Synthesizing Education

This isn’t just about education; it’s about society as well. We have a legitimate obsession problem with technology and the amount of it that we utilize on a daily basis. The concern should only be heightened by the results of a recent study.

 Consider the following excerpt from a recent Pew Research Center article on a survey from March.

at the top of the popularity list — essentially tied with small business for first place in making a positive difference while outranking even religious institutions — are technology companies.

Nor is that positive rating primarily the result of the enthusiasm of young and relatively young adults, the first adopters and overwhelming users of new technology. While fully 80% of those under age 30 express positive views of the tech sector, the fans of technology firms are well distributed across the age spectrum including about two-thirds (66%) of those in the 50-64 age bracket and more than half (52%) of those ages 65 and older. Even among the elderly, non-positive evaluations of tech companies are about as likely to be a non-response (19%) as a negative rating (23%).

Now it’s all fine and dandy that we are in love with our technology companies and the products they provide, but we also have to be cognizant of the pitfalls that this type of obsession can create.

For instance, we need to adequately train students to utilize the technology that is being placed in their hands (which we aren’t doing). We also need to be aware of “making up things” (like multi-tasking) in an effort to prevent misconceptions from being proliferated in our youth.

If you sit and listen to large portion of the educational base, many are continuing to stress the use of technology in the classroom, but they fail to acknowledge the need of addressing the flipside of that coin or ask important questions.

Here’s an example: does our obsession with technology result in any health-related concerns?

I get the obsession with technology. What I am trying to do is allow us to sit back for a second and acknowledge our need to perform research and educate the public on potential issues that may arise from it.

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Big Think is starting a really neat series titled, “Moments in Genius”, and while I am interested in hearing a lot of these ideas, there is a deeper aspect that fascinates me and relates strongly to a problem in education.

Take a look and see how many of these “great moments” were accompanied by an assignment sheet that specifically told these individuals what to think or do.

Was there some kind of structure to how they developed these ideas? Clearly, but there is a distinct difference between a “jolt” of thought and a step-by-step guide to how to earn an “A”. I understand that not all assignments can be so open because students wouldn’t strive to work on deficiencies as well as strengths, but the education world goes overboard. We mandate rubrics, thorough assignment sheets, step-by-step guides, and then get fired up when the product isn’t always high quality.

Perhaps the overly bearing structure of assignments and school is stunting, or prohibiting, the “genius moments” that we all believe kids are capable of while in school.

Here’s one that is synonymous with what people think about when it comes to “21^st Century Skills”: the invention of the portable telephone. Note the amount of interdisciplinary thinking, transfer, and analysis that Martin Cooper discusses.

When do we offer time for kids to delve into this kind of thought? Maybe we can start by creating delayed openings?

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It’s AP exam week (hence the minimal blogging and tweeting I did this weekend), and the kids are bracing themselves for the excruciating 3.5 hour exam on Friday. Fifty-five of those minutes will be spent answering eighty multiple-choice questions that cover American history from pre-Columbian to present day.

What interested me today was a discussion two of them were having on “strategies” for answering multiple-choice tests. These so-called strategies were especially important for the “except” questions as a way to rule out the “distractor” responses. Now, I don’t spend much time at all discussing strategies for answering multiple-choice questions because I feel as though, if they know the content, the strategies are irrelevant.

But it did get me thinking: should we be teaching strategies for these types of questions?

Now the people who are vehemently opposed to standardized testing will say “no” and rant and rave about how we shouldn’t be catering to these types of exams because they don’t prove anything about intelligence. I get that.

But what about LSAT’s, MCAT’s, PRAXIS, and the GRE’s? Realize I am not condoning standardized testing of students, but what I am saying is that at some point in their lives they will have to take a multiple-choice for some kind of certification.

Is it enough for us to just say “they should know the answer” or are the skills that some people use to answer multiple-choice questions worthy of being taught in the classroom?

Is there any value to that kind of logical deduction of potential answers?

Are we hindering the development and potential success of our students by NOT teaching them strategies for answering questions by eliminating potential answer choices?

Who wants to be the one to tell a student that they are vehemently opposed to standardized testing so they won’t be learning these skills, which might give the student an opportunity to obtain a certain certification?

Fascinating to think about this topic.

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Blogs I Have Written For:

The Importance of Generalizations in Social Studies- Bridging The Gap

Be Wagner Dodge & Then Replace The Windows?- Cooperative Catalyst

Blogs I Have Commented On:

Why Change?- My Island View

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We need technology-specific classes that have technology teachers at the front of them. Why? Because the whole idea of “infusing” technology into mainstream classes is great in theory, but the reality is that I don’t think we are seeing the type of growth in students that we should be given the amount of emphasis that a lot of districts are placing on their technology programs.

It fascinates me that the same argument a lot of people use to express a need for isolated content area courses is the antithesis of the need for technology courses and vice versa.

Think about it for a second. Many will argue that students need to have math, science, English, or history because “how will we ever know if students are learning those courses?” What they are really articulating is their lack of belief that infusing math into science will give students the necessary skills and emphasis required to be well-grounded in those subjects. Isn’t the same true for technology?

The next problem with the infusion model of technology is that there are no requirements for how proficient a given teacher needs to be. Is it really infusing technology if kids are spending days on end making a PowerPoint? Is it really an infusion of technology if students are typing a document in Microsoft Word?

I sure as hell hope not.

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Jonah Lehrer published this blog post further discussing (in part) his article from the Wall Street Journal about the relationship between peak creativity and specific fields of knowledge.

Take a moment to consider these excerpts and their implication on education:

Those fields with a logically consistent set of principles, such as physics and chess, tend to encourage youthful productivity, since it’s relatively easy to acquire the necessary expertise. (The No. 1 ranked chess player in the world today, Magnus Carlsen, is 19 years old.) Because the essential facts can be quickly learned, and it usually doesn’t take that long to write a lyric poem, the precocious student is free to begin innovating at an early age.

In contrast, fields that are loosely defined and full of ambiguous concepts, such as biology and history, lead to later peak productive ages. After all, before a researcher can invent a useful new idea, he or she must first learn an intimidating assortment of details.

Now I don’t know about you, but I think that teaching fits into the category of “loosely defined and full of ambiguous concepts” that Lehrer is talking about. Even still, if any of Lehrer’s discussion of creativity and age comes into play in education, I believe we are talking about a big problem with how we address teachers that are failing to implement innovative lessons especially since science may come to prove that it isn’t entirely their fault.

Lehrer would go on to discuss an experiment that further captures this concept, but I really like his explanation of why this phenomenon might occur.

If you will:

Why were young physicists better at working on quantum mechanics, at least in the early part of the 20th century?…

Simonton and others argue that young physicists benefit, at least in part, from their outsider status – they’re more innocent and ignorant – which makes them more willing to embrace novelty and surprise. Because they haven’t become “encultured,” or weighted down with too much conventional wisdom, they’re more likely to rebel against the status-quo and explore the the spooky ideas of Schrodinger, Bohr, et. al. After a few years in the academy, however, Simonton says that “creators start to repeat themselves, so that it becomes more of the same-old, same-old.” They have become insiders, invested in Newtonian mechanics; that is what they know and that is what they believe in. It’s only the impetuous youth, those marginal figures without tenure or grants of their own, who properly appreciate the anomalies of the subatomic world.

I understand Lehrer is talking about science, literature, and history, but I wonder if the same findings serve any relevance to teaching and learning. Not necessarily to kids but instead to teachers and  the changing of inneffective instructional practices.

Does the amount of experience that teachers have in the classroom correlate to the amount of creativity they exude in generating innovative lessons?

I understand that many people will argue in favor of the idea that anyone who wants to change can change, but evidence and human behavior may suggest that this can be hindered based on years of experience actively in the field.

With this in mind, does that mean that the time invested in collaborating with teachers all be for naught?

Lehrer provides an example where tenure isn’t a factor in limiting creativity within their field, something that they have dedicated their lives to, and clearly have a passion for doing.

This isn’t an indictment on why we shouldn’t help some teachers change or why we shouldn’t collaborate with them.

It’s a discussion of human behavior and to what degree we can expect change on any particular human being after a certain number of years in the field.

To suggest that any single  individual is incapable of changing a habit is ludicrous, but if we can perform these types of studies and develop a theory as Lehrer has, it may provide us with valuable insight into how best address teachers that experience difficulty being innovative in the classroom.

However we define that…

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Class size discussions fascinate me especially when we start talking about making students “independent learners” and when we want to expand learning “beyond the walls of the classroom” by introducing technology and, especially, social media tools. It even fascinates me so much that I wrote a post in early January talking about “How Class Sizes of 50 Could Be Better” and got a lot of people commenting on all sorts of issues, which gave me a new perspective and bigger questions on the topic.

For me, the debate over class size is a complicated issue that I have no real standpoint on simply because I continue to waffle on what size does to learning.

Until the point at which I see something new, I will probably base my decision on class size by the findings of the Tennessee Star Report.

Here are four of my questions:

1. If the big push is to create self-directed learners who are responsible for their education and are willing to work with their peers to gain a deeper understanding, then doesn’t increased class sizes move us closer toward achieving that goal?
2. If the need for students to develop social skills and relationships is so great, then how many relationships are created by seeing the same 25 people, during the same period, every day of the school year? Maybe smaller class sizes are more of a hindrance to development than a benefit?
3. Some cite the need to ensure that students are learning skills correctly within their classroom and monitor student learning as a need for smaller class sizes. If that’s the case, then do those teachers NOT use the internet for any activities? Do they believe that students are NOT being exposed to inaccurate content across the web on a routine basis?
4. If you teach in a 1:1 school then do you truly believe that the introduction of every computer doesn’t increase the number of students that are in your class? How can we be worried about distractions in the classroom from too many kids if we are putting them in front of a mechanism that has them connected to over 800 people on their Facebook wall alone?

The best argument I have heard so far against increased class sizes is that individual rooms could not hold more kids, and I even find this to be a stretch of the facts.

I don’t mean to stir the pot (of course I do), but let’s be honest, we are increasing class size every, single day simply by increasing more and more virtual content. Truthfully, I don’t find this to be a huge deal especially when we start considering 21^st Century Skills.

Here’s another way to look at it that may articulate these point even clearer. It would be interesting to see the correlation between the size of classes and the degree of interconnectivity (via technology) that has taken place over the last one hundred years. Can we continue to prepare our students for a “global world” by limiting the amount of people they come into contact with during learning? Does that stunt the amount of development they have to understand other cultures and adapt to new environments?

 We are also being hypocritical about our goals (see question #1) and framing them for our argument when we believe it best suites us. Students cannot graduate from college and become lifelong learners without learning how to accomplish this task in semi-closed environment.

I also question those that suggest we have moved away from a “factory-based” economy and moved towards a “knowledge economy” but don’t want to look at altering every aspect of the classroom, which includes the amount of knowledge available in it.

I’m not saying that class sizes should shoot up to 50 immediately without strongly considering the effects. I’ve written in the past about the disconnect that exists, or should, between the “school world” and the “real world” and read a lot of really interesting comments from some very intelligent people. What I came away with from a lot of those comments is that we should create a hybrid that combines “school world” and “real world” to increase responsibility and student awareness of what is expected of them.

Shouldn’t one of those elements be that of which I describe above?

What I think we need to do is revaluate the way that we view class size and think critically about whether increased class sizes will hold back learning…or increase it.

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It drives me crazy when people say things to kids like “you know, in the real world…” as though it is some far-off place that requires the indoctrination of 13 years of boring, irrelevant schooling to enter.

How about this? WE SHOULDN’T WANT THE CLASSROOM TO BE “THE REAL WORLD”! Why?

Because:

1. The “Real World” doesn’t always offer second chances to correct mistakes.
2. You aren’t always safe in the “Real World”.
3. If you forget an assignment in the “Real World”, you face the strong possibility of not coming back.
4. You can’t take risks in the “Real World” without fearing serious debt or loss of job.

I could go on forever about this (trust me, I have), but I think there are too many people who complain about “how are kids going to be successful in the Real World?” I just don’t get why they would want their classroom to represent this ridiculous place.

If anything, we should be pushing schools as a haven. A place to come where you don’t have to face the problems and issues that are ubiquitous with our daily lives.

It bothers me, and it should bother you too especially because I don’t know how many teachers would be so successful in this “Real World” that they speak of.

I’m not saying we need to start abiding by some bizarre set of rules that eliminates all connection between daily life and what goes on in school. What we need to do is stop throwing this concept in kids faces; they simply don’t care nor should they. Kids care about what effects them there and now.

We should be harnessing that to some degree and explaining to them why it is so important to take advantage of NOT being in the “Real World”. Note the subtle, yet extremely important, difference.

For more “Real World” discussion, check out Joe Bower’s post, “Ignore the “Real World”.

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The clip below is from the ending of the movie The American President where Michael Douglas delivers a speech that discusses character and leadership. It’s, perhaps, one of my favorite speeches ever given in a movie (I actually use it in class for an activity as well).

A lot of the issues that are discussed can be metaphors for the lackadaisical way that educational reform takes place. Unfounded attacks on either progressive or traditional means simply because changing the system is usually in the hands of the individuals that had success in the current system.

If nothing else, thinking of the parallels of the speech and that of educational reform just makes me want to try that much harder.

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Blogs I have Written For:

Start Doing the Minimum…And The Maximum- Cooperative Catalyst

Blogs I have Commented On:

Math Is A Dangerous Subject To Teach- For The Love of Learning

Some Thoughts on The Current States of Edtech…- Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom

Who Says You Need To Be A Teacher To Help Kids Learn?- Education Stormfront

Testing, Testing, 1,2,3- Teacher In Transition

Instructional of Formal; whatever- Life in Perpetual Beta

Is This Creativity- 2 Cents Worth

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