Last week, I reflected on our time at a number of education innovation and technology venues and some of the interesting premises about education, teaching, learning, schools, teachers, students, standards, etc…that surfaced when conversations happen devoid of educators for the most part. This is an extension of that previous post and serves as the first of three detailed observations we made during that time.
We distilled down much of our thinking to 3 general topics: Automate vs. Accentuate, Knowing vs. Understanding, Providing Resources vs. Teaching Students. Today’s episode is on the first item.
Automate vs. Accentuate
There is considerable focus on the use of data to make informed, automated calculations on student performance results and ultimately decisions on what a student knows and can do, and what might be better aligned to their needs instructionally at a given moment. Individualized learning ends up being the desired target of these efforts. When I consider Individualized Learning as a concept, I imagine a teacher working with just 1 student and intimately tying all of the instructional strategies, materials, projects, assignments, assessments, field trips, topics, etc…directly to that single child’s needs.
That would be an incredible experience for that learner. And given 5 students, the potency of this type of a learning environment could be retained by most teachers. Some teachers, maybe even able to keep the differentiated instruction at a high level for 10-15 students. But 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 students at a time? That’s not likely to happen with any real efficacy. Developing digital learning environments that attempt to create individualized learning structures based on formative and summative assessment data, even collected weekly in its most diverse forms…will not come close to the finely tuned teaching and learning experiences that could be engendered by a single, astute teacher.
What we can do though is focus on technologies that serve as an accouterment to the classroom teacher. Systems that do use all available data, limited or detailed, to help accentuate a teacher’s role in the lives of her or his students. Let’s develop technologies that increase a teacher’s ability to diversify their teaching strategies and materials with the same vigor as we are introducing ways to automate assessment and student data-tracking. Technology should look to enable the expensive, trained, systemically embedded human systems we have in place and not marginalize their intimate understanding of the students they serve.
Consider this: by the end of October teachers have spent over 300 hours with their students, and a teacher that has even just 3 years of experience has spent over 3,300 hours with students more similar than dissimilar to those they are serving now…let’s make room for that knowledge in our approaches. Make the student data clear and discernable, but don’t make it definitive. Use it as a supporting chapter to the story of a student to be combined with teachers’ understanding and inclinations about their kids to better consider materials and assignments. Use the technology to bring other competent, knowledgable people from the community, from families, from interested stakeholder groups into the classroom and the teaching process. Classes with 5-10 students might be fiscally unfeasible, but classes with 3-10 teachers any given week with one primary teacher every day of the week are possible.
We have seen a number of systems designed to “know” more about students academic progress and create opportunities to generate more individualized learning pathways for students through their learning process. Some are pretty impressive, some probably over-sell improbable outcomes…most have beautifully developed marketing videos and all are interesting propositions. Our hope is that most end up being thoughtful about our most adept and integrated instructional asset in the public education system…Teachers.
Our dream is that at least some end up as openly available resources and deliver critical services that aren’t kept from our schools and students of most need due to high cost structures wrapped around proprietary technical product.
Our calendar after the SxSW EDU events had us immediately in meetings at the CA. Dept. of Education and then at a 3 day educator conference showcasing online systems and curricular models. Having time now to reflect on one event that was primarily vendors,start-ups, and venture capitalists, and one focused on legislative will, governmental and department interplay at the state level, and the last a largely educator-centric and educational leadership get-together…we concluded that there is just a lot of uneducated to semi-educated guessing going on…on behalf of education in the ed-tech space. In processing all of this, we have come away with a few statements we felt strongly about regarding efforts to assist schools, teachers, students, families, education systems, etc…that might be of consequence and promote the bottom line of investors and companies as the case may be.
Here are the 3 general themes of those observations that I will elaborate on in more detail in the next few days…stay tuned.
For now, in the spirit of better understanding how schools see and consume technology, Education Week compiled a number of sources into a single infographic on the use of technology across the K-12 landscape that would be a good first step in looking at how schools rate various technologies and where they are electing to spend finite resources.
We had the pleasure of presenting some of our ideas and related technology on how to better use data to provide more effective, individualized Common Core resource aggregation and related professional development @ SXSWedu. Identified technologies include a new CCSS standards browser that draws OER metadata from the Learning Registry and prototype tools for fostering those materials into activities for both teacher CCSS professional development and classroom use. Research on our pilot model for this PD approach is also included.
On Valentine’s day, we had the pleasure of spending time with about 40 exceptional teachers. First off, I would like to acknowledge that these fine folks were made to spend their Valentine’s Day and the day after with us developing standards-aligned curriculum models online. As is typical, we like to gather as many are willing the first night of our training for dinner together somewhere local. And per the information laid out above…that had a group of about 20 of us looking for a place to eat on good ‘ol V-Day. We landed at AppleBees and inadvertently took many viable tables away from couples trying to commemorate the evening amongst a tribe of educators eating, drinking, and speaking of standards, activities, and instructional experiences with way too much enthusiasm.
Indeed we, like the teachers we accompanied…were not with our sweethearts. But there was plenty of love due to the fact that some of the most inspiring, dedicated, giving people you could ever hope to find yourself with on any given day, if not you’re own sweetie, are teachers. Here are some videos of the great people we were able to work with this last month.
This morning, I was contacted by my Mentor Teacher from years ago. She finds herself in a training on PLC in Arizona today with 2000 others. There is an auditorium, and there are experts on the stage illuminating the need to craft a school culture that embraces learning, values communication, and commits to data-driven results. “Common Core State Standards are challenging us to not conduct business as usual.” rings out across the room. I am not certain, but I would guess she has now taught middle and high school for close to 25 years. She asks my opinion on this whole “PLC thing” via Facebook message on her iPad and it pings my cell phone at 7:30am. By 8:30 am she concludes,
“Slick delivery and structure. It’s like they have a director backstage orchestrating the performance. They’re smart, but given that this is what it takes to point out the obvious doesn’t bode so well for our schools.”
I only hear from her about once a year any more and as usual it conjures in me fond recollections of student-teaching in her classroom, and in this particular instance, it is accompanied by the odd thought of her so far away from her own students today, sitting amongst a few thousand others, attentively listening to a panel of experts share how to make her school and her classroom more successful. How to “gear-up” for Common Core and be accountable to student learning.
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”]First School Assigned to Author as a Student Teacher
Years ago, when I was a young teacher-to-be, I was assigned to the very small, rural high school in a small town near the river. The school was only 350-students-and-16-teachers-small in fact. The student body was largely made up of deep, long-time farming families that spanned generations in this area of the far-northern, central California valley. There was a rich, agricultural heritage that permeated the school historically and surrounded it physically by way of orchards and rice fields that washed directly up along the edges of the campus. As one might guess, there was a large percentage of Latino students and a fair number of Caucasian students as well. Beyond those demographic terms, their lives were very similar as were those of their families for generations in most instances. While I elected to use the descriptors rich and deep above, I would not extend them to describe the fiscal resources of the community, the school or most of its families. “But,” the Principal explained to me in the demure school library, where the walls were adorned by the pictures of EVERY graduating class dating back to the early 1900’s, “I not only know every student on this campus, I also know most their families.” That was rich. He glanced at my assigned class rosters, “Let me see here. You’ll have Elba Mendez in 3rd period, I had her mother as a student in 1982, Margaret, right there.” pointing to one of the frames on the wall. “And, her uncle and I graduated together as well.” he added pointing to another. He could then identify her siblings, uncles, cousins, aunts, parents, and even grandparents. That was deep. As I quickly scanned these pictorial homages to the denizens of this small community, I focused in on where he had gestured to his and Elba’s uncle graduating class. Sure enough, a row down from her tio, there sat a spry, bright-eyed 18-year-old version of the Principal himself. Class President, baseball star, soon-to-be college student and eventually, a returning teacher to this very school where he would go on to live out his educational career.
My Mentor Teacher was a woman I did not expect to find in this very small, very cloistered corner of the county. She was not small, was well traveled, and had a very diverse series of life events and choices before landing at this site. She seemed in no way common to this environment, yet was entirely comfortable in it. (She had been a nationally-ranked shot-putter attending the Pan-Am games in Cuba, had taught in Kinsasha in the Democratic Republic of the Congo before being whisked out by helicopter in the face of advancing, hostile bands of rebels intent on killing or capturing teachers and intellects as part of the ongoing civil war there, and had recently worked with friends to personally design and build a straw-bail, sustainable, energy-efficient two-story home nearby on her horse ranch with her partner prior to such endeavors being en vogue). She was familiar though to the dynamics of this town and these students based on her own experiences growing up in almost the exact same type of community and school, only 20 years earlier in a small town even more remote, 220 miles further to the north straddling the Oregon border. She taught both English and History, was a fervent believer in project-based learning, and also adhered to giving students direct structures by which to learn to read and write critically.
[/fusion_builder_column][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”]Author (upper right corner) with students in San Francisco
She wanted desperately for students to see and understand the world far beyond their small town. She often tied their instruction back to the tenets of Joseph Campbells’ literary motif, The Hero’s Journey. She challenged students to consider the humble and beautiful familiarness of their hometown as wonderful, but also recognize the restrictive nature of those same things when trying to define their own identities in the context of a community that knew them before they were even born. I introduced her to the Internet, as a means to bring more of the world to more of our students, she was mildly intrigued…she in turn introduced me to teaching. Not as an exercise, or an area of study, but as a calling…as a passion. She allowed me to experiment and take the lead on unconventional projects. She allowed me to fail. Fail miserably, and not bail me out even though she was sitting in the back of the room with a look of, “Well, you got yourself here…now what?” She made me go with the kids on a 4 hour bus ride to San Francisco and take them to see Phantom of the Opera in a classic theater setting. Upon arriving in downtown SF a “mere” 5 hours early “so the students can experience a city”, she prepped me with, “We will need them back at the bus an hour before tonight’s show.” I inquired, “To ask them to share-out what they saw and learned this afternoon?” “No” she replied, “So you can tie the boys’ ties for them.” Through all of the on and off-site adventures of that year, the only rule she ever attached to my foibles was the condition that we would talk about the teaching/learning experience, examine it, understand it, and ultimately accept it, good or bad, but never reproach it. She also reserved the right to introduce any parts of my classroom failings to the general conversation that occurred daily in the staff lunchroom (roughly the size of a small bedroom or a large bathroom, take your pick) as the fodder of great laughter and guffawing for the other teachers. Even in a small staff room, at a small school, new teacher’s need to anticipate creating a large space for humility.
Slightly disparaged, but opting to warmly see my lunch-room admonishments as “faculty initiation” and thus acceptance, I would trod back into Wendy’s classroom each day determined to try something new. She would invite me to introduce Marvell’s and and Donne’s carpe diem poetry as a tool of antiquated seduction and I would in turn invite students to compare those methods of young poets from centuries past to similar efforts by young artists of the ’90’s. Venn diagrams with Marlowe’sThe Passionate Shepherd to His Love on one side, 2Pac’s What You Wont Do For Love on the other. It kind of worked. We started a drama program. By general solicitation initially (and then admittedly subtle coercion of kids with border-line academic GPAs required for sports and extra-curricular activities) we gathered over 25 students to join in our after-school drama program and put on a full production of Leonard Wibberley’s 50’s era, cold-war satire The Mouse That Roared in relation to our post-World War II US History units. We did a showing for our whole school, the elementary school, and two evening performances for the community on an old stage in the cafeteria that had gone unused for over a decade. I had no idea what I was doing; the school didn’t seem to notice and the students didn’t seem to mind. A friend of mine who managed a Pier 1 a city away allowed us to borrow about $4,000 in merchandise as stage props for two weeks to create a very believable throne-room for our play. Without permission from her company, nor insurance from my school, we drove the loosely bundled items through the open air of the orchards in the back of our trucks to the waiting hands of students eager to create Grand Fenwick’s palace amongst the folding tables and lunch trays of our aged school cafeteria late into the night. Years later, I would confess my early ignorance to the Principal regarding the drama program and teaching in general that first year. His reply, “I knew what you were doing. You were caring, and that’s all I’ve ever asked of any of my staff.”
I could go on. Suffice it to say, I survived that year. And more importantly, so did the kids. I owe them a debt of gratitude as I do to all of the students I was able to eventually meet in my career. I hold a special place for all my former colleagues as well. But today I am thinking about my original Mentor Teacher and that particular small-town Principal, and the humble community that gave an unknown, unqualified new teacher unfettered access to their most prized possessions by way of their children. There is a richness beyond dollars you find in some communities, and if you’re lucky, you will come across such a place and they will share it with you. I hold those early experiences and my time in education foremost in my work to this day. I try to carefully consider the spirit of my former students, the hopes of their families, and the passion of my former colleagues as key arbiters of my work each day. As we internally discus social learning models, resource metadata schemas, and how to graft formative results into adaptive summative systems I often take pause and consider where are the teachers, students, and families represented in these constructs and in that moment, they still aid me.
So as I wrap up this post, let me end with this thought on national efforts to reform education, statewide attempts to reinvent professional development, and unilateral approaches to re-focus communities on the learning of their youth. The degree to which we collectively come to understand how to best improve our schools, will largely correlate to the degree we recognize that people like my former Mentor Teacher and Principal should not be in the audience, but indeed should be on the stage…if there need be a stage at all.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
On February 14th and 15th, 50 of California’s top teachers in the areas of Multi Media Design, Video Production, Graphics Technology, Animation, Computer Assisted Design, Robotics, Computer Aided Manufacturing, and Engineering Technology will convence by way of road, rail, and air in Northern California to co-develop year-long sequences of full online curriculum projects in their related disciplines.
Navigation North has been contracted to support the development and delivery of the direct training and the structure of the online digital resource development process to provide these teams the means to author all of their materials and activities online for full dissemination on California’s CTE ONLINE website (www.cteonline.org). We will also be working to align all materials to the new Common Core State Standards and feed all resulting work to the federal Learning Registry.
For a month beyond the initial training series, these teacher teams will utilize the online environment to continue to collaborate and hone their projects for full publication later this Spring. We anticipate the amount and quality of these fully cross-integrated STEM projects to represent some of the best and creative instructional thinking and classroom experience California has to offer and look forward to promoting the results across the entire nation!
Navigation North was selected from an international field of applicants to present at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) edu conference and festival. Keynoting will be Bill Gates, you will find our presentation listed in the Conference sessions under Big Data and Emerging Technologies as “CCSS Implementation Tools vs. Orientation Rhetoric; Give the Teachers What They Want.”
Take a look at the exciting teams and concepts that were accepted for this exclusive event and consider making a run for the desert this Winter to connect with some of the innovation occurring across various education sectors world wide.
The largest national Common Core State Standards assessment consortium released their much anticipated Technology Strategy Framework and System Requirements Specification documents and in the announcement below cited Navigation North’s role in conducting the research and producing the ensuing documentation.
Joshua Marks, CTO @ Curriki (www.curriki.org) wrote a nice, succinct article on the relevance of LRMI (the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative) in which he has been participating as part of their Technical Working Group. There is a catchy video for the project as well…and a piece on how it relates to the Learning Registry and the Shared Learning Infrastructure projects. (linked below)
We will be joining Joshua this week in Denver with around 30 other national leaders on related work creating granular identifiers for the Common Core State Standards for better pinpointing of relevant materials and resources online as aligned to single concepts and skills often embedded in related clusters within a single standard.
Navigation North has been asked to participate in the Granular Identifiers and Metadata for the Common Core State Standards (GIM-CCSS) Project.
We will be traveling to join a team of national partners in Denver, Colorado on Dec. 11th and 12th to start on this critical work. The GIM-CCSS project is being managed by the State Education Technology Directors Association in collaboration with the following Steering Committee members and the respective agencies they represent:
Tony Alpert, Smarter Balanced, Co-Chair
Doug Jaffe, New York Regents Research Fund/PARCC, Co-Chair
Wes Bruce, Indiana Department of Education/PARCC
Dan Domagala, Colorado Department of Education/CCSSO’s Education Information Management Advisory Consortium (EIMAC)
Geoff Fletcher, SETDA
Steve Garton, Maine Department of Education/SBAC
Doug Levin, SETDA
Susan Van Gundy, Achieve/PARCC
The technical work to be undertaken by GIM-CCSS is very specifically limited in scope to developing digital references to the conceptual statements already contained within the CCSS documents and to preserving the logical structure dictated by the standards authors. It will build on the prior work of CCSSO-NGA, and with their input, describe and publish more detailed, digital, machine-readable identifiers and metadata for the Common Core. Products of the project will be published as an open standard to enable non-restricted use, maximize interoperability, and promote extensibility.
