Posted on 10th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Schools we now have
commons, common_core_state_standards, Equality, standards
Today the Common Core State Standards Initiative is releasing proposed standards for what students should learn in K-12 English and math. As Nick Anderson writes in the Washington Post article about the announcement: “Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.” Eventually, we can suppose, it will get to the kids — most certainly not in anything close to equal opportunities to learn. The Exeter faculty will make sure their students master the concepts; at Dunbar not so much.
There is a wonderful new way to have a common core for what students learn: use the global knowledge commons emerging online. For example, let’s hope all of the books are put openly online that the governors and state school superintendents have proposed in the standards they are announcing today. Otherwise students at Dunbar may have more trouble locating a hardcopy of them all than youngsters in Evanston and Peoria.
The Washington Post gives this example of a math common core standard: “Eighth-graders would be expected to use linear equations to solve for an unknown and explain a proof of the Pythagorean theorem on properties of a right triangle — cornerstones of algebra and geometry.” Happily there are many places in the online commons to learn about Pythagorean proofs. Click the image for an example.
Posted on 9th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Schools we now have
classroom, teaching
Handschooling has a sweepingly simple solution to the woes of teaching: quit trying to teach classes, teach individuals. That way you can do it at the level of understanding your pupil has. You can engage her interest, adjusting as you sense how she is grasping the knowledge you are explaining. You can interact with her, challenge her, and lessen the pressure when she is struggling. How in the name of Socrates’ ghost can you do any of that standing in front of the very typical class shown in the illustration above?
The New York Times Magazine article where the illustration appears goes on page after page trying to solve this mystery:
But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans… A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems.
Somehow we have reached a point where teaching is synonymous with controlling a classroom full of students. Teaching is thought to be something you do to a crowd. Think about it: that is absurd. This view of teaching has has led to the development of educational theories for managing a class that are called techniques for teaching. We get the flavor from the NYT Magazine article:
. . . what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. . . When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
Handschooling allows individual students to learn by letting them interact privately on their own device connected to the online global knowledge commons, perhaps spending part of a morning learning some optics from the OSA. No such opportunity existed when textbooks, grade curricula, and standards began sending education down the slippery slop of losing teaching in techniques of crowd control. Millions of natural, devoted teachers have bounced off of what resulted — to the enormous loss of several generations.
Handschooling will free teaching to resume. A teacher can interact with a student who is looking at the OSA page on The Eye. She can answer questions her student asks, and if she does not know the answer they can look elsewhere online to find it. Other students can join in the discourse. The ghost of Socrates will smile.
Posted on 8th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics
college_loans, government_education, reconciliation, student_loans
To readers who may think I am imagining the reach in Washington to take over American education, I recommend this Opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal: That Other Government Takeover: What else may go into ‘reconciliation.’
Everyone knows Democrats are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to get ObamaCare through the Senate. Less well known is that Democrats are plotting add-ons to that bill to get other liberal priorities enacted—programs that could never attract 60 votes.
One of these controversial measures rewrites the Higher Education Act to ban private companies from offering federally guaranteed student loans as of this July. Congress has already passed laws in recent years discouraging private lenders from making loans without a federal guarantee. But most college financial-aid departments still want private companies to originate and service the guaranteed loans. That’s because the alternative—a public option run by the Department of Education—has been distinguished by its Soviet-style customer service.
The Democratic plan is to make this public option the only option mere days before colleges send out their financial aid packages to incoming students. The House and Senate budget committees issued instructions last year to look for savings in the student-lending program, so the Democrats have prepared in advance their excuse to jam these changes through the reconciliation process.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan portrays the changes as eliminating subsidies to private companies, but no one should misinterpret these comments to mean that taxpayers will benefit. The plan that passed the House includes $67 billion in “savings,” according to a Friday estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. But the bill also has more than $77 billion in new spending. . . .
Posted on 7th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have
charter_schools, intervention, Obama, teacher_unions
Your school superintendent directs restaffing of your child’s school; the President of the United States publicly approves of what the superintendent did. This week, exactly that happened, as this front page New York Times story reports: School’s Shake-Up Is Embraced by the President. The reaction was mixed, but not the way you might think. The article does not say there were objections from parents or voters, although an earlier story mentions students and former students who say the school had been like their family.
Today’s New York Times article reports these reactions:
The pro-charter school Thomas B. Fordham Institute cheered: “’I think it’s going to give some cover to other school boards and school superintendents around the country that want to do something similar,’ Mr. Petrilli said.” Obama has said there should be some charter schools, so it is not surprising the charter school people are happy.
The teachers unions howled: “’I ripped the Obama sticker off of my truck,’ said Zeph Capo, a midlevel official at the Houston Federation of Teachers . . . .” “’Teachers were taken aback — and profoundly disappointed,’ said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.” Why would Obama do something so loudly in public that angers the teachers unions that backed his election?
It is a wake-up call to realize that there is not a loud public outcry at Presidential intervention into the management of a local school. And to assume Obama’s intervention is just a supportive pat on the head for reform is to be sadly mistaken. It is part of something much bigger – - as if the President sees himself as judge of what local schools should and can do. He is setting an amazing precedent with little said by parents and local citizens.
An aspect now underway of Obama’s very large intervention into local schooling is mentioned in the article: “To get a share of the $3.5 billion in what are known as School Improvement Grants, school officials can choose to transform the learning environments in failing schools by extending instructional hours and making other changes, converting them to charter schools, closing them entirely or replacing the principal and at least half the staff.”
$3.5 billion is dangling in front of those responsible for local schools across America. The deal is: follow federal rules to get some of the money. Is this Constitutional? Do we want it? Do we really think it will only affect other people’s children in schools deemed failing by Barack Obama?
Posted on 6th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles
intrusion, mobile_control
Software control like what Soti MobiControl provides to businesses was used in a recent school pilot program to allow teachers to interact with each student’s mobile, monitor what the student is doing there, and apply discipline. A month ago a school district in Pennsylvania was sued for calling down a high school student for something he was doing at home — observed by the webcam on his school-owned laptop.
How much intrusion should a school have, if any? At what age should a student be trusted keep the contents of the computer he/she uses for school private? Certainly, we would not allow college kids to be intruded on by deans of discipline who watch what they are doing on their smartphones and/or laptops.
An article from O’Reilly Radar about the recent school pilot program does a great job of describing the current state of things regarding the way schools exercise control and limit boundaries for what individuals students can do with their mobiles.
The network in the image above is from a Soti’s MobiControl video that shows how top down management of multiple mobiles works. The following are the first and last paragraphs of the pilot article. They explain the rationale for controlling student mobiles. Do you agree? I would rather trust the kids.
In most schools, cell phones are checked at the door — or at best powered off during school hours in a tacit “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding between students and administrators. This wide-spread technology ban is a response to real concerns: if kids have unfettered instant access to the Internet at school, how do we keep them safe, how do we keep out inappropriate content, how do we prevent real-time cyberbullying, how do we even keep their attention in class when competing with messaging, gaming, and surfing? . . .
As for the issues of safety and appropriate use of the Internet, each student in the pilot has signed an acceptable use policy outlining their responsibilities as cell phone users at school. Soti’s MobiControl software, which allows the teachers to interact with each student’s cell phone, also allows them to monitor use and apply standard classroom discipline techniques for inappropriate behavior in the virtual world — just as they manage behavior in physical hallways and on campus grounds. Not surprisingly, after some initial testing of the boundaries, a culture of responsible use quickly evolved among the students.
Posted on 4th March 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Schools we now have
connective_learning, standards
Put positively: learning online networked knowledge surely stimulates connections in the circuitry of a child’s brain. George Will writes in his column this week, reviewing the best-selling book Nurture Shock:
Until age 21, the circuitry of a child’s brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that “the performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader.” In high school, there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.
Tired children have trouble retaining learning “because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. . . . The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.”
An hour of the drill baby drill approach to teaching sets of standards may not a lot leave for connecting synapses to deal with while encoding memory in sleep. The idea of standards in itself delimits an individual youngster’s pursuit of her curiosity: The class all learns what is in the standard box in the class hour.
Compare what a student will experience spending the same hour following connections in the USGS Earthquake Hazards webpages that interconnect complex knowledge with interactive paths to follow active curiosity. Surely synapses purr into action as she clicks through the map to individual real-time earthquakes, and then to the three-dimensional global regional information when her eye catches the slab models for subduction zones.
George Will’s column is headlined: “How to ruin a child.” Another important way current child-rearing does this ruination should be added to the several in the NurtureShock book. We are ruining their potential to grasp knowledge by chopping it into standard pieces. We need to cut children’s minds free of lock-step, standardized learning that settles for a minimum and ignores the long tails of subjects. This can only be done by letting each child think individually.
Except for wandering and turned off minds, during a class hour all students are regimented to be thinking about the same knowledge at the same time. In contrast, an individual youngster clicking through earthquake knowledge on his own mobile internet browser is sending patterns of connections encountered among webpages through the circuitry of his brain. Such patterns can be complex, and are meaningful to him because they follow his focused attention and curiosity. In this example, a boy is moving beyond a few standard facts of earth science. He is exploring his way down through the long tail of authoritative, fresh, and interconnected knowledge about earthquakes.
We can suppose that if he gets a good night’s sleep interconnected understanding of earthquake knowledge will encode into memory. If he had spend the same time drilling a few earth science standards, the encoding would be not so much.
