Does this 19th century engraving show the perfect learning situation? Alexander had no iPhone, no laptop; Aristotle used no PowerPoint, no grading machines, not even a chalkboard. Have we come a long way, or is this a measure of how far we’ve fallen? “Aristotle and his pupil, Alexander (c. 340 BCE)” (original source?)
David Warlick‘s blog serves up a lot of stuff to make teachers think (cynically, I wonder whether education administrators can be shoved into thinking at all . . . but I digress).
David Warlick, in a taxi in Shanghai, probably off at some education conference or other.
Recently he pondered his own son’s use of several different kinds of media at once. In a longer discussion that would be worth your while, someone asked, “Has the nature of information influenced the emerging ‘appropriate technologies’ like the digital learning object called an iBook?” David responded:
My knee-jerk response is, “Not nearly enough.” This current push toward digital textbooks, urged on by our Secretary of Education, concerns me. I worry that we’re engaged in a race to modernize schooling, rather than a sober and thoughtful imagining and designing of learning materials and practices that are more relevant to today’s learners (ourselves include), today’s information landscape and a future that has lost the comforts of certainty, but become rich with wondrous opportunities.
What I enjoyed, though, about my experience in publishing an iBook was learning to hack some features into the book that were not part of Apples general instructions for using their publishing tool. This is the ultimate opportunity of digital learning objects and environments, that they can be hacked into new and better learning experiences by information artisans who see what’s there and what it can become.
In a cynical mood, I commented on an earlier statement Warlick made, about how technology has changed the education landscape:
“… we live in a time of no unanswered questions.”
BUT:
1. The internet and especially portable devices have exponentially increased the probability that difficult questions will be answered incorrectly.
2. For teachers, no longer is it possible to ask a simple, factual question as a teaser to get students to search for the answer, and thereby learn something deeper along the way. Portable computer devices present one more non-print medium in which education appears to be abdicating its duties, and the war. (We missed radio, film, television, recorded television, and desk-top computing; now we’re missing portable devices.)
Legendary AP calculus teacher Jaime Escalante; pencil, paper, chalkboard and chalk, maybe a slide rule, made up his technology kit. Photo: Wikipedia
3. No question goes unanswered, but what is really rare is a question that is worth answering; even more rare, that good question that can be answered well from free internet sources.
Darrell’s Education Technology Corollary: When administrators and policy makers tell educators (especially teachers) they wish to utilize “new technology,” they mean they want new ways to figure out ways to fire teachers, because they don’t have a clue how technology can be used in education, nor have they thought broadly enough about what education is.
Darrell’s Education Technology Corollary Corollary: When a teacher effectively uses technology in a classroom, it will be at the teacher’s instigation, the teacher’s expense, and administrators will get revenge on the teacher for having done so.
A couple of weeks later, my cynicism is growing. I’m warning you, teachers, you adopt new technologies at your risk, often — especially in some school districts like Dallas ISD.
But if education is to improve, this experimentation by teachers must continue. So teachers slog on, under-appreciated and often opposed in their attempts to fix things.
Someday a school system will figure out how to unlock teachers’ creativity, knowledge and skills. Not soon enough.
Teacher in primary school in northern Laos. Photo: Wikipedia
(Can someone explain to me how Warlick’s blog, with much better stuff than I do here, gets fewer hits? Teachers, not enough of you are reading broadly enough.)
But that was five years ago. There’s more information, and even an update at Stanford Magazine. So, we’ll update here, too:
Carol Dweck, Stanford University
Every teacher needs to get familiar with the work of Carol Dweck. She’s a Stanford psychologist who is advising the Blackburn Rovers from England’s Premier League, on how to win, and how to develop winning ways.
Your students need you to have this stuff.
A 60-year-old academic psychologist might seem an unlikely sports motivation guru. But Dweck’s expertise—and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success—bear directly on the sort of problem facing the Rovers. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.
What’s more, Dweck has shown that people can learn to adopt the latter belief and make dramatic strides in performance. These days, she’s sought out wherever motivation and achievement matter, from education and parenting to business management and personal development. [emphasis added]
Psychology professor Carol Dweck has spent her career figuring out why some people give up in the face of failure while others are motivated to learn from their mistakes and improve. It’s all about fixed mindsets versus growth mindsets (“The Effort Effect,” March/April 2007)
Now Dweck has formed Mindset Works, which “helps human beings reach their full potential.” Its signature product is Brainology, software developed by Dweck and educational researcher Lisa S. Blackwell and now available at www.brainology.us following successful pilots in the United States and abroad. The program aims to motivate middle school and high school students to do better in all their subjects by teaching them how the brain works and how to boost their intelligence.
A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the “10,000-Hour Rule”, based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles’ musical talents and Gates’ computer savvy as examples.[3] The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, and quotes Beatles’ biographer Philip Norman as saying, “So by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, ‘they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.’”[3] Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.[3]
Does Gladwell mention Dweck’s work? Is Dweck’s work confirmed by Ericsson’s? There’s a lot of room for discussion there, especially in an essay.
For writing, for writing essays, practice provides dramatic improvement for students — that much is certain.
I do like the work of business and management gurus who tend to look at things oddly, and ask the odd, just-right questions.
Jason Fried’s work found that most people, when they “need to get work done,” don’t go to an office.
Listen to his TEDS Talk, and consider, dear teacher or education administrator: What if schools are not the places to teach, or worse, not places to learn?
“I just can’t learn — my memory just doesn’t work.” Third time today I heard that excuse.
It’s not true. A lot of what we do in education is based more on tradition than any kind of research — school in the winter, start in the morning, quit in the afternoon, 30 kids sitting at desks in rows, testing for mastery, bells to change shifts classes — but here’s something we do know: Practice brings mastery; practice makes perfect, more than talent does.
Every teacher needs to get familiar with the work of Carol Dweck. She’s a Stanford psychologist who is advising the Blackburn Rovers from England’s Premier League, on how to win, and how to develop winning ways.
Your students need you to have this stuff.
A 60-year-old academic psychologist might seem an unlikely sports motivation guru. But Dweck’s expertise—and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success—bear directly on the sort of problem facing the Rovers. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.
What’s more, Dweck has shown that people can learn to adopt the latter belief and make dramatic strides in performance. These days, she’s sought out wherever motivation and achievement matter, from education and parenting to business management and personal development. [emphasis added]
It’s an awkward scene. John Goodman has a lousy role (and I’m not fond of the direction for him or Melanie Griffith here). I’ve never seen the movie, “Born Yesterday,” and I don’t know the context.
But ten important amendments to the Constitution, to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” a potentially useful mnemonic device for your U.S. history, and government students; it’s mostly accurate:
There is some skipping around – the song covers the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, then skips to the Thirteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments. The First Amendment’s five freedoms are covered completely, other amendments not so much.
The actor in the scene, playing the senator who sings the Fifteenth Amendment, is former Tennessee U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson. Thompson staffed the Watergate Committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, earlier — wouldn’t it be interesting to hear his views on this scene, and song, and what other tricks he may have encountered in the Senate, from Sen. Ervin, or the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd?
It’s not Schoolhouse Rock, but it’s really very good. Everything covered in the song is in Texas TEKS, but some things skipped, like the Fourteenth Amendment, are also required. Can you use it in your classes?
And by the way, does anyone know a rap for the Bill of Rights?
These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
Just as a reminder about what we’re doing in education, I hope every teacher and administrator will take three minutes and view this video (that allows you some time to boggle).
Surely you know who Tom Peters is. (If not, please confess in comments, and I’ll endeavor to guide you to the information you need.)
Education issues suffered here at the Bathtub over the past several months. Confession: I don’t like to write while angry, and thinking about education generally gets me there quickly. When I write in anger, I like to sit on the stuff and edit when I’m cooled down. But when I get back to edit, I get angry again.
If you watched the follies from the Texas State Soviet of Education over social studies standards, you might understand some of my anger. I’m fortunate in some ways that my students don’t track the news more closely — they tended to miss the Soviet’s gutting of Hispanic history from Texas history standards, and so they didn’t get angry. More than 85% of my students are Hispanic, many related to the Texas heroes dropped from the standards because they were brown (“What’s Hispanic Heritage Month for, anyway?” the Soviet probably wondered.)
Power of Bubbling -- for a scary story, click on the image and go read it at TweenTeacher
Plus, time for thinking about these issues evaporated during the school year. Summer isn’t much better, though a bunch of us had eight great days with members of the history department at UT-Arlington focusing on the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Age of Imperialism . . . even though reminded every day that the Texas Soviet doesn’t want us to teach that period as it is recorded in the history books. (No, there are not plans for a translation into Texas Soviet Speak, at least not soon. Teachers will have to make do.)
In one of our (too) many testing/oath-signing sessions this spring, a colleague cynically wondered what would be a good job for a kid who does well on the tests, a kid who has “demonstrated mastery of bubble-guessing.”
Bubble-guessing. Wow. Is that an apt description for what many schools teach these days!
I have a few days to put up the periscope and see what is going on out there. A couple of things I’ve noticed, that you may want to follow:
Education has a new god: data. It is believed to have the power to save American education and thus everything in education must be about data—collect more data about our children, evaluate teachers and administrators based on data, and reward and punish schools using data.
Sound familiar?
Zhao points to serious analyses of the Race to the Top applications and rejections which show, among other things, Pennsylvania was penalized for focusing on early childhood education, instead of collecting data.
Why was it we got into this swamp in the first place, and where did all these alligators come from?
Go read Zhao’s analysis, and maybe cruise around his blog. It’s worth your while. He’s a professor at Michigan State — University Distinguished Professor of Education. (One thing you should read there: Zhao’s slides from a recent speech. E-mail the link to your principal. Somebody find a YouTube version of that speech, please.) [Checker Finn, do you ever get over to this backwater? Zhao's on to something. Zhao's on to a lot of things.]
Race to the Top is the worst thing the Obama administration has done, in my opinion. It is aimed, or mis-aimed to give us a nation of bubble-guessers. My guess is that aim is unintentional. But the road to hell, or a Republican majority . . .
While we’re looking around, pay some attention to David Warlick’s 2¢ worth. That’s where I found the links to Zhao.
I could have shared some of these new ideas with her, but it would not have helped. The last time I helped my daughter prepare for a test, it was 8th grade and the unit test on the Civil War. When she walked into that classroom, she could talk about and write about the reasons for the war, what the North and the South wanted to achieve, the advantages that the North held and those of the South, as well as their disadvantages. She could tell you who won and who lost and why.
She made a 52 on the test because she couldn’t give the dates of the major battles of the war.
One of our mantras in the old Transportation Consulting Group at Ernst & Young was to understand that “You’re always ready to fight the last war.” For what we were doing, generally we had to change the technology for each assignment.
That’s doubly true in education, in social studies, I think. I constantly remind myself that my students don’t need the same things I got in high school. We shouldn’t equip students to fight the last war, but instead prepare them to understand they need to get ready for the next one.
And what about your tags? Warlick wonders. No answers, but good wonderings.
National Lampoon once ran a cover of a nice, spotted mutt, tongue out, looking sideways at a pistol pointing at its head. There was a sort of a caption: “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog.”
That’s one way to try to boost circulation! I first saw the magazine on the rack in a small pharmacy in Colorado Springs, across the street from Colorado College, between rounds of the Colorado College Invitational Debate Tournament. Being short of cash and in sore need of eye drops, I looked at the magazine but put it back on the rack. The woman at the cash register watched me carefully. When I got to the register, she said, “You know, they’ll do it, too! They’re just the sort of people who will kill that poor dog!”
(I imagine that woman has led Colorado Springs’ dramatic move to the right in politics.)
The publishers got that woman’s attention, didn’t they?
In the middle of the 19th century blackboards were all the rage. According to Pennsylvania State University engineering communication professor Michael Alley, it was common for universities and research institutions to proudly advertise that they had the only slate writing board in a 100-mile radius. Scientific lectures became more engaging than they’d ever been.
More than 150 years later, there’s still room for improvement. “People are not anywhere close to tapping the potential that a PowerPoint presentation offers,” Alley says. “We have a tool that can do an incredible amount, and people just waste it.” Who hasn’t been lulled into a somnolent state by some well-intentioned scientist presenting his research to a captive audience by reading a seemingly endless stream of bullet points?
Any media, done well, can be wonderful. P. Z. Myers’ paean to Prof. Snider and his color chalk artworks reminds us that even a chalkboard can be a place of art, in the eye and hands of someone who gives thought to the work and practices the skills necessary to communicate well. Looking around my classroom today, I note that better than half the whiteboard space features paper maps held to the board with magnets (which the kids like to steal).
The piece in The Scientist relates useful ideas to help somebody who wants to make a better, less sleep-inducing, communicative PowerPoint (or better, maybe, KeyNote) presentation.
Unplug, think, and write
According to Galloway, using PowerPoint to make a great presentation starts with powering down the laptops and writing out an outline on index cards or a legal pad. “People have to shut off their computer and go away as they’re writing their PowerPoint presentation,” he says.
Establish your assertion Alley says that he starts planning each slide by writing down a single sentence stating the idea he wants the audience to take away. “You have defined what it is you need to support that statement,” he says. “That’s where it starts.” Alley adds that the sentence should only take one or two lines, should consist of only 8–14 words, and should appear in 28-point font when inserted in the final PowerPoint presentation.
Assemble the visual evidence Let the assertion sentence for each slide guide your decision as to which visuals should accompany it. Use “explanatory images”—not decorative or descriptive images—to support each assertion, says Joanna Garner, assistant professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. When describing the context or methods of your research, photos and movies are ideal pieces of evidence; when presenting your results, elements like graphs, tables, or charts (appropriately highlighted to emphasize key points) will do the trick.
“This country doesn’t value teachers, and that upsets me,” she said. “Teachers don’t earn much, and this country worships making money. In China, teachers don’t earn a lot either, but it’s a very honorable career.”
Ms. Zheng said she spent time clearing up misconceptions about China.
“I want students to know that Chinese people are not crazy,” she said. For instance, one of her students, referring to China’s one-child-per-family population planning policy, asked whether the authorities would kill one of the babies if a Chinese couple were to have twins.
Some students were astonished to learn that Chinese people used cellphones, she said. Others thought Hong Kong was the capital.
Barry Beauchamp, the Lawton superintendent, said he was thrilled to have Ms. Zheng and two other Chinese instructors working in the district. But he said he believed that the guest teachers were learning the most from the cultural exchange.
Night out for the boys — well, for Kenny and me — while Kathryn had some of the girls over.
Kenny introduced me to a Dallas sushi venue, Asian Mint. His appearing-to-be deep-fried Texas Roll was a pleasant, crunchy blend of oriental and Texas. The mango sauce added a sweet smoothness. My more standard tuna came with a little internal heat — the wasabi perfectly blended (Kenny is the one who doesn’t like horseradish heat, having somehow missed that gene from my grandfather).
We closed off the night at Half-Price Books, at the store on Northwest Highway fans and employees fondly deem “the mother ship.” (Years ago, across the street to the east, the store was in an old, converted restaurant which had a pirate’s ship inside; the store kept the ship as a kids’ reading area. Was that the origin of “mother ship?”)
Books? Today?
I don’t read enough. 20 years ago I found a study that said if you read one book a month, 12 books a year, you’re in the 99th percentile of readers.
The coffee mug with Einstein on it says “Coffee makes me smart.” Kenny, our family’s most-tech savvy early-adopter — a high commendation in a family where Mom and Dad have been in computers since mainframes were the way to go — agreed that it’s more likely books that make us smart. We don’t read enough, but we stay in the 99th percentile.
What an easy, easy way to get ahead! Get a book: Read it.
Michael D. Green, the real estate impresario for Murray Hill who formerly headed the Louis August Jonas Foundation when I had so much fun there, used to say that he was not educated, but he read the book reviews. Reading the book reviews would be better than not knowing. At a Manhattan cocktail party he could hold his ground with just about anyone. I’ve never found a topic on which he didn’t know something, usually cutting-edge. His book recommendations are always epiphanies.
Image by Derek Bacon, copyright The Economist 2010
Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in Springfield, Illinois, on ground often trod by Abraham Lincoln. As did Teddy Roosevelt, Obama studies Lincoln’s life and career, and presidency. We know he devouredTeam of Rivals, Doris Kearn Goodwin’s detailed history of Lincoln’s high-powered cabinet, all of who came to respect his leadership, and most to call him friend.
The Economist scores with another astonishing graphic for the cover of the print edition covering the week of February 18 — Lincoln’s exasperation apparent (image at right).
ACCORDING to Paul Krugman, the winner of a Nobel prize for economics and a columnist for the New York Times, modern America is much like 18th-century Poland. On his telling, Poland was rendered largely ungovernable by the parliament’s requirement for unanimity, and disappeared as a country for more than a century. James Fallows, after several years in China as a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote on his return that he found in America a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent and “a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke”. Tom Friedman, another columnist for the New York Times, reported from the annual World Economic Forum in Davos last month that he had never before heard people abroad talking about “political instability” in America. But these days he did.
The growing idea among influential pundits that America is “ungovernable” is being driven in large part by Barack Obama’s failure so far to pass some of the main laws he wants to. And it is, indeed, a puzzle. Here, after all, is a president who only just over a year ago won a handsome mandate: 53% of the popular vote and big majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. He bounded into office with a mountainous agenda, including plans to overhaul America’s health-care system and cut its greenhouse emissions. He seemed until quite recently to be doing reasonably well. In a folksy December interview with Oprah Winfrey he awarded himself “a good, solid B-plus”.
Is America now ungovernable? What are the limits of a federal system, and have the states capitulated too much power to Washington? Is anything else feasible with our economy in the mess it’s in?
I can imagine a discussion of the limits of the Articles of Confederation to start, noting the requirement of unanimity from the states to do anything major — and how that hamstrung the growth of America until George Washington pushed Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to change things. Washington’s goals were only partly noble, to see a new, unified nation. That unified nation he saw as necessary to open settlement of the Ohio Valley, where Washington had several thousand acres of land he couldn’t sell until settlers moved in.
How does the current set of impasses affect business? Consider any small business, or big business, which offers health care plans to its employees. Health reform is stalled — a Blue Cross affiliate in California raised rates by nearly 40%. Health care is the one section of the economy where growth — meaning costs — grew through the depths of our financial difficulties in 2008 and 2009. The need should be clear, but there are blocks to getting anything done about fixing the system.
Or consider international affairs. Pentagon analysts worry about governmental instability created by the effects of global warming — drought, weather disaster, shifting crop yields (up in a few places, dramatically down where a few billion people live). Thieves stole e-mails from the scientists studying the issue, and subsequent propaganda based on the theft alone has stalled climate talks, worldwide, giving a huge economic advantage to China and India.
What should be the role of government regulation for clean air? Is the Clean Air Act sufficient? (Texas initiated suit against the federal government last week, claiming that the science behind reducing air pollution is wrong, a suit given as a gift to Texas’s major industries, some of which depend on the ability to dump garbage in the air with impunity.)
Is the problem more organically rooted in our inability to defeat incumbents in Congress? 2010 is a Census year — we count Americans to see how many representatives there should be for each state in the House of Represtentatives. The bitter redistricting fights will come in state legislatures next year. Can we save the system when politicians design seats more to secure a safe majority for their own party, rather than to see that every American is adequately represented?
What about media? Traditionally newspapers, aided by television, played the watchdog role on Washington politicians. Americans aren’t reading newspapers much, anymore. News holes shrink, and serious reporting on issues goes away. Can an open democracy survive without healthy newspapers? And if not, who can do what about it?
Go to The Economist and check out the stories (better if you’re a subscriber — the stories usually go away for non-paying browsers after a few days). What can you do with them in the classroom?
What do you think? What’s gone wrong in Washington?
But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.
Morning routines have been like this since the fall, when school officials mounted a mobile Internet router to bus No. 92’s sheet-metal frame, enabling students to surf the Web. The students call it the Internet Bus, and what began as a high-tech experiment has had an old-fashioned — and unexpected — result. Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared.
What would your bus drivers say?
(File under “If you teach them, they will learn — and behavior problems will fade away.”)
Don’t miss the end of the article:
A ride through mountains on a drizzly afternoon can be unpredictable, even on the Internet Bus. Through the windows on the left, inky clouds suddenly parted above a ridge, revealing an arc of incandescent color.
“Dude, there’s a rainbow!” shouted Morghan Sonderer, a ninth grader.
A dozen students looked up from their laptops and cellphones, abandoning technology to stare in wonder at the eastern sky.
“It’s following us!” Morghan exclaimed.
“We’re being stalked by a rainbow!” Jerod said.
More:
These students attend Empire High School in Vail, Arizona, near Tucson. It’s a digital high school, in a district that appears to me to be well above average in family income and technology smarts among parents who vote for school board members — maybe in school board members, too. The article says, “The Vail District, with 18 schools and 10,000 students, is sprawled across 425 square miles of subdivision, mesquite and mountain ridges southeast of Tucson. Many parents work at local Raytheon and I.B.M. plants. Others are ranchers.”
Empire high has a self-directed learner model – looks good online, and judging from the news article, it looks good in practice. These aren’t my students, maybe not your students, either.
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Posted by Ed Darrell 
