Appalachian Poems

Here's what I've been working on in every spare moment for the past week or so. Just sent the link (http://tinyurl.com/RPSpoems09) out to all the parents. Very satisfying.

Hacking Education

Image via Jake Bouma on Flickr

Time magazine recently ran a piece referencing the Union Square conference re: Hacking Education earlier this year, and the way in which that conversation was enhanced via Twitter.

For those folks trying to catch up, here are some relevant posts:

• Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson's initial post, Hacking Education.
• Fred's thoughts, post-gathering, are at Hacking Education Continued.
• See also Jon Bischke's Manifesto, which he put up just before the meeting.
• Two months later, Brad Bradshaw posted a detailed re-cap as well as a link to the transcript. There's a reading list up, too.
• Recently, Alex Krupp performed a mitzvah by curating and archiving some of the tweets that were flying around during the conference.
• And here's an American HS student talking about why he feels our educational system is failing.
  

Add links in the comments or tag away in Diigo or delicious with #hackedu... I'd love for more folks who are in schools to be a part of this conversation. (Someone made this point before me, but of course I can't remember who now... Vicki Davis, the @coolcatteacher, maybe?)

(And how are YOU hacking education?)

Outsourcing Judgment

Image: Anthony Turba via Flickr

I received an email last week that read, in part:

I am writing to you to find out if you have a sense of how the individual leadership programs listed in your link are viewed by the colleges. I am doing this research because I am often asked by parents if these programs are worth the cost and I would like to be able to give them honest assessments. I am certain that they all provide great experiences for students who are well matched to each program, and I recognize the importance of this. However, in these economic times I also want to provide accurate information to parents who are making decisions not only for the sake of providing good leadership experiences for their children, but also for the sake of investing in extracurricular experiences that the colleges believe are valuable.

This is a counselor trying to walk a line, pushing back against the weight of a question that pervades many students' high school experiences here in the US. The elephant-in-the-room question is, "What will the colleges think?"

As a college admissions officer, what I looked for in students' extracurricular commitments was impact and intiative. I liked it when I could see that a student truly felt that what they had done had made a difference, in their life and/or in the lives of others. And I was impressed when I could tell that a student had expended some serious thought and/or energy in pursuit of their goal. Finally, because I was familiar with the process of putting together a class in selective circumstances, I cared – maybe more than I should have – about students having successfully competed for inclusion in a selective program.

But I don't think there's a summer program in the world that could all by itself make enough of a difference in a student's candidacy for university admission for consideration of "the question" to be the driving factor.

As an educator, I want to help promote my students' moving towards the thoughts and behaviors I associate with lifelong learners. When faced the "what will the colleges like" question, I think we need work hard not to teach them that outsourcing judgment is a "go to move" when they're facing a decision about what's best for them.

Okay, I'll 'fess up. I've got a copy of USNews & World Report's "America's Best Colleges" on my desk. I pull it out almost every day. But I use it more as a reminder of facts – how many undergraduates does the University of Rochester have? – than as a source of expertise. To someone like me, up to my eyeballs in instantaneous information about any program or school I'm investigating and busily helping to curate the information as it washes over the transom, the much-discussed rankings seem like a kind of lazy collective shorthand, a one-size-fits-all answer to all those folks who ask, "But is it a good school?"

What makes a strong summer program strong? What makes a good college good? And who do you want answering those questions? Call me a wild-eyed idealist, but I think the individual students' votes should carry the most weight here. Some day in the not-so-distant future, they're going to be making decisions about which city to move to, which candidate to vote for, which company to invest in... and as they live their way towards that future, I want to help them build the skills that will be the foundation of their own judgment. Including discerning when it does and does not make sense to trust someone else's. And as much as students (and parents!) sometimes crave the easy clarity of someone else's thinking, I don't think we're helping them when we let them off this particular hook.

What do you say when you get asked "the question?"

(Thanks to the counselor who asked the question,
to Dan Meyer of dy/dan,
and to Barbara Diamond of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation,
whose post today got me thinking about this in new ways.)

Math Wars

tracks via duesentrieb on Flickr

A curriculum director in a public school district in the US recently posed this question on the NACAC listserv:

...we are preparing our math curriculum to reenter our program evaluation cycle which is a 3 year research and design process yielding a revised curriculum. As we prepare for this endeavor the "Math Wars" have re-emerged in our communities. Specifically, there is a desire, beginning as early as the 6th grade to place students in tracks or on a path to exit from high school with the minimal course exposure being Calculus 1. The motivation for this track is college admissions. I have a large, and vocal group of middle school parents arguing their students will not be prepared and accepted by competitive colleges and universities if they do not graduate with Calculus 1.

My questions/concerns include:

1. Is Calculus 1 an appropriate course to establish as the norm for a high school senior?
2. From your perspectives what are the advantages and disadvantages to this goal?
3. What role does Calculus 1 play in college admissions and readiness?

I've seen students for whom Calculus was an appropriate choice in the junior year (they went on to take multivariable calculus as seniors), and students for whom Calculus would have been a disastrous senior year choice. My sense is that the parent energy around this issue is born out of anxiety or fear. As parents think about the progress of their students through school, they want to imagine a future without limitations. For many of them the college search and application process will represent a re-shaping or narrowing of options, and so the underlying question of "but will this prevent him from getting into the very best colleges" threatens to drive everything.

Doesn't any good curriculum represent a range of choices? Could we say that Calculus would be the most common senior year choice for students who are strong in (or strongly engaged by) math? Is Calculus in the senior currently the "norm" in the district? (I'll confess the term makes me a little nervous.)

No parent believes that their student is one of the ones for whom Calculus would prove insurmountable, but the folks designing the curriculum have to keep those students in mind.

In my (small, independent, K12) school, I could produce a list of the colleges where students who had not completed Calculus had been offered a space. For that matter, I could produce a list of the colleges where our students with a documented learning difference had been offered a space. It's possible that neither list would do anything to assuage parent anxiety, although I would know that each college name listed represented a happy ending.

In general, colleges look for students to continue to challenge themselves as they move through their curricula, particularly in the five academic "solids" (math, English, history, language, science). But for every college where the level of competition would make gaining admission more challenging for a student who hasn't taken Calculus, there are five more where the achievement of a solid grade in Precalculus senior year would be something an admissions officer could point to as evidence of this student's readiness to "hit the ground running" in college.

Parents want us to tell them, "This curriculum will make it possible for your student to attend the most selective schools in the country." What we should be telling them is, "Every student will have access to the opportunity to take Calculus. More importantly, this curriculum will support your student's desire to challenge him/herself. It will make it possible for students to deepen their passions, shore up their weak spots, and explore new territory. It will support their developing self-awareness, and will enable them to develop the skills and habits necessary for life-long learning."

A girl can always dream.

(How would you approach this challenge?
Kind of wishing I was a curriculum designer.)

Whose Choice Is It, Anyway?

I read the recent Washington Post piece by AP Latin teacher Jane Miriam Epperson Brinley about the anticipated effects of the College Board's decisions to do away with the Latin Literature exam with a sense of deja vu. We'd been talking about this very thing in my school ever since the initial announcement. The immediate and powerful effects that the cancellation of a nationally standardized test can have are not suprising to anyone who works in an American high school. Secondary schools throughout the United States use the Advanced Placement curriculum for their most challenging courses; the courses are supposed to cover college-level material, and the exams are nationally standardized. As Epperson Brinley says, "Because AP exams set the standard of academic quality for college-bound students, high school curricula are often reverse-engineered to prepare students for AP tests." And as a commenter on the NACAC listserv noted, "In large part, parents don't sign their children up for courses which have no national testing to submit to colleges."

I believe that most teachers who teach at the AP level find the curricula rigorous and engaging, if sometimes confining and less flexible than they would like. My argument today with Advanced Placement is not primarily about the curricula (I'll leave that to folks who are actually teaching a full load of academically rigorous coursework), but about the conversation. By signing on to someone else's definition of "what we should be learning" (which is what a curriculum is, after all), are we in schools bowing out of a conversation about what is worth teaching and learning?

When I was studying the history of US educational reform in graduate school, one of the things I came to believe was that any reform effort that engaged a significant slice of people in the school community – whether it was smaller class sizes, mixed-age class groupings, extended school days, or anything else – anything that got people thinking and talking about their shared enterprise was a good thing.

In a secondary school where the educational enterprise is tied to the students' ability to successfully win places in the colleges and universities of their choice, AP curricula and exams offer an alluring "stamp of approval." Only a handful of secondary schools have opted out of this by-now traditional path.

But if, as teachers, we are also modelers of learning, what does it say about us that we are unwilling or unable to engage in an ongoing conversation about what our students need to learn today, and how that might differ from what we thought they needed to learn last year, or the year before that. If high school continually marches towards the holy grail of "college prep," which in turn is dictated by a set of assumptions and understandings about "what colleges want," where does that leave us?

This is the time of year when high school juniors all over the US are thinking about their senior year course selections. We'll be telling them that they need to challenge themselves, continue to make progress in the courses colleges consider to be "academic solids" (English, science, math, history, foreign language), and of course if they've taken AP-level courses in the past, they'll want to continue to do so. Some of the students already have a sense of what kinds of learning they hope to pursue in college and beyond. Others have no idea. But the definitions of success and the prescription for achieving it aren't nearly as individualized as they could be if we weren't taking our orders from external agents.

If we want students to experience themselves as independent, co-creators of knowledge, I'm feeling like we need to get out in front and start treating both ourselves and them that way. I'm sure that in most cases the AP tests are just the "nets" that help great teachers shape their shots. But I'd love to see what a curriculum that is a collaborative on-the-ground effort – taking into account student, teacher, and community perspectives – looks like. Increasingly, students of all ages and interests have the ability to connect with teachers and curricula that do speak to their interests and passions. Our relevancy in schools depends on our ability to be a part of that connection.

(This post was substantially informed by my reading
of Jeff Thompson's recent post, "It is the test! Or is it...",
which in turn was a response to a post by Dr. Scott McLeod.)

Leave A Trail

Image: One Way by James Traceur on Flickr

I had the great fortune to hear Will Richardson speak this week. (You can see notes – mine and his – here.) As a parent and educator, he shared with us this desire for his children:

I want my kids to be able to create, navigate, and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective, and ethical ways.

In the room with me were 50 or so other members of the New Jersey Association of Independent Schools (NJAIS), some (most?) of whom were probably already familiar with and/or open to Will's ideas. The audience was highly engaged, and one of the themes that threaded through our questions for Will was "How can we get everyone else on board?"

I've been thinking about that question ever since. (Will says that the question of "how do we move forward" is a common one within his communities.... "everyone is looking for the lever.")

Will's friend Clarence Fisher is a classroom teacher who "gets it." A recent post on his blog highlighted the power of global connections, and over the weekend, in a post entitled Where Are We Headed, he asked "How are we building the classrooms and learning these kids [current kindergartners] need?"

The list of K12 schools that "get it" with regards to 21st century skills gets longer every day. Scott McLeod ("Dangerously Irrelevant") is helpfully collecting names of schools that are successfully integrating innovative practices on his movingforward wiki, here; add your school if you think it qualifies! Public School Insights is also sharing a wide variety of success stories here.

But I get the sense that the vast majority of educators who "get it" are still lonely in their buildings, and maybe struggling with impatience. (Did you read Steve Dembo's post, "Is Joining a PLN bad for morale?")

Social media rock star Chris Brogan recently offered some advice about how to get from point A to point B within a business context in his "Get on the Right Side of the Fence" post, and that's the point at which my thinking started to crystallize.

We need complete stories, not just happy endings. We need case studies. We not only need to see that evolved schools exist, we need to know how they got there.

So keep learning out loud, everyone! Do not turn back.

And leave a trail, please.

Bloodhound image via J-Dub on Flickr

Scarcity vs. Abundance

Images: Virgin Dune & Waterfall, by H. Saber & fireramsey, via Flickr

Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail," is thinking and talking about a cultural shift, away from a presumption of scarcity to one of abundance.



(There's an even better, longer version up on Pop!Tech here.)

The implied tension between these worldviews is palpable in schools, where we are feeling both; Bill Farren has a great post up about this over at ed4wb entitled Schools In An Age of Abundance.

Bill says, in part:

The implications are interesting, especially as they pertain to schools. If we look at most schools today, we can see that they are still operating under (and often locked into) a model of scarcity. From the bookshelf space in the library to the information that is doled out by professors with limited office hours, we notice that the information, services, and availability to connect with others comes in quantities that are meager compared to what we experience outside of these institutions.

Bea Fields' recent post - Should Teachers Incorporate Texting and Twitter Into the Classroom? - addresses this tension right at the micro level. No matter how we try to kid ourselves about our ability to multi-task, attention is finite. Yet the information available to us is limitless. How do teachers manage the potentially disruptive presence of "the great out there" in our classrooms? At the University of Chicago Law School, the decision was to limit access to the internet during class. A Georgetown professor tells his students they may not bring their laptops to class, and explains his thinking here. Of course that wouldn't necessarily have any effect on texting and tweeting, both of which can take place with only a cellphone connection. My personal instinct would be to figure out ways to periodically throw open the windows and see what the breeze blows in. But then I don't have to worry about covering a previously established set of curricular content areas.

Outside of education the backchannel is here to stay, and there's lots of good thought going into how to make the best of it, notably Olivia Mitchell's "How to Present When People are Twittering"... Not surprisingly, "just tell them they can't open their laptops" doesn't appear a viable solution when dealing with adults. The latest Chronicle article on the subject also touches on the question of when we start treating students as adults. The comment stream raises additional questions about differences between disciplines and about the point at which teachers/professors can/should assume that students are capable of accurately performing the cost-benefit analysis of dividing their attention.

What do you think? What are the variables that matter?