Introit

Thinking Matters

So, Stanford University has instituted a new requirement that begins with this year's freshman class: Thinking Matters. A student can meet the requirement by choosing from among some 35 courses that allow freshmen to cultivate "the critical and analytical skills required for rigorous university-level work."

What's fascinating (to me, at least) about the requirement is what I as an independent school person infer from the following description from Stanford University News in Aug 2012:

Thinking Matters is one of the cornerstones of the university's new approach to undergraduate education. That new approach stresses the development of intellectual growth through critical thinking rather than accumulation of knowledge through course content.

What do I infer? That "course content" = the usual high school approach to "thinking," which is different from what Stanford considers "thinking."

That's not a hollow statement. Clearly, Stanford (and others, one should assume) is identifying the weakness(es) inherent in a high school system that focuses on coverage of content at the expense of critical thinking skills. Happily, we in independent schools are now examining (or, at least, we ought to be...) how we incorporate what Pat Bassett calls the 5Cs +1 in our overall programs, but we still struggle with coverage of content. And we probably should. It's an issue of balance.

Having said that, though, how are we considering the balance between standardized assessments (SAT, AP, ACT, etc.) and our attention to the 5Cs + 1?

In other words, is there meaning for us within the Stanford requirement?

Assessing Assessment

SAT, AP, ACT, ERB...you name it. Standardized assessments still abound in independent school culture. We become obsessed with higher and higher SAT and ACT scores, touting our averages to families; and, when they're not as high as we'd like, we obsess about how 'low' they are. We worry, we fret, we bite our nails. We wonder if our standards are slipping.

How ought we to assess in this, the second decade of the 21st century?

Standardized tests were born in a culture that was focused on the 'benefits' of industrialization: uniformity, standardization, predictability. With all the research we have at our disposal now--brain science, different intelligences, you name it--we continue to hone in on some of these tests and measure ourselves very diligently against them.

Is anyone out there working on a portfolio of assessments? What's that look like?

 

Role of Cognitive Science in Shaping Curriculum

Roger Schank recently released a tome that is very worthwhile: Teaching Minds - How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools. Schank is admittedly provocative, yet in a very good way. From the jacket: "Schank argues that class size, lack of parental involvement, and other commonly-cited factors have nothing to do with why students are not learning. The culprit is a system of subject-based instruction, and the solution is cognitive-based learning. This groundbreaking book defines what it would mean to teach thinking."

Schank outlines 12 cognitive process that, in his estimation, underlie learning: it's hard to see how it could be otherwise. They are:

Conceptual Processes

1. Prediction
2. Judgment
3. Experimentation
4. Evaluation

Analytic Processes

1. Diagnosis
2. Planning
3. Causation
4. Judgment

Social Processes

1. Influence
2. Teamwork
3. Negotiation
4. Describing

A key driver for Schank is that we are subject-bound when it comes to education. He states that, "If we wish to teach people, it is important to ask what cognitive capabilities we want them to have when we are done, not what we want them to know. In other words, we want to understand what we have to do in order to make them better able to think" (46).

I won't go into great detail here, but suffice it to say that much of what Schank offers would resonate with independent educators. He avows openly that he has problems with "knowledge" and "to know," as he sees them as inherently biased words -- biased toward how the system works currently.

He is compelling. I recommend this book to you because, if nothing else, it will provide for deep discussions in our schools. As a matter of fact, perhaps I'll recommend it as our next faculty reading project...

Manifesto on Learning

Tom Peters wrote a great piece in yesterday's (August 27, 2012) edition of the Financial Times, "Manifesto for the new rules on human capital." Many of his points would resound with independent schools. Permit me to highlight several below.

• "Development of 'human capital' should always be the top priority [...]. [T]his is an inescapable imperative in an age in which imaginative brain-work is de facto the only plausible survival strategy for individual enterprises of consequence [I'd suggest "schools"]... Generic 'brain-work', the traditional and dominant white-collar activities that now employ the bulk of us, is increasingly undertaken by exponentially enhanced artificial intelligence applied at ever increasing speed."
• "Generals and admirals (and symphony conductors and sports coaches and police) obsess about continuous training [I'd suggest "learning"]. Why is it an almost dead certainty that in a random 30-minute interview with a CEO [Head of School? Board chair?] you are unlikely to hear a word on this?"
• "Proposition: the chief 'training' officer becomes the top staff job in a business [school], with a charge equivalent in gravity to that of the chief financial officer or chief information officer."
• "The educational infrastructure must be upended to underpin support for the creative jobs that will be more or less the sole basis for employment, economic growth and wealth creation. Central to this would be a dramatically enhanced, appreciated, compensated and accountable role for teachers; teaching should be a career of choice for a nation's best and brightest."
• "Many small businesses [schools] [...] are typically unprepared to take the steps necessary to engage their employees [faculty] in seeking improvements in productivity and creative work."

I especially like how Peters ends his article, citing something that independent schools espouse:

"To deal with the most probable future employment scenarios, leaders will need to be masters of the liberal arts -- a clear-cut determinant of responding to the universal need to pursue creative work."

Summer Experiments

 Ah, the lazy days of summer. Today, my daughter decided to undertake an experiment in the backyard. "Let's do an experiment!" she said to her brother, who was keen, since the experiment involved bubbles and water. She engaged it with great excitement, proclaiming proudly the results of this experiment.

I had to smile. First, she was outside. Richard Louv would be happy, given his concern with what he has termed nature deficit disorder. Second, Roger Schank would be happy, since she was "doing science," meaning that she was actually learning it...engaging in formation of a hypothesis, then putting her idea to the test. She was using scientific reasoning.

Schank's tome, Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools, is a must-read, by the way, if you are truly interested in "learning." He has the ability to point out, in very simple and clear terms, that the emperor has no clothes. To understand what I mean by that statement, I encourage you to read it.

 

 

Rethinking Assessment

As I mentioned a week or so ago, I'm reading Cathy Davidson's tome, Now You See It, which is a study in attention, brain science, and related issues, all within the realm of education.

Though much of what Davidson covers in this book is covered in other publications--and specifically in many blogs, her chapter on measurement has forced me to revisit (philosophically) my beliefs pertaining to assessment and measurement. The historical perspective was very helpful, in terms of highlighting the rise of the multiple-choice assessment as a response to the standardization and uniformity prevalent in industrial society. I won't go any further, lest you are reading the book currently.

Suffice it to say that I'm now very focused on assessment and measurement. In fact, I feel so passionately about it that I am ready to identify it as the issue in education right now. It touches all systems: public, parochial, independent.

There is much to be done here, if one is to move the needle and end up with assessments that speak to a student's ability to handle complex, multi-layered tasks over time rather than a "yes, this is right, and that is wrong" approach to measurement/assessment.

Perhaps the greatest challenge we face in rethinking assessment is rethinking measurement. How do we measure a student's ability to handle complex, multi-layered tasks over time? There are many options here, but how many schools are bold enough to begin moving in this direction, away from the "standardization machine" that drives so much of the testing world in the US?

I still believe, though, that content is important -- students need to have some base of knowledge from which and with which to work. Having said that, I think we can devise ways for students to acquire the content WHILE working on those skills that will prepare them for the complexities of life and work.

Assessment or Asset?

One of my eleven summer reading books is Cathy Davidson's tome, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. Davidson offers a powerful and compelling narrative for us to re-consider how we do school, something this blog treats regularly.

 

Although I've not finished it just yet, I found the following quote to be powerful, perhaps because it is such a cogent statement for all that we read on Twitter, in blogs, in general educational literature, and what we hear at conferences:

"That is the glistening paradox of great education: It is not about answering test questions. It is about knowing that, when tested by the most grueling challenges ahead, you have the capacity to learn what is required to succeed" (85).

Shortly afterward, she states, "Put those kids [a group she had identified] in a lecture hall, give them a standardized curriculum with standardized forms of measuring achievement and ability, and they learn a different lesson. They might well master what they are supposed to learn, but that's not education. When you think of learning as something external to yourself, learning becomes a levy--an assessment, not an asset. The assessment no longer matters after the schooling stops. The asset is a resource one draws on for a lifetime" (86).

Her clarification of assessment versus asset really struck a chord in me.

I'm spending much of my summer considering how to transform my section of 9th grade history into a project-based learning class. That is no small feat, in case you're wondering. Central to this transformation is my own need to attend to assessment versus asset. I want the kids to have the asset, every time. I just need to figure out a way to get them there, while allowing for a way to measure their progress that can be translated into a meaningful grade, since we are still wedded to grades.

Innovation Sabbatical

In the interests of promoting innovation within independent schools, I propose a new kind of sabbatical program: the Innovation Sabbatical.

Some basic parameters: the sabbatical would be three to six months, the school would pay a stipend to the person in question (faculty, staff, or administrator), and the requirement is that the person must share what s/he learned during the sabbatical at an all-school meeting, plus publish it in the alumni magazine (and any associated social media).

An added bonus would be if the innovation turns out to be a viable product or service. The school, as the originator of the stipend, would receive partial ownership in a company created to sell the product or service, and revenues could go into the endowment.

News Flash: Online Learning is Mainstream

Can we please stop talking about online learning as if it's something new?

At this point (April 2012), online learning is not innovative, as a concept. There might be inventive ways of handling teaching and learning via the digital medium, but we've long since passed the stage where we could label it "innovative." The first online class for higher education was offered over twenty years ago (University of Phoenix), and public schools began using online coursework around fifteen years ago.

Online learning is decidedly mainstream. It is a viable option, there are quality providers (and those that lack quality), and there are different methods involved with the classes.

Independent schools are still trying to determine whether to award credit for online courses, whether to allow online courses when the same face-to-face courses exist already, whether the quality is as good as what an independent school would expect normally within its walls, and so forth.

But it's not innovative any longer. Rather, it's a question of to what degree a school will assimilate online coursework into its repertoire of course offerings.

Therefore, when we look at the "growth curve" for online learning, we need to understand that this curve shows the degree to which online options are offered and taken; it is not showing any degree of innovation. This is an adoption curve, not an innovation curve.

From this point on, any "growth" in the online learning market place is akin to "growth" in a mature industry. Consider Coca-Cola, IBM, 3M, and so forth: they are still trying to grow, but their growth is incremental because many of their products are already mature. To be sure, they put much time and money into their R&D departments in order to innovate, and these products do produce growth, but the "growth" of their core products tends to occur as a result of adoption in new markets.

Online learning--a core product of the world of teaching and learning--has a place in independent schools. That should be self-evident by this point, and we should stop saying "Wow! Look at the shine on that!" everytime we hear someone talk about it. We will spend (waste?) the next three to five years figuring this out, then realize that we've been smitten so much by online learning that we've forgotten to pay attention to other innovations. Schools won't have money to invest in creating/seeking innovative products that enhance teaching and learning because we will have been so busy implementing "innovative" online learning...that is now entering its third decade of existence.

Third decade?! That sounds as if we're behind the curve. Not in front of it; not riding the crest of the wave. Behind.

Rethinking School

Stacey Childress, who leads the Next Generation Learning group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has a very timely piece in the current issue of Harvard Business Review. In "Rethinking School," Childress outlines the foundations that support the vision of a more effective and practical education in the United States.

As expected, Childress underscores the importance of technology in advancing this vision. She immediately touches the 'third rail' of education: teacher productivity. "U.S. public schools have been largely impervious to the productivity gains that other sectors have realized from technology, for two main reasons. First, until recently, they hadn't widely adopted technology: Education ranked dead last, a 2002 Commerce Department study reported, in deployment of technology relative to number of employees. Second, when technology was deployed, it wasn't being used to do anything differently--a problem many industries have long since confronted and resolved" (78-79).

Rather than berate anyone for not adopting more technology, she (happily) spells out exactly what technology can now offer the education sector. "A new generation of sophisticated adaptive courseware and schools that blend the best of teacher- and computer-delivered instruction are making personalized learning approaches feasible and affordable, not as a replacement for teachers but as a way to give them the tools they need to become dramatically more effective" (79).

She goes on, "Adaptive software makes personalized learning practical through a combination of data analysis and pattern recognition technology--something like a more sophisticated version of Netflix's recommendation engine--which tailors instruction by offering up different content and exercises depending on how students did on the previous one" (79).

We're just starting this phase in education, she points out. This writer has to wonder, however: how will independent schools respond to adaptive software? Will we take the typical "wait and see" route, or will we be bold in pursuing blended classrooms that take advantage of the best that face-to-face has to offer and the best that adaptive software has to offer?