Blogg-Ed Indetermination

One of the hallmarks of factory automation models is the need to standardize parts, procedures, and work flow. It’s no coincidence then that when universal education started to become realized in the U.S. in the midst of the industrial revolution, the best minds of the time brought the industrial model of thinking to bear on schooling. Take a certain set of inputs (students),  apply a standardized manufacturing process (curriculum, teachers, classrooms), and at the end you get a standardized product: a high school diploma, indicative of a certain set of minimum skills.

It seems silly to us now to apply such a simple model to something as complicated as human beings, but I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the current model of American education is not that far different than it was one hundred years past.

Thirty-some years ago as a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, I was fortunate enough to live near a very innovative middle school in nearby Okemos, Michigan. Education at that time was in the midst of very interesting changes. Open-schools, behavioral psychology and teaching machines, block-scheduling, enforced integration, ethnic studies, peace studies…. It was a fertile time for educational experimentation.

Which model should of that time embrace? Which of these competing ideas and ideologies was anything more than a passing fad? What would colleges do with students coming from “different” programs? How could a school accommodate all this diversity?

Kinawa Middle School in Okemos, MI had an idea. Embrace them all, or at least most of them. Working with a creative staff, a daring principal, and a supportive Education Department at MSU, Kinawa created several different programs and provided teachers, students, and parents with the opportunity to choose the program that they wanted to participate in. Several “schools within a school” were the result.

Sadly, I lost track of what was happening at Kinawa after I completed by graduate studies. A quick glance at the school’s web site suggests nothing of this type of experimentation being conducted currently.

But the idea behind Kinawa has stayed with me these many long years.

I am a great believer in the marketplace of ideas. It was now always so. In my youth I could be a zealous, overbearing, and sanctimonious twit. (Some may think that my blog is evidence that I haven’t changed all that much.) But I like to think that I have, over time gained some modicum of patience. I have had the satisfaction of watching my more corn ball ideas be kindly forgotten by friends, and my better ideas come to fruition, albeit often in a more mature and better form.

And so we come to 21st century learning, and my discomfort with the either-or-ness that seems to sometime characterize the discussion:

• You are either full technology or you are against it.
• You are either innovative or stuck in the past.
• You are either global or parochial on your thinking.
• You are either an environmentalist or a you don’t care about our planet.
• You are either a promoter of social justice or a capitalist pig.

We talk a lot about the polarization in politics, and indeed there is ample amount of that to deserve discussion. And yet we fail to see the polarization in our own midst: teachers versus administrators, parents versus the school, teenagers versus adults.

We do not need a new model of education for the 21st century. We needs hundreds, thousands of new models of education for the 21st century. Each school, each classroom, each teacher, and each student has to create their own model of 21st century learning and teaching. The marketplace of ideas will separate the wheat from the chaff.

For the past several years, my school has sponsored wonderful assemblies and meetings featuring professors and physicians from Stanford about teenagers and sleep. They may be summed up as follows:

• teens are wired for different sleep patterns than adults or young children.
• teens don’t get enough sleep.
• sleep deprivation contributes to poor academic performance, mental and physical health problems, and student stress.

A few schools, including my own, have begun to experiment with starting school later in the day. The major problem seems to always come down to after school activities such as plays, clubs, and athletics, especially athletics. Athletics, with its dependencies on other schools for competition, seems to be the deal breaker – unless you can get all of the other schools in your area to affect a similar change. This has about as much chance as happening as members of our two political parties in congress agreeing on, well, anything.

But as Professor Smith in Lost in Space used to say: “Never fear, Smith is here.” (Note: substitute “Taffee” for “Smith.”)

All we need to do is throw-off the agrarian, nine month calendar that was foisted upon schools by well-meaning legislators; a calendar created chiefly to allow children time-off in the summer to work the family farm. Later, tourist bureaus chimed in with their support for summer vacation-friendly schedules which permit families to book  resorts, buy trinkets in souvenir shops, purchase boats, jet skis, and endless summers. As a kid growing up in Michigan, school always started after Labor Day to give the resort owners one last economic shot in the arm before the autumn doldrums.

The idea of year-round education is not new. Indeed some schools have been doing it for years. There’s even an association devoted to the cause.

There are compelling economic reasons to consider year-round education. Some year-round education schedules enable schools to service more students within the same physical structure, about 25% more. This makes a great deal of sense when schools are hurting for money and facilities are  cramped.

There are compelling academic reasons as well. Many teachers complain about the amount of re-teaching they must do each fall to address the knowledge and skills forgotten by students after a three month hiatus. Heck, I sometimes forget things in three minutes!

But my reason for thinking about year round school is mainly to address two stubborn problems that face all middle and upper schools:

1. student fatigue, and
2. lack of time for faculty professional development.

The typical 180 student contact days per year, with six instructional hours per day, computes to 1080 hours of instruction per year.

Now imagine a school day of five instructional hours per day. To get to 1080 instructional hours, we’d need to 216 days, or 36 additional days per year. (Note: there’s also nothing magic about 1080 hours of instruction per year.)

In my mind’s eye, we would strategically position three, four, even five day weekends for student time-off throughout the year, as well as traditional seasonal breaks. Students would have classes in each month of the year, and not simply add time to June and August, with all of July off.

Now, factor in faculty professional development, potentially twenty five extra days of faculty development per year! Getting excited yet?

Teachers, those long-suffering professionals who never find themselves quite in the same league as physicians, attorneys, scientist, architects, and the like; those same people who have to deal with the smart alecks at parties who “envy” them having their summers off, who think that teachers have it “easy,” such teachers might finally find parity with other professionals. Need a vacation? Take time off. Thinks the kids will go to hell in a hand basket without you? Believe me, the kids will be okay.

Yes, twelve month contracts will cost schools more money. This is not the “save money” model of year-round education. This is the “let’s get real about time” model of year-round education. And independent schools may be the only ones with the resources and innovative spirit to lead the way.

21st century learning asks us to re-imagine schools and learning in order to better prepare children for their future, not out past. Why aren’t then we thinking about something as simple as how students schedule their time, or rather, how we structure their time for them? For the vast majority of students the future will not be one built on agrarian calendars. Their professional development will be on-going, not something crammed into summer months or hurried meetings. They may work from home, or they may work in an office. They may work swing shifts or “bankers hours.” They may work four day weeks, or seven days on and three days off. But you can bet that, unless they are educators caught in today’s system, they won’t have a schedule such as the one they had for twelve years of their lives as students.

And here’s a final thought. For seniors, so soon off to college or a gap year, why not experiment with letting them determine their own vacation schedules, just like the grown-ups we’re say we are helping them to become?

Am I on to something or full of it? Let me know.