"A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."
Free information-resources for education ought to be something everybody could get behind...
Or then again, maybe not.
I'm mildly surprised, so I'll link it here: the cash-for-kids-for-academic-performance Family Rewards Program
Changed how teenagers spent their time. For the subgroup of academically proficient teenagers, it increased the proportion of those who engaged primarily in academic activities and reduced the proportion who engaged primarily in social activities;
Increased parents’ spending on school-related ...
...substantially reduced [teenagers’] problem behavior, such as aggression and substance use;
Did not reduce teenagers’ intrinsic motivation by paying them rewards for school attendance and academic achievement.
This was for low-income families; it's not obvious that it would or wouldn't work outside that context.
In the end, I suspect, a motivation program should try to affect your sense of who you are. Hmmm.
Or then again, maybe not.
Well, the essay emphasizes and uses examples of Learnable Programming, as a response to Khan Academy's (very clever) programming lessons, by Bret Victor who was credited with inspiring them, but it's really about learnability in general, and as he says,
The canonical work on designing programming systems for learning, and perhaps the greatest book ever written on learning in general, is Seymour Papert's "Mindstorms".
Designing a learning system without a solid understanding of the principles in this book is like designing a mechanical system without understanding "the lever". Or "gravity". If you are reading this essay (and I'm pretty sure you are!) then you need to read "Mindstorms".
Seriously. I mean it. If you are going to design anything whatsoever related to learning, then you literally need to read "Mindstorms".
Well, actually if you're right here then you're not reading that essay at all, you're reading a quote from that essay. But the advice may still apply.
Unless graduation rates increase, nearly 12 million students will likely drop out over the next decade, resulting in a loss to the nation of $1.5 trillion in lost wages and increased social costs due to crime and healthcare. Among students who do graduate, one-third need remedial courses in college and far fewer will go on to earn a college degree. Yet, more than half of all new jobs in the next decade will require some postsecondary education.
As that phrasing suggests, the "crisis" is not an increase in dropout rates, but rather an increase in the need for the qualifications which graduation is an attempt to represent. Really we don't need high school graduates; we need adults whose education suffices for a life of production, consumption, creation, family, and citizenship. (Hm, is that all?) So we have an effort by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
which the NYT reports as
Public Broadcasting Takes Role in Improving Graduation Rates
While graduation rates have inched up in recent years, nearly 25 percent of students over all drop out.
The National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino civil rights organization, helps run a charter school in Los Angeles? Who knew? A not-for-profit called BuildOn takes students who are on the verge of dropping out and gives them international service learning experiences, of the kind that has become commonplace for upper middle class kids, but is much less available to poor kids. Harlem RBI takes teens with school troubles, puts them on baseball and softball teams, and requires tutoring, workshops, and homework help to keep a player's average high enough to stay on the team.
The athletics approach is one I have to keep reminding myself about: it's not one that appealed to me as a kid. But it's not exactly a newfangled notion.
In Plato's world,
Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to ...create a harmonious person.
And I think archery and riding went in there too, although I also think story-telling comes even earlier, in character formation. But anyway athletics is important, somewhere in there, even if it might be minimized for people like me. But then, as Plato also put it,
“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Fair enough. I suspect that somewhat greater attention to (and measurement of) what amuses kids' minds would do quite a bit towards raising graduation rates, and even the rate of achievement of any particular level of qualifications.
Teacher unions all over the country have fought against using performance-based measures to evaluate teachers, but the unions are gradually losing this battle...
...the criterion used in evaluating teachers by many school systems and also by academic articles on school reform is the value added (VA) by teachers to student performance; namely, the improvements in students’ test scores as a result of taking classes of different teachers.
... the fundamental way to judge teachers is not how their students do on tests, but how different teachers affect the likelihood that their students finish high school and go to college, how teachers affect the earnings of their students after they enter the labor force, and whether their students get involved in gangs and crimes.
A small number of recent academic studies have tried to see how well VA measures predict how students do when they become adults. A summary of a good study along these lines by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff was published this summer in the journal Education Next under the title “Great Teaching”. ... 20 years... 2.5 million children ...
They find large effects on subsequent adult earnings when these young students had teachers who produced good improvements in test scores...
teachers with good VA ratings should be paid considerably more than teachers with bad ratings.
A couple of days ago my exercise-TED was Dave Eggers' wish: Once Upon a School, in which he tells the story of his attempt to start a volunteer tutor service in which his writer friends would be available to students...but the students didn't come, until "826 Valencia" also became the Pirate Supply House. And clever energetic people did clever energetic things, building up a volunteer list of people in the community who would come in for an hour or many hours each month, and it really seemed to help a lot of kids. Now there are a bunch of somewhat similar groups with a variety of themes, and there's onceuponaschool.org which, on its front page, suggests that you sign up by putting in your zip code...Hmmm, I see
when I put in the Hamilton Central zipcode I get
We found 18 Opportunities
Volunteering Opportunities within 20 miles of Hamilton, NY 13346, US
Results 1-18 | Sort by: | Search Again
opportunity
location
great for
1. Mentor High School Exchange Students in Sherburne, NY and Surrounding Areas!
Sherburne and Surrounding Areas, NY
55+
2. Run the Exchange Student Program in Eaton, NY or surrounding areas!
Eaton or surrounding areas, NY
55+
3. ...
There are a number of volunteer "opportunities" associated with schools nearby, but it doesn't seem that my own school has signed up with any of the organizations in question. I wonder if a bet is being missed.
"Across the board, on every issue, the teachers got a more favorable outcome than the school system," [Professor Bruno] said Wednesday.
The deal, which still must be ratified by the union's overall membership, calls for an average raise of 17.6% over four years... it also strips out a merit pay program that would have been tied to increased emphasis on student test scores...
Teachers also managed to hold the line on health insurance increases, and protect seniority pay increases and raises for additional education that the school system wanted to limit or eliminate.
Union officials also trumpeted victories in ...
The union didn't get all it wanted. In addition to the salary compromise, the school day and year will be extended
"The mayor doesn't walk away empty-handed from this,"
I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it's also frustrating when people don't acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it's not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it's actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:...
Everybody's going broke.
Or then again, maybe not?
Step one: Capitulate to the teachers’ union in the largest city in your state. Step two: Ask the rest of America to guarantee your state’s $200 billion pension gap.
Yes, there's a trailer hook. So you can stop worrying about that. And those "mechanic fixation" points are Lego compatible. To program Thymio II, you can use a nifty graphical interface, or a simple programming language called Aseba that's similar to Matlab. And oh hey did we mention that this thing is open source from source code to hardware? 'Cause it is.
Seriously, $100 seems very cheap for a platform like this. It's cheap enough that a $1,000 grant could outfit an entire classroom with robots that are colorful, versatile, fun, and can be tackled with a GUI before graduating to writing code.
Of course there are even cheaper systems, like the rubber-band powered Walking paper Robot - YouTube.
Surely every kid should play with robots. Or then again, maybe not.
It's common to focus on facts and skills, as being readily measurable. Still, there are ways to try to measure creativity, and they tell an uncomfortable story...
Kim, who is a professor of education at the College of William and Mary, analyzed scores on a battery of measures of creativity—called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)—collected from normative samples of schoolchildren in kindergarten through twelfth grade over several decades. ...
According to Kim’s research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called Creative Elaboration, which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. ... more than 85% of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. Yikes.... ...
the TTCT seems to be the best predictor of lifetime achievement that has yet been invented. It is a better predictor than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.[6] The correlation coefficients found between childhood TTCT scores and real-world adult creative achievements have ranged from a low of about .25 to a high of about .60, depending on which tests are included and how adult creative achievements are assessed.[6]
So, the decline in TTCT scores among school-aged children indeed does appear to be cause for concern. Kim herself calls it the “creativity crisis,” and that term has been picked up in a number of articles in popular magazines.
Well, surprise, surprise. For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.
Of course, maybe it's not freedom, maybe it's excessive fructose or excessive worry about fructose or too much or too little television. But it does seem like an issue worth considering, when we consider options for American schools.
The U.S. ranks 14th in higher education attainment at 42% of 25-34 with a degree, 20 points behind the leader, South Korea.
The U.S. ranks 26th in early childhood education (69%)
The U.S. is the 6th worst in terms of high school graduation, with 23% failing to attain a diploma
“Based on these trends, the U.S. may find that an increasing number of countries will approach or surpass its attainment levels in the coming years,” reads the U.S. report card.
However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.
The author here thinks that maybe we shouldn't be trying to do what the other guys try so hard to do; it's not worth doing. He cites a 2008 article in Nature, responding to very similar international comparisons: Making the grade:
To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.
These are students who can enter the science and engineering workforce or are likely to innovate whatever their field of study. Remarkable, but little noted, is the fact that the United States produces the lion's share of the world's best students (see graph).
TechCrunch, and commenters at Slashdot, also comment on the importance of immigrants. So maybe we should combine those, and build on established American strengths; maybe local schools like Hamilton Central should work on what they offer to the top students (hey, we need a robotics team!) and try to ease budget pain by appealing to a reasonable number of international students, as some other NY schools have done...even to the extent of selling empty classroom seats abroad.
Or then again, maybe not.
The attempt to achieve large scale in college courses is misguided. Instead of trying to come up with a way to extend the same course to tens of thousands of students, educators should be asking the opposite question: How would I teach if I only had one student? Educators with just one student in their class would not teach by lecturing....
To put this another way, I believe that the future of teaching is not one-to-many. Instead, it is many-to-one. By many-to-one, I mean that one student receives personalized instruction that comes from many educators. To make that work, technology must act as an intermediary, taking the information from the educators and customizing it to fit the student's knowledge, ability, and even his or her emotional state.
I'd tentatively say he has a large part of a point here, but...hmm. The MOOC model, whether it's carried out for higher education or K-12, doesn't have to contradict his many-to-one ideal; if there are 100,000 students finishing a MOOC, then they all have something in common (they have passed "Intro to Calculus" or "Designing a Rocket Stove" or "Baroque Music as a Commentary on Galileo" or "Origami Polyhedra" or whatever it is.) That likely means that they have all done reasonably well on a series of (peer-graded + machine-graded) quizzes, exams, and projects. It means they share some kind of assessment. It doesn't mean that they have all gotten there the same way; it doesn't mean that they have all done what Stanford students do.
But I'm not disagreeing with him about what's important; education needs to be more customized, more personalized, not less, and specific MOOC proposals may try to save money by going the wrong way. (And I hereby propose that the "normal" course length should be a quarter, not a semester. Or maybe a week. Break everything into Pieces! Hulk SMASH!). And he's at least two-thirds right about tablets.
The boffins at the Urban Education Institute (UEI) in Chicago have written an exemplary book on school improvement. They looked at 100 elementary schools that showed progress in attendance and test scores over a seven-year period, and 100 others that did not. They argue—with quantitative data—that five essential pillars are needed to build a great school. These are:
effective school leadership,
collaborative teachers (with committed staff and professional development),
parent-community ties,
a student-centered (and safe) learning climate with high expectations,
and ambitious and demanding instruction.
(Reformatted.) I'm always suspicious of lists like that, but it's plausible. In any case, like most of what I've read in the past few days, the point of the article is far from favorable towards the striking teachers; the author here believes that they not just demanding more money, but trying to prevent improvements in a failing school system. And this seems to be bipartisan, to a considerable extent: they're battling Rahm Emanuel, extremely prominent Democrat, while from the other side we hear Paul Ryan on Chicago Teachers’ Strike: ‘We Stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’ - ABC News
“I’ve known Rahm Emanuel for years. He’s a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher’s union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel.”
if you think that teachers do make a difference, and that some of the teachers aren’t very good, it seems to me that you have two choices. Hold out for a decentralized, discretionary, local-knowledge based system which has no change of materializing for various legal and structural reasons. Or develop admittedly imperfect evaluations, and use them as a replacement metric for seniority and ed credentials. Naturally, the teachers will hate this, in part because some of the resulting decisions will in fact be unfair. But it might be the best we can do.
Well, in Chicago it might be the best they can do; I suspect that local small schools can eventually do better. Or then again, maybe not.
The "Edible Landscape" project is one item that might help local schools, businesses, farms, etc; here's a 13 minute TED talk by Pamela Warhurst.
Warhurst sees this as community activism, community art, sustainability, and I guess being a locavore; most of that leaves me feeling "well, okay," but I'm in favor of things that make school "real" in the sense that the grading ultimately comes from something outside, where agriculture certainly qualifies. (So does robotics. Art sometimes yes, sometimes no. Math definitely yes for people like me, but definitely no for many others and I may have been born this way--certainly I saw it that way before heading off to Epsom Chapel Nursery School. (Simple math, anyway -- I never really got a proper grip on category theory.))
For as long as many of us can remember, high-tech industries have flourished in the suburban office parks that are so ubiquitous in Silicon Valley, North Carolina's Research Triangle and other "nerdistans." But in recent years, high-tech has been taking a decidedly urban turn.
This is a doom-and-gloom post. Well, not really. But partly. It's not obvious that school consolidation would actually contribute to the solution, but there really is a problem. Let's look at it.
Lately I watch TED talks on a tablet, a Nexus 7, in the morning while walking quickly up and down stairs; it's 20 minutes of reasonable exercise for body and mind, and all that. This morning I watched That's Stanford CS prof Daphne Koller's talk on Coursera. Of course Coursera is higher education, but the techniques can certainly be applied to K-12.
she wants to have lectures by the very best lecturers, broken into 8-12 minute conceptual units with students having to answer a question or two at the end of each unit (sounds like KhanAcademy or TED-Ed, so far).
She wants personalized lectures, at least in providing optional units
She also wants to have actual course scheduling, with tests and deadlines
She wants peer grading, which apparently correlates extraordinarily well with teacher grading except that it's faster (22 minutes??), and it scales for huge courses
She wants students to (usually) form study groups, both virtual and physical
She notes that personalization in this context can in several ways go farther than a physical classroom can offer, and it's not just choice of options; if 2% of your students share a misconception that causes them to get the same two test questions wrong in the same way, then as a classroom lecturer you'll never know, but as a MOOC (massive open online course) lecturer with 100,000 students, you'll see 2,000 students as one point on a graph and you can cause them to be automatically directed to the same extra units.
She also talks about the 2-sigma difference between (A) students who try to learn just from lectures, versus (B) students given individual tutoring. 98% of group B are "above average", if the average is set by looking at A. She thinks that personalized courses can come closer to B than to A.
I don't see anything there that doesn't work for K-12, except that you need to provide more physical supervision/security. (Well, I've known some small kids I would trust alone or even, maybe, in a group, more than some college-age students, but usually you need to provide more physical supervision/security.
