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Archives For November 30, 1999

Hey, Google: To Teach is To Innovate

October 9, 2012 — Leave a comment

An interviewer can ask a question to get the answer he or she wants to hear. That may have been the case on September 2, 2012 when   CBS’s 60 Minutes  framed a question on educators and education. The interview featured Google chairman Eric Schmidt who was responding to questions about Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. The educational enterprise Khan Academy began as a series of math video tutorials given by Khan for his nephew in 2004. Khan Academy expanded into its own YouTube channel to feature other disciplines including history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science. Schmidt was heaping praise on Sal Khan when he was asked, “He [Khan] was the guy to sort of make this happen? Why do you think it was him and not some person who was an educator, who had a background in this area?”

Schmidt’s response was incredibly disappointing:

“Innovation never comes from the established institutions. It’s always a graduate students or a crazy person or somebody with a great vision.”

With one sweeping over-generalization, Schmidt and the producers of 60 Minutes dismissed the efforts of our nation’s teachers as innovators inferring that outsiders, specifically outsiders from the business world, are better equipped to reform our education system.

Both Schmidt and the producers of 60 Minutes are wrong. Teachers are innovative.
Just look at the definition of “to innovate”:

1: to introduce as or as if new (as transitive verb)
2 (archaic) : to effect a change in
3: to make changes : do something in a new way

“To innovate” is conceptually connected to the verb “to teach”; teachers introduce content as new, effect a change in understanding, and encourage students to make changes in order to prepare for the future. Our nation’s public school system is an innovative effort; no other nation has so purposefully engaged in the enterprise of educating ALL children, regardless of ability or disability.

Apparently, Mr. Schmidt blanked on the relationship between his company and teachers who are familarizing students with Google’s mutiple applications. The Google Educator Academy is offered to teachers so they can better learn how to integrate Google products into classrooms. Of course, the Google Educator Academy also allows Google designers the opportunity to pick the brains of innovative educators as to what is needed in the classroom. For example, many teachers innovate with Google products in ways engineers did not anticipate. I doubt that when Google Maps programmers designed the software to provide directions on virtual maps that they anticipated teachers would use their program to create as virtual field trips to locations in literature. There are hundreds of these trips online including Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Christopher Curtis’s The Watsons Go To Birmingham, or David Wiesner’s Flotsam. My own Grade 12 students have created their “journeys of life” dropping their pins and explanations on their own Google Maps. Everyday, teachers use the available technologies in ways the creators never imagined.

Teachers are not in the business of developing technologies. Developing technologies are in the purview of engineers, graduate students, or a Schmidt put it, some “crazy person”. Instead teachers innovate with creativity and flexibility everyday in the classroom to promote understanding for diverse learning styles. At any moment, a change in schedule (fire drill, student emergency) could require an immediate shift in plans, a demand for innovation. An elementary teacher needs to be prepared to walk into a classroom at any grade level armed with little else than a picture book and innovate a writing lesson for pen and paper or for an open software program. Subject area teachers need to be innovative in content areas: to deliver a memorable lesson on percentages with pizza (virtual or otherwise), or to implement a lesson on measuring area using nothing but paper clips (virtual or otherwise), or to create a lesson on character development using paper bag puppets or animation software. Before accepting the premise that teachers are not innovative, consider how you might engage 24 fifth graders right after a recess period. If you are not innovative, I can assure you that 45 minute period will be memorably exhausting and/or uncomfortable..

While I certainly appreciate Sal Khan’s innovative contributions of providing video tutorials, I would also like to point out that his method of delivering content takes place some distance away from the classroom. His Khan Academy is a great supplement or complement to education, but the Khan Academy cannot replace the role of the teacher in the classroom. Khan’s methodology of taping lectures is also not entirely innovative. Eric Mazur at Harvard developed Peer Instruction in the 1990s, and the birth of YouTube in 2007 saw a plethora of teachers providing lessons for students. The Flipped Classroom Movement, started by teachers, is currently adopting the practices and offering variations to Khan Academy. What does bear remembering is that Khan’s position as a hedge fund manager provided him the time, financing, and connections to develop and market his Academy’s method to deliver content. Teachers do not have those resources so readily available.

Finally, I would suggest to Mr. Schmidt that innovation most certainly does come from established institution of education, and that he need only look around the offices and boardrooms of Google to see how traditional education has directly benefitted his company. Every single person in these rooms has had an education from an established institution, yet they are considered innovators. The people at Google, however, are not under the same kind of pressure to innovate at least five (5) hours a day for a minimum of 180 days a year.  That grueling pace is what innovative teachers keep.

In Curriculum, Education, Education & Technology, Teacher , , , , , , ,
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Et Tu, Kristof?

September 15, 2012 — Leave a comment

Dear Nicholas Kristof:

Not you too? I have always looked to you as the defender of just causes; a voice of reason in times of crisis. I agreed with your passionate opening in your New York Times column Students Over Unions, September 12, 2012, noting the role of poverty as a factor in “the most important civil rights battleground” and that “the most crucial struggle against poverty is the one fought in schools.”

In adding your opinion to the Chicago teacher’s strike, you considered that today’s inner-city urban schools, “echo the ‘separate but equal’ system of the early 1950s. In the Chicago Public Schools where teachers are now on strike, 86 percent of children are black or Hispanic, and 87 percent come from low-income families.”
In this opinion piece, you also made the good points that I look for in your columns:
  • The single most important step we could take has nothing to do with unions and everything to do with providing early-childhood education to at-risk kids.
  • Teachers need to be much better paid to attract the best college graduates to the nation’s worst schools.
However, you lost me at, “How does one figure out who is a weak teacher?”
Your solution is to have schools look at value added measurements (VAM) using test data. You suggest that researchers are improving the use of VAM and that, “with three years of data, it’s usually possible to tell which teachers are failing.”
Really?
Before you put your faith in VAM, you might have perused, John Ewing’s article “Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data” in the publication Notices of the American Mathematic Society.  Ewing’s thesis in the article addresses a common misuse of mathematics that “is simpler, more pervasive, and (alas) more insidious: mathematics employed as a rhetorical weapon—an intellectual credential to convince the public that an idea or a process is ‘objective’ and hence better than other competing ideas or processes.”
As the president of the organization”Math for America”, Ewing disputes the use of tests to evaluate teachers, schools, or programs, and he short lists four of the most important problems:

1. Influences. Test scores are affected by many factors, including the incoming levels of achievement, the influence of previous teachers, the attitudes of peers, and parental support. One cannot immediately separate the influence of a particular teacher or program among all those variables.

2. Polls. Like polls, tests are only samples. They cover only a small selection of material from a larger domain. A student’s score is meant to represent how much has been learned on all material, but tests (like polls) can be misleading.

3. Intangibles. Tests (especially multiple-choice tests) measure the learning of facts and procedures rather than the many other goals of teaching. Attitude, engagement, and the ability to learn further on one’s own are difficult to measure with tests. In some cases, these “intangible” goals may be more important than those measured by tests.

4. Inflation. Test scores can be increased without increasing student learning. This assertion has been convincingly demonstrated, but it is widely ignored by many in the education establishment. In fact, the assertion should not be surprising. Every teacher knows that providing strategies for test-taking can improve student performance and that narrowing the curriculum to conform precisely to the test (“teaching to the test”) can have an even greater effect. The evidence shows that these effects can be substantial: One can dramatically increase test scores while at the same time actually decreasing student learning. “Test scores” are not the same as “student achievement”.

In pointing out the flaws of VAM in testing, Ewing concludes:

“Of course we should hold teachers accountable, but this does not mean we have to pretend that mathematical models can do something they cannot. Of course we should rid our schools of incompetent teachers, but value-added models are an exceedingly blunt tool for this purpose. In any case, we ought to expect more from our teachers than what value-added attempts to measure.”

Ultimately, Ewing determines the tool, the data from a single metric, used to measure teacher performance is fundamentally flawed. I ask you to consider what other profession evaluates on a single metric?

Evaluate performers in any other profession and note the number of metrics used to determine success. Athletes have pre-season games, games, playoffs all of which give important data to determine improvement over time. Multiple industries release profit statements quarterly while parsing through the tremendous amount of targeted consumer data now available. Lawyers, doctors, and other professions are ranked not by single cases, but by professional performance accrued case by case. Government agencies use multiple measurements to determine progress in various sectors (employment, demographics, investments,etc) and provide monthly reports to determine progress; even the presidential race has a primary before the election. Yet there are those who would want teachers to be evaluated using the metric of a single test, taken one day out of one school year.

The single metric test is given state by state to measure growth in skills and subject area content in reading, writing, math and science. Elementary school teachers and teachers at the high school in these subject areas receive the most scrutiny. Many state standardized tests are given at specific grade levels. In other words, in my state of Connecticut, teachers in 5th, 8th or 10th grade who teach one of the “core” classes carry a different evaluation burden; their test results are widely publicized as the school ranking against other schools. Elective teachers (art, PE, music, foreign language) or “off-year testing” teachers do not receive the same level of examination by the public.

However, I do not advocate increasing tests at every grade level or in every subject in order to even the playing field. You write that the reliance on tests and VAM “are stirring skepticism and anger among teachers” because the evaluation system is being created by those who do not have authentic or extensive classroom experience. Instead, the evaluation system is being handed over in large part to the testing industry, and that testing industry lives in an incestuous relationship with publishing and educational “support” developers. The testing industry proclaims a school system’s success by evaluating data from a test, but within that same industry are multiple businesses that profit from a a school system’s need to purchase programs and materials they promote as necessary to pass the standardized test. “Failing the standardized tests? You need our reading/writing/math/science program!”

Before you hop onto the bandwagon with those advocating a one-test metric, consider how this opinion piece “Students over Unions” differs in both research and sentiment from your columns that bring national attention to the poor and the disenfranchised. So different was the tone of this piece as to have a caught the attention of several other writers who called you out specifically: Sarah Jaffe from Truth Out Five So-Called Libreral Pundits that are Attacking Teachers; and Education Week contributor Larry Ferrlazzo on his blog “When Bad Ideas Happen to Good Columnists” to name two.Valerie Strauss from the Washington Post in Why Rahm Emanuel and The New York Times are Wrong about Teacher Evaluation  also found and incorporated the Ewing argument in explaining the lack of union support from your paper. You even got into a Twitter-tiff with education advocate Diane Ravitch http://Twitter.com/DianeRavitch

Ultimately, I am confident that you would not want one column, specifically this one column, to be used to define you for an entire year.  You would not want one metric to measure your success as writer for the New York Times. You would not want one single opinion piece be used as measurement in order to evaluate your annual performance.

Well, neither do teachers.

In Education, Teacher , , , , , , , , , , ,
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My Film Lessons Resources for a Substitute in the Block Schedule

September 6, 2012 — 2 Comments

Wamogo High School (Region 6)  in Connecticut finished four days of teacher driven professional development. There were a few “requested sessions” which were organized to address concerns about the upcoming block schedule; we are moving from a sequence of 38-45 minute periods to alternating days of 80 minute blocks. The question came up, “What plans can a teacher leave a substitute teacher for this length of time?”

I suggested that a lesson plan that incorporates film is easy to prepare in advance, so I organized the following links that teachers can use to prepare a substitute lesson that incorporates film.

The substitute teacher may have students who think they have the “day off”, but a film lesson organized with a written reflection can be an effective way to promote new learning.

Film lessons are popular with substitute teachers. They are usually engaging, and they are easy to implement as long as the substitute can access the video online or operate the hardware to run a hard copy of the video.

Video/film lessons also meet many of the Common Core Standards as stated in the Overview for the ELA Standards: “Just as media and technology are integrated in school and life in the twenty-first century, skills related to media use (both critical analysis and production of media) are integrated throughout the standards.”

Our school has a subscription to Discovery Education which is jammed packed with digital content: film clips and prepared lesson plans are available for every grade level. However, other school systems may not have this resource.

The following free websites were reviewed in the presentation for teachers to use in order to find videos, lesson plans to use with videos, and/or worksheets that can be completed by students watching videos.

One major source to start looking for all video materials is the updated Edudemic 100 Video Sites on the Edudemic.com website.This website is organized with sub-headings General; Teacher Training; Science Math & Technology; History, Arts and Social Sciences; Lesson Planning; Video Tools and true to its name there are 100 sites, each rich with links to videos of all lengths in all subjects.

To accompany a selected film or video, I strongly recommend students have a writing assignment. The writing assignment can be in a variety of formats: notes, critical analysis, or reflection. I am not a fan of the worksheet, but substitutes benefit from a well-designed worksheet that students can complete and turn in at the end of class. For that reason, I located a number of websites that can be used to either develop a worksheet or websites that have worksheets already prepared:

Video documentaries are also popular; since these are often shorter than a feature length film, many can be run during one block period. A note of caution: several of these videos will need to be vetted to assure content appropriate materials are used. Many of the video clips on these sites are current and can be associated with news articles to use to supplement the viewing as a comparison or a contrast. 

The Oscars.com website offers a generic documentary worksheet. This prepared sheet is organized around political discourse, but the sheet has questions that can be used with any documentary. 

The Ted Talks website describes the numerous video presentations as “Ideas Worth Spreading.” TED began in 1984 as a “conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.” There are very entertaining videos on every subject, but most recently, there has been a new category devoted to education TED-ED. These short film clips at  http://ed.ted.com/ are offered with interactive quizzes and writing prompts.

My Film and Literature class used many of the lessons off the Film English blog devoted to film and English Language Learners (ELL) http://film-english.com/. The lesson plans are very detailed and involve critical thinking skills that can be used outside of the ELL classroom as well.

Our English Department has been phasing out the department’s DVD library; so many DVDs were scratched or went missing during the school year. We now use commercial “instant streaming” websites where we can purchase videos for safekeeping “in the cloud”. Unfortunately, this means that one of the best features used for showing a film, the closed-captioning feature, is not available. If we cannot locate a film through an “instant streaming” service, we check with OpenCulture.com http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline which has hundreds of movies available. Some are subtitled in English; most are classic films. Suppose the DVD case is empty? Teachers can check here to see if the film is available for free on this site.

Finally, the “motherlode” of film lesson plans is on the NYTimes Learning Network website. This is a one stop shopping for plans website (no subscription required) with lessons written by “[freelance] educators with deep and broad experience in the classroom and in curriculum development. They work with the editors, Katherine Schulten and Holly Ojalvo, who are also longtime educators, to develop the lessons.” The lessons are thorough, tied to standards, and so easy to follow that a sick teacher need only browse for a few minutes to find a lesson, film or otherwise, that can connect to a discipline.

This year, the 80 minute time block is new for our school and for our substitutes, and this longer class period demands even more attention to preparation. No teacher or administrator wants to lose 80 minutes (X) times the number of students in the classroom; do the math- 20 students in a class X 80 mins = 1600 educable minutes! A film/video lesson should not be offered as babysitting, but rather a lesson that extends learning in another medium. This quick presentation of information was designed to help teachers design lessons that can be easily implemented by a substitute teacher and meaningful for the students.  A well-designed film lesson can be effective even if the classroom teacher is not the one clicking the “play” button.

In Education, Education & Technology, Film, Teacher, Writing , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Teachers Built “It”

September 4, 2012 — Leave a comment

The claim “I built it” is being tossed around this political season.  I am not a fan of the unspecific pronoun “it”, but as “it” in this context stands for any one of a number of diverse businesses that power our nation’s economy, the inclusive, ubiquitous pronoun will have to serve.

While I agree that the success of our nation is due in large part to those who “built it [businesses]” in the past and to those individuals who will “build it [businesses]” in the future, I feel the need to point out that there is one profession that has more claim to this catch phrase then others. If America is a world power today because of those who “built it,” the individuals who “built it” are teachers. For example:

  • Teachers have “built it” by  teaching the reading and comprehension of texts in differing levels of complexity;
  • Teachers have “built it” by teaching formal and informal writing to communicate;
  • Teachers have “built it” by explaining the essentials of numeracy;
  • Teachers have “built it” by presenting the basic  laws of motion, gravity, and energy;
  • Teachers have “built it” by clarifying the organization of elements which compose the organic and inorganic on the planet;
  • Teachers have “built it” by explaining  science of colors and techniques of expression or the science of sound and musical techniques of expression or the science of drama and the techniques of performance;
  • Teachers have “built it” by presenting instruction in other languages to promote global understanding;
  • Teachers have literally  “built it” with hands-on lessons in engineering and industrials arts.
  • Teachers have “built it” by presenting lessons of history; the lessons of economic principles to budding businessmen, strategic principles to future military leaders, and political science to future politicians;
  • Teachers have “built it” by instilling an appreciation for civics and law to our nations’ citizens and to those who directly interpret and defend our Constitution.

Teachers at every grade level, teaching youngsters in kindergarten to teaching adults in graduate school, have had a hand in building our nation’s skills and developing our national brain trust. Teachers in all schools, public and private, have dedicated time and energy in the passing of information from one generation to the next. Teachers of all disciplines have shared their expertise in the hopes of building a better society.

Granted, not all teaching has been successful. There have been teachers that have missed steps in the building of knowledge; students may not have gained information that would have been beneficial. Some lessons have ended in failure, and despite best efforts, statistics on literacy for American adults vary over 80%. There is more that can be done to improve education, and so there are teachers working to “build” a better education system for all citizens.

Teachers are “building it” using the Bloom’s taxonomy of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Teachers are “building it” with an appreciation for the different learning styles of students from the verbal-linguistic to the  logical-mathematical; from the visual-spatial to the bodily-kinesthetic; from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal, and from the musical to the naturalistic.

In classrooms everywhere, whether a student is seated in an august university or in a home school kitchen, there are teachers who are at this very moment teaching students how to “build it”, whatever “it” might be. In each of these classrooms, the “building on” knowledge and understanding is critical to the success of what will be “built” in the future.

The phrase, “I built it” might even have its origins in the classroom. How often has teacher affirmed a student’s success with “You did it!” or “Look what you did!” rather than self-serving “Look what you just learned because a teacher taught you.”

Yes, our nation has been blessed with  inventors, industrialists, and entrepreneurs who can claim that they “built” successful economic enterprises. Yes, our nation has great artists, philosophers, and communicators who “built” our formidable culture.Yes, our nation is rich with independent and collaborative thinkers who now “build” pathways for our future.

But do not forget that there have been the teachers who “built it”in the classrooms where “it” stands for intellectual curiosity, understanding, and knowledge. The “it” that teachers build is education.

I am glad there are so many Americans of every political persuasion who proudly can state, “I built it!” Just so they remember that they “built it” because their teachers taught them how.

In Education, Teacher , , ,
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Recognizing Practice-The Olympics and Education

August 17, 2012 — 2 Comments

 How do you get to the  Olympics? Practice, practice, practice!

In this third post, my “tri-blog-a-thon”, connecting education to the recently completed London Summer Olympics 2012,  I ask you to recognize the significance of practice.

The 10,004 athletes from 204 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) who participated in the 2012 London Summer Olympics practiced for their athletic contests. There were incalculable hours of practice that contributed to each athlete qualifying for a specific event. Similarly, this fall there will be over 37.9 million primary grade and 26.1 million secondary school children* who will practice the skills taught in our nation’s schools. These students will have a mandated minimum of 180 days or 64,800 minutes of practice in a school year.

Practice by athletes makes participation in the Olympics possible. Practice makes education for our schoolchildren possible.

Of course, there is always a great deal of attention placed on the winner(s) of each Olympic event. Gold, silver, and bronze medals distinguish the best athletes on a given day in a given event. Similarly, our nation is obsessed with test scores in education, the final event in measuring specific skills on a given day.  However, there is often too little attention paid to the practice that is necessary to achieve high grades on these tests of skills. All skills, athletic and intellectual, can only be achieved through practice.

In preparing for back to school, teachers, parents, and students must recognize the importance of practice in education. Practice is to do or perform (something) repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill. Practice is to work at a profession; as in the exercise of an occupation. Practice is what athletes and students have in common.

Unfortunately, practice is often hard work. Practice requires attention. Practice means focus. Practice is demanding. And practice can be boring if there is no reason for the practice.

When my students complain about the amount or variety of reading they may have to do, I point out that they are engaged in a practice. Like a runner, they cannot win a race without running wind sprints or running longer more challenging race courses. They are practicing to be better readers.

Similarly, when they complain about the amount or variety of writing I assign, I point out that composing in various forms such as letters, essays, narratives, research papers or even texting is a practice. They will need to communicate in the future in numerous formats, handwritten and digital. They are practicing to be good communicators.

Student practice a wide variety of skills in different disciplines every day at every grade level. There are some skills that come easily to students with little practice; there are other skills that require more practice. The kind of practice a student engages in matters as well; repetition is not the only kind of practice to improve skills. There must be variations in the kinds of practice for a student to become good at a skill.

In his book  Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell  wrote extensively about  a “10,000 hour rule” where the key to success in any field is the practice of a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Gladwell’s book called attention to the work of researcher Anders Ericsson. In TIME Magazine’s article “The Science of Experience” by John Cloud, Ericsson had become the world’s leading expert on experts, ” a term he distinguishes from ‘expert performers’ — those individuals, possessing both experience and superior skill, who tend to win Nobel Prizes or international chess competitions or Olympic medals.” But more important than routine repetition, varying the kind of practice had the most significant impact on skill improvement.

Cloud detailed how Ericsson found, “Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens — something that changes the rules of the game they usually play — they’re little better than the rest of us.” Changing practice to incorporate more complex tasks improved performance:

“Ericsson’s primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion ‘deliberate practice,’ by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding.”

This kind of deliberate practice can build confidence. Other desirable qualities associated with deliberate practice are motivation,  self-discipline, and commitment, all qualities we want to imbue in our students.

So, here is a goal for the new school year. Let the school year be filled with “deliberate” practice for every student at every grade level. Let the practice be frustrating. Let the practice be difficult. Let the practice be challenging. Let the practice lead to failure, so that the practice leads to success. “Let there be practice” should be the mantra for all stakeholders in our nation’s education system in this coming school year.

Now let the practice begin!

*2006-07 statistics from US Census

In Assessment, Curriculum, Education, Teacher , , , , , ,
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Governor Malloy-The Connecticut Writing Project is Professional Development Worth Funding

August 3, 2012 — 5 Comments

Dear Governor Dannel Malloy:

I forgive you for the inflammatory comments about teachers in your State of the State speech delivered last February (2/8/12),   “In today’s system basically the only thing you have to do is show up for four years.  Do that, and tenure is yours.” After all, I  have said some pretty unflattering things about politicians these past few years. Let us agree that professions should not be demonized.

Instead, I would rather provide you with an example of  great professional development for educators by discussing the value of the Connecticut Summer Institute which is a part of the Connecticut Writing Project. Eleven dedicated teachers from different school districts in the State of Connecticut have spent the past four weeks this summer (July 9-August 3, 2012) at the Connecticut Summer Institute organized and taught by Bryan R Crandall  at Fairfield University. These were elementary, middle school and high school teachers, social studies and English, willing to spend a good portion of their summer vacations (for graduate credit) learning how to improve student literacy through writing from 8:30-3:30 daily. A variety of guest speakers  also visited the Summer Institute and shared their writing experiences; there was a a journalist, an author, a poet, and veterans including  co-director Julie Roneson of past Connecticut Writing Project programs. This program is associated with the National Writing Project, an organization dedicated to improving writing at every grade level. The NWP website states:

Writing is essential to communication, learning, and citizenship. It is the currency of the new workplace and global economy. Writing helps us convey ideas, solve problems, and understand our changing world. Writing is a bridge to the future.

In Curriculum, Education, Professional Development, Teacher , , , , , , , ,
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