Sunday, December 19, 2010

Guest Post: What are schools for?

Guest post by Harry Tennant

I just watched an interesting talk by a teacher, Diana Laufenberg, How to learn? From mistakes. She started her talk by pointing out how different the needs of education were for her grandmother, father, herself and now her students. Her grandmother and father had to go to school because that's where the knowledge was. It had to be transferred from the teacher's mind to the student's mind. Her situation was a bit different because with encyclopedias in the household, there was a lot of knowledge available outside the school. Today, students have an abundance of knowledge and information online, so why do they still need to go to school?

She went on to argue that because of today's information abundance, education should shift from providing the right answers (characterized by standardized testing) to an environment where students are challenged, they make mistakes, and they learn far more from their mistakes than they would otherwise learn.

But Ms. Laufenberg is wrong, isn't she? Schools have always provided far more than information. First, schools provide a value judgement on what is important to learn, the curriculum. One can disagree with what it is and perhaps that it is far to uniform across all students, but it is more than just information. Second, schools provide the necessary exercise and practice to make knowledge one's own. Let's face it, most of us tend to enjoy the fiction that if we're exposed to some knowledge, we've mastered it.

Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
--William Butler Yeats

Education must involve some bucket filling as well as some fire lighting. Ms. Laufenberg's very interestingly described assignments no doubt do a good job of fire lighting. When I look back on my own education, projects and reports stand out as some of the most enjoyable and inspiring things I did in school. And I wouldn't call doing practice problems in math class inspiring. But I'm very glad that I did those practice problems, and learned the prepositions and periodic table and the did the physics experiments and practiced writing paragraphs and so on. I'm glad my teachers took the time to fill my bucket so that when intellectual fires did start to burn within me, I had an adequate foundation on which and with which to build.

So, to my teachers for insisting that I do what they knew I needed to do: Thank you!

Posted at 8:16 PM (permalink) 2 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Guest Post: Do We Trust Ourselves?

Guest post by Harry Tennant

Dan's recent post of Sir Ken Robinson's talk about reforming education raises a big question:

What is the purpose of public education?

Two ends of the spectrum are

• Purpose #1: Informed citizens and skilled workers. We provide public funds for education for the benefit of society. The benefit was originally to ensure that citizens could read so they could be informed members of a democracy. Later, the benefit was to provide a skilled workforce for the growing industrial economy.
• Purpose #2: Fulfilled people. We provide public funds for education as part of the mission to "promote the general Welfare" as stated in the preamble to the Constitution as well as an important enabler for the "pursuit of happiness" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. In other words, we educate our children so they can lead happier lives.

The problem is that many people see these two purposes as opposites. Many equate happiness with pleasure and entertainment, watching TV, playing games and reading novels. An individual's life of pleasure offers little to the general welfare, only to their own. Why should you pay for me to sit around for my own pleasure?

This is why we have prescribed learning standards and assessments of reading and math skills. As a society we are heavily biased toward Purpose #1 and want to be assured that our public education money is an investment in a skilled workforce.

But "pleasure" is a poor synonym for "happiness." A better synonym is the one that Robinson used, "flourishing." Flourishing evokes the notion of a far better life than a life of pleasure. Yes, we want to experience pleasure as part of flourishing but we also want to enjoy the experience of being deeply engaged in challenging activities. Another part of flourishing is doing the kinds of things that give us a feeling that our efforts are of value beyond ourselves, that we have a higher purpose than personal pleasure.

Wouldn't it be ideal if you and everyone around you felt like you were flourishing in your life? Wouldn't that be a better society than one where so many are thought to live lives of "quiet desparation?" If pursuing Purpose #2 lead to a "rate of flourishing" that was as high as our rate of literacy, wouldn't that be well worth the public investment?

The argument against democracy was that the people cannot be trusted to make the right decisions and do the right things. The people need the benevolent control of wiser elites (in those days, the monarchies).

Do wiser elites need to prescribe the education we each need to contribute to society? Or, if we educate with the goal of flourishing, would we find that as each does what's best for himself we find that the best is also done for society?

It seems that the question comes down to this:

Do we trust ourselves?

Posted at 10:07 AM (permalink) 2 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Guest Post: The Student Whisperer

This is a re-post from November 11, 2010 to accompany the post on discipline directly below it here.  I am re-posting it to revisit Harry's comments and invite yours in response to this and to the discipline video below.

Do you ever watch the Dog Whisperer on the National Geographic channel? That guy, Cesar Millan, is absolutely amazing with dogs (although it's not uncommon that he gets bitten or clothes ripped). What he stresses is that dogs should be in a calm-submissive state and the humans (the pack leaders) should maintain a calm-assertive state with respect to the dogs.

That seems to me to be the ideal for school discipline and classroom management, too. With Cesar, it's never a dog problem but a people problem, despite the fact that some dogs are bred to be vicious, etc. As he says in the show, he rehabilitates dogs, he trains people.

It strikes me that student discipline is probably much the same way, if only the faculty had the kind of near-magical powers with students that the Dog Whisperer has with dogs. And the data from Discipline Manager backs that up. Looking at the data from a typical middle school, half the faculty had fewer than 15 discipline referrals while the top four had over 100. Are those top four having difficulty maintaining a calm-assertive state?

At the same time, some faculty do have near-magical abilities with students.  At least they seem magical to the rest of the staff. In an ideal world, they could mentor the teachers needing the help, but those teachers have their own classes to teach. Where do they find the time?

So, some teachers have known classroom management problems. Principals want to improve their skills for the benefit of students, to make the principal's job easier and to possibly save the teacher's job.

What do you think of a Student Whisperer service? We send a Flip video recorder (cheap) to be set up in the teacher's classroom for a day, and then the teacher returns it in the provided mailer to the Student Whisperer, one of those really remarkable teachers. Just like Cesar Millan, the Student Whisperer can figure out what the teacher is doing wrong almost instantly, just by viewing the video. It would be inexpensive for schools because the Student Whisperer doesn't need to travel, just look at some video. The video could be private between the teacher and Student Whisperer so the teacher doesn't have to worry about being exposed to the principal and colleagues, and there would be no retained record of the students in class.

What do you think?

Posted at 11:40 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Student Whisperer, discipline

Monday, December 6, 2010

Guest Post: Online Learning and the Growth of Disruptive Innovations

Guest post by Harry Tennant

My first digital camera was a fixed focus Sony Mavica in about 1998 that took 0.31 megapixel pictures (640x480 pixels). I paid $750 for it and was thrilled with it!

The pictures were poor compared to a film camera and the camera was ridiculously expensive. But the pictures were plenty good enough to put on web pages.

This is typical of disruptive innovations. They start at relatively low quality, typically high prices and appeal only to niche markets. It was true of transistor radios (originally poor audio quality but portable!), calculators (fewer functions than sliderules, short battery life), mp3 players (awkward interfaces before the iPod), video recorders (expensive, heavy equipment compared to 8mm cameras), etc. The big difference with disruptive innovations is that they are on a steeper learning curve.

The reason that digital cameras replaced film cameras despite the inauspicous start represented by my Sony Mavica is that, being based on digital electronics, they had the opportunity to improve rapidly. Their price could fall and features improve at exponential rates following the technology improvement of microelectronics. In contrast, film photography improved at a much slower rate. Within a few years digital photography nearly completely replaced film photography.

What does this have to do with online learning? Today online learning is primarily applied in specialty situations: remedial tutorials, early learning, otherwise-unavailable courses. But the rate of improvement of online learning may inherit the benefits of other online technologies: cheaper servers, better displays, better PCs, faster connections, better authoring software, ever growing communities of courseware authors, ever growing communities of potential students. Compare this with the expected rate of improvement in traditional classroom education. Who will win that race?

Does the steeper learning curve of online learning compared to classroom instruction suggest that online learning will overtake classroom instruction like digital cameras overtook film cameras?

The answer to that question lies in two sub-questions:

• Which parameters of online learning need improvement to be preferred to classroom instruction? and
• Are those parameters likely to benefit from the rapidly-improving underlying technologies (servers, PCs, disk space, displays, author base, student base)?

What do you think?

Posted at 9:02 AM (permalink) 5 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Online learning

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Guest Post: Individualized online instruction

Guest post by Harry Tennant

Clayton M. Christensen has written some very interesting books on how innovation works in business: The Innovators Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution.

More recently he applied his theories of how innovation takes hold and takes over (or doesn't) to education in Disrupting Class / How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Once again, a very interesting book. Without recapping the entire argument, let me just give the bottom line: online learning will change everything, but it won't happen by schools applying online learning to their core subjects, math, reading, language arts, science and social studies. It will begin with online remedial learning, online learning purchased by parents of struggling students, online courses on subjects that are not offered locally, online learning for home schoolers and online learning for preschoolers.

What do we know about the value of individualized instruction? Does having a personal tutor result in significantly higher student achievement than learning in a typical classroom? And, if personal tutors do help students to significantly higher achievement, why?

Suggested answers to "why" include

1. Students can learn at their own rate
2. Instruction can be tailored to the student's learning style
3. Instruction content can better match student interests

Is it true that individualized instruction is superior to classroom instruction for the above three reasons? Is small group instruction (3 - 5 collaborating students) even better than individualized instruction?

Posted at 2:24 PM (permalink) 6 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Online learning

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Guest Post: 8 to be Great and 21st Century Skills

Guest post by Harry Tennant

Richard St. John's, The 8 Traits Successful People Have in Common: 8 to be Great is the distillation of a large number of interviews with successful people into the most critical lessons for success. He interviewed about 500 successful people in diverse fields and collected additional interviews of successful people, compiling a big database on their thoughts on the keys to success.

St. John identified about 300 traits and from those, he identfied eight major traits, shared most widely. The eight traits are listed below.

1. Passion: Successful people love what they do
2. Work: They work very hard
3. Focus: They focus on one thing, not everything
4. Push: They keep pushing themselves
5. Ideas: They come up with good ideas
6. Improve: They keep improving themselves and what they do
7. Serve: They serve others something of value
8. Persist: They persist through time, failure and adversity

One of the interesting characteristics of these traits is that they are not inate. They are thought to be learnable, which suggests that they can help nearly anyone achieve their success in their lives.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills advocates teaching and assessing students on skills that go beyond the typical core curriculum. The 21st Century Skills include

• Creativity and innovation
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Communication and collaboration
• Flexibility and adaptability
• Initiative and self-direction
• Social and cross-cultural skills
• Productivity and accountability
• Leadership and responsibility

This list of skills certainly looks like good skills for students to acquire. But if St. John is correct, and his list of traits are the most critical for success, what are the right skills to teach?

• Should we teach how to find and pursue a passion (found to be the most critical trait of successful people)?
• Should we teach students how to focus and minimize distractions?
• Should we teach students how to persist on long-term projects and how to overcome disappointments?
• Should we teach students how to assess whether a piece of work is actually useful to and serves others and how to make it even more valuable to others?

It is debatable, of course, whether St. John's eight traits are truly the most important. But if we assume for a moment that they are, shouldn't we teach students to acquire the traits for success?

Posted at 9:44 PM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Success

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Guest Post: Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success

Guest post by Harry Tennant

Although John Wooden thought of himself as a teacher, as the head basketball coach at UCLA, he was the winningest coach in college basketball. Yet, he never mentioned winning to his players.

Winning is something you don't have control over, but you do have control over yourself. Coach Wooden defined success this way:

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.

He emphasized to his players that success is the result of a set of habits which he called the Pyramid of Success as shown below.

I highly recommend his book, Wooden on Leadership. Despite its title, it's not just a book about business leadership and despite its author, it's not a book about sports. It's a book about the habits of character that lead to success: doing the best of which you're capable. It's a great message to pass on to students as well as great advice on how to set an example for the students and staff you work with.

Posted at 8:42 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Success

Friday, November 26, 2010

Guest Post: Fighting obesity at school and at home

Guest post by Harry Tennant

This is a follow-on to Dan's previous post on nutrition.

You may know Jamie Oliver as the Naked Chef on the Food Channel. (It's not that the chef is naked, the food is...free of excess fat, sugar, salt, preservatives and other chemicals.) He has an excellent talk in which he discusses the seriousness of the obesity epidemic and a simple approach to a solution: teach children about food and have everyone learn to cook ten healthy, easy recipes...and then pass the recipes on.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jamie_oliver.html

One of his slides is really good. It shows causes of death in the US and highlights the causes that are linked to diet in red. The little bar way down at the bottom of the graph is for homocide, which gets so much attention in the news. The vastly bigger red bars, diet-related causes of death, get far less attention.

What does this have to do with education? A large part of the problem is failing to understand just how our diet is actually killing us (see graph above) and what we can do about it. Education can fix that.

In the spirit of Jamie Oliver's suggestion that we share good recipes, what is a favorite recipe of yours that's delicious, inexpensive, healthful and easier than drive-through burgers or ordering a pizza?

Posted at 7:59 PM (permalink) 2 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Jamie Oliver, Nutrition

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Guest Post: Unfair argument about the increase in per-pupil spending?

Guest post by Harry Tennant

An often repeated argument critical of public schools is that there has been a significant increase in per-pupil spending without an improvement in academic performance. Time reported 123% increase in per-pupil spending from 1971 - 2006 with 0% change in academic performance (17 year olds, 1971 - 2004 for reading) (p. 35, 9/20/2010). The movie Waiting for Superman repeated similar statistics.

The implication is that public schools are in crisis and spending more money does no good. But has that money been spent on increasing academic performance?

It has been argued that the biggest change in education over the past few decades has been accomodation for special populations. It has not been spent on increasing overall academic achievement.

I'm not suggesting that accomodation for special populations is a bad thing. However, one doesn't improve overall academic performance unless the attention and funding is focused on improving overall academic performance.

Principals and teachers: What has been your experience? Have funding increases that you've seen gone toward overall academic performance? If so, what were the changes that were expected to improve academic performance?

Posted at 7:30 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, public schools

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Guest Post: Sugata Mitra on Child-Driven Education

Guest post by Harry Tennant

This is a fascinating talk about the learning success  among collaborating students with Internet-connected computers. Check it out.

But one thing we know about learning is that without guidance, you won't see much in the way of accomplishing learning objectives. So, how can we take Mitra's exciting results about unguided learning of something and turn that into exciting results about learning the sorts of things we want students to learn?

Posted at 8:45 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Child-Driven Education, Mitra

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Guest Post: What's your last lecture?

Guest Post by Harry Tennant

In one of Dan's recent posts, he talked about the Alice Project, begun by the late Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture. Randy knew he was dying and wanted to create one last lecture, not so much for the benefit of his students and colleagues but for the benefit of his own kids.

Randy's Last Lecture (over 12 million views on YouTube) generated a lot of interest in the notion of a last lecture, and many other academics created or at least considered the idea of a last lecture of their own. What would they say?

What would you say? In particular, what would you say to your students?

University professors like Randy are experts in their fields of specialization. But a last lecture is typically about LIFE. Randy Pausch's lecture wasn't about computer science, it was titled, Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

There's a lot of wisdom in Robert Fulghum's book, All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Here's what is particularly interesting about those involved in K12 education: you are involved in teaching the fundamental knowledge and skills necessary for living well. Since the "last lecture" typically is about insights on living well, it follows that K12 faculty, addressing their last lecture to their students, are particularly well suited to create an interesting last lecture.

So, what would your last lecture say?

Posted at 8:00 AM (permalink) 3 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: by Harry Tennant, Last Lecture