From the Shameless Self-Promotion Dept. comes my TEDxNYEd Talk that I gave a few weeks ago. It was a real honor to be asked to do this talk, and I hope I did it justice.
I found it incredibly difficult to say everything that I wanted to say in 15 minutes or less, and as I reflect back on it now, I feel like a lot is missing. When I first started thinking about this talk, I wanted to speak more to parents than to educators, but I think I veered away from that a bit. And given the nature of TED Talks in general, I think at points I went too much into the moment as opposed to sticking to the bigger themes.
But overall, some rhetorical issues aside, I’ll take it. The best part? I learned a lot in the process. I definitely felt pushed by the experience, and it’s given me a great deal of valuable feedback into my own speaking and thinking. It made me consider deeply the ways in which we can now craft our messages and offer them up to the entire world for inspection. Scary on many levels, but motivating on many others.
Now, if I can just get this down to under three minutes to really appeal to the short-attention-span culture that we find ourselves in…
I get the great pleasure of spending an hour “teaching” in a classroom next Thursday with some 5th Year students at a school just outside of Sydney, and I thought I’d write a quick post soliciting some ideas for what I might do. They’re just starting a unit on China and will be doing some research about the country and its people, so I’ve been asked to do a lesson that shows kids how to “pull” in information and hit on some of those “manage, analyze, synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information” (NCTE) skills and literacies that we all need these days. I’ve obviously got some ideas, but I’m wondering, given that very brief lead-in, what ideas do you have that might help me serve those kids well?
The past couple of weeks have reminded me how hard it is for teachers to consider change when they don’t have a context for it and, most importantly, when they don’t value it.
Case in point: recently I was working with a group of teachers trying to help them re-envision their curriculum in the light of all this “new” social technology that some of us have been swimming in for the last decade now. And I had one particularly interesting and, I think, compelling exchange with a teacher who was finding it especially difficult to see any value to changing what he was doing in his classroom. Briefly, he shared with the group that one of his most effective lessons was built around helping students understand the political drivers of redistricting by asking them to redraw maps of nearby cities in ways that would make it almost impossible for an incumbent to lose an election. The way he described it, it was a great lesson that challenged kids to research, think, and create in some important ways, ways that the teacher pointed out were necessary to do well on the state assessment.
I tried to move the conversation into what I think can be called “doing both mode,” as in finding a way to engage students in understanding the concepts for the test but doing so in a way that teaches them to think more expansively by using online tools to go beyond the paper and pencil and learn about connecting and creating and collaborating along the way. And some of the other teachers in the room provided some great suggestions, using Google Earth or Maps, and adding multimedia resources that could articulate the reasons for drawing the lines where they were drawn. And with a little prodding, others suggested using Skype to interview people involved in the real process, or maybe even connecting with schools within the districts they were redrawing to get some sense of what the effects of those revisions might be in real life.
Throughout, the teacher was nodding his head in assent, but when I asked him how all of that sounded, he paused, and then he said “Well, you know, sometimes I think technology just adds a lot of bells and whistles, makes stuff look good without really adding to the learning. I mean, they don’t need to do any of that to get the concept.” And he’s right, of course. Students don’t need technology to pass the test; they’ve been doing it for years without it.
But here’s the thing: that teacher didn’t yet see the value of having his students make those connections outside the classroom even though no one was asking or expecting him to do it. In fact, it took about another seven or eight minutes of back and forth before I think he finally came around to the idea that the connections might matter even though no one was testing for them or writing curriculum for them or demanding that kids understand them. That we may want to consider adding the “bells and whistles” because the world our kids need to be prepared for is opening up in ways that go beyond the long-standing goals and objectives we’ve set up for them. That it’s not just about map making any more.
My sense of it is that teacher is still in the majority, and as teachers get incentivized to do even more test prep and one-size-fits all instruction, he’ll remain in the majority for quite a while longer.
(Note: I’m grumpy and tired after being sick for a week so I apologize for the somewhat random thoughts that follow. Hope you can make sense of it.)
I’ve been thinking about your post from the other day. This weekend, I ran across this 10th Grade Mathematics state assessment from Massachusetts. Forty-two questions that supposedly would identify whether or not a 15-year-old in Boston was “ready” for the world. I figured, what the heck, and I took the test.
Sad to say, based on the result, I should probably be heading back to middle school with Tucker (my 6th grade son) to get a refresher in Mr. Mead’s class.
But here is the thing: not only did I get the majority of the questions wrong, the vast majority of the questions asked me to do things I have never had to do in real life. I’ve never had to figure out the lateral surface area of a cone, nor been asked to give the mode of a series of numbers, nor had to figure out a square root. At least not that I can remember. If I ever did know how to do any of that stuff, and I probably did since I passed the test at some point long ago, it’s now long gone from my memory banks. Somehow, I’ve survived.
Yong Zhao recently linked to an article from a few years ago that indicates that kids in Wisconsin are spending somewhere around 3 million hours taking standardized tests, and that doesn’t include “time spent distributing and collecting materials, taking practice tests, giving instructions, and addressing other logistics of testing.” And I wonder, how much of that time is being spent on stuff that kids are going to forget? And then I wonder how much kids could really learn if they spent that time immersed in the stuff that they want to learn rather than what we want them to?
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make sure every child can read and write and do basic math and have a fundamental understanding of history and science and the rest. We should provide every child with the skills and literacies he or she needs to understand the world and continue to learn. And I know that if we are to help kids find their own passions for learning that we need to expose them to many different things, especially when they are young.
But I have to ask, does every child have to pass the same test by the end of 10th grade? Really? Does every child have to read Voltaire and Turgenev and Amy Tan as the Common Core suggests? Our friend Karl Fisch admirably asked this same type of question last fall:
And therein lies the dilemma – is it possible to provide in a systemic way a customized educational experience for all students that both allows and encourages them to pursue their passions, but also exposes them to the wide range of human endeavors that they may have little or no knowledge about and therefore wouldn’t be able to even know if they were passionate about in the first place?
They key word there is obviously “systemic” because we do want every child to have the foundation to continue to learn about whatever he or she wants or needs to learn. But, like Karl, I’m not at all sure that’s even possible. For one thing, there is a real disconnect between what “learning” is and the all-purpose goal of “higher student achievement;” I would argue the two are almost totally unrelated in today’s heightened political rhetoric around schools. And for another, real learning for the most part requires real contexts, not the contrived experiences that schools in general can offer.
To that end, the Common Core doesn’t help. The real impetus for the Common Core has nothing to do with learning in the contexts that we talk about it. Nothing to do with exploration, experience, reflection, creation, sharing, collaboration, or changing the world. Instead, it has everything to do with creating a new “Easy Button” for education, one that will let us compare our kids even more. In a world where we can personalize and individualize in ways like never before, we’ll give students an even more “common” educational experience. That saddens me.
The crux of all of this is that it’s just too hard to do it any other way. It’s too hard to let kids make decisions around their own learning (even though they’re doing it all the time at home) because we won’t be able to track it easily. It’s too hard to let them read books that fuel their passions because we can’t read all those books to see if they are “appropriate” or “effective” or whatever else. And we can’t let kids go really deeply into the things they’re interested in because goodness knows we have too much stuff to cover in the curriculum that they need to pass the test to make that work.
And while I’m sure that there will be some great, inquiry-based, choice-based curriculum that will be developed around the Common Core that will make even me happy, I fear that in general, we just don’t want to work that hard. We’ll go running to those textbook publishers and “approved providers” (who are no doubt salivating at the prospect) who will help us get our students to meet the standards but, in the end, do nothing to expand the opportunities for kids to learn things in ways they will never, ever forget.
