Two Steps Forward . . . Several Back

Posted on July 22, 2009 by JimS

Judith SotirBy Judith Sotir

I absolutely agree with Judith McDaniel (What Students Want and How to Design for It: A Reflection on Online Teaching, posted on July 19, 2009) that online learning of any sort requires a different dynamic than traditional teaching techniques. Although technology has moved from an interesting idea in the latter part of the last century to a defining role in this century, I don’t see schools necessarily following suit.

A good example is a recent workshop I did for staff from a local school district. The instructors specifically requested a workshop on “Using Blogs and Wikis in the Classroom” and were willing to give up some summer sun hours to attend. The tech coordinator (or facilitator, since the position of technology coordinator was eliminated and a principal stepped in to fill the gap) was more than willing to set up the workshop. However, when I got to the school (and remember, the TOPIC was blogs and wikis), I found that the firewalls blocked all access to any form of social websites, including blogs and wikis. I spent a good amount of time with the IT department getting access to a limited number of blogs and had to verify the content of those (even my own, by the way) I was given access to.

laptop with the words The Internet crossed out by a red St Andrew's Cross

Even after gaining access, throughout the workshop, that access was spotty, as links were sometimes allowed and sometimes blocked. From the instructor viewpoint, wanting to bring these tools into the classroom was questionable, given that experience. While filtering websites is important to schools, better dialogue is needed to allow instructors the access they need to teaching tools while still maintaining control of questionable content.

As a former school board member, I recall similar issues in the late’ 80s and ’90s with the IT department, administrators, and even board colleagues regarding having access to the Internet itself from the classrooms. While they saw the value of administrators and staff using the Internet, they balked at allowing the same access in the classrooms. I understand well the frustration of instructors who want to use these tools with their students but run into brick walls when they try.

While not identical, limiting access to Internet resources strikes me as similar to banning books. Instead of allowing instructors to develop educational content as needed, a concern from a limited group blocks all access to these sites. A better dialogue needs to be developed, including perhaps even a faculty liaison committee to bring these concerns to the proper channels. Simply assuming that teaching with computers is the same as traditional teaching keeps students from the tools they need to succeed in the real world.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Two Ambivalent Views of Michelle Rhee’s Efforts

Posted on December 10, 2008 by JimS

By James L. Morrison
Guest Author
and
MaryAnne Gobble
Guest Author

[Editor’s note: These two comments, by Morrison and Gobble, Innovate‘s editor-in-chief and managing editor, were part of a December 8 email discussion on Michelle Rhee, the controversial superintendent of DC public schools.]

Morrison:

After reading Clay Risen’s article about Ms. Rhee, “The Lightning Rod,” in a recent issue of Atlantic, I am a bit ambivalent about what she means for education reform. For me, the three most salient parts of the article are these excerpts:

[1] “As a teacher in this system, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for ensuring your children are successful despite obstacles,” she told me. “You can’t say, ‘My students didn’t get any breakfast today,’ or ‘No one put them to bed last night,’ or ‘Their electricity got cut off in the house, so they couldn’t do their homework.’” This sort of moral certitude is exactly what turns off many veteran teachers in Washington. Even if Rhee is right, she seems to be asking for superhuman efforts, consistently, for decades to come. Making missionary zeal a job requirement is a tough way to build morale, not to mention support, among the teachers who have to confront the D.C. ghetto every day.

[2] Rhee advocates another controversial plank in the reformist agenda: merit pay. Vociferously opposed by the teachers unions—a National Education Association convention audience booed Barack Obama when he told them he supported it—merit pay scales a teacher’s salary based on student achievement. Proponents say this is the only way to make teachers want to improve their performance. Opponents say it will torpedo already low morale and drive a wedge through faculty solidarity, and that basing merit pay on student performance leaves out all sorts of nonquantifiable aspects of learning.

[3] The divide means that Rhee’s challenge is not just to reform one of the worst school systems in the country and, in effect, prove whether or not inner-city schools can be revived at all. It is to answer a basic question about the nature of urban governance, a question about two visions of big-city management. In one, city politics is a vibrant, messy, democratic exercise, in which both the process and the results have value. In the other, city politics is only a prelude, the way to install a technocratic elite that can carry out reforms in relative isolation from the give-and-take of city life. Rhee’s tenure will answer whether these two positions are mutually exclusive—and, if they are, whether public-school reform is even possible.

I applaud Rhee’s efforts at reform, particularly with the DC schools, but it appears that she may not recognize or address the influence of parents, the community, and peer groups on human behavior and learning. Incorporating a plan to address and use these factors are also necessary to achieve her objectives, which are laudable.

Gobble:

I would agree that “business as usual” is not an option. Change is necessary and inevitable. I applaud Ms. Rhee’s drive to bring change to the DC system, which is among the systems most in need of some kind of reform. I think she has the best of intentions; her dedication to the cause is indisputable, and her tolerance of risk and uncertainty is absolutely necessary to the job she’s trying to do. I think she has the potential to do a lot of good — unless she so profoundly alienates her constituency that she cannot function. As the Atlantic profile points out, “Whether she recognizes it or not, her task is political as well as educational.”

I would disagree with Rhee’s fundamental assumptions: that there’s only one way to get there; or that you can get there by imposing a single set of views and standards on teachers, students, parents, and the community at large; or that there is only one possible measure of success. As a parent, I’m alarmed by the reliance on standardized test scores, which Ms. Rhee seems very invested in. Sure, a test score can tell you if a kid can read, and I think there’s a place for them in education. You have to make sure everyone’s got the basics somehow. But it can’t tell you if the kid can understand what he has read at any level beyond basic comprehension, or connect it to something else he saw or heard or read, or see its relevance to his own life. And, at least the way we’re testing now, when that test score becomes the end-all of the education process, it means there’s no time to explore those connections or build the kind of love for learning that means that kid will read.

Worse, there is not yet a test score that can account for the kid who can read and appreciate, but can’t function under the pressure of a test gobble01bor has a disability that keeps him from grasping what’s asked for in those circumstances. I have a brother with a serious learning disability. He barely escaped high school, and yet he’s a brilliant satellite electronics engineer, a very smart, imaginative writer, and a prolific reader. His emails and letters are, in his own words (although not his spelling), “grammatical train wrecks” that require a certain kind of translation, but they are imaginative and engaging, full of original imagery, as are his stories and comics. He can’t spell, and he would never, ever have passed the end-of-grade tests my middle-school son must take almost every year, but I would argue that he is as smart as or smarter than many students who ace all the tests, and in ways that matter more profoundly to his adult life than any end-of-grade test score will ever be able to measure.

I think that what’s wrong with public education is that it has become so profoundly separated from the communities in which it is supposed to happen. Standardized tests are part of that, because they force teachers and students to sit in classrooms focusing on a test that has little to do with the world around them, rather than turning outward to explore the world they live in. Imposing a change from above, without considering the community and the context and without involving those most invested in it, both expresses and perpetuates that reality. It is the most damaging kind of business as usual.

And that’s what scares me about Michelle Rhee’s approach.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Ineffective Use of Computers in Schools

Posted on December 10, 2008 by JimS

Harry KellerBy Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

On Tuesday, December 9, 2008, the New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “Obama wants to put more computers in classrooms, an old idea with dubious educational merit”[1].

It’s true that people have been putting computers in classrooms for many years. It’s also true that the impact of these computers has often been less than wished. However, neither of those facts tell us that we should stop. Rather, they tell us to review how and why computers are being used in those classrooms.

In my own visits to schools across the country, I have seen those computers being both underutilized and over-utilized. In some schools, the computers sit idle while traditional instruction continues. Occasionally, students are allowed to use the computers, and they get to use the standard business tools available such as spreadsheets and word processors. Sure, it’s nice that the students are learning to use those tools, but are they helping students learn their subject? I think not.

In other schools, I’ve seen computer rooms fully booked so that some teachers are unable to use them at all for their students. Upon inquiry, I discovered that math and English classes have priority because of high-stakes testing. The computers have various programs on them that drill the students on concepts required on those tests. In my opinion, these schools are wasting a valuable resource.

Computers slowly and quite certainly have revolutionized many businesses. Lawyers, among the last to succumb, now cannot live without their word processors with the ability to rewrite accurately, insert boilerplate, and check spelling and grammar. Software has been created to support the advances in productivity that we’ve seen in many industries. So, what’s the matter with education?

keller04The larger class sizes we see in schools are not the result of improved worker productivity; they’re caused by budget shortfalls. Clearly, computers have not improved teacher productivity. Students aren’t learning better. Just look at any number of international measures of student success in mathematics and science. We (the United States) are losing.

At least in traditional classrooms, neither the quantity nor quality of product has improved in this age of technology. Charter schools are making some headway mostly because their employees work multiple job descriptions and long hours. Generally, online education works because students self-select based on study skills, and teachers have tools to allow them to have slightly larger numbers of students. Those tools come with “learning management systems” (LMS) that online schools use to handle administration of classes.

To be fair, the United States has over 50 different sets of standards for education and administers those standards from a very large number of individual school districts. That fact makes creating software usable across the entire country quite difficult. Turkey has committed its education system to online learning and doesn’t have the same problems. The software I’ve seen from Turkey is first-rate and shames our own home-grown efforts.

If we don’t get moving on real innovation in education right now, we may find our children learning from online schools headquartered in Turkey, Israel, and Singapore quite soon. Teachers, like factory workers, will see their jobs disappear overseas.

Instead of waiting, as the automobile industry did, until it’s too late, begin today by merging the various state standards, requiring teachers to use good computer-based learning tools, and having our federal government support innovation that uses technology to make a real difference and that’s not just drill repackaged or textbooks converted to online format with animations and sound or other similar old methods with new facades.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »