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?

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Keywords: by Harry Tennant

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Pass It On Education Content: Changing Education Paradigms

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Keywords: Makes You Think, RSA Animate, Changing Education Paradigms, School Reform

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

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Discipline: What Was True in 1947...

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Keywords: Discipline, Classroom Management

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Education Funny: On the Lighter Side of Things

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Keywords: Education Funny

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

In The News: Ranking American Schools Internationally

48th Is Not a Good Place

Editorial Published: October 26, 2010

"The National Academies, the country’s leading advisory group on science and technology, warned in 2005 that unless the United States improved the quality of math and science education, at all levels, it would continue to lose economic ground to foreign competitors.

Posted at 1:58 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: Accountability, International Education, National Rankings, Student Expectations

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

In The News: International Student Assessment Results Released

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Keywords: International Assessment, Assessment

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Discipline: Elliott, Phone Home

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Keywords: Discipline, Cell Phone Policy, Cell Phones

Monday, December 6, 2010

Pass It On Education Tools: Common-Core Standards Website

This is the website of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. 
View the Standards there...and more!
 

Check It Out!  Pass It On!

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Keywords: Pass It On Education Tools, Common-Standards, Standards, Accountability

Monday, December 6, 2010

In The News: A First Look At The Common Core State Standards

P.S., as reported earlier, the number of states who have now adopted the standards is up to 43.  Texas and Alaska are not expected to join the list.

Posted at 2:29 PM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: In The News, Common-Standards, Assessment, Standardized Assessment

Monday, December 6, 2010

In The News: Common-Standards Bar

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Keywords: In The News, Common-Standards, Assessment, Standardized Assessment

Monday, December 6, 2010

Trends: Common-Standards

Click here to see the Education Week article this graphic is from.

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Keywords: Common-Standards, Standards, Accountability

Monday, December 6, 2010

Pass It On Education Tools: Unique Clip Art Free For School Use

Check It Out!  Pass It On!

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Keywords: Pass It On, Pass It On Education Tools

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

Pass It On Education Tools: Pledge to Flags

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Keywords: Pass It On Education Tools, Pass It On, Pledges

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

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Trends: Culinary Arts Competition

Read the entire article here!

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Keywords: Trends, Culinary Arts, Competition

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Education Funny: Berlitz Commercial

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Keywords: Education Funny

Saturday, December 4, 2010

In The News: C-FB District Break Up?

Read or watch the story here

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Keywords: In The News, School District Zoning

Friday, December 3, 2010

Pass It On Education Content: Think Different

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Keywords: Pass It On Education Content, Pass It On, Apple Ad, Think Different

Friday, December 3, 2010

STAAR: House Bill 3 Transition Plan

Download Complete House Bill 3 Transition Plan
You can also see it broken down into easier to manage sections by clicking here!

Posted at 10:01 AM (permalink) 0 Comments View/Leave Comment
Keywords: STAAR, TAKS, Accountability, Standardized Testing, Assessment, Texas

Friday, December 3, 2010

Pass It On Education Tools: Lit2Go

• Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go,
• Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer,
• View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen,
• Print out the stories and poems to make your own book."

Click here to go to the website!

Check It Out!  Pass It On!

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Keywords: Pass It On, Pass It On Education Tools, Lit2Go, Florida

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Pass It On Education Content: The Academic Word List

There is a very important specialized vocabulary for learners intending to pursue academic studies in English at the secondary and post-secondary levels.  The Academic Word List, compiled by Coxhead (2000), consists of 570 word families that are not in the most frequent 2,000 words of English but which occur reasonably frequently over a very wide range of academic texts.  These 570 words are grouped into ten sublists that reflect word frequency and range.  A word like analyze falls into Sublist 1, which contains the most frequent words, while the word adjacent falls into Sublist 10 which includes the least frequent (amongst this list of high incidence and high utility words). The following ten sublists contain the headwords of the families in the Academic Word List.  In other words, the ten sublists contain the most frequent form of the word, more often a noun or verb form, although there may be one or more important related word forms.  For example, the headword analyze would also include analyst, analytic, analytical and analytically in the word family.

The Academic Word List is not restricted to a specific field of study.  That means that the words are useful for learners studying in disciplines as varied as literature, science, health, business, and law.  This high utility academic word list does not contain technical words likely to appear in only one, specialized field of study such as amortization, petroglyph, onomatopoeia, or cartilage.  Two-thirds of all academic English words come from Latin, French (through Latin), or Greek.  Understandably, knowledge of the most high incidence and high utility academic words in English can significantly boost a student’s comprehension level of school-based reading material.  Secondary students who are taught these high-utility academic words and routinely placed in contexts requiring their usage are likely to be able to master academic material with more confidence and efficiency, wasting less time and energy in guessing words or consulting dictionaries than those who are only equipped with the most basic 2000-3000 words that characterize ordinary conversation.

(The word lists follow the description above)

Source:  Coxhead, Averil.  (2000). A new academic word list.  TESOL Quarterrly, 34, 213-238.  Averil Coxhead's website.

Check It Out!  Pass It On!

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Keywords: Pass It On Education Content, Pass It On, Academic Word List

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Pass It On Education Content: Web 2.0 Linking People In Ways That Are Profoundly Changing The Human Experience

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Keywords: Web 2.0, Social Media, Linking People, Technology, Internet, Pass It On

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Education Funny: Have We All Had A Student Like This? (The Elephant In The Room)

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Keywords: Education Funny, Elephant, Have We All Had A Student Like This