Blogg-Ed Indetermination

In a previous post I wrote about the academic school year and it’s roots in an agrarian society, and I called for us to re-think the school year.

This post asks us to think about years again, but in this case it has to do with the belief that chronological age is the best means of organizing students for instruction. Is it?

Thinking about a child’s age and readiness for school begins when the child is very young. As far as I know, parents may even try to conceive children at certain times of the year in the hope that they (the children) will be eligible to enter kindergarten in the fall of the year.

The map to the left indicates the kindergarten age eligibility by state. (Click on the map to see a more readable version).

But as an elementary school teacher can tell you, there is a huge range in the abilities, maturity, and social skills of young students.

Indeed, some parents are using this variability to try to give their children an “edge” by withholding their children from kindergarten despite being age eligible. The thought is that this extra maturity will help them outperform their peers, providing greater confidence that will pay off benefits in middle and upper school.

Once students are in school, significant differences in academic and emotional intelligence may regress towards the mean, or they may become exaggerated. In cases where a child might benefit from a placement at another grade level, it often very difficult to accomplish. Parents may be thrilled to hear that their child can “skip” a grade, but are often resistant when the recommendation is to be “held back” a grade. And teachers may be equally resistant to receive a child in either case in the belief that one way or the other the child will differ substantially from the others in their class.

The focus should always be, of course, what is best for the child. Not what is convenient for the teacher, or the effect on the parents’ egos. Grade levels, I submit, get in the way of making the best decision for children due to the shame associated with being held back and the uneven and often unfair expectations of being prematurely promoted.

There is an alternative to age-based grade levels, but it is not widely popular. “Continuous progress” schools have been around for decades. (The one-room school house was an early forerunner of the continuous progress school.) Continuous progress seem to exist mostly within the “alternative” environment of independent and charter schools, and are characterized by ungraded, multi-age classrooms wherein each child has an individual educational plan and mastery, not time, becomes the variable for progress.

(Making time the variable, incidentally, is one of the major benefits of online learning and its disruptive effects on traditional learning outlined in the wonderful book, Disrupting Class, previously reviewed.)

To make matters even more interesting—and contentious—one can argue that Advance Placement courses are a result of the inequities of a grade-based educational system. Started over fifty years ago, AP courses were designed to allow advanced high school students to take college-level courses in their high school and receive credit for it at the college or university they attended upon graduation. In one way, this can be construed as a nod towards continuous progress insofar as schools recognized that a certain subset of students needed more of an academic challenge than some of their peers. But oh my, what the AP has morphed into now! (More in a future post about APs.)

So no grade levels and no grading? What are you trying to do, remake American education?

Precisely that.

The last book I read in 2008, and my first one to review for 2009, is likely to get the prize for the most verbose title of the year: Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievment Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills our Children needs – And What We Can Do About It (Amazon Citation). Nevertheless it’s a great read, and a fitting companion to the current hit and still my favorite book for 2008, Disrupting Class.

Wagner had me hooked in the Preface, when he states “One of my biggest concerns is that most high school educators do not feel any urgency for change…. The result is that course curricula and teaching practices have remained pretty much the same for fifty years or more.” Amen to that, brother Tony. In fact, it seems that far too many educators eschew any sense of urgency or, alas, even excitement, joy, or energy in their teaching. Change? Fuggadaboutit!

But perhaps schools are not changing because “there is no consensus about what type of changes are needed or might work.”  Wagner sets out to discover what those changes might be, and his book might enable educators to  come to consensus, at least within their community, as to next steps.

The genesis of Wagner’s book can be traced to another seminal work of the last decade, Tom Friedmans’ The World is Flat, and the challenge that developing nations pose to U.S. workers as more and more work is exported from America to take advantage of lower wages and eager workers overseas. Wagner laments that while the world has changed, schools have not. And most of the leaders who might be able to do something about it are limited by our “past experience [which] still shapes how we think about school.” We have a hard time imaging anything different, because all of our experiences have had a homogenized, factory model sameness about them since the early 1900s.

So what does Wagner advocate, and from whom does he seek guidance about what we should be doing? Turns out that he speaks to a lot of people outside of traditional U.S. K-12 education: business people, international educators, college professors and administrators. And he finds a surprising amount of consensus abut what is needed, which he distills into seven “survival skills:”

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
3. Agility and Adaptability
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information
7. Curiosity and Imagination

Not exactly the Three Rs. Nor will you find these items as part of NCLB. Ditto for standardized achievement tests or college entrance exams. But he believes they are the key to the future of American education. And he sets out to tell us how we might effect such a change.

Part of the challenge is to help us redefine what is meant by academic “rigor” and how we assess it. Through case studies, anecdotes, and interviews Wagner lays out a compelling story of how American education got where it is today, and how misguided attempts at school reform have cemented us to the past and put our nation at risk of losing its relevance in both the economic marketplace and the marketplace if ideas, innovation, and democratic ideals.

Wagner points to alternative assessment vehicles as sources of inspiration and urgency to help us discover ways of testing student’s abilities to demonstrate academic rigor and mastery of the seven survival skills. Such assessments as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and it partner the College and Work Readiness Assessment (CWRA), and the ISKills Test.

But you say, what about AP courses and AP Exams? Surely they must provide relevant assessment results. “Advanced Placement Courses have grown rapidly in populatiry—in part, perhaps, because they appear to be the only way to increase the level of rigor in high school classes,” says Wagner. And he cites research form colleges that indicates that “success on AP exams is not a good predictor of success in comparable college courses.”

Wagner says that for education to become more than a “profession without a practice” characterized by “random acts of excellence” and “Reform Du Jour,” it will require “reinventing the teaching profession.” He calls on teachers and administrators to end the isolation of teaching and begin visiting one another classrooms as a step in the right direction. So is videotaping of lessons for later review with colleagues, portfolio assessment, mentoring programs and reduced teaching loads for new teachers, and replacing Ed.D. degrees with “M.B.A.’s for school administrators”—ditching most of the required coursework in school of education graduate degree programs. Among the surprising (to me) models for schools that are doing this right are DOD (Department of Defense) schools.

Reinventing the education profession is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the needed changes, however. We must also know how to motivate “today’s students, and tomorrow’s workers.” T0 do this, we need to understand today’s students and embrace how they are different from us. One measure of their difference is their facility with digital media. He cites the work of John Seely Brown who says that “Navigation may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st Century.” And we’re not talking about coloring in maps here, folks, but “learning through multimedia and connection to others, learning as discovery, and learning by creating.”

Wagner closes with compelling stories from several model schools:

• High Tech High in San Diego,
• The Met network of schools in Providence Rhode Island, and
• The Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts.

The stories of these schools have been told before, but are great reading.

The only sour note for me in the entire book was Wagner’s suggestion that professional educators associations such as NCTE, NSTA, and NCSS must define what it means to be literate in their disciplines. I think relying on them is overly optimistic. In my view such “learned societies” are hopelessly out-of-touch with the kind of challenges Wagner so vividly describes in his book. Time will tell, I guess.

As mentioned in my introduction, this book makes a wonderful companion piece to Disrupting Class and may be a less provocative way to initiate conversations with colleagues, parents, board members and others in your community about the future of education and the urgency to act now. A great book. Read it. Now.

I have written before about the wonderful book, Disrupting Class, by Clayton Christensen, et al. The book seems to be making the rounds in the blogosphere, and its three authors are appearing in interviews and web casts

This is a good thing. The book deserves a wide readership and, even more importantly, deep discussions amongst school leaders. Thus it was that I was excited to tune in to last week’s EdTech Talk with during which the book was discussed with Patrick Bassett, President of the National Association of Independent Schools.

(Full disclaimer: I work for an independent school that is a member of NAIS).

Bassett is one of the most wired and savvy education executives I know and therefore I was not surprised that he has not only read Disrupting Class, but he understands and embraces the implications of the authors’ assertions regarding the future of education.

It may be even more surprising that Pat represents a sector of education that many people many believe represents the ivy walls, tradition, and conservatism. But Bassett is not that that kind of leader. Indeed, he is recommending Disrupting Class as recommended reading to all NAIS members and believes it critical that we engage in thoughtful discussions at all levels within our organizations. He believes that NAIS schools have a leadership responsibility to help define future schools along five themes of sustainability, and that programmatic sustainability requires schools to change to reflect 21st century practices such as those discussed in Disrupting Class.

Listen to Bassett’s remarks: www.edtechtalk.com/21cl_88

By far the best education book I read this summer – and perhaps the best in the past five years – is Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (Amazon citation) by Clayton M. Christensen (Wikipedia citation), Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.

This book challenges us to think very differently about education, and posits that disruptive innovation is coming to education faster than we think. “Disruptive innovation” holds special meaning for Christensen. His previous books, The Innovators Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution explored the role of disruptive innovations in industry, such as the transistor and the Internet. We’re talking huge disruptions which led to the demise of entire companies, made fortunes for others, and led to huge social and economic changes in society. Schools, which many would argue haven’t changed all that much in the last hundred years, are about to be similarly changed.

What’s behind this change is student centric technologies, including distance learning and adaptive computer assisted instruction, that changes the paradigm of education to make time to learn something a variable, instead of a constant, in the classroom. Students are typically taught content in a linear, lock-step fashion which is interrupted a certain intervals to assess comprehension and you either get it or you don’t. In order to “cover” a given curriculum, teachers are compelled to move to the next topic even when one or more students don’t comprehend the previous information.

The authors lay out compelling arguments for why schools seem to resist change, and how the disruptive innovations that are occurring can be used to propel schools forward into a more effective model of education. Based on their experience with other disruptive innovations, they predict that by 2019, just over ten years from now, about 50% of high school courses will be delivered online. This is not a linear progression in online learning, but the classic hockey stick curve. What are YOU doing to prepare for this?

The end notes in this book are much more than simply citations, but serve to elaborate ideas and are very readable. Don’t skip them.

Out of all the four books I read this summer, this is the one that I am most recommending to my colleagues to read. I’m already planning on a re-read for myself, and looking forward to discussing this with others.

Read this book, and check out the Disrupting Class website. You won’t regret it.