AssortedStuff

This is going to be one of those I-think-there’s-a-connection-here sort of posts that will wander around until either stumbling across that link, or ending abruptly.

Anyway, last night I sat in on an online discussion around the topic of leadership, specifically in schools and school districts, let by Will and Shelly, and one of the fundamental questions we tossed around was “does a good leader need to also be a visionary?”.

I put forward the idea (and was probably in the minority in supporting it) that good leaders don’t necessarily need to be big visionaries as long as they surround themselves with creative, imaginative people and are open to the change that comes with new ideas.

This morning on my longer-than-usual drive I was thinking about that conversation as I listened to an interview with Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and, no matter how you feel about the company’s products, someone most would credit with being a “visionary” leader in the world of personal digital products.

During the program, one of the reporters asked him a simple but very relevant question: What do you do all day?

She was, of course, trying to get Jobs to talk about his role in the development of products at the company but maybe that’s a question we should also be asking our school leaders.

What do you do all day to produce “insanely great” products (in Steve’s frequently quoted phrasing), which in our case are well-educated students, prepared to be successful after graduation?

Jobs’ response to the question was very business-oriented, as you might expect.

But the nutshell version basically boils down to Apple employs many creative and talented people and his primary role is to clear the obstacles, foster collaboration, and allow them to use their talents to the greatest degree possible.

I would hope our leaders, both inside and outside of the education structure, would view their role exactly the same way when it comes to improving student learning.

Unfortunately, these days things seem to be heading in the opposite direction.

To more standardized classrooms, rigid, narrow curriculums, and prescriptive teaching designed to meet the growing demand for more standardized testing.

So, I wonder how things might change if Steve Jobs was leading American education.

Instead of Bill Gates.

2 comments apple, leadership, steve jobs

In this morning’s Post, more examples of the conflict between photographers and security people who don’t understand that yes, they can take pictures here.

The situation is especially bad here in the DC area where we have a higher than average number of the paranoid who also don’t know what they’re talking about.

However, one specific sentence in the story pretty much says it all.

Photographers say police need to be told explicitly not to prohibit photography, because officers often don’t respond well to impromptu citizen lectures on constitutional law.

Ain’t that the truth!

No comments dc, paranoia, photography, security

Something to look forward to in late September.  Media giant NBC Universal* is planning a one-week event, including segments to be featured in news programming on all their networks, called “Education Nation“

According to the press release that landed in my mailbox (and, I suspect, that of many other edubloggers), things will kick off with a two-day education summit that will be a “call to action, shining a spotlight on the most pressing national issue of our time: Education in America”.

Call to action? Who’s coming? Well, pretty much the usual suspects.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Delaware Governor Jack Markell, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Harlem Children Zone’s CEO Geoffrey Canada, President of MIT Susan Hockfield, National Superintendent of the Year Elizabeth Morgan, Civil Rights Activist Al Sharpton, and President of University of Phoenix Bill Pepicello, Ph.D., join a host of top leaders in education to open a national dialogue and address the gap between how we perceive education and the actual results we are producing today.

And don’t forget Bill Gates, whose foundation is one of the sponsoring “partners”.

Interesting. All but one of those big names lives and works less than a days drive (in traffic) from New York City, the location of this summit. Just an observation.

Anyway, later on the NBC press people mention that the overall project will include input from “more than 300 big thinkers in government, politics, business and technology — as well as school administrators, teachers, parents and students from across the country”.

Again, notice that the people most directly affected by the education process – parents and students – are thrown in almost as an afterthought.

Later the same day, by coincidence (I think), I also received a promotion for a new book from Milton Chen, former executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (of which I’m a member), carrying the same title: “Education Nation“.

A snippet from the introduction to that book, posted on the promotional site, certainly sounds like a good starting point.

Imagine an ‘Education Nation,’ a learning society where the education of children and adults is the highest national priority, on par with a strong economy, high employment, and national security. Where resources from public and private sources fund a ‘ladder of learning’ for learners of all ages, from pre-K through ‘gray.’ Where learners take courses through the formal institutions of high-quality schools and universities and also take advantage of informal experiences offered through museums, libraries, churches, youth groups, and parks as well as via the media.

Ok, I need to dial back the skepticism a little and reserve judgement on both variations on Education Nation until after I get the chance to evaluate the ideas presented.

However, it will be very interesting to see if the nations presented by NBC and Chen have anything in common, and especially if either has any connection to reality.

*No more GE microwave programming I guess. :-)

No comments education, edutopia, nbc, reform

A major story in a recent edition of Newsweek* declares we have a creativity crisis is the US.

The authors base that screaming headline on the fact that scores on an assessment that seems to accurately predict kids “creative accomplishments as adults”, have been declining since 1990, after rising steadily since the test was first administered in the 50′s.

The fall in creativity scores has been “most serious” in younger children, kindergarden through 6th grade.

Why is this happening?

One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children. (emphasis mine)

The writers correctly spotlight as one of the educational causes the testing culture in most schools that squeezes out any thought of teaching art, music, dance, or other activities thought of as “creative”.

However, they also make the even more valid point that there’s very little creative about how students are taught in their “core” subjects.

Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way. (emphasis mine)

I would go even farther and say that, for the most part, “current curriculum standards” are crap and should be junked… but this is a good start.

The whole article is actually worth reading for some interesting information about current research into creativity and children.

However, for an even better perspective on the matter, go rewatch Ken Robinson’s classic 2006 TED talk on how school are killing creativity in children or his return to TED from earlier this year (not quite as good) on the learning revolution.

Or read some of what Mitch Resnick has written on the subject of how children learn, especially Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society (pdf).

*I can’t tell you if it was the cover story since I haven’t seen a paper copy of the magazine in years.

No comments creativity, learning, newsweek, schools, students

I’ve never liked the whole “digital native/digital immigrant” meme, and an administrator at the University of Kansas seems to agree we need to look at how people understand “technology” in new ways.

She says that many of those digital natives we call students, in both K12 schools and colleges, are actually technologically illiterate, at least under what she says should be an updated definition of “tech literacy”.

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

Zvacek was careful to make clear that by tech-skeptical, she did not mean tech-negative. The skepticism she advocates is not a knee-jerk aversion to new technology tools, but rather the critical capacity to glean the implications, and limitations, of technologies as they emerge and become woven into the students’ lives. In a campus environment, that means knowing why not to trust Google to turn up the best sources for a research paper in its top returns, or appreciating the implications of surrendering personal data — including the propensities of one’s bladder — to third parties on the Web.

I think I like the idea of teaching tech “skepticism” instead of “literacy”, for adults as well as kids.

It ties right into helping people develop their crap detector, a concept Neil Postman wrote about in the 70′s and that Howard Rheingold is discussing now.

Thanks to Shaun Johnson for the link.

5 comments literacy, skepticism, students

In the op-ed section of the Post this morning, Alfie Kohn, one of the smartest voices in the debate about American education, challenges the myth that today’s parents coddle their kids more than ever, and as a result, those children are the most undisciplined generation in history.

It must be true since it says so in dozens of books and articles on the subject.

And, of course, there are plenty of stories about parents who refuse to set limits on their kids, and kids that are undisciplined narcissists.

Except, as Kohn notes, there are just two problems with those “what everyone knows” facts.

Social observers have been saying exactly the same thing about each generation of kids for more than a century.

And there is almost no research to support any of these claims, with what has been done largely based on questionable methodology.

In short,

There’s no evidence, then, that today’s parents are more permissive than parents of yesteryear, or that today’s young people are more narcissistic. But even if there were, no one has come close to showing that one causes the other.

Neither logic nor evidence seems to support the widely accepted charge that we’re too easy on our children. Yet that assumption continues to find favor across the political spectrum. It seems that we’ve finally found something to bring the left and the right together: an unsubstantiated knock on parents, an unflattering view of kids and a dubious belief that the two are connected.

Logic? Evidence?

When it comes to the debate over issues related to American education, it’s not surprising that both often go missing.

No comments alfie kohn, myths, parents, students

In his reflection on the speakers from the first day at the Building Learning Communities conference, Jeff articulates beautifully a major stumbling block we have in American education: fear.

In this case, fear of allowing too much of the outside world into the classroom, and especially the fear of allowing almost anything from inside out.

“There’s no way my district will ever let us use any of these social tools, they’re scared.”

I’m sure many of you have either said this or have heard someone who has said this.

Alan November kicked off the conference today with one simple message:  We need to break down the Firewall fear

The same country that believes in free speech and the freedom of the press is the same country with some of the most restrictive filtering systems in its schools.

In our overly-large school district, for what seems like decades, we’ve been working on “internet safety” rules/regulations/curriculums to go with the web filtering system, all in the name of protecting kids from… well, no one can articulate exactly what.*

But, as Jeff points out, protection is something we can’t give them.

We need to break through this culture of fear, we need to empower students to make decisions, to analyze and evaluate good content and learn how to avoid the bad stuff. We need to empower students to protect themselves.

At the same time our politicians and administrators also talk about teaching “21st century skills” (like communication and collaboration), and about how students must be “globally aware” citizens of the world.

Making that happen is impossible when there is no direct interaction with that world.  When all feedback on what students do in school comes exclusively from within that closed environment.

And it certainly won’t happen when we teach kids (not to mention the adults in their lives – parents and teachers) that the web is something to be feared, instead of helping them understand how to deal with it, the good, bad, and ugly.

Jeff is exactly right that “Creativity and fear do not mix.”

Creative people, something else we say we want our students to be, take risks.  They learn how to deal with failure.  They learn from and respond to their critics.

The last thing creative people do is hide behind a firewall.

*Maybe to protect us from the lawyers? Often it seems that’s the overriding concern.

2 comments blc, censorship, creativity, fear, filtering

While I’ve written a little about each of the seven cities we visited on the big trip (the posts are here if you want to catch up), there’s still some time unaccounted for.

Because it takes a while to move a huge ship between ports and down relatively narrow channels (that’s our boat in the picture, waiting at the pier in Tallinn), two days of the cruise were spent “at sea”.

This was the part I was least anticipating, mostly because I don’t do well with the kind of organized fun that I’ve often seen as part of the cruising cliche.*

However, if you think of the ship as a huge resort complex (with many of the associated options) that some genius engineer managed to make float, it’s not so bad.

Although they said we had 2600 passengers on board (plus about half that many crew), it rarely seemed crowded, other than the last minute lines returning from shore excursions.

Most spaces were very comfortable and surprisingly open, decorated in a style reminiscent of most of the upper middle priced chain hotels I’ve visited (think Hyatt/Mariott/Westin). Pleasant, but not worth taking pictures of.

Onboard activities, of which there were many, ran the spectrum from standard Vegas lounge acts (and a casino, of course) to an interesting showing of a documentary on moving and preserving a New York theater presented by the filmmaker.  And shopping, of course.

The ship also had plenty of outdoor activities and spaces available, although they didn’t seem to get much use due to the cool, windy weather on the two at-sea days.  But some of those spaces did offer wonderful vantage points for pictures.

Of course, you could always find a quiet corner to sit, read, and watch the ocean go by. Or eat yourself silly at the buffet that was open 24/7 (with some surprisingly good items).

All in all, large-ship cruising is not necessarily my favorite way to travel (the last time we cruised was somewhere back in the 90′s and many things have changed for the better since then) but this experience was still very enjoyable.

If you’d like to see a small collection of pictures of the ship and views from it, visit the At Sea set on my Flickr page.

I’ll be posting more pictures to Flickr as I review everything I shot second time, but this will probably be my last post about the trip here.  The normal stream of irrational rants will resume. :-)

*I’m old enough to remember that height of 70′s TV cheese, The Love Boat, which set a standard for cruising cliches for two decades or more.

No comments cruise, ship, travel

Were you aware that “public education is in the midst of a quiet revolution” in the US?

I wasn’t.  And after reading this morning’s Post, it’s clear the writer’s use of the term “revolution”, quiet or otherwise, is a major overstatement at best.

It seems this particular “revolution” is being funded by the big money foundation headed by Bill Gates and his wife.

However, actually reading past the headline we find that almost all of their cash is going into a variety of experiments focused on relatively minor variations on the status quo: national standards in language arts and math, pay-for-performance systems, and charter schools.

Of course, this is the same Gates Foundation that over the past ten years has already dumped $2 billion into their failed program to develop a small high school concept.

Which in most cases resulted in a shrunken version of the standard educational structure used in most high schools and little improvement student learning.

But that piece of history gets only a brief mention in this glowing assessment of Gates’ education current funding of reform efforts.

The other side of the issue gets only slightly more space.

Skeptics say the Microsoft founder is foisting a business-driven agenda on schools without understanding the challenges of public education. “I suspect that eight years from now, the Gates Foundation will say, ‘Whoops, we made another big boo-boo. What should we do now?’ ” education historian Diane Ravitch said.

And then there’s this little bit of information from the second half of the story, providing one likely reason for this puff piece to be published at all.

(Melinda Gates, wife of the Microsoft chairman, and investor Warren E. Buffett, a major donor to the foundation, are both on The Washington Post Co. board of directors.)

The price of having a major newspaper declare what you’re doing a “revolution”?

No comments bill gates, education, foundation, reform, washington post

In parts one and two of a multipart post, Larry Cuban looks at why school districts buy new technologies when there is little or no evidence they do anything to improve student learning, especially when most are having major budget problems.

From part one, he notes that consumer spending on electronics in the US is up despite the continuing recession.

At the same time schools are purchasing more technology products while also laying off teachers, increasing class size, and cutting program.

Economists can probably tell you why families are devoting scarce resources to new and better technology devices but why are schools doing the same thing?

The reasons public officials most often give for these purchases, past and present, is that the electronic devices will transform classroom practices, student learning, and prepare students for jobs in a competitive global economy. So, school boards need to back up these reasons with solid evidence for spending public dollars on new (and replacement) technologies that promise significant changes in teaching, learning, and administrative practice.

Where is that “solid evidence”?

The evidence for these electronic devices doing what is expected both in the U.S. and abroad is—as I read the research–at best, spotty—at worst, weak. Few careful and impartial observers of U.S., Europe, and Asia where governments have committed themselves to infusing technology into schools can say with confidence that the use of new technologies has led to increases in student academic achievement (as measured on either U.S. or international tests), altered substantially how teachers teach, or prepared students for to compete in an ever-changing labor market.

In part two, Cuban offers two reasons for this blind devotion to tech “solutions” that solve nothing: political and psychological.

This political explanation helps to make sense of why policymakers effortlessly skip over the lack of evidence to support major high tech expenditures. They figure that media photos of students happily clicking away on laptops–visible symbols–will trump the few research studies or critics who question purchases.

Turning from a political to a psychological explanation, districts buy technology because they suffer from “inattentional blindness”: They are too focused on a specific problem and lose sight of the big picture.

Or they suffer from some kind of blindness caused by salespeople promising tech-based “solutions” to whatever problem their schools might be facing without seeing if it fits in that big picture.

Of course, if the stuff looks good when photographed next to the superintendent, mayor, governor, and/or congressional candidate, so much the better.

Cuban, as always, makes some excellent points about our educational obsession with gimmicks.  Take the time to read both posts.

No comments edtech, education, larry cuban, reform, technology