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Tax Cuts? How about more money?

In his op-ed in the Times the other day, Thomas Friedman suggests that teachers should be given tax cuts - that is, a complete cut.

I like this idea on the surface because it (a) increases the salaries of teachers by a couple thousand per year and (b) gives teachers a well-deserved afternoon of not doing taxes. However, I have the feeling that this wouldn’t be enough to really be enough. Kevin Carey does a little math and shows us that Friedman’s plan is not all it’s cracked up to be.

On the other hand, I think this is a better direction:

I’d also double the salaries of all highly qualified math and science teachers…

But again, that’s a lot of hand-waving. We still don’t have fair and efficient methods for evaluating teacher ability (or at none that everyone agrees on), so that throws a wrench into things.

Don’t get me wrong. As they say, any press is good press, and teachers need it. Friedman has even written in support for idealistic Teach For America corps members (as I once was). But I can’t get behind his quick fixes and idealism. Good policy and a stronger education system won’t come from a nicely-written op-ed in the Times.

Oh, I have to ask: Does Tom even run his columns by his teacher wife before submitting them to the editors?

Doing Educational Research That Counts

As I continue my plunge into the world of educational research, I’ve come across two pieces of writing that have stimulated my thinking over the holiday break. With one semester under my belt, I’ve realizing the need to get more actively involved in research (with others and on my own). As I’ve contemplated my research involvement (and gotten started on a couple of projects), big questions loom: “What kind of research is important in education?” “What separates good research from bad research?” “How do I make sure my research has an impact?”

These two articles provided some guidance in answering these questions…

The first is a transcription of a talk given by Dr. Richard W. Hamming given in 1986 on the topic “You and Your Research“. The audience for this talk is mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and other researchers of natural sciences (as opposed to artificial sciences), but he outlines some important characteristics of great scientists in any area:

1. They have courage: “They will go forward under incredible circumstances; they think and continue to think.”
2. They work in conditions that are less than ideal: “…often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset.”
3. They have tremendous drive: “Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.”
4. They tolerate ambiguity: “They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started. It requires a lovely balance.”
5. They work on important problems: “If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. It’s perfectly obvious. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.”
6. They seize upon opportunity: “The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through.”
7. They are good salesmen/saleswomen: “…it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it.”
8. They don’t let their personal faults (ego, dress, anger) get in the way of their success: “…good scientists [as opposed to great scientists] will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer.”

While some of these recommendations from Hamming come as common sense, it’s easy to get lost in your work and lose sight of these fundamentals.

Of these characteristics, the one that has been on my mind the most lately is #5 - working on important problems. What are the important problems in education?

This brings me to the second piece by Dan Willingham, entitled “A Science of Education Requires Specific Goals for Education“. He offers a convincing argument for the establishment of shared set of goals for education in America. His argument is based on the distinction between natural and artificial sciences - the former seeks to explain the natural world, the latter explores the designed world. As an artificial science, educational goals can provide feedback for researchers to advance their studies.

I think this could be interpreted as a argument for a set of national education standards, but I think that there are broader goals that would not be encompassed in the current scope of “standards.” For example, Willingham offers “To inculcate in students a love of learning” as a potential goal for K-12 education. Although only a proposed example, our current evaluation methods for schools simply do not encompass this type of goal. While we don’t have much data on something like this (and it might be difficult to measure), it provides an opportunity for educational researchers to develop new methods and theories to account for this goal. As an education-researcher-in-training, I can say that the ambiguity in educational goals can make it quite difficult to navigate the current research and determine areas for improvement.

Although I can’t offer vast experience in the field, I will take a shot at proposing some of the goals of K-12 education that I find important (I’ve borrowed/adapted a few of Willingham’s):

• To instill in students a body of knowledge sufficient to function as citizens: facts and concepts in standard subjects, and the knowledge to use them (from Willingham - defined more or less by current educational standards)
• To identify and prepare students for a wide array of careers - both current and future (either through job placement or post-secondary preparation)
• To develop in students a strong work ethic
• To adjust to the abilities and backgrounds of different students (adapted from Willingham)
• To foster creativity and ingenuity in students (adapted from Willingham)
• To provide a safe and information-rich learning environment
• To socialize students in a diverse society

This is by no means a complete or refined list, but I think it could serve as a very rough draft. What do you think the goals of our K-12 education system should be?

Related links:

• KIPP founders give 5 thoughts on how the Obama administration can reform American education.
• Dan Willingham’s video on how teaching content is teaching reading.

23:59:60

At 23:59:59 on December 31, 2008 (tonight!), a leap second will be added to correct standards for time with mean solar time. That means that instead of going from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00, clocks around the world will add one second – 23:59:60.

What can happen in that one second?

We’re performing a little social-media-network-internet experiment to find out. To participate, do one or more of the following:

1. At 23:59:60, record a one second video (or edit it down later) of what you are doing during the leap second. If you don’t have a video camera, set your digital camera or cell phone to video mode. Still shots are OK too.
2. Upload your one second clip or photo to one of the 23:59:60 groups on Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo. Make sure to add the tag “23:59:60″ or put “23:59:60″ in the title. If possible, allow public downloads of your content.
3. Spread the word to your friends! The more people that do this, the better. Promise.
4. If you have fancy video editing skills, compile and mash-up the one-second clips however you see fit and add them to the groups above. Go crazy with it.

Arne!

I have to say that I’m pleased with Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. Besides sharing the namesake of my former governor, Arne Carlson, he is a bullet-dodging pick for the president-elect.

He straddles the warring camps in ed policy and he plays basketball, two characteristics that are becoming hallmarks of the Obama campaign. I strongly agree with Obama’s view on the ed policy battles:

“It’s been Democrat versus Republican, vouchers versus the status quo, more money versus more reform. There’s partisanship and there’s bickering, but no understanding that both sides have good ideas.”

This battle is apparent in my reading of the edublogosphere, and it seems to me that the back-and-forth between various bloggers provides more fodder for posting and comment than thoughtful commentary on improving education. This gets tiresome to me at times, but there is some good thinking going on out there.

One of those bloggers that I’m enjoying reading is Robert Pondiscio, who writes over at Core Knowledge Blog. He has a nice post that compiles some of the reactions rippling through the education world to the Duncan pick. There seems to be a tentative consensus that it was a good choice, and I hope that Duncan’s honeymoon goes as well as Obama’s so far…

Here’s a link to some testimony Duncan gave the Education and Labor Committee on his efforts in Chicago Public Schools

This is your brain…

A couple of links for the neuro/brain crowd…

First an art exhibition of images produced from brain research. A Beautiful Mind. Some really tasty images. Anyone have some links for wallpapers like this?

And, via Fimoculous’s End-of-Year Lists, a wrap-up of the top 10 brain research stories from 2008 from NewScientist. Two highlights for me were the article getting to the bottom of “mind gyms” and the article on the “intense world” hypothesis of autism.

Just a slice of my increasing reading of brain research as I prepare for my cognitive science minor.

My Theory of Learning

So, the final assignment for my “Psychology of Student Learning” class this semester was to write a paper about “My Theory of Learning.”

Now, I’m not so egocentric to think that I could re-invent educational psychology as a first-year PhD student. There are many, many learning theories out there. So rather than try to reinvent the wheel (even if the wheel is misshapen and incomplete), I tried to come up with a framework for understanding these various theories and how they fit together. The framework that I ended up with defines 4 spheres of learning systems: (1) Prior Experience and Knowledge, (2) Learning Environments, (3) Cognitive Processes, and (4) Application and Assessment. These systems are highly interconnected in a complex way.

My background in environmental science (and spending too much time with my MFA-thesis-ing gf) led me to the following thesis about “learning”: Learning is an emergent property of interacting systems.

In my theory, these interacting systems are the four mentioned above, and the connections/relationships are what we learn through research. So, my framework is not so much a way of explaining how people learn, but a way of organizing the research and theories that are out there and suggesting what they tell us about learning. I’ve tried applying a my framework to a couple of research projects I’ve come across lately in my slide presentation for this paper, so rather than walk you through its entirety (in its unpolished state), enjoy this slideshow…

Moving Beyond AP

Over the weekend, the NY Times published a piece on Scarsdale High School and how they are moving beyond Advanced Placement with their Advanced Topics curriculum. In my reading of the article, two things stand out to me.

First, Scarsdale has an exceptional high school. Its students come from high-income families and it has the resources to reach out to higher education institutions (including Ivy Leaguers) to develop their own curriculum:

“We have the luxury of being able to move beyond the A.P.,” John Klemme, Scarsdale’s principal, said in a recent interview. “If people called it a gold curriculum in the past, I refer to this version as the platinum curriculum.”

In reality, talking about Scarsdale High School as a case for abandoning AP is like using marathon runners as a case for abandoning preventative health care measures - those in the upper end of the bell curve already get what they need. I’d imagine you’d be more likely to find school districts that consider offering AP a “luxury” than districts that can move beyond it and offer a better curriculum. I have admitted that AP is not perfect, but I think that AP offers courses that are more rigorous than what most schools can offer on their own. In addition, it provides a standardized test that gives those schools the chance to demonstrate how they measure up.

The second thing that popped out at me was that throughout the article, the author and subjects imply a view of the AP curriculum as essentially the content of the AP test. I wouldn’t necessarily say they are wrong -  AP teachers pretty much teach the material that is tested, and historically, the rigor on those tests has been defined by the “mile wide, inch deep” philosophy. One of the reasons Scarsdale has abandoned AP was for its focus on shallow content.

The problem arises when the assessments drive the curriculum, an issue implied in the article. Are AP courses prescriptive? In one sense they are not -  an AP teacher can present their curriculum to their student however they want, as long as they can pass the test. On the other hand, the content taught in AP is prescribed by the AP tests, and teachers can teach choose to teach that content to the lowest common denominator (i.e. memorization). In my experience, the best AP teachers never do this, and are not concerned about it.

The question is then “What’s the value of AP?” What has been, and continues to be, AP’s value is that success on AP tests is a good predictor of college success.

William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, said that Harvard’s admissions officers care little what a school calls its courses, but find that Advanced Placement test scores are a reliable predictor of college performance. Without them, he said, “there’s obviously one less piece of information there.”

Could AP tests continue to be good predictors of college success if they covered fewer topics? I’d hope so. Students taking the “Advanced Topics” courses at Scarsdale seem to be doing fine on them despite covering fewer topics.

It appears that the real benefit of “moving beyond AP” comes from relaxing the requirement to take the test at the end of the course (obviously many Scarsdale students still do). This has allowed teachers to focus their time on topics they and their students find interesting, and help their students gain a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

(I found it interesting that AP scores at Scarsdale have reportedly not changed, with the exception of US History and US Government. From what I understand, these are two tests that are content and fact-heavy, so I’m not surprised that covering less content would result in a drop.)

A model of “optional testing” might be a better way to go for some schools, not just the elite.

The Pendulum Swings…or does it?

Dan Willingham’s post on 21st Century Skills, over at his Brittanica blog, got me thinking about content knowledge and skills, and how they relate to assessment design (my area of interest). Matthew K. Tabor wrote a follow-up post that gives some good examples of how content knowledge - knowing the facts - and skills (which he prefers to call “process”) - being able to use that knowledge - are related. Both authors argue that deep understanding requires both, and the swaying emphasis by educators (the pendulum) from one side to the other tends to hurt more than help.

I see content and skills/process as two sides of the same coin - deep understanding. One reason (of many) that this false dichotomy exists is because of the way standards documents are written. My past job gave me the opportunity to become rather familiar with K-12 science standards documents, which range from high quality to complete garbage. In many science standards documents, including AAAS’s Benchmarks and NSTA’s National Science Education Standards, content and skills are found in separate sections. This can lead teachers using these documents to believe they are separate things that deserve separate treatment in the classroom. In science classes, this often turns out to be lectures to teach content and labs to teach skills. More integrated methods exist, but they require skilled educators that have deep pedagogical content knowledge and experience. Incidentally, Massachusetts - a state Willingham applauds for their achievements - has extremely good educational standards across the board, and have science standards that have clear performance expectations that integrate content and skills. (Aside: I’m not arguing that good standards will lead to good teaching. Rather, good standards are an indicator of a state that has a well-organized DOE and a talented pool of educators to develop good standards.)

My (admittedly limited) experience in science test development (at College Board) tells me that this dichotomy in standards leads to a similar split on state-wide assessments. A lot of criticism aimed at assessments points out that they are heavy on testing discrete facts and light on testing skills. This approach favors the student that can cram the most facts in her brain the week before the test (which will quickly escape after the test). On the other hand, assessments that claim to test reasoning skills (like the ACT science reasoning section) have their own problems - they don’t require students to have any particular content knowledge and are highly dependent on other skills, such as reading ability.

Why do we end up with tests like this? A lot of this stems from current testing procedures. A big problem facing assessment design is that standardized tests are given in a “one-shot” manner. This usually happens once a year, or as NCLB requires, once each in elementary, middle, and high school. This means that assessment designers have to cram a year’s worth - or worse, 4 years’ worth - of content into one test. Psychometric requirements rely on items with a range of difficulty (in order to separate “high ability” from “low ability”), so you end up with assessments that test discrete facts that range from familiar (’easy’) to obscure (’hard’). This might be good for answering Jeopardy questions (which measure intelligence in some regard), but it doesn’t really - at least on the surface - reflect what most think of as a well-rounded education.

To me, a well-rounded education includes exposure to a wide range of content knowledge, as well as development of skills. However, there is an unbalance in the current assessment environment in the direction content knowledge, which I think upsets most teachers that see their job as more than teaching discrete facts. In his post, Willingham states, “In calmer moments, everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it..” I believe in the need to temper current dissatisfaction in our educational system, including assessments, with examples that show promise.

The Advanced Placement testing program, while it has its flaws, exemplifies a testing program that shows promise in balancing broad content with skills(/process). AP’s success lies not in the quality of its tests (although I can attest to their quality and developers), but in the grassroots culture of high-quality teachers that has developed around it. Good teachers were initially drawn to the AP because of its promise of granting college credit. AP teachers are required to have deep understanding of content knowledge and skills and the ability to deliver it them to students (I’d be interested to see the qualification stats on AP teachers). Indirectly, AP tests set the bar for these teachers, and they believe that the test reflects their ability to teach students the content and skills of the test. On top of that, AP recognizes teachers (one per state) that have excelled at teaching the AP curriculum, which provides a (albeit limited) professional pathway for which teachers can strive.

I don’t mean to be a complete fan-boy of AP - there are ongoing issues that will not bode well for its future. A considerable number of AP teachers will reach retirement age in the next 5 years; the expansion of the AP program without proper teacher support could potentially cripple the system; the testing procedures will continue to be pushed to increase volume while maintaining quality. In addition, there are still issues regarding the tests themselves that require upgrading - out-of-date content and lack of emphasis on assessing of deep understanding. Efforts to redesign AP science courses are underway to address these issues.

In the end, I side with Tabor (although his *poof* needs a little more explaining) on the point that highly-qualified and skilled teachers - who have deep content knowledge and skills - will provide a students a balance of content with skills in a meaningful, engaging manner. I just wish there were more of them around…

Getting Taken to eLearning “School”

So, my apparent insomnia is being fueled by the discovery of a slew of elearning blogs and resources. I’m literally bouncing from tab to tab and window to window trying to follow all of the posts and links.

That said, it would probably be good to summarize what I’ve been learning the past few hours…

Stephen Downes appears to be something of an authority in the elearning community. I haven’t made it through his essay on the Future of Online Learning: 10 Years On, but here he’s given a thorough vision for the future of learning. In his conclusion, he gives a statement similar to the sentiment that (in part) led me to leave the traditional classroom in pursuit of more forward-thinking endeavors:

Today, and for the last century, education has been practiced in segregated buildings by carefully regimented and standardized classes of students led and instructed by teachers working essentially alone.

Over the last ten years, this model has been seen in many quarters to be obsolete. We have seen the emergence of a new model, where education is practiced in the community as a whole, by individuals studying personal curricula at their own pace, guided and assisted by community facilitators, online instructors and experts around the world.

Another broad vision for what online learning and the work environment can be over at Pontydysgu’s site.

In delving into the topic of open educational resources, I found that the resources I’m familiar with are just a start, and that the community around these resources is lively. Apparently, you get points for getting fired up about opening up courseware (Chris Lott). I also found some interesting posts on open education and its three parts: content, support, and accreditation. I also found a course that I may be adding to my schedule this winter. Steps toward becoming an Edupunk? Looks like I need to just share…

In my wandering, I also came across some interesting theories of learning, both old and new.

Ok, time for sleeeeeeeep.

Monday Inspiration: Dave Eggers and John Seely Brown

I’ve been bumming lately because it’s been over two years since I’ve been working with students daily. At the same time, I’m supposedly working in education, yet have little contact with those I’m hoping to impact. I’ve got a couple of projects in the pipeline, but I had reached a breaking point on Sunday, and I needed some inspiration. Luckily, some came just in time…

Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, gave a TED talk way back in February 2008 (my, how time flies) on his work at Valencia 628, a volunteer effort to bring writers, grad students, and others with flexible time schedules to tutor students. The tutoring venues are magical places - pirate (SF) and superhero (BK) supply stores - that are really inspiring places for students to get tutored. (Aside: I used to work around the block from the superhero store in Brooklyn, and am kicking myself for not finding out about it sooner!)

Two things about this project stand out to me: First, it reminds me that while there is a lot of work to be done in schools, there’s a lot that can be done in communities and outside schools to make education a “village affair.” Second, the projects discussed by Eggers engage students in authentic writing projects that are shared outside of school, a strategy that really engages students.

My other inspiration came from John Seely Brown, a personal hero of mine, gave a talk back in 2006 about the long tail of education, and how the internet and Web 2.0 technologies can be platforms for truly revolutionizing education. Two things that stood out to me: (1) JSB talks about remixes of web content  as acts of synthesis (see the Narutix example) that show how people are contemplating and understanding of ideas through participation, and (2) JSB’s experience story about seeing his graduate professor get stumped and work through a problem before his eyes - the first time he understood what it meant to be a mathematics researcher.

These two guys made my Monday, and gave me some juice to hopefully power me through the week (and month). Finals are around the corner…