In fact, our job is not to help teachers understand the concept or make it part of the curriculum. The task is to…

Develop a definition of Digital Learning in [the OLSD²], identify how it impacts teaching and learning, and articulate why it is important to students’ learning.

Interesting. From reading that charge, I would have to conclude that Digital Learning is a separate idea from the learning that students do, and apparently from the process of teaching as well.

It’s certainly possible to learn without the use of digital tools. But is learning with digital tools fundamentally different than without them? Do we need a discrete phrase like "digital learning"? Or is it in the same class as 21st century learning – an oft repeated cliche linked to a collection of vaguely defined ideas?

Anyway, we will not be working alone in the effort to develop that definition. Over the next few weeks the district is holding a series of public meetings asking parents, students and other members of the community to contribute their ideas to the mix.

It will be interesting to see who shows up and what they have to contribute. I don’t expect large numbers since community sessions like this only draw big crowds for issues like boundary changes but I’d love to be surprised by some enthusiasm for issues related directly to instruction.

Stay tuned while we solve the mysterious identity of Digital Learning.

2 OLSD is, of course, our beloved overly-large school district.

Now I certainly believe a basic understanding of those roles should be part of the school experience from the very beginning. But then students were asked to consider what they might study in college and to create their own future diplomas, complete with a statement of the subject in which they would major.

While there are two pieces to this assignment that I find troubling, the first is more of a question than a quibble. I wonder if the kids in this particular class were asked to consider more common but less stereotypical “helper jobs”, ones someone in their family might hold, such as plumber, auto mechanic, or store clerk, or even one unique to the DC area, lobbyist.

However, beyond the potential lack of inclusiveness, what bothers me more is that an activity like this seems to be telling kids at the beginning of their formal schooling that college is the only acceptable path to follow at the end of that path, more than a decade later. Are we starting the traditional college-is-the-only-way indoctrination too early, long before kids have any kind of clear understanding of their own talents and interests?

Having never taught elementary students, I’m sure someone can tell me why I’m wrong about this rant.

Recently our department here in the overly-large school district was given the areas on which we are to focus in the coming year (and maybe beyond, depending on how long the current big boss is in his position), and listed in several places is that phrase. Associated with it is our task: “Identifying strategies for teacher to use to integrate communications, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity skills into the curriculum”.

Beyond the constant use of a vaguely defined phrase that is at least 12 years past it’s expiration date, there are two major problems with this particular element of our discussion.

First, none of those skills are unique to the 21st century. A successful person at any point in human history was skillful at communicating, working with others, critically assessing the world, and finding creative ways to deal with new situations. They also made use of whatever technologies were available at the time to do all that. We want our kids to do the same throughout their lives with the most effective tools they have at hand.

An even larger issue is that last part about integrating all those skills “into the curriculum”.

Our curriculum, as in most K12 institutions in this country, is still very much a teacher-directed, fact-driven relic of the previous century. Or maybe even from the 19th. Everything is laid out in the “program of studies” and “pacing guides”, scripts that set the content and direction of learning from day one through day 180.

However, there’s a big disconnect. Those so-called “21st century” skills (aka the “4 C’s”) are best learned by doing. By interacting with ideas and solving problems that don’t necessarily have one simple answer. By finding and assessing information, and then creating new ways to use and communicate it.

If we are really serious about students learning these “new” skills, the current curriculum is largely worthless. It is chock full of easily googleable trivia and the primary skill being taught is how to play the testing game, to analyze packaged questions and select the “right” answers.

We need to totally rethink the definition of what is essential for students to know and be able to do when they graduate and that will not come from trying to graft a collection of cliches to the antiquated process we now call school.

* If by “favorite” you mean I want to scream whenever someone uses it.

That’s one more goal: to revolutionize the lecture in terms of cost and quality. The idea that you can store video essentially for free should mean that anyone can watch the best lecturers in the world. Rather than a student getting one of 3,000 people across the country who try to teach beginning physics or statistics or remedial math, through a process of comparison, competition, and improvement, you get someone who is pretty special and has the budget to do something fantastic. Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.

Transform lecturing by giving them better production values.

The high-budget video of a concert may look and sound better, but you’ll probably learn more about music by actually singing with your family around the piano. I’m betting Gates didn’t learn computer programming by watching someone talk about.

Except Alfie Kohn has some evidence-based arguments to use in response to those claims that are far more clichéd talking points than truth.

As always, his essay is very good, well worth saving for your next discussion with someone from the all-testing, all-the-time fan club.

However, this is probably the most important point Kohn makes about improving student achievement in the US, no matter how you define that term.

4. Rich American kids do fine; poor American kids don’t. It’s ridiculous to offer a summary statistic for all children at a given grade level in light of the enormous variation in scores within this country. To do so is roughly analogous to proposing an average pollution statistic for the United States that tells us the cleanliness of “American air.” Test scores are largely a function of socioeconomic status. Our wealthier students perform very well when compared to other countries; our poorer students do not. And we have a lot more poor children than do other industrialized nations.

More than 20% of American children are living in poverty, a rate that puts the US 34th out of 35 industrialized countries, the same ones frequently used in test score comparisons.

That ranking should be far more upsetting politicians and corporate types than the numbers generated from largely irrelevant multiple choice tests.

Although the intro section includes a little criticism, it’s pretty clear from the start the writer has no intention of asking anything that might be considered push-back. The editors even include a sidebar with a list of Bill’s “favorite edtech startups”, all of which are more about the technology and data management than they are about learning.

The whole interview isn’t very long and offers none of those “cures” mentioned in the subhead. But Gates’ answers to two questions stood out as especially shallow.

At the top, the writer asks him what he sees as the “ultimate challenge in education”. Gates replies that we must “get more out of $600 billion a year”, the amount he says the US spends on education. Spoken like a true billionaire money manager.

Then towards the end of the article comes this excellent question.

You’ve said that when you were in high school, you followed your own interests, taking on independent study, working on computer programming day and night. Is there room for that kind of student-driven learning in a highly rigorous, metrics-based environment?

Gates’ response is both disingenuous and clueless.

People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system. For the self-motivated student, these are the golden days. I wish I was growing up now. I envy my son. If he and I are talking about something that we don’t understand, we just watch videos and click on articles, and that feeds our discussion. Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

As so many education “experts” do, Gates’ is extrapolating his personal experience to every student in the country. But unlike him, I don’t believe the highly curious kids are a small percentage of the whole. There are many more than he can see who are very self-motivated, just not by the narrow goals dictated by a standardized test-driven system.

Let’s face it, we don’t give our students many reasons or resources to express their curiosity and self-motivation during the time they spend with us in the formal process we know as school. Maybe fixing that would be a better way to spend Bill’s money.

It turns out those web-based services are not yet to the point of being completely dependable. Case in point, back in March Google pretty much lopped off one of the cornerstones of the information management process I use and advocate when they announced the shutting down of Reader, their service that is the "cloud" behind (above?) many, if not most, RSS aggregator applications. Which means that millions of us who depended on Reader (plus more than a few software publishers) are looking for alternatives before July 1.

Last week my process potentially took another hit when the developer of Instapaper, another application I depend on every day, posted that he was selling the popular read-later service. Considering how many small web/app companies have disappeared lately because their new owners wanted the people and technologies* but not the product, I had reason to be concerned.

However, there’s a big difference between this announcement and Google’s. Instapaper’s owner was very up front and transparent about the sale. Between posts to his blog and discussions on several podcasts, he made it clear that his first concern was for the users of the service. A core part of the deal was that the development of Instapaper continue.

It remains to be seen if everyone involved follows through on this plan, but this situation illustrates the big difference between Google and this individual developer (other than one is an 800 pound gorilla).

Google’s business is selling advertising and it’s users (and the data they generate) are the product being sold. The shutdown of Reader is one more sign that leaders of the company have decided anything not generating revenue must be changed or deleted.

Maybe not something to worry about but certainly something to consider before you begin to rely on a product, service, or app (from Google or any other company) that may disappear on short notice.

Very exciting. We certainly could use more solid research on the effectiveness of technology like the iPad for instruction. 

However, this ain’t it.

The post is nothing more than the complete text of a press release.

A narrative of how iPads were used in the classes of one teacher at a relatively exclusive private school for boys.

With very few details to validate the “markedly improved” metric.

And written by the company that publishes the $10 app used in the “study”.

I wonder how often this PR piece was passed around in an effort to justify iPad purchases without reading past the headline or questioning the source.

Other than the slightly altered verbiage, nothing has changed in fifteen years. This is the Post Company’s annual attempt to define school quality in the most simplistic, meaningless way possible using a system created by their education writer emeritus, Jay Mathews.

For those who have missed the annual ritual, here’s how the “challenge” index works:

We take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year and divide by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June.

That’s it. Nothing about how well students actually scored on those tests. Or of how they may have been academically or intellectually challenged at their schools in other ways, using assessments other than standardized tests.

The list completely excludes very challenging schools like the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia which is entirely project-based, assessing student learning without these “higher level” standardized tests at all.

As I’ve ranted in this space in previous years, there’s nothing wrong with compiling lists based on arbitrary criteria, and I doubt many would even notice if the Post called this a ranking of the schools most oriented to pushing test-driven college prep programs.

But listing schools only based on their abilities to herd students into particular testing programs is a very narrow, superficial way to define an educational challenge.

In this particular example, the San Jose, CA school district has been for many years a “poster child” for claims of incredibly improved academic performance by high school students who were required to take college prep classes.

The reality, however, didn’t even approach the hype: “In 2000, before the college-prep program took effect, 40% of San Jose graduates fulfilled requirements for applying to University of California and Cal State University. In 2011, the number was 40.3%.”

The writer of this piece is not an education writer but nevertheless does a great job of summarizing the state of school reform research.

The number of ed reforms that hold up when the evidence is looked at critically seems to be tiny. The number that continue to work when they’re scaled up seems to be tiny. The number that continue to show results all the way through high school seems to be tiny. The number that can withstand critical scrutiny seems to be tiny. And of the ones that are left, the cost* to keep them up usually appears to be prohibitive.

And he’s certainly correct in the approach he suggests when reading reports of these educational miracles in the future: “I don’t think you can go too far wrong by being almost boundlessly and annoyingly skeptical about this stuff.”

* I think you need to include both monetary and human costs in those calculations.

She said “We need to do more to encourage the curiosity and investigative spirit of our students.”, a declaration in reference to teaching elementary-age kids.

Having never taught students below the middle school/junior high level, I really don’t know, but at what age do kids stop being curious? When do they stop investigating things that catch their interest? I mean, isn’t this how we, all learned a great deal about our world in the first place?

The process starts by getting a question in our mind (maybe not in the Jeopardy form of a question but still questioning) and then doing what it takes to find an answer.  ”What happens if I stick this fork in that wall socket?” may not be the smartest inquiry anyone created but some of us discovered electricity that way. As well as one more thing to never repeat.

Einstein is supposed to have said “It’s a miracle that curiosity survives a formal education.”, and whether he did or not¹, I think the premise is an unfortunately accurate one. As we enter into the spring testing season around here (and in most American schools) and students spend large chunks of time on decidedly non-curious activities, I wonder if real curiosity in most kids only exists outside of the time they spend in classrooms.

That initial statement about curiosity also led me back to a good post from Presentation Zen² in which Garr Reynolds starts with this observation on the topic.

The courage to make mistakes is related in some measure to curiosity, exploration, and the ability to speak honestly about a topic and about ourselves. For it is fear of mistakes, of being wrong, and the possibility of ridicule that stops us from showing our natural curiosity. The openness to show your natural curiosity in front of others requires one to be vulnerable.

I’m not sure there’s a significant point to this rant (or any point at all for that matter), just a collection of random thoughts on a trait that should be common to most human beings.

However, we probably would not have nearly as many education reform types talking about “encouraging curiosity”, “teaching innovation”, “fostering creativity”, and the rest if we didn’t work so hard to wring those naturally occurring tendencies out of our kids early in their educational life.

1 Half the pithy sayings attributed to major historical figures (Mark Twain is another) are probably made up or corrupted.

2 Thanks to Delicious, one part of my cloud-based brain extension. By the way, the whole column is worth a little of your time.

That's a meeting of all our school principals. No APs, no central office folks (other than our outgoing superintendent addressing the crowd for the last time). All 200+ of them in one room.

Minus a few who managed to skip the mob scene for some reason.

I used to think student test score gains were a good way to rate teachers. I don’t think that any more. Grading individual teachers with scores is too approximate, too erratic and too destructive of the team spirit that makes great schools. Rating schools, rather than teachers, by test score gains is better, at least until we find a way to measure deeper indicators of learning.

My immediate response was, it’s about time. Teachers do not do great work in isolation. They have always had a support system of some kind and we should be evaluating and rewarding everyone as a team as well as individuals.

Anyway, so what changed the mind of Mathews? Well, he doesn’t make that completely clear in this column but it has something to do with his admiration for the teachers receiving the Agnes Meyer award, given annually by his employer, The Washington Post, to the teacher of the year in each of the DC area districts. Plus other teachers he has written about over the years.

Mathews goes on to note that the assessment system used in DC (and elsewhere) puts too much emphasis on student test schools, rarely mentioning the “creativity and vitality” of the teacher or schools, and making a “big deal” out of adhering to the rules. I actually agree with him that the teachers who do the best work for kids are usually the ones who are not afraid to challenge and break those rules when necessary.

While I’m not sure I subscribe to Mathews’ idea that we should go back to the “old fashioned” system in which teacher evaluation is based solely on principal observations, at least he’s headed in the right direction.

However, if Mathews would only change his mind and abandon the incredibly narrow and “too approximate, too erratic, and too destructive” system of evaluating the quality of high schools known as the “challenge” index (which, of course, is his invention and also ignores “creativity and vitality”), that would be very unexpected, and welcome, change.

And he begins with a really crappy analogy, comparing developing “fantastic teachers” with the way that football teams “identify and nurture” their players.

Completely ignoring that those players, although evaluated as individuals, do not work in isolation. Their success, even that of a star quarterback like Gates’ example, Tom Brady, is very much dependent on the great support of many other people in a well-funded organization.

Teachers, however, in the view of Gates, many politicians, and other education “experts”, are expected to be rated based only on a very narrow measure of their work with absolutely no regard for any other factors.

The remainder of the piece is a messy mix of clichés in which he talks about using “multiple measures” and how “teachers want an environment based on collaboration” without any specifics. Certainly he doesn’t offer anything to convince the reader that he has a clue about the teaching process or how to evaluate it.

Although Gates and his business friends have been accorded a great deal of influence in the discussion over education reform, they do so with no accountability whatsoever.  To correct that situation, Anthony Cody writing at Education Week Teacher proposes The Billionaire Philanthropist Evaluation, noting that the kind of accountability they demand from teachers “is a street that goes one way only”.

Needless to say, Gates does not fare very well, starting with his lack of awareness of the social conditions that impact the learning of many students and extending to his poor understanding of effective instruction.

The bottom line?

Mr. Gates falls below standards in all four of the areas that were observed. His philanthropic activities should be suspended immediately pending his completion of the recommended professional growth activities.

Of course that won’t happen. He has enough money to buy a higher grade.

* Just for good measure, the editors included a video of Gates giving expert opinion on cyber security (which he might know something about considering how buggy Windows was while he was CEO), and… the new pope?

Nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s a 53% increase in the past decade and around “two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall”, drugs that can cause more problems than they solve.

And the situation is probably going to get worse.

And even more teenagers are likely to be prescribed medication in the near future because the American Psychiatric Association plans to change the definition of A.D.H.D. to allow more people to receive the diagnosis and treatment. A.D.H.D. is described by most experts as resulting from abnormal chemical levels in the brain that impair a person’s impulse control and attention skills.

But what if the doctors are not always right?

“There’s a tremendous push where if the kid’s behavior is thought to be quote-unquote abnormal — if they’re not sitting quietly at their desk — that’s pathological, instead of just childhood,” said Dr. Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the author of “How Doctors Think.”

What if those kids diagnosed with this condition are simply bored and in need of alternative paths to their learning? Are “repeatedly losing one’s cellphone or losing focus during paperwork” really symptoms of a medical condition?

Does the fact that I have problems with paperwork and hate sitting still for meetings mean I’ll be getting a prescription?