Category Archives: Educational Malpractice

You CAN Do More with Less. But Only for So Long.

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Yesterday, Colorado’s new governor made some announcements regarding his budget proposal to the state. Specifically, he announced about half a billion in proposed budget cuts for next year, which wasn’t a huge surprise. What was a surprise, at least to me, although I should’ve seen it coming, was that he directed most of those cuts at K12 education.

That’s disappointing, but almost understandable1. What kills me, though, is that the budget scenario will probably be good political cover for an unfortunate move being made in the school district where I live, my children go (or will go) to school, and my wife is a teacher.

Basically, they’re going to ask2 high school teachers at three of the city’s schools to teach another class per semester. It’s a kind of peer pressure move. 3

I’ve been following this story for a while – it first surfaced last fall, and I traded email with a district assistant superintendant on the plan before Christmas. But I didn’t think I’d need to say anything. I had thought, perhaps naively, that the plan wouldn’t come to pass. The move is based on faulty logic and poor math4. Surely, I thought, the human filters would be thoughtful and wise. I mean, come on. This was a school district that understood the importance of teachers having meaningful time in their school day for professional development. For collaboration. For individual and small group student contact time outside of class.

Or so I thought.

As this plan has emerged, and opposition from the high school teachers who, rightly, believe this will harm the quality of their instruction as well as their ability to meaningfully build relationships with students, I’ve heard, quietly, from elementary and middle school teachers in the school district. They’ve not had the same time without classes to interact with students and each other. These middle and elementary school teachers, or at least the vocal ones5, aren’t willing to advocate for something that they don’t have themselves.

The whole thing’s a mess. All teachers should have time to be meaningfully thoughtful and human to their students. Every day. 6

Perhaps my biggest concern with the entire deal is that it’s easy to hide behind big words like “efficiency.” While I’m a fan of efficiency when it makes sense7, I’m thinking that some of the most important work that teachers do, and do quite well, isn’t about being efficient. It’s about being available. It’s about being human. Patient. Kind. Thoughtful. Reflective.

Those are hard things to be when every minute of your work day is full of teaching and you’ve now got an additional class to look after during your grading time at home.8 We should be looking to have our teachers, all of them, “teaching” less and learning more9.

My friend Zac wrote a while back about a scary kind of school: The kind that are breaking teachers. Those are the kinds of schools that look good on a balance sheet or a collection of test scores. They’re probably, at least on paper, very, very efficient.

They’re the ones where on the outside, everything looks great. But then you open the place up, and you see that stuff’s pretty rotten. And will only last so long.

In this time of tightening budgets and scary realizations, I hope that central administrators, classroom teachers, parents, students, politicians and everyone else realize this:

We can do more with less. And good folks, if asked to, will do so. But, if the “more” isn’t very good, then maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe our leaders should say “let’s do fewer things better rather than so many things poorly.”

As next year starts to take shape for educators and legislators, let’s hope at least a few folks are considering that position.

You probably know of stories about folks being asked to do more with less. This is one of ours. One I can’t quite wrap my head around. These stories are complex and difficult.

I’d look forward to hearing yours, and how you think we can work to make things better in a difficult time.

  1. The Governor did acknowledge that K12 is a huge line item – and one that has flexibility, compared to say, giving prison guards a month of furloughs. Of course, this is Colorado, where we amended our state constitution to provide additional monies for education, and the legislature used some creative math to circumvent that constitutional requirement as the economy worsened. So funding’s never been pretty. [↩]
  2. No. They pretty much told. [↩]
  3. Hey. C’mon. The other high school in town is doing it. I’m sure it’s good. [↩]
  4. It seems that, according to one district source, asking a teacher to teach one additional course would only mean twenty minutes more of teaching per day. I don’t get that. Do you? [↩]
  5. And there aren’t many. This is a divisive issue. Unfortunately. [↩]
  6. I wish that the teachers in the district where I work had more time to be thoughtful. I spend a great deal of my time seeking ways to carve out that time. It’s hard to do. But worth doing. [↩]
  7. And it does make sense. But at what greater cost? [↩]
  8. The fact that teachers are spending so much of their time grading at home is of larger concern. But no one seems to want to talk about that much. [↩]
  9. I know. The Finland comparisons are tired. But, at least in the area of professional development and how teachers spend their time, I think they’re worth making. Finland does teaching and learning differently. And it’s worth exploring. [↩]
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The Podcast: USDoE Listening Session at NCTE

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In this podcast, recorded on my last day at the NCTE Annual Convention, I share a recording of a listening session hosted by NCTE.  In the session, the U.S. Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach, Peter Cunningham, represents the Department.  He took questions for most of the session, and I found the conversation fascinating.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be in conversation with our government, and I hope that you are making efforts to be in conversation with your public officials.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the conversation.  I’ll share two short observations.  First, I found that there were many issues raised by the questioners in the audience.  Thoughtful ones, in many cases.  But it seems that what was heard was simply “we (meaning educators) want less testing.”  That’s a gross oversimplification of the issues expressed.  I do hope that the US Department of Education is listening just a little more carefully1

I’d also reiterate my eagerness to see the specifics of the National Ed Tech Plan implementation.  Right now, it’s a fine plan.  How will it be implemented?2

Direct link to the audio

  1. I think they are, but it’s sure hard to tell sometimes. [↩]
  2. Plans without timelines are visioning statements, and not action plans.  I hope this one becomes an action plan. [↩]
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Machine Language Won’t Tell This Story

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This piece was first published on The Huffington Post. Comments here are closed – head over there to share your thoughts. Thanks.

I work in an IT department for a school district in northern Colorado. I’m a licensed educator, and I spend my time working between the technical and the instructional sides of our educational organization. I am in the fortunate role of trying to tell one group’s stories to the other, and vice versa. I speak education but I also speak computer.

On the technical side, computing has changed much of the way we can educate children. And computers are powerful learning tools, built on a simple language of on and off, or 1 and 0. Binary language makes computers happen. It’s simple and powerful.

But it’s not how we talk to one another. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.

We people are informed by narrative. Story. We tell the stories of each other and ourselves in ways that maximize the impact of our experiences. Sometimes, in our race, to tell easy stories, stories that resonate or make loud yawps, we fall into the trap of oversimplifying the story because we want to make it easy to follow, or to follow up with action.

And that’s usually when we mess the story up. Badly.

Binary is a powerful language. For machines. It’s a terrible way to try to communicate with people.

And I’m pretty sure that students and teachers and parents and, yes, even politicians, are people.

So this binary oversimplification of heroes and villains in education that we are perpetuating? It’s not helping.

Public or charter. Bush or Obama. Good or bad. Union or not. Democrat or Republican.

Just. Not. Helping.

There is plenty worth changing about the face of modern education in America. But to pretend that it’s as simple as a binary, in most cases, is to discount the complexity of people, society and cultures. Teaching and learning are not machine processes — they are actions and outcomes of people. Messy, complicated, and special people.

Too many education reform conversations are about the “educational product.” As if children are products to be made, rather than people to be mentored.

They’re not.

They are people to be inspired. Challenged. Amazed. Nurtured. Loved.

Any talk of good or bad, or dumb or smart, or old or new, oversimplifies that most difficult of processes — what Yeats rightly called the lighting of a fire.

So, as many of us gather here to tell stories of education and reform and hope and change, there is an exciting, scary and difficult task ahead. It’s an old mission, and one that’s never been more important. Education changes people. Our task is difficult.

We can perpetuate the binaries, or we can work to define the middle ground, the rich and full and powerful space between two extremes that, to be honest, we mostly made up to make the stories easier to tell.

Those binary stories are not particularly good stories, or better ones. They’re just the ones that are the easiest to tell.

And easy, in education, usually isn’t good enough. Nor is yes or no. Good or bad.

People and their stories are bigger and better than binary.

Let’s raise the bar on conversation about education, America. Soon.

Our children deserve better than binary. And so do we.

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The Clock’s Ticking

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Right now, according to Sir Ken Robinson, my children are at the peak of their divergent thinking abilities.  And those will diminish as they advance in their schooling.  Uh oh.  So, how do we build schools that amplify, rather than eradicate, divergent thinking?

This is not an idle question. Watch the video and then help me answer it. Quickly.

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Motivation, Cash & Literacy: I Despise AR. Should I?

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This is first draft thinking if ever such a thing existed. And it’s selfish. And personal. And close to home.

Ani goes to Kindergarten in the fall, so we spent the winter investigating schools around our town. We were looking for places that felt right for us – evidence of care and thoughtfulness, ties to particular district programs that we think are valuable or hope that Ani will have an interest in in the future, that sort of thing.

We settled on a short list of three elementary schools in our school district, the district where my wife is also a teacher. One of the schools, our first choice, was full up and we didn’t get selected into it. Of the two that remained, it was a draw. Until I attended parent nights. I could tell that both schools cared about kids, but I had a real concern about one of the two schools: the use of Accelerated Reader (AR).

While I was at the parent night where I learned about the school’s use of AR, I tweeted some of my questions and concerns, and began to hear back from many people about the pros and cons of AR.1 Actually, that’s not true. There were a few lukewarm responses. But most of the replies, many of them private, were about bad2 experiences that folks and their children had with the program. Phrases like “it sucked the joy out of reading” were sent to me by friends, colleagues, and near strangers from all over my Twittersphere.

And I swore to myself, as I listened and thought and considered, that I wouldn’t expose my daughter to such a program.

And yet, Ani will begin next year in that school, where AR is a large piece, according to the principal, of the formative assessment used by the Kindergarten teachers.3

That said, I’ve got some baggage around Accelerated Reader and programs like it. And I worry that my baggage is unfounded, particularly when people I know and respect choose to use the program. I don’t get it. And that bugs me.4

I know that motivation that springs from external sources isn’t terribly motivating when the external motivator is gone. In fact, I know that such external motivation can decrease one’s intrinsic motivation for the thing that being fiddled with. I was reminded of the tension between what I know about motivation and what I see thoughtful people doing when they use AR when I stumbled across this article in Time on Saturday.

The piece is a profile of some work being done by Roland Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard, to see what effect money can have on student performance. The angle that’s interesting is that he’s not looking at how to incentivize teaching – he’s looking to see if financial incentives can impact learning. Specifically, he’s paying kids to do certain things. And it’s fascinating work, for several reasons.

For starters, he ran into considerable trouble from grown ups when he proposed doing such studies, in part because folks (like me) get hinky whenever you talk about paying kids to do well in school.5 More on that in a moment.

I’m also curious because of the way he set his tests up – there are several different models in his study, ranging from paying 2nd graders $2/book to do some reading up to paying high school students a certain amount for every good grade they earn.

The author of the article, Amanda Ripley, does a good job summing up some of Edward Deci‘s work on motivation, which I’ve relied on in the past:

The most damning criticism of Fryer came from psychologists like the University of Rochester’s Edward Deci, who has spent his career studying motivation. Deci has found that money — like other tangible rewards — does not work very well to motivate people over the long term, particularly for tasks that involve creativity. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that rewards can have the perverse effect of making people perform worse.

A classic experiment in support of this hypothesis took place at a nursery school at Stanford University in the early 1970s. There, researchers divided 51 toddlers into groups. All the kids were asked to draw a picture with markers. But one group was told in advance that they would get a special reward — a certificate with a gold star and a red ribbon — in exchange for their work. The kids did the drawings, and the ones in the treatment group got their certificates.

A few weeks later, the researchers observed the children through a one-way mirror on a normal school day. They found that the kids who had received the award spent half as much time drawing for fun as those who had not been rewarded. The reward, it seemed, diminished the act of drawing. So instead of giving kids gold stars, Deci says, we should teach them to derive intrinsic pleasure from the task itself. “What we really want is for people to value the activity of learning,” he says. People of all ages perform better and work harder if they are actually enjoying the work — not just the reward that comes later.

In principle, Fryer agrees. “Kids should learn for the love of learning,” he says. “But they’re not. So what shall we do?” Most teenagers do not look at their math homework the way toddlers look at a blank piece of paper. It would be wonderful if they did. Maybe one day we will all approach our jobs that way. But until then, most adults work primarily for money, and in a curious way, we seem to be holding kids to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.

In Washington, the kids did better on standardized reading tests. Getting paid on a routine basis for a series of small accomplishments, including attendance and behavior, seemed to lead to more learning for those kids. And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year — and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.

So now we come back to AR, a program where, as in Dallas, students are incentivized to read books. Maybe I shouldn’t be linking these two things, but I am, and it’s making me uncomfortable.

I’m one of those folks who thinks of questions of motivation when it comes to Accelerated Reader. I would make the case, if you asked me a week ago, that AR kills intrinsic motivation and replaces it with a token7. As soon as the tokens are gone, then so is the reason to do the thing that you were handing out the tokens for. In fact, I made that argument in a classroom last week in my school district.

And then I read this article. And it’s messing with my head.

Suppose I’m wrong about the fact that paying kids – be it through cash or other tangible stuff – doesn’t help them to improve as readers, writers and thinkers. Suppose that AR is one of those programs that, like $2/book for second graders in Texas, leads to long term gains for kids. Is that a deal worth making? I’m not sure, but I can’t discount or write it off as easily as I might like to.8

And that bugs me. Lots.

You?

  1. I also recorded a podcast about the experience. Give it a listen if you want to learn more. [↩]
  2. terribly, horribly, awfully, no good, very bad [↩]
  3. This post isn’t about the school, or their methodology. I’m excited to have Ani go there, although I am nervous about the experience. We’ll stay on top of it. I hope. [↩]
  4. It fills me with terror and anxiety, actually. If I’m wrong about AR, what else am I wrong about? And AM I wrong about AR? [↩]
  5. And we might be right to get hinky about such things. [↩]
  6. I’m butchering the conclusions – you should really read the study for yourself. I’m planning on it. [↩]
  7. Or a pizza, or a toy, or a whatever [↩]
  8. Big suppositions, but I’m thinking out loud here. And about to ask you to help me think out loud better. [↩]
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Tom’s Doing Our Homework

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Do me a favor, would you?

Take a few minutes, right now, and read Tom Hoffman‘s “10 Reasons You Should Care About the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s Draft English Language Arts Standards.”   He’s doing the thinking and linking that needs to be happening around these proposed standards.  Folks need to be reading and talking about the points that he’s raising.  Here’s a taste:

We are inviting testing companies to determine the future of our schools with virtually no accountability or public input.

These standards were developed by two testing companies, the College Board and ACT, with help from a nebulous non-profit, Achieve, Inc. It is essential to understand this when reading the Common Standards; it explains many of their odd choices. In the example above, the obvious interpretation is that they chose to define the standard as “support or challenge assertions” rather than “construct a response or interpretation,” as every international example they cited did, because the former is much easier and cheaper to score reliably on a standarized test.

No high performing educational system in the world would consider giving testing companies this much control over their standards and curriculum. It is absurd.

After you’ve read the post, please link to, print out and mail, e-mail, or do whatever you need to do to share it with smart folks you know interested in language arts.  Tom’s right – the wrong people are having their say in a pretty important conversation and the validation committee‘s pretty light on language artists.  Public comment on the standards is open until October 21st. There’s time, but not much.  Tell folks that you know or that you think should know.

You’ll share this, right?

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ISTE Changes This Year’s Policy; Bloggers Still Lose

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I guess the biggest frustration to me regarding the “Oh no – we didn’t realize the policy and now we’re certain that ISTE’s out to get independent media and citizen journalists and quash the edupunks and destroy any chance of education reform ever in the history of forever!” hysteria over ISTE’s NECC audio/video policy is that so many of my colleagues, people whom I respect and value, are probably going to end today or start next week thinking that this conversation and its tone was/is/shall forever be a fine example of the power of blogs and new media to make change.  And that would be wrong.

The problem I have with seeing this as a victory is that the bloggers in this one come out looking like a cross between Chicken Little and Tony Soprano.  And that’s not a good thing.  In the past 24 hours, I’ve read misstatements, threats, assumptions, and lazy research.   “I’m taking my ball and going home” lines, too.  From educators.  Attempting to solve a problem. It’s disappointing.  A rational, responsible, and patient tone would have been much better than some most of what I’ve seen and read in regards to this issue.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m pleased to see the policy changed, albeit temporarily. It was an old rule that didn’t fit the current media landscape. ISTE, I hope, would be the first to say that. And I’m pleased that so many bloggers felt compelled to address the issue. But I’d like to think that some more patient and questioning language might have been used in the “investigation.”  Questions inviting dialogue, perhaps, rather than assumptions and anger.  I felt like we were headed up the mountain to the monster’s castle, pitchforks and torches in hand.

We’d never let our students get away with this type of conclusion jumping and invective.  And so, we shouldn’t be happy about the methods, but we should be pleased about the outcome.  I hope the folks who make it to the table in future conversations on this and other matters of policy and disagreement are those who approach with patience and kindness, checking their assumptions at the door.  And I hope that, if I’m ever guilty of such poor choices in language and attitude, that you’ll be quick to call me on it.

My goal here is not so much to place blame – but to suggest that perhaps we could all do better.  I know I’ve been guilty of getting excited and forgetting to do a gutcheck in the past.  Let’s all try not to do that.  There are too many rules and policies and issues and problems and situations that need changing and will require our best work.

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Connective Writing: Multi-Purposing

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The more I work as a professional developer and teacher of teachers, the more I am resolved that I will do my best to never create a resource for one situation that cannot be useful in another.  There are too few of me and too many needs in my district to do otherwise.

I think, though, the careful consideration of audience and purpose that I engage in before creating a resource is a valuable one for all readers, writers, and creators.  Perhaps there’s value, in a connective writing class, in spending some time on rhetorical analysis, specifically in the vein of thinking about multi-purposed work.

This isn’t a new statement for me to make, either here or in my classroom(s), as I’ve always operated under the assumption that the best writing happens when writers consider their audience and their purpose for writing, allowing them to determine the focus they should take in a particular piece.  This idea (often called the rhetorical triangle, with each of the points defined slightly differently by the person(s) doing the defining) can and should be expanded to include all kinds of composition and writing, not just print texts.  This leads me to the teaching point that I would want to include in my connective writing work:

As much as possible, all texts should have a life outside of the classroom.

This “extra-curricular life” can take multiple forms, and won’t make sense for all types of writing and creation, but I strongly believe that we should never create something that will die after a teacher has blessed or cursed it with a grade.  I’ve always believed that, but the more I learn, the less I’m willing to suggest that such multi-purposed work should only happen at the end of a course, after all the practice work is completed.  Project-based learning, too, embodies this philosophy, as projects should have a life outside of the classroom.

What does “extracurricular life,” or multi-purposed work, look like in a professional learning experience for teachers?  One way I attempted to create a multi-purpose-able resource in CyberCamp was through the series of Works in Progress (WiP) presentations that we asked every participant to do.  As I explained at the beginning of CyberCamp:

One of the values of CyberCamp is sharing.  Talking about what we’re up to is a good way to better understand our own work, and the act of sharing it with a group is useful, too, because it allows your fellow CyberCampers to help you out, be it through good questions, suggestions, or becoming an extra set of eyes and ears in the world seeking resources to help you with your project.

Because sharing is so essential, we’ve set up time here at CyberCamp for everyone to have a 20 minute block of time in which to share their work.  Each day, we’ll ask two of you to share what you’re working on and then we’ll give ten minutes to the CyberCampers to give you some constructive feedback.  We’ll be talking more about what “constructive feedback” looks at CyberCamp, but know that you’ll be getting help – not criticism.

Again, because sharing is so essential to what we do, we’ll be adding an extra level of sharing to your process.  We’ll literally be sharing your Work in Progress conversation with the world and archiving your presentation here on the blog using a tool called Ustream.  This will allow you to share your work with, and to learn from, the world.  While that can be scary, trust us when we tell you that your work is important and worthy of being shared.

Not to toot our own horn (or whistle, to stick with the camp metaphor), but it seems to me that a twenty minute investment of class time here (thirty minutes if you leave time for some feedback) leads to an excellent archive/snapshot of a work in progress, a chance to get very specific feedback, and a permanent record of the event that is available for further scrutiny, reflection and commenting.   Not bad, as far as multi-purposing goes.  Add in the fact that these presentations also become resources for other people working on similar projects as well as models of our activity for future CyberCamp experiences, and we’ve got some handy multi-purpose resources.

Other examples of multi-purposing in CyberCamp include our project proposals as well as our blog.  Pretty much, any well-written blog (as a whole, not each entry) is a fine example of multi-purposed writing.  But perhaps that’s another post.

One of the struggles, of course, with trying to build multi-purpose resources, or to find ways to ask learners to do so, at least one that I worry/wonder about, is making sure that I’m never putting the needs of future learners or secondary audiences ahead of the learners who are the “primary” audience for a particular activity/event/experience.  Let me try to say that better – we can sometimes create problems for our class when we try to create opportunities with “outsiders,” particularly if we’re forcing a connection that maybe isn’t organically or authentically there.  Connections just for connections’ sake are bad ideas, maybe even educational malpractice.  The trick becomes figuring out where those lines and boundaries are, and when to say no to kind invitations to meet/Skype/join up with others who may or may not be in a similar place, educationally speaking.

Another struggle, I suspect, is figuring out how to contextualize those creations in a way as to make them as useful as possible.  I’m beginning to practically understand why so many higher ed folks talk about learning objects and repositories and a slew of related issues, and struggle with those things, too.

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