Ben Daley, High Tech High

I was up in San Francisco since Monday at the New Schools Venture Fund Summit. A few thoughts and lessons learned:

1. Teacher preparation, school leadership development
I was struck by the innovative things that are happening at places like Charles Sposato Grad School, Relay Grad School, Aspire Public Schools, and Urban Teacher Residency United. I am more convinced than ever that we need to get the faculty members from these various programs together to learn from one another. I am on this.

2. Teacher leadership
I think that the teacher leadership program in our graduate school is doing great things. I had great conversations with Tony Klemmer from National Academy of Advanced Teacher Education and someone else whose name I have forgotten (if you read this – please contact me!) about how they are explicitly working with teachers to help them develop leadership skills. For example, how do you take leadership with your peers when you do not have formal authority? We are doing this in some ways I know, but I’m interested in thinking more about how to make this even more explicit in our curriculum.

3. It’s not just test scores
I noticed a palpable shift in the conversation at the summit this year, where more people were beginning to say out loud, “Our students have high test scores but aren’t doing well in college, so test scores are not enough!” This made me feel hopeful.

4. It’s all about “student achievement”
Despite the small shift I noticed, the overwhelming feeling at this meeting is still, “all that matters is student achievement (and unstated: and all we mean by student achievement is bubble test scores).” And this is coming from my friends. This made me feel depressed.

5. The role of for-profits in education
I wrote about how Rick Hess has helped me feel more open to the positive role that for-profits can play in education. Every time I start to get irritated by for-profit people, I try to rein myself in (Rick, I really do, I swear!). Still, I felt overwhelmed by all the characters at the Summit who are looking to get rich capitalizing on the “$700 billion education market.” This made me feel creeped out.

6. Blended learning
Just when I started to get interested in blended learning, I had to go to a meeting where 3 out of 4 people are making a living selling “blended learning solutions” to schools, because “blended learning has been proven to work.”
Umm, no it hasn’t.

7. Putting college in kids’ faces
At my visit to Aspire K-6 and 7-12 schools, I was most struck by how explicit they were about college. Every classroom had a college flag at the door. The teacher was wearing a hat from her alma mater. At first, I thought it was hokey. Then I heard a 4th grader talking about his top three colleges (Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford, by the way). I saw 8th graders asking a visitor to their classroom what college he went to and then gasping with pleasure and recognition that he had gone to Duke and Stanford. I don’t think our students would act like that which made me wonder…

8. The Stanford d school is legit
Everyone and their brother is all geeked out on “design thinking.” I was totally skeptical.

Me: “Ok, but what is design thinking?”
Everyone and their brother: “It’s like a process, man.”

I was wrong. My visit to the d school was terrific. When I walked into the building, I almost gasped. I thought, “This is how people react when they first walk into High Tech High.” Super innovative space inside a boring old box. Two little nuggets from the workshop:
a. empathy — the idea of leaving your own professional ideas behind and really understanding your students/users/customers and trying to really understand what their needs are. Writing it down makes it seem trite. It struck me as powerful.
b. delightful ideas — although this reminded me of this, our facilitator made a great move to tell us to focus on “delightful ideas.” After we spent some time brainstorming a solution to a problem, we were then directed to pick a “delightful solution” to focus on. It was exactly right, because I had already felt myself gravitating towards one of our most practical solutions. Focusing on a delightful solution had a group of strangers almost falling on the floor laughing as we thought through our solution, which started to seem more practical the more we fleshed out the idea.

9. Kudos to the NSVF team for having the summit be less about going to lectures and more about having interesting experiences and making connections with stunning colleagues. By far the best summit in quite a few years.

All in all, a great trip.

cross posted at blendmylearning.com

Since we opened High Tech High, we have had the mantra with technology that we are about “student production, not just student consumption.” By this we mean that students have many opportunities in life to consume more and more media and technology. Merely having a school where students consume even more content is not what we need. Instead, we think 6th graders should write a picture book about Ancient Egypt for younger children, 10th graders should write a book explaining connections between chemistry principles and major world events, seniors should create a “multimedia exhibition exposing hidden paradigms, underground cultures and unresolved issues,” and juniors should build launchers to study the concept of projectile motion.

When I think about what is happening in the area of blended learning, I wonder about student consumption and production. I mean, I like Khan Academy and MIT open courseware as much as the next person. But if blended learning means kids sitting in chairs consuming content off the internet, I wonder if we have progressed as far as we need to. I wrote about one promising example of students creating something in an online course. I am interested in more examples of this nature.

cross posted at blendmylearning.com

I have written earlier about the free online course from udacity.com on computer science I am taking with high school students right now. One aspect of the course that I did not recognize at first is that it is actually a project based course. It is not a “computer science 101″ course. It is a “learn to make a search engine in 7 weeks!” course (and by the way, you will learn computer science 101). The difference is subtle but significant.

Engagement
When I heard about a course on learning to make a search engine, I thought, “Cool! I want to learn how to do that!” and I signed up. Imagine if the tag line had been:

Course Objectives:

• Gain a breadth of understanding about computers and Computer Science.
• Gain ability at developing algorithms for problems and improve logical thinking.
• Learn something about a specific programming language (Python) and use it to write computer programs.

In fact, the course objectives above are pretty close to exactly what we have been learning in the udacity “build a search engine course.” But there is no chance I would have signed up to take the course above. Framing matters.

Why do we have to learn this?
At High Tech High, we have a design principle “real world learning” or “adult world connection.” This means that we try to design learning experiences so that students see a purpose to what they are learning. Udacity’s search engine course is aligned with this principle. They could have said, “Well, take four years of courses with us, and at the end, you will know how to do something with all this knowledge you’ve acquired.” But they didn’t. Instead, they have started teaching us the basics, but immediately in the context of getting us ready to create a search engine. For example, in week one,  we needed to write a computer program that searches for something. We could have searched for anything, but in the udacity class, we learned to search for a link on a webpage. It was obvious to me why I was learning to search for a link. It wasn’t just some exercise that the instructors were assuring me would help me “later in life.”

Designing online courses that capture some of the best aspects of project based learning would be a step in the right direction.

cross posted at blendmylearning.com

This fall, I enrolled* in the free, online, Stanford artificial intelligence course. For me, this class was a watershed moment. I have followed the development of many online courses over the years. I have often felt that the courses are really just a textbook copied onto a screen followed by a multiple choice question that asks you to recall what you just read. In other words, 19th century pedagogy, but it’s on a computer, so now it’s really exciting. In contrast, this Stanford course had a number of features that make me think very differently about what is possible in an online space. For example, although as a teacher I would really prefer smaller class sizes, I was surprised that a class with 160,000 students could lead to more learning than a smaller class would.

As a result, when I learned that Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors from the artificial intelligence class, had created a new free online university (udacity.com) and is offering a new online course this spring in computer science (tagline: create your own search engine in seven weeks!), I immediately signed up for the class. But then, as I thought about it more, I thought, “I bet there’s some students in our schools who would be interested in this course too.” I had started to compose an email to all the high school math and science teachers in our schools telling them about the course when I thought, “You know what, I should take this on myself.”

A few weeks ago, I met with a group of juniors and seniors at High Tech High International and made the following pitch. Join me for 7 weeks. We will all take this online class and will support each other through a study group that meets twice a week. We’re going to learn some computer science. We’re going to learn something about how we do or don’t learn in this environment. A bunch of students said yes. I am going to post about what we are learning.

* I can’t say I “took” the course: with full disclosure, I did stop working on the class in week 4. Life interfered, which could be the subject of another post.

I’ve been invited to contribute to a new/revitalized blog on online/hybrid/blended learning called “blend my learning.” I will be cross posting my posts here and there.

When I heard about Stanford’s class in artificial intelligence to be taught online for free this fall, I knew I had to take it. At High Tech High, we have been thinking about how to use technology so that students can learn more effectively, particularly in terms of our work in our graduate school of education in working with teachers and school leaders from a distance.

I got an email on Monday telling me that class was starting, that 160,000 students had signed up, and that students are taking the class from 190 countries! I was pretty busy this week, and then when I logged on this morning, I found out that I am already behind! Yikes!

I have spent a few hours working on the course. It is fascinating. I studied physics at a liberal arts college. I find watching the lectures to be very reminiscent of attending lectures in college. Only it’s better, because I can pause to take notes, there are quizzes where the instructors “check for understanding” before moving on, and of course I can attend the lecture whenever I want, wherever I want, and can pause when I need a break.

In terms of consulting with peers, I have spent time on the forums getting help from classmates. In terms of real person to person interactions, I have signed up to attend a meetup study group session next week in San Diego which 113 people (and counting) are tracking. While it’s true that I can not stop the professors to ask questions, in fact I did not do that really all that much when I was in college anyway, and there is way more interaction on the forums (with students challenging the assignments, linking to resources to support their point of view, etc.) than I ever remember in undergraduate courses.

Also, while I am sure there is a lot of work being done behind the scenes to make the course function, the instructors have chosen to go quite low tech in their approach, which I really appreciate. They have recorded videos on youtube, (30 seconds to 5 minutes each), simply pointing a webcam at a piece of paper that they write on, and the quiz questions are embedded directly into youtube.

Finally, one of the things that I find quite interesting about the class is that having 160,000 classmates actually makes the class work better than if there were only 400. In either case, professor-student interaction would be quite limited, but with so many students, there are bound to be classmates in your geographic region, plus there are that many more students interested in posting to the forums, which means that I can learn a lot, even if I don’t post there myself.

Will I be able to keep up with the work for the next 10 weeks? Not sure, but I’m thinking a lot about what this means for distance learning for educators in the meantime.

Because I work at a school called High Tech High, I am often asked about what I think about educational technology. People are often surprised to hear that I think that the reality often doesn’t live up to the hype. While I think that there are some very interesting things out there (aleks.com, khan academy, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, and Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course come to mind), a lot of what passes for innovation is a textbook scanned into a computer coupled with some multiple choice tests. It’s 19th century education, but it’s online!

Meanwhile, I get an email almost every day about some piece of education technology that is “proven to work by research,” and thus am totally skeptical of claims about data that proves that education technology “works.” So one might think that I welcomed this recent NY Times piece called A classroom software boom, but mixed results despite the hype.

However, while I agree with the author’s point about mixed results and hype in educational technology, their condescending tone towards educators throughout made my blood boil.

The carefully selected quotes from “experts”  and comments include:

“[Educators] want the shiny new one,” said Peter Cohen, chief executive of Pearson School, a leading publisher of classroom texts and software. “They always want the latest, when other things have been proven the longest and demonstrated to get results.”

Though the clearinghouse is intended to help school leaders choose proven curriculum, a 2010 Government Accountability Office survey of district officials found that 58 percent of them had never heard of What Works, never mind consulted its reviews.

“Decisions are made on marketing, on politics, on personal preference,” said Robert A. Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University. “An intelligent, caring principal who’d never buy a car without looking at Consumer Reports, when they plunk down serious money to buy a curriculum, they don’t even look at the evidence.”

But Mr. Capelli, like others, relied at least in part on personal experience.

When I read this piece, I thought to myself, “Well, I know why I don’t consult the What Works Clearinghouse.” It’s because every week I see in Edweek that the clearinghouse has determined that yet again, everything they have studied “doesn’t work.” But I thought, “OK, fair enough, I’ll go look on the what works clearinghouse and see what works.”

So I went to the what works clearinghouse, and found that in high school math, science, English, and history, nothing works! Which is like going to Consumer Reports and finding out that all the cars are bad, and you’re like, “But I need a car.”

screech…

However, I just went on the clearinghouse to link to what I had seen last week when I checked. Either I am crazy, or the clearinghouse has totally changed how their search function works since this NY Times piece was released six days ago. Now there are examples of textbooks and educational software that appear to work, because “potentially positive results” are defaulted to show as “working” when last week they showed as “not working.” Indeed, Cognitive Tutor, which is the software so maligned in the NY Times article because it doesn’t “work”, now appears to “work” according to the What Works Clearinghouse.

I am really not sure what to make of this. I am posting this anyway, because I am still irked, although also baffled/skeptical/cynical. I had a lot more to say about this, including the wisdom of declaring “what works” based exclusively on multiple choice test scores, researching curricula and ed tech tools as though they are a pill for a patient to swallow, and the politicized decisions surrounding the what works clearinghouse, but this apparent change in search functionality has taken the wind out of my sails, as I am unclear what this all means and if perhaps I read this wrong before, although I don’t really see why the times would have written a whole article about how bad cognitive tutor is if it “works.”

Fortunately, I have stored up opinions about a number of other topics and will get writing on those instead.

Obviously, people passionate about school reform do not neatly fall into one of two “teams,” nor does everyone on one “team” agree with every single that thing that this “team” supposedly believes in. Still, there do seem to be two camps in the conversation right now, the ed reformers and the not ed reformers. As I mentioned here, the two camps often seem to talk past one another. I would like folks on all sides of the conversation to acknowledge a few things.

To the (“so called”) “ed reformers,” please acknowledge:

1. that it is possible to want better outcomes for low income students and yet believe that using multiple choice test scores as the primary driver of school change is not the best idea.

2. that we have been using standards and multiple choice tests to try to drive school reform for over twenty years and it “hasn’t worked” using your own metrics. If you argue that we haven’t been doing it right, fine, but please acknowledge that we’ve been trying to improve schools using your ideas. In other words, for the past three decades, the country hasn’t exactly been in the grip of a Ted Sizer inspired set of reforms.

3. that the other countries around the world who have school systems you admire do not implement many of the reforms you advocate.

To the anti-ed reformers crowd (and your team needs to work on their name!), please acknowledge:

1. that some of the most progressive public schools in our country are charter schools.

2. that there are many people working in charter schools who aren’t exactly radical republicans determined to “destroy public education.”

3. that we have historically attracted lower achieving students into the teaching profession, that this is not a particularly good thing, and that Teach For America/charter schools/alternative credentialing and other such reforms have resulted in more academically talented individuals working in the public school sector.

Can we all have a group hug?

It seems pretty clear that both “sides” in the education reform debate are talking past each other. As the crucial conversations people would say, it would be better to “remain in dialogue” rather than “retreating to silence or violence.” I thought this interesting conversation between Gary Rubinstein and Whitney Tilson was at least an effort in that direction.

It seems like someone (edweek?) should host a series of conversations of this sort.

To get us started, I propose:

Andy Rotherham and Diane Ravitch

Jonathan Kozol and Wendy Kopp

Alfie Kohn and Rick Hess

others?

Cross posted at edweek.org on the Futures of School Reform blog.

Several years ago, I attended a conference for teachers. The speaker at the podium was defending their support for a law that requires all teachers in the state to use the same textbook. The crowd of teachers was getting restless to the point that several were shouting back at the speaker. Exasperated, the speaker bellowed into the microphone, “But not every kid in the state goes to your school!” Yes, I thought, but your policy is affecting the kids in my school!