Practical Theory

I'm in St. Louis, post presentation, and I'm pretty pleased with how it went. It's not easy for me to figure out how to talk to audiences that aren't made up of educators, because the question is always what is the balance between the universal ideas and the deep entry into pedagogy. Judging from the reaction, folks seemed to think that I struck a good balance today. I had a lot of people come up and tell me that I really challenged them to re-think their ideas about school design, and that's thrilling to me. A few folks asked me about strategies to get educators and facilities folks talking more, which is also really exciting.

And even better, this time, I remembered to hit record, so I can share the uStream with you.



And here are the slides as well:



It was also really, really fun for me to incorporate so many of the ideas that people left on the last entry into the presentation. What's becoming more and more apparent to me is how much all of these ideas --curriculum, technology, facility, 21st Century learning, the ethic of care -- are inter-related, and how important it is becoming to get everyone in the room who matters to talk about the really big ideas and how to make those ideas happen.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: school_design, presentation, school2.0

Tomorrow, I'm speaking at a school design conference to a bunch of people who build schools. My job is to talk to them for 40 minutes about what we need the learning to be before they go into groups to actually design the spaces.

What would you make sure to tell them?

The last few days brought two blog very important blog entries for those of us who really think about the sustainability of a teaching career. Kilian Betlach (TMAO) of Teaching in the 408 has announced that he's not coming back to his school in September and Pete Reilly over at the District Administrator blog writes about ex-teachers' attitudes about the profession. Suffice to say, when those ex-teachers compare their new jobs with teaching, teaching comes up short.

We all know the stats that say 40-50% of new teachers leave teaching within the first five years. Now, TMAO hasn't announced whether he's leaving the classroom or just his school, but even a casual reading of his blog gives plenty of reasons why he may be leaving the classroom.

The Pete Reilly article is really worth reading because it speaks to the ex-teachers' feelings about teaching. Those teachers felt overworked, under-prepared, under-challenged, and under-appreciated. Now, granted, these are the teachers who did leave, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that they found more satisfaction in their next job, but the data is staggering in how overwhelmingly they felt what they felt, and given that we are losing teachers in such staggering numbers, we need to pay attention to the reasons why.

One of the questions I've started asking when I present is this -- "How is it that we have so many idealistic, intelligent, dedicated people in our schools and yet have so many problems in our schools?" We have to start questioning the system that cannot harness all this energy and intelligence.

Too often, the rhetoric of schools does delve into the heroic martyr teacher succeeding against all odds. That's not sustainable. That's not even useful.

We have to create school systems where teachers are valued, where we support young teachers, where we find ways to ensure that teachers at all levels of their career are given the opportunity to continue to grow and learn, and we have to find ways for teacher to reach the highest of expectations - their own expectations and others - in ways that allow them to work fewer than 70 hours a week. It wouldn't hurt to pay a living wage, too, but honestly, teachers know what the money looks like, and while it's a problem, I'd venture to say it's not the biggest problem. Class size, teacher load, lack of collegiality, lack of support, the sheer massive effort that excellence in the profession takes, day in and day out... all those loom much larger in the minds of the people I know who have left the profession.

The sooner we recognize that if we want teachers to treat our students with an ethic of care, we have to create school systems that treat teachers with an ethic of care. If people don't believe that for ethical reasons, they should realize it for practical reasons, because if we keep on with our current model, we are never going to get enough of the teachers our students deserve.

[Thanks to Gary Stager for reminding us all to blog about this... also check out this month's Rethinking Schools for its analysis of NCLB and its programs.]

In case folks missed this, the Department of Education has determined that the $6 billion spent on Reading First -- the "scientifically proven" reading program pushed by President Bush and Sec't Spellings -- has done nothing to improve reading scores. In its article on the Reading First study, the Washington Post quoted Secretary Spellings as saying, ""If ever a program was rooted in research and science and fact, this is it."

Tim Stahmer, over at Assorted Stuff, has a great post about how Reading First is yet another example of the Bush Administration favoring politics over policy, as Reading First money ended up in the hands of many Bush supporters.

For me, this is one of the great crimes of NCLB, and one I've written about before. One of the truly horrible pieces of this bill -- and the reach it has had on district policies -- is how it has created a truly education-industrial complex with whole cottage industries springing up around standardized curriculum and standardized testing.

This has a painful and powerful effect at the district level, as resources are diverted from where they can do the most good. I was on the phone with a colleague today who is trying to get funding for an innovative, home-grown program. The Philadelphia Inquirer finished a three part story about drop-out prevention today and quoted a District official as saying that to increase the number of seats in these programs from 3,150 to 5,000, the district needs to spend another $37 million. Given the incredibly difficult fiscal challenges facing the School District of Philadelphia right now, that money isn't there. But imagine how much more money would we have for innovative programs if we didn't spend as much as we did on so many pieces of the standardization of curriculum and assessment over the past five years.

Reading First is one of the biggest piece of the "Who benefitted from NCLB" puzzle, but there are many other companies who have seen stock prices rise as schools have become less humane, as the Dept. of Education study shows, no more effective.

If we, as educators and students, are being held accountable through high-stakes testing, who is holding the policy makers and the for-profit education industry accountable for what they have done to our schools in the name of this most cynical of federal programs?

Wondering if there's something wrong with the last post...

So... I did talk about a lot of those ideas yesterday... It was interesting to do it, because this is a conference of educational IT professionals and not that many teachers, so it was a very interesting audience for the message and I uStreamed it.

And I forgot to press record.

argh

A lot of yesterday's talk dealt with a lot of the ideas that have been kicking around in my head lately. I'm not 100% sure I've nailed down exactly how I want to talk and write about these days, and I think yesterday's talk is going to be the thing that gets me back to writing about these days, because I got a lot of the ideas out loud, into a general structure, and now I can start to wrap my head around some of them in more detail. So I'm happy about that... it's time to really start forcing myself into writing about these ideas in detail. It just is.

So I did remember hit record in the second session, which was much more "unconference-y" in that it was a lot of folks from the first session asking questions and talking.

So you'll hear remnants of some of the ideas in the second session... it was fun to just talk to people after the big keynote.

[Cross-posted at LeaderTalk

I'm giving a keynote in Oregon tomorrow... and I know my role... talk happy about SLA, about pedagogy, be positive...

Especially because this is an technology conference, not a school reform conference, but I don't think I want to do that.

I want to scream at these folks... I want to shake them up. I want to tell them that we have to stop thinking that business has any idea what schools need to be. I want to tell them that our reliance on test scores will kill innovation and creativity. I want to tell them that every time I go to the exhibit floor at a conference and see more tools for monitoring, accountability and security than I see tools for creativity, creation and collaboration, I see us move one more step away from the dream of what I believe our schools can be.

I want to tell them that the Who had it right. The Kids Are Alright. It's the adults that keep screwing up.

I want to tell them that we have to forget so much of what we think school are now -- we have to unlearn so much of current educational thinking. And then I want to tell them everything they have to relearn... I want to tell them that we can't look to the future unless we are willing to learn from the past.

I want to tell them that pedagogy matters. That we have to empower, even if that means giving up the soft comforts of security... of filtering... of mandatory curriculum... of lecture.

I want to tell them how much this matters.

I want to tell them that yes, Bill Gates and all the folks yelling and screaming about the broken American system are a little bit right and a whole lot wrong. I want to tell them that yes, our schools have issues and problems, and they aren't perfect. Sadly, they are a reflection of all of us who work in them, and sadly, we often build our flaws right into them.

But I also want to say that those folks have no idea how to fix our schools. And how dare they think they do.

But I want to ask them this... how is it that so many bright people... caring people... dedicated, idealistic people work in our schools, and yet we still have the problems we have.

I want to ask them how a test score matters when kids come to school hungry?

I want to ask them how a lecture matters when kids cannot see a connection between the work of the classroom and the life they see outside the school.

I want to ask them how, given a seven hour work day, we can possibly hope to do everything currently asked of us in the classroom.

I want to remind them that the average School District of Philadelphia high school teacher sees 165 kids in a day. And I want to ask them how they are supposed to do anything caring, meaningful and real in that time.

I want to tell them that technology solves none of this by itself.

None of it.

Not even a little bit. In fact, the way it's being used now, it's making it worse, as online tests and digital "delivery of instruction" command a larger and larger part of the educational-technology landscape.

And then I want to tell them what we have to do.

I want to tell them that schools can't be all things. We have to give up our notion that we can do everything. We can't teach coverage and creativity. We can't assess depth and breadth as our primary focus and have any kind of sanity. We can't tell kids we want them to think for themselves, take ownership, solve the problems of the 21st century, oh and by the way, first you have to take this test that was made by someone you never met and if you don't pass, forget all that stuff.

I want to tell them that we have to question every single system we have in our schools. I want to tell them that everything should be on the table. All of it.

And then, after I say all that, I can talk about SLA. That's less scary, I think.

From A Schoolmaster of the Great City:

What the school system needs to understand is that its strength lies, not in the strength of the central organization, but in the strength of the individual school, not in making one school like another, but in making each school a distinct unit. The need of the system is the preservation of its units, so that each school can keep itself alive, wide awake, responsive to its people, easily adaptable, the best of its kind.

This is what matters. This is what NCLB does not understand. This is the problem with the standardization movement.

Kids are different. Schools are different. Teachers are different. What we want to do is create a network of schools with broadly defined standards that allow schools and teachers to create environments that speak to their communities.


While some may argue that NCLB was not meant to create the standardized curriculum movement that we are seeing in cities all over America, that is the the result. The testing movement has narrowed curriculum and created an atmosphere that is poisonous. I've heard too many stories of teachers being told to take good lessons out of the curriculum because it won't be on the test.

Does this mean that schools should not have standards and accountability? No. Absolutely not. But if we are to make data-driven decisions, let us use good data. The Middle States accreditation process has been around for decades. It is rigorous, it is comprehensive, and it is based on broad standards and multiple data sources. I am loath to think that someone would judge SLA solely on our PSSA scores, but I'd open up a Middle States report to anyone who would ask.

We have to learn that assessment -- student or school -- isn't cheap, and it isn't easy. And school reform isn't cheap or easy. And top-down standardization won't get us the schools we need. At best, it'll get us a barely passable norm -- and that's at best. What we want is a system that helps all schools to develop their best. What we want is the ability to assess the goals of a school and the progress the school is making toward those goals.

And amazingly, we've known that for a long time. Angelo Patri wrote the quote that started this entry in 1917. And I'm not sure we're any closer today to achieving that vision. That should give us all pause.

Dennis Richards, Superintendent of Falmouth, MA has a very, very good idea:

May 1, 2009 is the Day. I am one person trying to change the world. Join me and we will make history. If you talk about the Echo Chamber, here's how to open the door of the chamber and walk out! I need your help to Pass This Forward! Education as we know it will never be the same if you do.

The 2009 ASCD Annual Conference has four themes and two are relevant to this shout out.

Imagine: Challenging Minds to Engage and Learn More Deeply

Imagine: Connecting Learners in an E-World

This is a "shout out" to students and educators in my digital network. Pass this message onto everyone in your network.

Twitter It!

Post It!

Do video teasers for YouTube and TeacherTube!

Do whatever it takes to get this message out.

THE MESSAGE

ASCD is the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Their membership represents more than 175,000 educators from 119 countries and nearly 60 affiliates. Their 2009 Annual Conference is about Imagining how to Engage Students more deeply in their Learning and about How Technology Can Help.

2008 Annual Conference: March 15-17, 2008

12,000 ~ The number of people attending

500+ ~ The number of sessions offered

27 ~ The number of sessions in the Instructional Technology Strand

5 ~ The number of sessions in the Instructional Technology Strand with Web 2.0 content!!

2009 Annual Conference Can Be Very Different
Visit Claiming What We Imagine

We talk a lot about trying to reach beyond the "usual suspects" in our audience. I was thrilled that EduCon brought in a lot of first-time edu-techies to the conference, and I'm excited to do it again next year, but Dennis is 100% right. ASCD is the one of the most august educational organizations out there, and if we want to start to reach beyond our current audience, this is a big, big step.

I'm going to take a look at some of the work I've been doing around re-imagining schools and see if it makes sense, but you can be sure that I'm going to submit a proposal.

So should you.

[Full disclosure -- the idea for this post came from SLA English teacher and edu-blogger, Zac Chase. More disclosure -- I've never seen Empire Records, although I'm told it's quite good.]

DEB
I decided I'd rather kill myself than meet Rex Manning. Now excuse me I'm going.

AJ
No listen to me. This isn't funny. I'm not joking. I'm not gonna let you go out of here until you tell me what's going on.

DEB
Mind your own business.

LUCAS
She's fine. She's amazing.

DEB
Thank you.

LUCAS
(whispering)
AJ she's in the store. She's gonna be OK.

I spend a lot of my time worrying about our kids. One might say it's what I spend the bulk of my time doing. We have a lot of kids at SLA who come from broken homes, who have seen friends, parents, loved ones killed, incarcerated, addicted. We have a lot of kids who struggle with their own demons, sometimes for reasons we cannot fathom. It's not a story that is that different than any other school anywhere and it certainly is a story that resonates with any teacher from an urban district.

What makes SLA a little different, hopefully, is that our kids still show up every day. With our advisory program, every student at SLA knows there's an adult who is responsible for them as a person, not just as a student. With our advisory program, we the adults are constantly reminded that our kids are *kids*, not just students. We've averaged 96% attendance all year long, which speaks to the energy and passion of all the people who inhabit our building.

But despite that, there are a number of kids who struggle, for whom the work of SLA is incredibly taxing and difficult. And there are a number of kids who I worry about every day. And despite the fact that those kids stick their heads in my office every day, I worry. We call parents, we send out dozens of emails and letters, we have conferences, we meet with kids, we get them access to city services when we need to, and still I worry.

The third quarter ended the other day, and I was able to access report cards. I'm particularly worried about a number of kids in our 10th grade. 10th grade is a tough year, I believe. High school is not new anymore, and the reality of life after high school hasn't kicked in yet, and it's my experience that 10th grade is when kids disappear. At the middle of our 3rd quarter, we had a number of kids who were on that cusp. So I viewed those report cards with a great deal of trepidation.

But they keep showing up, and student by student, they are starting to succeed in powerful ways. When I examined grades, student after student showed that they were getting it... now, progress isn't a straight, bright line, and I'm not naive or optimistic enough to think that everyone of of the students at the top of the "Worry List" are now going to have nothing but success at SLA, but they keep showing up every day, they keep trying, and they are seeing the success that comes from that.

There's no magic bullet, there's no one solution. But when you create structures that allow students and teachers to see each other as people, not objects, and then when you bring people who want an excuse to care deeply about the people around them and let them fill that structure with their shared humanity, good things can happen.

So I keep worrying, it's my job after all, but whenever I really start worrying, I just remind myself, "They're in the store. It's going to be o.k."

This hurts:


Statewide testing measure passes in Nebraska Legislature

LINCOLN -- Nebraska lawmakers decided this morning that the state's schools should follow the rest of the country and give students uniform tests to measure their academic progress.


The Legislature voted 33-15 to give Legislative Bill 1157 its final approval. That sends the bill to Gov. Dave Heineman with enough support to override any veto.


The vote sets the stage for Nebraska to end a testing system that differs from school district to school district. Critics say that system keeps schools from being fully accountable to the public because a school district can be accurately compared only to itself.


But others say Nebraska's alternative to standardized testing was a model that didn't subject schools to rankings and allowed schools to keep a broad curriculum, instead of focusing only on the material being
tested.

I'm really beyond sad about this. The STARS project was a school-based, NCLB compliant assessment model that honored teachers and valued students. The State Commissioner of Education, Douglas Christensen is brilliant and courageous and compassionate - in short, he is a gifted educator.

Sadly, this news comes a year after Time Magazine profiled the STARS project, and it comes on the day after I received the latest issue of Edutopia Magazine named Dr. Christensen one of the Daring Dozen for 2008. Too bad the legislature was more concerned with the ability to compare one district to another with a test score than actual teaching and learning.

I've written about the STARS project before, and it was their success that gave me hope that we -- on a large scale -- prove that there are other ways to assess what kids learn than just the standardized tests. And I admit, on an almost daily level, I wonder how we got to this moment in time where our politicians have convinced so many that answers on a standardized test could ever tell us more about what a child can do than what the teachers who work with the kids day in and day out would tell us.

With Nebraska's vote yesterday, it just got that much harder for all of us to hope for systemic reform. Thank you, Dr. Christensen for always fighting the good fight, and I can't wait to see what you do next. And here's hoping someone makes every legislator who voted for Legislative Bill 1157 take the tests they just mandated.... and I hope that they have to publish the scores too.



Update: Doug Christensen has resigned as Commissioner of Education for Nebraska, effective July 15th. He had served in that role since 1994.


Technorati Tags: nebraska, STARS, ed_policy

Wharton Professor and long-time digital citizen Kevin Werbach (anyone else here old enough to remember his Bare Bones Guide to HTML?) posts the Ten Challenges for the Network Age on the Supernova 2008 blog. He is using these ten challenges as the framework for the Supernova conference this year, and while I am often wary of education thinking that we just have to take the questions that business is pondering and apply them to education, I've known Kevin through various digital communities for around fifteen years, and I greatly respect the way he considers issues. He does look at these questions from a media / communications lens, and that lens has some powerful ramifications for education as well. With that... here are some thoughts on his ten challenges:

Scarcity and Abundance
(Both are sources of value, yet they cannot coexist.)

For education, clearly this challenge is particularly relevant -- This is probably a blog post or three all to itself. (O.k. -- they all might be.) But I'd define this challenge in this way -- How do we handle the abundance of inputs and outputs available to our students given the scarcity of two major problems in our schools: Allowed / Accepted Channels of Access (number of computers per child, bandwidth, filtering, restrictions on publishing, etc...) and time.

Choice and Coordination
(Users are in control, but don't they need guides to avoid being overwhelmed?)

I love that it's not just education that is struggling with this. Kevin hits on the ultimate pedagogical question of the 21st century (and probably of the 20th, too, but that's another story.) How we help our students learn to navigate the Towel of Babel that is the internet these days is probably one of the most important things we can teach our kids. Smart, ethical use of information is everything. Kids do have more information at their fingertips than ever before in human history. More than ever before, they need teachers, mentors, guides, to teach them how to handle that. It is my contention that as educators realize that they no longer are or need to be the ultimate arbiter of all content in the classroom, what we must realize is that we now have a much more difficult and important job to do -- we must teach wisdom.

Aggregation and Fragmentation
(Network effects mean that the big players get bigger, but at the same time, markets increasingly specialize and personalize.)

Harder to apply this one to education on a "tech" level, but I'll take this one in a different direction. We spent the last century building comprehensive high schools where the big players did get bigger, such that you now have high schools of 4,000 - 5,000 students in many places in our country. (Not just urban -- the "Regional HS" is a staple around here.) Over the past ten years, in our cities, we are seeing the rise of the small school movement (and probably also the charter school movement), where schools do specialize around themes or learning styles or ideas. This movement is, in my opinion, nascent and still very fragile, but it's an interesting moment in time where school admissions are becoming market driven and schools are having to create more and more of a personalized experience for students.

This, of course, is also happening at a time where the big players have gotten bigger and bigger. "Data driven decision-making" (in quotes because I still firmly believe that much of the data schools are using is poor and therefore we're making bad decisions) and NCLB and, sadly, technology, has meant that every test score can now be immediately published. We are seeing, in schools, technology used administratively as big brother, with more and more standardization being pushed top-down from the federal, state and district levels, and sadly, the very tools that could free education are often used to bind it. This is the paradox that we have yet to solve.

Stability and Disruption
(True innovation requires disruption, but disruption can be painful and costly, especially where investment and trust are significant.)

Again, this one hits education right on the head -- perhaps more powerfully and painfully than it does business. As educators, we must be hyper-aware that we cannot be revolutionaries at the expense of our students. One of the very real -- and not all that visionary -- parts of our job is to prepare the kids for college. Therefore, we must be very careful with the amount of disruption we cause because we must still create institutions that are recognized by the very slow-to-change higher-ed institutions that then select our students. This is one of the reasons that we so much more innovation in the urban districts than the suburban districts. Urban districts, by and large, are not viewed as stable, there isn't much investment and there isn't much trust, so disruption is easier, because there's more willingness to take risks.

We must take risks in education. We must challenge the tried-and-true way of educating students, but we must do it thoughtfully and carefully and transparently, because we don't have the luxury of just "going out of business." Every school that makes those choices poorly affects the lives of the students who honored that school with their choice to go there. This is -- as much as any other reason -- we must always, always, always humble ourselves before the enormity of the task in front of us.

Behavior and Rationality
(People don't always act according to models of rationality, especially when connected to one another, but our economic frameworks assume they do.)

People don't always act rationally, and students are people too. Ergo, students don't always act rationally. This is not a shock to any educator or parent. The fact that this translates to -- and is perhaps augmented by -- their behavior online is also not a shock. But it's also true that if we substitute "educational" for "economic" we also have a problem that our educational frameworks assume some level of rationality as well. It often seems obvious to teachers that "If student does this, they receive that." And yet, that very simple causal relationship (think, "Do you homework, do well in class.") is often missed by kids. I'd argue that is because those simple causalities often aren't, but again, that's another blog post.

How this relates to the way schools adapt to the digitial world is simply this -- we no longer have the luxury of assuming that we don't have to teach about this stuff. Every school should and must teach students the idea that "We are the stories we tell." Every school should and must teach digital ethics, teach the idea of creating a deliberate and thoughtful version of ourselves online. Every school should and must challenges students to think about their behavior -- on and off-line -- as if the world depended on it, because, quite honestly, it does.

O.k. -- this blog post is now a LOT longer than I expected it to be, and it's 60 degrees out here on the last weekday of Spring Break. Part Two is coming... thank you to Kevin for challenging me to think and write about this. Suffice to say, if these are your ten challenges, I think Supernova 2008 will be an amazing conference. When are you running one for educators, Kevin?

Technorati Tags: kevin_werbach, Network_Age

[Note: I haven't blogged about specific party politics since I became principal of SLA. It's not hard to guess where I stand politically, and I have not taken down a single entry I wrote, but I felt I had to write about this.]

Yesterday, I made up my mind who I was voting for on April 22nd.

Yesterday, I saw the most courageous and powerful political speech in a generation, if not more.

Yesterday, Barack Obama took the stage for what most thought would be a defensive speech in an attempt to repair damage made by his association with his pastor who has made controversial remarks over the years.

Yesterday, I watched Barack Obama challenge all of us to change the way we think about race, to move beyond a zero-sum game and instead imagine a world where we can heal together better than we ever can apart.

Yesterday, I watched a major candidate for president say openly and publicly the things that were often only whispered or spoken in "safe," homogeneous groups.

Yesterday, I watched Barack Obama take a major step toward changing the way we talk about race and class in this country.

Yesterday, I watched Barack Obama give us a hopeful, honest vision of the future while being painfully and powerfully honest about our past and our present.

Yesterday, I watched Barack Obama challenge us to change the way we talk about politics in this country.

In the end, people will vote for who they want to vote for. And there are certainly good reasons to vote for any of the three candidates in the race. But I do believe that yesterday's speech will go down, regardless of the outcome on April 22nd or the outcome in November, as one of the most important speeches in recent American history. It is something that every American should watch, because it challenges us. It is something that should be talked about in our schools and around our dinner tables, because Sen. Obama spoke honestly and openly and truthfully about the problem that confounds our nation -- the way we talk about and deal with race and class and anger and hatred. He challenged us in a way that we have not been challenged since Martin Luther King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Yesterday, I watched Barack Obama create history, whole cloth with his words, standing in the National Constitution Center in my city. He reminded us of the best of what we can be, of what our country can be.

If you haven't seen it yet, set aside thirty-seven minutes, and watch the speech.

Al Upton is a teacher in South Australia who had been doing some really amazing work with 8 and 9 year olds and cyber-mentoring. I'd tell you to go read all about it, but I can't. The government shut down the program while it assesses the risk of kids posting work online. This is what we all fear... that someone can complain to someone on the other end of a phone in an office and all the work we do can disappear.

Go read the conversation, lend your voice of support:

http://alupton.edublogs.org/

And be sure to read the voices of the kids who feel the loss of a wonderful, innovative program.

As if there weren't enough reasons to go to NECC (EduBloggerCon, The Blogger Cafe, rumors of BBQ at the hotel, and you know... NECC), there's now another reason to go:

Gary Stager, Sylvia Martinez and their friends will be hosting The Constructivist Celebration on June 29th. It costs $30 to attend, and Gary and Sylvia are some of the best folks out there at combining educational technology with progressive pedagogy in powerful, meaningful and real ways.

It's a small event, and Gary told me told that spaces are going quickly. Reserve your spot now, and I'll see you there!