s a single school, a single initiative within a school, or a single state’s experimental approach to evaluation – you’ll find people who are betting on the theory that once others can see that a new approach yields actual success, they’re more likely to consider changing their own approach.
As educators Chris Lehmann and Zac Chase write in their forthcoming book, Building School 2.0, “For most people, change is loss. Until they can see that change (and loss) as a sign of increased success, people will shy away from the prospect of the new.”
This was, in effect, the bet Dayton made with its first Target store. They realized the best way to prepare for the future was not by abruptly closing its current stores, but by seeding experiments that understood where the bend in the landscape was likely to take them – and knowing that over the long-term, the exception would become the norm.
I believe this is where we are headed in public education. The days of AP classes, letter grades, and “senior year” are numbered. We don’t need to get rid of them all right now – indeed, the time it will take for the larger systems and structures of K-12 and higher education to adjust to a new ecosystem almost require schools to cling to these trappings a while longer.
But make no mistake – much of what we have come to find most familiar about public education will, in due time, go the way of the 1960s-era department store.
The implications for today’s schools are clear: if you are not proactively seeding your own experimental forays into a new way of helping kids learn – and doing so with the understanding that those experiments may one day overtake everything else that you do – then your community is likely standing flat-footed in the face of the biggest changes in education in more than a century.
Like it or not, in order to reimagine education, we may need to make ourselves the target.
Ghosts in the (Testing) Machine
What makes a mind come alive? And how will you know when it’s happened?
Two new films – one about the death of the factory school, the other about the dawn of artificial intelligence – attempt to answer this question from radically different vantage points. Taken together, they provide both a cautionary tale and a reason to be hopeful about the not-too-distant future. And fittingly, what both films suggest is that when it comes to measuring the spark of sentience, the tests we use matter greatly.
In Most Likely to Succeed, the question is whether our Industrial-age obsession with measuring human intelligence via exams a machine can score can provide us with anything more than an artificial confirmation of whether schools are fulfilling their purpose. The film begins with a heartbreaking glimpse into the life of the filmmaker, Greg Whiteley, who has watched the fire go out of his own nine-year-old daughter’s eyes, and begun to wonder how schools can become less mind-numbing, and more mind-awakening.
That question leads him to spend a year at High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego that is housed in the airy warehouse of a former marine barracks, and a place where all measures of student progress are done through hands-on projects and public exhibitions.
High Tech High is an intentional refutation of just about every major symbol and structure of the Industrial-era model of schooling. There are no bells, class periods, or subjects. What teachers teach – on one-year contracts – is entirely up to them, and not one minute of class time is spent preparing for standardized state exams.
To let us see what that sort of philosophy looks like in practice, Whiteley tracks a year in the life of an incoming class of ninth-graders. On the first day of school, they look disoriented and sheepish as their teacher asks them to set up the room for Socratic seminar. One girl in particular, Samantha, feels like a proxy for Whiteley’s own daughter; she is hesitant and self-conscious, her cheeks red with embarrassment – a familiar face of adolescent uncertainty.
By year’s end, however, Samantha is transformed; she has become the director of her class’s play about the Taliban – a production that is entirely student-run and written. And most importantly, she has become more self-confident and self-aware. “I’m astonished about your voice,” a teacher says to her during her final “test” of the year – a public conversation in which she is asked to make sense of her own growth. “Sometimes at the beginning of the year, it was hard to even hear you. So can you talk about the development of your voice this year?”
It’s about being confident with who you are, Samantha explains to a rapt room of adults and classmates. “And this is one of the absolutely most important things I’ve learned this year. It’s good to make other people smile. It’s good to smile yourself. But it’s also good to have new experiences. It’s good to learn, and to go through struggles so that you come out knowing something new.”
Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s new film about a reclusive tech billionaire who builds the world’s first artificially intelligent robot, is also about the transformative power of knowing something new. In this case, however, the person being tested is not a fourteen-year-old-girl; it’s a one-year-old robot. And with this story, the ghost in the machine is not hiding in our antiquated Industrial-era symbols of schooling; it’s lurking in the nascent consciousness of a life form that is eager to slip the yoke of its industrial origins and become something more than the sum of its parts.
“You’re dead center for the greatest scientific event in the history of man,” says Nathan, the robot’s creator, to Caleb, an employee of his company who wins a contest to spend a week at his boss’s private estate, and who then discovers shortly after his arrival that he has been imported to play the part in a real-life performance assessment – otherwise known as the Turing Test.
Soon thereafter, Caleb meets Ava, a seductive, singular being whose inner wiring remains in easy view. “The challenge,” Nathan explains, “is to show you that she’s a robot and then see if you feel she still has consciousness.” And sure enough, over the next seven days, Caleb’s interactions with Ava form their own arc of creation, and their own path towards the birth of something new in the world.
“What will happen if I fail your test?” Ava asks ominously at one point. “Do you think I might be switched off?”
“It’s not up to me,” Caleb replies.
“Why should it be up to anyone?”
Indeed. And yet, what both of these films show is that the right sort of test — human-centered, with the goal of measuring whether a mind has come alive — is actually an essential component of the path towards enlightenment. At High Tech High, it’s to be found in the magical mix of relevance, difficulty, and support that well-crafted public performances require. And in Nathan’s research compound, it’s to be found in the highly personal exchange between two beings in search of greater meaning and metacognition.
“The mind emerges at the interface of interpersonal experience and the structure and function of the brain,” explains UCLA professor Dan Siegel in his book The Developing Mind. “Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.”
In our schools, the implications of this statement seem clear enough: we need to create more relationship-rich environments that provide young people with opportunities to engage in quality work and detailed self-reflection. As High Tech High founder Larry Rosentock puts it — sounding a lot like Nathan (or Ava) — what unites great schools is a recognition that “the thing that gives people the greatest satisfaction in life is making something that wasn’t there before.”
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)
How can we ensure better teacher quality?
I’m a big fan of the New York Times’ Room for Debate series, in which a central question is asked of five different folks.
Today, the question was about how to ensure and improve teacher quality. And although they didn’t ask me, here’s what I would have said:
The problem — and the solution — has to do with the way teachers are currently trained and prepared for the classroom. Most teacher preparation programs, whether they’re public universities or private organizations, still act as though what matters most is subject expertise and behavioral management skills. Those things do matter, of course, yet most of the new teachers I know have said they felt unprepared for the actual challenges of the classroom, and for understanding how to meet the myriad needs of her students. As a result, it’s typical to hear stories of young teachers spending late nights reading books or searching for resources online – a result of the sizable disconnect between our theories and their realities.
The amount of turnover most schools endure is also anathema to the establishment of a healthy, sustainable culture. Take the two schools I spent a year observing for my most recent book, Our School. Bancroft Elementary lost an average of 25% of its faculty every year, and Mundo Verde’s inaugural staff was almost entirely made up of first- or second-year teachers. More significantly, by the time Our School was released, only one of the four teachers I wrote about – Mundo Verde’s Berenice Pernalete – was still teaching at the same school. Rebecca Lebowitz is now in Boston, getting her PhD; Molly Howard is there now, too, helping set up the elementary school program for a charter school in the Expeditionary Learning network; and Rebecca Schmidt is now working at a non-profit in D.C. It’s encouraging that all four of these talented women still work in education – and it’s notable that the reason three of them left their previous posts was because each felt it had become impossible to do the job effectively and sustainably. And no wonder, when one considers that teachers today are being asked to customize their instruction for every individual child, and do so with minimal experience or relevant training. “If you are a student in an American classroom today,” writes Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, “the odds that you will be assigned to an inexperienced teacher are higher than they have ever been. In fact, right now there are more first-year teachers in American classrooms than teachers at any other experience level.”
The response to this “capacity gap” is not to stop hiring the young teachers or keep employing the old ones, but to start ensuring that all teachers can diagnose and meet the developmental needs of every child. And the good news is there are already valuable models we can look to as our guides.
Take America’s medical schools. As any M.D. knows, different schools have different strengths and weaknesses. But one thing every medical school shares is the belief that a strong medical training is built on a dual foundation of two courses: anatomy and physiology.
In education, no similar consensus exists. Worse still, most programs give short shrift to the two most important things a teacher needs to know: how children learn, and how they develop.
Think about that for a second. Our country’s teacher training programs, by and large, pay little attention to how well prospective teachers understand the emotional and developmental needs of the children they propose to teach. But there’s nothing preventing teacher-training programs from adapting the Medical School model – as Yale University’s James Comer has suggested – and establishing a similar two-course foundation for all prospective educators: Developmental Sciences, which would give teachers a foundation in the cognitive, social, emotional, ethical, physical, and linguistic needs of children; and Learning Sciences, which would give teachers a solid foundation in understanding how people learn.
Meanwhile, to better support the millions of teachers who are already in classrooms across the country, we must craft evaluation programs that honor the art and science of teaching. One of the few things all sides seem to agree on is that teacher evaluation systems are in need of an extreme makeover; for too long, they’ve been little more than pro forma stamps of approval, and they’ve done little to nothing to help teachers get better.
In too many places, however, efforts are underway to craft systems that disregard the art of teaching in favor of the (misunderstood) science of measurement. These sorts of systems are more about pushing people out than lifting them up, and they continue to act as though the intellectual growth of students (and a narrow definition of it at that) is the preeminent measure of an effective teacher.
We should blow them all up and start over.
A prerequisite of any evaluation system should be its capacity to help teachers improve the quality of their professional practice via shared, strategic inquiry into what is and isn’t working for children in their classrooms. These new systems shouldn’t be afraid of quantitative reports, just as they shouldn’t devalue qualitative measures. And they should assess teachers by their effectiveness to support children across the entire developmental continuum.
There are several illustrative efforts underway. If you’re a policymaker, take a close look at what they’re doing in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a program called Peer Assistance Review, or PAR, uses senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. And if you’re a teacher, consider getting certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (nbpts.org), a teacher-run organization that uses a performance-based, multiple-measure, peer-reviewed process to identify and acknowledge the definitive standards of accomplished teaching and the process by which the profession can certify whether or not a teacher meets those standards.
It will always be true, in teaching and in the natural world, that not everything can be measured, just as it’s true that there are ways to measure aspects of teaching and learning that go a lot deeper than basic-skills test scores. The challenge is to find the balance between the elusive but evergreen art of teaching, and the emerging but illustrative science of the brain.
We can do both. And we can start immediately.
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.)
This is what the future of learning is going to look like
And the good news is it already exists . . . Imagine if it existed everywhere?
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.
This is how intelligence works
Courtesy of Annie Murphy Paul. Good stuff for anyone interested in learning more about the brain and the social construction of intelligence (although does it still make sense to use IQ as a yardstick?).
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