Of Sasquatch and Schools

Pretty universally, educators find themselves kvetching about parents who believe that because they went to school they are experts on education.  You know, like how dare they?  Why, after all the years of professional preparation, graduate degrees and credentials, not to mention the years of classroom experience, are we to suffer this presumption?

Like all good myths, including mermaids, Sasquatch, leprechauns and fairies, this one also fails to die because it has deep roots in illusion and history.

In the year 1800, our culture was agrarian.  90% of the population was involved in farming, growing our food, thus 90% (and probably more) of the kids grew up on farms worked by very tired parents and older children.  Before the organization of schooling, children learned from their parents – mostly moms – and the learning goals were to serve the task of farming and furthering the solidarity of the farming community, and in cities the goal was to succeed in some delimited trade, but still based on elementary reading and calculating skills.  As schools became organized in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the role of teacher shifted to mostly young unmarried women (powerless and predictable entities) who could be counted upon to instill these values in the hearts and minds of farm children.

The illusion here was that children were being taught by surrogate parents, in loco parentis, by the “controllable” teacher in the one-room schoolhouse overseen by the “educated class,” the local (male) mayor or preacher.  The reality was these farm kids were being taught by energetic adolescent and single young women who not only taught the 3-Rs, but also imparted a vision unique to the American frontier, one of achievement, great energy, and self-determination.  By the 1870s, Susan B. Anthony was fighting to bring to 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, and young women across the country were changing the face of the nation, their 41-year struggle ending finally in 1920.

Illusions aside, the fact remains these farmer parents paid these young teachers to teach their children as they themselves would be teaching them.  School was exclusively an authorized extension of parenting.  While the reality was undoubtedly much greater than this, the core parental assumption was that education was bounded by parental life experience.  Only.  This worldview is one we share with our parents and their parents’ parents, and it is only the “educator class” by means of professional inculcation and experience, which has learned that education is much more than a simple academic cloning of our students’ parents.

Today, a parent’s life experience includes his and her own personal experience with schooling.  They are to be forgiven for thinking schooling is still exclusively an extension of parenting.  All myths are etched into our psyches by the greater culture, for better or worse.  In our case, knowing the task at hand is much more complex than that, it is most certainly for the worse.  While parents head for work in highly networked, creative, tech-infused environments, when doing their best to represent their children’s welfare they find themselves uttering words like “Pencil and paper worked great for me when I was in school, so they’re good enough for my child.”  Pencil and paper, when polls suggest 84% of American workers need to use their computers at work. These parental attitudes toward schooling reflects perception grounded solely in myth, obviously having no relationship whatsoever to their daily workaday experience.  Today’s workplace is all about change and facile evolution of skillsets, quite different from an earlier core mandate of stability and social compliance.

While teachers today still participate in the parenting function simply because they are tasked with controlling the days of increasing numbers of young people, the days of bringing children to adulthood capable of living their parents’ lives is today considered failure in most educators’ eyes.  Our task now is to prepare children for a future in which we cannot describe the professions for which they are preparing.  This is crazy talk, right?

Maybe, but it’s a form of craziness our students have fully embraced, and they are not waiting around for our school systems to catch up.  The greater culture, the modern equivalent of the adolescent school teacher with a revolutionary heart, is feeding our students a vision of the future that is quite unlike anything the traditional school system is prepared to provide.

Out of simple self-preservation we adults who run our schools (and send our children to them) need to clear the dust of years from our eyes and see the future through the eyes of our students.   It has been some years since ed technologists formulated the task before us through the ISTE NETS standards, but the response from society has been a collective yawn.  Meanwhile, the kids are rocketing past us and finding alternatives to fifty-year-old pedagogy.  If the Pew Internet & American Life Project is indicative of anything at all, it is that students are finding learning and meaning in their digital world despite the educational system’s best efforts to suppress it to keep things comfortable.

Let’s pause and think about what we really mean when we say we “educate the future.”  Are we really?

Happy Birthday, Dr. Hawking

The press is full of news of the 70th birthday of Dr. Stephen Hawking on January 8th, including Discover magazine’s coverage of how he could have lived so long with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Not that I feel he needs me to add to his accolades, but I do have a favorite “Hawking Moment” of my own that continues to inform me professionally, and indeed how I live my life.

In an earlier post here I promoted the book, Transforming School Culture by Anthony Muhammad.  In that post I described my encounter with Dr. Hawking thusly:

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Some years ago (I think it was 2003), the UC Davis Cosmology Group invited Stephen Hawking to present a recent paper, and as luck would have it, one of my 5^th grade students that year was the son of one of the cosmology faculty who had extended the invitation to Dr. Hawking, and I was politely invited to join the physicists for lunch with him. Yes, as an amateur astronomer I was thrilled to sit at the master’s feet, and he said a great many things of great complexity and importance during his public lectures.

But to this lunchtime crowd of mostly his peers, the one thing he said I will never forget was, and I paraphrase here: Forget everything you think you know.  Be like a child and receive the new data as if you were just born.  Easy for you to say, you might think.  Well, nothing is easy for Stephen Hawking to say, and he challenged his colleagues to engage in a personal dogma dump so they might comprehend the meaning of the new astrophysical data emerging at a fantastic rate.  He encouraged them to let go of everything they thought they knew about the universe.

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So, Dr. Hawking, thank you for encouraging the dogma dump, that we might regard our world and our roles in it afresh as the data informs and change remains our ever-present companion.  We are all the better for it.

Gaming to save the world. Not kidding.

Last September brought us the news that the online game Foldit had produced actual real-world solutions to a biochemical puzzle, leading to advances in medical research, specifically in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. The news of the discovery was good, but the fact that it was brought to us courtesy of the gaming culture those of my generation have long feared and disparaged was the real earth-shaker here.

Jane McGonagal, Ph.D., takes this news to the next level, and we need to pay attention.  For my entire professional career I’ve begged my students to become participants in the salvation of their deeply at-risk world.  With a number of stunning exceptions to the rule, for the most part the response has been, “Uh huh, let me get back to my X-box if you don’t mind, Mr. Storm.” For me, and most of us, this channeling of our brightest minds into (what we perceived as) mindless gaming was ample cause for despair, portending no less the end of civilization and perhaps the species.

In this TED talk linked below and in her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Dr. McGonagal sees not only hope, but cause for actual excitement arising from this enormous body of talent and passion growing from the gaming culture.  Have a listen, and see if you don’t find yourself allowing for the possibility she just may be onto something.

Edmodo

At the risk of revealing my personal lag time for becoming aware of an ed tech tool for which I’ve been pining these many years, I am posting here a few links to information on a service that may well become the transformational tool of the current generation of K-12 teachers who are currently stretched and stressed beyond anything sustainable.Edmodo, simply put, is Facebook for the classroom.  Not coincidentally, Facebook and LinkedIn are major funding sources for this free service.  In this space, teachers can provide streaming interaction with their students through accounts they alone supervise, based on Groups established (i.e. classes) for teaching purposes.  Edmodo is wildly customizable, to the degree that the same application can also be utilized for established PLCs or other more informal interest groups with colleagues.  Edmodo is safe, a “walled garden” available only by invitation, and accessible through any Internet-connected device.  Mobile Edmodo apps allows students to interact through smart phones and tablets, in addition to any Internet-capable computer.

While Edmodo sponsors excellent webinars to get teachers and districts up & running (district-specific subdomains are also freely provided), of the 500,000 teachers and 4.5 million students using Edmodo at this writing, blogger Bianca Hewes has done a particularly nifty job in describing her use of it in her English classes, most recently in this recent post, Edmodo: resource sharing, collaboration, lessons, communication, assessments and organisation.

While Project-Based Learning (PBL) is clearly at the heart and soul of Edmodo designers and its most devoted users, it seems any pedagogical stripe can be accommodated as long as personal interaction is the goal.  Edmodo invites the curious to set up a free account and give it a go.  You just may love it.

Cathy Davidson

Educators with an affinity for technology and living in the 21st Century with an inclination to thinking about the future, find common purpose whenever someone begins a rant about education going about its business the wrong way.  We have a sense that instruction needs to incorporate the abilities and sensibilities of the networked digital students in our classrooms, and we can point to growing evidence that traditional lecture drill & kill instructional models are damaging our collective futures.  We know this grasping at traditional pedagogy is not only rendering our education systems ineffective, but perhaps utterly irrelevant to the degree its practitioners and administrators ignore the changes in how information molds our culture and its youth.

Yesterday I attended a UC Davis Chancellor’s Colloquium featuring a meta-thinker who is providing clarity on the science of precisely why education needs to massively reconfigure its practice in order to succeed at its task.

Cathy N. Davidson of Duke University has written the book Now You See It: How the brain science of attention will transform the way we live, work, and learn.  As codirector of the HASTAC Collaboratory , Cathy has drawn upon the collective knowledge of brain scientists, psychologists, educators, technologists, management scientists and more (from the book jacket) not specifically to offer “The Solution” to all our ills, but get us talking and thinking in dynamic ways; talking to each other and thinking out loud together to develop real solutions to real problems in evidence in the misalignments between education and culture.  Read more about HASTAC.

You can watch this 2008 video of Cathy Davidson here, or you can wait for the video of yesterday’s presentation.

Another excellent opportunity to hear her is featured in Duke University’s Office Hours, where she takes questions on Learning in a Digital Age.

I highly recommend making her work a frequent stop in your learning journey, either by reading her excellent book (seen here signing my copy) or following her blog .  It was with great pleasure that I add her to my link set of Necessary Thinkers on this page, as no one better fits that descriptor.

Occasionally I hate when I’m right

Quote from a recent BBC News article on global (and particularly South Korean) educational technology:

“President Barack Obama’s “Digital Promise”, announced last month, involves a new national centre to advance technologies that can supposedly transform teaching and learning… Given the way education in the US is so highly devolved there are bound to be continuing questions over how much the initiative can achieve.”

Ouch.  That word: devolved, really hit me where it hurts.  Why? because I’ve used it on this blog before, though this BBC reporter has added the even more damning adjective, highly.  It has long seemed that while the rest of the developed world invests mightily in its future (the kids), bringing to bear the best technology and practices our innovations and research have to offer, voters in the US have driven the political system into a death spiral of complacency.

So here we have an article, written by the British press, peering into our house and perceiving its condition the same way I do, though part of me has long hoped that the decline I have witnessed is relatively insignificant compared to what our politicians would have us believe is our fundamental, God-given, inevitable superiority.

So am I merely cynical, or is this an accurate representation of what American education has become and  will be for generations to come?

Teachers: aspiring bureaucrats?

Blogger relationships are dangerous places. Particularly for educators, topics are intertwined whether we consider our professions through the lenses of technology, equity, curriculum, access or whatever, so we often find ourselves moved to comment on topics related to our particular focus.

So it is here with this blog post by Starleigh Grass, What’s the difference between a bureaucrat and a teacher?

How often do we find ourselves locked into systems that exist merely for the sake of the system? How often are our energies devoted to just keeping the system going, while our presumed clients tug at our coattails and skirt hems as if saying, “I’m still here… ?”

Assessment, yes. We need radar to find those who cruise below it, to put light on those the bureaucracy fails to serve. But do all standardized materials serve all the children we host in our classrooms?

We need to standardize certain aspects of our profession: it should be absolutely uniform in all children’s experience that they arrive at school and know they can learn, and they know this because the adults who work there believe this about them. And the adults who believe this do so because they love them and they love the potential each child represents, and are excited by the future they see in their classrooms.

You may enjoy this writing by another blogger who brought Starleigh’s article to my attention: Literate Owl’s comments on What’s the difference between a bureaucrat and a teacher?

Interactive White Boards: Tool or Toy?

Yesterday brought a blog post by the Skunk, What makes an interactive white board interactive?, prompting my reply below.  I am a huge proponent of IWBs, though the financial and physical implementation of them is merely the beginning of what is required to make them an effective tool for 21st century instruction.

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I’ve always seen IWBs as the critical bridge between a generation of digital natives and their teachers, who remain largely comprised of digital immigrants. New teachers who are also digital natives are much more attuned to the value of interactive, project-based learning environments, though their employers rarely give them the opportunity to practice teaching that way.

Internet-connected IWBs provide the training wheels to bring teachers into a much more interactive mode of “instruction,” providing a rich digital resource that can be shared as a class. The key to knowing whether IWBs are being used effectively is imbedded in the term “shared.” If a teacher manages the technology such that students are regularly creating meaning using the IWB (and/or related response systems for checking for understanding), then it is being used effectively. If the IWB is a jazzed up presentation tool used exclusively by the teacher, the teacher will realize a certain bump in their students’ level of engagement in the short term, but they will not be using the full power of the tool.

Effective IWB professional development focuses on guiding teachers through these stages of understanding the meaning of “learning through interaction.” It is not about students seeing or holding technological “things,” but having human interaction in a learning environment made more dynamic and rich with the aid of digital tools. In 1:1 classroom computing environments, facilitated by a teacher who understands 21st century learning dynamics, the IWB is completely unnecessary, because the interaction and consequent learning is happening between students with access to 21st century tools.

“Technology is not related to instruction”

The sentiment above has been expressed by those who prefer to concentrate their energies on preserving 19^th century instructional practices, and this topic is debated endlessly, so for the moment I’m going to concede the position as being dearly held by many, and it sounds good when there is no immediate consequence to holding it.

However, while “There is no connection between instruction and technology” may be a position held by both practitioners and recipients of this thing we call “education,” the reality in the modern work world seems barely aware of the argument.

My recent brush with the media was instructive:  http://www.reuters.com/video/2011/09/07/roadkill-research-reveals-clues-for-cons?videoId=221334793&videoChannel=74 

Ben Gruber, the Reuters reporter who scheduled, interviewed, shot and edited this story, was a history major in college with a passion for writing and politics.  Over the course of his career, he was presented with a choice, along with his colleagues, between becoming technology-fluent or getting out of the business.  Multimedia news stories were once produced by a writer, cameraman, sound man, producer and (often) a driver.  Ben Gruber: one guy with a car, camera, tripod, and clip-on microphone.

If you weren’t willing to adapt to the changes in the profession, if you felt you didn’t have the tools to evolve professionally, the decision as to whether you would remain a Reuters reporter would not have been left for you to make.  No one wants to hear, “But no one showed me how to do that!” They only want to hear, “Sure, I can figure that out.”

Is the plea for students to master “21st Century Skills” really just cover for ed tech people to convince others to buy more toys?  Is it really okay to graduate someone who can only write, then another who can only run a camera, and another who can only drive the car?  Ben demonstrates here that we are advised to pay attention to what it takes to be a contributor to the world in 2011 and into the future.

The world that is looking for people to run modern systems has little room for narrowly-trained specialists, and desperate for creative problem-solvers who are willing to keep learning and create learning environments for themselves for their entire working lives.

Egypt on the rise

Last Spring a young Egyptian woman, Mona, contacted me in her effort to visit K-12 classes while she studied at UC Berkeley for the summer, wishing to see our use of technology in our classrooms.  There were logistical difficulties owing to our now very limited summer school offerings, but we managed to set up some class visits for her at a couple of our sites including our charter New Tech Network high school, Da Vinci Academy.

Regrettably I was unable to meet Mona due to my own summer travels, but she apparently left grateful for the time she was able to spend with us.  On my desk this morning I found an envelope with a keychain, the fob pictured here.  In a subsequent email exchange, she called it a “humble gift,” though while perhaps humble, I found it moving and deeply thought-provoking.

I have referred to recent events in the “Arab Spring” in previous posts to this blog, and Mona’s visit has brought those events even closer to my professional world view.

On numerous occasions throughout my career, I have been visited by international teams of educators, mostly from Asia, intent on learning how it is we Americans do what we do.  These were nations that were building infrastructure and slowly growing their social systems, rethinking how education should be done, and reaching for ideas.  If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice the citizens of Singapore, Shanghai, and South Korea haven’t done so badly for themselves over the past twenty years.  Now the visits and learning are traveling from the West to the East as we grapple with our own value systems and the defunding of education.

Egypt and other Arab countries on the distant other hand, rather than slowly developing a system, are in a head-long charge to remake their societies.  In London and Philadelphia young people use Facebook and Twitter to vandalize their neighborhoods out of boredom and general adolescent disgust with authorities.  In Cairo and Alexandria, young people are using these technologies to remake their world into something meaningful, changing governments, lighting their way to the future.

I have found myself increasingly envious of Mona as an educator in Egypt.  To be an technology-oriented educator in a country that is hungry for relevance, powered by people impassioned by a vision of the future that provides a world in which they want their grandchildren to prosper would be a dream.

Perhaps if we in America can look abroad for these examples of people looking beyond their personal and immediate comfort and affluence to focus on the future they are creating, we may avoid international irrelevance.