It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year!

During the past few evenings I have spent time at my daughter’s new school waiting to pick her up after soccer practice.  The soccer field is located next to the football field which is also by the area where the band practices and of course everything is located next to the high school.  As I wait for practice to end, I can see football practice, band practice, cross country practice and even volleyball practice (they came on the track to run) take place.  I bet that there are over 100 students practicing or just wandering around.  What a great sight.  This time of year is a magical time for students and all of us involved in education…it is truly “The most wonderful time of the year”!  Everyone has the hope of a new beginning.  I can feel the optimism of the students as they look forward to the upcoming year and sense the joy of friends and colleagues reconnecting after a long summer.  In other words, this is why we are educators.  The kids are happy, excited, and nervous all at the same time.  The start of a new school year promises unlimited opportunities for the students and teachers alike.

True learning is so much more than the classes’ students take or the grades they earn in those classes.  Our school systems provide spaces for students to learn how to interact with each other; learn lessons about striving hard to reach a goal and become an important focus for their community.  Our challenge as educators is to remember that we are always dealing with those wonderful, complicated, frustrating beings called students.  They are the focus of everything that occurs in the school system.  They are the ones creating the energy and excitement for the start of the new school year.  We must not allow them to become abstractions or data points as our educational system becomes dangerously infatuated with “measuring” students. 

The “success” of a student, school or teacher is now directly related to how well a student performs on a test.  In an abstract way this may seem harmless.  After all, shouldn’t the school system be held “accountable” for what students learn or don’t learn? However, there is an insidious by-product of the infatuation with testing.  As schools, teachers and policy makers pour over the data supplied by these tests and analyze the results, students stop becoming individual kids with a life history and they become number.  In effect, they stop become humans and are just a metric that will be used by policy makers in far away locales to determine future policy decisions affecting local schools.  Students become an abstraction, not a living, breathing person.  Interestingly enough, local communities do not view their children as an abstraction; that is why parents consistently give high approval rankings for their own, local schools.  Communities can “see” their students…they can put a face on a test score.  Policy makers do not “see” individual students, they only view graphs, trends in data, and statistical models…the students have become disassociated from actual learning.  Over the past few nights I have witnessed the joy of seeing students as more than just a number.  We must always push back against the urge to allow students to become an abstraction.  Spend some time at your local school this evening as it gears up for the new school year.  You will see (and feel) for yourself that kids are more than an abstraction. 

Virtual Reality in Education

Let’s talk about the possibilities of virtual reality (VR) in learning.  The coming virtual reality revolution will lead to dramatic changes in who benefits from learning experiences and how learning occurs. In other words, VR will have a significant impact on people and systems.

Earlier this week, I took part in a conversation with educational leaders from across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania about the barriers that are in place for an optimal learning experience for students.  Although there are specific barriers rooted in specific problems within a learning organization, the number one concern for our group was more global… inequality. Inequality encompasses both people and systems.  Inequality means inequality of access (to great teachers, curriculum, and enriched learning opportunities); inequality of opportunity (a student is not aware of what she/he does not know); inequality of resources (the financial wherewithal to provide an outstanding learning experience).  Virtual reality has the potential to bend the arc of inequality allowing more students to access outstanding learning experiences and leveling the playing fiels for learners.  I will leave you with three points to consider.

1.     VR will allow students from all geographic and socioeconomic levels to access enriched learning experiences.  The promise of an inexpensive VR system will allow students to access content and instruction from all over the world. Imagine actually being in a class with students from all over the world and interacting as if you are in a face to face environment.  VR will force us to change the way we categorize learning environments.  After all, if modern VR headsets allows us to interact in the same ways in which current face to face environments do, then the needs for different categories becomes moot. 

2.     More than the present day “online” learning environment, VR will be a submersive experience.  A student will be able to actually experience a learning environment and be able to interact with it in ways that are not possible in a traditional “2-D” environment.  Imagine a learning environment where students charge over the top of a WWI trench with the soldiers or walk the moon with astronauts.  What a challenge this will provide for instructional and curricular theorists and practitioners!

3.     Here are some questions that I have forming in my mind about the possibilities of VR that I will leave unanswered.

a.      What will a futuristic school look like? 

b.     Will we need expensive buildings? 

c.      How will tutoring occur with students? 

d.     Where will learning occur? Do students need to meet in one place at all?  If they do, what specification will be necessary to allow VR to occur?

e.      What are the new instructional practices necessary to engage students in their learning?

f.      Who becomes a teacher?  What are the implications of this answer?

g.     Will school districts and schools become obsolete in their current iteration as learners and learning facilitators self-congregate in ad-hoc or semi organized organizations?

h.     Is VR the technological breakthrough that will finally allow true customization of  learning?

Here is the article that sparked this blog post.  Enjoy!

Voodoo Statistics

Education reform efforts are guided by an attempt to quantify the term “value”.  This is done with something called “value added models” (VAM’s).  VAM’s use student performance data (in Pennsylvania’s case from the PSSA test) and attempt to show how much “value” a teacher has brought to the student.  Education reformers that are infatuated with VAM’s claim that the model “controls” outside influences (things like poverty, race, etc) through complicated statistical processes; however a recent paper from the American Statistical Association cautions us about the use of VAM’s.  The entire paper can be found here but I will share some highlights with you.

Some of the cautions that the paper presents are significant.  At the most basic level, VAM’s rely on results from State mandates standardized tests.  Interestingly, the paper claims that tests currently given to students do not meet the high standards required for validity and reliability.  Specifically, the report states:

• ·       The measure of student achievement is typically a score on a standardized test, and VAMs are only as good as the data fed into them. Ideally, tests should fully measure student achievement with respect to the curriculum objectives and content standards adopted by the state, in both breadth and depth. In practice, no test meets this stringent standard, and it needs to be recognized that, at best, most VAMs predict only performance on the test and not necessarily long-range learning outcomes.

The paper thus states that the test only measures how well students do on a test and not their future learner outcomes.

Additionally, teachers attribute very little to the variance in student performance on the test.  Remember, VAM’s were created to “show” how much a student has “grown” during a school year thus attributing “value” to a teacher.  Again, the paper:

• ·       Research on VAMs has been fairly consistent that aspects of educational effectiveness that are measurable and within teacher control represent a small part of the total variation in student test scores or growth; most estimates in the literature attribute between 1% and 14% of the total variability to teachers. This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.

It is worth noting that professional statisticians are warning us that the majority of student variation in test scores is out of the control of the teacher.  Currently, Pennsylvania teachers will have 50% of their evaluation based on VAM scores.  Maybe a better percentage would be 1-14% since that aligns to statistical reality.

Finally, VAM scores may not tell us anything worthwhile because of the range in which a score could possibly fall.  The report states:

• ·       The VAM scores themselves have large standard errors, even when calculated using several years of data. These large standard errors make rankings unstable, even under the best scenarios for modeling.

The paper does state that there are good uses for VAM’s, and I agree.  The paper specifically points out that they are useful to analyze the effect of a system on student learning.  This requires that the use of the scores not be focused on specific teachers or classrooms, rather a broader view of the school or school district may lead to a more useful analysis.  The bottom line is that VAM’s may be used as a small part of a larger conversation about student learning and teacher effectiveness.

Complaince Zombies

Being a school leader today is not for the faint of heart.  Actually, being a leader in any enterprise in today’s changing world is difficult.  Society is always shifting and changing and attempting to keep up with these changes is a challenge.  Education policymakers have responded to the challenge with a series of policy prescriptions for education.   Teacher and school leader’s evaluations tied to student test scores; offering school vouchers to attend other schools; creating data banks of student information that can track across district and State lines; cyber schools; and creating a curriculum that all students in the United States will take are policy examples that education policy elites have created in an attempt to prepare our youth for the 21^st century.  I will discuss in another blog post whether these policy prescriptions are good or bad, but today I will discuss an unintended consequence of these policy prescriptions. 

We live in a world that is breathtakingly fascinating and complex.  Change is occurring at such a rapid rate that it seems hard to keep up.  Think about your cell phone.  It was only seven years ago that Apple introduced the first iPhone.  Until that time our cell phones basically served the function of old fashioned phones…they were a way to communicate.  Whether the communication was voice, email, or text messaging, the phone was viewed as a communication device.  Today, our Smartphone’s are mini computers that have “apps” that bring an unlimited amount of information to us.  This is just one example of rapid change in our society.  I believe it is interesting that the policy prescriptions put in place to address the changing world in which we live have had an unintended consequence.  These policies have created “Compliance Zombies”.

Compliance Zombies are educators who (through no fault of their own) spend large parts of their day figuring out how to comply with all of the “reform” initiatives put in place by education policymakers.  They have turned their brain off and robotically go through their day making sure they have met the requirements of the latest mandate from the State. A typical education leader in Pennsylvania must deal with figuring out the requirements for the new teacher and principal evaluation systems, entering data into the student information system (and verifying the data), entering data into the teacher information system (and verifying the data), align curriculum to the State tests, administer up to fifteen state-mandated tests to their students per year, and analyze test scores to input into State-mandated evaluation systems…an enormous undertaking indeed.  Compliance Zombies must assure the State, their school boards and themselves that everything is being completed to the exact specifications of the State Department of Education.  This leaves little or no time for educational leaders to actually lead.  In a world of constant change requiring nimble, quick reactions to stimulus, our educators are stuck in a world of “command and control” fretting over whether they will be compliant to the wishes of the State.  In other words, they are becoming brain dead just to stay compliant.   A better solution to becoming compliance zombies is to become an “Education Imagineer”. 

Education Imagineers view education through a lens of possibility; Education Imagineers study the ways in which societal shifts are affects learning.  Going even deeper, they anticipate shifts in the world they live and create programs and services that will help students thrive in a new reality.  Education Imagineers create organizations that are not “command and control”.  Rather, the organizations they create foster innovation and creativity through the input of all members of the organization.  Education Imagineers deconstruct the difference between “schooling” and “learning” to help them understand what their students need.  Education Imagineers use the mandates from the State and imagine them in new ways.  They understand the system in which they work…i.e. there will always be mandates from the State and Federal governments concerning their jobs.  However, Education Imagineers use these mandates as a pivot to accomplish the necessary work in their schools. 

Students will benefit once education policymakers realize that the command and control, mandate-compliant model is simply not working well for our kids. To produce innovative, creative learning options for students, our education systems must start to reflect systemic changes that encourage innovation and creativity.  The current system accomplishes just the opposite.  Unleashing the creative power of educational leaders is better for our students than encouraging an army of “Compliance Zombies”.  I know that there are thousands of Education Imagineers in the country right now.  I have interacted with hundreds in our State.  Let’s have a discussion about how our educational system can pivot to encourage Education Imagineers.

Let's "Update" Education

I call my son my personal philosopher.  Over the years, he has stopped me in my tracks with his simple statements that really make you think.  In one instance, I asked him when he got home from school whether or not he had fun at school.  He said “No”.  I then asked him, “isn’t learning fun?” and he said “Dad, learning is fun, school isn’t”.  That statement was five years ago and he is now in third grade and loves school (and learning).   

Recently as my son was playing Minecraft he started to tell me about the next Minecraft update.  (If you have not heard of Minecraft then you do not have a child under the age of 12…more on Minecraft in a later blog post).   He was so excited about what he heard was included in the next update that he told me in detail how the game was going to be improved.  As he was talking, he looked at my iPhone and proceeded to tell me about all of the cool new features that were included in the latest ios update for my phone.  This conversation with my son made me realize two things.  First, kids growing up today are incredibly immersed in technology, and second we need to “upgrade” education.

It is cliché to say that kids today are “technology natives”; of course they are technology natives, their entire lives have been immersed in rapid advancements in technology. As I watch and listen to my son I realize that there are implications to his immersion in technology that have implications for society and learning.  First, “updating” something is second nature for him.  He does not consider “updating” to include buying something new (unless the device will not support the update, but that is another topic).  Rather, updating is something that happens periodically to improve the quality of the game, device, or tool that you are using.  In the past “updates” did not occur as sudden, thus one could wait until a “new” product was introduced to the marketplace before you “updated”.  Rapid innovation and iterations of products are now so sudden that “updating” occurs several times a month in some cases.  My son expects his games and devices to be improved (for free).  Constant updating also sets the stage for him to think about updates that he would like to see in his life.  He and I will discuss his ideas for updates and try to guess whether or not his ideas will be included in the next update.  This constant iteration of products and services are an expectation for him.

entire experience has been in a technology drenched world.

I am now going to shift focus to our education system.  When was the last major “update” in our educational system; if you could travel back in time to a high school in the 1920’s would it look appreciably different than a high school today?   Sure, there may be flashy technology in today’s high school but the structure of the system has not changed since the 19^th century. Think about it.  One hundred years ago students were put in rows and listened to a “sage on the stage” tell them what is important and why they need to “hear” it.  Students were processed through an educational factory system by their “date of manufacture” (grade levels determined by age) in the exact same fashion as students are today.  Although I can start to see hints of radical structural change in our schools (Mass Customized Learning is a great example), in the vast majority of cases there has not been significant changes in our learning delivery system…an upgrade is needed. 

I am excited that we are in a place in time in education where we can change the system’s structures to meet the needs of today’s learners.  School leaders can glimpse into the future and adjust the system to meet the needs of future learners.   I believe we can update our learning system for students.  Conversations in education now center on how to have instruction that will “meet” the students at their interest and ability level as well as instruction tailored to their learning style.  To radically update the system, professional educators will combine their experience and expertise to create learning environments that break down the 19^th century learning model.  I know we can (and must) make these changes.