The K-12 Teacher and the Computer

On "the deconstruction of the K-12 teacher", we see When the Computer Takes Over for the Teacher - The Atlantic

I think it used to be taboo for teachers to borrow or buy plans written by other professionals, but it seems that times are changing. Just last week, I spoke with a history teacher from Santa Maria, California, who bluntly said, "I don’t ever write my own lesson plans anymore. I just give credit to the person who did." He explained, rather reasonably, that the materials are usually inexpensive or free; are extremely well made; and often include worksheets, videos, assessments, and links to other resources. Just as his administrators request, he can focus on being a facilitator, specializing in individualized instruction.

I’ve started recognizing a common thread to the latest trends in teaching. Flipped learning, blending learning, student-centered learning, project-based learning, and even self-organized learning—they all marginalize the teacher’s expertise. Or, to put it more euphemistically, they all transform the teacher into a more facilitative role....

Note that there's no claim here that the teacher is being marginalized; it's the teacher's expertise. And that might make a fundamental difference in who is qualified to be a teacher, and what pay scales should eventually be. Interesting.

Textbook Stories...

Environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes in the Washington Post about Environmental history errors in a high school textbook - The Washington Post

The other night I took a look at a few pages in my daughter’s U.S. History textbook (Pearson Prentice-Hall, U.S. History: Reconstruction to the Present (Ohio Edition, 2008)) concerning the growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as I was curious what my daughter was learning about it. I expected to disagree with some of book’s choice of emphasis or the way certain events are portrayed. What I did not expect, however, was to find a series of plain factual errors....

I'm reminded of experiences 20 years ago with my children's textbooks. I still have a letter (well, I still have the TeX file from which the letter was printed) from March 4, 1995, noting that page 197 of my 10-year-old son's science book, by Mallinson et al., defined "resistance" as "a force applied by a machine". That's the meaning of "resistance"? I added that

The Mallinson usage seems clearly counter to the ordinary English use of the word, as well as to that of traditional physics. I suspect a typographical error here, but there's no diagram, example, or calculation given which might clarify their meaning. That, I think, is a more serious problem than an erroneous definition, and I'd noticed it before with this book....

It's not really fair to say that the book was wrong, because the book didn't really mean anything by its definition....it was just words. The book was not even wrong. It's a problem noted by Richard Feynman in his fairly famous encounter with the California school textbook system, some thirty years earlier, emotionally described at Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books by Their Covers'. This has been going on for a long time. Some people don't want to allow Wikipedia as a reference, because it does have errors. Many of them. Perhaps we shouldn't allow K-12 textbooks as references either.

Testing Teacher Effectiveness

Grant Wiggins, the "Understanding By Design" guy, agrees with Cuomo that the current local system of teacher ratings in NY is a "sham", but writes (from New Jersey) in An Open Letter to Governor Cuomo: Re-think the Regs of APPR | Granted, and...

Here is a simple analogy to make the point. You were a ballplayer and are a Yankees fan. But suppose only once per year, we “tested” the Yankees on their skills, on tests developed by experts. Now, imagine, the players do not know how they did, either during or after the test. Now imagine, the NYSED gives them a value-added score – with test security, so they cannot double-check or question the test results (or test validity). Worse, imagine in addition that the impartial evaluators and internal supervisors (coaches) went to one game where the Yankees were terrible – like the game last week in which they made 4 errors, left runners stranded, and pitched poorly. By the logic of your plan, we would be obligated to find Manager Girardi “ineffective.” But that’s both bad measurement and not common sense. Two weeks later it looks different, doesn’t it? Indeed, the charm of baseball is that a long season of 162 “tests” enables the truth of quality to out. If this is true for highly-skilled and trained professional athletes, what about novice young students?

In short, I fear you are making matters worse, not better, by this new round of reductionist rules. And by insisting that they be put into operation next year, with no time to really think them through, test them, and refine them ensures that this effort will backfire.

Smaller Schools, Bigger Achievements?

They're talking about urban schools, but I choose to focus on Small Is Good, in Small high school reform boosts districtwide outcomes -- ScienceDaily

"Small school reform lifted all boats."

Small school reform, in which new, small high schools replace large, comprehensive high schools, has been adopted by major U.S. cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Boston. Studies in New York and Boston have found that small high schools deliver better outcomes -- including higher graduation rates -- than large high schools for urban students.

I'm convinced. :-)

Stand up to pay attention

One of many possible small improvements (or maybe it won't be confirmed; let's say one of many items worthy of exploration).. We think better on our feet, literally -- ScienceDaily

A study from the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health finds students with standing desks are more attentive than their seated counterparts. In fact, preliminary results show 12 percent greater on-task engagement in classrooms with standing desks, which equates to an extra seven minutes per hour of engaged instruction time.

I'm not sure how far to go with that "seven minutes per hour", simply adding on 12%, but if you can then it's a substantial increase to the school year....certainly my school years could have been stretched quite a bit with extra attentiveness, and maybe a standing desk -- like the one I'm typing this on -- would have helped with attentiveness as well as health. It's hard to say.

Research on Programs for Gifted Students

From the University of Iowa, U. S. schools are still shortchanging gifted kids, experts say -- ScienceDaily

This two-volume report is designed to "empower" parents, educators, administrators, and policy-makers with evidence and tools to implement 20 types of acceleration, which include early entrance to school, grade-skipping, moving ahead in one subject area, or Advanced Placement courses.

And just as important, A Nation Empowered aims to keep the conversation about acceleration going....

But it's not actually available quite yet; I follow links to Acceleration Institute

Coming Spring 2015

with a lot of other links, mostly having to do with the previous version of report that they're updating. Still, that's interesting too.

Share & Learn; iPad Usage Research

Science Daily reports on literacy testing of young technology users at Kindergartners who shared iPads in class scored higher on achievement tests -- ScienceDaily

a natural experiment where classrooms in one school had 1:1 iPads; classrooms in a second school had 23 iPads to share, where kids primarily used them in pairs; and classrooms in a third school had no iPads. She looked at the effect that using 1:1 iPads for one academic year (9 months), compared to the other two conditions, had on student literacy (as measured by the STAR Early Literacy Assessment).

Results showed that students in shared iPad classrooms significantly outscored their peers in 1:1 and non-iPad classrooms on the spring achievement test, even after controlling for baseline scores and student demographics. Blackwell found that shared iPad students scored approximately 30 points higher than 1:1 iPad students and non-iPad users.

Sometimes the best teacher is another kid -- and not necessarily an older kid, though it might be. I am reminded of some of what Sugata Mitra said in his TED talk at The child-driven education

In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching....

Yes, you do need grown-ups sometimes (that's why Mitra's later work has been on his plan to School in the Cloud with the "Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) toolkit". Mitra wants to involve professional educators as much as possible...but his most dramatic successes have been with kids together with raw materials, sometimes encouraged by a "granny" who may or may not be physically present and who may or may not be professional at all. I think we need more experiments on "self-supervised" sharing. (With a grown-up in the background. Usually.)

NSF EdTech

Reports on reporting about what we're learning about learning (and, of course, teaching about teaching) at the Huffington Post's 7 Cyberlearning Technologies Transforming Education | Aaron Dubrow

...NSF funds basic cyberlearning research and since 2011 has awarded roughly 170 grants, totaling more than $120 million, to EdTech research projects around the country.

The speakers in the lecture series, all leading cyberlearning scholars, ... represent the forces transforming what education may look like in the future.

1. Classroom as Virtual Phenomenon: RoomQuakes and WallScopes

HelioRoom simulates the orbital motion of the planets in the Solar system on a set of synchronized computer displays situated on the walls of the classroom, with planets "orbiting" around the periphery of the room. ...

... RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area. At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring....

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms .... Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging. ...

Tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna in Wallcology. ...

2. Games for Good: Learning While You Play

... in the game "Citizen Science," created by Squire and his team, players help restore Lake Mendota, a real lake in Wisconsin that, in the year 2020, has become polluted. As players explore the landscape, they take water samples, interact with a virtual, simulated watershed and talk with stakeholders....

... for a game that might reach even broader audiences, Squire and colleagues created Progenitor X, a zombie-themed tissue engineering game. In Progenitor X, players learn about the relationships between cells, tissues, and organs while trying to survive a zombie invasion. ... As a member of The Progenitor X Defense Force, you are a part of a highly trained squad of scientists who use highly advanced bio-medical technology to locate, seek out, and treat infected humans to contain the threat. ....

"These projects are not only using technologies that only recently became possible. They also build on decades of excellent research on how people learn," said Chris Hoadley, the program officer at NSF who leads the Cyberlearning program. "I believe it's only by advancing technology design and learning research together that we'll be able to imagine the future of learning."...

3. Teaching Tykes to Program: Never Too Young to Control a Robot

... Bers described her latest project, the KIWI robotic kit (subsequently renamed KIBO), which teaches programming through robotics, without screens, tablets, or keyboards. Using KIBO, students scan wooden blocks to give robots simple commands, in the process learning sequencing, one of the most important skills for early age groups. By combining a series of commands, kids make the robot move, dance, sing, sense the environment or light up....

4. Virtual role-play and robo-tutors

... Virtual role-play - where learners engage in simulated encounters with artificially intelligent agents that behave and respond in a culturally accurate manner - has been shown to be effective at teaching cross-cultural communication.

"You learn by playing a role in a simulation of some real life situation"

"We found in our military training that when soldiers use this approach, once they get into a foreign country -- let's say they're sitting down with local leaders -- they feel as if it's a familiar situation to them... Moreover, the software could address the shortage of qualified teachers able to teach Chinese, Arabic and other less popular languages... The first Web-based course was tested last year via Virtual Virginia, a statewide virtual school program, and received overwhelmingly positive ratings from the students....

5. Tools for Real-time Visual Collaboration

... "Computers have been individualistic devices," said Ramani. "But a new class of technology is emerging that allows us to engage in our individual learning process and also in a collaborative process." SkWiki ... allows many participants to collaboratively create digital multimedia projects on the web using many kinds of media types, including text, hand-drawn sketches, and photographs....

6. Fusing data collection, computational modeling and data analysis

Simulation and modeling have come to be regarded as the "third pillar" of science... ... By embedding simulations and sensor data collectors in the classroom, Dorsey and Wilensky are able to aid students in gathering, visualizing and analyzing data from multiple sources. A principal innovation of InquirySpace is the integration of the Concord Consortium's CODAP data exploration software with the modeling environments. This integration enables students to plan extended investigations of models, to do sophisticated analyses of the model runs, and to engage in arguments from evidence. ...

7. Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality: Increasing ecological understanding

... Two decades ago, with funding from NSF, Dede started investigating head-mounted displays and room-sized virtual environments... At the beginning of the two to four week EcoMUVE curriculum, the students discover that all of the fish in a virtual pond have died. They then work in teams to determine the complex causal relationships that led to the die-off. The experience immerses the students as ecosystem scientists. ... At the end of the investigation, all of the students participate in a mini-scientific conference where they show their findings and the research behind it.

I don't know how well the experiments will scale up, but I would like to note that all of this seems to require ending the teaching-to-the-test that the last few posts have been about. They all seem to require teamwork, but none of them have much to do with traditional lectures. All of them have a learn-by-doing framework, where the computer facilitates the doing -- or even provides the universe for that doing to be done in.

Creation vs Current Curriculum

This is a rather more abstract level than I usually post about, but I want to link to Yong Zhao's recommendations at A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners

• Stop prescribing and imposing on children a narrow set of content through common curriculum standards and testing.
• Start personalizing education to support the development of unique, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. ... ...
• Stop constraining children to learning opportunities present in their immediate physical environments by assigning them to classes and teachers.
• Start engaging them in learning opportunities that exist in the global community, beyond their class and school walls.
• Stop forcing children to learn what adults think they may need and testing them to what degree they have mastered the required content.
• Start allowing children the opportunity to engage in creating authentic products and learn what they are interested in, just in time, not just in case.
• Stop benchmarking to measures of excellence in the past, such as international test scores.
• Start inventing the excellence of the future. You cannot fix the horse wagon to get the moon. We have to work on rocket science.

A Final Word
To implement these recommendations, the first thing we need is to abandon ... the obsolete employment-oriented educational paradigm, the very mindset that both gave birth to and has been perpetuated by A Nation at Risk. After thirty years of experiments that have brought revolutionary, destructive changes to American education, without any measureable improvement, it is time to be freed from its spirit.

As Newsweek found almost five years ago, reporting on The Creativity Crisis

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class....

Campbell's Law, Standardized Testing, Accountability, Atlanta

I've mentioned Campbell's law on this blog before. As Wikipedia says, Campbell's law

is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell:

"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms. This may take the form of teaching to the test or outright cheating.

This week SlashDot reports Prosecutors Get an 'A' On Convictions of Atlanta Ed-Reform-Gone-Bad Test Cheats - Slashdot

in early 2010, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported on how Hall and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were bringing a "fair and transparent evaluation and support mechanism" to the Atlanta Public Schools. "We are excited to continue our [$23.6 million] partnership with APS and Dr. Hall," said Gates Foundation director of education Vicki L. Phillips. Five years earlier, in a 2005 Gates Foundation press release, Hall said, "We look forward to partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to take our reform efforts to the next level."

And now they're in jail -- well, Hall was facing 45 years in prison, but died before the end of the trial. Eleven are in jail. And it's hard to argue that this isn't a foreseeable consequence of excessive reliance on measurables -- i.e., on standardized testing. As the Atlantic puts it, Eleven Atlanta Educators Have Been Convicted for Cheating Conspiracy, Revealing the Dangers of Standardized Testing — The Atlantic

The scandal shows the dangers of hyper-testing and bureaucracy in a school district serving a particularly disadvantaged population of students. Unfortunately, although what happened in Atlanta is especially egregious, these educators' actions are not unusual...

People do respond to incentives.

That doesn't mean that testing is bad...testing is good, every teacher uses it. High-stakes testing creates strong incentives which will distort results and hurt some kids. The kind of low-stakes testing built into Khan Academy or Ted-Ed lessons is pretty safe because no individual score is worth gaming. But the Big Test Day idea, where scores mean money, strikes me as fundamentally flawed.

Test-taking

Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post talks about Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous but maybe his best points are about the attempts to make schools focus on test-taking skills:

the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.

Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.

But other than bad test-takers, their economies have a few important traits in common...

Bottom line, their economies work pretty well--and attempts to fix a 50-year-old "crisis" of bad test scores do run a serious risk of doing much more harm than good. We need more innovators, not more test-takers...STEM has to be a big part of that, and many people doing STEM understand that just fine. By all means, let us advocate "STEAM not STEM," but if somebody starts advocating standardized tests as a basis for evaluating creativity...ummm.... no. Just say no.

Motivation, Feedback, Content

For an infovore like me, the Internet does indeed seem like a gigantic, interactive version of the libraries that took (or do I mean provided?) so much of my childhood -- and between them, they've served as basis for self-education that keeps on going. But does that provide an alternative to classroom learning for normal people? I dunno. Arnold Kling suggests in Online Self-Education: The Bigger, Closer Library | askblog that we

think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.

However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.

That's quite a claim, but it's not at all impossible. Feedback systems on phones and tables will not, of course, be similar to the feedback system provided by a teacher any more than a sewing machine's motions are similar to those of a traditional seamstress. However, the app that reacts to your input will have learned from experience with tens of millions of students, some of whom had more or less exactly the problem you're having. Dissimilar != worse.