SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

Today's blog is more gee whiz, here comes the Internet tsunami to transform education, and I know we've heard it before - first, radio was going to be the panacea and then it was televsion, and of course they did nothing of the sort. But I really think the Internet is transformative: I mean, look at what it's done to movies and books and communications and banking. Look at Google and Facebook and amazon.com. 

And in this vein I offer Forbes Magazine's cover story on Salman Khan. And to get a clearer picture of what's coming down the pike, read this interview with Mr. Khan. Here's a crucial excerpt, outlining where the Khan Academy is headed. H/T JE

"A lot of the criticism I have [gotten] is “There is no such thing as a silver bullet. The Khan Academy is not going to solve education’s problems.” And we agree with that 100 percent. At the same time, we think we’re at the very top of the first inning. Over the next five years we are going to be investing heavily, more than anyone, in analytics that give you a dynamic assessment. What does a student know? What does a student not know? How effective is the tutorial? That is what is exciting. That is the possibility of doing experimentation at Internet speed with Internet scales of data. So what you see today at Khan Academy is a very crude approximation of where we’ll be in five or 10 years. And even that won’t be the silver bullet. But we’ll be moving in the right direction."

Universities are losing their monopoly

GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND

The next step in the evolution of on-line universities has arrived:  Antioch University is integrating courses from MOOCs into their accredited degree programs.   http://www.antioch.edu/antioch-announcement/antioch-university-becomes-first-us-institution-to-offer-credit-for-mooc-learning-through-coursera/   They don't present it this way, but basically you get credit for a 'free' on-line course by paying them to certify it.

There might be some value-add for the tuition price beyond the calligraphed diploma.  At Antioch, there will be a faculty member serving as a facilitator so that students aren't entirely on their own.   But I'd guess that university staff everywhere are outraged because 'facilitator' isn't going to be a tenure-track position.

There is nothing new about on-line courses or distance learning.  There isn't even anything new about disintermediation of university functions;  Pearson offers exam centers and Sage offers on-line libraries.  But splitting teaching and credentialing functions cuts to the heart of the monopoly that has sustained universities for 800 years.  It won't be long before we see degree-granting universities whose only assets are their reputation and supply chain.

Ontario was promised an on-line university in the 2011 throne speech.  We're still waiting, but it just became a lot cheaper.

MOOCs - a game changer?

The New York Times has a feature article on MOOCs (massive open online courses). This is a must-read article for anyone interested in where education is heading. Right now, MOOCs are pitched only to university students, but I can't see any reason why they couldn't be offered to high school students in due course. The phenomenon is still in its early development stages, and there's no telling where it will go. Think early days of the telephone or television or automobile. Right now, we can see only through a glass, darkly. 

Truth and Hope

Here's a very powerful speech by a Teach for America alumnus about what is possible for extremely disadvantaged students. Unfortunately, in Ontario we lack both of the essential ingredients for this kind of large-scale success - Teach for America and charter schools.

Sunday at the Movies (Our children, our choice)

Here's the latest release in our video series - this time featuring Alberta's charter schools.

Practice Better Teacher Training

A few PD day activities are frivolous (think going skiing, for example), a few PD day activities are beneficial (think getting important information), but the vast majority of PD day activities are well-intended but useless. The following excerpt from Practice Perfect (pp 10-13) encapsulates what is so often going wrong.

"Our workshops and our schools were full of people who wanted to be better teachers and were willing to work for that. We had things to teach them that could make them better. But too often we failed to do so. Here's an example: one technique that differentiated great teachers from the merely good was the way they used nonverbal interventions to correct behavior during their teaching. The idea was that using words to correct students who were in danger of becoming off task required teachers to interrupt the thread of instruction in their classroom. A teacher stopped to correct one student, and two others became distracted - a death spiral. Champion teachers solved this dilemma by using nonverbal correction. Colleen Driggs, a legendary teacher at our school in Rochester, New York, taught her students nonverbal signals to correct the three or four behaviors most likely to occur when their attention was slipping. When Colleen pointed to her eyes, it meant that students should 'track the speaker' - look at the student who was talking so they would stay engaged in the conversation. When Colleen clasped her hands in front of her, it was a reminder to sit up straight. If Colleen made a brief hands-down gesture, it was a reminder for students to put their hands down while another student was talking, the idea being that if your hand remains up you are thinking about what you want to say and not really listening to your peer.

"Teachers loved the video of Colleen teaching and correcting nonverbally. It seemed brilliant and obvious at the same time, and teachers were excited to try it themselves. Back at our offices we set up a sort of teaching lab to try out different practice activities. Several of us played students. We misbehaved. And while we did so, we sent a brave teacher I'll call 'Jen' to the front of the room to try to teach a lesson. She did some good work, but we learned that practicing successfully was much harder than it looked. It was hard to remember to make nonverbal interventions in the moment. Jen went back to old habits under duress. Plus, we hadn't let her think through in advance how she'd handle the behaviors. Trying to decide what do to in the moment distracted her and caused her to make other mistakes. Our misbehaviors were either too frequent or too soon so that Jen never really got to the heart of her lesson. We were having such a great time channeling misbehaving students that when corrected we'd keep ratcheting things up so that there was always another thing for Jen to try to fix. She'd struggle through an interaction, think of a better response, and repeat the role play, but this time we'd model different behaviors. She never got to practice her fix. Control was always just behond her grasp.

"In the debrief Katie nailed the issue. 'What Jen just did was practice failing,' she said. 'She practiced but she didn't really glimpse what success feels like. She's just ingrained failure even more deeply.' We quickly realized one of our first rules of practice - one of the most violated yet important - which we'll discuss in the first chapter: practice should involve people practicing success, even if it means, as it did in this case, simplifying the activity. We began simplifying by making the off-task behavior predictable. Only two people were allowed to be off task. And we told Jen who they were. Now she could allocate her energy to making effective corrections. Then we realized that we needed to let Jen play not just any response but the right response. After all, Colleen had done that in her video: she had identified the three most common behaviors beforehand and planned a gesture to correct each. So we added a preliminary activity in which the teacher got a list of typical off-task behaviors (for example, a student staring out the window; a student with her head down on the desk). Jen first had to plan what gesture she'd use to correct the student. Then she practiced making hte gesture a few times. Next, she faced the class, but with the studnets doing the exact behaviors she'd just prepared for in a predictable order. She practiced using what she'd learned, and we made the practice more 'realistic' (complex and difficult) only when she was ready for more. Eventually, we added other pieces: a coach to give feedback; the requirement that Jen practice using the feedback right away by redoing the activity. We also added variables we could adapt if teachers found this activity too hard or if they were successful right away.

"As we began to use this activity in workshops, we could instantly see the difference: not only in people's reactions to the workshops but in their classrooms. Teachers not only successfully implemented the techniques (we could see it clearly when we videotaped them), but they began to adapt the techniques in new and even more effective ways, which we in turn learned from and added to the trainings we offered.

"Over the course of that first afternoon, the next months, and finally over several years, we honed our practice activities into tools that could help make teachers better, at scale. Somewhat unexpectedly, this made teachers happy. At first they were a bit skeptical about practicing - some of them were a lot skeptical. After all, it's awkward and makes you a bit self-conscious at first. But after a few rounds teachers could see themselves improving, both in the practice and in their classroom afterwards, and this had a powerful psychological effect. They realized that the things that happened in their classroom were within their control, that they owned what happened. Success had taught them that they could fix things, step by step. And they wanted more. Further, they enjoyed getting to work with peers in a collegial setting. Practicing together made teaching a team sport."

Practice Creative

I'm currently reading Practice Perfect: 42 rules for getting better at getting better by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. I found the discussion around practice and creativity fascinating, and therefore reproduce part of it here (pp 37-39). 

"It's worth pausing here to observe that arguing in favor of more drilling would set many American educators on edge. Many educators perceive drilling - which they characterize with the pejorative 'drill and kill' - to be the opposite,the enemy, of higher-order thinking. To them, an explicit correlation between imagination and drilling would be anathema. Learning that asks students to memorize and automate will reduce their ability to generate creative thoughts and make cognitive leaps, such educators might argue.

"The problem with that argument is that learning generally doesn't work that way. As cognitive scientists like Daniel Willingham have shown, it's all but impossible to have higher-order thinking without strongly established skills and lots of knowledge of facts. Cognitive leaps, intuition, inspiration - the stuff of vision - are facilitated by expending the smallest possible amount of processing capacity on lower-order aspects of a problem and reapplying it at higher levels. You leap over the more basic work by being able to do it without thinking much about it, not by ignoring it. This synergy between the rote and the creative is more commonly accepted in many nations in Asia. 'Americans have developed a fine dichotomy between rote and critical thinking: one is good, the other is bad,' write the authors of one study [editor's note: we have this book in our library] of Japanese schools. But they find that many types of higher-order thinking are in fact founded on and require rote learning. Creativity often comes about because the mind has been set free in new and heretofore encumbered situations.

"In business school Doug once worked in a group trying to solve a macroeconomic problem. It came down to an equation made up of dozens of variables scrawled across a whiteboard. Solving it seemed impossible. Then a member of the team - educated in Eastern Europe, not coincidentally - walked to the whiteboard. 'This part of the equation must be negative,' he said, circling a series of variables. 'This coefficient is negative, and every other value is positive.' He then circled two more strings of variables. 'These two must be positive, because in this one all of the values are positive and in this one we multiply two negative values. So we have, really, in this equation a negative times two positive. This must give a negative.' He said down: 'Like this, we will all go bankrupt.' He had leapt over and across the problem in a way no one else had, not because he ignored the rote work but because he was so facile at it. To skip over the mundane parts you have to know them cold. John Wooden said that ' wanted to be as surprised as our opponent at what my team came up with when confronted with an unexpected challenge.' What's counterintuitive is Wooden's belief about how you got there. Drilling let players' creativity emerge under pressure."