Some interesting comments on paradigm shift, school structure, creativity, and divergent thinking.
Thanks to Joe Bower at Love of Learning for putting this up. I love the RSA Animate videos, I even show them to my classes when appropriate. Hadn't seen this one yet. I don't know what I think about Robinson's comments on ADHD, but the general theme is right on.
I am feeling so depressed about 'school reform' that I've found it really hard to pay attention to this blog. Plus, I'm teaching a prep I haven't taught in a while (Creative Writing- its awesome), so I am as busy as I can stand (aren't we all). Then I ran into this. I laughed my ass off, and it really hits the nail on the head. Diane Ravitch tweeted it.
Posted at Failing Schools, by Sabrina. She rocks, and Failing Schools is now added to our blogroll!
I told F. Scott today that I was fired up to figure out how to get laptops or ipads into the hands of my students. The more immersed I get in the Google universe (or the Googleverse as my students have suggested we call it), the more frustrated I get with the obstacles: having to take my whole class down the hall if I want them all on computers, and having to share this one lab with all of my department colleagues (which means having to sign up to use it well in advance), having a number of these computers nonfunctional on any given day... I could go on. It would be so much better if my students had access to the Googleverse (and any other web 2.0 tools I hope to use with them) at their desks in our classroom.
Up until now, I always knew I wanted laptops in my students' hands. But honestly, before now I didn't know exactly how I would use them. Now I know. I see new ways to use them every day and I get more and more frustrated that I don't have them.
I came across an article in the NYTimes this evening that helps to articulate exactly why we MUST make this shift in classrooms across the country. The longer we take to get our teaching wired, the more obsolete our teaching will become. The article explains this well:
"Even as technology spending in K-12 public education has risen steadily in the last 20 years, student performance — as measured by test results — has improved only incrementally. Meanwhile, children are proving to be wildly adaptive when it comes to using media outside school. They are fervently making YouTube videos, piloting avatars through complex game scenarios, sampling music, lighting up social networks and inventing or retooling (or purists would say, bludgeoning) language so that it better suits the text-messaging pay plan on their cellphones, only to show up to school to find cellphones outlawed, Internet access filtered and computers partitioned off from the rest of the classroom — at least in many cases. Michael H. Levine, who directs the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, acknowledges the conundrum. While there may be sound reasons behind limiting things like Internet browsing and social networking at school, he says, it does little to teach students how to live in the 21st century. It also may contribute to a broader relevancy issue. A 2006 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to examine the reasons that almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Researchers surveyed high-school dropouts in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country, where they were told again and again that school was boring. The final report recommended, among other things, that educators take steps to 'make school more relevant and engaging.'”
F. Scott helped me brainstorm an email to a key person in our school district to help me figure out how to actually get moving in this direction with my students. I think I'll enlist my students' help too... I'll keep you posted. M. Shelley
I had the opportunity this evening to attend the TEDx Denver Ed event, in conjunction with the current conference for the International Society for Technology in Education.
On the whole this event was inspiring. The talks were all compelling, and the hosts were full of personality. I walked away with thoughts about how I could get my students working on relevant problems in their community in ways that would line up with the curriculum of my course and with ideas about what it looks like to really take a classroom forward using web 2.0 technologies in a collaborative, problem solving, student-directed setting. I walked away with a renewed call for the audacity and courage that it will take every day to bring to reality the meaningful change that I envision for my students. These are good things of course.
But as my husband and I drove home, I told him that something critical was missing from the conversation for the evening, something that I couldn't quite figure out. But it was there, gnawing at me.
We were both quiet for a long time trying to figure out just what that missing component was.
I'll take a stab at putting words to this missing piece:
One of the first speakers, it seemed, had the job of contextualizing the conversation. he talked about how school funding is falling apart, how teacher jobs are getting cut across the country, how high stakes testing is placing the focus on things antithetical to real progress for our students in our schools. But after that first presentation, these issues became (as my husband said) "the elephant in the room." Nobody was addressing these issues in the way I guess I had hoped for.
See, that's what I've been working on in my thinking: we need seismic shift. Massive change. I see what I want my classroom to become, yet I have a hard time getting there. Why?
How might we go about changing a system that is largely the same it was in the late 1800s? How do we convince well-meaning teachers across the country that something actually is broken and needs to be fixed? How do we change the common vision of a productive classroom as one where students sit in rows and silently and passively listen to the teacher or quietly work at their desks?
How do we escape the tyranny of the way things have always been done?
I'm convinced. Our system is broken and we need to fix it. And I want to, yet I bump up against a wall of shared assumptions about what teaching and learning is all about, assumptions carried unquestioned in the minds of my students, their parents, my colleagues, and me. Even though I'm looking for these assumptions all the time in my own thinking, they still catch me and hold me within the bounds of the ways things have always been done.
One speaker this evening asked us to think about how simply layering on web 2.0 applications to our classrooms won't actually change anything if the heart of what we're doing isn't re-imagined and re-designed at the pedagogical level. I agree. That's the crux of my mission. I guess I wanted some help with how to accomplish this mission. THAT's what I wanted everyone to be talking about. Because if we can't accomplish this seismic shift, everything thing we do will just be business as usual and millions of American children will float through school, bored, and exit at the end without the critical skills they need to navigate their complex world.
And how on earth will we be able to actually realize this change within the current context of less funding, fewer teachers, larger classes, dwindling resources, and a country-wide reform movement still beholden to the mantra of high stakes testing, achievement, and teacher accountability?
THAT's the conversation I had hoped to take part in this evening.
I'm glad I was there. I feel honored to have been invited. I just wanted some help on how to shift thinking (in my community and across the country) on the very big ideas that organize the ways we all think about the purposes and practices of school.
Finally I've carved out some time to write what has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks.
I walked in my PhD graduation ceremony a few weeks ago. I finished everything for the program last summer, but my school only runs its graduation once a year. So nearly a year later, I got the pomp and circumstance to make it all feel complete.
The keynote speaker gave what was on the whole not exactly a sunny address. As she looked down at the dozens of graduates, (undergrads just heading out into the world of teaching, seasoned teachers earning master's degrees, and the ten of us receiving our doctorates) she painted a realistic picture of the state of education in America today. She talked about how reform measures attached to NCLB haven't been working. She talked about how the policy being dreamed up across the country will continue this trend. I remember wondering what the rest of the audience was thinking--the friends and family members of the graduates who may or may not know much about the world of education. Did they think the speaker was angry or bitter? Did they believe the picture she was painting of the state of education? I wanted to stand up and look at the audience and shout, "she's right you know! It IS this bad and it's only getting worse! PLEASE get involved. DO SOMETHING! HELP US!"
But I didn't. That would have horrified my mother-in-law more than if I had worn my bright green chuck taylors under my commencement gown. (I did consider that shoe choice, but only for a minute).
The speaker left us with this request: we must be soldiers of love. We must fight for our students and for what we know serves them best in their lives in the complex world they will face beyond school. Me must make our voices heard. This is why I went to see Diane Ravitch speak and why I have told as many people as I can about what she had to say. This is why I work tirelessly with my teaching to offer my students a classroom experience that will prepare them for what lies ahead in their lives. This is why I listen to them to better understand who they are, where they are headed, and how my teaching can help them toward those goals. This is why I write, why I send out articles for publication, why I'm working on a book manuscript of my doctoral dissertation, why I apply to present at a variety of conferences. This is why I wrote my governor and asked him to veto the law the state legislature recently approved regarding teacher effectiveness. I asked him to not only veto this law but take a stand against the current national reform movement, not play along with the Race to the Top money, and be a leader in demanding more meaningful reform. This is why I asked my colleagues to sign on with me on this letter when I sent it to the local newspaper.
The governor still signed the bill into law, and the newspaper didn't publish the letter, but I still need to speak up and fight for what I believe will best serve my students.
Soldiers of love. This should be the name of the counter educational reform movement.
This video has been making the rounds on the internet- It came to me by way of a friend on Facebook. Ah Facebook- occasionally good for something other than sucking your creative soul. It is a really fun animated version of Daniel Pink's talk at RSA. I love creative stuff like this, so I was instantly captivated. In fact, I watched it twice in a row so I would remember his main points. And I immediately found myself connecting his comments on drive, or what motivates us, to the occupations of both teaching and being a student.
Here is the video, some comments from me are below.
Pink identifies three factors that impact what he calls 'drive': Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Oh yeah, money is a factor, but not they way we might think, according to Pink (sorry for the rhyme).
Here is how I think this relates to the lives of teachers (I'll address students in another post when I have a chance- because I think what he says is also important in thinking about the experiences of students). For much of the history of public education- at least in my memory, teaching has been a comfortable middle class job. No one was getting rich, but none of us expected that. We made a living. This was using money in the way Pink identified- teachers made enough money to take the issue of money off the table. In return for stability, teachers lived with the fact that they wouldn't be subject to huge financial reward. For most of us that was a fair trade. Of course the high social prestige of the profession made up for some of that (note sarcasm here), but what was important was that it was a fair living, and since most of use have ambitions other than monetary, that was good enough.
What made teaching great was the abundance of the other three factors. Teaching has buckets of purpose. I have never met a teacher that didn't really believe in what they were doing- it's importance, it's meaningfulness, it's worth. You want purpose, education has purpose. Helping children learn and understand the world around them feels as meaningful as anything one could be doing.
For a long time, education has also had a fair bit of autonomy. Sure, in public education we are (and should be) accountable to our students and communities for providing the collective vision of eduction we are charged with, But for the most part, teachers and schools have had a high degree of autonomy in not only how we do our work, but often what that work actually is. Teachers were invited to participate in the discussion of what we should be doing, and had genuine influence. Further, in our classrooms, we often had tremendous autonomy. Though we were often told the what, the how of our work was mostly left up to teachers and groups of teachers in schools. As long as we met the expectations of our community, we were allowed freedom in how we did what we did. Note that the teachers we revere, both in our own lives and in our mythology, are the ones that exercised autonomy (think Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society)
And, teaching is hard. Really hard. It is the sort of higher level cognitive work Pink is discussing (I know it is fashionable in some quarters to claim that 'any person with the appropriate background can teach,' but that simply isn't true. It is hard, complicated, and takes time to get competent- a minimum of three years according to most research I have read). So mastery takes work. And we are never done. Over the nine years I have been in the high school classroom I have gotten continuously better, and every time I became aware that I had achieved a new level of competence in some way, it was also apparent to me how much further I needed to go.
So teachers were willing to put up with low social status and the less appealing parts of the job because it provided large amounts of the other things that Pink identifies as key to 'drive.' In many ways it was the perfect job (for the right sort of person). The rewards Pink is describing to produce high performance we actually working pretty well.
However, today what is happening in eduction is changing that. There is less financial stability, so money becomes an issue. I already live with a salary far below the average for my level of education, but the budget squeeze at the federal, state and district level is real and serious. My salary has never held pace with inflation, but it wasn't that far behind. Now we face real changes in the monetary aspects of education. One of my colleagues was literally in tears in her office the other day having heard that our districts 'offer' in this year's negotiations was a pay cut. It not that we are or should be immune from the realities of economics, I'm just pointing out that the game is changing. Money has been put back on the table in education and we are worried. And the stability that we used to trade for the lower salary is no longer. Benefits are being cut or squeezed, teachers are getting laid off in large numbers, and this will continue for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, there are major changes in the other factors Pink discusses. It is, again, fashionable right now to blame teachers for the problems in education. This has produced the most top heavy, top down model of management one can imagine. Teachers are losing autonomy very quickly right now. At the federal, state and district level, more focus is being put on controlling not only the what, but the how of teaching. Teachng is being transformed in some quarters from the cognitively challenging work it should be, into the sort of mechanical, menial labor that Pink says is exactly the sort of work in which the simple reward paradigm does work. Which might not be that big a deal, except that if you remember the best teachers you ever had, they probably weren't the ones who treated their work as mechanical menial work. They treated it like the intellectually complex challenging task that good teaching is. And if you think about the worst teachers you ever had, they were probably exactly the type of teacher that will fit well in the new vision of teaching.
As for the other two factors, education will never lack purpose, but if it feels like the very system you work in has committed itself to making it difficult if not impossible to achieve that purpose, then eventually all but the least imaginative will quit in frustration. And if we turn the job into a mechanical menial function, then there is no challenge in mastery, and that will cease to be a factor.
Now for the editorializing. As if I wasn't already doing that. It is always interesting to me that we (the collective 'we'- read 'that guy who has the Secretary of Education post and many others like him) think that 'business ideas' will save education, but when you hear that, the person saying it does not mean ideas like the one in Pink's lecture (or in the awesomely creative deployment by RSA Animate). No, the lessons of 'business' that we want to deploy in education all come from the manufacturing sector. Efficiency, scale, standardization. A business model with little room for the factors that Pink identifies as key to "drive." Also, interestingly, it is the part of our economy that our leaders continually tell us is not the future for our country. So we are trying to make a system for educating children (which NO-ONE ever says is not of grave importance), who we want to be passionate, autonomous and committed to mastery, using a system which researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago found is unlikely to allow the people who are the delivery system to be passionate, autonomous or committed to mastery. But we really want innovation? We think we want creativity in education? We want teachers passionately committed to the work they do and willing to labor at continuously improving? We could do that. But I don't think that's the direction we are heading right now.
It's two weeks to the end of the school year. I just spent two hours in which I should have been grading thinking about this, which is perfect anecdotal support for what Pink was saying. But I REALLY have to grade some papers today. Really.
