Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education | Video on TED.com

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education | Video on TED.com

In this interesting presentation of his research, Mr. Mitra demonstrates how children can fuel their own learning through their curiosity.

My favorite quote is, "If there is stuff on Google, then why do we have to stuff it in our head?" One of our biggest stumbling blocks with using new technology in the classroom, is this, we try to get the technology to perform the same traditional job of:

1) The authority (teacher, book, computer) presenting information or demonstrates a skill

2) Students memorize the information or practices the skill as much as they are willing or as much as they can in a predetermined amount of time

3) Students demonstrate the skill or parrot the knowledge back to the teacher for judgement

4) Repeat

In a traditional model as described above, the variable in the knowledge equation is the expertise or mastery that children can demonstrate at the time of judging. Some students will earn an "A" and others will earn an "F."

One of the first things we should note about Mr. Mitra's experiment, when time was kept constant, the variable remained mastery. "When I came back in two months..." or "At the end of the experience, children were able to perform at 76% and when I came back two months later, we gave them a test and they performed at 76%." When time was no longer constant, then mastery went to 100%. "The fast team got it in 20 minutes, the last in 45."

I believe that it is time for educators to rethink the necessity of information memorization. I don't mean abandoning recall all together. Instead, I am asking, "What are the real essentials that a well-educated person should be able to recall of the top of her or his head?" If we all have or soon will have smart phones with access to google, what is a reasonable set of memorized and recallable pieces of information that will allow one to use the new tool efficiently?

Wanted: Robot Labor

Han Moravec, a principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, wrote,

“Multicellular animals with cells specialized for signaling (brain cells and nervous systems for thinking) emerged in the Cambrian explosion a half-billion years ago.  In the game of evolutionary one-upmanship, maximum nervous-system masses double about every 15 million years…  Our gadgets, too, are growing exponentially more complex, but 10million times as fast as that.  Human foresight and human culture move things along faster than blind Darwinian evolution.  The power of personal computers has doubled annually since the mid-1990’s; today’s PC might be comparable only to the milligram nervous systems of insects or the smallest vertebrates, but humanlike power is just thirty years away.”[1]

Computers, and robots with, “humanlike power is just thirty years away.”  Setting aside my childhood science-fiction fantasies about how cool (Star Trek) and how terrible (Terminator) robots with humanlike thinking power will be, Moravec’s thesis has serious implications for public education, and the US economy.  When robots are performing low-level service jobs, what will high school or college dropouts do for a living?  What skills and knowledge will tomorrow’s children need to obtain meaningful employment in 2040?

The automobile industry has already seen the beginning of the robotic revolution.  2010 robots, only performing at an intelligence level of “insects” are capable of performing simple, repetitive tasks found on an assembly line.  The military is using them to search and disarm bombs, and robots helped seal the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.  Hospitals and Business are even experimenting with robo-docs and robo-employees.  Army and BP robots require a human at one end controlling the machine.  In effect, they are complex puppets with virtual strings ranging worldwide.[2]  If Moravec is correct about robots of 2040, then these future machines will be able to perform far more complicated programs without human controllers.  

Moravec is not imagining machines capable of creative human though or human inspiration.  These are not robots capable of inventing a new food recipe or designing a house.  In 2040, I imagine there will still be a demand for creative chefs and architects.

Rather conservatively, his robots of 2040 are capable of running extremely complex multi-step programs.  Imagine a robot that can cook and prepare a fast-food meal, or a robot that can assemble a building.  Imagine robots that can lead a customer to the proper shelf at department and ring-up that sale.  Imagine robotic cars that can drive themselves.  Imagine that in 2040, low-skill service jobs that currently employ millions of Americans are gone, automated.

Already, the robots features in Markoff's September article roll out for only $15000.  Imagine if a low-level food service robot cost twice that much ($30000) plus an additional $10000 each year for power and maintenance.  Imagine this robot will need replacing every 5 years, but can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  That imaginary robotic worker would then cost out at a mere $1.82 an hour.  

Moravec may be wrong in his prediction, but I don’t think he is.  In March of 2010, researchers at the North Carolina State University announced the creation of a nano-dot memory chip that can hold an entire library of information in a single square inch.[3]  One month later, HP announced a separate break though in computer memory that mimics human synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains,” commented one of HP’s physicists.[4]

Educators and educational reformers are focused on teacher evaluation right now.  The debate seems to be centered on if student test scores should be a part of evaluating teachers and if so, how much weight student test scores should have in these evaluations.

Perhaps it is time again to look about the curriculum we are teaching in K-12 education.  The publication of new National Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics, is a start on this road, but are those standards the kinds of skills and knowledge that young adults will need in 2040?

Teachers should take the lead in this coming debate.  We should begin to think seriously about the next generation of teachers and students and make some decisions about what a well-educated 18-year-old will look like in 2040.  Additionally, we need to continue the discussion about reducing the numbers of school dropouts.  High school dropouts are severely limited in their employment outlook.  In 2040, when robots with “humanlike power” are available to perform low-skill service jobs, the economic outlook for under-educated Americas looks bleak indeed. 

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[1] Moravec, Hans.  “Making Minds.”  Science at the Edge: Conversations with the Leading Scientific Thinkers of Today.  John Brockman, ed.  New York: Union Square Press.  2008.

[2] Markoff, John.  “The Boss is Robotic, and Rolling up Behind You.”  New York Times.  September 4, 2010.

[3] Narayan, Dr. Jay and Shipman, Matt.  “Nanodot breakthrough may lead to ‘A Library on One Chip’.”  North Carolina State University New Release.  March 28, 2010

[4] Markoff, John, “HP sees revolution in memory chip.”  New York Times.  April 7, 2010.

A Place at Whose Table?

With ESEA (No Child Left Behind) up for reauthorization and with Race To the Top grants being written by nearly every state, teachers and teacher associations have been trying hard to get a seat at the table.  We’ve been trying to bring our experience and expertise to these reform efforts.  Perhaps if teacher evaluations must be tied to test scores, we can have some influence over the tests.  Perhaps if there will be common standards, we can help write them.  Perhaps if there will be school accountability, we might help determine what criteria will be used.

Even if teachers and teachers' associations get a place at these educational reform tables, the tables were still set and the menus provided by educational reform pundits who are not teachers.  Oh, we may be able to strike some of the items off the menu, and I am sure there will be dishes we don't like...  but it's not our dinner party, it's not our chef, it's not our restaurant.

Instead, we need to finance and build our own restaurant, hire our own chefs and create a menu that will serve the needs of our customers (students and teachers.)

For decades, teachers have been political only on defense.  We either scream "NO!" at the reforms being offered, or we beg/force for ourselves a seat at the table to try to massage away some of the worst elements of a proposed reform.

We do this, because we are tired after a long day of teaching.  We don't have the time to spend in our own think tanks strategizing about what a high-functioning school could look like or dreaming of what skills and knowledge a well-educated graduate will have in 2030 or 2035.  We do this because we are strapped for cash.  Teachers do not make nearly enough to fund our own think tanks and pay some of us to take a year or two away from the classroom to strategize on our behalf.  So we continue to allow the other side to set the agenda and we either decry, “NO!” or beg for a seat at the table.

“NO!” is rapidly becoming an exhausting answer for the public.  Teachers and administrators, parents and students, voters and politicians are all now agreeing that the status quo is no longer working.  Teachers and teacher unions are losing their credibility and now even our once-political allies are seeing our organizations as obstructionists and more interested in protecting so-called bad teachers than promoting a positive learning environment for our kids.

How would WE fix these problems?  How would we evaluate teachers so that good teachers who want to get better can receive meaningful feedback from professionals they trust?  How would WE remove the 1-5% of teachers who really don’t or no longer belong in our profession?  How would WE measure student learning in ways that make sense academically and make sense to the non-teaching community?  How would WE organize a charter school that really works?  How would be recruit, train, and support new teachers who can be successful and remain in the classroom after 5 years?

I think this is the next step for teachers and teachers associations in the realm of educational reform.  WE have to commit the time and the money to imagining what a well-running public school system will look like and what steps can take us from here to there.  The days of saying, “NO!” or for securing a seat at someone else’s table are over.  It’s time to set our own educational reform agenda.

Book Review: Meeting Students Where They Live: Motivation in Urban Schools

Curwin, Richard L. Meeting Students Where They Live: Motivation in Urban Schools. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. 2010.

Curwin kicks off his advice book for urban teachers with a story about a king looking for a teacher for the prince. After testing all of the teachers in the land, the king selects the three finalists. One has the best content knowledge; another has the strongest classroom management and discipline. You have probably already guessed that it is the third teacher, who is not the strongest in either category but rather combines great skills with the philosophy that it is a teacher’s role to serve her/his pupil and society at large who wins the job.

While many of Curwins ideas and strategies would work in any school, his focus is on low-achieving, unmotivated urban youth. He is not arguing that urban youth are themselves low-achieving or unmotivated, nor does he argue that there are no low-achieving or unmotivated youth in the suburbs and the country. Instead, he recognizes that there are some students who live in conditions exasperated by urban poverty and violent neighborhoods. He recognizes that many students living in urban poverty have lost hope that their lives can be better that they are; that their lives can be better than the lives their parents live; or that education may be a way to pave a road to a brighter future.

The summary conclusions of Curwins book is that teachers are charged with helping our students learn and find a love of learning. To do this, he makes five recommendations:

First, curriculum should be tailored to meet each child’s individual needs. Teachers should use diagnostic evaluations to assess a child’s knowledge and skills given a topic and guide that child toward increased knowledge and stronger skills. Here, Curwin challenges current-trend thinking that says that curriculum should be more closely articulated, so that teachers in a similar discipline are teaching nearly the same material on a given day, enabling those teachers to later collaborate on student results. Curwin’s counter argument is not to challenge the data that is driving this current trend, but rather to trouble that data with the question, “Maybe it does work, but at what costs?” Curwin wants teachers, administrators, parents and law makers to wonder, “Is getting high test scores worth it, if learning is forgotten or if children learn to hate learning?”

Second, expectations should be high, but attainable for every student. Expectations that are too high lead to frustration and failure for struggling students. They learn to hate the subject and many decide to misbehave as a result. Curwin imagines a child thinking, “If I am so bad as being good or smart, then at least I can be really good at being bad.” Conversely, expectations that are too low lead to boredom.

Third, evaluations should diagnostic in nature. Little is accomplished, Curwin posits, in using summative evaluations to rank children, rewarding the best and punishing the worst. In fact, he argues, it runs contrary to motivation. Those students who need little motivation get lots of encouragement from the rewards, and those who need motivation rebel against the punishments.
Forth, everything a school does should be gear toward getting kids to want to learn. Contained within this concept are Curwin’s theories about discipline and classroom/school management. If the point of school is for children to learn, then it makes little sense to remove a child from a learning environment if the child is misbehaving. Instead, Curwin advises teachers to refer children to the principal only as a last resort. Curwin offers numerous tips and ideas about how to redirect misbehavior and offers perhaps his most interesting idea, the Altruism Consequence. Consequences are not punishments, Curwin states. Rather, they are the natural outcome of actions. When we hurt someone, the consequence is doing something nice for that person or for the class/school. Curwin believe that giving difficult youth opportunities to be good and help others will, in turn, heal the hurt and lead to higher levels of motivation for school.

Fifth, students need freedom and flexibility to explore their strengths and needs. In traditional schooling, adults decide on how children will spend their time, and how they will compete against one another for rewards and grades. Here, Curwin argues that some learning is better than no learning. There is little to be lost when a teacher lowers the bar for a child who has been stubbornly refusing to jump at all. Curwin believes that schools are currently over-emphasizing achievement, which ranks and kills motivation for low-achieving students. Instead, he thinks that teachers, principals and schools should emphasize effort, because achievement is the outcome of effort and, Curwin surmises, effort is the only factor that we can really control.

A new idea for Teacher Training

I believe studies that say that the most important, controllable factor in a child’s education is being in the classroom of a highly motivated, well-trained teacher. I believe that current education reforms aimed at achieving this are misguided and heading for disastrous, unintended consequences.

Current educational reform efforts are overly focused on the idea popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece comparing finding talented teachers to finding talented NFL players from the hundreds of college teams. In a nutshell, Gladwell posits that there is no reliable way to pre-determine who will and will not be talented before seeing players/teachers in action for a year or two. Gladwell’s proposal is to end teacher job security, and place hundreds of teachers in classrooms each year, keeping the ones who seem to be successful.

I see two major flaws in his proposal.

First, unlike NFL players, teachers do not sign a lucrative enough contract to bridge them from an unsuccessful tryout to their next career, nor are teachers paid nearly enough to attract the most talented applicants available. Instead, we count on an inner spark, or emotional desire to teach to attract young talent.

Second, the training that teachers receive is far too removed from their actual day-to-day practice when they enter their careers. College prospects are at least playing very-nearly the same game and their professional counterparts. Gladwell’s analogy is perhaps closer to scouting college baseball teams looking for NFL prospects.

Compensating teachers at a rate closer to what other professionals can expect is perhaps a solution to the talent-attraction problem. If teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area could expect the same $60,000 to $70,000 starting salary as their business-professional counterparts and could look forward to $100,000 to $120,000 top earning potential, then our profession might attract some of the top talent that is currently more attracted to business.

Training emerging teaching in a longer, more intensive way would go a long way to approximating teacher training to similar professions.

I propose that teaching interns be placed with cooperating/master teachers for a three-year experience. The first year would be intensive training in pedagogy and classroom management that the teaching candidate could see modeled in their mater teacher’s classroom. The second year would be a paid internship where the master teacher and candidate shared responsibilities for a group of students. The candidate could plan units of study and individual lessons with the help of their master teacher. The candidate could also receive on-going training in educational psychology and sociology. Finally, in the third year, candidates would begin a one or two year residency, being paid lower wages, but completely in control of their classrooms and intensively evaluated by the school administration, their master teacher, and their peers. After passing a Bar-exam-like experience, then the newly tenured teacher would receive a large bump in salary – the big pay-off to warrant this now-more difficult journey into the profession.

In one way, Gladwell would get his way. Master teachers, school administrations, local communities, and the candidate her/himself would have ample opportunities to decide that this profession was not a good fit. Newly tenured teachers would be far better trained and prepared for the real job of teaching children. At the same time, the profession of teaching would finally be compensated like comparable professions. Best of all, students would have better-trained teachers who were far more likely to stay in the classroom far beyond the typical 5-year mark that presently sees 50% of our young professionals wash-out.

We should Replace Teacher Tenure with Something that Makes More Sense

A resurgent trend among self-professed education reformers is to blame teacher unions for the poor state of public education.  The accusation is that teacher unions overly protect lazy teachers, negotiating teacher tenure provisions on their contracts that make it near-impossible to fire even the very worst teachers.

Perhaps it is time to change teacher tenure into something that makes more sense.

Can't we all agree that school districts need some time to try-out new teachers and see if they are a fit for the school?

Can't we all agree that if, after the above mentioned probationary period, schools should still be able to fire a teacher.  I think even teachers would agree and only ask that the teacher is made aware of the reasons why s/he is being fired and is given a chance to fix the problem before s/he is actually fired.  This all sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Can't we all agree that some folks, even school administrators, can be petty and mean.  I mean we all know someone who has had a boss who was just out for blood.  Maybe you showed up your boss in front of her boss; maybe your boss was racist/homophobic/liberal and just didn't like your skin color/sexual habits/conservative politics.  That boss shouldn't be able to make up reasons to fire you right?  If they did, you should have the ability to appeal the decision, right?

Can't we all agree, then, that teachers should have the right to appeal a decision to fire them, too?

Sounds reasonable?

Okay, so to sum up: We replace teacher tenure with a 3 part system like this:

1. New teachers are on probation for a year or two so that schools can just try them out

2. After the probation period is over, schools can still fire teachers, but the teacher must know the charges and be given a chance to fix the problem.

3. Teachers can appeal the decision.

Done.

Best Practices

I am resistant to the concept of an instructional strategy being labeled as a so-called best practice.  I understand the methods used to derive such a label.  A particular classroom-management technique or instructional method seems to be successful for many different teachers in many different classrooms.  As the number of teachers seeming to have success with the method or technique increases, the technique or method earns the status of "best practice."

Don't get me wrong...  I am not saying that these management techniques or instructional methods are mislabeled or fraudulent.  On the contrary, I love finding new management techniques and instructional strategies that seem to be having broad success.  

My argument is this...  Too often, education professionals search-for, covet, promote these "best practices" as if this technique or these instructional methods are a silver-bullet cure or the holy grail of education reform.  

Do not seek wise people.  Seek what they sought.

Instead of searching for a silver-bullet fix to our classrooms and schools, we should look at the methods by which teachers developed their best practices and adopt those methods to create our own best practices.  Those educational guru's studies different management techniques and instructional methods and found ones that seemed to be working.  This is what we should do in our classrooms and schools.

Teams of teachers who share the same curriculum (all of the 10th Grade English Teachers for example) should research what instructional methods or classroom management techniques seem to be working for their kids.  Ones that seem to be successful should inform those teachers who seem to be experiencing less success in their classroom.  For example, Mr. Jones might ask Ms. Wong, "How did you teach your lesson about Thesis Statements?  From looking at their formative assessments, I see that my kids didn't seem to get it, while yours seemed to do much better.  When I re-teach Thesis Statements to my classes, I would like to try a new lesson based one some of the methods you used."

This is a WONDERFUL conversation teams of teachers who share common curriculum could have.  Together, the team could do their own research based on the performances of their own students.  Together, they can analyze the relative success and needs of their own students.  Together, they can talk about interventions and re-teaching.

What makes this method better than finding the Holy Grail Of Thesis Statement Lessons is this: we all know that classes of students change from year to year.  A lesson that worked gang-busters in 2007 may seem to not be working in 2010.  With a method in place where teachers can do their own professional research on their own classes, we achieve the real Holy Grail of Education (higher performing students).

Creating a method that I describe above isn't easy. 

It takes a major shift in teacher-thinking.  Teachers need to stop thinking that they are a lone professional working in isolation.  Teaching was not developed as an isolated profession because that is how teachers thought we would work best.  Teaching is an isolated profession because in the 1800's there was only the need for one teacher for the community.  In 2010, teachers need to redefine themselves as members of a team of professionals.  The team are all of the teachers that share either students or curriculum.

Teacher teams need to have agreements about some alignment of their practice.  This sticks in the craw of many teachers who push back saying, "Do not turn me into a Wal-Mart employee!"  On the contrary, if teams of professional teachers can agree on what goals should be taught, and what formative and summative assessments will best inform the team of how well students are achieving the goals, then teachers can use their skills and knowledge in designing different instructional methods, management techniques, and interventions for students who are not achieving.

Then teacher teams can have their own research-based conversations and find their own best practices.